Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop I've used pretty much every desktop out there, and the Linux desktop is still the best of the best. I've been working with desktop computers since CP/M-80 was the operating system of the day. Since then, I've used MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, AmigaOS, System 7, macOS, Xenix, SCO OpenDesktop, and more versions of Linux than you can …
Finally, unlike Microsoft and Apple, Linux distributors are not looking over my shoulder.
This may be the single most important argument for using a good Linux distribution. (I'm not talking about android or chrome, which are google's spyware built on top of Linux.)
But, like security, privacy is a process. You have to live it and be consistent to keep your privacy. Using a good OS is just the beginning of that process.
RE Manjaro pinging...
I'm far from an expert, but that sounds like the Network Manager connectivity check, which simply determines your online status in order to inform you if you have lost your connection and keep the network status icon up to date. In this case, it's just pinging your own distro's servers to confirm your connection.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Checking_connectivity
My grampa used to say "Use the best tool for the job." Especially when he caught me using one of his screwdrivers as a wood chisel. I took his philosophy with me when I started IT many years ago. I really hated the willy wagging about which OS is superior when ever I would go to a conference, release party etc. As smart as some of these people were, they were still childish. I have MS, Apple and Linux at my disposal, and will use the best tool for the job at hand.
I can't see any reason using anything else than Linux, I've got both windows Pc's and Mac's but very seldom used, most often turned on if I need convincing myself that my current Linux setup is superior. I also ditched Iphone and Android a few years back as well due to privacy concerns, and I'm using Sailfish OS on a Sony smartphone, works like a charm.
I run Mint myself, I have for about a decade. I also run Windows 10 and 11.
My wife refuses to use a Linux desktop (but will use her Chrome tablet). It's about branding and convenience. I know I like a Debian derived release for at home (I've run rpm derived ones for work too) and I know I like the Cinnamon desktop or XFCE and I'm not crazy about Gnome 3 and don't like KDE and I'll live with Fluxbox on old machines etc. That's the kind of requirements setting that's second nature to a techie but too confusing for non techies.
If I recommend a Linux, the moment I need to change or configure it for my wife to run a programme, she'll say she wants Windows. There Microsoft makes all the decisions (or Apple, as I think there are still people running Macs somewhere) and a programme either runs or doesn't, there's no "if we change this and configure this and put this element there, we can run this other versions". It's simple.
Anyway, I like Linux, I use Linux but we can't pretend there's a single Linux Desktop to compete with MS.Apple.
Furthermore, we can't deny there are whole ecosystems of both hardware and software that simply MUST use Windows, full stop. Something that requires Windows to run becomes a deal-breaker for many, and no, there usually aren't viable substitutes for many of them, especially if they're custom jobs.
I put it this way. Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows (to the point I see "Activate Windows" watermarks almost everywhere that they're willing to put up with its headaches over whatever headaches Linux may produce.
And, more importantly old software for that API still largely works
If some old app crucial to you is suddenly out of favour, you are stuck with getting it to compile on supported distributions yourself, mess with VMs and other layers, which all require their own attention/time and also get more difficult with time.
There is no binary backwards compatibility at all for Linux.
> that's not true.
> i got compiled stuff from 10 years ago, still works.
> device drivers and such ok, but these are renewed anyway
Most things I find about the same as Windows : simple things just work, more complex things with dependencies mostly know how to fix themselves.
The one thing I always have trouble with (and I suspect this would be exactly the same on Windows) is anything that uses Python. Everything fails, and any attempt to satisfy its desires fails too, and breaks other things (eg python-based tools installed with the distribution).
The Python 2/3 thing seems to have been replaced by 3.onething vs. 3.anotherthing, and no python programmer can bear to base distributed software on dependable dependencies. The all have to use the latest thing and break old stuff. It's become a write-only language.
Oh, for the stability of C !
It's a fucking nightmare.
You mock Office, but it has no counterpart after all these years. Apple come closest, and other than being restricted, their offerings range from an utter joke to competitive.
As for the open source world... LibreOffice, or whatever they are calling themselves this year, recently updated their website. It went from looking like an early 2000s one to a late 2000s one. So if they can't even make their website look decent (despite making much noise about it)...
I prefer Libre Office, it follows GUI standards so I can use it easily.
As to latest Word, two feature annoy.
Cursor going left when you type, looks very odd.
Save dialog is broken, so I just copy to name and location I want and empty it.
I do not have time to work through their arcane interface, I have more important things to do.
Like most weird UIs, it's only weird to new, or occasional users. Personally, I find most Line-Of-Business application UIs to only make sense when considered from the perspective of the professionals who use them day-to-day.
Like Photoshop or Gimp. They are seriously weird for anyone coming from Paint level programs.
"Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows"
Inertia, mostly. If a company has used Windows for 20+ years, they need a very good reason to change, since change costs. So it is not so much a compelling reason to use Windows, it is lack of a compelling reason to use Linux.
Also, many companies use other Microsoft software than just Office and Outlook. For example, Sharepoint and Microsoft Dynamics. Or they may use legacy systems that only run on Windows servers.
But, yes, for the average office worker, Linux is fine. But the server software is harder to migrate.
Said by someone who is a daily Linux user and hasn't used Windows for years (except when trying to help other people who have problems with their Windows machines).
Inertia can shift. Lotus 1-2-3 was something of a standard for a very, very long time until the rise of the 3.1/Orifice combo.
Active directory, Sharepoint and credential management are in many ways now the golden handcuffs for persistence of MS in the enterprise. Can linux do that kind of centralised user and permissions control over a domain? Yes. Can it do it in a unified UI with assurances that all the bits work, and have technical support? Certain large linux distros can; but it comes at a cost.
For home use I am completely sold and swapped to linux full-time best part of a decade ago. I fear the fragmentation and choice that is a major selling point for home use; are also the blocker for enterprise uptake on the desktop.
"except when trying to help other people who have problems with their Windows machines".
Likewise. I just carry a bootable USB with a Mint ISO on it. It can take as much as 20 or 30 minutes - exploring the new OS - to "fix" any WIN problem I have come across..... Including the install.....
I will offer dual boot, but "that's much too complicated" - "I really want something (usually it is Libre Office) that JUST WORKS when I want it". Everything else is a bonus.
Change always costs, every time MS redo their OS or Office UI again! Retraining for a Linux desktop need only be done once if you stay with Cinnamon rather than the frequently changing Gnome.
Staying put also costs, heavily and repeatedly, but how do the bean counters weigh malware protection for MS against reduced vulnerability in Linux?
"Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows"
In almost all cases the something is:
a. applications and
b. manageability via group policy.
Many of the clients we support still use crufty old Windows apps, often using some peculiar backend data format that their business still depends on. We try to wean them off, but some are still dealbreakers.
Also, a lot of applications tie into the MS Office suite, so cannot use an alternative. As to the comment about using the web alternatives, they are not the same. OK for lightweight use, but don't try doing heavy spreadsheets. You can't use application add-ins on the web versions.
I've used Linux as my desktop for 21 years now. Both at home and office. I've always looked at the issue of why there hasn't been more adoption by business with curiousity. Over the past 15 years, the reasons have become clear. Cost. No, it's not software cost, it's the retraining and maintenance cost. The costs incurred when the handful of people guiding your companies chosen desktop suddenly decide to go in a new direction or port to a new toolkit. Or the developer for the old reliable app your work-flow depends on -- decides to orphan the app because of increasing demands in the real-world for them.
Can you image a large corporation dealing with KDE 4.0.4a in May 2008? Or the first 20 releases of Gnome3? When alpha-quality desktop software is put out as a new "release" version, the users are essentially the beta testes.
Then what of the custom apps you have written or had written relying on Gtk that suddenly started breaking with every new minor version release of Gtk+3. Or the Qt5/Qt6 Trolltech cockup. Do you have the time, and have you retained the talent, needed to port you custom app to the new toolkit and fix the breakages with each new minor version release? That type of uncertainty has presented a large obstacle for Linux desktop adoption for a long time.
(I'm no windows fan, but there is certainty there for business, VS2022 will still build XP apps)
Don't get me wrong, I feel about my Linux desktop the same way right-wing gun nuts feel about there guns. After looking at the business desktop angle for 15 years, I understand why there hasn't been more adoption by business. All it takes is getting burned once, and the top two Linux desktops have mastered the art of how to throw the baby out with the bathwater time and time again.
If it takes a few weeks to work out the latest bugs on one of the major desktops, I'm perfectly happy using fluxbox in the interim, but for a corporation, weathering those kind of storms is simply cost prohibitive.
"but don't try doing heavy spreadsheets"
Which is correct advice with or WITHOUT MS office.
Spreadsheets are for quick calculations, not for running businesses on - and anyone who does the latter will eventually find the practice biting them hard on the arse
"heavy spreadsheets" are the accounting equivalent of using a screwdriver as a wood chisel (as mentioned elsewhere in these forums)
Inertia, mostly.
You're too kind and diplomatic IMHO. Having had discussions about this frequently (why do we always have to defend using *nix, and "them" never about using their preference?) I would rather categorise it as:
[x] Ignorance
[x] Laziness
[x] Smugness
[x] Arrogance
[x] Limited vision
[x] Limited imagination
[x] ...
Short answer is - network effects for transfer *between* companies and individuals.
