Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux
scottrlarson.com
scottrlarson.com
All Electron apps are.
The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.
well, Firefox did, until Mozilla (of course) removed it
Chrome still supports it
Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.
There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.
Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.
Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...
* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.
Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.
* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.
I speak as a former docs writer.
If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.
> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted
Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.
As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".
Point 1:
Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.
The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.
They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.
(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)
They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.
Point 2:
How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.
There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.
(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)
Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.
So this is clearly not a handicap.
Point 3:
Docs are really hard and don't pay.
I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.
Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.
This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.
Point 4:
The real context here.
Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.
You're right, I was mixing up threads, I apologize. Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right? If so, I agree, and I understand why a volunteer-driven project would take this route.
However, two points:
First, a properly-designed GUI should require less documentation in the first place.
More importantly, I don't see how this refutes my original point that running shell commands copied from the internet is less efficient, learnable, and secure for end-users than using comparable functionality through a GUI.
Again, I understand why distros take this route, I'm merely pointing out that it is less efficient, learnable, and secure. With respect to the four points in your last post I agree so I'm not sure there's much worth discussing there.
Er, no, not at all. TBH I am puzzled by this interpretation. I had nothing like that in mind, no.
> Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
Our experiences with home PC users must be qualitatively different.
I have trouble getting the PC users I help to remember the name of their web browser or to understand the difference between a webpage and an application. And of the few people I know who might be able to learn how to use the terminal, none have the slightest interest in devoting time to doing so -- they would prefer to use their computer time doing actual work or playing computer games than wasting it learning how to do computer admin tasks more efficiently.
The prospect of teaching anyone but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of PC users to successfully run terminal commands seems so removed from the realm of possibility I have trouble imagining it. Maybe I could see it catching on with an LLM as an intermediary to actually structure the commands?
For most, it would be:
1. Open the app or software store
2. Type "spotify"
3. Click "install"
If it doesn't, then it's not a distro for non-techie end-users.
Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.
A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.
But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.
Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.
Windows has changed too, their bad practices are increasing and the public perception is suffering by that.
"Windows 11 is a hate crime."
I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.
[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.
For people who have been using Linux for decades, it is not so shocking.
Definitely frustrating it has taken so lone.
I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.
I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.
Adobe, I can't comment on
Fundamentally the problem with any anti cheat system is that it is indistinguishable from a root kit. You're giving software full privileges to your machine with the ability to edit your kernel, inspect running processes, and inject code into running processes. I'm not saying there's no situations where you don't want a program to be able to do this but you should be extremely cautious about doing so because that program essentially owns your machine.
Put it this way. Suppose you trust those game companies and their anti cheat software. Do you trust that this software will never be hacked? I mean we're talking about an extremely high profile target with wide adoption. Sounds like you're adding a pretty valuable target that's worth far more to hackers than it is to the game studios. I mean we're talking about the same game studios that let easily solvable but game breaking bugs persist for years. Even ones where the community has provided patches for...
[0] <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/battlefield-6-and-valorant...>
I'm pretty sure it trounces Linux (for some value of whatever you think "Linux" actually is) on Accessibility. This is an area that could be vastly improved.
Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.
(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)
Two things are non-obvious about this info.
1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.
2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.
To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.
It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.
It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.
Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.
Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler.
I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™.
I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chr...
I like the current ChromeOS. I am concerned by the change.
She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.
Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.
Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?
EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
> Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies.
It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.
These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.
> The name is stupid
Over in Windows-land, you frequently hear "oh yeah you gotta reinstall Windows every couple of years, or whenever you do xyz operation (say, disk cloning)". Troubleshooting Windows is a huge pain in the ass. There's no good centralized documentation, SEO sucks, registry hacks are common, etc. I've spent much more of my computing life on Windows machines, and I still have no idea how they truly work. I have no idea why sometimes the only way to fix an hardware/driver issue is by running the built-in troubleshooters, etc.
