Upgrade to Linux
upgradetolinux.com
upgradetolinux.com
But yeah. Terrible.
It’s not for a lack of trying either, I really have tried to like tiling wms.
The one thing I do like is the command line - I find that to be a much better experience than power shell or cmd. But that is it. If I want to do anything creative that isn't text based it feels flatly inferior. But your mileage may vary based on what you like to do.
I love it in a server, I just don't like linux on the desktop.
I just find it less frustrating and more organised looking than overlapping windows, swiping between desktops (or it being animated, or somehow slow even with animations turned off).
Basically I just meant I don't think I'd like the Gnome/Xfce/whatever Linux desktop experience either - it would have all the same things that frustrate me on macOS/Windows, and I expect I would agree it's inferior to those (with their massive budgets, UX staff count and salary alone probably dwarfing the Linux OSS projects - not a criticism of them or their efforts).
The ongoing fiddling around – to this day – with a substandard experience regarding battery life, WiFi performance and GPU issues as well as HiDPI especially on laptops is a dealbreaker for me.
But then again, that may be a major purpose of desktop Unix, Linux especially: to enable those who see fiddling around (read: hacking) as an end in itself. After all, a dedicated car mechanic will never be truly happy driving a Toyota.
It could be a 2012 mobile site without a proper desktop version though.
Even the burger menu icon aspect ratio seems 'wrong'.
According to the link I clicked on to get here, this is supposed to be "linux differences".
I daily drive linux and recommend it to people who I think would do well with it, but I would never link them this website.
Well, I mean, um https://www.linuxexperten.com/library/e-resources/linux-malw...
Literal viruses on diverse unices were indeed fairly rare in the past (and are still not common).
Traditionally on most linuxes (and bsds) you obtain trusted executables from a known good source (your distribution ) , whilst files from other sources are never run at all.
This means that Linux viruses find it hard to actually spread in the wild.
This particular strength doesn't mean other kinds of malware can't still be successful, of course. (Though naturally people try to harden Linux against many threats.)
On the other hand, the vast majority of people installing applications by piping curl output to Bash are also on linuxes and bsds
If you do not already have a pubkey for which the code can be signed, then there is no chain of trust to verify in the first place. What signature would you check the code against in such a scenario? One you download from the vendor's same website?
Uh, yes? The naïve Windows user has Windows Defender scanning downloads to offer at least some token protection against known threats.
But I think the main point is that this debunks "whilst files from other sources are never run at all".
And yes: while traditionally people might install just from their distribution, times have changed a bit and people now do install from pip, cargo, npm, etc; but these are _somewhat_ trusted repositories still (rightly or wrongly).
Some people sometimes use curl as well. Due to the nature and low volume, this still doesn't give literal viruses much leeway. This is because it's not a target-rich environment (only a few executables), it's not guaranteed to happen on many computers, and most importantly, people tend to only curl in one direction. When you curl, you're mostly going to end up downloading executables from some central location. Typically these executables don't subsequently get copied to (m)any other computers or back to the server. So a literal virus doesn't get a lot of traction to replicate the way a virus wants to.
If you do manage to curl some malware, what you'd get is probably going to be something that's properly called a Trojan. Trojans are definitely a thing.
Just because you're on Linux doesn't mean you're magically completely invulnerable to all kinds of malware, you still need to act with care.
On the upside many distributions are more or less designed to keep you safe by default, and won't suddenly do something crazy to get you into trouble. On the downside the human operators are not always similarly inclined. ;-)
Well in my case, I screw around a lot on my computer. So I end up copying and pasting a few lines of bash code that download god-knows-what because I accidentally deleted the entire /etc/ directory and the howto guide that was the 3rd result on Google says "run this it will totally work".
So at least for me, yes, it's often worse than installing an .exe from a vendor's website.
But I didn't mean to say Linux installs don't tend to be safer than Windows, just that it's not as rosy as the original comment made it seem like.