You just mention “a company has used”, but this really isn’t the thing. The issue is interchange outside the company - Word, PowerPoint, Excel. I get at least hundreds per week by email, from dozens of different sources, and half of them I will have to insert and/or modify, and return.
Can be literally anything: “please fill out your supplier details in our standard form with fields”; consultation documents with requests for in-document comments, where five other companies in a consortium have already inserted their comments with tracked changes on; spreadsheets collating technical data; presentation where other companies have already “done their slides”, and you just have to insert a couple of yours. Automated systems that need some large data upload, where the online upload tool states it only accepts *.xls , not csv or xml. Neither daily user nor their employer controls these
As a minor supplier, try telling your major customer that you can’t just insert your presentation slides into their standard PowerPoint set, maintaining their fancy logo and video transitions, for *their* governmental final report, when requested to do so at 8pm on a Friday without notice. See how it goes.
" try telling your major customer that you can’t just insert your presentation slides into their standard PowerPoint set, maintaining their fancy logo and video transitions, for *their* governmental final report"
It's even more fun when you point out that by failing to adhere to open standards they've already eliminated themselves from contention on most government contracts (look in the fine print - it's mandatory in the EU, USA and most of the rest of the world)
The reason for Windows on the desktop is *manageability*. Group policy, system lockdowns, visibility, standardisation. Can you do this with Linux? Yes, sort of. Is it an industry standard, understood by thousands of potential IT dept employees? No. Group policy just works, doesn't require the huge learning curve and effort, and additional resources, of ansible, puppet etc..
Those of us who have been in IT for more than a couple of decades will remember the reason
IT staff everywhere were identifying Windows and MS as the worst possible option so Microsoft bypassed anyone who knew about IT and persuaded the bosses. Obviously, they could not use facts to persuade them so it involved pleasant persuasion. I remember hearing of a friend whose boss was off on a golfing weekend in Ireland. I wonder if he (always a he) got new golf clubs out of it.
Puff pieces of impressive inaccuracy appeared in various magazines targeted at managers who took pride in knowing very little about computers.
I doubt that there was any actual money changing hands. It wasn't that kind of bribery. it was, however a brilliant use of money.
A certain ex Prime Minister got a really nice Belgravia house very shortly after signing up HMG to several more years of Windows woes. No money changed hands, but (as described above) it was a "very effective use of money"!
Just remember - "any politician who leaves office richer than when he went in is corrupt"!
Something must be compelling for so many businesses to use Microsoft Windows
Two reasons:
1. Active Directory. These days there's configuration management tools like Puppet, but even now they're not as pervasive and straight-forward as AD.
2. Shared calendars in Exchange. Seriously, they still don't have any clear competition. The CEO's PA is the most important person in any company, and this is what matters to them.
straight-forward as AD
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
I never seen a forest as cursed as the AD Frankensteined together from bloody chunks of ADs cobbled together by psychotic and sociopathic admins who never even listen to themselves, let alone others or indeed reason itself, as it was at my previous employer.
Hell is AD.
There are a lot of linux zealots in denial, cannot face up to the stranglehold of AD and Group Policy has because there is no alternative on the linux zealotosphere.
Meanwhile, they will not hear the very long list of things that hold linux back, they will just insist that these are not a problem, but everyone else is just stupid.
The top of this list of problems is these people.
I've been around long enough to see AD and Group Polices to evolve and for someone who work with Directories for a living, I mush say that AD suck - it was basically a wrapper around NT domains, these they have changed alog but still, it's a horrible design.
Group Policies is a blatent mess and no one with a sane mind would ever venture into it, but it's what Microsoft gave people and they have to live with it.
AD sucks and Group Polices is a blatent (sic) mass?
OK, it's true. But nothing else is stepping up so....
I've read through these comments and as a linux user I'm exasperated. Until these arrogant, supercilious, in denial linux zealots become objective, linux has no chance. Not a cat in hell's chance.
Put yourself in the position of the end user, they are being lectured about their computer by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. That's what you look like zealots. Face it or lose again.
"There are a lot of linux zealots in denial, cannot face up to the stranglehold of AD and Group Policy has because there is no alternative on the linux zealotosphere."
I'm told that Sambe provides a good domain controller but that's beside the point. Exactly why do you need AD? Or to put it another way, what might make it redundant?
Samba is actually pretty decent tech, but it doesn't replace windows, AD, SMB shares etc. It is just a cheaper, and generally more stable, alternative to serve them on. Compatibility and support issues aside, it implements the same protocols.
So your windows clients mostly don't know that their not talking to a windows server instance, but they still use windows accounts to access windows shares with windows permissions, while syncing windows policy files to set and manage values in their local windows registries. (save for the odd mac or Chromebook, which mostly sign in for AAA stuff, file and print shares, and bloody Exchange access.)
And if you aren't using windows clients things like NoMAD may start being attractive, but at some point you deployment is so far off the map that it will be impossible to support from the outside, godforbid you have staff turnover. And if one of these small projects folds up, you are stuck up a tree. Your boss gets taken out to a weekend golf retreat, an now you have to roll out a third party app that has AD integration and their support will hang up the phone if they hear the word Samba.
With enough effort you can overcome most of these problems, but you then assume the burden of fixing all future problems in a cheap and timely manner, or having to walk back the open source stuff and re-implement run of the mill windows to get back on the part of the Venn diagram that says "I have a job tomorrow" and off the part labeled "Here be Dragons"
And then Microsoft collaborates with a major productivity provider to release something whiz-bang that uses an Extension of AD that only they support? Consider how slow ReactOS has been trying to come up with something that supports Windows but isn't Windows...while Microsoft is already on Windows 11 and still adding on along the way.
AD and Group Policy indeed has a stranglehold on "enterprise" IT environments.
It is equally true there is no Linux equivalent.
These are not mutually exclusive.
A further corollary: because something is pervasive does not necessarily mean it isn't an awful mess. It may simply mean "we haven't got anything better".
Linux has equivalent -- and better tools -- they are just different enough that they're not on the radar of people looking for a one-for-one branded replacement.
Group membership in Linux is easily enough driven from LDAP. Red Hat has a nice sssd wrapper around that set of technologies.
Group policy is more often then not used as a proxy for configuration control, and under Linux you do that configuration control directly. Ansible is the weapon of choice. This has the huge advantage of allowing the 'playbooks' to be stored in Git. Which means that there's far better administrative and audit control of changes then done with Group Policy. That's why AD is the #1 goal of hackers, because change there is organisation-wide and auditing isn't done because the mechanism is too difficult. Compare with Git pumping Git summary lines and diffs of Ansible playbooks (and thus enterprise-wide machine configuration files) into a Slack channel for continual casual review by the operational staff.
Linux tends to pull forward cutting-edge security technologies. The machine I am writing this on runs Secure Boot, to an encrypted drive based on a key in the TPM, with all system executable files and libraries under Integrity Management. It remotely logs to a server analysing activity for misuse patterns -- exactly the same software as used for our big internet-facing servers. Login requires a Yubikey to be inserted, if that's removed the screen locks. Windows is catching up, but in a typically Microsoft way -- using these desirable features to push their sales agenda, so use of a WebAuthn key requires cloud authentication rather than site-hosted AD.
The core property of Open Source licencing is that nobody can prevent you from fixing something you want to that nobody else has decided to work on.
For values of fixing from your spare time through paying an individual offering a prize or setting up a big company to do it.
Theres a difference between inability to prevent, and doing what you want, but don't be confused.
That’s the truth. I have (as one who was an early adopter and coder in the 70s but hasn’t kept up in the new century) always used Linux on the play laptop, and would prefer to get away from Windows after 35 years of office-based frustration- but there’s no Ableton Live for Linux, and there won’t be and that’s just it, for me. No doubt El Reg techies will have a million easy solutions in the VM world, but as my brain cells step up their self-harm instincts as the years roll by, I want to reserve them for what I do with the software, not how the software works.
"My wife refuses to use a Linux desktop"
Miy wife uses Linux. If it were Windows there'd be a problem every time I have to help her with something - invariably application related. (Usually that's "I can't close this tab". The answer is "You just did. It's now showing the next tab which is on the same page as is the next one again and the next after that." Maybe tab proliferation is Pinterest's party trick.)
My wife uses Linux (Mint) and has done for some years. She's happy to handle her own updates and upgrades, and seldom has any issue that requires my intervention. She uses an HP laptop and a Dell desktop, and enjoys using both. Email and browser are synchronised across the machines, and she also has log-in rights on the other machines around here (though she seldom does).
Recently, she tried to use "Office" on her sister's machine, and ran into endless problems. It wouldn't even "Save" her work sanely - she was glad to move back to her laptop, where she was able to complete the work they were doing very quickly in Libre Office.
She would tell you - if you asked - that Windows is a complete waste of time, and a very hard way to get things done!
My wife and kids (from the day they were able to use a computer) were using Linux desktop as their first computers, and didn't have a clue that there were other OS's out there. Of course, I was the IT admin for home computers so they had always thought that using a computer was so seamless and maintenance-free (I did all of them remotely and they had no idea how much work was involved, including upgrades, install, backup, etc.)
That changed once kids entered school and school required MS Office for homeworks, and they started realizing there is something called Microsoft Windows. I persisted by letting them use OpenOffice (and now LibreOffice), and they were able to get by with just Linux.
