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99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
They also want the developers to dedicate their entire lives, 20 hours a day, for no pay, just became they’re entitled to a FOSS Windows clone.
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
- Hardware compatibility issues.
- Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
- Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
- Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
- Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
- Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
fanzyzones
Thanks!! This is just what I need. Pop_os has an equivalent in their DE and because work I have windows and I really miss it.
If you don’t have admin rights on your work pc, you can install fancyzone by installing powertoys from the microsoft store.
Add binary compatibility issues to that list: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The moment you need software that is not packaged by your distro you either need to be lucky that whomever compiled it accounted for your setup, or compile it from scratch yourself (if open source and publicly available). Especially with closed source software (like most games) the latter isn’t even an option.
You say it like it’s a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them… I don’t want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn’t work. I already spend all day doing that in my work’s linux servers and my home server.
This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn’t work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I’ve paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
Honestly I think potentially a bigger factor is that there are very few manufacturers who sell machines with linux preinstalled. Very few people have ever installed an OS before or have any desire to do so.
Also there is plenty of software with no real linux alternative even today unfortunately.
That is exactly why Chromebooks were (are?) so popular. You got a cheap laptop with an easy-to-use OS without having to do any install. And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
You would think. Surprisingly, i only know of one non techy person in my life for whom this was the case, and even they ended up needing to use some statistics software for school after switching to linux. Luckily, they were able to get it through a school-provided VM.
People have all kinds of needs and those needs can change over time. For people who are deaf in one ear, there is no easy way to set the audio output to mono. That’s just one way that accessibility features are lacking. I know people who rely on apps like notability syncing their mac laptop to their ipad, which no app on linux can do. I know people who have specialized software for work such as VPN apps that simply do not exist on linux. I know people who do creative work for whom it would be a major learning curve at the very least to switch. It only takes one app or crucial feature to lock you out. Even I have to dual boot from time to time for firmware updates or to play games my friends want to play that aren’t on Linux.
But you better believe I’m tracking all of these issues so I can switch people over as soon as they’re implemented ;)
Personally I believe that unless you’re able to do a slackware or gentoo installation, you’re not ready for Linux.
/s but only kinda
Linux users need to have a higher level of technical literacy than windows users. It just can’t be avoided unless you’re okay with potentially reinstalling your os at some point. The bar has been lowered a lot, but because other companies refuse to play nice with Linux, it’ll always be there.
If you’re okay with that tradeoff, then yeah Linux is great. But a lot of people aren’t even aware of it and it causes a lot of pain
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
The misery I have trying to get a newer(or sometimes older) version of a package I want is sometimes immeasurable. Yet somehow usually the right version is extremely accessible on choco.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn’t want, etc.
Rose tinted glasses.
I think you guys have hit the nail on the head. So much of the Linux argument has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with what people already know.
Everyone forgets the bugs and crashes they’ve always had to deal with even exist, because they become background noise. Then they change to a new OS and might run into completely new “roadblocks” and cry about how broken and useless the OS is even though their new problems are just as minor (or more so) than the problems they left behind.
In reality, any OS is a complicated piece of kit. The more you do with it, the more likely you are going to run into something that does something you don’t expect - and the more tech literate you believe yourself to be, the more likely you think the OS doing something you don’t expect means it is broken.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate “normal” person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that’s for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It’s based on arch btw
The fact that there is a “correct” distro only adds to the unreadyness for mainstream.
I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it’s not really an app store, because it’s not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I’ll agree with you that Linux isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I’m tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn’t been fixed. I’m also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there’s another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven’t had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are “chicken and egg” things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn’t fixed quickly because there aren’t enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it’s hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don’t switch because it’s glitchy, it’s glitchy because there aren’t enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won’t switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn’t sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers… but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it’s not that things don’t break in Windows, it’s just that it’s a bigger emergency when they do break.
I’m not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I’m having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you’re trying to change doesn’t show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that’s not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the “DOS prompt” but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the “power” shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn’t quite there for the end-user, it’s getting closer and closer. Really, all that’s needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That’s an easy one.
Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
If Steam OS getting a wider release happens around the same time as Windows 10 hitting end-of-life, that could be a game-changer.