My solution? Type my strong password at every reboot and move to using the Yubi key they offered me. Great, I like Yubi keys. Oh, I can't set a security key as my primary means of 2 factor? My options were Hello or using the Microsoft authenticator phone app (couldn't use my other OTP app...). So every single login always started with "Sign in with Hello or use a security key". If using Hello I could just tap my finger and move on (and Outlook might crash silently). If security key I had to go through this dumb process of clicking: "use another device", "security key", "next", "type credentials", "tap security key", "ok". I think that needless "next" button was what really got under my skin. It was already a manufactured problem but an extra dialogue screen that is just doing nothing. Quite Kafkaesque.
That advantage has been lost with Win10, which jumped on the constant-update bandwagon and took control away from the user. For me that's what tipped the scales to Linux.
I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)
A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42862560/should-one-create-a-bond-with-a-bluetooth-le-device/42916081#42916081
https://www.cve.news/cve-2024-53144/I've used Bluetooth for a number of devices for about ten years, and I didn't even know there's a config file until now! Thus far, it's been mostly a "just works" experience except for the battery level on by BOOM 3 speaker, but that's their fault for doing some proprietary bollocks.
I fight for the average user for respect of privacy and security, because, go figure, the average user only knows what there is a browser or an app, and they can logon and use it.
They have no clue of what is really going on.
So how we fix this? Give the average user the power. And show them what is going on and what are the options.
GNU/Linux desktop is not an alternative to Windows or mac. It is the only one who respects you.
If should be the only option you learn in school and learn about open source.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.
Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
Using local time for the RTC theoretically makes it simpler to schedule wakeups at user friendly times, but that seems less impactful.
On Linux with one command you can switch between UTC or local RTC time to match Windows. On Windows you need to change a bit in the registry if you want it to adapt to the Linux way - i.e. the correct one.
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
I ended up in this discussion with someone on Reddit who was convinced to their core that asking an older person to use Linux was "cruel" because they shouldn't have to spend their remaining years learning to type esoteric commands and older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things. Aside from the bizarrely confident ageism, give someone a thinkpad running fedora with KDE (put away your knives for a moment) and they'll be fine. And if they have issues with Linux they're going to have issues with Windows too. (As to the distro, as long as it's not one of the DIY distros, it's also probably fine, and I'd bet most people--even those brittle, sad old people (/s)--would figure out Gnome in a day.)
> older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things
I agree that people of all ages can be interested and capable of learning new things, even something as dry as learning how to administer a computer. And Linux is a great option for someone who actually wants to learn more about operating systems.
But the overwhelming majority of people who use a computer use it as a tool to do things, like keep in touch with family members, listen to music, write a book, read the news, look up tutorials, draw, make a webpage, play computer games, etc. Unless you aspire to learn about Linux itself, every second spent dealing with Linux driver issues is a waste that steals time from the actual things you want to do.
In those cases it's absolutely cruel to force someone to dedicate time to learning esoteric technical skills before they're allowed to use their computer. That's why the only people I've evangelized Linux to are people I'm happy to continue to support indefinitely or who are actively interested in learning about Linux itself.
As to the first issue, you're right about installed base of Windows helpers, but my assumption is that a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Pure, unfiltered anecdata, but my kid uses Linux at home and he doesn't experience even 5% of the bizarre issues he tells me about on the district Windows computers (which are, granted, about 8,000 years old).
I'm not sure about that... over the years I've gotten lots of perfectly functioning hardware from my father because it didn't work for him anymore because of a new Windows "upgrade". Scanners, printers, audio and graphics cards all got their turn of becoming expensive paperweights after Windows introduced a new driver model and the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to rewrite their old drivers.
But not 100% the time. And that makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Linux expert in their life. Finding a file that got put in a weird place, plugging in USB devices, understanding what version of an application to install (apt? snap? flatpak?), permissions, weird issues after updates, etc. All solvable problems that seem simple to you or me but that would stymie a nontechnical person.
> a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Exactly. Linux is fantastic if you have a technical person on speed dial or are interested in investing time and energy becoming a technical person. For the other 90% of the planet it's just not there yet.
It's no different to Windows in that way.
> plugging in USB devices,
That it more likely to just work in Linux than Windows. The latter will probably need a special driver.
> understanding what version of an application to install
Most window managers provide software installers / managers.
> permissions,
A normal desktop user doesn't look at permissions.