Then this whole thing changed once my wife and kids realized there are computers called Mac (kids' friends looked cool and my wife saw Oprah praising Macbook Air, and especially got jealous that her friend could do computer admin herself using a Mac, albeit pretty simple chores really). So I had to relent and buy them Macs.
Now my wife and kids all use Macs, and I use Linux. At least their beginning computer experience with Linux desktop preprared them to seamlessly use Macs. Actually one of my kids had to use remote Linux GUI session using Mac as a client for one of his school works (not related to IT though), so he had to learn some basic Linux CLI. Of course Windows is completely out of the question for both myself and my family.
BTW, they still have to use Linux server for many network services, and of course they have no idea they are still relying on Linux for file sharing and many other network services, except one of the kids is getting some inkling of what it takes to use Linux in-depth.
These days it's mostly a process of "plug in USB cable, wait for drivers to install, print" on every OS.
The problems come when you have a weird old printer that "has to work!", but the only drivers are on a scratched CD and you have a choice of Windows 98 or Caldera Network Desktop v0.8...
Going back to 1984 a Xerox printer annoyed a techie user with its closed source driver.
Hence, GNU.
My current Xerox laser just worked. The previous one was timed out by the Apple user going to 64 bit.
Yes, I could have replaced it with a daemon and z system printthis directory, but not in the 5 minutes allowed.
These days it's mostly a process of "plug in USB cable, wait for drivers to install, print" on every OS.
Nope. Not in a modern office environment with a follow-me system where you walk up to whatever network printers and call off your own prints using the RFID from your access pass.
This demonstrates the gap between bedroom linux users and the real world.
The fact that the print engines on most of these machines run some flavor of embedded open source os isn't a ringing endorsement of the state of viability of the Linux print system.
That hacked together Gutenprint crap won't cut it once you get past the trivial cases, and mostly on old or popular printer hardware. Good luck getting a full blown office copier with a finisher, hole punch, and stapler to all work properly. Good luck installing a color calibration profile. Good luck waiting for the laughter to die down when you call support for the 5000$ firey rip and tell them your running an unsupported 3rd party driver.
The whole original article is written from the slant of the typical "It works for me" Linux evangelist that plugs their ears and yells "LA LA LA" after proclaiming if admin aren't forcing people who don't want to change onto Linux, they are the real problem. The ecosystem isn't feature complete as a replacement, too many users hate it, and you are standing alone if anything breaks. The risks still exceed the upsides, and the rest of the pain is manageable, if frustrating, like the patching train, or Exchange.
Not one of mine but a retail group installed follow me printing at their stores. There was only one follow me printer in each store which was in the back office. There was a normal laser printer in the store for general printing and customer orders. However the follow me printer was set as the default and reset to that every night. As a result when someone on the shop floor sends something to print if they haven’t changed the default printer, nothing prints. They change it, reprint and then have to remember to also delete the copy waiting on the follow me print queue.
The idea is that at head office no matter where you are in the buildings you’re always near the correct printer. On the shop floor it’s always going to be the same printer you’re using. Requests to permanently change the default printer away from follow me for all shop floor workers has, my mate tells me been declined.
Yeah, their gonna get sued again, and lose. Their recent printer firmware has network exploitable but if you update the firmware it blocks all third party print supplies, as well as some recent HP OEM cartridges that HP started shipping without the Narc chip due to supply chain problems.
That's right, you can pick a root exploit exploitable from the local network, or the ability to print. On your printer. Some of the MFPs may not even scan unless it recognizes the supplies apparently, so I hope you have been saving those empties like a packrat.
Yeah, and I've vowed to never touch another HP MFP. Not after some fo the crap they've pulled. In my case, quite a while ago, they put a timer on the inks so if you are a light users, the ink times out before it's used up - and then, as you say, it won't do any of the other non-print functions either.
Corporations deal with corporations. There needs to be a business conversation about how your technology is going to improve my business, and do you have the capability to keep it working successfully for the foreseeable future (maybe decades). Having managed large datacentres for international companies my role was to understand the technology and translate that into reliable, secure business solutions. Techies who are only interested in the technology are extremely useful, but not all are willing to understand the business context. Linux simply doesn't have the clout as business solutions at corporate level.
You are me and I claim my five pounds (which I shall forward to Mint or Mozilla or others; without donations they will die).
Coincidentally, I updated to Mint 20.3 not half an hour ago. To do that I had to click - I think - three buttons, and didn't even have to stop what I was doing until the obligatory reboot. Apparently, Linux is too hard for those used to Windows.
Yes, you just listed ONE single feature that you used successfully and easily ONE TIME.
A painless single reboot update is a wonderful thing, but it hardly represents the state of play for the whole OS and ecosystem. Linux has pushed out it's share of bad updates, Mint included. So let's just wargame that alternate scenario for a sec. If you are comfortable booting off that USB stick you remembered to build before the update crashed your only working computer, you can try to hack out a solution to the problem at the command line. That could be something fun like video drivers, the boot loader config, something funny in automount, etc etc. or maybe it's just systemd having a tantrum. These problems may also kick out due to a simple hardware failure, or a simpler upgrade like a new monitor.
Nothing about the Linux user desktop experience stays easy once you scrape off the shiny gold leaf of the top layer of the GUI. And good luck getting it "fixed" if you take it in someplace. I once rescued a secure laptop the user had taken to Best Buy and the geek squad retards were trying to install windows 10 on it but got stuck when the TPM kicked in and password locked access to the drive volume. That was a day of my life I will never get back.
So please to all the Pengunistas, for the love of Richard Stallmans beard, when you feel like shouting "It works for me!", bite your tongue and listen for second. Because the rest of us wind up having to fix the mess you left behind.
Nothing about the Linux user desktop experience stays easy once you scrape off the shiny gold leaf of the top layer of the GUI.
Surely that is entirely the point of the GUI? It may not be to your taste any more than the GUI of W11 is to mine, but that is immaterial; you probably don't have my taste in cars, either, or cornflakes?
Why are you so angry about this? I'm not shouting: I'm simply stating an opinion; your opinion apparently based on use cases that don't concern me is immaterial to me and very unlikely to make me change my mind. But for me Linux has been an excellent system for over twenty years. I don't play games and so cannot comment on its suitability for that, but I develop software and hardware, edit photos, videos, and audio, browse the internet, write and typeset books, use the usual office applications, scan and OCR large (thousand page) documents, and so on. So far I have found nothing I need to do that I have not been able to do with at most a little research. It works for me.
You raise the issue of TPM: should I applaud this? Let me see: Windows requires TPM so therefore computers have to built with TPM so every other operating system has to find a way of avoiding it? That seems a little unfriendly, no? Perhaps I should be the one getting angry.
If you are comfortable booting off that USB stick you remembered to build before the update crashed your only working computer, you can try to hack out a solution to the problem at the command line.
Can say the same about Windows - except that Windows generally makes it harder to fix things when it breaks itself. I recall when one of our customers was hit by a non-working WiFi dongle driver - you could roll it back, but you couldn't stop Windows detecting the out of date versions and "helping" you by updating it again in a few hours time.
All OSs have their quirks. Personally I find Windows much much harder to deal with - and often the answer is "wipe and re-install" simply because fixing the layer of lipstick 20 layers down is effectively impossible.
You personally find Windows quirks harder to deal with because you have spent far less energy learning them through the years, versus your comfort when working with Linux' quirks.
The driver issue you state is fixed by finding the .INF in \Windows\INF, reading the INF for driver information and deleting the cached driver versions, then deleting the legacy .INF's themselves. It takes only a few minutes, but you aren't used to this and, therefore, consider it difficult.
"Coincidentally, I updated to Mint 20.3 not half an hour ago. To do that I had to click - I think - three buttons, and didn't even have to stop what I was doing until the obligatory reboot. Apparently, Linux is too hard for those used to Windows."
Linux Mint point upgrades (at least for me) have always been just about that easy. Oh, sure, there was invariably some goofing around to find the right set of incantations that led to an older Dell/Broadcom wi-fi adapter working again, but that was about it.
I wish I could say that a major version upgrade was the same. It's not. I have an old Dell Latitude 2120 netbook that was for some time my daily driver* on Linux Mint 18 something-or-another. A few months ago, I thought it'd be the prudent thing to do to bring it current, even though on every front except being current on security patches, it worked fine.
I'm going from memory when I recount this tale of woe, so it may be that I've missed a step or not gotten something completely right. Instead of the nice graphical mintupdate client, there's this awful console based script you're supposed to run. Okay, fine. There's also a whole laundry list of other things to do...backing out any newer packages you've installed from other repositories, removing those repositories, configuring and using Timeshift if your version is new enough to have it, and probably other things besides.
I wouldn't mind the console based approach one bit if the script's user experience wasn't awful. Here again, you do what it wants, in the way it wants you to do it, or else. As I remember, it insisted that I do a dry run and Timeshift on releases where that feature existed. Okay, but maybe I'd rather have sailed a little closer to the wind. Maybe I don't have the disk space for Timeshift or I don't want to use it for that purpose. That should be my choice. Periodically throughout the upgrade process, it'll ask you to bump your privileges with a sudo prompt. If you're not watching for that, and it's understandable why you might not be, it stalls.
