Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works. Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn’t valid.
These things exist for windows as well but they are not accessible. Linux is a car without the plastic hood over the motor. Its not dumbed down.
Does that make it hard to see the three things a noob should touch? Yes.
But there are linux distros that take care of this so this comment isn’t correct.
i could see this comment maybe a decade ago. things like Mint have made most of these complaints just echos of a different era.
SUSE is weird but their YaST was compelling enough to make them an option. Cockpit in RHEL doesn’t compare. I think that having admins edit text files is bad. The capability should be there, but it should not be mandatory. Editing files manually instead of a GUI increases the odds of a mistype trashing the system.
Literally the only thing keeping me from switching:
Act as a host in Parsec. If hosting ever becomes available for the Linux release, I’ll switch.
Hi to run into this problem. I have a Mac mini that I use as a bridge from my home network to my work laptop. Now, most workloads requiring horsepower, I will run in the cloud, but there are some workloads that I want to run locally. I can parsec into the Mac, but I can’t parsec into the Linux server I have. The state of media on Linux is not great, and there are understandable reasons as to why.
Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine https://moonlight-stream.org/
Spy it’s users
Linux can totally do that. Even if your distro doesn’t package it, you can always install spyware from source.
Redstar OS would like a word with you
Natively run Windows software. Do I win?
Wine’s not an emulator…
That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but … I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer “does” is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like
CreateWindowEx()in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we’re disqualifying it because “it requires you to install a package”, then we also consequently:
- Add things like “print stuff”, “display graphical applications”, and “play audio” to the list of “things Linux can’t do”
- Disqualifies Windows from “natively executing” any .NET applications (a Microsoft-built first-party framework), since .NET applications require you to install .NET.
You’re right, you are being pedantic.
You’re correct in that it is a compatibility layer - And I’m not disagreeing with that. Also to be clear: Not just arguing to argue or trying to start a fight, mind you. I just find this to be an interesting topic of discussion. If you don’t find it to be a fun thought experiment, feel free to shoo me away and I’ll apologize and leave it alone.
That said, we appear to only be arguing semantics - Specifically around “native” having multiple contextual definitions:
-
I am using ‘native’ to mean “the instructions are executed directly by the CPU, rather than through interpretation or emulation” … which WINE definitely enables for Windows executables running on Linux. It’s the reason why Proton/DXVK enables gaming with largely equal (and sometimes faster) performance: There is no interception of execution, there is simply provision of API endpoints. Much like creating a symlink in a directory where something expects it to be: tricking it into thinking the thing(s) it needs are where it expects them to be.
-
However, you are using ‘native’ to mean “within the environment intended by the developer”, and if that’s the agreed definition then you’re correct.
That’s where this becomes an interesting thought experiment to me. It hits me as a very subjective definition for “native”, since “within the intended environment” could mean a lot of things.
- Is that just ‘within a system that provides an implementation of the Win32 API’? If so, WINE passes that test.
- If I provide an older/fixed/patched version of a DLL (by just placing it in the same directory) to fix an issue caused by a breaking change to a program that is running on Windows, is that no longer native?
- Or is it just ultimately that the machine must run the NT kernel, since that’s where the developer intended for it to run?
Does that make sense? I hear a statement like that and I find myself wondering Which layer along the chain makes it “native”? - I find myself curious at what point the definition changes, in a “Ship of Theseus” kind of way.
It seems to me that if we agree that the above means “running in WINE is not native”, then we must also agree that “anything written running for .NET (or any other framework, really) is not native”, since .NET apps are written for the .NET framework (Which is not only officially available for Windows, mind you) and often don’t include anything truly Windows-specific. Ultimately, both are providing natively-executed instructions that just translate API calls to the appropriate system calls under the hood.
I hope that does a better job of characterizing what I meant.
You clearly know more about this than I do, and you’ve thought a lot about it. Your points deserve a better response than I can give at this time, but I wanted to acknowledge that at least. I also wanted to say you aren’t pedantic and I’m sorry I said that. You spent time and thought on making a good conversation and I wish I had been more engaging with that instead of trying to be correct. Thank you for still conversing instead of arguing even after I was less than perfect of a conversation partner. I hope in the future I see more of your comments. Have a really nice day.
