The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
I have incompatible hardware.
Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don’t know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don’t speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.
If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I’ll give desktop Linux another shot.
This said, I’ve self-hosted on a Debian box for years.
I recently switched for the first time, and have been using EndeavorOS with KDE on a couple year old laptop, and my experience has been the complete opposite. It’s fantastic. I feel like this is what using a PC is supposed to be like. Before Microsoft fucked it all up.
I managed to get someone online to try out Linux because their Windows 7 install was dying. Turns out the problem was hardware, but he used Linux for a while and stuck to it for his new PC.
A whole bunch of utilities he got used to had no Linux equivalent (people online claiming the average user can replace GUIs with awk and sed are fools) but I have quite some experience with Wine, so that wasn’t too bad.
HDR is an issue. It just doesn’t seem to work right. Media players do all kinds of weird stuff. I’ve seen six screencaps from six media players taking snapshots of the same file, and they all had their colours wrong in different ways on Linux. VLC managed to get the colours right, but then lacked some other features. The Linux version of his previous media player uses different codecs on Linux so it suffers from the same problem.
Thank to Valve, many games work out of the box, but even Valve’s settings need patching every now and then. Elzen Ring didn’t work right because the version of Proton Steam decided to ship was broken, and needed to be changed in the config settings.
While debugging something else, we also ran into an issue with Teamviewer, which still doesn’t seem to support Wayland. That was a quick workaround, but it still sucks. I hope Teamviewer fixes their stuff soon.
I can troubleshoot, debug, and work around these issues, but normal people can’t. The big things all work. Browsers, settings pages, email, you name it, your average office worker can get through their day out of the box. For the technically skilled, Linux is amazing, with tweaks, source code, and tools available for every purpose under the sun if you’re willing to read some documentation and maybe a little source code.
However, if you fall anywhere inbetween “I just need a browser and basic word processing” and “I know how to program in C”, Linux requires a lot of reading, Googling, and replacing with slightly inferior versions.
Linux may be full of great freeware, but Windows has decades of history of free shareware that seems to just work better. I think the difference is that a lot of Linux tools were written by developers for developers, whereas Windows tools were often written by developers for users.
With Flatpak maturing, things are becoming better and better, but there are still times where I need to tell the guy I helping to open a terminal, and that’s the point where Linux as an OS for normal people fails.
I’m happily using Linux on practically any computer I own, but there’s no denying that Windows was better in a lot of ways for the general public, even back in the XP days.
Rustdesk is better than this proprietary spyware teamviewer
I don’t trust the Rustdesk developers after finding that their solution to “the user is running Wayland” was “disabling X11 in the way Gnome users on Ubuntu would need to” without a clear explanation. That has since been fixed, but the rustdesk code is still full of weird and sketchy decisions (seriously, who spawns a
shprocess to read and parse a file on /proc?).I like Rustdesk for its goal to finally provide a usable remote support tool for Linux users. It’s the only open source tool that I know of. Last time I tried to deploy it, I found out they hadn’t published a full server (only a proof of concept) which did put a dent into the product.
But overall, I trust Teamviewer a lot more to just work when I need to provide tech support to people. I’m already talking to someone without too much technical experience when I take over their screen, I don’t want to go through a whole debugging process to get the remote support tool working too.
HDR is an issue. It just doesn’t seem to work right. Media players do all kinds of weird stuff. I’ve seen six screencaps from six media players taking snapshots of the same file, and they all had their colours wrong in different ways on Linux. VLC managed to get the colours right, but then lacked some other features. The Linux version of his previous media player uses different codecs on Linux so it suffers from the same problem.
Not surprising, there’s zero HDR support on Linux desktop as of right now. You either need a player that can tonemap from HDR to SDR or you need to run your entire desktop through gamescope (which is what Steam Deck is doing).
However, KDE Plasma 6 releases next month and it’s the first desktop environment to come with rudimentary HDR support. So things are evolving in that area.
Linux works well if you need something to function as a tool, be it a NAS, network appliance, server, etc. You can setup it up with the small subset of things you need it to do and trust it’ll just run without further interference.
When it comes to a consumer device, it fails the “just works” criteria much harder the OSX or Windows. Software tends to be maintained by an army of unpaid volunteers passionate about their specific use case with a lot of infighting around how things get done. Such functionality is often developed by people with such a warped idea of usability that they consider VIM to be the ideal, modern, text editor. This is a piece of software that started life in the mainframe days, where input lag was measured in seconds rather the milliseconds, in order to minimize number of keystrokes, no matter how convoluted. This leads to multitudes of forks of functionality with subtly differing functionality often with terrible UI and UX catered to the developer’s specific workflow.
Whenever a lay persons asks how to get started with Linux, they get sent down a rabbit hole of dozens of distros, majority of which are just some variant of Ubuntu, with no clear indication of what’s different as they all just describe themselves as the ultimate beginner distro. With the paralysis of choice, they can pick one at random and hope it’ll work with their hardware without issue, spend hours figuring out the nitty-gritty differences and compatibility issues, or just give up and keep using what they already know.
Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.
