Slashdot Mirror
Why Aren't People Abandoning Windows For Linux? (slashgear.com)
- Updates on Linux are fast and "rarely call for a restart" -- and are also more complete. "Updates are typically downloaded through a 'Software Updater' application that not only checks for operating system patches, but also includes updates for the programs that you've installed from the repository."
- Windows "tries to serve a variety of markets...cramming in a scattered array of features" -- and along those lines, that Microsoft "has gradually implemented monetization schemes and methods for extracting user data." And yet you're still paying for that operating system, while Linux is less bloated and "free forever."
- "Because less people use Linux, the platform is less targeted by malware and tends to be more secure than Windows"
The article also touches on a few other points (including battery life), and predicts that problems with Windows are "bound to get worse over time and will only present more of a case for making the switch to Linux."
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the article, along with some new thoughts on why people really stay with Windows:
I think the main "excuse" is the perception of reliability, which is really laughable if you've actually read the EULA. Microsoft certainly doesn't have to help anyone at all. I would argue that Windows support is neither a bug nor a feature, but just a marketing ploy.
Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).
It does not come 'free' with the PC/Laptop. Even though they will need to pay eventually (upgrades/subscriptions) people still see it as free.
When you buy a Microsoft computer, you agree to use only Microsoft products, including the Windows App Store. Installing Linux is illegal tinkering, and if we catch you doing it, we will delete your data.
- James Kelly, Senior Microsoft PR Executive
...will be year of the Linux desktop. Just a few months to go but it might get there.
systemd. HTH! HAND!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The OS doesn't really mean anything at all. The OS only exists to run software which solves specific problems to get jobs done. On paper Linux looks like, but in the real world, it just consistently falls short for desktop usage. It does GREAT in the server world, due to the reliability and performance, but these are less of a concern on the desktop.
On the desktop, we need the ability to accomplish tasks by individuals that are not computer experts and dont have experts sitting around them constantly to ask questions to. Having done tech support in a small business of people who are not tech savvy, routinely being asked how to dial an international phone number, or reply to an email, or send a FAX, these are not tasks that the Linux ecosystem are suited for.
Linux is built for tech savvy people by tech savvy people. Linux is chock full of software engineers, but lacks UX engineers in all aspects of the ecosystem.
That's it, really. I need to be able to run AutoDesk AutoCADD, Inventor, and Revit. If someone can demonstrate those (with all their built-in components, rendering, and plug-ins) running nicely with full capabilities on any type of Linux, I will happily make the switch.
And no, FreeCADD and Blender are not valid substitutes. Sorry.
Z
Lots of distributions. Lots of ways of doing things. Systemd or not. rpm or dpkg or portage or one of the other dozen or so package managers. Lots of old documentation hanging around telling you to do things that don't work any more. Binary drivers or not. X11 or Wayland. GNOME or KDE or neither.
Putting aside the argument of wasted effort, it's just confusing for the average user. Even those of us who are capable of navigating these waters may easily grow tired of the hassle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For the vast majority of users windows works well enough. And their PC / Laptop came with windows.
So there is no incentive to change.
I've been using Linux for over 20 years on everything that I touch and I haven't used Windows since Windows 98 (which I didn't like at all).
I wish I could buy a new laptop or desktop computer off the shelf at Staples or Costco and bring it home and have it boot up into some version of Linux instead of MS Windows.
But I can't, and I have to go through a lot of hoops and now ever play a game of try-to-find-the-bios-settings on any new computer that isn't a custom build.
And most people simply won't do that. I hate doing that and I know how. Most people don't know how do to that so they're even further behind.
Linux on the desktop won't happen until the day that I can buy one at the store and bring it home and start using it immediately.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
The public just buys what the major tech marketing machines are selling. Very few even know there is an option and why it matters.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Exactly. It's an OS made for programmers, and it sucks for everyone else. That's all fine and good, and it's great that Linux exists to serve that need, but that's never going to fly with general users, or even power users. It's just too damn difficult to get anything done. Until you can simply download and install (as opposed to: download, compile, build, tweak, fail, try again, find the correct version, try again again, still likely fail, eventually give up) a reasonably wide set of applications it simply can't catch on. It's like someone was still building a car that needed the valves manually adjusted every 2000 miles, and required knowledge of carburetor jetting for varying altitudes, etc., and then asking "Why aren't people abandoning their boring-as-shit Hondas for this amazing Linmotorcar?" Well, because IT SUCKS! Nobody outside a dedicated few wants that kind of hassle, and Linux is a massive, nasty hassle that far too frequently can't do what you want anyway (unless you are a programmer).
I manage a small network for my parents. My dad is a lung doctor, and my mom is a nurse. I cannot get their current EHR system to run under Linux (WINE) and wasn't able to get their previous EHR to run under Linux either. So, for them, I do not save the thousands of dollars that were required to be spent when Windows XP was deprecated, and thousands of dollars again now that Windows 7 is approaching it's end-of-life because I cannot run one critical desktop application under Linux.
We evaluated OpenEHR. It would have required substantial modification to be able to collect, and present, patient data in the manner that would have been useful to their medical office. My software development company could have provided these modifications. As could another, more experienced, software development company that supports OpenEHR. We came to the conclusion that those modifications would be more expensive, and risky, than the commercial licensing, and constant Windows replacement costs. The commercial solution was ready, out of the box, and (not very well, but still) supported.
Until Linux offers better desktop application replacement support, there will be many corporate environments that depend on Windows application which cannot be migrated. WINE is not easy to get everything running under.
The software development company I use relied exclusively on Linux, and open-source software for our developments. However, that does not mean it is a good solution for everyone. Saying "everyone should use Linux" is just as wrong as saying "everyone should use Windows." There are different use cases for different technologies, and attempting to shoehorn everyone into a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't (in my experience) lead to a good outcome.
I want to play video games and they develop for windows first and linux as an afterthought. Proton is nice but its not native support nice.
Exactly. Until any version of Linux can run Photoshop or Capture One (or as someone below said, AutoCAD), or any other mainstream software which people use on a regular basis, people are not going to use it, even if it's free.
People want to either insert a disc or download the software and get it to work. The first time.
Until this massive obstacle is removed, Linux will be relegated to its insignificance in the personal computer market.
I might stop using Windows when MS stops offering security updates for Windows 7 (in January, unless things change). I have never heard of a single feature of Windows 10 that is attractive to me. Almost everything I see and hear about it makes me actively not want it.
I've already had, for several years, a dedicated Linux desktop that I use almost daily. I have peccadilloes with Ubuntu and Gnome that I'm sure I could fix if it were my primary OS. I mostly hang on to Windows because of proprietary software support. I use ArcGIS for my work, and I play PC games. These days, game publishers are starting to offer Linux versions of their games, and Steam is making it much easier to play Windows games under Linux. And if I had to, I could keep a laptop around with Windows just to run specific software that doesn't work elsewhere.
For the time being, I'm quite comfortable with Windows 7. But as time passes, it's clear that what MS wants me to do is rent my OS from them, and that's just not going to happen.
The rise of steam, mmo's, always online drm and f2p games means the average pc and software consumer is a fucking moron.
No, it means that the average pc gamer is a fucking moron. The average PC and software consumer has probably never heard of steam, mmo's, and f2p games.
You clearly don't understand either Linux nor Unix.
I think the main reason is too much distribution fragmentation. E.g all the RPM Distros need to chuck themselves under a single banner, the same with dpkg based distros and the gentoo ones. At the moment Linux is like 5000+ different OSs and noone can get decent documentation on any of them. You end up having to get a bit of config from arch, a bit of config from debian, a bit from ubuntu and pray that the ductape and glue you use holds together. Also new hardware support is garbage. I'm writing this on a Razerblade Stealth 2017. It was a pain to get the scripts right to use my Razer core with it, and I have to disable a libinput keyboard driver in the config files to get my computer to not crash when capslock is pressed. That took 9 months to figure out as there was no clear documentation anywhere online about it. Just an obscure forum post. I've updated the Debian documentation since, and posted to Razer's forums about it. This is where Linux is super weak. I've been using Linux for 18 years, if I'm struggling with issues like this imagine what the newbies are facing.
Which people would abandon Windows? I can't think of many interesting Linux projects that didn't turn into a couple of nights spent on forums and tutorials for me! That's not something most people want to deal with!
If we consider Chrome OS as a Linux distribution then it seems to be happening, especially with the recent improvements: better file management, android/Linux app support. As for GNU/Linux, it hasn't any serious commercial support on desktops, it's primarily volunteer driven with so many different projects trying to do the same thing. People want something that is supported and meets their requirements.
Cause slashdot is beating a dead horse.
Joking aside, Linux support has gotten better from the days when posting on a forum would be met with RTFM. It's still not enough to get folks to turn away in masses to Linux. I honestly don't know what the answer is.
It's not games. Valve went as far as to create their own flavor of Linux.
It could be apps. I find that MsOffice is still better than everything else out there. I'm great with Gimp simply because I'm too cheap to pay for Adobe products, but adding stroke to text is still a lot more difficult than it has to be (select layer, convert layer to path, etc)
It could be hardware compatibility. Some of the more "pure" distro's refuse to include binary drivers.
It could also be my cousin Vinny, who is sort of defacto tech support for aunt Jenine (I really don't have an aunt or cousin named that)
Maybe it's the ease of entry as a professional. Windows 10 basic cert is easy, Linux, not so much.
Maybe it's something I just heard in my Security+ training, that GUI's prevent mistakes.
Maybe it's the accountability, you know who you're dealing with, there's at least some central number to call for support, instead of a fragmentation of 10 different companies.
Maybe it's the government, who still swears by windows for a lot of things.
I really don't know. I know I'm typing this from Windows, in a chrome browser. I have my reasons. Having been on slash since the beginning, this question is just never answered. It's almost like Incels asking, "Why can't I get laid?"
Linux is wonderful for sure.
But it's basic issue with toppling Windows dominance over the desktop is Apps. Plain and simple.
Until developers start pushing out major Apps for Linux, it's going to remain in the shadows, running all the backend stuff like it always has. Linux simply has no hope on the desktop until it gets the App support from major companies, like Windows enjoys now.
Which leads to the second problem for Linux. Fragmentation and poor compatibility from distro to distro. There's just no standard for developers to follow, that would ensure their stuff will run as desired on any given Linux desktop. There's ton of different UIs, different display servers, different system tools, different locations for common stuff. Even the basic libraries installed on any given Linux desktop are rarely the same as they are for another one. Different versions of just about everything plagues Linux's viability for big corporation's developers.
Even Steam can be a bit of a chore to get working properly on a Linux desktop install. You gotta make sure the right libraries are in. And even when you get it working, there's absolutely no guarantee any of your games will work. They might. They might not. Windows does not suffer from this issue. You buy a piece of software/game for Windows. It will work. Period.
Don't get me wrong, Linux's various distros have come a long way in addressing compatibility and dependency issues for their software repositories. But, from my view, it's still too much of a disaster for big corps to make the investment in developing their big App suites for Linux.
Once big name corps, like Adobe and Microsoft for example, start pushing out Linux versions of their flagship products, Linux will have arrived. But until then... we're stuck with Windows.
I was loyal to Windows because I earned a living fixing people's computers, and 90 some percent of them were running Windows. In order to work on it, I needed to be very familiar with it. But things change. Now I'm retired and most people just use their phones, or if they do use Windows, they only use the web browser. So recently, getting tired of Microsoft's bad behavior, I started transitioning to Linux Mint. If nothing else, for the geek cred. I still have to go back to Windows on occasion for some proprietary Windows-Only software, but I'm spending most of my time in Linux and I love it!! And it is waaaayyyyyy faster on my powerful but ancient workstation. It's just a matter of time until Microsoft no longer supports this ol' thing, but with dual Xeons, 48GB RAM, and an NVMe SSD it's still got a lot of life left in it.
You don't compile on binary Linux distro. You just install and then the installer does its thing and the program is ready. You can get a source distro like Gentoo Linux if you want to learn. Most people can use Debian stable or just some other distro that fits their need.
Most people also just have phones or smart tablets today. They don't use normal PC's today. Most phones are using Android today and that is a Linux distro in it self.
Windows 10 has been the single best thing Microsoft has ever done for Linux. Well, that and the Vault 7 malware release from the NSA. That was the day I stopped using Windows 7 and went back to Linux. But even my dad decided to finally abandon Windows for Linux after Microsoft forcefully "upgraded" his machine to Windows 10 without his permission and then failed to properly put back one mystery DLL after downgrading back to Windows 8.
Lots of people are using Linux on their phones and tablets these days. Young people are also increasingly opting for cheap Chromebooks instead of paying out the wazoo for a Windows laptop. I'd say Linux is doing just great!
In theory the one benefit OSS/F software can offer us is better security. Those who are able have been willing to pay the price of a little inconvenience for that. In professional settings, against casual attackers this still holds true. In daily life? No. The attack surface is too big, the job of securing things too complicated, the likely attack is more often social engineering than technical, and state level actors can compromise the system at lower levels outside the scope of the kernel. They can compromise the BIOS, the hardware, whatever they want. We lost. They have control. The phone world trained most us to accept it. Everything is spying on us, so fuck it.
The only real security is outside of modern tech entirely. If you're in a car from 10 years ago or more, you're probably safe. "Things we say in the car". It has become an expression I use.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You can get psuedo legal copies (keys purchased overseas that are grey market) for around $10-$20 bucks. If you already had Win 7 around they gave 10 away for a few years.
Free isn't enough. It needs applications. For end users that means Office (lots of folks still use the native version) and games. Steams' custom WINE doesn't run everything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I haven't seen that many Anonymous Cowards on one article badmouthing Linux in a while. It really exceeds the usual level of spam.
Microsoft PR department at work?
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've been using computers since the late '70's. Am an Embedded hardware and software Engineer.
Each time I build a new PC, I install Linux and give it a try. But every time there's a show stopper.
Mostly unable to run my Engineering programs, PCB design, etc.
But also a vague feeling that it was written by amateurs.
Poor documentation, configuration files scattered everywhere, childish images and colour schemes.
Inconsistencies with the GUI.
Whatever, I'm certainly no fan of Windows. I keep hoping that something like BeOs/Haiku will come along..
Ubuntu 16.04 is easily on par with Windows 98 edging towards Win7. Some issues. Overall not a hard transition from Windows.
Ubuntu Mate 18.04 is a drop in replacement for Windows. Installs from a USB. Install is easy. Devices just work. The caja browser is very similar to Explorer. USB devices mount and dismount nicely. Printer and scanner works. It even has a boutique software library to kick start users. Office suite comes standard.
Windows is only leading because it comes preinstalled.
For gamers, Ubuntu now has Steam.
It's been 70 years since the standardization of the metric system, which is arguably superior to Imperial units in every way -- but Americans still use the latter, because it's what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
It's been 38 years since the standardization of the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is faster to type with than the Qwerty layout, and yet very few people use Dvorak, because Qwerty is what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
If you're a computer buyer, chances are the computer(s) you bought came with Windows preinstalled, so that's what you learned to use -- and if you're not "into" computers, you didn't enjoy learning how to use it, and you really don't want to have to repeat that painful experience for some other operating system. Hence, you'll continue to use Windows unless/until there is some really compelling reason not to; because you're not there to learn about new operating systems, you're there to get your primary task done as quickly as possible, and that means going with what ever tools you already know how to use.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The rise of steam, mmo's, always online drm and f2p games means the average pc and software consumer is a fucking moron.
No, it means that the average pc gamer is a fucking moron. The average PC and software consumer has probably never heard of steam, mmo's, and f2p games.
I don't think it means either of those things. Steam works better for a lot of people than boxed games did. No more lost or scratched discs, lost CD keys, no more infinite updates whenever you have to reinstall. Built in cross-game chat. It's not perfect, but it helps more people enjoy more games.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The average computer user is not even qualified to own the device let alone operate it proficiently... There is no substitute for doing your homework before using a piece of technology for productivity.
1. Top-tier games don't not supported, or run more slowly.
2. Top-tier productivity software not supported.
3. Doesn't come preinstalled many/most places.
4. Many users already familiar with another O.S. and don't want to re-educate themselves.
5. Not ideal for developing software deploying to Windows, Mac or iOS.
6. Less likely to be supported by random hardware, e.g. printers.
I don't run Linux as my primary native desktops (but do run it on my laptop and in a bunch of VMs). The primary reasons are:
- I rely on Quicken (not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) and it's not available/supported on Linux (yes, I tried to run it on WINE but it was unusable from a performance standpoint and, anyway, then it's only one Quicken or WINE update away from breaking on an unsupported platform).
- I also rely on HR Block tax software (again, not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) for my tax prep every year and, again, no Linux version exists (and, for a variety of reasons, I need to look back at taxes for many years beyond the "norm" so "working today" is not good enough).
- While BSOD used to be a modestly regular occurrence on Windows even just 15 years ago, I haven't had it happen for years on Windows (Win 8.1 Pro now), Ubuntu updates break my systems from time to time (which is one reason I run them in a VM -- just restore a checkpoint and try to isolate the problem by selective updating) - I currently have several VMs that I have to remember to uncheck the GRUB updates when doing updates or the system won't boot (yes, I'm sure I could figure out what's wrong, but it worked fine just a few months ago and I've got other things to do than dig into code that I will never update or contribute to).
Perhaps, when forced to Win 10, I will downgrade to a single Win desktop with RDP access for the family for use of essential "Windows Only" software -- but that will depend on the state of Linux desktop then (and, my hopes are not high).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Technology is only as reliable as the understanding of the user using it.