> weird issues after updates,
Well, yes. Sadly the solution is the same for both Windows and Linux - wipe and re-install. It's a regular occurrence with Windows, sadly.
We had a guy bring in his Linux laptop to a LUG because it was behaving badly. Turned out he had run out of disk space. He could have fixed it himself, had he realised. But the surprising thing was - it was 15 years old, and never had an issue up until then. I've never had a Windows machine someone was using regularly last that long. App churn causes everything to degrade, NTFS fragments something horrid, it slows down to being unusable. You eventually wipe it and restart.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
Not going back anytime soon either way.
disable swap. Programs will crash instead, which may be more useful.
Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.
Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.
A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?
> and makes everything slow while doing it
It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.
And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.
I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.
For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).
If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.
It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.
> It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior.
If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.
If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.
Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")
I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.
The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.
What you should do:
- Follow the instructions from [1] or elsewhere[2] and get yourself at least 4G of swap but I would do 8. Are you really going to miss 8G of disk space?
- Change the swappiness value[2]. Set it to 10 to get pretty similar results to what you have but without crashes.
- Read more about what swap files actually are because you are currently giving a strong impression that you have vastly oversimplified how a computer's memory system works.
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
[2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.
> I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for.
> Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms.
From your links:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq: "Swap space is used when your operating system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and the amount of available (unused) physical memory is insufficient." -> More RAM for your memory heavy usage. In this case if you buy more physical RAM your programs will run faster.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...: "The swap space acts as an extension to the physical memory and allows the system to continue running smoothly even when physical memory is exhausted." and "Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space." -> More RAM. Slow RAM, but more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness: "Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available." -> Do I need to repeat myself here?
Did you seriously write and link all of that without reading any of it?
> I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
> pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes
> Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
> But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcom...
I read that as “playing computer games feels like work” rather than “getting games running feels like work”.
I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>
Do any other companies do the same?
Then there are more bespoke vendors that cater specifically to Linux. System76 is probably the most well known, but there are many others.
I'm speaking mainly for laptops/desktops. For servers it's always been you just put whatever on.
Linux gets the most time on servers and containers but the desktop base continues to grow, so expect most problems to be there (bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Accessibility is getting much better.
Important relevant note:
Some companies offer "DOS" or "FreeDOS" computers. This is notably common in poorer countries.
These commonly do not really run DOS. They run a very old version of FreeDOS in a VM under Linux. HP uses Debian.
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
1. When you look for Linux machines, look in other countries than your own.
2. Include machines described as DOS machines. They are really Linux machines and will run Linux fine because they in fact ship with it.
There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.
Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.
Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
Underrated point.
Most Linux distros have historically catered to an ecosystem of open source software with the distro repository model, and cross-distro software distribution is probably the biggest papercut still remaining with Linux today.
Thank goodness things are so much better these days with Electron, Steam, Docker, FlatPak and WINE. But there are still gaps that need filling.
The main problem is that Windows comes on laptops.
So how can we fight this? It might be hard to make this illegal as also Apple creates hardware and put's the software on it.
So the only way is to teach people about their options.
Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.
Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.
This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.
Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
True, but mostly because they see software as a binary number on a disc.
If they saw software as an artefact to build, as Free Software does, this would not be a problem.
A pox on all their (propitiatory) houses. All they are all beneath contempt. They want money, above all. They love money, above all. They care not for their users
Timothy 6:10
That sounds like skill issue (i.e the company developing the software doesn't have engineers experienced in developing apps for Linux). There are many proprietary software available for Linux.
In fact I was able to open some huge Excel files more easily in WPS than in MS Office (I have a work laptop that runs Windows 11).
But, I think you have a point, and that point is that the most stable Linux API to release software is actually the Win32 API provided by Wine. Native libraries treat backwards compatibility like a liability.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).
> I am ok with that not being solved
Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.
It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.
Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.
Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
Tbh, it sounds like you may be forced to use a Windows VM ( if you want try 'dropping' windows that way ). Last time I was looking at it, VMs were still fair game, but were starting to be identified as a way to bypass some of the restrictions ( mostly because they were only doing a couple of checks for whether OS is in a VM ). That said, few friends were recently sharing pics suggesting those checks were getting more invasive.
<< Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
Just in case it helps, I went through a major system issue at some point with Windows 7 and once it was clear that CPU/GPU passthrough works surprisingly well ( before nvidia started messing with it after 3060 ), I got a way to ease myself in with better fallback position should my linux install fail somehow. This approach ( OS engaged for a specific purpose ) worked better than dual boot, which in practice was never used. There is some learning curve, but nothing excessive or something that is not well covered online.
I'm sure there are users with specialized needs who need something more complex, but i dont think microsoft office is quite the moat it used to be.
I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.
So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.
This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.
The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!
I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.
Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.
So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.
Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.
Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.
And that’s the issue with every alternative, it lacks 1:1 features/bugs so what’s usable for one isn’t for another.
Not judging you, but for me I just couldn't tolerate it any longer.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)
I open up firefox, go to youtube, and immediately notice that 30% of all frames are gone. Hardware acceleration isnt working.
I put the computer to sleep and go make dinner. When I return my wireless keyboard cant wake it up, I have to hard-reboot the computer to wake it up.
I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems, and it start spitting out terminal commands that end up making no difference.
In my experience, 2025 is not yet the year of linux. I'll try again in 2027.
Hardware acceleration isn't working -> what GPU? Do you have the right drivers installed (yes for Linux this is a consideration as there are so many display configurations not all drivers cough nvidia work for all scenarios).
You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at. Is this 30% dropped frames at 4k60 or 1080p30? You can argue that this is too much detail for something that should "just work" but given where you are and what you're talking about I would think you would be more nuanced in the troubleshooting. If you want the most seemless and effort free web browsing and media viewing experience just buy a macbook air (good product and also good dev machines for most).
>You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at.
If hardware acceleration isn't working, it doesn't matter which youtube video made you realize the issue existed. It's not as if the method you use to fix the driver would be different when the video you want to watch is 1080p30 instead of 4k60.
If not... Well, wow, I really hope you're not "coding on Linux" for anything important.
What did you do wrong?
> I switched from windows 10 to ubuntu
1. What version of Ubuntu?
2. After installing, did you update?
2a. If so, how? Firefox is a snap; doing an update with the "apt" or "apt-get" commands won't touch it.
3. Did you install graphics drivers? Did you even check if you need them?
4. Did you try Chrome? Youtube is a Google product. Test with the Google browser. It's about 2 clicks to install it.
5.
> my wireless keyboard cant wake it up
Well known issue with some wireless devices (especially Bluetooth). Don't use them if you have an alternative.
6.
> I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems
It's a predictive text tool. Of course it can't. Don't use LLM bots for search. Better still, don't use them at all.
7.
> In my experience
From what you posted, this is scant and poor.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-Lua-Plugin-System
I'm thinking taking an existing laptop (say hp), installing debian variant.
I'd be intrigued what other options are out there as I'm trying to move the whole family over
Whether these advanced features are desirable is of course a matter of opinion. Personally, I find macbooks very hard to use because the trackpad never does what I want on account of having the motor skills of a spastic five year old. So I don't miss this at all.
On mac I disable nearly all gestures, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
You are right though, we're probably all talking about different aspects of trackpad usage.
And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.
But with the end of life for windows 10 in October, I switched back to Linux and I'm quite happy.
I'm running Manjaro with Xfce on my 4 year old LG Gram and it's really snappy while only using 900MB idle memory.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
There is a good progress with the likes of Lenovo (who for decades refused to refund Windows tax) selling computers with Linux pre-installed.
If you want gaming on Linux, get an AMD GPU.
I thought it was very poor, myself.
When I started at my current job I started with a dual boot machine (Windows/Linux) with the thought of testing Linux as a desktop OS out for a bit. After a year I realized I wasn't booting into the Windows installation anymore so I removed it.
Now 5 years on I am still as happy as ever. I am still struggling with some Adobe Creative Suite replacements, but in those 5 years things have gotten so much better already (and so much worse on the Windows-side) that I can see myself doing this for the long-term future.
There is just something relaxing about working on an OS that treats you with respect instead of trying to trick you into something constantly.
What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game. Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.
Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine. If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.
If you think Windows is bad for the world, stop driving eyeballs to their same strategies in the f/oss world as well.