That poor netbook made it through relatively well. Another one (a much less powerful Latitude 2100) did not. At some point during that upgrade, and in spite of have done everything it wanted for safety's sake, some part of the process just died and left the system hanging there. It was with some trepidation that I finally rebooted it, only to find that it was no longer capable of booting graphically. Fortunately, the network stack still came up and I was able to walk it through what was left of the upgrade from the command line. I'd hate to think where a non-technical user would be if this happened to them.
I don't even want to talk about printing on Linux. Most of the time I've had anything to do with it, even on well supported devices (i.e. those that understand PCL and/or Postscript), it has been an irritating process at best. Then again, I hate printers and printing on any OS, and wouldn't mind it at all if every printer in the world just magically fell out of an open window one day.
I've yet to see any desktop Linux react gracefully to the system's running out of (or just low) on disk space. Windows and MacOS both give you a warning that you'd better stop and do something about this problem. Popular distros for desktop use just start acting screwy, and maybe you can open a terminal to run df, if you know to do that. A lot of people don't. I don't think it unreasonable for the computer to clearly warn that something bad is about to happen that will make it unstable or worse. (As you might guess, Timeshift has caused this problem for me.)
Try hooking up a touchscreen monitor to a system where any non-touch enabled displays exist. Tell me what happens. (For me, the system behaved as though it assumed all the monitors were touch capable, and this threw the calibration of the one touch-capable display way off. Evidently, nobody ever tested for what happens when you do that! Yes, I tried to recalibrate and it put some of the targets on non-touch displays.)
I like Linux Mint. I think it's probably one of the best distros going for those just starting out and then some. I'm still unconvinced for the reasons above (and so many more that we won't get into today) that Linux in general is a good fit for everyone who uses a computer, and especially those who don't understand computers reasonably well or aren't prepared to dive in and troubleshoot, possibly becoming quite involved in doing so, when it's all gone wrong.
I feel as though the author of this article is well suited by Linux and even Unix before it. I'm glad it suits them more or less down to the ground. (I'm very sincere here: no sarcasm whatsoever.) To discount other people's feelings and experiences that maybe Linux isn't everything perfect and then some is shortsighted at best. There's still a lot to be done in the name of usability and discoverability. (Yes, I know it's open source and that means I could do it...which is fine, except for the part where I'm not a programmer because I've never enjoyed computer programming no matter how many times I've forced myself to do so. I've certainly done it when I had to, however.)
* Lord have mercy, although it should be said that at the time, an Atom N550 and 2GB of RAM wasn't a bad existence. The small screen size and limited resolution (1024x600) were more of a problem than anything else.
"I don't even want to talk about printing on Linux. Most of the time I've had anything to do with it, even on well supported devices (i.e. those that understand PCL and/or Postscript), it has been an irritating process at best"
I can only talk from my experience, but getting a Brother printer/scanner working was as simple as downloading the driver installer from Brother and running it. Ubuntu's supported IPP (AirPrint) for a few years, and is actually really nice. :)
"I've yet to see any desktop Linux react gracefully to the system's running out of (or just low) on disk space."
Mint does warn you when you're getting low with a pop-up in the top right of the screen. But yes, if you run it out of disk space, bad things happen. :(
I'll bite: Linux is hard to use, given that out of our 2 large screens + one telly, the pi (bought for curiosity, really), only picks up up correct resolution on 1 out of 2. On the other screen resolution defaults to such that makes your eyes water after a minute or two. On telly - nothing at all. This makes kinda hard to use linux on, eh? All those screens are 2 - 5 years old. Ah, and I tried pretty much everything. And I mean, I tried the bleeding obvious, on the power front, cable front, ports, on modifying every f... potential boot line (btw, pi4), not all in one go, nosir. And more than just one linux distro. And more than one probing in the forums (which got me more of the same solutions that I had seen and tested before and that didn't work).
And then, this: I plug any of my old (10 - 15 yr old) lenovo laptops that run, hell, I'll say it, run WINDOWS (7 and 10) - and the screens _just work_. In fact, I'm working off another, approx. 10 yr old 24'' screen now, at my relatives' place, via one one of those absurd mini-dp / hdmi / dvi dongle-cable combinations - it _just works_. Do I want to plug the pi into this one, and f... about with cables and settings just to see something, MAYBE? No, not really. Well, I probably wasn't paying enough attention.
p.s. 'other than that', no issues.
That sound more like you might have a hardware issue rather than anything software related. I would try a decent quality HDMI cable. As while there are no need to spend a fortune on HDMI cables, from experience i have found that cheap ones from ebay or Poundland are more susceptible to issues that slightly more expensive ones. Even if they appear to work fine for some devices they can cause issues with others.
If you read, he already said he tried switching out cables, devices, etc. without success, yet if he uses the same cables with a much-older Windows-based laptop, it becomes literally plug-and-play. That sounds to me more like a lack of support.
I had 2 identical Pi's and one refused to work with the a couple of different HDMI cables that worked fine with the other one. So I was speaking from experience when I say it could well be the HDMI cable even if the OP had swapped cables, he might have been swapping out one cheapo cable for another cheap cable which his Pi just didn't like. People assume that because HDMI is digital that a cable with either work or not, but that isn't always the case.
As other have mentioned though the Pi running Linux is meant as a device for tinkering around with so you kind of expect there to be more teething troubles than connecting a consumer device such as your average desktop PC.
"As other have mentioned though the Pi running Linux is meant as a device for tinkering around with so you kind of expect there to be more teething troubles than connecting a consumer device such as your average desktop PC."
Don't give me that. I'm mostly on the Linux side of this argument, but not when people react like that. If we're to succeed in arguing that Linux is suitable for general use, we can't react every time a bug is found by inventing a reason why it's not a problem there's a bug there. And by the way, I'm not yet convinced this is a software problem (explanation below), but your argument applies whether this is or not, so I'll deal with it first.
The Raspberry Pi is designed for education, has OS integration directly with the hardware, and has a decade of hardware and software experience. It can get away with many problems, but it can't get away with failure to function. I'm not expecting that it will repair itself after you mess around with it, but if it can't power on and use its basic peripherals, that's a critical bug requiring a patch. In my use of the Pi, I haven't encountered many of these and fortunately, the Raspbian developers appear to take my view on it more than yours. If we can confirm that it is a software issue causing this failure, it requires an immediate fix and should not be an accepted "teething trouble".
All that said, I think this might be a hardware issue, specifically an issue with the HDMI ports on the failing Pi. This can be tested; swap the SD cards between the Pis. If the same card is failing, then it's a problem with the system on that card, and a reimage could fix it and is worth a try. If the Pi continues to fail with the card that formerly worked, then it's probably a hardware issue, though you could always try replacing the embedded firmware if it's a Pi 4. The hardware issue could be in the HDMI port or controller, which would exhibit the same behavior no matter what cable or display was used.
unless both tests involve similar video hardware, its an apples to oranges comparison.
The RPi's video hardware and/or broadcom's video core may be wut dun it.
(there are often issues involving refresh rate that can cause Xorg to pick a particular resolution. The monitor reports its capabilities and the video driver picks the right mode. You can edit the Xorg config to manually set resolution, which I have occasionally needed to do. Usually the culprit is a video adapter trying to use an unsupported refresh rate for the monitor for some odd reason. Since this is a config issue it is not somthing a newb would be able to manage without assistance. Fortunately a search engine generaly finds the solution in the form of 'edit this file' if you spend a minute or two searching on the monitor name and the computer hardware and the words 'Linux' and 'video')
Sorry, remind me how many condescending Windows fanboi posts we've seen on this forum again?
Fanbois will be fanbois, zealots will be zealots, whatever The Cause.
Meanwhile the normals just get on with what works for them.
Hmm... Ok I'll bite too:
Apples to Oranges! It is a bit disingenious to compare a raspberry pi to a windows laptop and here is why:
The pi is a special case where you have specialized hardware running a specialized distro and this is a very pi specific and well known problem. There are literally millions of pages on the Internet addressing pi display problems on TV devices via HDMI and picking the correct overscan settings.
Any standard laptop / desktop pc running Linux with a regular HDMI port will work with any standard tv that has an HDMI input. At least, that has been my (admittedly non-representative) personal experience with using various Linux Laptops to watch media on my larger TV screen(s, I have changed TVs multiple times) over the past 15 years.
You have taken a known problem specific to the Raspberry Pi and the Raspbian platform and made a generalization which is not in any way applicable or relevant to any other Linuxes / devices. If you really want to make a valid comparison, I suggest you make a startup linux mint usb stick, stick it into one of those windows laptops and see if you can get a picture on your TV and if you don't, then feel free come back and tell us all about it, because THAT would be a more valid argument to back up your statements.
My permanent working set-up is a Fuji laptop alongside a television, with both screens active. I can, if I want to for some reason, use a GUI tool, arandr, to change the resolution of either screen on the fly. The window manager and hardware just co-operate without a complaint.
My "set top box" is a Linux netbook connected to the big television. No problems there either.
As someone commenting from a Pi4 running linux with dual HDMI displays functional I wholeheartedly agree with this apples to oranges comparison. Linux on a laptop/desktop is not the same as linux on a special purpose single board computer such as the RaspberryPi.
Getting the Pi to work the way I wanted tested my patience but was fun nonetheless...
"Any standard laptop / desktop pc running Linux with a regular HDMI port will work with any standard tv that has an HDMI input."
Yeah, that statement blows the argument pretty badly.