While there are free alternatives for a lot of software available on Linux, the simple fact is that there is a lot thatt is Windows, or Windows/Mac, only.
Games are a great example. While you could screw around with WINE and get World of Warcraft running, it's never going to run as well as it would in its intended environment, and there's every possibility thatt an update to the game that works fine on Windows will not work on Linux with WINE.
There are, however, many use cases for Linux where it can work quite well. For instance, if you're using Chrome to browse the web, Thunderbird to check email, LibreOffice to edit documents, you might do great on Linux. Just be sure it works with all your hardware (printers especially) before making the switch.
I have a laptop which runs Linux (Ubuntu Mate to be precise), and it's great as far as it goes. Getting my printer working with it (an older Canon multi function) was much more annoying than on Windows, particularly when I decided to use it with my Windows box and share it from there. It was doable, but very annoying figuring itt out. I still couldn't use it full time, however. I enjoy playing games on my computer, and not many of them come with Linux support.
What the article seems to miss, what most people in the tech industry seem to miss, is that the vast majority of the population (around 90%) will stick with whatever software their computer comes with. Most people don't even know what an operating system is, let alone how to find a new one or install an alternative.
Almost every store you can walk into (or shop from on-line) defaults to selling PCs bundled with Windows, therefore that is what virtually everyone buys. If most stores sold their computers with another operating system, Windows would quickly disappear from the market.
This is true of any device, not just PCs. It's the same with phones, tablets, etc. Almost everyone runs Windows or macOS on personal computers, Android or iOS on phones. That will only change is retailers bundle different software with their devices because almost all people regard computers as appliances, not devices that can run a range of operating systems.
Windows makes a BFD of updating your computer or scanning for mal ware.
Ironically the fact that updates are a big deal on Windows machines makes people aware of them. They are aware when one exists and if they haven't done it. This intrusiveness gives you the sense that as long as you stay updated Microsoft will keep your machine happy and healthy.
Linus doesn't provide that feeling.
You are never really aware if the "kernel" (scary) is upt to date or what that means or how to tell.
So it's daunting.
A linux distro with a security CLippy would give people more confidence something was out there keeping them safe and healthy
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As has been commented elsewhere in this thread: People want a tool that is easy to use, fairly reliable, has all the programs they need on a daily basis, doesn't have any esoteric UI choices, and doesn't need any under the hood work.
If you want people to switch to Linux the system has to operate faster, crash less, be easier to use and have all of the programs they routinely use. None of this "Open Office works just as well as Windows Office" crap. People want the integrated presentation that MS office has trained people to accept. Without MS Office, AutoDesk AutoCad and Revit, Photoshop (Wine doesn't count) you aren't going to get any traction.
People don't want the solution to be "Well you need an emulator to run that program because it doesn't run natively in Linux". That by itself shoots Linux in the foot.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every time this comes up we have hundreds of posts from slashdot readers who loudly proclaim that they use Linux and they wish everyone did, and btw, Windows sucks. Yeah, yeah. We already know you will never use anything from Microsoft and you're so happy you are so smart and everyone else is so stupid. But here's the bottom line.
It isn't about you. Nobody cares about you or your superior knowledge. As employees people only care about their work application, whether it's some sort of specialized application like a library circulation system that costs hundreds of thousands or an industrial warehouse application, or standard old spreadsheet and word processing. It's provided by the employer. If it doesn't work, call IT.
As a home user all someone wants is to walk into WalMart and buy a cheap laptop that can surf the Web and handle email. That's just about it. An HP Stream Laptop for $100 will work just fine, thanks very much. Update options? Meh, whatevah! Just stay out of the way. Drivers? Say what? You mean the Uber guys?
And THAT'S the computer market these days. Throw in the iPad lovers and that just about covers it. There is simply no need for Linux. This other stuff just works, and that's all we need.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
For many users, Outlook and Excel are the reason. Granted, the Outlook web interface is pretty good, but it does not quite equal the native client. With Excel, the Linux alternatives are poorly known and a point of (often unjustified) concern. I'll add that the Excel interface is generally better than the open source alternatives as well, particularly with things like column fills and conditional formatting.
Finally, let's think about graphics and sound, which are still sketchy way too often on Linux after all these years. Just a month ago, I watched a skilled Linux sysadmin spend days trying to get a 3-monitor setup to work properly. He ultimately succeeded, but what a nightmare!
Powerful computer games that are fun.
An OS with working CPU and full GPU support.
Productivity software thats supported over the years.
An OS that can support art, music, photography, video "workflows".
Less complexity about a changing new CoC and free software license.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Stay with Windows.
I used to think that it would be great to attract more users to Linux. But then that brought us stuff like Pulse Audio, Wayland and systemd. And gamers. My applications run just fine on Linux and X. Stop screwing it up just to get some FPS crap to run on it.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is quite honestly what a lot of us want to know. Ditching a beloved hobby just to 'stick it to the man' is just ... No. Why should I be miserable when Microsoft won't even realize I exist anyway?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Already folks, I admit I'm too lazy to sit down go through the book (very thick) and go through the exercises. However, I need a Linux machine, shelling out some money... right now I have other priorities. I have never got VM or virtual box or whatever it's called to work. Even sat down with a friend who says he uses it all the time, he couldn't get it to install even after doing all kinds of HD partitioning and whatever.
I have read and heard many advantages of Linux. Even for serious systems at work and other places I've seen they use Linux. Windows both the OS and the thing that lets you see through walls have no place for these systems.
I have noticed there are two kinds of people: Those that know Linux and they can turn it upside down, in and out about. Know all the gory details of various types from Redhat to Ubutu (sp?), also highly skilled in C, python, unix, and all the other languages. The other people are those that ain't got a clue. I do know it is an operating system, they use a penguin for a mascot, and you don't have to pay Borg Bill a fee every year (or month).
mfwright@batnet.com
I use all three major desktop OSes regularly. IMHO, Linux in the form of Debian and Ubuntu are only slightly more useable than Windows only because the underlying OS is built well e.g. none of this registry crap or installing major applications in such a way that it's impossible to make a bootable backup. The GUI though is just as embarrassing compared to MacOS which is simply elegant. You're never fighting with the GUI. Oh and the simple fact that Windows lies like a rug about the fact that it's not ready to use when you boot it until you let it sit there for 20 minutes while it does major housecleaning is irritating.
A big part of the problem is this: The world has a near infinite number of problems out there that are all clamoring for attention: Whatever you do for work, The environment, mowing the lawn, Political Parties, taking the cat to the vet, gridlock on the drive home, What's for dinner, Today's school shooting, List of HoneyDos on the weekend, political scandal of the week, Homeybees are going extinct, the neighbors next door don't want a solar power plant built down the street, there is a rally a city hall for a righteous cause, churches asking for money, the list goes on and on and on.
The last thing you want to do when you home is spend energy trying to figure out why your computer isn't working. So it isn't a case of deliberate ignorance, it is a case of being worn out at the end of the day and not wanting to deal with another problem. Windows is a know entity that works well enough. The barrier to entry for linux is that everything looks different and acts different enough that people don't want to have to be retrained, especially then they have to use windows at work and Linux at home.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
The primary issue with Linux is it's architected to rely exclusively on source code.
There is no concept of a kernel driver. If I sell a piece of hardware requiring a driver there is no possible means by which I can bring my product to market without extraordinary pain and suffering or by being unreasonably restrictive on supported distros.
Same problem extends to 100% userland commercial software. While basic ABI for executing apps is backwards compatible binaries compiled 20 year ago can still execute in the real world this is meaningless. Any nontrivial software with dependencies require stable interfaces that simply don't exist. Hell they don't even exist across current distributions of Linux. Anything with GUI / GPU access, security stacks, sound, printing.. good luck.
The really telling part of this is the rampant persistence of criminally outdated packages often included with most present day distros. Even people whose whole job it is to work dependencies so all software where source code is available works find the task to be impossibly hard.
Windows has win32... Linux has a bunch of disorganized undisciplined interests scratching their own itches and throwing the word "deprecated" around like it's a badge of honor. The end result is little interest in commercial software for the platform and massive pain and suffering for anyone wanting to run anything not packaged with distro.
Updates are NOT better than windows. They are actually much worse. When you replace a file in use the reference to the old version persists from the perspective of any currently running application. This can have unpredictable repercussions.
Say there are additional resources beyond a dependency that need to be updated and running application is still accessing those resources as if it were still running old version because it doesn't know any better.
Or assume there is a security bug fixed in dependency but the application is long running and continues to execute for months or years with the vulnerability in place because nobody ever bothered to restart application or system.
There is nothing inherent in Linux architecture that makes updates better for Linux than Windows. The restart behavior of Windows updates may be annoying but at least outcomes are predictable WRT actual application of updates.
As for security of Linux over Windows with regards to malware... Linux people are living in an alternate reality if they believe any of this bullshit. The entire UI stack is swiss cheese. Linux has been a nonstop tragedy of privilege escalation vulns just like Windows. There is no architectural advantage Linux has over windows on security. The only meaningful advancements are from architectures using type 1 hypervisors. Even this has been considerably eroded due to proliferation of hardware vulns.
All I want is a computer that can securely have a browser, run emulators for my old school video game roms, play my mp3 collection and play all my movies ripped from DVDs. Can Linux handle all these basic tasks? If so I'll gladly say goodbye to Windows.
Whatever the reason, relying on "it is less targeted" as your security is absolutely insane.
The real reasons are:
- People have Windows.
- People know Windows.
- Programs they buy/download work on Windows.
- Programs they use in work also work on Windows.
That's it.
There's literally nothing stopping someone nowadays selling Windows apps that are literally just Linux VMs running inside a hypervisor that happens to be on Windows. True cross-platform capability.
The reason I don't run Linux on my main machine? It already runs Windows, and I can put Linux in a VM. 50% of my servers in work are Windows, 50% are Linux. Because some things have to be Windows (e.g. Exchange), and some things can be Linux.
But they all run on a Windows Hyper-V server (despite the underlying hardware supporting Red Hat) because people are familiar with Windows and I have to assume someone else will take my network over. Literally my entire working relationship with people in the same position as me has found one person who runs Linux as anything other than a toy to say they've done so - and most of them don't run it at all (except incidentally, e.g. Android phones, etc.).
There are major in-roads (e.g. Chromebooks) but pretty much the underlying OS matters not one bit at all. As we go on, even the app layer doesn't matter as everything moves online.
Fact is, at that point, people don't need to care what they are running. They could run them all, at the same time, on the same machine. Dual-booting was something we did before processors could support proper virtualisation. Nowadays even the cheapest laptop supports virtualisation extensions and could run on anything.
Why doesn't it? Because people *literally don't care* about the OS they are using, could use, or what some application uses. They just want to click, install, work. Same way that I honestly couldn't give a shit whether my car engine was a classic piston or Wankel engine. I just want it to start, drive me somewhere, and get repaired by someone else.
Anything else is literally trivia.
How many times does it have to be explained before it finally sinks in ?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more . . . . .
It isn't because we like Microsoft. It isn't because we hate Linux.
( I use both depending on what I'm doing )
We don't abandon Windows for one simple reason:
MANY OF THE APPLICATIONS WE USE DON'T EXIST ON LINUX.
It's the same damn problem VR has. Developers don't want to commit resources to something that so few use while, at the same time, so few will consider it because very little is developed for it.
Some have Linux versions ( like Maya ) but, for the most part, many of the professional / commercial applications I use on a daily basis do not.
There may be some open source alternatives but, none of them quite stack up to their established commercial brethren.
This, and only this, is why ( like it or not ) I am f*cking stuck with Windows.
In case you're curious and you want to go find me some free, open-source version *** that performs as well as any of the following ***, here's my list:
The entire Adobe CC suite
Maya & various Maya Plugins ( covered, it works in Linux too )
Zbrush
Rhinocerous 3D w/ Brazil
Substance Designer / Painter
Keyshot
Capture One Pro
Cubase Pro
Sibelius
Various Musical Instrument Libraries
The driver that ties my synth to the DAW
The day all the above developers create a Linux version, I'll switch.
Until then, Windows it is.
forced me to find a Linux solution, price tags like that is a good motivates me to make me work out in linux what i wanted to do with windows, and if it was 30 or 40 dollars a copy instead fo damn near 200 micro$soft would lose less customers, but its too late now and i have my security system set up and working the way i want it and i am not going to rebuild it now even if they did lower the price
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
People just don't want to learn anything new
Sure they do! Everybody learned how to use a modern smartphone thanks to the iPhone, people learn to use new applications on their computers every day but the reason they do that is because it comes with some significant benefit. For example I can certainly see value for 3d animators in learning software like Blender - and a lot of them do - but whether they run it on Windows or Linux or macOS is pretty much irrelevant.
You STILL have no software and it's the 21st century already.
Personally, the one piece of Windows software for which I really haven't found a decent Linux replacement is Publisher (2010). I use it to make greeting cards and such and while other apps can handle the layouts, graphics and text okay, they all suck to some degree or another with regard to paper and envelope handling (like for greeting cards) compared to Publisher. I also *still* have a fairly extensive personal budgeting spreadsheet in Lotus 123, which I'm loath to port to Excel or Libre Calc -- luckily 123 and WordPro still work fine on Windows 10.
At the moment, I have the following systems at home: Windows 7, Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04 (with CentOS7, Win7 and Win10 VMs) and a Dell T110 (w/32GB RAM) for which I haven't decided what I want to run on it yet. And I've been an admin on just about every version of Windows and type of Unix (ever). So I'm not unexposed to the various options. At the moment, I'm migrating things from my Win7 to Win10 system and will then consider upgrading my Win7 system in-place (shudder) -- as Win7 will be EOL next year (sigh, not a huge fan of Win10).
Anyway, just my $0.02.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have used Windows 10, macOS, Linux (lots of flavors, including Mint, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, and various Ubuntus). Right now I am reasonable convinced that Windows is the best solution for me, although I miss Linux often. The biggest issue for me is the availability of software. Here are some immediate ones that come to mind:
1) The software I use to prepare my taxes (the browser version is more expensive if you can believe that)
2) Skype for business (necessary for my work at my university)
3) Acrobat Reader (necessary for some tax paperwork that requires submission by PDF)
4) Microsoft Office
5) iTunes (because I have an iPhone)
I bought a lifetime license for Crossover Linux because I wanted to support the Wine project. Wine will allow me to get by with an older version of Office (rather well, actually) and some other useful software (like the Epson wireless projection utility). The other items on my list don't work well with the latest version of Crossover. Many of the programs that I run in Linux (Thunderbird, Geany, Eclipse, wxMaxima, Octave, VLC, just to name a few) have Windows versions that work exactly the same way.
Windows also has better search from the start menu for documents and applications, something that only KDE seems to do well, and KDE has its own problems. Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time removing all of the asinine parts of Windows 10 from a Powershell session when I do a clean install, but that's not much different than the scripts I use to configure Linux distributions after I install. The addition of the Windows Subsystem for Linux also provides a lot of missing functionality (although it is much slower).
I know the VM solution will probably come up here, but I feel that if I have to use a Windows VM for certain tasks and a Linux host for others, I'm forced to configure two systems for my personal machine and that's time I don't have.
I work for a small startup company. We had a user whose computer had a bad hard drive, and he needed to get back online ASAP. I had a Linux Mint machine I was working on (XFCE, not Cinnamon), so I temporarily lent that to him. I installed Chromium and Slack, which should have given it everything he needed. I came in the next day to find the computer I had lent him gone and back by my desk.
He freaked straight the fuck out. It wasn't Windows, so he just straight panicked and didn't know what to do with himself. The very act of attempting a change was too much for the guy, he chose instead to work off of his phone for a few hours until his old computer was restored.
In short, unless it looks and acts just like Windows, users will reject it out of hand.
As an evolution from DOS
Windows has been around enough to make its architecture feel instinctive.
Its organized and works well enough.
Linux its a kitchen with too many chefs.
If you stick with Debian, It tends to be organized, almost professional.
but, the fractionality of it, its a pain.
I love the simplicity of Linux and use it for specific tasks,
but general computing, Windows is the boss.
I cant visualize someone using Linux without a technological degree, at least.
I have used Microsoft products since MS-DOS v1.1. I do have a Linux box, just to play with but I don't do much with it any more. I really wanted to use multiple OS's just because I worked on mainframes, mini's and micro's through the years.. I did ask a somewhat nooby question on a Linux forum and the unhelpful shit I got in return was pretty bad. No one answered the question outwrite but I did get a huge amount of "your an idiot" type responses.
Now, here is the point. Given that the Linux community treats "normal" users as such a pariah, why would any company subject their employees to such venom and scorn. I was a Windows Administrator (desktop and servers) and if I had responded to a end user question in such a manner I would have been fired for cause.
The Linux community needs to change its attitude. Linux and Windows are Operating Systems - that's all. The programs I use run on Windows, they do not run on Linux, whatever flavor you can think of. Now, when I have to support over 100,000 users, do you really think that not getting adequate "real" assistance or support is going to make sense?
Chrome OS is made to run one application: Google Chrome. If you want to run an application other than Google Chrome, you need a different operating system. And if the Chromebook you own was manufactured before Crostini, that isn't likely to happen.