I know what you mean about it being frustrating when flatpak apps don’t work right though. I had an app that would just start to open and die, no error message, no feedback, just it started to open then closed. Because I was new to Flatpak I didn’t know how to poke at it. But, then I discovered how you can run flatpak apps from the commandline, and when you do that you get access to flags and you get error messages you can read. But, if you’re just some dude/dudette who wants to sit down and run an app and it doesn’t work, that kind of behaviour is ultra frustrating.
The problem is that there’s still a lot of flux when it comes to packaging and running Linux apps. There’s the old way – debs and rpms. There’s flatpaks, there’s the snap store, there’s homebrew, there’s mise and of course there are manual installs and/or building from source. Each one’s a bit different and has its own benefits and drawbacks. And, standard things like showing an error message that helps you sort out the problem when things break isn’t universally handled in a clean way.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Yeah that’ll happen if you run Bazzite. It’s extremely hardware dependent. It “just works” if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it’s a shitshow
I would probably not recommend newcomers an esoteric linux distro tbh. People hate canonical but if people in academia can daily drive Ubuntu, anyone can
Linux will never be “ready”, in a large part because it’s made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and most of those people just don’t understand how an end user thinks.
I got annoyed when my new Windows machine immediately had to install a bunch of updates, which only required me to click next every fifteen minutes or so, and I had to uninstall Onedrive and disable the news feed on the lock screen.
I’d have taken it back if I had to spend that much time actually researching, I’ve got far better things to do with my time.
Let’s be real. Most people can’t really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.
You don’t see how terrible Windows is until you’ve switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.
The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.
It really feels like your PC isn’t yours.
“Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?”
“WTF is a computer?”
Everything’s computer!
I don’t quite remember whether it’s the rectangle with all the buttons you press or the TV with all the funny pictures on it, but one of those.
The average ‘advanced’ window user: CLI is scary!
Also the average ‘advanced’ windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it’ll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it
The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.
It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
File extensions, wanting a GUI for everything, running some random threat detection software, assuming that Linux is lightweight so therefore it will make old machines have modern performance… The list goes on
Wanting GUI for everything is a bad habit?
That is just regular consumer needs.
I wouldn’t have any issue if it was a consumer device.
The problem is when it is a server.
I find this list weird. I guess I’m the kind of person you’re complaining about!
I like having GUI available for standard stuff (eg.
dconf editoris great for various desktop settings). And I like file extensions in many cases - eg. I like to be able to tell the difference between a.pngand.jpegjust by reading the file name. … And Linux often really does give better performance on older machines compared to Windows.… So I suppose in your eyes I’m basically an old Windows admin brining bad habits to Linux. I’m just not seeing the downside of these ‘bad habits’.
So I suppose in your eyes I’m basically an old Windows admin brining bad habits to Linux. I’m just not seeing the downside of these ‘bad habits’.
Yeah. Now I get the best of both worlds. First time I need a setting, I do a nice search, instant result, and click toggle.
If I love that setting, as a power user, I can script the change to every future computer I use.
If not, I search settings, instant result, toggle back.
Gnome is amazing lately.
Well, at least for me…
Yeah, I do like me some file extensions.
I want a GUI for some things, but I’m perfectly comfortable with SSH into a machine as well. My general purpose server has a DE on it. My second server has a specific use and has no DE, nor do my IOT devices. All of them are headless.
I have an older laptop with Arch (btw) on it. It runs well for what I use it for. I understand I’m not watching YouTube in 4K though. The CPU and GPU have their limits.
I have a good inverse example. I started a new job as a government contractor. The machine I get is Windows. I need docker-desktop. I have a basic user account. They install docker-desktop. But it doesn’t work for me because I don’t have permissions. I tell them, hey docker says I don’t have the right permissions. They say, oh you have to apply for an elevated Developer account. Which I wont get because I’m a contractor. This is what you are asking about. The Windows way is just to increase the user’s permissions over the entire system. Which is utter bullshit coming from Linux. Anyways, I know the person helping me is just ignorant. And all they did was, next next next accept. But if you look at docker install instructions, for Linux and Windows, they create a docker user group and you just add your account to it. Super easy, and it’s one line in the terminal if you are on Windows or Linux. Windows admins just assume power user for everybody. No concept of localized security. Anyways, round and round with the back and forth, he finally adds me to the docker user group. And it worked, and I didn’t need to have elevated security or apply for a Developer account, wait two weeks doing nothing on the tax payer dime to only get denied.
yeah this was the thing.
it’s not even about whether linux is ready. windows got sloppy drunk and rode its motorcycle into a brick wall. it’s linux or nothing now.
Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD
Classic.
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don’t ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
But muh games!
I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.
Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.
Yeah, Apple will just cave when necessary. Honestly, even if the USA is removed from the equation, nobody is really safe from any government or corporation. We’re only in better and worse condition because no one has done the unthinkable yet. The UK online safety bill, Signal’s threat to leave Sweden, France busting activists using Swiss VPN. If you can’t host it yourself, secure it yourself, rebuild it yourself, you can’t trust businesses and governments to do these things for you in the long run.
Hell, it’s starting to feel a lot less like freedom and more about the ability to hide, even if you’re doing nothing wrong, because someone may eventually decide that what you’re doing was wrong.
Encrypting your chats to keep them from being sold/mined for government oversight? ILLEGAL!
I think you’re 100% correct.
With all my Apple stuff I thought we were headed for a Star Trek federation. Instead we’re getting a starship troopers federation 😞
The whole doing nothing wrong argument doesn’t work when Nazis take over because Nazis will arbitrarily decide that normal things are now deserving of the concentration camp. Basically nobody who is oppressed at any point in history should ever feel like they have nothing to hide. Gay people, women, any minority religious racial Etc are all one Trump tweet away from Guantanamo Bay
Linux is American by that definition
I’ll bite. How? It’s open source software championed by a Finnish academic professor.
Yeah that makes zero sense to me
Lots of the money comes from the US and US companies. But as you said, it is open source.
US corporations donate to the Linux Foundation, and in fact all the Platinum members of the Linux Foundation (donors of $500k or more/year) are corporations - although I don’t think they’re all American. But the Linux Foundation has no control over the code, it merely promotes use of Linux. Did you mean something else by, “Lots of money comes from…”?
That was pretty much what I meant.
He’s now American.
Outside of that a lot of Linux is supported by US companies. If boycotting the US was the goal it is going to be very hard.
I think by America they pretty clearly meant corporate America and its corporate-owned government, neither of which controls how Linux works.
I hate to break it to you but Linux is maintained by corporate America. Everything from the Linux foundation to Linux focused companies like Red Hat, Amazon and Microsoft.
Sure it is probably better than anything else available but I think it is silly to focus on the region a company is based in when we are talking about international corporations.
I don’t know what argument you’re having, but what I said was that the Linux Foundation doesn’t have any control over the code.
Linux focused companies like Microsoft
my sides
Being a contributor to an open-source project is not the same as actually owning a “commercial” product. They can voice opinions in the mailing lists, but they don’t have direct influence. Sure, some maintainers work for those companies, but I would say that’s hardly the same. It’s sponsorship, and it’s welcome pretty much no matter where it comes from in my view.
If those companies disappeared overnight, Linux would be fine. Development would be a lot slower, sure, but it wouldn’t implode and instantly become worthless like macOS or Windows
The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn’t usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they’d consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.
For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
Gaming has improved significantly, although it’s rather frustrating that it’s by all these compatibility layers and such rather than native run.
For desktop, as a workstation and general purpose it’s ‘ok’ with rough edges. Things like (limited tests with a couple common distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Bazzite) the nextcloud app not supporting virtual files that have been available for a while in Windows and domain auth being twitchy where I’ve tried.
For the end user a big part is being able to just find an app and use it, no compiling or tweaking of settings needed for it to do what’s expected. Package managers help greatly, but with the huge number of distros out there it makes it really hit and miss to say just go for it. The relatively few times you can just download a Linux version of an app from a site (as people are prone to doing if they go read about something on the web) you often would have to go chmod +x it and quite possibly have to run it from a CLI rather than just click the downloaded app.
So usable yes, but in a place where I could just drop it on someone and say go to town less so…
I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.
But to be honest, I’m just not the target demographic for that.
I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.
And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.
Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
They actually are ! I have seen a few posts talking about it. Not sure about SuSe/Mandrake, but they are talking to implement Linux or try to somehow get away from Microsoft.
Agreed. Just put Debian on a 17" i7 Asus laptop tonight as win11 didn’t like the track pad or the display adapter.
To get Chrome on, had to download a deb file, then manually open it with a right click and choose software installer since it wanted to open an archive instead.
Just little things like that are tedious for the n00b.
had you installed mint or pop, you could just install multiple chrome variants from the software manager
This is part of the annoyance of Nix as a desktop though. With windows you have 64bit and (for whatever reason) x86 versions of apps and it’s generally just assumed to work with what your running, unless you have an antique with win98 or something.
With Nix there are a a whole pile of possible variables and ways to install things. Particularly with people getting so used to phone/tablet app stores the need for easy install, use, removal is needed for mass adoption. Nobody wants to create folder structures and set environment variables to use some app.
Good point.
Mint wouldn’t run on my other Asus laptop which is why I ended up on Debian. I think it was a discrete GPU issue booting to a black screen.
I know most Linux users probably wouldn’t want Chrome anyway, but since it’s the most popular browser and this post is discussing the greater populace, I think it was a valid point - same as how a n00b booting to a black screen is an issue.
Having to fetch gnome tweaks to get a right click on a trackpad is another - that might just be a Debian thing.
Is it Linux’s fault that Google doesn’t provide an apt repository? Chromium is available in DebianStable
For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
How I wish
It’s like someone’s never used GroupPolicy.
As much of a shit show as it is, group policy is really the killer feature of Windows.
And Active Directory
Kinda but … they go together, and Active Directory is more or less LDAP+Kerberos with a sprinkling of standardization on top.
I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
I thought the holdup was the graphics drivers (Nvidia mostly) not the de. Normal desktop mode with KDE works fine on my steamdeck.
Fair point. But even so I think SteamOS has the most viable potential to achieve something like a 5-10% adoption rate that could get entities like nVidia to pay more attention.
Lol can’t disagree with you there, they just need to release it already!
It’s pretty much just graphics cards at this point and games. Printer is weirdly enough work better on Linux then when I first started back in 2010. It used to be that everything was proprietary weirdness nowadays you just plug and play on Linux and then it’s Windows where you have to mess with drivers. Personally I switched away from all in ones and just got a flatbed scanner so I never have to worry about needing that feature. I still need a good printer that isn’t on the Israel BDS boycott and is cheap to operate on a per page basis. I feel like if printers weren’t a scam more people would use them for more stuff again
As you’re a Linux user, I would assume that you’ve heard about brother laser printers. Why not one of them? Or a used version if they’re on the boycott list? Aftermarket toner is cheap for them
I used to have one and I was happy with it but I was foolish enough not to take it with me last time I moved. Is that still the consensus pick?
Maybe 2 weeks ago accusations were flying that brother bricked printers using aftermarket ink after a firmware update.
Evidence was scant, and brother insists they aren’t doing that. So if you do get one, maybe don’t update the firmware.
Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”
One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).
Will ValveOS be useful for anything besides playing games?
Games are pretty demanding, there will probably be widespread support just coincidentally. Also companies build software for where the market is, a big Linux population will command more development time for drivers etc.
If it is useful at only playing games I think it will be a popular option nonetheless.
Sure, lots of people mainly use their computers for games, but I would think even they would demand at least a web browser and/or social media apps.
SteamOS has a web browser.
It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.
In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.
But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.
Only a small fraction of people use Steam so I don’t see that happening.
Steam apparently has about 130 million monthly active users and about 70 million daily active users. About half the planet has a computer at home. So, Steam users are somewhere between say 2% and 10% of the world’s active PC users.
If someone is a daily active steam user, they spend a lot of time on the computer. If they have to make sure their drivers are up to date and their frame rate is high enough to support their games, they’ve probably developed a bit of knowledge about the system. My guess is that people who play Steam games tend to be the tech support people for their friends and family more often than not.
So, it’s a small group, but it’s an influential group. If enough of that group becomes comfortable with SteamOS, they may be comfortable setting it up (or a variant of it) for a friend or family member, even if that friend or family member only uses their computer to watch videos, check emails, etc. In a world where Windows was free and just worked, that might not happen. But, in this world Windows 10 is about to lose support, and Microsoft is suggesting that if your computer can’t run Windows 11 you should just throw it away and upgrade. In that world, more people might end up switching to Linux.
