People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
However, for folks who don't want to install some random packages, maybe Atomic version of the distro is better: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.
Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.
Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.
For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.
Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
You should revel in the fact that you now have choice and not a single option. That does mean you will have to pick one.
All of the options you have been presented with will work fine - there is literally no wrong answer here!
All of them are very well documented and you will not get a "SFC /SCANNOW" type answer if you have a problem.
You can center the taskbar. Add a spacer on the left of "Application Launcher" and on the right of "Icons-Only Task Manager", and they'll center what's in between.
Unfortunately, that doesn't completely center the application launcher popup, it's still a bit more on the left. Good enough for me.
As someone that is 100% on Linux and is occasionally forced to use Teams (where a fat client is no longer possible and was worse than the browser version when it was), I'm curious what that 5% was for you.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
> getting Japanese IME working
Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.
A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
But regarding your Nvidia issue, I did get it working on Fedora first, but it was remarkably cumbersome (I put the blame squarely on Nvidia though). I used this guide:
Also, Meta-T for snapping windows into tiles with Shift-Drag multiplies that organization.
The sheer productivity gains of using Plasma makes Windows look pathetic.
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
Granted, I think Apple has slightly better execution, but that's pretty subjective, I suppose.
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
There's a good joke in there somewhere
Microsoft's tagline is "Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere"
If you visit https://www.apple.com/os/macos/ , Apple touts Apple Intelligence (AI), connecting devices, cloud to increase productivity and, this time a direct quote, "accelerate your workflows". This is more or less the same tagline as Microsoft is pitching.
Somewhat humorously, Apple doesn't seem to mention their agent, Siri on the page at all, but it's being reported a revamped Siri is coming in 2026.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
It's because, rightly or not, they don't trust Linux in comparison to MacOS and view it as a piracy vector.
If it wasn't going to get blocked by some prominent factions on principle, I think you could build some trusted web technologies that allowed secure video delivery pipelines. But there's too much of a position that nothing like that should exist from some quarters that it'll never happen.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
I’m not saying that to defend Microsoft, but at least they have _some_ measure of product success leading them to push further. With apple the leadership push for ai seems an entirely divorced from the current reality of the company.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
The good news is I gave it a quick spin just now and it has come a -really- long ways since then. Within 10 minutes I had an ok workflow for doing cuts / ripple deletes. You can add text with individually colored words and styles, add a background shape behind the text and also add effects like drop shadows, glows and other things. All done graphically in the video preview.
It's no where near as intuitive as Camtasia but I think it's very usable and over time I'm sure I'll get used to its features.
I just hope it's stable, I'll edit a couple of videos and see how it goes.
It dates back to the 1990s and has used in Hollywood movies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks
There is a free version to try out with limited features, then subscriptions and also options to pay just once ($200 or $420).
I don't know if that will apply to me since their site doesn't explain what they are in detail but it already rubs me the wrong way that they classify themselves as cross OS compatible, but a bunch of stuff doesn't work on Linux.
I would essentially be paying $200 just to export to 1080p since the free version is limited to 720p. Except I'd likely need the $420 version since the pricing page says you can't adjust the h264 bit-rate option without the pro version. I could maybe justify the cost if the paid features worked on Linux but the ones that sound interesting and related to me (title editing, effects, etc.) do not.
Blender is amazingly designed and robust but it's really optimized for 3D design, not editing screencasts.
I tried 5 just now and while it looks familiar to a standard video editor it's missing a lot of features Camtasia and other video editors mentioned here have.
It also feels like using a spaceship when all I want to do is walk around the block. I like learning new things but to me, efficiency for the things I do a lot wins in the end. I'm sure I can design anything I could ever imagine in Blender but if I need to do a lot of complicated workflows for really basic things every time, all of that gets thrown out the window.
My goto things in a video editor is cutting, ripple delete, adding text callouts with minor effects, highlighting certain areas, zooming into certain areas and wanting to quickly take my original OBS source and render an mp4. Ideally it would run well on lower end hardware and also support 2x playback while editing (saves a lot of time).
Many DAWs are also video editing systems nowadays, I believe Reaper has a decent one.
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
[0] https://www.quantable.com/analytics/whats-blocking-google-an...
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.
And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.
They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
All modern Chromebooks can be put into developer mode without opening the case, which gives you root access.
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
See! Even a terrible analogy can get the point across.