I don't know about roms, but the WINE project is pretty magical. As for the rest, hell yes! My media server is an Intel NUC running Kubuntu. Music library is on there, a pile of DVD rips, youtube streams fine in 2k, most other things stream fine, and it just works. Took almost 15 minutes to install it. Download the ISO, put it on a USB stick, plug it into whatever you're installing Kubuntu on, and follow the prompts. It can even set up a dual-boot and keep your windows partition.
Or you can just run it off the USB stick if you want to try it out but not risk upsetting your current setup.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
MS is a shitshow. They may be mellowing slightly, but I woud never trust them.
Linux is perfectly usable as a general desktop/web surfer, and for most routine office tasks. It's fast and reasonably friendly. It's a lot of fun for development and similar stuff.
But I like to do advanced graphics (Photoshop, Illustrator) and audio/video (Sonar, Mixbus, Premiere Pro, Audition, etc. etc.). Not to mention the thousands of great free or cheap apps and utilities comprising the larger Windows ecosystem. Until Linux has anything remotely comparable, I'll hold my nose and somehow deal with Windows.
It may be that the new MS Win10 update policy fixes most of my concerns about Win10. Until then, I'm sticking with Win7 (super fast and stable on modern hardware).
Linux? Yeah, I run it as a VM sometimes, or on my RPi, but it's still all about itself -- interesting if you want to play with an OS, but useless if you want to get something amazing done creatively, without struggling with your tools every step of the way...
Most Chromebooks support Android apps
Only if they're from Google Play Store. In order to sideload Android applications onto a Chromebook, you have to put the Chromebook in developer mode, and a Chromebook in developer mode will prompt whoever turns it on to wipe all data.
I've thought about this recently, and it goes something like this: I think there are some rings which help categorize whether using Linux makes sense...
Ring 1: Development Applications.
IDEs
Text editors
Compilers
Ring 2: Server Applications.
Web Servers
Routers/Firewalls
Storage/Data Transfer
Databases
Ring 3: Lowest-Common-Denominator Desktop Applications.
Desktop Window Environments
Productivity/Office Suites
Web Browsers
Mail Clients
IM Clients
Audio/Video Players
Ring 4: High Level Desktop Applications.
Audio/Video Editing
Architecture
Finance Software
Legal Software
Medical Software
Point of Sale Software
etc....
Rings 1 and 2 are things that software developers tend to know a lot about, making it very easy to code them well. In most cases, software fitting into those categories are superior to Windows-only applications. The LAMP stack is basically the default for web hosting at this point, and plenty of software-based routers run on Linux or BSD while doing that on Windows is almost comical to suggest.
Ring 3 is pretty mature in general at this point, but it's pretty easy to need a particular function in Excel that isn't available in Calc or some such. The more complex the needs are for a particular application, the more likely the Linux equivalent is going to be a bit of a problem. Even if it can handle it, the learning curve makes it undesirable without an even bigger reason to do it.
Ring 4 is hit-or-miss. Content creation creeps along on Linux, but it's far from mature, and lots of plugins aren't available for the platform. Plenty of line-of-business software *needs* some sort of commercial support, and it's the chicken-and-egg problem that everyone runs Windows because their vendors require it, but none of the vendors make Linux software because virtually none of their clients are running Linux on the desktop. Lots of high profile use cases simply require Windows (or possibly OSX) because there's no reason to develop for what will likely be a support nightmare, and even if one vendor tries to standardize support on Ubuntu, everyone's SoL if the next vendor standardizes on CentOS.
On the dubiously-good side for Linux adoption, the everything-in-a-web-browser trend makes the number of software titles requiring support to decrease as time marches on, making it easier to switch. However, anybody arguing that it's easy to switch has clearly never worked in tier 1 tech support.
I could personally convert a great number of individuals if the options for Linux office suites were compatible with MS office. I don't mean "mostly compatible", I mean 100% compatible. They need to be able to edit word files, and have them open in an identical way for the people they are sharing them with, and those people are using MS Word.
"Sorry my whatever didn't open formatted correctly, I'm using Libreoffice" is an apology I have all-too-often made to coworkers. Libreoffice gets you 90% of the way there. If it got to 99.5%, Linux would be a viable operating system for 90% of the population. Without it, it is a viable operating system for the 5% of us who either *can* go without MS Office, or who are simply too stubborn to put up with MS BS.
...that the answer to this question is: The applications! Jeebus... it's the applications!
I know of several people who are "stuck" on Windows because they rely on a sophisticated bit of graphics design software that is only available on Windows (and, occasionally, on MacOS). And I'm sorry, but that, for these users, The GIMP does not suffice no matter how many times some fanatic starts shouting that it does. I'm sure there are other applications that are deeply entrenched into a business that would be too disruptive to uproot and switch everyone over to Linux even if there is an alternative that matches the original feature-for-feature..
That said... plenty of people have abandoned Windows. I know of some who, like Ernie Ball, decided that hassle of dealing with Windows (or the BSA) wasn't worth it and switched to Linux---or, in some cases, some BSD variant. In my case, it happened in the latter half of the '00s after WinXP scribbled on itself one time too many---straw, camel's back, etc. I have a kvm image of Win7 around here somewhere---in case I get nostalgic.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Sure, some version of LibreOffice or one of its forks may be 99.9% bug-for-bug compatible with Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows, but in the corporate world, that 0.1% that causes a pagentation issue when you turn your Word document to a PDF file can cost you a promotion. If you use the corporate-approved Microsoft product, you can blame IT and get away with it.
In K-12 schools, colleges, and universities, people usually use whatever their institution buys or recommends, which usually means whatever company gives the institutions the best deal. For decades, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and others have been giving institutional discounts that made it very hard for the institutions to say "none of the above, we will recommend Linux to everyone, not just our geeky students."
In the non-corporate/home/small-business world, people usually go for "as close to free as in beer as possible, easy to use, and as close to 100% compatible with what everyone else is doing as possible." Whatever they learned at work or school or whatever their kids are learning at school usually equals "easy to use" and if they have kids, they want to be compatible with what the school uses if possible.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
All I want is a computer that can securely have a browser, run emulators for my old school video game roms, play my mp3 collection and play all my movies ripped from DVDs. Can Linux handle all these basic tasks?
The Xubuntu operating system runs (among other things) Firefox browser, VLC media player, Mesen and FCEUX for NES ROMs, Mesen-S and bsnes-plus for Super NES ROMs, and mGBA for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance ROMs. Install Wine, and it also runs BGB for Game Boy debugging, j0CC-FamiTracker for composing chiptune music, and OpenMPT for composing sample-based sequenced music.
Even if people wanted to distributing non-trivial commercial software for Linux it's impossible without releasing a dozen different versions to target a sufficiently wide range of distros and versions.
I thought you just needed to make a build for Flatpak or perhaps for Steam Runtime. What am I missing?
Linux on the desktop has been promised on the desktop for over 20 years now. Microsoft knows it can get away with abuse and you accept that abuse by refusing to fix problems in Linux. In fact Windows XP despite being unsupported for five years now still has more market share than Linux. What does that tell you that people would rather use unsupported Windows than Linux.
Is this entire article flamebait? This topic has been argued to death on this site every time the term "OS" comes up.
Business users invariably use MS Excel and Word in their job. They won't change. There is no alternative to Excel. If you give a business user Google Sheets, they will export Excel, work it and then import them back to Google. Google Sheets cannot do filtering, sorting and scrolling at the speed of Desktop Excel.
If all you do is email, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, linux is fine
For CAD, CAM, electronic design, PCB layout, image editing, video editing, music production, and other specialized stuff, you NEED windows
Please don't tell me that there are alternatives for all of these on linux. Yeah, they exist. but they are not even in the parking lot of the ballpark of the same quality
If you need Cubase, Altium, Solidworks, etc... there is no choice
It's because I actually like windows better. I'm not about to give up something I like to use, to use something I like a lot less. I pretty much use Linux where I need to use it and Windows everywhere else.
Drivers, mainly sound and video drivers, when you have to read through pages of forums, make changes manually to X Windows config files to eliminate video tearing or getting your HDMI port to output sound and video without a delay.. and once you have got it right a new update package is deployed that undoes all that manual work to fix what should be working out of the box.
If Intel, NVidia and AMD drivers were stable and bulletproof then I'd move a lot more of my machines to Linux, if it can be easy and stable in Windows or on a Mac OS level then there should be no reason that same hardware just works out of the box under Linux, especially after all these years but the frequency of issues is still far too high.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and I have at least 7 Debian boxes that run 24/7 in different locations - both physical and VPS cloud deployments.
Desktop is still just not cohesive enough. I can handle different look and feel between apps but driver issues are a deal breaker.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Everyone with a brain remembers the great betrayal of valve with half-life 2 and cs in 2004 when he launched steam to steal the fucking software and undermine game ownership. The man pioneered walled gardens
Nintendo and Atari were doing the "walled garden" thing roughly two decades before that with the lockout methods in the Nintendo Entertainment System and Atari 7800 ProSystem consoles. At least if you have a PC running Steam, it won't interfere with installing and running non-Steam applications on the same PC.
1) Games. Folks with bleeding edge systems that require windows may be a small minority, but the large majority thinks they need Windows to run any recent game.
2) On a related note, the random thing you need to run that doesn't have a LInux version, nor a Linux equivalent
3) Fear. Microsoft may fuck you over every chance they get, but they still have a lot of support. Linux has the same, but you can't exactly go to support.linux.com for help.
Borderlands 2, Bioshock Infinite, CS:Go, Rocket League, L4D2, Insurgency, Hitman, Portal 2, Metro Last Light Redux, Shadow of Mordor, Divinity Origional Sin, ARK: Survival Evolved, This War of Mine, and about a thousand indie games.
Does every AAA title play on Linux? No. Not ever AAA title is available for Windows either, some are console exclusive. So what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
That's at least what keeps me teethered to Windows.
With games, it gets better. Especially with indie games that rely on development tools like UE or Unity that can easily compile for either platform usually see release for many platforms. But gaming hardware is still a huge problem. Drivers for gaming keyboards or mice are rare, and the few that do exist are mostly half-assed afterthoughts that barely deliver the basic function of the device. If you're looking at anything more specialized like steering wheels or head tracking devices, you're SOL.
For anything important, Windows has long expired.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What the hell are you on about?
Most people have no idea that there are arguments between developers. How would they even know? Unlike you, they're not coming to /., and they're not lurking linux forums. If you're using linux on the desktop, you're blissfully unaware of those things, unless you're going out and searching for them. What do you think, that there are passive aggressive popups on linux from developers shitting on each other?
I'm rather unclear why people would need to be googling blogs to run linux. You install it and it works. FFS, better than windows a large percent of the time. You just turn it on and get things done. Windows does not do this.
Windows tells me that I need to wait while it installs new software before I can log in. Windows tells me that I must update and reboot or update and shut down. I am not allowed to just shut down. Windows will take inactivity as a cue to reboot, and will close unsaved things it doesn't recognize. Or crash them. I really can't tell. And once or twice a year windows will be unusable for the better part of an hour when it needs to do a giant update. Linux never does this. Ever. Updates just quietly happen in the background, and then you're done. 75% of the time it doesn't even ask you to reboot, and when it asks, it asks. It doesn't tell you that you must, and get increasingly more aggressive the longer you wait to do so. I try to remember to reboot my laptop every 2-3 weeks, just to make sure any really important updates get loaded.
$ uptime
19:25:19 up 19 days, 20:55
Looks like I'm about due. When was the last time Windows let you do that?
How do you safely download a new piece of free software you need on Windows? The answer is that you don't. Linux? Just open the Software explorer for the distro and most of the common things you'd need are right there. And a lot of random niche stuff too!
If you want to just turn it on and have it work, you want Linux.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
They don't want to use a program that has no manuals...
Found the shill. Never heard of a manpage, huh? Linux is one of the most well documented operating systems in the world. You are an imbecile.
For the last 20yrs, there has always been that 1 game I must play that is only working on Windows. Forget about Wine - performance matters. Technically though, I use both Windows and Linux - I just can't get rid of that one game, damn it.
Ever used Cinnamon? It's much nicer than Win10's interface.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Have been using both Windows and Linux since day one for both. Just put a sock in it.
This is NOT the stuff that matters.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How does one keep music playback, open web pages, chat sessions, and the like running over a reboot into the other operating system?
You don't compile on binary Linux distro. You just install and then the installer does its thing and the program is ready.
Provided the application that you want to use happens to be in your distribution's repository. Many distributions reject certain categories of application on principle. For example, Fedora rejects video game console emulators out of fear that Nintendo might cause Red Hat to spend money on a legal defense.
I am a Linux people. Many years ago I got a fix into the kernel. But do a quick read through the defensive comments here, the ones where the poster is calling somebody's reasons "crap." Those are all intolerant Linux fans, who won't take the time to listen to real-world issues.
For us techies, Linux gives a lot for a little cost. Scripts just run. Less malware when you build it yourself. Full power. Low cost.
But for Windows users, that's not the case. They don't want to ever have to understand the computer; it's an appliance. A Roku for web browsing, games and a few applications. It's a phone, but with a keyboard and big screen. And Windows is better at that than Linux. You buy something, it will work for Windows. No issues. A printer... just works. A game... just works. A phone plugs in. Not so easy for Linux.
It's actually not a problem with Linux; it could be made nearly that easy. But the responses here are indicative of the underlying problem: Linux fans want to change the users, not the operating environment. While Windows users don't even want to understand that there is one.
Ditto here. Had a nice RaspbyPi system running a few months and used apt-get to upgrade the distro. It killed X11 but if I switch terminals I can use startx and it works but some process from the original is still taking up 100% CPU from then on. If I kill it it's restarted. Spent some time digging around in forums. Forget it I'll just dump a new image on the SD card and start over with the latest distribution ready to go. Such a waste of time. I've had upgrades blow out networking, video, sound, the list goes on. At least I don't have to manually calculate my modelines like back in the day.
Set up one of these systems for a family member and eventually it just kills itself.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I have been a Linux user for many years with quite a few different distros and I have to agree with the other guy. I am running Xubuntu right now and nothing 'just works'. A lot of the programs I want to use don't have documentation. Sometimes you have to read the source code even to know what the program is for. In general Linux program documentation is just utter rubbish compared to most Windows programs. They almost always assume that you have the technical expertise of someone who writes compilers for a living.
Very few program installers bother to add menu or desktop launcher entries and it is by no means easy to do that manually. Many programs are from somewhat to very out of date if you try to just do an 'apt install x' and Ubuntu flavours have one of the best software repositories in the Linux world. Really only Arch Linux can compete. So you have to google the program and hope they have a ppa and many don't and even when they do they are sometimes out of date and when you try to install an out of date ppa it screws up the entire software installation system until you fix the problem which is by no means easy or straightforward.
Installing programs on Linux is often like wrestling an alligator naked. It's almost always a massive massive struggle and yes it isn't that unusual for you to be expected to compile from source and without any instructions on how to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and there is a Snap or Appimage or Flatpack which makes the installation more like Windows, sort of automagical when it works which it doesn't always. Frequently such packages cause problems when you actually try to run the program because the program was not originally written with that sort of installation in mind or because the installer hasn't been updated for 3 years.
Overall I like Linux better than Windows, but that is only because Windows sucks so very very badly because Microsoft is one of the worst software companies on the planet. But Windows at least has consistent single click installs that really do almost always just work and when someone bothers to write a Windows program they nearly always at least tell you what the program is supposed to do and very very often even tell you how to install and run it. I hate to say this but I think at least some people who love Linux love it because it is so difficult to use. I think it's kind of an ego thing. Like they want to feel superior to the retardo Window users who would not have a chance in hell of running even the easiest 'desktop' Linux distro. It makes some people feel so very elite, but that's not what an operating system is for.
After the Windows 10 OS-as-Adware debacle I decided to finally make a serious effort at doing everything except gaming in Linux, but the people who write Linux software don't make that easy. So many of them are like, "Uh yeah I wrote this free program (it's free so stfu and don't complain!), but I don't give even the slightest fuck if even a single person besides myself ever uses it. Really. I. Don't. Care! So go read my uncommented source code with 100 different source files if you want to know how to use it or how to install it (compile from source baby!) or even what it is actually for. If you want to know why I wrote it you can go fuck yourself. No really. Go buy commercial software if you don't like it. Oh there is almost never any commercial software for Linux? Then go run Windows if you want documentation." That last bit is my point. Windows developers usually write docs or even manuals (Manuals OMG!).
I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to compile from source a linux web server I really would like to use, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It is a massive puzzle or mystery. And no there isn't a binary available. So I had to just give up. There is however a Windows version available and I am pretty sure installing *that* version of the server would be a piece of cake. I have a Linux server though so that doesn't help me. It is open source and I have the source code so I could presum
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
They don't want to use a program that has no manuals
That's ridiculous. Most users don't want manuals, and Linux has far more complete documentation than they would ever want to deal with.
That's why nothing comes with a manual anymore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What the hell are YOU on about?
Linux does NOT "just work", unless you're very lucky and using well supported hardware. One distro "might" install the closed source drivers for your wifi card, another probably won't or it'll tell you the name of the driver and leave you to figure out how to get it.
Then there's choosing exactly which linux you want to commit to. SuSE? RedHat? Ubuntu? Mint? Who knows, there's like 60 different ones. That's where the blog searching for opinions and information starts and where you learn some of the darker underside of "community" coding, ie. that the community is a dysfunctional group of crybabies who all want to be treated like special snowflakes.
As for updates, almost every distro I've used in the last 10 years has some form of updates are waiting notification on the taskbar demanding attention. Half the time their GUI update app crashes or just freezes and you have no idea if it's finished or not.