That is not even consistently true for laptops that shipped with OEM Linux support. It's not even consistently true for windows or mac hardware. Outside the narrow range of machines built entirely from parts with full ODM support, you are going to hit very common hardware that does not play nice with the Linux generic hardware support and has problems.
A great example is if someone hit one of the alternate F-key hotkeys for the audio, wifi, or video systems and the logic board resets something to new values on the fly. More likely to NOT work than to work on "any standard laptop/desktop" by a reasonable definition of standard, not one that is cherry picked.
But glad it worked for you to watch TV. That said you are right that the Pi is an edge case, and by itself doesn't make a clean comparison against more "average" hardware. But you don't have to look far to see how many mass market computers ALSO choke on standard linux distros, and how few have been QCd on even on flavor of *NIX.
Our TV is occasionally used for live broadcasts but mostly as display for MythTV (mini-ITX, venerable Ubuntu release) or Kodi (Pi). I did have a lot of grief with resolution using our old TV, eventually traced to it reporting back its resolution as being that of a PDA! (StackOverflow strikes again?) That was cured by snipping the appropriate pin of the VGA connector.
Sorry, mate, no cylindrical smokin' thing.
A PI is a novelty device, a hack-a-thingy, not a desktop replacement, nor does it have the full capabilities of a normal computer, and I guess that's the problem. The hardware, the graphics chip, maybe the hardware support for that chip, that can / will be a bit of an issue.
I'm typing this on a reasonably new Thinkpad with Devuan installed, which took all the effort of downloading the iso, sticking it on a stick and then disabling the secure boot shizzle to install it. Hell, even the WLan card worked out of the box - on Devuan, which is as stale and conservative as Debian, maybe even more so (and that's what I like about it). Regarding the graphics: No problems so far on my Linux machines (yeah... cannot part with my old laptops, now doing media server etc. duties), with different screens, video projectors, our TV.
You do have one valid point: depending on the hardware and the distribution used it will be a right PITA to get some things running (wlan, sometimes even LAN, sometimes graphics acceleration). Check this before you buy. You did this with the PI? Right?
"not a desktop replacement"
Depending on your usage of course. For me it is a fine desktop replacement. No whirring fans, vesa mounted on my monitor, and fully functional for web browsing, cat video perusal, and occasional work related terminal wrangling...
Exactly - a Pi 4 with a cordless keyboard / touchpad device and a nice big monitor has proved to be an excellent "Granny Computer". The only hardware-related thing that she has to remember is to reconnect the charger to the keyboard when she finishes using it. She watches TV, organises her photos (both from her digital camera and from her Android phone), types the occasional letter (and sends it to a shared printer next door) and listens to her favourite Radio Stations.... It does all she wants, and takes little space and power. It's also equipped with a pair of small "bookshelf"-sized self-powered speakers.
The only (minor) issue is that all her neighbors on the "Granny Farm" (OAP Home) now want the same gear!
Should I assume that the distribution you're running is Pi OS?
I've never, for example, in several years, had Mint not detect a screen resolution correctly (and that includes various laptops, various monitors of varying provenance, a telly, and a graphics card/monitor combination which, for reasons I never managed to ascertain, Windows 10 would not run at native resolution).
Okay, I'm not sure if you can run Mint on a Pi, but have you tried other distros? And if your response is "Why should I have to play about with distros to get Linux working?" my answer would be that Pi is a specialised/hobbyist platform which one might expect to throw up the odd challenge, and is unrepresentative of the Linux desktop experience for most users. (For comparison, how did Windows fare on the Pi?)
I have an original Pi model B, a Pi 3 running in a PiDP11 case, and a Pi 4, all running with TVs as their monitors. The TVs range from 720p through 4K (just the Pi 4 on this one) all via whatever HDMI cables I've had lying around.
I've used Raspian and PiOS as the Linux distributions, all without problems.
I did have trouble with the resolution on RiscOS with a 1080p TV, but never with the Linux releases.
The Pi 4 was a very usable environment for browsing and media, relatively quick (and on the 4K TV eye-wateringly sharp at 4K), and I feel I could have lived with it as my daily-driver if I had to, but I probably would have wanted something other than an SD card as the storage if I were to make it so.
I often wonder whether people who fail to get Linux running on a particular setup approach it with an attitude that either expect it to fail, or over think it because they 'think' it ought to be complex, and try to do too much to get it working. Generally, Linux 'just works' unless you have some unusual hardware.
I'm not quite sure what your issue is but I have the reverse.
The two Windows machines on my desk have fits over being connected to dual monitors on a regular basis, usually ending up in reboots, unplugging and replugging and a fair bit of swearing.
MacOs required a third party tool to stop the resolutions randomly changing.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, is just solid as a rock.
That said, Ubuntu is the only thing here running on a Lenovo, so maybe that's the common factor?
Have a look at the tvservice command - you can force any resolution and refresh rate you like. I use it on my pi400 to force a 1280x1024 50Hz display for my Amiga emulation whilst also forcing a signal to a HDMI audio splitter from the other port so I can hook up some decent speakers :)
I will agree with you that some times in specific circumstances getting Linux to work with an older hardware can be challenging.
But it can be absolutely impossible on windows.
Here is the story I have, I had an old hp scanner.
I know it worked well and had it running on my old win xp laptop.
Well my desktop runs Linux mint , version 17 at the time, so I connect the scanner to it and nothing. Could not make it work no matter what I tried. Granted I was a total nube , just installed and setup my desktop a few month before and all. Well long story short, my new laptop, win 10 did not run the scanner also. Yes it would tell me why " my drivers were too old and not supported" but what help is that?
So wheny back to my mint desktop, research it for about an hour, and setup the scanner to work.
My second successful story is my latest old laptop an HP pavilion with a very old NVidia card.
Run XP on it for years, than installed mint 18 with some difficulty but it worked. Moved to mint 19 and ... Video is dead. Yes I still see the desktop but screwed up with artifacts all over, flickering all the time. Not good. Well laptop is over 15 years old, wanted to test out new 20.04 Ubuntu. Installed it and the same thing. Research tells me drivers not supported and default video driver can't handle. It.
Did more research, and have a perfectly running Ubuntu laptop that can't handle win 10 at all.
I am for Linux all the way.
I've had similar issue here too. My wifes Dell laptop is a pain in the arse as to whether or how well it will work plugged into a large screen/TV. On the other hand, my Toshiba "Just Works" on the same large screens/TV. My rouble-free Toshiba is running FreeBSD, her problematic Dell is running Windows 10 and had no issues running Windows 7.
Hardware and software combinations are complex and mostly work, but when YOU are the one with the problem, in isolation, with a specific bit of hardware or software, it's easy to blame whatever is new and unfamiliar. For the non-techy users, that can be a deal-breaker because they don't know what to do about it.
In general though, Windows has fewer issues because most hardware is designed with Windows in mind and thus provides relevant drivers. Linux and FreeBSD often don't have drivers from the manufacturers, relying on open source reverse engineered drivers using the manufactures specs. That becomes an issue when the hardware has bugs which the manufacture resolves by working around the hardware issue in software, often without telling anyone or updating the specs. Not sure about nowadays, but GFX cards were well known for bits of broken hardware being bypassed by changes to driver software behind the API. ISTR a specific ATI chipset years ago that boasted various hardware accelerations, but some specific function was buggy. It came out later, when the v2.0 hardware was released, that at least one of the v1.0 hardware functions was disabled by the driver, which took on the job in software. Texel shading seem to ring a bell.
"And then, this: I plug any of my old (10 - 15 yr old) lenovo laptops that run, hell, I'll say it, run WINDOWS (7 and 10) - and the screens _just work_."
Odds are, that old Lenovo will quite possibly run Linux very well, with all default drivers from the install. Lenovo are pretty good with Linux support. Hell, their own bootable hardware diagnostics tool is a bootable Linux distro on USB stick so, by definition, there are Linux drivers for the hardware.
Windows+R type control hit enter. I've been using that since XP, in fact I use the run box for a lot of stuff. Devmgmt.msc, compmgmt.msc, lusrmgr.msc, services.msc, regedit and more.
The UI changes are largely irrelevant to me though on Windows 10 I spend a few minutes removing the search bar, the tiles from the start menu, the weather app and a few other bits to get the desktop tidier. However I do the same on Linux, removing the desktop switcher, changing the look of it and tidying that up too.
"Windows+R type control hit enter."
Yes, but it used to be easy to find from the Start menu. Most average users have little clue about ANY short cuts. Many still type their password in then USE THE MOUSE to select the password box. No one ever told them about the TAB key. Never mind ALT-F-S (save), ALT-F4 (exit), CTRL-P (Print) to mention the most common shortcuts. I've been doing various levels and type of IT support for 30 years and I'm STILL showing the basics to users, both newly minted straight out of school, and users about to retire.
I mean, there's a whole industry for customising Windows UI.
You can even wholesale replace it with the likes of Cairo.
There is a good point to having ine default UI. And until 11, Windows were good with providing a good one, while keeping tinkering even without third party stuff.
You're right. Microsoft lowered so much the expectations from a GUI that Linux starts to look usable. Another dumbsizing or two of the Windows interface and Linux will start to look good.
I hope to retire before that happens, then I can get back to DOS for my computing needs.