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You windows
Windows does what Nintendon’t? Wait, that’s not it…
that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity
Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?
its mostly goat barn
You misspelled “naivety” lol
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect. Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.
Flatpak and Snap are Linux packaging formats that have sandboxing implemented and it’s pretty solid. There’s also Firejail for running sketchy applications in a stronger sandbox
People really dislike it when you point this out, But the security model on Linux is lacking. Yes, we have things like apparmor and SELinux, but compare it to sandboxd on macOS. The windows sandbox isn’t perfect, but it’s really user-friendly, and it works in most cases. Linux doesn’t have a direct equivalent. We’ve made great strides with making immutable distros through things like flatpack, and snap, but something that they failed to do is implement a least privilege model that is as robust as sandboxd on macOS.
From what I see, windows sandbox is literally a template VM.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/windows-sandbox/ba-p/301849
Reall great article. Thanks for sharing. But I dont know where you get the “literally a template” idea from. The article is explaining pretty well how its made and there isn’t one thing that leads to the assumption that this was just a template that gets booted up.
It says in the article that windows sandbox is using a “base image”. It boots up the image, you do stuff then close it, and the next time you boot it up it’s the base image again. Is that not what a template VM would do?
The primary difference between a usual VM template and this is that it’s small. “When installed the dynamic base package it occupies about 100MB disk space”. That’s because it’s essentially mounting a bunch of the system files immutably. You could theoretically do the same on Linux, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Most of the advancements they have is under the hood stuff, like linking files instead of directly including them or managing memory. Battery state pass through and graphics OOTB is cool though, depending on your setup you might have to put in a bit of work to make that happen on Linux.
Hit the ground running deploying…pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything “out of the box” is literally impossible by design.
The person is correct in this isn’t a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $userTo ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
That’s very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that’s no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.Erm I’ll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don’t get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
That’s a letter U problem. I can administer Linux a bajillion times easier than windows, because I do it for a living, and haven’t touched MS since Server 2010. Also Docker in Windows is LOL. You’re leveraging Linux to shit on Linux. Lets do that all in IIS and see how you feel.
Yeah, I started working for a company with a lot of Windows servers two years ago and I still can’t wrap my brain around them. I’ve been a Linux sysadmin/sysarchitect for 20+ years and I’m still completely lost how to get Windows to much of anything. I usually don’t have to do much on those servers, but when I do its StackOverflow that’s really administering them. It’s because I lack foundational knowledge about windows and also because I’m fine not having that knowledge.
Pointing out that you find it easy because you do it for a living isn’t a very good counter to their point - most people do other things besides Linux for a living
IIS is not the same as Docker. Sounds to me you are shitting on IIS for the sake of trying to prove a point I wasn’t trying to make.
This goes into my next point. Linux users are toxic as hell. They are elitist snobs who shit on newbies because they have years of experience.
This. This is truth!
This is a very dangerous, and unfortunately widespread, generalization. The shitty ones are the loudest ones, and I’m sorry that most of your experience with linux users has been with them. I promise, much of the community are kindhearted individuals who simply use linux because of its ideals, or because they’re developers, or privacy enthusiasts, or those who bought a steam deck and think the lack of windows is pretty neat.
This is what’s holding the community back. The “get good” advice isn’t really advice and keeps Linux from hitting the mainstream. I get it you’re amazing at Linux but the rest of us shouldn’t have to go back to school to get a computer degree and become a Linux professional in order to use it. This is the same person that replies to questions about Linux with “why do you need the GUI just use the command line instead or it’s dead simple just type: followed by like 80 lines of code that people can’t make heads or tails of because they’re novices. Man I get that you want to flex but it’s a pretty strange flex.
OTOH, many people can’t make heads from tails regarding windows, icons or buttons, and they don’t get the contextual clues that the GUI gives for any operating system. They don’t see them, and if they do they’re unable to make the automatic inferences most of us long time users obtain from them. They act as people who are blind from birth and suddenly see, who have problems to understand tridimensionality; the GUI is not in their mind model of how to work with computers, and they have a lot of difficulty interacting with it.
So that makes the “get good” advice valid? What are you talking about bro? I didn’t say Linux isn’t valid. I think you must have replied to me specifically on accident because your response isn’t germane to my reply. Or if you feel it is please explain. Make sure you use as many polysyllabic words as possible. I think you wrote up one of the Linux documents I’m to understand.