Don't even pretend that "Software Explorer" is something common to every distro, or that a new user wouldn't get freaked out that installing their app might require a bajillion dependencies to be installed first and having no clue what all those are won't just decide better not.
"Linux, it just kinda works, maybe, but once you've got it working it's pretty solid!" is not winning over anybody.
I use Linux Mint as my daily driver at work, but our home computer is, sadly, still running Windows.
Anything application or hardware runs either on Windows or Linux will work better under Linux. But there are still too many applications, and too many pieces of hardware, that do not work on Linux.
MS Marketing budget in 2018 = 1.6 Billion ...
Canonical total income for 2017 was 130 million at a $500k loss so the total they spent at all was 130.5 million and that includes headcount
Linux will be on the desktops when a company can spend 1.6 billion telling people it should be
I would love to use it. But I'm sick of my laptop not powering down properly. I'm sick of patchy driver support. I'm sick of having no educational apps for my kids to use. I'm sick of every app that works on other platforms not running the same way, or as well, on linux.
If only Linux devs actually cared enough to do stuff like that the OS would be a lot easier to use. Keep in mind though that the software was often designed to be installed the old way and that it does waste some hard drive space with Windows style installations that can't make use of shared libraries. To get it to really work they may have to redesign the software a bit.
I'm not sure that Snap/Appimage/Flatpak is the answer for Linux. I think a better answer is a Standard Desktop GUI environment. Linux devs need to just bite the bullet and agree on an ironclad standard way to do software installations and menus and launcher icons and all the different Desktop Environments should abide by those rules. The idea that the user should hand edit a .desktop file every time they install an app is just ridiculous. I can barely believe that is still a thing in 2019 Linuxes.
Having said that I don't see why nearly every Linux app cannot have a Snap/Appimage/Flatpak installer as well. Is it really so difficult to make one? It is the nuclear option when other methods don't work.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Speaking as someone who has dual booted since around 1993 (Yggdrail plug and play Linux) ...
... These costs must be offset by something that is specific to Linux, and the things that Linux advocates speak of when talking to Windows users are often not meaningful or interesting to the latter. So the typical Windows user sees no gain.
... the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) reduces the number of such things. Various *nix tools or utilities that fit a particular task better than their Windows counterparts are now conveniently available from the Microsoft Store for free. Note that some long time Linux users are finding that WSL lets them have their *nix toolchain under Windows, that's pretty convenient for cross platform development. Kind of a repeat of what we saw with Mac OS X and the BSD console and posix API being available. Such things just make Linux less special than it used to be. In 1993 when I started using Linux it seemed a godsend, I wished I had it for undergraduate CS studies. Fortunately I had it for grad school. But today, its just less special.
Primarily, there are a lot of people that need an app or utility that is only available for Windows.
Some will argue that there are FOSS replacements for the functionality provided by these apps but most of these FOSS replacements are not Linux specific and run under Windows too. Someone wanting to save money by using Gimp does not need Linux.
Secondarily there is the network effect. As the dominant OS Windows just has more people you can ask questions, ask for help. Same for those dominant non-FOSS apps.
Related to this is virtually any hardware gizmo you might want to buy will be supported by Windows. Linux, maybe not.
In short there is a cost from switching to Linux, software availability, what others are using, compatibility,
Regarding things specific to Linux
To be VERY VERY clear, the above is strictly discussing the typical user desktop. If you want to discuss embedded or server environment, of *nix based workstation use, things are quite different than the consumer desktop.
I'm 35, an electrical engineer who has owned a PC for ~29ish years (win 3.1). I build all my own desktops and have for years, I do all the IT work for folks in my family, I am far more competent than the average user, but I'm no sysadmin. I used some linux in the early 2000s and played around with dual boots on a few occasions. I have a family so I don't get to game much, but I do play a few games from time to time, mostly use my PC for coding and A/V stuff. My most recent attempt to ditch windows was a year ago when my CPU from my old computer died, I updated my wife's PC and took her old parts and threw ubuntu onto it. I spent about 80% of my time fixing random driver issues by copying and pasting command line codes into the terminal. I tried to get a few of my games to play using virtual box and other such things (games didn't have native mode) and it was just massively troublesome and performance was terrible. After about a month of spending 3+ hours a week on random issues I had with ubuntu I decided to pull the plug, it was just too much work. After failing to get that computer running I bit the bullet, bought some new hardware and gave a dual boot windows/ubuntu a shot. Once again I ended up spending hours upon hours trying to figure out how to get windows/ubuntu to stop overwriting each other's bootloaders so that I didn't have to restart my computer with boot repair. Eventually, I just gave up and am back to using only windows. As much as people want to pretend linux desktops are ready for primetime, I just don't see it. It's possible I've just had bad luck, but I don't have infinite amounts of time to pour into making my PC work the way I want when Windows works just fine (once you disable all the random MS spyware).
I use OfficeSteam OS! It's great because it runs Microsoft Office and Steam, plus it has the best video driver support. The other OS's don't run these two killer apps nearly as well: Some don't run Microsoft Office at all, or their video drivers and Steam support aren't as good. The makers of this OS are such game fanatics that they named their Siri clone "Cortana!" I know the OS can run other things but I just use a browser for the rest.
I have to agree with this. Manufacturers of peripherals don't usually provide Linux drivers for their products.
There are some generic drivers but their functionality can be limited.
I found this out when I tried to connect my Canon wireless printer to Linux.
No drivers for the scanner in the printer for example and only basic printer functions.
The benefit of rendering on Linux is the clustering, you're not running Blender there, in fact artists don't care what OS is running on the render farm.
A myth. It is well known that Linux users are generally willing to pay more than average for game titles. I do not doubt that Linux users also earn more on average.
A vanishingly small minority of Linux users refuse to ever pay for software. Contrast this with the mass hordes of Windows users who habitually steal their software, every last bit of it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The average user does not know what a man page is, how to find it, how to use it. And once they spend 10 minutes flailing around (assuming they get this far), reading arcane text written in a language that looks like english, they bail out take the computer to Best Buy and have its guts wiped and replaced with Windows. And they do that because they don't want to have to get a CS degree so they can use a web browser.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Very few people use Photoshop or AutoCAD.
It's availability.
The average user isn't going to wipe Windows and install Linux. Price, software, difficulty, none of that matters, Linux could run everything faster, better, the fact is they won't because Windows was included with the system and does everything they need.
If you ask them to switch the answer is "Why?", and they are right.
You can say it's X software or Y software or anything else but that isn't really an issue because most people do not use that software or there is an alternative. If you want a good example of how it can happen take a look at Android, people use it because it came with the phone, it's there. It doesn't matter if they prefer IOS, it's an Android phone. Want them to use Linux, you need a major marketing campaign and manufacturers with system in stores. Do that and software makers will come running, but until then it's not going to happen. Android and Chrome had Google backing it, who's backing Linux?
anyone with an IQ of 120 or less is going to have very serious problems installing and using it and that means most of our species.
I've got a USB stick in a drawer with a Kubuntu install on it. Plug it in, boot up, click "install", and it does it in about 10 minutes. If that's scary, you can click the other tile and just run it off the USB stick. It's like 85% as good as installing it.
Making that bootable stick is the hardest part. You have to download a program from the internet, insert a USB stick, and run the installer.
Most of our species aren't doing more on any device than what you listed. And anyone doing more than that is going to have to learn something, even on Windows.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
On Windows, I can buy whatever mouse/keyboard/monitor/CPU/GPU/sound card/USB headphones/USB drive/etc. that I want, plug it into my PC, and it will work correctly 90% of the time. In fact, most of the time I won't even have to think about it. The other 10% of the time, I'll need to go to Windows Update (or, in very rare cases, the manufacturer's website) to get the driver... which will install itself completely automatically.
On Linux, I have to carefully research which hardware works and which doesn't; which config files I need to edit by hand; and -- if I'm feeling adventurous -- which kernel flags I need to unset to get it all to work. If I'm very lucky, my new hardware will work in some capacity; it will almost never be 100% functional, but maybe I can get it to the point where it's good enough.
This is a massive problem for everyone, but especially for gamers, who absolutely must have their GPU, monitor, audio, and network working correctly and at peak performance. This is also absolutely not a problem for ML developers, network admins, etc., who operate on clusters of 1,000 machines and couldn't care less about all of the peripherals. Guess what, though... there are way more regular users out there than AI network admins.
>|<*:=
...we've spent years learning all the little quirks and nooks and crannies of Windows, and don't want to do it all over again for another OS of dubious added value only to lose access to Windows-specific games unless we want to go thru the pain of trying to make some damned emulator or other workaround work to get back what we already have working right now. And then there's Photoshop - first search for this returns, "Mar 23, 2018 - You can install Photoshop on Linux and run it using a virtual machine or Wine." Why do I have to VM or Wine? Why not native? I read something like that and expect all kinds of quirky problems. These programs are screwball enough just learning them in the environment for which they were made, let alone learning them and, when it doesn't work, having to wonder, "Is that Photoshop not working, or is it the VM, Wine, or Linux itself?
Why buy into a pile of problems and months or years of getting good at another OS as much as you already are good on Win 10?
And, I just got a new scanner. It came with a software key printed on the bottom of the scanner that contained "1"'s, only they were capital i's, and it took a while to figure that out. Throw in possible problems from a VM or Wine and/or Linux on top of it? Why have to chase 3 - 4 sources of problems when you can limit them to 2 in the environment for which the software was written?
Anyway, that's why...
I used to run Linux in the pre-OSX days and still run linux on my laptop. My desktop will never run it again however.
Yes, linux distributions often have a software repository. So does Windows 10. It's called the Windows Store. The difference with Windows, however, is that it isn't an exercise of installing 5 different programs one after another in an attempt to find one that isn't so buggy it's useless for your needs.
I don't care about customizable desktops. I want a reasonable default where I can get work done.
I get better battery life in Windows 10 than linux on my laptop.
Windows comes on PCs. Most people never have to pay for Windows.
Now, to other places Windows excels: If a new AAA title is coming out, it's going to run best on Windows. It might not even be available for linux and the linux drivers don't have the performance of Windows.
If a new piece of hardware comes out, I can go buy it and use it. I don't have to know anything about its internals or anything else. I can just use it. If it comes with software, it will run on my computer.
If I use some internet service, I don't have to wait a year for linux to catch up and support it. I don't have to jump through hoops. It's going to be tested with Windows and work with it. If I have any problems, the company will provide support.
Linux was great in the early days. Now it's focused more on features than fixing bugs. The whole thing is a bugfest
I think it's as simple as that. While Linux has gotten much easier to install there are times when you have to get under the covers to fix or enhance things. For less sophisticated users - and let's face it, most users are unsophisticated - it will be seen as a chore. For people that work in an office, most of them are using Windows at work. I have tried using Macs and Linux laptops in Windows shops and while most things work fine there are some incompatibilities.
For home use though, Linux is great. Fast, secure, and nobody is spying on me (we're talking about you, Microsoft).
The same reason Trump is President, people are lazy and stupid...and they don't care.
I have no idea what your issue is. Just a month or so ago I got an Intel NUC for a media server, slapped a SDD and some ram in it, plugged in a wireless USB keyboard and mouse, a USB boot stick with Kubuntu, clicked a few times, and 10 minutes later I had a fully functioning computer. (Ok, I did have to stand close to my giant TV with the wireless keyboard to start the install, since I couldn't adjust the resolution until it was installed. Wouldn't have been an issue if I had started with a monitor, but wasn't much of an issue even without.) I did nothing to set up anything I needed to use it for. Audio, video, wireless keyboard and mouse, HDMI out, streaming from a number of sites through the browser, youtube at 2k, I can play DVD rips, mp3s, mp4s, ogg, flac, the works.
Updates are quiet and require all of one click most of the time.
If this was a unique situation, it would be one thing. But my laptop just works, as does my desktop.
Have you used something like Kubuntu or Mint in the last 5 years? They are night and day from a decade ago.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I was thinking of moving my home router/server to a non x86 linux box and the syntax for iptables is terrible compared to OpenBSD's packet filter.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Compatibility, compatibility, compatibility.
Table-ized A.I.
Why do people use Windows, and aren't flocking to switch to Linux?
Ultimately people think of Windows as being more reliable. May or may not be true, but perception is reality.
1) People are used to windows, technology has become too complicated. We have to remember so many things. The alternative? People cling to something that they are used to.
2) People know where to go in windows when they want to update their drivers, partition and mount a drive, look at files. This is similar to point #1. People are used to it, and know how to find things in windows. If you can't find something Windows has a good search functionality for that too.
3) The average person doesn't like going to the command line. Cool, I'll learn that, you think. Then after trying for an hour to get some software setup, or BTRFS and a file share setup, then you just lose interest. There are a thousand different things documented online about Linux, and you have to trudge through those to figure it out. Too much information, and too complicated.
4) People on Linux forums are a mixed bag. Maybe I just had a bad experience? Lately I was writing on a Linux forum asking for help on what should have arguably been a working feature in a Linux distribution. Being able to read SMART data from a hard drive. There were some issues with my experience,
a) It should have just worked. It would have just worked on windows (perhaps this is true, and perhaps this is not true, but perception is reality)
b) The person was rude to me. He didn't have the attitude that he was there to help me, he had the attitude that I was being a pain and should be able to figure it out myself, or that I should spend hours trudging through other forums finding the info I needed. He was annoyed that I wasn't able to read between the lines on what he was saying to me. It was too technical, and I wasn't going to spend a lot of time viewing the code samples he was showing me.
5) Linux is fragmented. There are too many distributions. How can I expect consistency if there are so many packages, UI managers. It is not united
6) Linux is unreliable. Times I have tried to switch over, and a couple of things happen. Programs crash, and weird things start happening. It just takes one bad experience like that to kill people's impression or opinion on Linux.
7) Perception is reality. People think of Windows as being the software that just works. Sometimes that's not true, but as I say, perception is reality.
Linux is a great server. It's reliable if you have a fixed task like webserver, or fileserver. But it's not a great desktop operating system for most average users.
I'm sorry to say, but this isn't going to change with the current direction that Linux is going in.
Hyper-V can't do CEPH with out iscis & updates suck with the 2016 and newer auto updates suck.
Honestly, it's more interesting to discuss why this topic keeps getting brought up than the actual topic itself. Re the original topic, it's pretty much a dead horse at this point: Linux is objectively bad for people who want something which just works (especially for the last 10% cases). That's the main issue, it's always been the main issue, it hasn't gotten any better over the last 15 years, it's unlikely to ever get better, end of story.
So why does this horse keep getting dug up and beaten again every few years? Are the hardcore Linux supporters simply delusional? Is there some marketing push to get more people onto Linux? Is it just a Slashdot thing (ie: keeping the dream alive, even though it's been dead for decades)? Is there any new reason to think the status quo will ever change? Why is this "news"?
Denial.
If any OS has been around for 25+ years and is still struggling to hold on to 1% desktop market share, it's a clear indication that people don't like it. When mainstream users tell Linux fanatics why it sucks, the community refuses to acknowledge that the problems exist, let alone try to fix them. Every day, Linux people tell me there's no reason why it can't dominate the desktop world and you never have to go into a command prompt to do anything... and anyone who says otherwise is citing information that's 10 years out of date. Then you run into a problem, and the only solution is to go to a command prompt and type something.
The first problem Linux needs to solve is "DLL Hell", a problem that Linux people keep jeering about but was solved in the Windows world more than 20 years ago. We have dozens of package managers for the dozens of package managers to install the build environments for the package managers for the scripting languages that create the package managers for the updaters for the installers of the package managers, most of which install directly off the Internet unless you create a local repository, which is easy enough for any normal person to do, of course. Wow. Who knew that copying files from one directory to another was such a complex problem?
Pretty much this. Once the desktop UI issue was solved they need to just leave it alone, or at most offer truly optional add-ons or mods.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Given that most of the complexity and PITAness in software stems from feature creep, and feature creep is simply the result of some people demanding that feature, while most of the other users don't want it, it was for a long time a benefit of Linux, that nobody liked it.
Take for instance the much hated systemd. For some people it solves the major problem of dealing with complex init dependencies in uncertain conditions and they would not want to do without. For others this is exactly the opposite of what's happening and systemd is a problem in itself.
Similar things can be observed at the application level, with professional spreadsheet, CAD, graphics and audio software definitely leading the field: All of them have many thousands features, but every user deems a different subset of them essential. Thus they cannot simply use the open source alternatives, which still lack some of these features. Whereas I would not even run libreoffice, since everything too complex for gnumeric calls for a script and I enjoy the ultrafast startup times.
In this sense, a small userbase is an asset, not a liability. Like many things in live, it's more a concave relationship. Too little users and your project is dead, too many users and it starts to become an unwieldy beast.
They don't want to. No one cares about computers anymore. Only phones matter. A PC is a device to bring work home and type papers and do taxes. Windows has Microsoft Office. Linux doesn't.
No one runs operating systems. They run apps and the OS is just a screen for the app. Linux nerds do not get this as the focus is learning and fighting the OS. People just don't give a shit alnor want to be a System Administrator. Just let them use Excel
http://saveie6.com/
WTF are you smoking? Gnome is why I switched back to Windows after gnome2 died.
Guis are 20 years behind
http://saveie6.com/
Why don't you watch teens react to Windows95 video on YouTube? Their response is wow so ancient and empty missing so much.