>What, you mean like MS' changes in UI and the "Where is the control panel today?" game from XP - Vista - Win7 - 8 - 10 - 11?
At least when you buy Windows it doesn't ask you if you prefer Cinnamon or MATE before you can download.
Or rather than full blown Ubuntu I'll install the simple xfce desktop, first thing it asks me on login - "do I want gdm3 or lightdm"
I've been using Linux since it came on Soft Landing System floppies, and Unix for 10 years before that and I don't want to care / know / have an opinion on desktop login manager daemons.
"multiple choices of UI"
You say that as if it isn't a problem with Windows. And yet every time MS bring out a new version of Windows there are complaints about the fact that they've changed the UI. Every time. The difference is that on Windows you don't have a choice other than to stick to the old version until MS manage to overcome your efforts and manage to foist the new one on you.
OTOH the article author says he prefers the Cinnamon UI. At a guess he originally preferred Gnome 2 but not Gnome3. So did a few others so there was rapidly a choice of two other desktop managers, both providing a UI as close as possible to the old Gnome 2. Personally I never got along with Gnome, KDE plays well with the way I work although Ken G above doesn't like it. It doesn't matter - Ken & I can both have the desktop we prefer.
Would you have liked multiple work spaces? You didn't get them until MS said you could. Would you like a tabbed file manager interface? You might be lucky on the next iteration of W11? If you don't like a tabbed file manager interface will you be able to turn it off when it arrives? Who knows? I've had choices of these things for years. I have the desktop which is pretty well what I want. You have the desktop MS wants. That's choice.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Windoze. You highlight one of the most obnoxious - arbitrary changes to the user interface, and don't forget changes to the file format (.doc to .docx for example). Simple changes that have simple fixes (usually hidden), or require learning slight but not insignificant changes to the way one does things (right click or left click).
.doc to .docx is, in fact, an improvement of sorts. It resembles a proper standard* and not something designed not to be backwards compatible or a dump of a chunk of memory**.
* It's a real, de jure standard but that's not the same thing.
** At least in early versions there was a risk of sensitive data from some other material finding its way into a .doc.
When you buy a laptop/PC with Windows pre-installed you get one desktop UI (which you cannot change).
When you buy a laptop/PC with Linux pre-installed you get the default desktop UI for the distro that's installed (and you have the option to change that if you want to).
How is that confusing for users?
(Of course if you install Linux yourself you'll need to choose a distribution and a desktop. But if you're doing that, chances are you're the sort of person who can navigate -- and appreciate -- the availability of choice.)
Personally, I find choice a Good Thing. I play the electric guitar... should I buy a Gibson or a Fender... a Strat or a Telecaster? Confusing, no? So, I'll go down the guitar shop and spend a few hours annoying the staff* and having a good old time while I'm at it. Then I'll walk out with the guitar that suits me.
*No I don't, never have, and never will, play Stairway to Heaven - not in a guitar shop or anywhere else.
When I did my grade exams for classical guitar back in the 1970s, one of the well established pieces used the same basic chord progression at the beginning, as I later found out, as Stairway (take that away and think it through, Spirit!).
It was really difficult not to play Stairway when noodling about, but I don't make a habit of it.
In the lawsuit brought by Spirit against Led Zepplin, one of the defence attorneys testified that "... the descending chromatic structure of the guitar riff at the center of the lawsuit is heard in numerous other songs, including Chim Chim Che-ree from the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins."
Meh. Personally I don't actually play rock much anyway (aside from a brief stint in a garage/punk band circa 1980) - mostly African, plus some reggae, Latin and funk.
-> When you buy a laptop/PC with Windows pre-installed you get one desktop UI (which you cannot change).
Window Blinds?
-> How is that confusing for users?
Because if Bob decides that your Linux desktop is Gnome and you are trying to follow a tutorial which uses KDE, it won't look the same will it? The same goes for XFCE or whatever else.
Choice of desktop has been one of the main reasons for failure of Linux on the desktop. The fabled Year of the Linux Desktop is always around the corner. It is the Godot of computing, and Godot never turns up.
> Because if Bob decides that your Linux desktop is Gnome and you are trying to follow a tutorial which uses KDE,
Errm, why would you do that? You'd follow the documentation for the distro/desktop you actually have installed, surely - y'know, like you would for Windows or Mac.
> Choice of desktop has been one of the main reasons for failure of Linux on the desktop.
Nah. We've been through this. No OS becomes widely used until it's routinely shipped pre-installed on the hardware - because regular users have no motivation to change OS (even if they're aware they can - which they mostly are not). That's why you have Android or iOS on your phone and Linux on your router.
> The fabled Year of the Linux Desktop is always around the corner. It is the Godot of computing, and Godot never turns up.
What do I care? "OS wars" are for sad zealots and immature fanbois (on both sides). Just use the OS that works for you.
Dunderheads everywhere I look...
-> You'd follow the documentation for the distro/desktop you actually have installed, surely - y'know, like you would for Windows or Mac.
If I open a computer graphics magazine or go to a computer graphics web site for a tutorial on something, it will have either Windows or Mac. If I open a Mac magazine or web site the apps there will look exactly the same as they do on my desktop. I rarely go to the Apple web site - the 'documentation for the distro/desktop you actually have installed'. There are not 8,000 different desktops for the Mac. It is about the least customisable desktop out there.
-> Nah. We've been through this
And you still haven't accepted it. You keep finding any other reason rather than accepting the truth. In another post on this article there was somebody complaining that Dell stopped selling Linux laptops. I pointed out that nobody (in economically viable numbers) was buying them.
Most people want their computers to work and to run the applications they want to run. Linux in large part does not fit the bill.
"And you still haven't accepted it. You keep finding any other reason rather than accepting the truth. In another post on this article there was somebody complaining that Dell stopped selling Linux laptops. I pointed out that nobody (in economically viable numbers) was buying them."
Strangely, when Dell first started doing that, Linux laptops cost more than Windows ones, despite the cost of the Windows licence. Maybe it was because of the all the other "demo" shit that Dell were paid to put on the Windows desktop that simply didn't run on Linux? Or also partly because those Windows licenses cost pennies when pre-installed by the manufactures 'cos MS REALLY want every PC to have Windows on them.
Choice of desktop has been one of the main reasons for failure of Linux on the desktop
No.
* Linux on the desktop is NOT a failure. Otherwise, there would not be so MUCH choice since nobody would spend time on what's needed to make choice even POSSIBLE
* Micros~1 and Apple spend BOATLOADS of money on MARKETING. A good marketer could sell ice cubes in Siberia.
The only reason we are using Windows on our desktops is because of marketing, which included pressuring computer makers to ship the OS pre-installed on all of their computers, and NOT offering alternatives.
Having lived through the OS wars of the 80's, I can pretty much say that you are (partially) one of the truth deniers.
The only reason I can say partially is because of the MS culture of the day and how they armtwisted the computer sellers and bought "assisted" congress in making laws such as
<Clif-Notes version>All computers sold _will_ have an operating system on them"</Clif-notes version>
You must have missed the MS trial of the century.
how did you get 'that' out of what I wrote? pressuring computer makers to ship with windows was a HUGE part of their marketing. Oh well I guess I did not happen to use the correct key words and tricky phrases and dot all of the 'i's and cross all of the 't's to satisfy the criticism algorithm you happened to use when you wrote that, but whatever...
-> Because if Bob decides that your Linux desktop is Gnome and you are trying to follow a tutorial which uses KDE, it won't look the same will it?
I know. It's just like that when I follow a tutorial for an application which uses Windows XP. It always looks so different from my KDE Neon desktop. I wish they did something about that. Very confusing! ;-)
Because if Bob decides that your Linux desktop is Gnome and you are trying to follow a tutorial which uses KDE, it won't look the same will it? The same goes for XFCE or whatever else.
Linux zealots are in total denial about this, because they don't see it through a user's eyes. They just see users as idiots. Same thing for package managers. The look at a tutorial and how to use RPM but they are using Debian, and then there is snap and others. Sometimes they have to edit a file to get access to another repository. Sometimes they are asked to go to github and build something from source.
Instead of calling people idiots because they find this stuff a bit less than helpful, face up to it. Quit with the arrogance and superciliousness. Or Windows is just going to wipe the floor with you. Again.
"Is it really so difficult to work out that you follow the tutorial for what's in front of you?"
For the average user, yes. I've recently had to tell someone that no, they can't run that application on their Windows computer because that's a Mac application. They'll need to find the Windows version if it exists. Do you really expect that a user like that will understand which package manager they've got?
This also of course assumes that the tutorial does offer a bunch of versions. There's probably only one, and if there are multiple provided, they won't cover things. A knowledgeable person understands that, if they're using Mint, they can probably do most of the stuff that is in the Debian or Ubuntu tutorials, but probably not the OpenSUSE one. They also know how to interpret an error message and can usually take a reasonable guess at what they need to do in order to make a slightly inapplicable command work. Many Linux tutorials are written for that kind of knowledge level, which is just fine for me. There are people for whom it is not fine, so we either have to make it better or patch situations in which an average user will need that kind of thing.
> Same thing for package managers. The look at a tutorial and how to use RPM but they are using Debian, and then there is snap and others.
Erm, when did you last use Linux? On modern distros like Mint, the user simply goes to the Software Centre and finds the app they want, clicks, and installs it. You know, the same as they do on their mobile phone. No need even to know what the package management system happens to be. (I have no idea what the package management system on my Android phone is, and could hardly care less.)