Yes, there are Mac and Windows evangelist, but there's more and they are louder in the Linux community. You would think for a community that claims to support "freedom" and "opensource," they would live and let live what others use for operating systems.
I would also argue that the Mac community in particular is pretty vocal about trying to convert people to macs.
Glad they focus on the important stuff, at least.
Just throw things together (that were all designed and built separately) and convince yourself it will form a coherent whole.
1. The emphasis in this website of "you can change what you want" targets a pretty small population. Anecdata of the worst sort, but the vast majority of people in my orbit absolutely do not want to manage their computer. They want it to largely disappear so they can work and watch cat videos. Most of them think customizing their computer means changing their wallpaper. And that's fine! I never lead with "I can customize this machine to do what I want." I lead with "Eh, I got tired of forced reboots and disruptive updates and privacy issues so I switched to Fedora and it doesn't do any of that. If I want to fiddle with something I can [and I very, very much do tinker], but I don't have to."
2. I laughed at the notion of using linux to bring an ancient 5-year-old computer in the closet back to life. I mean, yes, that is one of the great things about linux, but the macbook pro I'm typing on right now is 5 years old and it runs like it's new. The hardest thing to convey about Apple equipment is that the TCO is lower because you can easily upgrade on a 5-7-year cycle, pretty much as long as Apple gives security updates. Expensive at the front end (though competitive with similar Windows machines), but not as expensive over the lifespan. (And, emphatically, I'm not saying you can't experience long ownership cycles with PCs, but, from experience, it's harder.)
On the other hand, when this MPB runs out of gas, I'm probably going to replace it with a thinkpad, or possibly with an ARM Mac running linux.
And let's not forget that, eventually, "you can change what you want" becomes "you have to change what you want" because the developers of your distro / desktop environment / window manager / UI toolkit decide to change the default behavior (if they don't change the entire thing).
Your second paragraph mentions changing defaults. Of course software evolves over the decades. You may not like every change, but evolving along is always an option, of you don't want to tinker. Also, most UI config is stored in dotfiles. Upgrading doesn't apply the new defaults to an existing account.
MS office still dominates and our company and customers work in Excel. Without support for office Linux is harder than Windows for me.
With WSL2 almost everything I can do in Linux I can now do in Windows.
Don't get me wrong there are things that I hate about working in Windows. Especially Windows shared folders and mapped drives. Compared to Linux network shares it's horrible.
I get random slow downs when my computer is doing something in the background and explorer becomes non responsive.
I get updates that require a restart all the time.
I can't customize the UI as I would like.
I miss i3 WM.
What a dream.
But the way Microsoft abuses me every day with its constant invasions that can’t be disabled, and worse: Windows Storage Sense deleted my personal files from my computer. It’s right there in the logs.
So yeah, Windows is out for me. macOS survives a while longer, certainly while my machine feels like mine.
But I really do think something like FOSS operating systems have to survive for people. It’s great that the cloud is run on it, but it’s far too controlled by corporations, and more than a decade ago.
I'm 30 and I never had to use MS Office once in my life, LibreOffice works fine with everything I had to do with it
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/vsto/office-p... assemblies?view=vs-2022
Much of what I work on involves programs that interop with Excel. Yes there are other ways of writing and reading spreadsheets but sadly none are as reliable as using Excel interop. At least if your spreadsheet has to be compatible with Excel. It is possible someone has build an amazing library that does this but I'm not aware of it.
Edit: I could have Windows on a VM but that is awkward and slow. I find I get more done without that added bit of complexity.
Good luck otherwise.
If a job requires me to use windows, I will find another job.
Linux/BSD were barely usable on PCs when I started using a computer. Now to my surprise, they are, especially Linux now good enough for my day to day use, even on some old and weak hardware.