OP never said he is not familiar with Windows anymore ...
He clearly said that his condition for helping them is if they install Linux. Those two are totally different statements.
I even find that a rather flimsy excuse that you made up. I do not work with MacOS, does that mean i can not help somebody with MacOS? Google kung-fu and i can figure it out. How about Linux ... OS2 lol ... If you have even a bit of basic knowledge, a OS or program is all about Googling the answer these days (or even AI / LLM answering it for you).
We can have a discussion about people being lazy and pulling the "but X family member will solve the issues with my PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone". I simply taught the family members who really want to learn, how to properly Google for issues. It did not matter to me that they use MacOS, or Windows.
Same with internet security, Windows is no issue for safety as long as the people using it, know what they can open and what they can not open. The moment you teach somebody the proper way, all those "support" calls vanish as their system stays clean of viruses and bots.
The whole "i will not help you unless you install Linux" ... that is toxic behavior. Instead of helping people by actually teaching them the basics, and those basics are operating system agnostic... his solution is a bit of blackmail.
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
Which is why I'm strongly considering a Steam Cube.
I haven't found anything in my steam library that Crossover (wine with a nice GUI) hasn't handled on my Mac yet. I'm sure a bad game exists, but for most games it is seamless.
I tend not to have unrealistic expectations like running AAA titles at high framerates on a mid-tier laptop, and tend to go for indy games, but the games I have run work great.
Native game selection is - in fact - pretty limited, but who cares if it is being run with a compatibility layer if it plays well.
Really, though, if we are going to nitpick at "perfect or don't bother" level. Skip linux too, Windows beats both on equivalent hardware.
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
The terrible thing is that you are probably unqualified to do driver surgery without taking on more work than the problem is worth to you to fix.
Closed source OSes like MS Windows and OSX dont permit you to see, let alone fix things internally.
Being able to do it yourself is truly the only liberating thing out there, since paying someone else to do it does not seem to actually work these days (or ever).
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
RIP Zareason
Yes, things breaking adds to this experience but when you are young, there is a lot of time for things you enjoy.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/millions-to-receive-free-e...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/11/04/electricity...
It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse and feeling like malware than Linux desktop being THAT much better than the last time I tried it, but between proton and maybe 95%+ of my work being in a browser window or browser window (Electron) these days, I basically never run in to compatibility issues and never have Candy Crush advertised to me.
No disagreeing on that. I hate how intrusive it is. I feel that I am paying for something AND I am still the product.
I am willing to pay for software, but please don't force me into a subscription model or you'll lose me as a customer.
The switch went smooth as butter for me, my system seems to run more stable and fast now, although it definitely helps that I was using WSL for years.
To this day I only ever use windows for gaming. Wonder if it’s time to try gaming on Linux again.
Edit: I started playing with Linux 8 years ago and about a year later moved all my stuff to Linux Fedora and later Mint and never looked back. No regrets so far.
Unknown could just as easily be windows, chromeOS or macOS or just automation for that matter. Why would only Linux report as unknown for only a portion of users?
Given that the Unknown line is directly mirroring the ChromeOS line, it’s much more likely that it’s misattribution from ChromeOS. (And yes ChromeOS is Linux under the hood but the distinction matters because of the implication of the article)
What is the methodology of the statistics collection? Is it just user agent strings?
Last time I tried Linux on desktop was Ubuntu 16 and it was all kinds of clunky, modifying text configs to make wifi work, random update services taking 100% CPU until I sudo-crippled them, etc.
On mint although everything... Just works. Including Steam and Spotify. It feels like a snappier, non-annoying version of Windows :)
What may make this happen is political risk. The rest of the world outside the US doesn't like the excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US, especially when that may mean snooping or disconnection. This used to be just a theoretical objection, but under the Trump administration it's a practical one.
Which is, as you say, an issue of digital (data) sovereignty.
When the US government acts in an erratic, unreliable, and untrustworthy manner, large organisations naturally look to de-risk their infrastructure and supply chains by removing American products and services from them:
https://dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dutch-universities-do-without-...
It's the same reason many countries don't want Chinese products in their telecommunications infrastructure. They don't trust what the Chinese government will do, or rather they do trust that the Chinese government will do things that aren't in their best interests:
Of this demographic I found they were mostly conservative/right wing. It makes me wonder if there are a bunch of influencers like Luke Smith out there telling them how to use this stuff, or if they're just figuring it out on their own through forums. I think the word "flocking" is too strong, but there is definitely a large and growing non-technical userbase of people who use linux.