It's impressive how these Microsoft-owned products became fundamental to my daily software needs. I know I have to find better alternatives, move to using Codeberg/Forgejo, Spacemacs/Neovim..
And programming languages? I like TypeScript, and Microsoft has been a good steward of the project. Similarly with Go and Google. I also rely on VC-funded language runtimes, frameworks, libraries. That's a risk I sometimes question. Ideally I would shift to using FOSS altogether, the whole stack top to bottom.
Even the hardware I'd prefer "open source" if possible.
One is an actual open source free software project. The other is spyware cosplay open source.
Travel laptop to Mint was smooth so then decided to get ambitious and try Arch/Hyprland on Desktop. Was far easier than expected (cuda, audio, bt etc) and the fiddly parts were mostly because its Arch/Hyprland - fiddling is kinda what you sign up for with that combo
The only 2nd thoughts I'm having is that I kinda want to play the new battlefield and the anticheat makes that a no go on linux
You still have not answered. That is saddening.
Ah well. Here are 2 of my efforts.
This is my 1st try for my current employer. I still stand by most of it, though.
P1: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/21/reg_linux_guide...
P2: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/23/reg_linux_guide...
P3: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/24/reg_linux_guide...
My more recent take with some updated de-cruftifying steps:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/linux_nonapproved_lap...
I talked about choosing a distro here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_l...
Executive summary: use Linux Mint. The latest version, with the default Cinnamon desktop. Anyone who disagrees has an agenda and it's not ease of use, so can probably be ignored.
the only things that didn't run natively were a few video games, and even for these it seems there is a good emulation (?) layer now in Steam (I forgot the details as I didn't game often).
The bad is that Apple is just like Windows, just wants to look better. It is not.
Better than Windows? Ok, a little better yes.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
I had it set up with a network bridge so that each VM looked like an actual PC on my network.
I was at my mum and dads yesterday and I was asking my dad if he'd seen any messages or nag screens about upgrading his computer from Windows 10? It's ancient and I wouldn't put Windows 11 on it, even though I can burn a copy with Rufus to remove all the requirements. As it happens, he had. In fact, he thought Microsoft wanted him to pay for it, such is their confusing marketing!
Now, my dad is no dumbass. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, all his faculties are still present and correct and he's used computers for years and he won numerous awards as uni for being smart af! Anyway, I put him off the idea of Windows 11 and onto the idea of a Chromebox instead. He seemes keen to try it.
Also, my dad only uses the web, the odd spreadsheet to keep track of his money, the odd YT video and that's about it: he's not a power-user.
My reasoning for the Chromebox is that I can't be about all the time when he needs tech support and I'm worried he's scammed by someone wanting him to "install an anti-virus, quick, before all his money is gone" or something. Plus, he has an Android phone already... it makes sense I think.
Next week I'll drop off my Chromebook and set it up for him to try. I think it'll work out, and if it does, I'll buy a Chromebox for about £300 and that'll do him for ever I think.
On a side-note, I've switched back to Windows 10 a few weeks ago: specifically Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I used the Massgrave script and it's valid until 2038 or something. I've had it with the latency and general dystopia (and the broken printer... ffs Microsoft!) around Windows 11, which I'd been using for a couple of years until last week.
It may sound trivial but I still can't get over the volume slider latency in Windows 11: When you change the volume slider in the quick launch area and the "ding" sound happens 400ms later, not at the same time, it drives me nuts!
Anyway, my £0.02
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
Back in university RMS came to a neighbor uni in Stockholm for a traditional lecture about software freedoms etc. I think everyone thought he was a bit crazy or idealistic (I guess most still do). But the warnings of how you weren't going to own anything, that you have to ask permission, that your devices can be disabled etc, that sounded like fiction at the time. But looking back to that era (2011 or so), it slowly did change for the worse exactly like he warned.
While a lot of the early internet idealisms have fizzled out, I think today those ideas and passions were much more important than we thought. For instance, I usually say that if the web was invented today, browsers would not be approved by the app stores. We take some things for granted, and a lot of those things came from a different era, arising out of preconditions that largely no longer exist.
I don't remember exactly what company (I think it was Novel), but one made a fortune bridging them.