A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don’t think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.
Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that’s required is insane to the average user, and most people won’t want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.
That’s the thing about Linux though, is it really depends on the user. The average user doesn’t need any more than a web browser and maybe some Office suite. Chrome OS has shown this. Linux is actually great for these users.
It’s the semi-power user, the one that has to do a lot of work, but doesn’t know much about computers that Linux seems to trip up.
It’s like that wojack bell curve meme.
You perfectly describe Linux from 10-20 years ago but a lot has changed and improved
Last time I installed Linux, it took me about 30 minutes. I had a perfectly fine system that I then improved to my personal likings because I can, not because I must.
I also (about a month or so ago) installed windows 11 and it was a shit show. Getting the ISO installed on a USB stick already took hours and more attempts than I wish to remember to get something that actually worked.
Then the installation, It took literally hours, loads of “I want to sell you shit you don’t need!” screens, I needed to download gigabyte sized files for drivers with bloat shit, it managed to freeze within minutes.
People pay money for that shit and it will spy on you.
Meanwhile in Linux land, you can have it as simple or as complex as you wish
Don’t come up with the “but inevitably something will break and then you need a command line she’ll” because have you ever had the fun of needing to dig around in undocumented windows registry bullshit, or the windows “power” shelll?
I too am using Linux, but finding an “automatic” linux is difficult since most distros are about performance. It’s like trying to find an Italian Sports Car with an automatic.
And for the general user, they don’t install their OS. It’s preinstalled on a Laptop, or an all-in-one, think-dell office PC that their company provides them. Sign in like you do with everything today and you are good to go. Even Macs do this.
Linux has improved, but the desktop os’s need to be more stable (in 1 year I broke 2 manjaro installs and my BTFS file system died in my Fedora install), packages need to be more up to date, and there needs to be gui’s for any setting that a user needs to access like restarting a systemd process. A general user will not touch a terminal. Let alone download a git repo, just to update the latest build of Mangohud since the Ubuntu version is so out of date that the GOverlay GUI Utility that’s on Ubuntu doesn’t work with it.
manjaro’s so notorious for it’s bad mainteinance it even gained a website for tracking the last time they screwed something up. I’m glad I haven’t seen anyone recommend that shitty distro in a while. Tbh nix (the package manager) has proven to provide excellent stability no matter whether I used it on macOS or Artix. It’s been more than a year since I had to reinstall my OS or generally deal with large scale system breakage. Also have grub set up to provide both a LTS and edge kernel, for example. The last installation that broke for me was well over a year ago, it was OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it also used btrfs. Which is a pretty nice FS if set up correctly, but by default it’s quite slow. Then I switched to Alpine since I’ve been using it on a VPS for a couple of months earlier and absolutely loved it. I don’t count fucking up the configuration files as system breaking because I assume the consensus to be that we refer to unexpected issues here. Getting rid of GDM, glibc, bash, systemd, coreutils and similar bloat not only speeds up your system, it also improves it’s security and stability.
I wonder when I’ll become so deranged to start tinkering around with BSDs and Gentoo, it’ll be pretty funny if instead of wasting my time gaming I’ll waste it hacking my system to improve it’s responsiveness by 1-2% lmao
TBH, when Manjaro broke it was my fault, I know it was my own fault, and I feel if I was running EndeavorOS the results would’ve been the same if I did the same actions.
That said, yes the miss-matches repos drove me insane, especially as someone who likes keep my update number at 0, and I can’t update AUR packages. And there were a few niggles and grips here and there. But as a power user, who didn’t want to touch a terminal, Manjaro has the best set of Setting and Configuration GUI’s I’ve used thus far in Linux. If another distro took what Manjaro did, but kept it to the Arch Repos, then I’d use it in a heart beat.
Linux would have to manifest a physical fist that punched me in the face every so often in order for me to quit using it. (I’m just shy of 20 years since abandoning Windows)
My reasons:
- So far there hasn’t been something I’ve wanted to do on Linux that wasn’t doable - and most of the time (especially these days) it’s easier.
- Everything MS has done in the consumer space post Win-2K
- Everything Apple has done.
Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.
Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user
Weird edge cases. You would think that edge cases are a minority, but a setup without any edge case is the real minority.
From screens that decide to not power up (Nvidia !!!) to programs not wanting to start (Minecraft flatpak who doesn’t run from desktop but okay from command line), sometimes when you want it to just work it’s exhausting.
On my side I’ve totally given up on windows and happily run a full AMD household, it’s fine, but still.
I am dual booting because I bought a nice OLED monitor with HDR and Linux doesn’t support it yet. For certain games with nicer graphics, HDR is really beautiful.
The moment Linux support HDR, I nuke windows for good.
KDE Plasma 6 supports HDR now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/hdr-support-for-kde-plasma-6-seems-to-be-shaping-up-nicely/
Too much of a hassle. I don’t wanna risk having my setup break when… Never, really. I want to use my machine and that’s it.
About 23 years ago I couldn’t make it boot when I plugged in a USB hub.
