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Comment by t1c | Hacker News Reader

And why aren't more people switching to an OS that respects them (like Linux)?

My personal experience is that while Windows is very hostile (and getting worse) to its users, it's rarely broken or buggy. The system lets me get work done and not fidget with the system itself.

Linux-on-the-desktop has made great strides. But I still get screen tearing when scrolling in my browser. I still tend to find that I need 0.5 to 1 generation old hardware for the drivers to work. I don't get good battery life on laptops unless I spend way too much time fiddling with things.

And of course, a lot of professional tools don't work on Linux at all. I'm an electrical engineer and while I'm not a designer for my day job any more, I do still use professional-level tools for personal projects. They run in Windows, and Windows only. So basically no matter how much strength of will I have, those tools ultimately keep me on Windows as my daily driver.

I love a lot of Linux command-line tools and always have WSL w/Debian on my Windows machines. No more dual-booting.

Yep, all this. I've tried linux half a dozen times over the last couple decades, several times it even seems to work out of the box - then a day or week later, I realize my printer doesn't work, or I unplug the ethernet and realize the wifi doesnt work, or something that had worked great suddenly stops because of some update. All problems relying on searching through decade-out of date forum posts, hoping someone else's commandline solution fixes my issue. It's too much work, so I use windows 10.

>All problems relying on searching through decade-out of date forum posts, hoping someone else's commandline solution fixes my issue

I've been fortunate that Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been an excellent troubleshooter for my problems so far.

Because for most users the costs of getting used to a new OS outweigh the benefit of switching.

No, it’s because people approximate the costs badly. Pretty much everyone I know is biased towards inaction even if the action provides immediate as well as long term benefit. Especially when it comes to technology. Even the technology oriented people.

What was that about respecting users?

> No, it’s because people approximate the costs badly.

"Why doesn't everyone switch to Linux? They must be stupid" is just as short-sighted now as it was 30 years ago.

Linux is great, but there are and were plenty of good reasons why it's not optimal for the average user. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41283651

I didn’t say it’s stupid. Everyone’s assessment is inaccurate every once in a while. Or pretty much always, when it comes to certain biases.

You say “average user” and then point to a comment where someone’s disappointed that they can’t get their professional software to work. The average user these days needs a web browser, and doesn’t care which one.

> I didn’t say it’s stupid.

You're claiming that the main reason most people don't switch to Linux is some sort of deficiency of judgment rather than anything practical, and that's not true and it's never been true.

You dismissed the costs of getting used to a new OS right off the bat, and that's a real thing. In my link that you dismissed, the first sentence ("while Windows is very hostile ... to its users, it's rarely broken or buggy") is relevant to most users. Professionals may have trouble getting their apps to work, gaming has gotten better but still has the same problem. If user literally only cares about running a web browser, then yeah, Linux would be fine; but Windows is already fine, so why bother switching?

I like Linux. I've used it at home and professionally. I'm a huge fan of FOSS principles, and I think it would be better for everyone if more people used open systems. But Windows works well enough to satisfy most people, and they're not going to change purely for ideological reasons. Maybe it'd be a better world if they did! But it's not reasonable to expect them to, or to cast that as a failure of judgment.

If we're talking purely about the average user it's perfect for them. They use a browser primarily, which work great.

The trouble is the slightly above average user who is not technical. They think they know computers because they can click around in some random Windows GUI and get something to work. But they don't actually know much in a general "how stuff works" way.

And then there's the highly technical like SWE who thrive under Linux.

So really it's just the weird middle ground that struggles. You know, your MBAs who can use Excel but get scared at plaintext files.

I am not sure how you can be so certain that it would be an immediate benefit to those users… how are you measuring the cost of having to learn something new and the benefit of knowing how everything works?

Because for the vast majority of normal people a computer is equivalent to Windows. Many of them don’t even memorise concepts, but areas on the screen where to click, in the order required to achieve a specific outcome. Those are stumped when Microsoft modifies the layout of the task bar or a context menu.

And now someone tells them to install Linux, on a separate partition perhaps, with a shared boot manager, migrate their data from NTFS to ext4 into the correct folders, install their apps or equivalents in the package manager, and get used to a myriad of different interface design approaches? This is just not going to happen, unless the onboarding experience is improved by a few orders of magnitude, and desktop applications use a single, consistent, UI framework.