Or maybe I’ll just say: cool story bro.
So that makes the “get good” advice valid?
No, they’re untrainable. It’s literally impossible for them to get any good. At all.
Perfect. Good solution. Linux only for the elite.
LinuxComputers only for theelitepeople willing to engage their brains.FTFY
Is your point meant to be that these people who already have trouble learning GUIs would somehow have an easier time intuiting command line?
If that’s correct, that’s an absolutely BS argument
Is your point meant to be that these people who already have trouble learning GUIs would somehow have an easier time intuiting command line?
No, my point is that they’re lost causes and they’re untrainable.
No, my point is that they’re lost causes and they’re untrainable.
Ah… I still don’t get how that’s meant to refute the previous person’s point that elitism and the “git gud” attitude around Linux contributes to it’s inability to become mainstream.
If anything your reply only reinforces their point, because you seem to be suggesting we throw anybody who struggles to learn it to the curb.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there’s almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn’t geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn’t always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It’s a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works “out of the box” better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It’s pretty solid.
Truth!
In my experience, most package managers should set up dependencies by themselves! Though, I do agree with the lack of explanation of documentation.
I use arch by the way, but what’s your opinion of other “user-friendly” distros like Manjaro or Garuda?
Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it’s an adventure each time.
seamless sleep
On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn’t wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn’t perfect still but it’s way better than windows was.
I think that’s a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Mac really does not do this well. You’re ostensibly just not noticing it.
Play virtually any video game with ease. I’m happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it’s definitely not there yet.
But really it’s not Linux’s fault. All games could (probably) run on Linux if someone ported them
Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn’t have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every “PC” game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn’t a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It’s less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
roblox
literally the only thing that took a minute… i think i might have it now with vinegar. so i guess even thats kinda off the list
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it’s not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it’s not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven’t found a distro that is)
Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it’s just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue
Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
True, but that’s more due to Nvidia’s stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
True, I really do think Linus was right when he said “fuck Nvidia” but sadly it’s still a point against Linux :(
It’s not just Nvidia, though… I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn’t supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Mullvad has a decent Linux GUI, but you have to install their service. On the positive side, it works with and without systemd.
Just had a similar experience with Bitwarden. Works flawlessly on every device, but the linux vesion doesn’t integrate with the browser (the app not the browser extension). I also had to do some special tinkering to make it accept self-hosted vaultwarden with self-signed certificate, because electron apps on linux don’t use the internal’s system trusted cert store ? Nah, you have to install certutil, and add it to a “sql database”… ⋮/
And i’m just starting as a linux power user, and it already begins to show why linux isn’t “there” right now… But I don’t see it as something bad, quite the opposite, linux is supposed to be flexible, open source, a playing ground for nerds… But people’s desire to overcome GAFAMS monopoly slowly turns linux into something I hope won’t hurt the community or make them part of GAFAM acronym…
Nowadays I’d say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don’t even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.
Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.
I’d also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it’s just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
Nah I don’t run anything related to graphics. Mainly clang compiler. Speaking of native speeds I mentioned, sysbench gives me pretty much the same results in WSL and in native Linux, with a margin of error here and there.
You know what? Windows doesn’t get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don’t like (I’ll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I’ll admit they do that well.
Serious question: Can Linux run all my smart devices (tvs, lights, plugs)?
I’ve got home assistant running on a linux machine that lets me control/monitor my smart devices [0] from my mac, windows, linux, and android phone.
[0] list of smart devices:
- 5 Lifx lights (Full functionality)
- 1 Wemo device (toggles a dumb strip light i have around a mirror.)
- 3 Google home devices (the big, small, and medium speakers)
- 2 Android TV’s (Nvidia Shields)
- Logs Temperature & humidity (full functionality and doesn’t even require creating an account or using an app.)
- Roomba (full functionality)
- graphs my server’s cpu, disk, ram, etc
- graphs firewall traffic.
- graphs minecraft server latency + player count.
- Integrates with my Unifi controller and two Wi-Fi access points.
Yes
With voice control?
Yes
Depends how those are connected. But check out Home Assistant.
Photoshop and Lightroom.