And since, my life just became too invested in Microsoft/Adobe products to be able to use something else as a daily driver.But I “use” Linux every day - whether it’s the PiHole, the NAS, the server that runs my 3D printer, or WSL in Windows PowerShell. I’m about to spin up my own OPNSense router, too.
Weird trajectory on WSL - I learned Unix commands using MacOS terminal for a previous job, but I generally abhor windows command line (it just doesn’t work with my brain). So now when I use commend line in windows, I default to *nix.It sort of works out that I use Macs for personal use, Windows for work, and Linux to run the systems of my life.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it’s a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won’t catch on for the average PC user.
Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.
There’s still no way to log into Nautilus as root user from Nautilus.
So you can’t just double click on an icon to decompress it below the home folder.
And then people will give out this long series of terminal commands…hello, I said FROM NAUTILUS.
I’m actually quite okay with using the terminal, the problem is almost nothing invoked from the CLI actually works properly. If the programmer can’t be arsed making a skin, they generally can’t be arsed with proper playtesting either.
Some of those that don’t find it intimidating do find it tiring. I grew up using MSDOS and later Windows 3.1 when it came out. Most of what we did was in command line and having everything in a GUI is just a QOL upgrade you don’t really want to come back from.
I’ve been using mint on my laptop for a few months now and it’s great, but like you said there’s still some things that require command line tinkering and I just don’t have the energy for it.
It’s the same reason I like console games, they just work. Don’t get me wrong, the console modding scene is non-existent and any kind of customization is generally out of the question, but it just works, and it works the first time every time.Tbh for some people there’s no going back once you learn it. Navigating a GUI and clicking through several buttons vs having a nice shell with completions and whatnot like Fish and learning piping at some point just becomes faster, same thing as using modal editors.
Full agree on tiring. I work as an SRE, my job is administrating Linux machines (containers these days). When I need to use a computer, I just want it to work out of the box and Linux doesn’t offer that yet. I don’t want to spend time getting it to work
Nkt with GNOME. I only needed to use the Terminal in GNOME to do complex things an ordinary user wouldn’t do anyway.
Tinkering in terminal is the thing I like most about Linux. What’s holding me back is most of the tools and games I want to use is not yet available on Linux but I think it’s getting there soon
Most of the games? Or just a few? Because my experience recently with Proton has been pretty amazing, and I’ve yet to run into a game (that my laptop meets the requirements for) that hasn’t worked. Even some games that Steam marked as “unsupported” worked just fine for me.
I’m comfortable using a terminal, but with my Linux machines s common pattern is:
Need to get some software working. Find how to fix it, edit some config files.
Months later I run a system update and it’s starts asking me about merging the changes I made to various files. What were they for again? Are they still even necessary with the update or are the values I changed no longer used?
Then sometimes, something I installed is no longer supported, or needs a manual update because of how I installed it.
Thank you! Glad I’m not the only one to mention this or agree with it. Had some twit bitching at me last night to prove it, as if I kept screenshots or something. I just fixed things and moved on.
Agreed. This should be the #1 priority for at least one Linux distribution to make it accessible. The issue is that Linux fanatics will cry blasphemy for it and that’s counter intuitive.
I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.
this is actually my case lol, no way I’m writing thesis in libreoffice or onlyoffice if I didn’t have much experience of using it
Why aren’t you using LaTeX to write your thesis though?
If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.
It’s just too much work, and I’ve only ever experienced Gnome in the distros I’ve tried and hated it. Windows is far from perfect but I know it like the back of my hand. Every step of the way in trying to use Linux for me was a chore.
20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I’ve already tried and fuck off.
I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it’s got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.
(That attitude has completely changed. Maybe give it another try sometime)
Lemmy is basically a Linux forum these days. Have you seen that kind of attitude here on Lemmy? You should give Linux another go and post any problem you have here on Lemmy.
what distro was it back then? some distros religiously dedicated to software freedom don’t ship the proprietary
linux-firmwareblobs which might, among other things, contain your WiFi drivers.I honestly don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I also tried Mint thinking it might be more intuitive, but I couldn’t get WiFi to work with either of them.
virtually any built in card works these days. with 3rd party cards… well you’re better of looking up it’s chipset and how well it is supported by linux before you buy one, for example some cheap realtek dongles had no WPA3 support and worse throughput. Iirc Broadcom has for a long time been hostile towards linux.
I can totally relate to this. I‘m pretty far into my own linux journey and if I didnt have so much stuff already done and wouldnt know as much, I probably would have a really bad time sometimes.
It’s definitely not the majority (anymore, I guess) but there are some real elitist douchebags out there. The amount of times I got RTFMd is unholy.
By now, I do understand some of it as some users get really frustrated. This is hard to deal with sometimes as using polished windows has made them used to being pampered into helplessness. This does trigger me at times. I have to work hard to not RTFM them in that case.
TL;DR: imo, a lot of folks on both sides get frustrated because M$ and others make shiny, well oiled data collection machines and linux is neither the former nor the latter.
I’m not sure Windows is particularly polished though. Going back to it on occasion it feels kind of awful to use. I think most people are just fighting decades of muscle memory on how to use a PC
