cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1064425
And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
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That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Related: Omakub
Linux scary. Some guy yelled at me in Finnish :(
random fatphobia in the opening paragraph followed by programmer elitism.
Dude seems well adjusted and pleasant. Overall point isn’t wrong though.
Welcome to the DHH Show! He’ll be forever, no matter how many people beg him to stop.
Dude ain’t well adjusted https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem. That being said exercise is healthy and junk food isn’t. Saying that is not fatphobic.
I love Linux. I’m so glad I switched both my PC and laptop to OpenSUSE and got rid of dual boot Windows. Using Linux exclusively for months has really opened my eyes to the truth:
Lol, tell me you’ve never worked IT support again.
The average user can’t remember passwords without browser autofill. They don’t want to tinker. A “just works” linux distro with a relatively limited set of default features targeted to a specific hardware set to avoid complications, like SteamOS on Steam Deck, is pretty much at the limit of the investment level the average user is willing to put in to keep things working.
It really just depends on what you do, and how you do it.
A formula-1 car is not for normies, but a regular car is. Same principle applies here. My tech illiterate mom has Fedora on her laptop, and she finds it considerably more intuitive to use, than her previous Windows installations
This is fair. But at that point the same could be said of a Chromebook for her needs, which I’d venture is true for most people’s computing needs given entire swaths of the world do everything on a phone or tablet.
The Linux vs Windows debate is peculiar, because it really only applies to users who are more advanced than the average, arguing about problems that only arise when you want to do more demanding things with your machine like development and gaming. Your average user doesn’t care about any of the anti-monopolistic / FOSS reasons to use Linux, which makes the argument for them essentially “you should use this operating system that takes more work to use because it’s better for you for reasons you don’t care about.”
In order for Linux to become more mainstream, it needs to be able to exceed Windows’ performance and ease of use for gaming and productivity - which is challenging since when most users think of productivity apps, they only think of Microsoft products. It’s not enough to be equal in order to compel people to switch from what they’re accustomed to.
1000% agree.
As a software dev, I’m using windows and I know I shouldn’t switch.
Tbh it’s even worse, I can not switch. And that’s why it’s even more ridiculous. Linux power users like to say that you can do everything you can in windows but with more control. And with “control” they are right, but with “everything” more than wrong. Everything that’s not working out of the box is a gamble on time wasted getting said thing to work. For the simplest thing you can be stuck for weeks just by sheer bad luck.
Say you are a software dev? Yeah Linux is pretty solid.
3d artist? Meh. Blender is the last thing that works, otherwise you are stuck. Octane, 3ds max, Maya, c4d, Houdini, v-ray, real flow, … You gotta be lucky to find them to be compatible even if it’s only with a workaround.
Music production? Well you are stuck on LMMS, which is basically only used by very specific experimental artists. Also plugins, especially those with copyright protection will give you one hell of a hard time.
Images? Well gimp is not Photoshop if we’re honest, and stuff like coreldraw is also hard to replace on Linux.
Video cutting? You have to carefully tip toe about everything Adobe, and that’s an awful hassle. And because everyone would love to give Adobe the middle finger, we are slowly realizing how hard it is to replace Adobe and that if you go somewhere, it is not working as well by default, you have to really make it work.
And especially in big enterprises time is money. So every time someone thinks about where to migrate to, how to migrate, or when they are migrating, and than when they have to propose new workflows, new solutions, a bunch of workarounds, maintenance pipelines, etc. it’s just not worth it. Not on a big company scale, and unfortunately also not on a me scale.
At the end of the day, an OS is a tool to me, not a lifestyle choice, a hobby or a commitment. And it shouldn’t be. As long as Linux is at least 2 of those things for everyone that’s not using it, it’s not very compelling to switch. And that goes for every distro.
Btw. this is the reason why I can understand people using apple over windows. Yeah it’s 1000 bucks to take like 20min less to do a thing. But it stacks up exponentially with every device that integrates into Apple’s universe. And if you spend even 20min less per day, that’s already more than 2h per week that you now have to dedicate to other things.
I’m not rich and this doesn’t entice me, but I get it.
So yeah, make a distro that’s not only modular and expendable,but make it also very easy to understand and make it as easy. And make it either as compatible with Windows software or add those features in a different way. And then people like me can dream about a FOSS universe for everyone.
Or be the same but cheaper, but yes inertia is huge at the difference in market share
It’s easy to forget that Windows’ success doesn’t come from people seeking it out and installing it as an OS intentionally. They’re buying machines that come preloaded with it. Linux’s success, however big or small, lies in how its methods of distribution compare to Windows OEM dominance.
Let’s be real: when it comes to the actual installation of an OS, regular users ask people like us to do it for them. I don’t think Linux is going to outpace Windows anytime soon, but the last few times I’ve been asked for that kind of help, I’ve installed Linux for them, because it is absolutely ready to be used by regular people.
I fully believe PC gaming’s future is on Linux. Valve are pushing compatibility heavily enough to the point where Proton runs virtually all my games as smoothly as Windows would and as hard as it would have been to believe a few years ago, most my library has native support anyway. Combined with the fact that Linux has a smaller runtime overhead than Windows, most of my games run better.
Ease of use is the harder metric to gauge. Most people seem to forget that Windows isn’t built for ease of use; not like MacOS anyway. Things break on Windows all the time; most people are just more familiar with the common workarounds. Even installing things are easier (once the user learns the singular command they need to do this) and flatpak installations align more with how people are used to installing apps on their phones and tablets.
One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.
A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out.
I installed VMware Horizon for my job’s remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn’t bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.
I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies.
I still can’t get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.
I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute.
Plasma recently added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can’t figure out why.
I can’t get CopyQ to launch minimised no matter what I do.
My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can’t figure out why they’ve decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. fixed
Flatpak Steam app wouldn’t pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.
My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn’t supported.
People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn’t include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS’s when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows.
For 99% of Windows or MacOS users who work in their browser and within simple applications, day-to-day Linux usage is as easy or easier than Windows. Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and lack of government intervention/regulation led us to this point plain and simple.
I just a few weeks ago successfully switched my father-in-law’s mid-2011 iMac (out of support for years) to Nobara 40. It took some finagling with the SIP settings and some other macOS specific stuff before it would boot the liveUSB but once it did, it works flawlessly OOTB.
Pretty incredible how frictionless the transition was for him. He even chose to switch from chrome to the default firefox, despite me having setup chromium for him to compare (but he knows its there if a website doesn’t load right in Firefox). He’s in his 60’s and not a techy person at all. Everything is so intuitive with KDE these days he picked it up no problem.
Only downside is background sync for KDE connect doesn’t work on iOS yet, seems this is a sticking point for most FOSS apps for some reason. It was causing disconnect/pairing issues for us. But I showed him localsend for now and it works flawlessly for transferring photos from the phone to the computer.
He’s happy with all the default apps and onlyoffice (which I switched out from libreoffice as I’ve found much more consistent formatting when sending/receiving to MSoffice users)(maybe this is outdated, haven’t tried the new release). Printing and scanning was plug and play. Apple trackpad and keyboard auto-paired. I showed him how to setup widgets and he went nuts. Overall 9.95/10 would convert a normie again.
I’d love to use Linux, but I just don’t have the legs for those socks
