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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Mostly games and photoshop.

Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.

> gui configurability

A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.

Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining.

Also, when you do something different from everyone else, every problem will be blamed on you for doing that.

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Games? A good portion of the Steam catalog runs just fine on Linux.

But not all of it, so if you want to play a particular game you might be out of luck.

Single player is pretty much fine, it's multiplayer that really gets you. No Apex, Valo, LoL.

Codeweavers Crossover does an admirable job at filling the gap (shoutout for making AoE II run like it’s native), but yeah, there are some that you can’t get around using Windows for.

What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much simpler, you don’t need any GUI to configure it. And probably there’s no point in that. Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).

I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient. Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for long years, and is dead simple. I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread. And most Windows sysadmins I know personally, when I tell them about Linux, and they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it. Which is vice-versa actually. I cannot imagine what that is, to be a Windows sysadmin, especially supporting all this mediocre engineering.

> Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).

It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.

> I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread.

Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it seems to be getting worse.

> they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it.

Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to compile your own software to use Linux") and partly because people hate change, and partly because it took them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they expect the same again.

It took me many years to accept Unix logic (macOS and Linux) too, but mostly because my first system was Windows.

For some reason, things like disks, C:\ and D:\ were logical to me, while I couldn’t grasp why cannot I put my files into root directory, and I’m forced to live in a subdirectory (/home/user) instead. It takes some time to re-learn, but I’m looking back with some dread. Things I accepted as simple, are actually unacceptably complex.

> Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.

I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're right that the most important stuff is covered by guis nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.

Something like nix-gui seems like an interesting approach: https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui

>Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.

Buddy, I love Fedora, but this is nonsense.

The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen. The reddit mods on the subreddit literally ban people for complaining about it.

Libre Office isnt the future.

I just use Google sheets.

> The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen.

I was curious, so opened Impress, typed some text, and saw that the font selection and size was by default open on the right-hand "Properties" panel, alongside all the various text configuration options. So that at least is not true.

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