If old school ways were superior than more people would still be running Windows95 and Linux
http://saveie6.com/
Despite the pretending on here, it doesn't run most of the software that people and organisations want to use. Change that and Linux will start to make serious inroads.
I hate to say this but I think at least some people who love Linux love it because it is so difficult to use.
I find your hypothesis preposterous.
Warcraft was just update to run on modern systems and is available in gog and includes battle net support for multiplayer. Just saying as you don't need a DOS emulator anymore
http://saveie6.com/
Lolwut? Who said anything about Gnome? Yes, Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome 3, but it's completely different to the user. It is a traditional desktop, not using the weird "activities" system. And Gnome 2 was forked into Mate, so that's another non-issue.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Go back in time with the site:slashdot org in Google and type in XP eol? Holy fucking crap XP fanboys we're all getting +5 informative bashing 7 as worst OS ever! XP best etc
People over 40 hate change. I was dumbfounded on a tech website where anything newer than 14 years was considered a teendmill and vandalism
http://saveie6.com/
Depending on the industry and where a business is in its growth, there is an increasing number of applications that are going the way of web-based access (which are generally not OS dependent). However, centralized administration and enterprise-level scalability with ease of administration are critically important aspects, all of in which Microsoft excels (and no one else compares. And, even when not considering these factors, some industries line of business applications only exist as Windows applications (in example, think dental software).
When it comes to these things, Microsoft wins. No one comes close to matching up. That is simply the fact. However, when it comes to deep back-end implementations (storage, databases, networking, SIEM, backup appliances, and other) Linux-based systems have significant enough advantages to win over a Windows-based system. This isn't always the case but from what I have seen this is applicable to most cases. Microsoft is trying to regain some territory in this area with the advent of Windows Server 2019 through new and some improved datacenter-centric features and functions.
If Linux wants to win the Desktop, Linux will have to win in business first. Linux already has a place in the server arena, but to win it all Linux will have to put on a marketing hat, improve its productizationability, and get vendors to support Linux (good luck with that - it isn't cost effective for all but for applications in the enterprise-class that are mission critical, and most businesses are nowhere near being 'enterprise-class'). In addition to vendors, Linux is going to have to step out of the primitive free-for-all anti-communism mentality and pick up game with lucrative, powerful, easy to administer and manage, centralized feature and functionality sets on a level high enough to give Active Directory & Gang a run for the money. This kind of thing is not going to be free (it is impossible to support these kind of feature sets for free without any form of continued active development and enterprise-level support). You're going to have to bring in these "big brother" features that all the fear mongerers in the Linux community despise.
That's true but I think a lot of people don't switch because there is a ton of commercial software that is available on Windows but not Linux and many of us need some of this software for work. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Linux which lets you use commercial software and develop, run and test code under Linux without rebooting or the overhead of a VM.
It's like 85% as good as installing it.
You see it's crap like that that gives Linux a bad name. No it's not 85% as good. It's barely 20% as good. It gives you a nice OS wonderfully out of date with a complicated system to store resident files while at the same time being painfully slow.
Running Linux from a USB stick has it's place but claiming it's 85% of anything even remotely resembling a desktop workspace just serves to reinforce the idea that opensource zealots are just pushing an agenda rather than actually presenting a serious product.
... are still strong reasons to stick with Windows.
People will skip generic Linux and move straight to chrome os, but that will still take a few years. Unless chrome os devices continue to rise in price and continue to ask 1000 Euros for a laptop with 64gb storage (no joke).
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What are you talking about? No one cares.
Updates just are, they take a short time and are done. Most users don't give a shit. It's mildly annoying on a rare occasion but for the desktop computer at home where you have a choice there's always the opportunity for an update to magically apply without ever bugging you. Linux is far more invasive in that regard.
Cost? Windows doesn't cost anything. It's free. It just magically is there on every computer I have. Buy one from the HP website, I have magic windows. Buy a computer from Bestbuy, magic windows. It's as free as Mac which also magically shows up on Mac. Why should I change from one "free" system to another system just because it's actually free, and after I've already paid for my first "free" system? Users don't care about a cost they don't directly see.
Malware? How does Linux stop me from having my Facebook account password leaked? I mean sure I get plenty of viruses sent my way, I can find them in my gmail inbox but for some reason I can't open them or download them. Even so you're entire argument boils down to "no one uses this so we're not a target, please come join us and make us a target".
Your arguments are complete nonsense in the eyes of the people you don't understand. So let me answer your title question: Why do people not abandon an OS in favour of another? Because they don't care!.
Sidenote: You don't reboot your computer? Do you not like security? I get it Linux never needs rebooting. ***fires up putty****
Authenticating with public key "rsa-key-20150627"
Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-43-generic x86_64)
*** System restart required ***
No mail.
Last login: Sun Apr 7 21:59:21 2019 from 192.168.2.109
~# uptime
09:01:36 up 7 days, 11:47, 1 user, load average: 0.18, 0.26, 0.63
Well shit looks like a security update came through this week and I need to reboot my magical Linux computer.
Parent might be flamebait, but it rings true.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Gaming on Linux is an inferior experience. I flat out could not play everything that I currently play on there.
1. fear of the unknown.
2. too many distros making it so confusing to choose
3. pick the wrong distro and you will have to create your own partitions which will scare off potential users. not all distros will auto create partitions like ubuntu.
*fewer people are using Linux
Either you do little to nothing with your Linux installation: just browsing, email, and some text editing
Congratulation, you have successfully described what most of our species usually does with a computer ! ( <- you can substitute that with "smartphone" to keep up with times, if you want. But it boils down to the same thing for most average Joes).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The proposition was "Linux users want free". Which is bullshit. Linux users want freedom, there's a slight difference.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The ui is fine, its software support. Most mainstream apps support windows and or mac, and only some support linux. Many apps are html5 but still dont mention linux. An example, if photoshop and office came out on linux, things might start to change. Until then, those who know how to find equivalent software, or use a vm, or have specific use cases that work well, will remain the primary linux desktop users (like myself). Even at work, in a primarily mac environment, i am the sole individual figuring out how to make our enterprise apps work on linux, and publishing it for others. If you know my wiki page on our intranet you can run linux and connect to all services, but no official in house guides for group chat, imap mail on o365, vpn, follow me printing, domain AD connectivity, ldap OUs etc, and even the 'if you want it erase the soe and your on your own' attitude does not attract the users. And that is not even a technical problem, its a numbers game where only the biggest 2 players get the support.
I tried to install Linux on an old Macook once. Bought a nice big flash drive to boot off of and everything. I found out that Macbooks don't like that, and I quickly gave up.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
macOS is the only alternative that has a reasonable chance to beat windows out of the marketplace.
I've abandoned Linux on the desktop in favor of macOS for many happy years now. Gone are the days where I fight with the kernel to get some module installed or resolve dependencies. I'm still running all my servers on Linux and can't think of a better alternative. But on the desktop? I've seen several non-IT people up close (i.e. family and good friends) trying to jump from windows to either Linux or Mac. The Linux ones were largely failures and all but one went back after some time. The Mac ones were largely successful and created a much lower support burden for me.
Linux won't replace windows. It's been trying for two decades where it was always the next year that will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. We've been through a dozen window managers, some (like E) definitely more interesting, powerful and beautiful than windows, some bare-bones, some competing standards (who remembers the Gnome vs. KDE wars?), some attempts to copy windows, some attempts to copy NeXT (I still have a sweet spot for windowmaker in my heart), some completely new ideas.
None of them had any measurable success. None of the Wine and Parallels have impacted the windows stranglehold. Here's a chart from 2013 to 2019 - Linux barely appears: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Do you know what's eating Microsofts lunch? Android. As soon as you include smartphones and tablets, windows is a minority player in the market. But on the desktop, macOS has ten times the market share of Linux. Forget Linux on the Desktop, after 20 years it's time to get off the dead horse.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
people don't really care and don't want to put in the effort of installing anything else on their pc.
it's not only with computers, but basically with everything. when they buy a car and it comes with a pos build-in radio, they will not bother replacing it with a better unit. a browser included with the OS may be the worst thing ever, but most people won't do the effort of installing a better one. changing lightbulbs with led lights might be better for power consumption & environment but most people won't change unless they are forced to do so, and the list goes on and on...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Umm. What's wrong with Steam?
Think about what we used to get with PC games in the 90's -- total ownership, dedicated servers, level editors, free maps, mods and skins.
I totally own the games I have on Steam. Several hundred of them are DRM free, so don't even pretend I can't download and just run them.
Dedicated servers have mostly vanished from all gaming arenas, whether you're on console or PC, and whether your PC games are on Steam or not. The market for dedicated servers clearly just wasn't there.
Level editors, free maps, mods and skins are not only still available but Steam actually makes it easier to find and add them to many games. It doesn't prevent you from finding and adding them to other games. It doesn't stop developers from adding them and does make it easier for developers to distribute them.
It's all about profits.
For the companies, sure. As a person that plays computer games it's about choice, availability, value and ease. I've never has as much choice or had it so easy to acquire and run games. It's bloody fantastic and I'm only spending about twice what I was spending in the mid-90s when I was earning too little to even pay my mortgage.
Yes, your average windows user knows just how to "start typing away" and not fuck things up. This is the attitude that keeps Linux from succeeding in the home market.
So I should create a back up for every time I change a setting, just in case it borks my system? No thanks. That's something the OS should handle gracefully, not by doing a full restore from backup.
Updates on Linux are fast and "rarely call for a restart" -- and are also more complete. "Updates are typically downloaded through a 'Software Updater' application that not only checks for operating system patches, but also includes updates for the programs that you've installed from the repository."
Updates on Windows take me about half an hour every six months or so, so I guess that counts as 'rarely call for a restart' too.
Shit, I spend more time updating the Linux subsystem for Windows than I do the main OS.
I'm also very comfortable with updating the applications I use only when I'm ready. I don't need everything updating at once, and anyway, my experience is that Linux distributions only update a subset of the applications so this point isn't even entirely true.
Windows "tries to serve a variety of markets...cramming in a scattered array of features" -- and along those lines, that Microsoft "has gradually implemented monetization schemes and methods for extracting user data." And yet you're still paying for that operating system, while Linux is less bloated and "free forever."
You can disable many of the features in Windows if you don't wish to use them.
I don't mind paying for good software. Windows 10 is bloody good software.
Except for the monetisation and data slurp. That's a very legitimate complaint and one that does fucking annoy me. Which is why I've asked the UK ICO to investigate this illegal activity by Microsoft.
"Because less people use Linux, the platform is less targeted by malware and tends to be more secure than Windows"
"Because Linux is shit people can't be arsed to hack it" isn't really an advert. I don't get malware on Windows either though, so it's not really a differentiator for me.
Much more relevant is the point made by half the people posting here, which is that "Because fewer people use Linux, software functionality needed and used daily by millions is unavailable". That's the differentiator. That's the one that matters.
...this time it's really gonna happen. Not like the 25 other yearly Slashdot posts proclaiming that
Super cereal
Linux does NOT "just work", unless you're very lucky and using well supported hardware. One distro "might" install the closed source drivers for your wifi card, another probably won't or it'll tell you the name of the driver and leave you to figure out how to get it.
The same is true of both windows and macos, only work easily on hardware specifically designed for it and supplied with the software preinstalled. The trouble sometimes encountered trying to get linux on a machine intended to run windows can be more accurately compared to the trouble encountered trying to put windows on a machine originally intended to run something else, like a raspberry pi or chromebook.
Devices which are designed to run linux usually do so reliably and without any hassle whatsoever.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Because no matter how hard people try to make Linux accessible, it isn't.
I'm certainly not a "n00B" when it comes to computers; at the same time I'm not a "power user" of any particular platform. I build my own PCs, I code (mainly in C#, but have learned C++ and a number of other languages). I'm probably as close as you'll get to someone "ripe for conversion".
But whenever I've given Linux a try - which I have done on more than one occasion - I've not had a good experience. The first time my graphics card wouldn't work, despite it being a pretty common Nvidia model. Another time it was my sound card that just wouldn't make any noise. A third time everything worked perfectly but with no network connection. Great. That's nul points for a basic installation on common hardware there.
And you know what? When I asked for help, the general reply was "cut & paste this code" or "type 'sudo [something]' in a terminal window". No-one explained WHY I should do that, they just offered random things to try. None of which worked, of course.
People want something that works and that they understand. My mother isn't an expert by a long way, but she knows how to investigate a number of problems, the vast majority of which are solved with a look at "control panel" and a couple of clicks. But ask her to start typing code into a window and she'll switch the damn thing off.
LINUX fans can't have it both ways. You can't tell me the system is "infinitely more flexible than Windows" AND say that "it's easy to use". No, you have an admittedly highly-customisable system that when something doesn't work quite as it should requires either a huge amount of learning, OR a huge amount of trust in the forum where you've just found the proposed solution to your problem is cutting and pasting half a page of code that you don't understand.
Also, every time I've said to a LINUX fan "So... I'd like to give LINUX a try," they immediately start boasting of the benefits of their favourite "flavour". The average user doesn't care about the differences between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Dubuntu, Arch Ubuntu, Red Trilby, Arsecandle and Fetid Puma Goblin, they want "the best one". If you can't even tell someone who says they'll use a PC for gaming and browsing the internet which is "the best version" (without a three-hour discussion ending with six or seven choices narrowed down from the initial hundreds) then you'll never crack that magical "everyone" market.
The article points out "advantages" of linux over windows, but doesn't cover the reasons not to switch to Linux:
1. Compatibility - apps, documents, fonts, plugins, etc. The same reason some find it hard to move to mac or from mac to another OS. OS are different. I can't run apps made for windows (not talking about emulators). When there is an equivalent app, not all features and functions carry over. If I am used to windows, another OS can look strange and have a learning curve. SO at the end of the day, there is no compelling reason to make me switch in this area. Libre Office is nice, but even on windows is not the same as MS Office.
2. Cost - we have to see what happens, but Win 10 was free for most users, and MS keeps adding features and not charging. Much like Mac. So the upgrade cost may have gone away. Time will tell. How many years has Win 10 been doing feature upgrades for free now?
3. "More secure" - attacked less, is not more secure. Although it is targeted less at a consumer level, the number of Linux attacks and exploits is not anywhere close to zero. Although most users may not be running Apache, the libraries that make up much of linux are on desktops and servers and need to be patched just like windows needs patching. Safe browsing and download hygiene apply regardless of OS. Oh and many attacks are social engineering and there are plenty of remote control apps for linux.
4. User capabilities. Mom and Pop that get a PC with Windows, usually don't have the tech abilities to create a bootable installer. If a machine shipped with Linux someone would use it, but are they going to install Linux when Windows works? And again, why would they want to? Compelling reason to switch?
So maybe if you have win7, and your coming up on EOS, you have a reason. But if you still have win7 you are either waiting for a new PC, or you don't like change. If someone was switching to Linux, they would have done it already.
I have used Linux on desktop. I have used Mac as well, and own a mac. I prefer windows.
Quote: Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).
We do have one form of crowd funding up-and-running right now. I just became a Patreon supporter of Ubuntu MATE. I was skeptical of Patreon, but over time I've warmed to it and begun to think it's actually brilliant. I'd love to see more open source projects getting on Patreon. I mean, example. . . I was severely peeved when Adobe took Lightroom subscription-only, and that was the end of my dealings with them. So, now I'm using RawTherapee here, and I'd be fine with supporting it through Patreon. That's a different kind of subscription, and a far more palatable one to me.
Sounds very interesting thank you for the information.
Windows users don't realize you have a plethora of desktop options, including making your own if no others appease your likes. It is the most common reason I hear people say they wont switch
I'm using Linux 100% at home and at work. I don't really care if people switch to it or not. I know it's the superior OS, if you don't want to spend the time to learn how to use it then feel free to pay Microsoft or Apple and be locked in their shit. Everytime they tried to make Linux "user friendly" ithey make it dumber, removing options, customizations. The plebs can keep their walled garden I'll happily stay on this side.
Kids are stupid, did you really use teenagers looking at windows 95 as a reason not to use linux? You haven't changed a bit billy... Shill some more.
Agreed, When they first started working on plasma a few years back, It sucked ass. But as of the last year or so it has been great. It's like the old windows interface everybody begs microsoft to bring back. to the point that people make programs to sit on top of windows current garbage to look like this.
With Steam Play, A shit ton. There is also a good hand full of native AAA titles there is a wiki somewhere dedicated to it if your're really curious. Steam is the best thing to happen to Linux in a long time, they are giving incentive to the people stuck on windows for gaming a reason to switch and abandon the torture.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/l...
https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08...
https://ubuntuforums.org/showt...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/...
https://bufferoverflow.io/gpu-...
http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/...
https://www.se7ensins.com/foru...
There is literally 100 guides to this, whoever told you you need more than a $100 GPU and a cpu that supports VFIO lied to you and you should never trust another word they say.
Just dual boot any Linux distro against Windows 10.
Then install common software like firefox, eclipse, intellij, libre office, steam, etc.. and compare. Linux LOSES on every count PLUS it can't support the hardware and where it does it does a poorer job - AND they abandon hardware support too often.
Burned too many times.
I'll stick with Windoze for general purpose and mac for Music production.
Or you are me. You buy a modern XPS, the same one that dell sells with linux. Only you buy it with windows because it was cheaper (wtf why was it cheaper?). Then you download the latest ubuntu and put it on a usb stick. It fails to launch, so you google and find out you need to add kernel options in order for the install to work.
