Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

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> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.

Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!

At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.

But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.

Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.

Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?

Windows would be 'taught' as a byproduct of another activity involving Windows software, usually starting with Office/365.

Sadly, schools don't have real computers any more, it's all chromebooks. Gen Alpha is going to be completely computer illiterate.

My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.

Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.

I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.

I don't understand, we didn't have computers at all and didn't end up illiterate. Why are you underestimating kids so much?

Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.

Wonder if Chromebooks have taken over since.

AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.

How does remote RDP/VNC kill AD and Group Policy? You still need AD to provide centralized authentication/authorization. And you still need Group Policy to configure the VMs according to the corporate standards - disk images may work for the initial rollout but not for applying future changes.

That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.

The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.

You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.

Network boundaries are insufficient. A file share might need to be read-write for some users and read-only for others. Database access is even more granular.

Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.

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