This failure mode of capitalism should've been easy to anticipate: owners of capital eventually become the customers.
Capitalism is great for technology development. But stable markets don't generate the returns VCs and public company shareholders demand.
I predict a return to simple commerce: pay money for a good or service without third parties. It doesn't need to grow or generate returns.
Maybe get a Macbook?
Do you even know how bad Linux is? The video drivers don't work, bluetooth doesn't work, your laptop won't wake up from sleep, it's horrible. Go the fuck away. Linux is horrible.
Windows is fucking awesome. Mac is OK. Linux sucks. Don't waste your time.
But I still think it's better to have the unwashed masses move to Linux just to give Microsoft the middle finger of realisation that they're, well, making horrible decisions.
Maybe we can compromise by keeping all the n00bs shepherded into the Ubuntu pen?
Windows is a well documented hellscape of advertising, tracking, poor performance, and disregarding user will. Some people may pay to upgrade to a guilded cage from Apple, but trying Linux on the hardware you already have doesn't cost a dime. I've given Linux to multiple mostly tech illeterate friends now, and they are all happier and asking for less help on those systems. Amusingly, the help they've asked for wasn't even Linux specific and they would've asked the same things on Windows.
Then I had to plug in the LAN cable and the whole system just... froze and needed a hard reboot. I don't know Linux systems deteriorated so much because everything "just worked" ~10 years ago and it got way worse since that.
I just don't have the time anymore to waste hours of my day to get apps working, when it just works on windows or mac.
That's not interesting, the most common os is Windows, ergo most downloads are going to come from windows.
> Win11 file picker is years ahead of some random file picker option available on linux
First it would be nice to know why you would think this and maybe provide an example, second there are other file pickers. It should also be noted that you don't need one at all, but if you want one, there are so many options, try nemo
> HiDPI
Wayland
> Multi monitor scaling polish
What did he mean by that? Wayland supports different scaling factors between displays.
> rdp
VNC, ssh + pf
> vastly superior accessibility
Hahahahaha
Some examples of what you mean please, otherwise this is just a lazy shill answer
Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
neither nautilus nor nemo provides you convenient way to navigate, to check free disks space, to check photos in an album view, to see all the file properties and customize table views.
if you don't have this usage scenarios, it doesn't mean its a ragebait.
and btw, your attitude is one of the reasons people don't want to move to linux. One more toxic community? Naah, I'm good.
cd where/you/want/to/navigate
ranger (if you want interactive)
>check free disk space
df -h
> check photos in an album view
nsxiv -t *.{jpeg|png}
> see all the file properties
ls -l
But I guess you are right. If one wants to use a computer like you use it on windows, then linux is a bad choice. The best choice in that case is windows.
Your file manager is not your operating system, use something else to view images.
I have all those "usage scenarios", which are in fact absolute basics and thus it's worth remembering 3 commands. The problem arises when one uses a Desktop environment with a dock and all other bloated nonsense. Maybe computing is solved once people reverse the brain damage inflicted by Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sorry for my attitude, because OP is the reason computing sucks and becomes more bloated and telemetry ridden every year. It's pure laziness to learn something new. Linux should be there for everyone, but shouldn't be called "immature" just because someone needs a perfect clone of the windows file picker, or wants his proprietary windows programs to run. Thats all good and fair, but not linux' problem.
I remember KDE copying that a few years after Microsoft introduced Active Desktop. That was, what, 25 years ago now?
VNC is highly dependent on implementation. Sunshine/Moonlight runs circles around RDP in terms of performance and includes audio. For situations where you need the extra functionality is RDP... You can just use RDP. It works just fine on Linux, especially if you're on recent KDE.
On-screen keyboards are admittedly a pain point, but I've usually seen people say nicer things about the screen readers than Windows. Probably lots of different experiences depending on implementation.
File picker has been a strength of Windows for quite a few versions. And the consensus seems to be that it is better than Mac's (based on my YouTube watch history). I have used various Linux desktops, and none of the file pickers are nearly as good as the Windows native one, in yet of being able to navigate/filter/order things and occasionally getting more information about the selection.
Someone that is not me started the debate of RDP vs VNC and file pickers in the first place.