So you do that and now you can get it to launch, but it's so slow it's almost unusable. You struggle through that and finally get your install. Then you realize that even though you have 16GB of ram, for some reason it only made a 1gb swap partition and now you can't just close the notebook lid and come back to it later, because what you come back to is a kernel panic.
So now you start over and do a custom format to get the right sized swap partition. This time everything works but 3-4 times you get a kernel panic on resume and you don't know why. More research determines it's because your notebook has a nvidia/intel hybrid graphics and even though nvidia is disabled it's still loading a kernel mod that is causing this instability. So now you are in the terminal and you need to add kernel options that you worked for others until you find the one that works for you.
Now you finally have a working notebook and you think, "This is totally ready for my mom to use". I'll give her the ubuntu install media.
Shit I forgot "ya bitch".
This is a flat out lie. Install chrome, uses GPU out of the box for rendering, same with Firefox which comes preinstalled on 90% of distros.
wtf are you talking about? got some proof for this? Because my font renders fine. And I have never experienced an issue with that. There are like 10 things I could complain about on linux, that does not make the list. Thats like saying I don't like windows because Billy Gates is a shill. Maybe the case in fringe cases(outdated text editors, windows articles) but not relevant.
If a few of the big companies said "Hey Adobe, We want to get away form windows expensive licensing. Port CSS to Linux" It would be done in a month. That starts with the nerds on this site guys...
Then why do they run windows?
I want to be clear that I have managed tens of thousands of linux servers in my life time. I've managed ubuntu, debian, redhat, cent, etc. I've also used linux on and off as a desktop for over at least 15 years. Its still not a good desktop for standard users. When a problem shows up, it's rarely fixable without a deep technical understanding.
And then you find a 3rd party repo, and you're off to the races. Seriously its the same as having to go to a website to download say. google chrome or winrar. This is irrelevant.
He heard Trump uses Linux so it must be Deplorable.
What settings are you changing? If you cant read man pages, and don't know what you're doing. Stay out of things like systemd and conf files in /etc. You will be fine. Or you know, go RTFM
You could even do it on a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie, but you'll get a bit better performance out of a full blown PC.
I run EmulationStation on mine, which has Arcade, Atari2600, SNES, GameboyColor, and a few other emulators on it.
I use VLC for music and videos. Handbrake for ripping DVDs, RipperX for CDs (if you still have those), and I run serviio as a DLNA server for my home network.
Kdenlive for video editing, GIMP for photo work. Plenty of browser choices - I use Pale Moon, Firefox ESR as a backup.
I am running Devuan XFCE, but if you are new I'd suggest Mint w/Cinnamon or MATE desktop environment. I only ditched it because I wanted to get away from systemd. Or there are plenty of other good choices. You can try different distros for free, almost all run as a live CD/DVD so you can give them a whirl to see which you like best before installing it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Are users of Photoshop and AutoCAD anything other than an extremely small percentage of Windows users? I don't know anyone who uses either.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Long-time Windows user. I'm comfortable with Linux and have used it for a number of projects, but when it comes to using it as the main OS on my "daily driver", I just can't grapple with it. I actually enjoy tinkering, so part of me would be interested in doing this, and I think about it from time to time. Recently I made a list of the things stopping me:
* I need seamless disk encryption — it looks like there are solutions for this but nothing as stupid simple to set up and deal with as BitLocker.
* Doesn't appear to be any way to get my fingerprint reader to work for login (Dell Precision FIPS) — I hate typing passwords.
* No good MS Exchange client from what I can tell, I need both email and calendaring working well.
* No OneDrive sync client.
* No OneNote client (I suppose I could switch to Evernote).
* No good Quicken alternative, I rely on it a lot for personal finance and managing a small business... Quicken has its own set of issues, but everything else I have tried totally pales in comparison.
* No good way to sync/manage my iPhone (need iTunes here).
* No good way to sync up my iCloud photo library (the Windows iCloud client is pretty terrible, but it does work).
* I use Adobe Lightroom for photo management and I dread having to switch to something else...
I'm actually totally interested in ideas to get around any of these, but I imagine that many of them involve totally changing up how I do things. For example, getting away from Microsoft services (i.e. OneDrive) or Apple services (i.e. iCloud for photos) to switch to something more "Linux-friendly" would impact my whole family. My extended family in the case of Apple. I've got too much going on in my life to take on that project. Looking at this list, I realize that switching to macOS is a lot more feasible; but, I really don't like the direction that Apple is taking with hardware as far as "PCs" are concerned... I don't think that I would be a very happy MacBook owner.
Things have been moving well in the opposite direction, though. With Microsoft's "Subsystem for Linux", when I need Linux for something I rarely actually have to boot it up anymore.
If Linux could play all the DirectX/OpenGL games as they are released then that would take a HUGE cut out of windows.
I just tried Linux on my laptop and the trackpad didn't work. So there :) You are right though, the various Linux distributions have come a long way.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I work at a glue sniffing company and my IQ is 70 and I prefer the leapfrog OS. But I may have to migrate to Mac OS if I don't change jobs soon.
Look, just get over the things you thought you knew in the 1990s, or you're not going to understand this
My current Windows machine has never crashed. Updates are generally seen as a positive thing. I'm not aware of a security fault in any of my Windows machines over the last 15 years.
You might as well point out that Linux doesn't make you set up EMM386.
You guys are arguing about Windows 95.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
First off, I agree with everything you said. I have been using Linux only on my computer since '98, and have been through a few distros along the way. I remember doing upgrades back then - oh my, the pain. Linux has certainly come a VERY long way since then. But last year I switched to Devuan and I use XFCE. So I still have to dig in on occasion.
But - I think we need to redefine what an "average" computer user is these days. I am not even sure what that would be. Because we do still have people who know next to nothing. My parents are like that, and I know plenty of other people. But kids can navigate and do things very well.
It is a little short-sighted to say aspects of Linux that techies cherish are the ones that alienate the general user. Linux and the philosophy behind it is a major force that allows the general population to use the computers they do today. Whether is it the search of Google, Chromebooks, Android phones, AWS, or the multitudes of the various technologies out there. The Linux desktop is but one aspect of it, but overall it's role in the internet age cannot be over-emphasized. Without it we would not be as far as we are today, and would be facing worse lock-in than ever.
But back to the point of the Desktop, it has come a long way even in the last 10 years. But I think it's less relevant than ever. Microsoft has tried repeatedly to force "new and improved" desktop experiences on everyone, and that hasn't gone well. I am not a Mac person, so I can't speak to that... but I can't think of much of anything in the Windows world that has wowed me in forever. If anything, I have to remove the obstacles put in my way. I see my work machines getting more and more powerful, and performance not improving or even getting slower. So much junk and cruft. I can't think of one feature in Windows10 that I want or cannot do in Linux. Not software mind you - feature of the desktop environment. What I do know is that I can't customize it to behave the way I want, or look the way I want. Which may be due to being under the corporate thumb, but Windows has never been about letting you customize things very easily.
So the question "Why aren't people abandoning Windows for Linux?" is simple. They are. Look around at everyone staring at their phones. Chances are, there is Linux under the hood. The real question is "Why are people still using Windows?". That's easy...
1. I use it at work
2. Some app they can't get anywhere but Windows
3. Change is scary
4. They aren't.. they are using their phone / chromebook / mac. Windows is gathering dust. It will just take more time to become irrelevant.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
People tend to use the same OS as they do in their daily work. Until linux makes substantial inroads into the business desktop market, it will never gain marketshare in the home market. End of story.
For starters, normal people don'[t install OSs. The machine they buy at WorstBuy has Windows. Unless they buy a Chromebook or wander into the Apple section.
Many people use Windows software, like games, MS Office, Quicken. Gnucash isn't Quicken, and Libre Office isn't MS.
And if they need help, there are fewer Linux people to ask, many of whom have a "RTFM n00b" attitude, compared to tons of Windows people to ask.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Quality mentioned with either OS and associated APIs is an oxymoron. Windows and Linux are both piles of crap with a crap filling, and a salty caramel coating that has a distinctly crappy aftertaste. However, Windows runs Outlook, Excel, and Autodesk Inventor. Until that gets fixed, I am completely stuck with using Windows. Everything else I do can be run on either pile of sh:t.
I use both OSs daily (I have settled on using Red Hat Linux). My experience has been that Red Hat does have a slightly less crappy aftertaste when compared to other Linux brands. Mainly because I can ask Red Hat a question and not get 30 worthless and inaccurate "answers" from a bunch of maladjusted, neck-bearded incels. Red Hat also have a nice track record on my preferred laptop brand: Thinkpad.
In case anyone asks: Yes, I know there are email programs and spreadsheets for Linux, but the good ones are even more tremendous pieces of crap. Also, Inventor only works with Excel.
" It is well known that Linux users are generally willing to pay more than average for game titles. "
That data only proves that among users who were willing to pay, Linux users were willing to pay more. There is not accounting done for users who were unwilling to pay.
Other than the word "real", is there a single advantage to be being a real Unix instead of a fake one?
I have no idea why you're downloading and double-clicking .deb files. We've had package managers for a long time now. Your issue isn't that linux doesn't work well, it's that it doesn't work like you think it does. That speaks nothing to how well it works, and everything to difficult it is to teach people that microsoft's way isn't the best way to do things.
Maybe this needs to be said more bluntly, you can get all your facts right, but in the end nobody cares! Suzy in purchasing has and never will think about how best to do things with a computer. She wants to complete a task, the computer is a tool and the less time it spends in her way the happier she is.
Pretty much any average user can download and install linux, and do most of what they currently do in Windows out of the box.
You've never worked with any average users then. Average users are sketchy with downloading and installing browser extensions. You are NOT looking at the 95% of the user base here. Users don't give 1 second of thought to the process of I need an OS, and then a browser and my office productivity package before I can do what I want. When they walk up to a computer they will ask does it have internet, or can I use Word/Excel/Powerpoint on it. Many users will want Quickbooks or QuickTax. Even if they can get a techy friend to download and install linux for them as you describe, they aren't going to be able to do any of those out of the box except use internet(unless they get unlucky and even that needs some tweaking too). MS Office and the Quicken toolsets aren't available under Linux period. I know you may reply with OpenOffice, but users will reject that and demand the computer just be put back the way it was when it was working. Try moving users from MS Office 2010 to MS Office 2016 and listen to how many have problems adjusting and missing things they used to be able to find. You have NO idea what users need or are interested in trying to do for themselves.
It's sometimes rather baffling how disconnected from what users actually use their computers for the average slashdotter is.
Indeed. Users can just download Linux, install it, and use it out of the box. Yep, the disconnect is baffling.
Native games or through Steamplay with Proton? I'm primarily use my PS4 for games, but I have tried a couple of games through Steamplay: Star Trek Online and Fallout 3.
Here's a database of games tested with Proton, which ones do or do not work. The number of working games keeps increasing over time
https://www.protondb.com/
And here's the native Linux/SteamOS games page on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com...
Yes Microsoft goes way too far in the other direction and assumes you have the IQ of a small monkey. So you have two different extremes and some of those things like extension hiding are just a symptom of the evil maliciousness of Microsoft. They must have made a deal with the devil or something.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It's not just that but the point of an OS is to offer APIs so programming is easier.
It is much much much easier to write quality programs for Windows than Linux. This is why all the game platform is dominated by Windows, so is office software.
Windows API's and quality programming should never be in the same sentence. Both OS's require a learning curve to understand their perspective API's, so if you started learning to code in Windows, that will be more familiar to you. However, there is an awful lot of crap code that comes out with the Windows API's. At least with Linux, there is an entire community to check your code and help improve it. As far as gaming, the main reason has more to do with marketing and not the API's. The simple economics of scale is why the gaming industry shy's away from Linux in favor of Windows. Unfortunately, is a chicken vs. egg situation. We need good Linux games to get people interested in the OS, but we need a lot more people using Linux before the game developers will give it serious consideration.
Here's a fundamental thing that's getting missed. If you could magically have ALL games 100% Linux compatible tomorrow you still would not have given people a reason to switch to Linux. You only removed 1 reason for people to refuse to use it. It is not enough to fix the very many show stopper issues keeping people off Linux, you need to give users something they care about and can't get on their Windows box. Name me something users care about that is better on Linux. Failing that, even provide a GOAL for the Linux community to work towards that would provide users something they care about and can't get elsewhere.
I wouldn't mind using Windows XP.. or Windows 7.. not a fan of Windows 10 but got pushed along.. :-(
Harald
What? Firefox on Linux has had hardware acceleration for video decoding for YEARS. You need a relatively recent video card to accelerate decoding of Google's VP9 though. for Nvidia that's PureVideo feature set F or later. Basically the 750, 950, 960 and the 10xx, Titans, 20xx's, and 16xx's.
[CronoCloud@potos ~]$ ffmpeg -hwaccels
Hardware acceleration methods:
vdpau
cuda
vaapi
qsv
drm
opencl
qsv
cuvid
Was the last time you used Linux, 2001 or something?
The Linux community has spent almost 3 decades now still ignoring desktop users wants and needs. There has been this blind belief that if only parity with the Windows experience(Apps, HW support, ease of use, etc.) could be reached then, finally the world would embrace Linux. Users though do NOT care about their operating system. The user community is not out there wishing against hope for the day they can run Linux on their desktops. Until the Linux community actually decides to look at what they can offer users that Windows can't, and that users actually care about, there will be zero progress towards getting Linux on desktops. Even Apple, with all it's resources and it's user oriented design of OSX had an uphill battle selling itself and had to distinguish itself to users with things like 1 way fo doing things, simplified UI and HW choices, and an overall support model of it works or it need to get replaced. Apple provided users with a simplified experience. What's Linux even attempting to offer?
Then you install the rpmfusion repo, which you're going to do anyway if you have a Nvidia graphics card. Think!
[CronoCloud@potos ~]$ sudo dnf search nintendo
Last metadata expiration check: 0:47:06 ago on Mon 08 Apr 2019 09:02:31 AM CDT.
Summary Matched: nintendo
desmume.x86_64 : A Nintendo DS emulator
zsnes.i686 : A Super Nintendo emulator
gcube.x86_64 : Nintendo Gamecube emulator
desmume-cli.x86_64 : A Nintendo DS emulator (CLI version)
gnome-nds-thumbnailer.x86_64 : Thumbnailer for Nintendo DS ROM files
fakenes.x86_64 : Nintendo Entertainment System emulator
desmume-glade.x86_64 : A Nintendo DS emulator (Glade GUI version)
gnuboy-x.x86_64 : Nintendo GameBoy Color emulator (X version)
snes9x.x86_64 : Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator
gnuboy-sdl.x86_64 : Nintendo GameBoy Color emulator (SDL version)
gnuboy-svgalib.x86_64 : Nintendo GameBoy Color emulator (svgalib version)
gnuboy-fb.x86_64 : Nintendo GameBoy Color emulator (frame buffer version)
snes9x-gtk.x86_64 : Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator - GTK version
In my experience. MOST user are intimidated by the IDEA of an operating system, if they even understand the term. They certainly are not comfortable installing a new one. So unless it can be done automatically, without loosing access to their existing data. Or unless in comes on the computer when they buy it. It's not happening.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Working in a place where people are probably closer to normal computer users, they mostly have no idea what Windows is. They have no idea what an operating system is. They may know that a Mac is different from a PC, but that's about it.
Exactly. It's an OS made for programmers, and it sucks for everyone else.
I am not a programmer and I have been using Linux since 2002. In fact, Slashdot articles about Linux are what encouraged me to try it out.
Until you can simply download and install (as opposed to: download, compile, build, tweak, fail, try again, find the correct version, try again again, still likely fail, eventually give up) a reasonably wide set of applications it simply can't catch on.
But you CAN simply download and install a wide variety of applications from software repositories. Some might call me a power user and I have only 6 binaries I've compiled myself on this system:
IDJC and libshout-idjc. IDJC is an internet DJ application, the ONLY reason I compile it is that the version in the repos is not using a few advanced features.
nethack and a cp437 utility. I only compile nethack because I enable a few optional features. I compile up cp437 utility so I can get proper IBMgraphics (and an Epyx Rogue looking rogue level) in my UTF-8 terminal.
overbitenx, there's a binary in there that needs to be compiled to use the overbitenx firefox extension that adds gopher support to modern firefox.
pterm, a Plato terminal emulator, which isn't in the repos.
That's it. The hardest one to compile is nethack, because it uses an archaic build configure method, rather than standard configure scripts. But I have a "recipe" I've been using for years. I just follow the recipe to edit the various conf files and Makefiles and I'm good to go. Basically I use the "unix" hints file and make the necessary edits to enable the features I use and also enable X11 support alongside the standard terminal version so I can play it either way.
Seriously, is your head in the sand to still be asking this?
1. People don't want to relearn. Ever try to convert someone from Windows to OSX, or OSX to Windows. There are 10,000 questions of "what app do I use for this?". "Where do I find stuff?".
2. It is still ugly and disjointed. Sorry, out of the box, it is ugly. Sure, you can make it pretty, but that is too much work already.
3. Which linux? Ya'll got how many distros to use. Which one is the "right one". With OSX and Windows that is known already. You grab the one from Microsoft or Apple, end of story. With Linux, you almost need an advanced degree in reading bullshit. No one is authoritative. No single company is the thought leader. Who are they? Are they stable. You might know these answers, the general public doesn't.
4. When was the last time you saw a Linux commercial showing happy users...Oh right: never. Public perception of Linux is "Who the fuck is Linux". Seriously, they only people that actually know about linux at all are geeks, people working in IT, or people related to them.