In the same time, Windows peaked at Windows 7 then downhill all the way. Windows 8 was quite a surprise by changing the UI, but okay other than that. Windows 10 is the malware. When Windows 10 was first out, my computers fan started to run like crazy in the mid-night but when I checked in the morning everything looked alright. It went on for quite a few month until one day I was woke up by the fan and decided to take a look at what was the computer doing. Yep, upgrading to Windows 10, but the upgrade failed so rolled back to Windows 7 like nothing happened. So I upgraded to Win10 manually which I regret almost immediately. Since then updates just like Russian Roulette. Almost every time there would be something got broken and something broken got fixed. And I started to notice some core utilities which were rock solid like diskpart, ipconfig etc got broken. The most ridiculous time was that all 3 UIs(so called modern, win32 and cli) were broken and I spent hour and had to use a combination of 2 out of the 3 to get back online. And I also constantly got OOM BSOD on one particular version even though I have 64GB RAM installed.
The only reason I still use Windows now is that there are no alternatives for some work related stuffs.
That's basically me as well. I tried hard to use alternatives but it didn't work out.
Most average users probably want to enable the rpmfusion repos to get things like media codecs, drivers, and various other nonfree stuff. It's not hard to do this, but it makes it more of a "turn key twice" solution compared to Ubuntu.
I think you've gotten unintentionally close to answering GP's question, and your own.
By virtue of Fedora being the literal upstream of RHEL and getting lots of attention from the RedHat guys, it is (IMO, YMMV) both a big testing ground for new RedHat software, and also pushes new software versions and features probably more aggressively than any distro except rolling release ones.
Keep in mind, software like SystemD, NetworkManager, D-Bus, the PAM implementation most distros use (Wikipedia claims some use the BSD openPAM implementation, can't find those though), PolKit, and others seem to have pretty big financial or engineering support from RedHat. Fedora ends up effectively being "the lowest common denominator" in the sense that most other distros end up being "like Fedora but with <x> replaced with <y>".
The sometimes bleeding edge feature set and use of new functionality (like Wayland, systemd-resolved, pipewire off the top of my head) can make it a bit less "beginner friendly", potentially, than a more conservative distro. It also makes it very appealing if you want to understand the "technical side of Linux", since anything you learn on Fedora will probably transfer more easily to other distros than vice versa, even if Fedora is more convoluted and full of cruft.
That's my takeaway, at least. Compared to Arch, a given release of Fedora will have about as up-to-date versions of major software, with the benefit of release engineering. Rolling release is a drug not everyone is strong enough to take...
edit thoughts: I want to be clear, the projects that RedHat either started or is heavily involved with usually have a lot of community involvement too. I don't want to minimize the importance of other contributors, just pointing out RedHat does a decent amount of work in several low level components of "GNU/Linux"
[Opens Network tab]
Considering Google has their own CA or could use Let's Encrypt, it should be more than feasible.
- Link to a 1 minute tik tok video on how to boot Kali off of a thumb drive??
The latest issue is that after updating the kernel and graphics drivers, I can't suspend the PC anymore. It dumps a bunch of crap to dmesg, then returns to the login screen. This is a known issue on the forums, and it's still broken.
I also have to deal with broken wifi semi-regularly, most recently last year, when an update took out the wifi drivers until I could roll it back (at home, since I don't have ethernet at work).
I love Linux, but it's a love-hate relationship. I still don't think it's ready for mass adoption until it can be as reliable as windows or MacOS for consumer PCs.
The GS-66 is a gaming laptop with an NVidia card. The nouveau driver does pretty good, but I find trying to upgrade to the latest version or installing Nvidia's official driver causes more problems than it solves. For the wifi, the Intel Killer AX from only a quick google search looks like it has known issues.
There are a lot of hardware companies that are actively hostile to linux users. MSI is definitely one. Lenovo's Thinkpad and Dell's XPS lines have a big audience to test and fix issues.
MSI can make extra money off of window's users after sale, but HW companies only profit off linux users from selling the hardware.