I'd say that for most users the main blocker is the inane (from Windows point of view) Linux partition setup and management.

The whole system setup is just borderline arcane. Tell my girlfriend to do that or hack the government, it will be on the same level of impossible to her. And she’s a smart, digital native.

And that comes before all the user interface struggles mentioned above.

"Digital native" is more a marketing term than anything else, and because of the age group it referred to, it ended up meaning the opposite of what was originally intended: it's people who didn't experience technology's growing pains, only the simple slick interfaces, and so don't really understand how it works.

There’s a difference to prior generations, though. My parents grew up with machines being brittle; you could break something permanently by operating it the wrong way. That is fundamentally different with computers: Younger people I like to refer to as digital natives have been raised on software and usually just mess around until something works. That doesn’t mean they really understand it, but the mindset around human-technology interaction is fundamentally different, and devoid of the angst of breaking stuff older people tend to show.

So my point here is that even people open to experimenting with technology will be absolutely helpless in setting up and using a Linux distribution, because the onboarding experience demands so much implicit knowledge.

> she’s a smart, digital native

I mean... I don't want to say anything mean because it's not her fault, but I wouldn't say this.

A digital native 30 years ago was writing SQL queries to make reports for their boss. And they were a secretary making hourly pay.

Digital natives today can barely run their goo goo ga ga phone software. Systems have gotten so abstract that complexity is completely hidden from users. So users don't actually know how to do anything.

I mean, I've had friends, digital native friends, who can't explain what a filesystem is. They don't know what a directory is. They don't know what different types of files are. They don't know what an Excel workbook is versus a text document or what .md means or whatever.

Point being, the problem isn't the complexity or "arcaneness" of linux (side note: linux isn't even arcane, many workflows are much more modern/faster than in Windows land). The issue is that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.

Because a lot of the software that people are used to or want to run don't work on it. Gaming being a huge one.

Lutris. Fedora Bazzite + Flatpak = problem solved. Libreoffice? Flatpak. Updates? Seamlessly. Anything fails? Rollback.

Agreed. There are plenty of good solutions for gaming on Linux today.

But these solutions are lot more complex than the default windows experience of download steam, install game, play. Many people don’t want to tinker, they want to play their game, not the operating system.

Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now, but the biggest limitation is anti cheat for some of the larger titles. Fortnite, despite all its open platform push, probably holds linux back the most.

Apparently Fortnite has two different anti-cheats, and one of them works on Linux.

Both of them (EAC and Battleye, with EAC being Epics own product) can work on Linux if the developer integrating them chooses to allow it, but Epic has chosen not to allow it in Fortnite citing them being less secure when running on Linux. Which isn't an unfounded concern, judging by the state of cheating in Apex Legends ever since they started allowing Linux clients, nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users. Most cheaters dual boot Linux for no reason other than to cheat.

> citing them being less secure when running on Linux > nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users.

Did they give any more details as to why? It could come from cheaters preferring developing for one platform than the other. I would like to know which features windows has that makes cheats harder that they miss on linux.

The anti-cheats run in kernel-mode on Windows and user-mode on Linux, so it is significantly easier to hide a cheat on Linux. The Linux ACs can't see anything outside of the standard process isolation sandbox.

And to get the same for linux they would have to build a kernel module for all major distributions or open source the module and have users compile it themselves. I can see why both dont make sense for them.

Thanks for clarifying.

Sure with higher overhead of support. Running Windows on my gaming rig means all my games are capable without fail. On Linux, I have two recently played games which would require a ton of work to get them working. MSFS and WARNO.

>Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now

Is this really true? I find it _really_ hard to believe.

Steam Fossilize

As someone else reviewed the other day (in the 9590X review thread), Linux gets better worst-case performance, while Windows will likely have higher highs and lower lows

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269996

For things like getting into the game, look at windows defender CPU usage during startup...

At least most stuff puts everything in a single .pak file and uses sqlite databases to avoid most of the windows filesystem overheads I guess.

I'm pretty sure Epic Games' "open platform" push has nothing to do with FOSS or antitrust and everything to do with money.

Tim Sweeney's tweet comparing computer users moving from Windows to Linux to "moving to Canada" comes to mind.