> Sometimes they have to edit a file to get access to another repository.
Seriously? I think I last edited a software sources file in Linux about 10 years ago. If a user needs to install an app that is not in the distro repositories (and given the vast amount of software available in most Linux distro repositories these days, in my experience that is increasingly rare), then, you know what? They're in a similar scenario to installing software on Windows - i.e., go to the hosting site of the app and follow the instructions there. This is usually as simple as downloading an installer for their distro, which (probably) automatically adds the appropriate repository - after which (unlike Windows) the app will update along with all other apps.
> Sometimes they are asked to go to github and build something from source.
In my experience, that never, ever, happens, with the corner-case exception of some extremely niche software aimed at technical users.
> Linux zealots are in total denial about this, because they don't see it through a user's eyes. They just see users as idiots.
Oh, the irony! You, Windows zealot, appear to see users as idiots who cannot follow simple instructions and read the documentation that comes with their OS.
> Or Windows is just going to wipe the floor with you. Again.
Ok, OS War warrior.
For pity's sake, this is infantile. Just let people use the OS that suits them best. I happen to use Linux because it suits me best. I happen to think Windows 7 was a pretty decent OS. I happen to not get on very well with Mac OS. I don't really give a flying one what OS other people prefer to use.
"> Linux zealots are in total denial about this, because they don't see it through a user's eyes. They just see users as idiots.
Oh, the irony! You, Windows zealot, appear to see users as idiots who cannot follow simple instructions and read the documentation that comes with their OS"
Thing is, for average people phones, tablets, laptops, etc are just appliances. Read the QuickStart leaflet, maybe, and go. Why should one have to wade through pages and pages of manual in order to, say, take a photo? On the phone, you just touch the phone icon, and there it is. Etc.
Desktop OSs aren't consumer-friendly, period. There's a reason businesses hire IT people to make their employee's devices usable anywhere in the building or organization. It's called "I have to tread a manual to make this thing work???? WTF are you thinking????"
This has nothing to do with being smart or stupid. It has to do with what you want to spend your time on. Making the device do tricks? Nah. Using it for useful stuff? Yes!!!!
I don't disagree. But this, as (I think) you imply, applies equally to all desktop OSes.
I believe the problem is that people who, over time, become intimately familiar with one particular OS, be it Windows, Linux or Mac OS, mistakenly interpret their unfamiliarity with another OS as "My OS easy, my OS nice - other OS hard, other OS nasty". And that scenario, at least between Windows and Linux, is not symmetric, since most Linux users have some familiarity with Windows, but not so much vice versa.
In fact I don't really recommend Linux to entrenched Windows users partly for the reasons you mention - what would be the point? They're (probably) okay(ish) with what they've got, and transitioning would be a world of avoidable pain. (One exception might be in areas like my own - scientific computing - where Windows can be a world of avoidable pain - see my post on this.)
Then again, there are other users who would hardly notice the difference, so long as it's got a browser and some office app.
No I don't, never have, and never will, play Stairway to Heaven - not in a guitar shop or anywhere else.
It's that 2nd chord in the riff that irritates the staff, because people usually mess it up. If they could play it as well as Led Zeppelin did (most do not) nobody would mind. (my mother owned a music store until she retired a decade or so ago)
And the shop will do best if they have a wide range of guitars with different neck, pickup, and body styles, because different human hand and human body shape and personal desire for "that sound". 12 year old girls and 40 year old men probably want different guitar shapes, let alone colors etc. - and ALL of them need to be set up properly with new strings to be easier to play. And you always tune them to E flat because everyone always has to re-tune it and cranks up the pitch so at the end of the day you quickly tune them back down so you aren't always replacing broken strings...
(/me wonders if there is a Linux equivalent to playing 'Stairway to Heaven' in a guitar shop)
you did cause me to realize that the UI "designers" at Micros~1 that seem to *FEEL* (not think) that ONE SIZE FITS ALL, are _NOT_ guitar musicians, nor JAZZ musicians (or anything involving improvisation) because of their apparent 'collective vs individual' approach favoring 'collective' and "one size fits all".
You have provoked the wrath of the penguin downvoting army with your sacrilege, AKA common sense. There should be at least 2,000 more desktops to choose from. And if you don't like what you see after wasting years of life trying new desktops, you can always learn to code and make your own.
Windows used to have many different desktop configurations, not just from the options in Control Panel, but many 3rd party add-ons that could totally change or even replace the original desktop. That was back in the Dark Ages, before MS took away users choices. Remember the Themes Pack? Good luck trying even that basic level of customisation of a Windows 10/11 desktop.
This is because there is no one size fits all in UI. MS tried to shoe horn the same UI across touch screen and desktops with Windows 8 and look how badly that was received.
Your choice of distro doesn't really matter, you can install the same software on each one, it more of a personal preference as to which you might pick. But choice isn't a bad thing. No one is saying that we should all wear the same clothing or drive the same car because there is too much choice in these areas.
This is because there is no one size fits all in UI. MS tried to shoe horn the same UI across touch screen and desktops with Windows 8 and look how badly that was received.
It was received badly amongst the nerds and geeks. The end users start up their computer, launch their application and the OS is no longer relevant. Because the productivity is in the application, not the OS.
Unless you can't run your application because of something weird. Which is where Windows has been eating linux lunch all these years.
Of course, I will be wrong because a sysadmin with 20 years of linux experience can't see a problem with something so easy to fix.
"Unless you can't run your application because of something weird."
They are trying. They are trying really hard. I still remember the days when I could sort the Start Menu into the order I wanted it, so even the less frequently used programmes were still easy to find, not just the most often used at the top and the rest buried miles down a long list.
It was only "nerds and geeks" who knew they could alt-F4 to get out of their application on Windows 8 - ordinary users were utterly stumped when, having clicked on a tile to launch an "app", they found themselves drowning in an endless, bottomless full-screen ocean with no apparent way of getting out again.
Such users were of course too stupid to figure out that all they had to do was perform the correct magic wand wave gesture with the mouse cursor in the invisible magic area actually outside the screen to conjure up the "charms bar"
I've used some pretty weird UIs on Linux over the decades but never one so confusing or illogical as Windows 8...
Multiple distros and desktops is only a problem for the terminally (sorry!) stupid. Any sane Linux newbie will start with a quick google, which will tell him that Linux Mint / Cinnamon is the best beginner's choice. He will then download Mint and boot into it. A quick play will establish if it works with his hardware, in which case he can install it. Simples!
If you're daft enough to start with Arch, Slackware, or some hackers' favourite, you will get what you deserve.
Indeed. I started out with Slackware over 20 years ago, and not only am I still using it, but have a delightful wife, two adorable children, a nice house and a reasonable job.
Let this be a lesson to you all.
/runs away to join the circus
I keep my laptop dual-boot (Ubuntu rather than Mint these days) and when I was running Mint as my main desktop OS it worked fine when it worked but trying to get anything new working on it was always a matter of days tracking through every forum and linux related stack exchange site trying to figure out which information was still relevant. It felt like walking on the ice of a deep lake- smooth and easy, but if you fell through a hole of wanting to get your video card working (maybe it's better now but when I was using it routinely the drivers for laptop 3D accelerators were really hard to configure) or wanting to use an ASIO soundcard you ended up in deep water very quickly. After a routine grub update somehow overwrote my boot sector and made it impossible to do my job for a couple of days I realised that the benefits of feeling vaguely morally superior as a Linux user weren't worth it compared to the sheer amount of time it took to configure things that work automatically on Windows.
Now Windows is my main OS again, although the operating system is nowhere near as good, the sheer amount of tools I can run on it more than compensates. I can run games without having to spend hours figuring out how to get the OpenGL driver to work and having weird random crashes! I can write music and use the many thousands of VST synths available! VSTs sometimes work on WINE but with the complexities of Linux audio you can spend a lot of time not even knowing whether they're working or not and good music tools are expensive - I can't afford to invest in something I can't use. I like Linux and I would love for it to be a practical day-to-day OS but I simply cannot do the same things with it that I can on Windows and for me having a computer is about the things I can do with it.
"things that work automatically on Windows" until they don't. Last year it took a reinstall of Win10 to get updated to the next version of 10. I had been trying the various 'fixes' to be found on the internet, probably for a year or more, and decided to reinstall after I was coming up on the cut off date for the then version on my machine.
Another 'nice feature' of Windows is that the online instructions, even on the MS support pages, rarely conform with what I see on my screen, when I attempt to follow the online instructions - and quickly have a completely different image on my monitor, and the instructions go off in another (unavailable) direction.
-> I mean Windows has its own day of the month – Patch Tuesday – just for fixes
And Linux has so many patches that practically every day is patch day. And don't deny it.
-> My Linux servers on the net are attacked dozens of times a day and to date, the score is Steven 100 - Hackers nil.
And here is the dangerous myth that is yet again being spread. If you know what you are doing you can run a Linux machine on the internet securely. But if you don't know, and new to mid Linux users do not know, you will have an insecure machine on the internet. I see attempts every day from Linux machines which have been compromised.
-> security is a process, not a product
Correct! And to know that process you have to know what you are doing. New Linux users will not know.