Perhaps in some crazy way, because this has his own set of pros and cons, I'm seriously considering evaluating ChromeOS as my daily driver. Fixing things should be a thing of the past here, and I'll still have a full Linux virtual machine running inside of it to work outside of ChromeOS's limitations.
On topic… calling switching to Linux an "upgrade" is pretty presumptuous. It's not an upgrade for someone whose business relies on programs or technologies which are still only available on Windows - for many of those people, that's probably why they're on Windows in the first place.
Linux needs to do one thing to make it a viable option: Make steam and all windows based steam games work out of the box.
Linux needs to do one thing to win the consumer market: Make all steam games work better than on windows out of the box.
If linux can do that, they can win a market that is not the server market. If Linux cannot do that, then people are trapped on Windows for the foreseeable future.
That is the "did we solve your problem. y/n?" of the desktop environment. It is the only question that matters. I don't see the purpose in marketing Linux for non server purposes until that hurdle has been jumped.
And what I've also found is that issues that affect my games on Linux Steam are usually also reported for Windows (i.e. black screen on loading, certain freezes).
I have a steam deck and it occasionally asks me how well the game I just left ran, cloud sourcing. The steam deck is great, highly recommended (my first unit had a bad battery, but valve handled it quite well and after trying some mitigations, just replaced it).
https://www.protondb.com/explore
and I was fairly surprised.
I definitely expect the 20% tail to be 80% of the effort.
I've also found that often there would be a lag time between the windows release (for total war warhammer for example) and the non windows releases. I've also found OSX versions of things to be a bit buggier (guild wars 2 for example), I assume that is no different for Linux. Reactive solutions to games not running (as opposed to games working by default) seems like the type of behavior that would continue to prevent Linux from being a standard choice over windows. The small frictions build up until you don't want to deal with it anymore.
You are right though, closer than I thought.
That it works so well is as close to a miracle as you can get with software.
What is needed is not "Linux making it work", it's developers making it work on Linux. And it's actually happening, albeit at a slow pace.
Recently the Steam Deck has been very successful at convincing game devs to put in an effort - for the benefit of all Linux users.
If Linux had MS Office and the Adobe suite, there would hardly be a reason to stay on Windows anymore.
I'm sure Microsoft's reluctance to bring office over - despite their self-proclaimed "love of linux" is because they know it would be a nail in Window's coffin.
There is a whole concept of "Killer app" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application) that the industry was founded on.
The linux desktop does not AFAIK have any kind of killer app. The value of running a linux desktop is clear for devs and security professionals, but it is not clear at all for "normal" people. The killer apps for windows are Steam, MS Office, and Firefox/Chrome, to a smaller degree active directory.
The only viable path that I can see for linux is "free" privacy respecting operating system choice, but in order to be a choice it must run exe's without any extra configs, check boxes, pop up windows, or anything else that would indicate something should be understood or configured. It must be able to understand a printer is on the network without any effort at all. It must take no more than 3-5 clicks and a google search to be running Firefox.
Awareness before feature parity (runs MS office, runs steam) increases resistance through bad experiences. If someone has a bad experience, they will be less interested even if it gets better later.
I feel like your comment is not very different than "awareness of rsync is the first step to moving files around."
The content here is neat! Running into a typo in the first sentence I read was a little off-putting though.
Not to deride the site, or any writer.
The 1st Linux distro I used was TAMU back in 1992. I have tried countless desktop distros over the last 30 years. I still try the major desktop distros when they have a new release but leave disappointed each time. Poor battery life, poor trackpad gesture support, and awfulness of both flatpaks and snaps are just a few of the issues.
Perhaps I've gotten used to the deficiencies, but saying this with a bias of being a macos user for a decade that worked on custom touchpad gesture UI for a while.
Same!
With all the keyboards shortcuts, and "new" apps like Windows Terminal, the experience is just wonderful!
Most of my apps are fullscreen, and Windows-Arrows to pin to specific quadrant on the screen is just as good as i3 and tiling wm.