5. Not enough supported apps. By this I mean: accounting software. It is still there, used by people running small businesses. And support doesn't just come from the people making it, it also comes from their accountant. Typical accountant procedure is: You can use whatever accounting program you want so long as it is QuickBooks on Windows or Mac. Otherwise find someone else.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Simple GUI settings are enough to cause the system to become unstable.
Linux has come along leaps and bounds but its still not the default so why would anyone bother? In fact the only way I see it ever being used is under the covers of something like ChromeOS where people don't even know what is underneath.
I have been a Linux user for many years with quite a few different distros and I have to agree with the other guy. I am running Xubuntu right now and nothing 'just works'.
I've been running Linux since 2002, RedHat type distros, though I have dabbled with a few debian based live distros, DSL, Puppy and Ubuntu. I'm currently running Fedora 29, which "just works"
A lot of the programs I want to use don't have documentation.
Now I would agree that there needs to be some improvement in documentation but it is VERY rare for an application to have no documentation. Not even a manpage? Which applications?
Very few program installers bother to add menu or desktop launcher entries
What? If it is an X application from the repos they almost always install a menu entry.
and it is by no means easy to do that manually.
Sure it is? Xubuntu right? Install MenuLibre (or LXMenuEditor), then you can add new launchers to the menu easily. I just did it to add "NetHack-X11" to my menu. (I compile nethack because I use certain optional features)
But it is easy enough to add them from a terminal, they're simple text files. I could have done the same thing by adding this:
[Desktop Entry] .nethackrc for X11
Version=1.1
Type=Application
Name=NetHack-X11
Comment=NetHack-X11, don't forget to edit the
Icon=/usr/games/lib/nethackdir/nh_icon.xpm
Exec=/usr/games/nethack
Actions=
Categories=Game;X-XFCE;X-Xfce-Toplevel;
To either my .local/share/applications directory or systemwide in /usr/local/share/applications/ as nethack-x11.desktop
yes it isn't that unusual for you to be expected to compile from source and without any instructions on how to do so.
It is VERY unusually to be expected to source compile and even rarer to not have a basic README giving basic compile instructions. Usually it's as easy as entering into the source directory and: ./configure
make
sudo make install
Now sometimes you might have to pass an option to the configure script to enable or disable a feature but that's something like: ./configure --enable-feature --disable-this-feature, ./configure --help will often tell you more.
But I VERY rarely have to compile anything, in fact my /usr/local/src directory only has 6 compiles in it and I'm what might be called a power-user.
I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to compile from source a linux web server I really would like to use, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.
Which one? Perhaps I can help.
In summary, no, Linux is most definitely not ready for general nontechnical users
Poppycock, I'm not a programmer, and as I said, I've been using Linux since 2002.
Bah, I have no IQ in the 135 range, one teacher back in grade school said it was around 125 or so, but it's probably lower now....and:
[CronoCloud@potos ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 29 (Twenty Nine)
Then again I do browsing, email, text editing, image editing, other things, depending.
Changing a user setting shouldn't bork the system at all, and if it does. login in rescue or single-user mode and revert the change.
No need whatsoever to reinstall.
Sadly, this is hilarious. The year of the Linux desktop will never happen until people pushing for this realize that Linux is not the panacea they profess it is and efforts are made to fix things---not just for the "typical user", but for people who need to get things done for their jobs. Until a large majority of people like engineers (and i'm not talking about software engineers), scientists, and technicians adopt Linux as their daily driver, the "year of the Linux desktop" will always be ridiculed.
Also, it needs to be the year of the Linux LAPTOP, so laptop-related issues like fixing hibernation and sleep-to-hibernation need to work reliably---and not on a select few models. Furthermore, Linux developers need to ditch the attitude of always asking "why do you need to do that" or "do you really need to use that" whenever something isn't working as it would on the same hardware running Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS, etc. Ditching the Pythonesque "Dead Parrot" car dealer mentality may help.
I have to wonder if this idiot has ever been within 100m of a computer running any distro of Linux, or if he's being paid to be an idiot.
Btw, I'm running CentOS 6 on my 10 yr old HP Netbook, with gnome (ugh), and it runs just fine.
The Linux DAW's like Bitwig aren't good enough for you? Blender not good enough for you?
Ever since adding Ubuntu and Kali bash shells to Windows I find myself booting into linux less and less. If GUI linux support is ever added that will be the end of linux stand-alone distros I think.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
Gaming
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
The only thing preventing me from removing Windows 10 from my PCs is that I cannot run Windows games on Linux.
I've used Linux a bit, enough to see that despite a bit of a learning curve, it's better for most non-gaming stuff. I'm accustomed to tweaking Windows, a habit that began wif M$ Flight Simulator. Always trying to squeeze the most frames from it, and disabling/modifying those Windows things that sucked up a fair bit of the hardware power/processor cycles I paid for. Desiring to get the most fluid performance possible, over time I became a fair hand at tweaks. Moved on to P3D a while back, and still optimizing as much as I can to make flight sims and all the rest look the best. Now that I'm old and retired and have extra $ to put into PC stuff, it's never looked as good as today.
Despite that, Windows still sucks. Forced(and shi__y) updates and other carp, including the soon-to-come WAAS garbage, make me eager to leave Winblows behind me.
Unfortunately, I've yet to find anything that tells me I can run almost any Win10 games on Linux. I'd enjoy learning a new system, something fresh to tweak and optimize for my uses. Lack of games support is all that keeps me from Linux, and I quit hoping that'll change before I die.
Dagnabbit...
Olphart at play. Ruck FepubliKKKans. Welcome to the Worldwide Idiocracy, y'all.
Linux devs need to just bite the bullet and agree on an ironclad standard way to do software installations and menus and launcher icons and all the different Desktop Environments should abide by those rules.
They did, and do. freedesktop.org is a thing. They decide on those standards.
The idea that the user should hand edit a .desktop file every time they install an app is just ridiculous.
Generally you don't need to do that, especially not things you've installed from your distro's repositories. Heck, most of the time, even things you compile from source will install the proper ".desktop" files to /usr/local/share/applications.
For over 20 years, I've read, and occasionally participated in, the Linux versus Microsoft debate, The issues have been analyzed, discussed, and argued and the core issues have not changed. Windows is still the 800 lb gorilla ruling the market, and, Linux is still the affordable, safer, slightly geeky alternative few are willing to try. News flash: the vast majority of general users don't care. They are familiar with Windows, it does what they want (more or less) and they are not interested in trying something new. However, several things are changing this dynamic: more and more people do most of their personal computing on smart phones. Software as on-line service is growing. Alternate OS's like Chrome and Android are taking more and more device market share from Microsoft (have you tried to buy a MS smartphone recently?) When the programs, applications, games and data storage you work and play with are all on-line, and none care what OS you run, so why should the user? At that point, the M$ premium becomes glaringly obvious, and a cheaper OS becomes a rational choice.
they all suck to some degree or another with regard to paper and envelope handling (like for greeting cards) compared to Publisher.
Ah ha! Found out that LibreOffice Impress has ease of use issues with envelopes didn't you?
I may have a solution, at least for envelopes. Glabels, it's not just for labels, you can print on envelopes too.
... it wants its argument about Linux desktop complexity and its unsuitability for email and faxing back.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
One must have is all it takes to reject linux in favor of windows.
Other factors:
Windows comes pre-installed on every laptop you buy, so why remove the standard OS?
Windows is used in schools, and at work, it is more familiar.
I have heard that Microsoft used the BSD stack for their networking. If so, msft must have worked overtime to make it suck. BSD has good networking IMO.
Workgroups, homegroups, only having selective versions of Windows that can join a domain. It's a mess, and getting worse.
Aside from that, in my experience, msft networking just does not reliably work. Copy a large number file from one box to another, and many of the files may get dropped; or it may crap out halfway through. There are ways to do this more reliably, but you should not have to use special hacks.
I was recently asked to help somebody move her files from an XP box, to a Windows 10 home version box. She wants the XP box set up so she can go through it, and copy what she wants where she wants. Should be nothing to it, but it's actually a pain. Put both versions of windows on a workgroup, have full admin privileges. But windows will not allow some directories to be shared. I am not the only person who has noticed this. Windows forums are filed with similar complaints.
Msft offers help pages on this sort of thing. But msft's documentation simply does not work. Msft instructs users to follow a particular procedure, but the OS will not allow it. Crap documentation for a crap OS.
I am not looking for help on this. Just posting my opinion.
Sorry need citation on thst as the gpu issue has been solved for years as well as the wifi issue.
That holds true even more if you look at people using non-pirated versions.
---
Ask the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. . . (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've had exactly the same experience. Every linux install I've had has eventually eaten itself within 2 years.
.jar file in linux. It worked for a few weeks, then suddenly decided that it would no longer display symbols in the main window. Nothing I did fixed it, from re-downloading a new .jar file to clearing out all of the settings caches I could find to rolling back and reinstalling the video drivers. I booted back to windows to finish the assignment and that was the last I used linux for that semester.
I wouldn't care too much, I usually refresh my windows installs every few years, except that whenever I go the the internet for help on the linux problems I generally get attacked by people who perceive asking for help on weird problems as trashing their OS.
Apparently I'm supposed to spend my weekends reading and researching in detail all of the notes on every single update that comes through before installing it. Except that I don't actually have to do that because I don't need all of those updates and should only install them if I'm having an issue. Except that I'm a retard for not having kept up with all of the updates and that's why my installation bricked itself after running the annual all-inclusive update.
And that's not counting the other random things that made my system completely unusable in the most annoying way. One of the best examples being back during college I dual booted linux and windows on my laptop. After getting linux up and running with all components working (wifi and video being the usual pain in the ass) I had a stable system for all of 4 weeks. One of my programming classes required using logisim for homework assignments. I was trying to use linux for as much as possible, so opted to run the manually downloaded
I can only speak for myself, but I don't really see a benefit to switching to Linux. I built the PC I am using. I have customized the experience so it works the way I want it to. I don't need to set up servers or anything. I have paid a lot of money for software and hardware that are not supported on Linux, only Windows, and OSX. Windows 10 is a smooth experience, and you can turn off the spyware features. I have never had to pay for windows 10, it was a free upgrade from a windows 7 license that I took from a computer that was being retired at work.
Some of the stuff that people are complaining about in this thread are artifacts from windows xp sp1. The world has moved on.
Technically, for many people, their primary computing device has changed from their desktop to their smartphones/tablets. So, you could make the argument that many people HAVE switched from Windows to Linux (and *nix since IOS is a version of *nix..basically BSD with a Darwin Kernel).
I rarely use my desktop PC. The last thing on it is video editing and that's just for the big screen. I can edit video on my phone, too, but it's harder to be precise in the smaller screen. Other than that, I do everything on my (Linux) Android phone. Most apps are easier to use on the phone these days, with the desktop app being inferior in terms of the UI.
Only boring people are ever bored.
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No, he said 85% as good. Not 20%.
Your English comprehension is 0% good.
Goes to show that "software devs" get lost as soon as hardware comes into play. You obviously would be better off having 2 discrete gpu's. You can however share one gpu with a little more work. You just used it as an example not realizing it could be done. You don't really care as you never plan on even attempting to install Linux. Your loss not mine.
Mine isn't far before his. I did however read the site for a decade or so not logged in and can't figure out my "Highdude" user info. And even teenagers these days know how to do gpu passthru. Well the ones that like to learn shit and not complain about not being able to do something before googling.
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I work for a company that has a lot of Linux desktop users. Every time my team gets together, usually 20% of the time is spent complaining about LibreOffice crashing or formatting badly, having to recover their laptop after an update screwed it up, or some other non-business fiddling required just to keep the damn thing working. And then if you want to have a meeting, much of the commercial meeting software, gotomeeting, skype, skype for business, etc. actually works. (Gotomeeting has improved) The desktop computer is a tool to do a job - there are too many things that just don't work on Linux or require endless fiddling to use or maintain.
The proposition was "Linux users want free". Which is bullshit. Linux users want freedom, there's a slight difference.
So why are they paying more for proprietary games then?
Contrast this with the mass hordes of Windows users who habitually steal their software, every last bit of it.
Yes just like all those people who use Linux on mobile.
BTW, clean-shaven here. But I assume that you have a smooth spot where balls should be.
Ouch! Nice try on the "clean-shaven" bit but you've outed yourself as the perfect stereotype with your admission that the concept of a woman is completely foreign to you. HINT: not everybody has balls.
Thanks for playing, better luck next time.
It's a safe bet the AC I responded to had balls at one time. Hey, isn't it amusing when an internet creature such as yourself awards themselves victory in a thread? Legend in their own mind.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Because they can.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
When you said they want "freedom" I assumed you meant in the context of software, i.e. Free Software ... I guess you meant something else.
Bitwig looks awesome, I'm getting it. I like their no-dongle approach. Found out about it thanks to this thread. To the Microsoft trolls: much obliged!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish only has qpdf version 8.21 and I need the latest version which is 8.4. There is an appimage but it won't run for me. I don't know why. Yes I did chmod +x on the appimage. Still won't run.
So I downloaded the source tarball. I need to install two libraries as prerequisites: zlib and jpegturbo. Neither was even easy to find in the distros. It turns out the zlib package I need is called zlib1g-dev, but the software home page neglects to mention that. Of course I installed zlibc which is the wrong compression library entirely before googling and googling enough to discover the package I needed.
So ok I can finally do ./configure and then make as the qpdf web site instructs, but I already had 8.21 installed. Not sure if that is what caused the problem. The software seemed to compile. So I then did a 'make install' as well and it seemed to do something, but when I enter qpdf --version I still get version 8.21. So it did not upgrade the package.
So I figure maybe I have to remove the old package first. So I do apt purge qpdf. Easy enough. It uninstalled version 8.21. Then I tried 'make install' again. No luck. Now when I type qpdf I just get command not found. So it appears like I am going to have to reinstall version 8.21 again even though I managed to get the software to compile from source *and* there is an appimage available. Have I made my point?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Plus the Linux developer community is actively hostile to commercial software developers.
What a joke. You don't see Linux users pirating stuff, that's vanishingly rare. Stealing their software is very much a Windows bellycrawler thing.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Missed your meds today? I suppose you think you made a point, but it's not discernible.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
in fact artists don't care what OS is running on the render farm.
In Hollywood they do. You're aware that Autodesk ships a native build of May for Linux, right? And this is the standard for Hollywood animation workstations, because it responds faster and gets more work done with the same hardware, compared to Maya on Windows. Got relatives in the business, I know this for a fact, and besides it is widely reported. Hollywood runs on Linux. Linux won that battle by pure technical superiority.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
and I think Mac OS is the way to go.
I used it for a long time (since Mac OS 8) and always loved the interface. I thought, "this cost a premium, but it's totally worth it!" But now all I see now is "Apple fucks up" news. When you see this:
>machines ever less upgradable
>machines get OS updates for too little time
>entry level desktops have no dedicated GPU
>high end desktop sucks, not refreshed in 5 years
>laptop with too few ports
>laptop with gimmicky touch mini-screen rather than F-keys
>laptop keyboards with a shitty super thin switch that goes bad for no reason
Do you think that's a viable platform? Something worth a premium?
Circumcision is child abuse.
How is that confusing? You're unaware of Android? A widely used Linux system with a massive rate of piracy?
Point is it is absolutely nothing to do with Linux or "Linux users". If you have alternative statistics on what the piracy rate is on Linux then I'd be happy to see them (and no, your anecdotes are not evidence or statistics).
This is something that Eric Raymond put out in 2006 and it's just as relevant today.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi...
Users don't want to know what's going on under the hood as long as it's simple and works. Linux UX development still hasn't caught up to Apple and MS on the "Stupidly Simple" interfaces. And likely never will.
To each their own, I find windows to be shit on the desktop. I used Debian personally. Literally the only reason I responded to you was because of your "$20k" comment that was completely false. Had you said all the things you have said just now we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. You make very good points. However if large companies all tell vendors like adobe "were moving to linux, port or we switch" There will be linux releases of every major program within 1 full quarter. The reason there is not many now is because people are complacent getting screwed by microsoft. Every other day there is an article about how $userbase is mad at $Microsoftdivision because of something stupid. As a consumer, I don't like the fact that my pc is not really mine with windows anymore. I used to love windows, hell I used to love windows 10! When it first was released that is, then every few months they would make it a little more unbearable. Now I classify it as spyware/trojan as it should be. Plus the UI is shit tbh. But I love KDE and windows XP so... theres that. What exactly is your bad experience with mint anyways? I have never used it but its what I started my brother on as there's tons of support and I don't like the way ubuntu has been going for a while. I literally have no issues with my OS when I don't break it playing with things I know I shouldn't be. I even have one of the ryzen motherboards that has a a quarky way of interacting with the superIO that made it impossible to see sensors until linux kernel was updated to use a work around. Had a similar issue on windows when it was released also. But other than having to install lmsensors from git, I have 0 other setup that isn't a command or two away.
Of course I meant free as in freedom. However, we pay for our AAA games like everyone else. Well, unlike that huge subculture of Windows users who only play stolen, cracked games.
The free (as in free beer and free freedom) part of AAA gaming on Linux is the infrastructure: Mesa, freedesktop, GPU drivers (fuck you Nvidia) Vulkan, etc. This freedom is infectious, as with AMD donating Vulkan to the OpenGL ecosystem, and Valve forcibly course-correcting Apple with MoltenVK, so that engine developers can just ignore Apple's Metal stupidity, reduce their target rendering platforms by one, and as a fringe benefit, get Linux-compatible rendering for free.