Why would you set up Steam OS for a family member. That is problematic in many ways.
I could care less if Linux explodes in market share or not. It serves my needs fine and that’s all that matters for me.
If steamos just works you could just have the music. Steamos is also going to be the charging horse that lets everyone else in the door so they won’t have to use it
I haven’t used SteamOS so I’m speculating. But, it’s probably possible to boot to a desktop instead of to Steam. It’s probably easy to install Firefox (or Chrome) and Thunderbird. I would expect that Valve has made the desktop experience easy to use.
So, why install SteamOS for a family member? Because you have a desktop OS that’s easy to use that a big, rich commercial company is spending a lot of R&D effort to make as good, easy and smooth an experience as possible. Even if the primary use case is playing Steam-based games, if you have a family member who just wants an easy-to-use OS that just runs their web browser, an email client, and a few other odds and ends, that might be the easiest way to do it.
It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.
Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.
So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.
It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.
Yeah, so it sounds like a good choice for a relative who isn’t a gamer but wants a hard-to-break simple OS that runs basic things like a web browser, email client, etc.
It’s probably too soon now, I just checked and it doesn’t quite sound like it’s very stable yet (as in, they’re still tweaking it). But, maybe by the time Windows 10 is no longer supported it would be a good option.
Maybe. I just mean once(if) there becomes an OS that reliably runs Steam and the games on Steam, there will be a viable alternative to Windows for a significant population of users.
I disagree
Most people just want Windows
I’m certainly buying one of whatever they release.
A large scale migration would be wild. It would be like the Commodore 64 all over again - where one of the coolest things in gaming also happens to be the most functional personal PC of the year.
I guess it could happen.
Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn’t work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.
Based Linux wont run riot games
Is that a bad thing?
Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
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league of legends used to work on linux. they removed the compatibility, explicitly.
They’re just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
can’t be done, but they’re making an admirable go of it.
With the most braindead reason,
There are barely any Linux users…
Riot… I quit the game because I didn’t want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends… That guy gets counted as a windows User…
Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don’t attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn’t bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
well it’s good for us, I think. it wasn’t fun anymore last time I played it, and it was never a healthy habbit.
The fact that it won’t run on Linux anymore is, what finally got me out of it.
I’ve never spent a dime on it, but I’ve wasted so much time on League for over 10 years.
Being on Linux exclusively saved me.I am in a similar boat but I disagree with saved me. I just cared more about my friends than the game and my friends were bad at it, and so I had to adapt my attitude, leading into a more casual experience and the resulting distance to the game.
whoa gpu pss through is wild, how well does it work ?
If I remember correctly and I never did it myself, so please be careful.
He used KVM with qemu and there you can configure a pci through put and he would run the Linux over integrated graphics of the CPU.
Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
Because it is.
Same goes for Valorant, I hear.
Playing Valorant is like opening port 22 and having “password” as your root password.
Not to mention the backdoor it opens into your soul, for the toxic commumity to pour their verbal detritus into.
I run Linux daily, Linux isn’t ready, its really not much of a debate. If the average person can’t operate it efficiently then the average person will just stick to mac or windows.
I’ll admit it is closer than it has ever been thanks to compatibility layers like proton but the average user still can’t figure it out so it still has a way to go.
The average person can’t use Mac or Windows efficiently either lol
Honestly, Windows isn’t ready for the desktop, either, it’s just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.
Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). “Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS” shouldn’t be sensible advice.
Windows is horribly janky, it’s just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.
Until everything breaks because the average user hasn’t bothered updating.
With atomic distros, that updating happens in the background, you don’t have to do anything. It’s like MacOS or Android.
So like forced updates in Windows?
Sort of. In my experience with Windows it gets really annoying. They tell you there’s an update and that you have to restart. If you put it off for long enough and just hibernate your computer, Windows will eventually boot your computer even if it’s “off” to install the update.
With Bazzite and other atomic distros it’s more like it lets you know that there’s an update available for you, and that the next time you reboot you’ll get that update. I personally haven’t ever had it bug me to reboot, but maybe it does that eventually. I don’t know of any Linux distros that would have the nerve to boot your system when it’s off to install an update.