Also, there's software for everything you may even think about: just yesterday, I wanted an app to display pictures while keeping the same position zoom factor, to take bits and include them in a report.
I found nomacs (free software), which is keyboard driven: my workflow became Alt-Tab, Win-Shift-S for snapshot, Alt-Tab again, Control-V, Alt-Tab and the arrow for moving between pictures.
> Poor battery life, poor trackpad gesture support, and awfulness of both flatpaks and snaps are just a few of the issues
It can happen on some Windows install, especially with newer hardware. But there're a lot of eyeballs on Windows, so getting a working solution is more likely.
Aero snap (or whatever Win+arrows is called now) is not a replacement for a tiling wm, and you being happy to finally have a _terminal_, of all things, is just sad.
Exactly. Most software is cross platform, and a few odd ones run only on Windows, so you get most software.
> Aero snap (or whatever Win+arrows is called now) is not a replacement for a tiling wm
For most cases, yes. Add that other shortcuts to have windows at specific coordinates and stripped of borders, and it's the same.
> you being happy to finally have a _terminal_, of all things, is just sad
As long as linux doesn't provide unique high-value software that doesn't exist on windows, why should anybody bother ?
One interesting use case for linux is if you want to run early stage stuff developers wrote. Thats easier with linux.
Maybe there's some practical value in that for non-developers. Not sure.
Since Win 11 I've had multiple inquiries from friends/family about how to switch to a different OS... (or get them back to at least Win 10...)
How many people need more than: browser, word/excel clone, and email client?
Everything is moving onto the web and Windows becomes less relevant.
Why do you think ChromeOS is so popular?
Mostly for kids who know nothing about computing.
I use Manjaro and it's great but it's not for everyone. I've gotten my parents to use Ubuntu for a while on some old laptop. But people like that have a high chance of encountering issues that will require fiddling with configuration files or doing stuff on the command line. And it's deal breaker. People like my parents are simply incapable of doing either of those things. So, my father now has a mac and my mother uses an ipad. Zero IT support needed from me.
Chrome OS is probably the only thing that works well enough that I could recommend it to people like that. And with Chrome Os Flex, that's now an option. But it would be a bit of a downgrade.
My dream is that someone makes a website (single page app) derived more around workflows between oses, I've kept a rough personal spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcp...
There's something to be said for breathing new life into these machines.
It's by far the most popular desktop OS, and most people are happy with it.
Just pathetic.
that makes me a bit sad, but as a former Linux desktop user, I would not inflict that experience on anyone.
Linux, as an entire operating system, and not just as a kernel, really needs a strong steward with a vision if it is ever going to be beaten into something that is a cohesive single thing, and not a loose aggregation of software packages.
Unfortunately, by the time most people learn and know enough to become this person, they are at retirement age, and no longer have the energy or the desire to be that person. The younger people who attempt this are simply swatted away by the more toxic members of the Linux fanbase.
The only person I know of who could have possibly have filled this role when they had energy for it is the person behind the Linux Hater's blog of old. That person understood what was wrong with Linux very well, and was vocal about it.
That's who we need, again, someone like that. Someone to point out all the silliness and absurdity and expose it all as the silliness and absurdity that it really is. Because it is all very much incoherent and broken in so many ways. It all functions, it all works, but is it really competitive with MacOS or Windows? Those two both have their flaws, and plenty of them, but I don't think that Linux can hold a candle to either of them, really, for anyone but the most technical of users.
And maybe everyone has just agreed that only the technical users are the users who are important for this operating system. I don't know what the thought is about that, but I'll tell you, technical users are not the only users you need to care about as a Linux application developer.
a blog entry describing the linux Hater's Blog: https://www.mschaef.com/linux-haters-blog
an archive of the blog entries: https://github.com/atoponce/linuxhaters
chromeos flex had been tested on a lot of older machines.
https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094?hl=e...
If you're for "freedom" software then live and let live what others use for operating systems.