There is a crossover where it costs less to add Linux support than the incremental income from the additional market segment, resulting in a steadily increasing incidence of day zero Linux support. This in turn motivates more gamers to make their long-contemplated move to Linux, which increases the size of the market and so on, a virtuous spiral. There is also an established ecosystem of legacy ports, e.g., Feral and GoG. And finally, there is just a lot of Linux love out there. There are an increasing number of game shops that do Linux support as much for the love of it as the additional income.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Had no idea what you referring to. It helps to write out what you mean. First thing, Android users typically don't even know or care that it's Linux, It's kind of a stretch to call them Linux users. Second and more important thing, you quoted stats (hard to call them stats really, more like anecdote, but playing along with you here) from 2012 and 2013. Got anything better? Otherwise, meh, no discernible point in evidence.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What you quote smells of Apple spin more than anything. I hope you're willing to admit, Apple is certainly not above spinning, in particular the kind that masquerades as third party anecdotes.
their game Wind Up Knight was a paid app on iOS, the piracy rate was at one point as high as 80%
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Piracy on iOS: 60% of Monument Valley installs on iPhone and iPad not paid for
Do I need to go on?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
125 is still pretty high compared to most people and I bet you have a technical background. Fedora is actually pretty impressive. A harder distro than Xubuntu which I am using. My IQ is less than 100, but I have many years of programming and Linux experience. So I can manage to run Linux even though I am not really smart enough to manage Linux properly.
I just had to compile an app from scratch which required 2 dependencies and even then I can only run the program from within the 'build' subdirectory. Trying to copy the executable file to usr/local/bin didn't work. Won't run from there.
The appimage that was available also didn't work with certain options and so seems like it won't be reliable in general. The appimage wouldn't run at all at first. It is at least running now and I am not sure how that happened. The app does at least have a thorough and up to date user manual which is like a miracle in the Linux world.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Now I would agree that there needs to be some improvement in documentation but it is VERY rare for an application to have no documentation. Not even a manpage? Which applications?
Well I never said it wasn't rare. It is indeed rare for there to be not even a sentence explaining what the application actually does. Probably less than 1% of Linux apps, but that pretty much never happens with Windows apps. It is so rare that I cannot come up with any examples in the few minutes I have to post this, but they are out there. I have seen lots of examples over the years. Most recently several embedded web servers had zero documentation and I think some gui tools. Usually they are very niche applications and of course obscure. The real problem isn't the nodoc applications. It is that there are so many applications with very bad and ultra-minimal documentation.I would say as many as half the Linux applications I use have what I consider to be inadequate docs and at least 20% have only very minimal documentation.
What? If it is an X application from the repos they almost always install a menu entry.
Really? That hasn't really happened at all with my installation of Xubuntu, but maybe there is something wrong with my installation. I dunno. But I've never run a distro like that. Maybe I should try Fedora sometime if most of the apps install menu entries automatically. I guess I could at least try Kubuntu. I will check out MenuLibre or LXMenuEditor. I have been meaning to look for apps like that. But it shouldn't really be necessary. Linux desperately needs to make software installation a lot easier if it ever wants to get mainstream users.
It is VERY unusually to be expected to source compile and even rarer to not have a basic README giving basic compile instructions. Usually it's as easy as entering into the source directory and: ./configure
make
sudo make install
I don't find it unusual at all. It depends on how obscure the software is, but a lot of the best niche Linux software is only available as source or if you need an up to date version you often have no choice but to compile as I just did with QPDF. I had a similar problem with Eclipse IDE which was not in the Ubuntu repos at all. One of the best things about Linux is the large variety of little software tools available for many different things, but binaries are frequently unavailable for those. The nice thing about Arch Linux which I have used in the past is the AUR often has those little programs and auto-compiles them for you. I think also Arch Linux goes the extra mile in enforcing the sort of strict compilation that you just listed. I wish that always just worked but it frequently does not. And as far as hand editing .desktop files I didn't mean it was hard to figure out how to do it. I just meant it was a long and tedious process. Although I guess it somewhat depends on how fast you can type.
Which one? Perhaps I can help.
appweb and ESP, a web server and MVC framework respectively. I'd really like to be able to use them but I cannot even build them and even if I manage to build them the documentation is so inadequate that I doubt I will be able to get it working. I would like to try though. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Also if you are still feeling generous why can I not upgrade qpdf to the latest version by compiling from source? I did ./configure, make, make install but it didn't actually install the program. It did build it though and if I go to the 'build' directory I can run it from within that directory only. These sort of little problems happen to me constantly with Linux. Software installation and documentation are just not problems with Windows. Of course Windows has no equivalent to qpdf and anyway I wouldn't want to install Windows on m
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Second and more important thing, you quoted stats (hard to call them stats really, more like anecdote, but playing along with you here) from 2012 and 2013. Got anything better? Otherwise, meh, no discernible point in evidence.
Well I haven't researched it extensively no, but have you got any stats to back up your assertions re: piracy on Linux? You claim it is low yet provide no evidence whatsoever, not even a few years old.
Of course I meant free as in freedom.
You said they want freedom yet the only evidence you have for Linux users paying for software is for non-free software.
I don't doubt there is high rates of piracy on iOS, however there doesn't appear to be any evidence to suggest Linux is any better.
It takes a long time for the worst software company in the world, Microsoft, to get things right. It is only when their software is reaching EOL that it gets decent. It isn't a fear of change on the part of the users that is the problem. It is that Microsoft is evil and incompetent and should probably be destroyed in a large explosion.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
People are afraid of change. And with Desktop Environments lacking some key features or usability that society has come to love about windows, why would they switch. The effort should be to focus to teaching kids about Linux, so they understand that they have a choice. Or maybe, tech folks could help introduce Linux distros to their friends. If there was a single Linux Distro usable in mostly the same way as Windows, this wouldn't be of concern. It's important to educate, as well as provide familiar tools that feel natural. I don't agree with most user choices, but people like what they like and tend to learn and use software that makes life easier.
There are two distros that I like for these purposes, and they are Kubuntu, and PureOS. Yes, I'm partial to KDE, don't judge me! A few people I know have chosen Gnome Unity, but very few.
Not sure what the right answer is.
Go find your own evidence, it is abundant. Please quit being a disingenuous pest. If you need an example of users paying for free software then look at Blender foundation, or any number of other examples.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Found the shill. Never heard of a manpage, huh? Linux is one of the most well documented operating systems in the world. You are an imbecile.
Have you ever actually used Linux? It isn't reading a man page for a system command that is the problem. It is figuring out how to use some software package that expects people to learn how to use it by reading their source code.
Some of the best Linux software has almost no documentation at all and certainly not enough for non-experts to figure out how to use it. Most of the time they assume the readers of the docs are experts and are not really shy about admitting that either.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Did I say that, or did you put words in my mouth? Oh yes, you put words on my mouth. I somehow got the idea that you were a reasonable person with a bit of intellectual honest, unlike many of the other partisan creepy crawlies slithering around Slashdot, but pardon me, I was wrong.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That's not the reason why Linux software doesn't usually have manuals though. The reason for that is that the developers don't want to write them. They won't even comment their code. So they sure as hell aren't going to write hundreds of pages of documents about how to use it. It's not like they are getting paid to do something they don't like. So they don't do it and if non-expert users cannot figure out how to use the software who cares. It's not like they are getting paid.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It helps that the vast majority of Linux users have little need for software that carries a price tag, with the notable exception of games. You can imagine, that might lead to a lower piracy rate.
It is my opinion that, further, the vast majority of Linux users do not engage in piracy. They general hew to a higher moral standard than the general population in my opinion and they generally enjoy higher income in my opinion. If you disagree with my opinions then it is incumbent upon you to provide evidence, or better, just stateyour opinion and quit being an annoying wanker.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What are you talking about?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Did I say that, or did you put words in my mouth?
"You don't see Linux users pirating stuff, that's vanishingly rare."
Any evidence to back that up?
If you disagree with my opinions then it is incumbent upon you to provide evidence
I can disagree with your opinion all I like with equal validity because your opinion is factually baseless. See Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster ... however if religious nonsense on the basis that it cannot be disproven is your thing then by all means carry on.
Go find your own evidence, it is abundant.
I'm not making your argument for you just because you can't make it yourself.
Please quit being a disingenuous pest.
Hey you're the one playing the game and it's so much fun pestering you and pointing out your inability to make a cogent argument :P :P :P
You are the one making an argument. Go find your own evidence if that is what you want to do, otherwise fuck yourself.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
OK, I get it. You haven't got a shred of evidence to support any argument, only bluster.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Look at retro pi site, they have all the emulators, they all run linux native. and they are in most package manager repos already, same as A/V software. If you have never used Linux I suggest using Mint, Ubuntu or Arch as they have the most support in terms of online forums if you run into an issue.
Yea, I have no idea what hes on about. I have never once had to edit a .desktop file in linux. Kind of confused me at first thinking he was talking about windows...
OpenSource AMD drivers are better, so unless you run vega/vega 7 I would stay away from the closed source AMD drivers.
Posting on slashdot.
Yeah, KDE is all we ever needed
Cheap storage VM.
Really? That hasn't really happened at all with my installation of Xubuntu, but maybe there is something wrong with my installation.
what version of Xubuntu? Creating menu entries is the standard in modern Linux. It should "just happen" whenever you install a graphical application from the repos.
But it shouldn't really be necessary.
It isn't, most of the time.
Linux desperately needs to make software installation a lot easier if it ever wants to get mainstream users.
It IS easy. Want to know how to install Eclipse on Fedora? You can just open up whatever graphical software application your desktop environment has installed, or...it's actually faster to just type "sudo dnf install eclipse" in a terminal.
I had a similar problem with Eclipse IDE which was not in the Ubuntu repos at all.
Yes it is: https://packages.ubuntu.com/co...
appweb and ESP, a web server and MVC framework respectively. I'd really like to be able to use them but I cannot even build them and even if I manage to build them the documentation is so inadequate that I doubt I will be able to get it working.
Now you have to remember I am not a programmer or developer. I can do some basic troubleshooting, but I could not tell you "how" to set up a web server for professional use.
But compiling appweb was as easy as typing "make" in a terminal, that's what the instructions said to do if you didn't want to go to the effort of building their special build too. Which I just did. The final message of the compile said that it could be ran in two ways, one of which was "make run", Which I just did.
It put up a little intro page at 127.0.0.1:4100, which I was able to access so it's working just fine. I didn't compile up ESP, but the build instructions look the same. You'll have to read their more indepth information to get everything setup for "production" use. Don't ask me, not-a-programmer/dev/webadmin
Also if you are still feeling generous why can I not upgrade qpdf to the latest version by compiling from source? I did ./configure, make, make install but it didn't actually install the program. It did build it though and if I go to the 'build' directory I can run it from within that directory only.
On Fedora the version in the repos is the latest version, 8.4.0. Again, which Xubuntu are you using? an LTS version? You might not need the latest version unless it has a feature the older version doesn't.
But your problem is probably either one of two things, the application is installed, but qpdf happens to be of those applications that installs libraries alongside the binary and since you didn't ldconfig after the make install the binary can't find the libs
Or else it's a $PATH issue and for some reason /usr/local/bin isn't ahead of /usr/bin, but that's much less likely. Just run ldconfig as root, that should do the trick.
I bet you have a technical background.
Nope, I work with persons with disabilities, in a non-technical job, and that is all I can say about that.
Fedora is actually pretty impressive. A harder distro than Xubuntu which I am using.
When I first started using Linux, Red Hat based distros were considered the "distros for the non-technical masses" in the way Ubuntu and Mint are now. I'm just used to the "Redhatty" way of doing things. Though back when I first started using Linux fewer things were "automatic", though more things were than what was said in the Linux books I had. One book said one often had to manually edit the /etc/printcap for one's printer.
Not on the Red Hat version I used in 2002, all you had to do is was run "printtool", which was graphical, and select your printer from a list, exactly like how one can do today Though it was a pre-cups system. (Though in most cases you don't even need to do that, and it just works!)
Installing truetype fonts? just put them in the right directory and "maybe" run fc-cache.
No-dongle? I didn't see that! (I just like knowing about what's available so I can spread the word to other Linux users) The only audio editing I've ever done has been VERY simple things in Audacity.
I have never once had to edit a .desktop file in linux
I have, especially in older Linuxes, which is why I know about methods of doing it, but even then it wasn't all that common.
Less common now, I actually had to open one up to see the syntax since I hadn't had to do it in a few years.
Many Linux users want freedom in the same way many radical leftists want freedom. The disdain and angry mocking that comes from most in those communities against even the mention of someone feeling free to choose something the community has elected to hate immediately shows that community's near religious fanaticism that is about anything but freedom. Freedom is generally the smaller part of the equation with hatred of all opposing views being the a much larger part. I'm not saying all in those communities but there's a reason we have so many different flavors of Linux pulling in so many different directions with each having near militant levels of adherence.
I need several apps that don't run on Linux: mostly music production applications and plugins. They don't run reliably on Wine, etc..
That's the only reason for me.
Maybe Linus could contact Albeton and fund a Linux version? If that happened, Linux might pull in tens of thousands users overnight.
The biggest complaint I hear about desktop Linux is that it works beautifully right after you install it...
But as soon as you install the wrong software, get a new piece of hardware, change the wrong setting... it falls apart and you're sitting at a terminal switching between typing obscure commands and hunting through user forums for hours or days.
It's a giant box of spring snakes with a pretty bow on it.
That's a feature, not a bug.
I'm not interested in software that comes without the Four Freedoms. I don't want your proprietary software to succeed.
Hence why desktop Linux is not being taken seriously.
I find installing programs under Linux easier most times. I can run the install through the terminal and I can check the output. On Windows in most cases I don't even know what is happening. If I am lucky I can find some log files somewhere.
I think we need to redefine what an "average" computer user is these days. I am not even sure what that would be.
People who spend 99% of their time in either the browser, or an app that came from an app store, or an app in the browser that came from the browser app store. The median user spends 100% of their time in one of these ways. Only an infinitesimal percentage of "computer users" are doing anything else. In some ways this is a clear victory, because computing has become so ubiquitous. But it remains to be seen what computing's future looks like, and it may include even less general purpose computing devices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why do you need it updated if you don't use the internet on it?
Many proprietary applications will not run without Internet access because they phone home continuously to verify the continued validity of the software license. I was under the impression that some Autodesk products had instituted this requirement of phoning home.
Does your ISP charge you for using windows? but not linux/macos?
Some cellular ISPs charge subscribers for using Windows, macOS, or desktop Linux, as opposed to iOS or Android.
Crostini works on a new enough Chromebook. It does not work on older Chromebook models because of lack of support for the container in older CPUs and kernel versions. In order to measure the overall user experience, I'll have to see whether sales staff at Walmart, Best Buy, and Office Depot are knowledgeable about whether the Chromebook models in stock support "Crostini" or "Linux apps".
Most people are lazy and complacent. They don't want to put any effort into thinking new thoughts even if it would result in removing some of their burdens, at least they are burdens they are already familiar with.
Do you have Home? 64 or 32? Professional? Game? Ultimate? Server? SP1,2, 3 or 4? Do you have WinXP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10? For some windows programs, are you licensed for the 4 core 2 processor system? What cores/processor do you HAVE?!?!?!?
Since Vista, none of that stuff has been very relevant. For the most part, you just clicky clicky and you get the right thing. Websites detect whether you're using 32 or 64 bit and offer you the 64 bit download only if it looks like you can handle it. Microsoft hassles you to upgrade. Very little software requires Windows later than Vista. Windows since Vista supports all your cores.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Also, reinstalling is not usually a necessary step to fix Linux software problems. Read the manpages, infopages, and other available documentation, and you'll be able to fix almost any problem that isn't a hardware one. Linux is an OS that encourages exploration, unlike Windows which requires extra manuals to simply bring it up to Unix standards. Note that fixing a software problem may entail installing a compiler if you haven't already, and recompiling the offending software from source. I remember having a non-functional cron that I had to fix in that way 20 years ago.
It's hard to know how to evaluate much of this in a global way. There are many ways of assessing "goodness". Here, however, are a couple I have found. Note I am a statistician, data scientist, and quantitative engineer. I work a lot with numbers and with quantitative and highly structured ways of dealing with text. My world is basically Python 3 or R, and R heavily dominates. I can run either on Ubuntu or on Windows, and I use, at various times, 7 Home Edition, 7 Enterprise ("Pro"), and 10. Python is Python, but its problem is that numpy and scipy do not have the numerical rigor instilled in them seen in a MATLAB or in R. Python has a lot of packages and I will sometimes use it, but primarily to prepare datasets for R. R is my main, so it's my world. The principal problems with R on Ubuntu vs Windows are: (a) On Ubuntu, new packages are expected to be recompiled. Accordingly the outcome of an install is not only dependent upon the new functions being downloaded, but, during compilation, the library base and the compiler versions available. Sometimes these fail. On Windows, the default means of distribution is to distribute binaries. This freezes all interrelationships among packages into a solid, consistent, and mostly often successful mixture. (b) Memory management on Ubuntu -- even with multiple cores -- can be complicated. If I have a calculation which demands 100 Gb of working space, a choice of a fixed memory.limit specification can be lethal. Moreover, much of the focus upon software like Python is to be able to script calculations. This isn't always the best way to do things.