Also, a major way that the Epic Games store was funded was via double-digit stock investment from Tencent, one of the largest gaming monopolies and also tech monopolies. Imagine if Facebook, Paypal, Disney, and Microsoft's gaming division merged into one company, and you start to describe Tencent.

Tencent is using Epic Games to drive a wedge in the US-based tech companies and raise anti-trust concerns with them.

They are legitimate concerns. The 30% fees on the gross amount to more than half of the profits going to platform holders even after subtracting their payment processing and bandwidth expenses. And then they charge you for marketing within the store on top of those fees, driving it way above 50% of net profits on titles that want to be seen (organic visibility based is intentionally undermined by the in-store ads system).

Of course it doesn't, despite all the talk, Sweeney happily kept having his games published by Microsoft and Epic Games store released without Linux support.

Steam deck made gaming work really well, sometimes better than windows with the same hardware. It isn’t 100% compatible of course, but it does work for most things.

Not being 100% compatible makes it a non-starter. I only use Windows on my gaming machine, and until I can play all the games I play with no performance hit, I am not going to switch.

You’re confusing 100% compatible with all the games you play. All the games I play are 100% compatible, I’ve already switched. If the ones you play aren’t, of course you won’t switch. The question is whether you checked or just assumed they don’t work.

I have checked. They aren't all compatible.

I know you said Linux, and maybe have the same opinion of Apple, but if the OS does actually require TPM 2.0 (and much of MSFT's stuff tries to degrade decently, for all their faults, so this might not be immediately obvious), it's not much different than the hardware requirements Apple imposes (which to be fair, some people also see as arbitrary, and in some cases, I would agree).

For me, it's touch screen support. I try it out periodically to see if it's improved.

Battery life is the second issue.

Touch screen support depends on your desktop environment, I'd recommend giving a modern GNOME + Wayland setup a try. As for battery life...yeah, that's hit or miss. There's some management tools that can help sometimes.

Linux is still a hard sell if you don't have easy access to people who know it well. Even things like adding an app to the app bar can require editing a text config.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and my kid uses it, but it's STILL more painful than Windows for a lot of things.

Right click -> Pin to Task Manager?

If you're using something like i3, sure, but you know what you're getting into. If you're using something like KDE, it just works.

Decision making like Gnome’s “you can’t put things on the desktop, why would you want that anyway, you’re using the desktop wrong” don’t do it any favors with getting people to switch from Windows or Mac.

I can only think of one reason: gaming. Gaming on Linux is much better now, but still nowhere near as good as gaming on Windows.

Yeah, definitely for multiplayer. Love what Valve is doing though, hopefully more companies will follow suit.

I just spent a week trying to share a new hard drive via samba and failed completely. "Respects them" my ass.

I recently tried. After hours of trying my xbox controller still can't connect. Steam doesn't detect my Gullikit controller and frankly, I have to literally decide to go down this pain again to hopefully maybe switch one day.

Strange, my PlayStation 5 controller just works on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Don't have one of those (and really don't want one, AA ftw in a controller tbh), from what I read during my journey is that the xbox controller uses some weird DRM in their chipset but I have honestly no clue what that means in the context of bluetooth.

I'm not surprised microsoft would make linux compatibility with their controllers difficult. A shame, though.

Odd. Are you sure it's Linux? Or at least totally Linux? I've had no issues pairing MS Series X controllers (or Xbox One) over Bluetooth to my Steam Deck or Linux PCs or using them plugged in. Maybe the Gullikit controllers don't operate quite the same as the MS versions that the drivers don't play nice?

Honestly I connected it to both macOS and windows before. I recently got a new WiFi card so I'm thinking it just has a crappy chipset in terms of Linux support (Asus PCE-AXE59BT is all my store had at the time). Playing around with Mint and tried the xpadneo kmod.

That's really weird, I also have a Gullikit controller (the one with the hall effect sticks) and it works perfect OOTB on my desktop & laptop, both running Linux. Maybe try switching the mode on the controller to Windows/Android instead of Nintendo Switch?

Linux respects everything except for the user's time

Idk, I think most beginner distros are fine. If my dad (who primarily uses Apple products, browses the web, checks email, that's it) can figure out Fedora + GNOME, I think anyone can.

Because half the shit I use only works on windows. And no I can’t change it because I have to work with other people who’s shit only works on windows.

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