Also, if you don’t want that update, you can “pin” your current deployment and you don’t have to update. Next time you boot you can choose the “pinned” deployment rather than the new one. Normally you wouldn’t want to do that because you’d be missing out on security updates, but if you’ve heard that the newest drivers are unstable, you can definitely choose not to update – or at least not to boot into the updated version.
Also worth mentioning that there are always 2 boot entries, the newest one and the previous one. So, if the newest one does get installed and there’s some issue, you can reboot and choose the previous one. Theoretically you can also roll back to an earlier one from months ago, but I haven’t ever done that.
Until everything breaks because the average user held down the power button mid-update because the computer wouldn’t shut down.
Anything’s possible. But, they try to make that hard. The system always keeps 2 versions around, the newest one and the previous one, so if you screw up the newest one you can always boot into the previous one. And Bazzite, at least, uses BTRFS which uses copy-on-write, so it’s much harder to corrupt the filesystem. I think the /boot partition is still ext4 though, so it’s possible that if you time it just right you could theoretically mess up your boot partition. Then you’d need to use a rescue USB drive to fix it.
The /boot partition is FAT32 due to RedHat’s stupidity but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that regular users don’t know how to boot into a previous version of the OS. Yes, I know you just have to select it on GRUB but a black screen with a list of kernels qualifies as broken for regular people.
I’d agree that in the current state it’s pretty useless. But, I don’t think it would take too much to make it usable. If the GRUB menu had some basic information on it like: what version is it, when was it installed, has it booted successfully, etc. then I think that would be enough for most people to figure out. Although, I do think that the current Bazzite timeout is way too short.
BTW, on my system /boot is ext4, /boot/efi is FAT32 and the rest mounted at /sysroot is BTRFS.
This is a lot safer on Linux than Windows, this year. A lot of engineering has gone into making updates resilient.
And Linux hasn’t done the Windows 10 to Windows 11 - black screen for a couple hours, hope you know not to touch it - that we sometimes see.
Linux now has a stronger default permissions model, so it’s a lot harder for user error to break the machine in serious ways, even if they do reboot during a sensitive update.
Linux does do the black screen and hope you don’t touch it, at least OpenSUSE and Fedora do. And that’s a good thing. The “reboot to update is bad” meme needs to die but I digress. I’m skeptical that Linux is more resilient than Windows when it comes to updating but even if it is, Windows automatically rolls back failed updates while Linux will boot you into broken system and expect you to know what to do. Regular people can’t deal with this, even if the answer is a simple as selecting a different entry from the GRUB.
while Linux will boot you into broken system and expect you to know what to do.
But…
even if the answer is a simple as selecting a different entry from the GRUB.
Okay. Yeah. It’s often that simple.
I take your point, but I’ve had my Windows blow itself to hell way more than my Linux has, and putting Linux on relatives machines has been by far the least hassle of the big three, for me.
But that’s just my anecdotal experience.
I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
I’ve been playing FFXIV on Linux with dlss, reshade and 3rd party mods and it’s been a blast.
Linux is 100% ready for gaming even with the worst case scenario (nvidia) I’ve been able to overclock and play just fine.
My grandma uses Linux, you stupid?
Are you calling your grandma stupid? I already stated I use linux as well.
Did she install it herself or did you set it up for them?
Because the majority of people do not have the luxury of someone who will fix their shit if it breaks. They just bring it back to the store.
I stopped using Linux on my desktop PC in 2007. Last year I switched back, and wow everything is so much smoother now. Video, sound, webcam, networking, all worked perfectly out-of-the-box. No more messing with fglrx for hours to get ATI/AMD graphics working. No more figuring out ALSA vs OSS vs PulseAudio vs whatever else. I don’t know what the sound subsystem is even called now, because I don’t need to know. It just works.
KDE is beautiful now, too. I tried a few desktop environments and liked KDE the best.
Great time to switch. I’ve been using Linux on servers since 1999, but it’s totally viable for desktops these days too.
The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn’t there yet, because I can’t use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as “no big deal”, you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won’t work. Well yeah, that’s a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?
Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don’t game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.
