Tbh I don’t think Linux users should recommend Linux to Windows users. Linux fundamentally cannot replace Windows, it will never fully replicate its software support or quality. If someone tells me that they need Adobe products or other professional photo/video editors I would genuinely tell them to reinstall Windows.
I still don’t believe Linux needs to be pushed on people and it’s simply not for everyone.
It shouldn’t be pushed on people, but it should be talked about to give people more choice and agency in their home computing.
I dont argue with people about this, because i sleep well knowing that windows days are numbered (simply due to its parent companies structure) while linux/bsd will undoubtedly continue to thrive for decades if not centuries. A little bit of healthy superiority complex is great.
I know this thread is 10 years old, but still the steps “My laptop is a bit too warm” – “Scanning for temperature sensors broke my monitor” – “sudo i2cget -y 6 0x4f 176 [WTF?!] fixed it.” are really not unlikely to happen again today. I shot xOrg trying to get control over my fans just this year.
Valid, but ultimately no average user is gonna try anything like that on their own.
Can confirm. One of my housemates gave another a laptop last month. She asked me to set it up for them, since it came with windows 11, and I have warned her about that virus. I really tried to install windows 10 on the thing, the chip set supports it, but I couldn’t get past a step that needed to connect to Microsoft during the installation and initial setup. There are two more tricks I could pull to get the thing running Win 10, which are install Windows 7 and upgrade from there, or pop out the HDD and put it in my working Win 10 machine, and continue the setup using that box, but both of those seem like work.
I ended up slapping Mint on the thing, installed Firefox and Ublock Origin, and gave them the machine. Told them to ask me if they have any issues whatsoever, and they have been using it ever since. Apparently no issues, cause I have asked, and they said nothing they needed help with.
I mean, dual booting is an option. I can do everything I was doing in windows on Linux now. Rest of my family is on Linux now as well. Seems to be working just fine.
dual booting is a horrible experience and makes Linux look bad even though it’s windows messing it up
VMs, too. You can use a bare Windows VM with just the 1 or 2 programs that don’t work under Wine, unless they are major ones like Microsoft Office (still, LibreOffice is good enough or you can use older Office under Wine). This will minimize what the closed-source operating system gets access to.
This was my solution. If I need windows for anything, I’ve got a Win10 VM. And with QEMU/KVM, it gets near native hardware performance. Thankfully the only thing I need it for currently is checking my work email once a day for a part time thing I do - their particular setup for the Citrix Workspace environment I’m required to use won’t work on Linux.
The real problem is the lack of official support from companies like Adobe, Nvidia, and others that refuse to support Linux. Sure there are workarounds, but not without getting into the console which is already too much for people who are used to the drivers just downloading. Many Linux users tend to overlook how much Windows just does everything for them, for better or worse.
As Adobe gets increasingly shitty, more and more people realize they can go without Illustrator or Photoshop, often even After Effects. Lots of users got used to them with licences they didn’t pay for (at school or work) and often only use them for basic functionality, not wanting to invest the time to learn Inkscape, Krita, Blender etc. that would be adequate for their use case. However, the AI training fiasco might be the push they need.
need Adobe products
Just use GIMP, lol
[My eyes roll so far back in my head that they fall out of my skull]
Darktable and krita.
Most of the time you don’t even need to leave darktable. Great support for raws.
Anything video, kdenlive is ok for quick stuff but davinvi resolve is a cut above.
Honestly Adobe products are not great anymore. Their usability has gone down the toilet imo. xd was the last bit of interest for me, and that went to garbage a long while ago when it went paid only.
it will never fully replicate its … quality
What do you mean specifically by “quality?”
The fact that Microsoft can afford to invest money into the GUI while DEs like Plasma and Gnome often receive limited funding.
I was asking more specifically about the word “quality” itself than the whole sentence. Are you referring to stability? Security? User-friendliness? Integration with whatever? Hardware support? 'Cuz the word “quality” is way too broad a term to just use and not expect to piss off a lot of people. Lol.
That said, I can’t disagree with you about, for instance, Plasma. (I haven’t used Gnome enough to comment, but my last experience with Plasma back like 10 years ago wasn’t great.)
I strongly prefer relatively minimal solutions. Rather than Plasma or Gnome, I use Sway, for instance. And it’s solid as a rock. More so than either Plasma or Windows’ graphical system in my experience.
Plasma, in my book, is way over-engineered. Windows too. And that’s why they suck. And, admittedly, Plasma perhaps more so than Windows.
If I can find any common ground with you here, this is it: Microsoft has leverage on its employees to “fix” bugs in its over-engineered crap while KDE’s over-engineered crap doesn’t get fixed until volunteers can get to it.
But neither the Microsoft approach nor the KDE approach (nor, I’d guess, the Gnome approach) is a solution. You can’t fix fundamental design flaws by heaping fixes on top. Sometimes you have to step back and decide it’s best to finally rebuild the foundation. And Windows has a problem with almost never doing that. The Linux ecosystem is much better at that, I’d say. (And the argument could probably be made that that’s the result of engineers just wanting to build something new and shiny rather than keep working on the boring old stuff. The result is working, though. Certainly in my estimation.) Look at Wayland, for instance. The only “innovations” I’ve seen from Windows is how they redesign their start menu and piss everyone off every couple of Windows versions.
And in the Linux ecosystem, I can throw away what I don’t want and replace it with something I do want. I can’t really replace any pieces of Windows.
I can’t measure any of the above in dollars that went into Linux ecosystem vs dollars that went into Windows.