-> Finally, unlike Microsoft and Apple, Linux distributors are not looking over my shoulder
That point I will not argue with.
I don't remember waiting even 5 minutes on a reboot and completion of Windows updates and I've never had top of the line hardware in my PCs. Downloading through dial-up was a long wait ('90s). I have tried to like Linux and tried it multiple times but I prefer the applications I can get/use with Windows. Started using MS-DOS through to Windows 11, with the exception of Vista, Me(yuk!) and a limited time on 2000.
I don't believe Linux is any more secure than Windows (both are only as secure as YOU make them) and find the telemetry/spyware argument to avoid Windows pretty weak. Most of the Windows telemetry can be disabled (in services) and anyways most software and drivers send telemetry of their own. Even if you never use the web or a computer all your information is already known and out there, between the leaks and hacks, the Government and Corporations massive data hoarding your privacy is already gone.
There is plenty I don't like or care for in Windows 10 & 11, but overall it is the better option for me.
HAHAHA. No. My boss won't even let me work on my PC unless I absolutely have to, or gets out of his way to turn the damn thing on LONG before I need to use it, because the win10 on it - not powered on every day - wants to apply updates EVERY TIME IT'S POWERED ON, and every time it prevents the machine from doing anything user-facing for any number of dozens of minutes. No, the machine isn't a many-core beast, but it isn't exactly obsolete either - this is just the nature of "YOU DON'T NEED TO WORK, I HAVE MORE IMPORTANT STUFF TO DO NOW" win10 updates.
I mean Windows has its own day of the month – Patch Tuesday – just for fixes
And Linux has so many patches that practically every day is patch day. And don't deny it.
The difference is that Windows needs a day for its slow and long-winded updates and forced reboots. Then maybe an out-of-band update to fix the breakages.
I'll have Updates available showing once every few days - as like as not for applications (e.g. Signal desktop once a week) - and it takes seconds to deal with. Every few months there'll be a kernel update but even then the system keeps running with the old kernel until I restart at my convenience.
The difference is that Windows needs a day for its slow and long-winded updates and forced reboots
If you keep making up shit and lies like this, you are going to get nowhere. I am a linux user but I'm so frustated with this zealotry and lack of objectivity and just plain arrogance.
> Correct! And to know that process you have to know what you are doing. New Linux users will not know.
Of course new Linux users should not be setting up internet-facing servers - any more than new Windows users. I wasn't aware there was anything mythical about that!
Not sure who's "actively touting" that in the server space. On the desktop it's perhaps true, if only because desktop Linux is a small attack target for miscreants, and the average Linux desktop user is arguably somewhat likelier to be more tech- and security-savvy than the average desktop Windows user.
I had BT Openreach on the phone this morning for 45 minutes to repair my internet connection. I Did everything I was told. Downloaded Anydesk for Windows, tried to run it - nothing.
Looks like I will have to go back to Windows if I want to get a decent internet connection.
LOL, at least one person didn't get the joke.
On the other hand, I told the scammers one time that I used Linux. They immediately switched scripts and tried to get me to install the Linux version of TeamViewer. I was quite impressed, but still managed to waste a good 20 minutes of their time "waiting for the download" :-)
They don't need to enumerate patches. If you have used Linux, you know that everything gets patched. There's a reason that there's usually something for your package manager to update quite often. This is good, because I want all my machines to have their vulnerabilities fixed. I'm quite happy to see that the code I'm using is being improved actively. However, you cannot deny that patches are needed on Linux just as they are needed on Windows.
"And Linux has so many patches that practically every day is patch day. And don't deny it."
Worth bearing in mind though that the patches are for your entire installed system, apps, libraries, fonts and all, not just the OS. I'd be worried if my OS of choice only ever got patches on a specific day of the month instead of as soon as practically possible though.
Yeah, so rest have to suffer. The large paying customers have the option to use their own patch deployment servers and in the main do that, so can choose whatever patch schedule they want. They don't actually need MS to have a monthly schedule. Of course, it might be lawyers demanding the MS patch release cycle. If they get hacked while sitting on a non-deployed patch, it's their problem. If they are waiting on the MS monthly patch cycle, it's "out of their control" and "unavoidable" because it was MS sitting on the patch.
If you're running a large estate then your devs will want to know what's changing in advance of deployment so their (usually unnecessary) "clever" tweaks can be tested against the New Thing.
Allowing OS updates to just happen as soon as they're available is a recipe for lots of pain.
New win devices come with rafts of dubious bloatware and practically uninstallable anti-virus. Most people don't seem to notice, then get scared when you say "let's remove this and this and this. To see if that makes it faster." Linux is much more start with a bare shell and add the bits you want. Also there's no pressure to register/activate/give an email address, or worse some id to 'improve' the experience.
I have tried Linux. I can get most things to work, but have yet to find a client email package that fully supports Office 365. I'd be interested to know if anyone has found one - I currently have 6 different O365 accounts and 4 others which I can display within my Outlook (Office 2019 on Windows 10) client.
Then, there's WhatsApp - I don't like it, but I do need it. And it runs nicely on Windows 10.
Then, my web builder s/w is Windows based. And so it goes on. My working profile is predicated on a Windows lifestyle, so I am stuck with it. But I am not unhappy.
PS - I am also at the stage of Alan 100 - virus's 0. [So far!]
Alan
You have hit the Linux wall. Eventually nearly everyone does.
The Linux wall is such and such an app which runs on Windows but does not run on Linux, or has no direct equivalent, etc. For some people it is Photoshop or Illustrator (I promise I will drop a whole bag of inodes onto the head of anyone who says Gimp and Inkscape), for others it Excel macros. Some things that are commonplace on Windows are simply not available on Linux. If you can work within the limits of what Linux offers, that's good. But do not believe the hype: eventually you will hit that wall.
You could turn that round. There's the Windows wall where something you take for granted on Linux doesn't exist such as an equivalent to Gimp or Inkscape that doesn't need a subscription. And if you suggest Photoshop or Illustrator you can have your inodes back in the form of a load of NTFS disk fragments.
> But do not believe the hype: eventually you will hit that wall.
I have to say that in 20+ years of running Linux almost exclusively I've not hit that wall. Maybe that's my personal usage case - I work in scientific computing, but there you go. I could not do my job properly in Windows, full stop. Linux is just fine for my extracurricular use too (I'm not a gamer, and have no use for Photoshop, etc. etc.)
(FWIW, The only wall I've hit is being forced to use Outlook at work, which -- along with the majority of my colleagues it must be said -- I loathe with a passion. And in my experience it's no less dysfunctional on the Windows desktop than in the browser-based incarnation I'm obliged to use on Linux.)
"And in my experience it's no less dysfunctional on the Windows desktop than in the browser-based incarnation I'm obliged to use on Linux."
I find the browser based version is very, very different if said browser is running on Linux and not Windows. Even when the browser, Firefox in this case, is the same point release version. Outlook web access functionality on a browser seems to be dependant on the underlying OS, which is something a web app should never do. I have no idea if this is a real thing or if MS are simply being bastards to anyone not drinking the correct flavour of KoolAid.
I use Wine and Play on Linux to manage the versions and application to run on which Wine version.
i run PCB CAD software and simulation software no issues. It "may" require some tinkering, but in general no issue. Else, a VM is used for some home grown software.
I have not tried it, but people have said that Office runs under Wine no problems - so there are many approaches.
You're right, but that's less of a problem of Linux but with FOSS in general (i.e., while there is some truly great FOSS programs out there, a lot of FOSS is nothing more than a crap copy of some Windows application). Quite often the same FOSS programs are available on Windows, and they suck the same there, too.
Linux is fine for a desktop system if your computing expectations are rooted in what was common in the late '90s/early '00s. If you'd be content with Windows 2000 or Windows XP today (aside from security aspect of course) and the software you want to use is available for Linux then go for it. Just don't expect the same level of UX you get on modern day Windows or macOS.
If not, though, a Mac might be a better alternative.
Mac's not that good either, take a look at some of what's been lost since Snow Leopard (still the bar by which all future versions of macOS are judged and found wanting).
There's nothing of value I miss from the old Snow Leopard days (and, actually, Snow Leopard wasn't that great to begin with, and turned me off from the Mac platform for several years until I came back when Sierra was new).
Complaints (like the one in that link you put up) which talk about the (supposedly) good old days are similar to those where people say they miss Windows XP. If you think something like XP (or Snow Leopard for that matter) was the best thing since sliced bread then you'll probably also like the retro-grade UX of common Linux desktops.
But I don't. I actually like modern macOS (Monterey at the moment), I like what it offers me, and while it's not perfect it does the job it's supposed to do and does so very well. I can do >99% of the things I do on Linux (which I also use), and can do this inside a modern UX and without being entirely dependent on some low-quality FOSS clone of an antique version of some application I need to do my work (and while macOS doesn't have the software selection of Windows, lots of commercial software vendors do develop for the Mac, contrary to desktop Linux).
If you highlight Snow Leonard's UI as being retrograde, could you please highlight what is an improvement about Monterey? As far as I can see there are just a series of arbitrary UI decisions (removal of color which helps distinguish areas, removal of title bars, hiding UI elements until you know how to make them appear a la Windows 8 charms bar), removal of long-standing UI workflows such as Save As, iDevice-isation of the UI, dumbing-down of the bundled apps and iWork, then finally for the coupe de grace running iOS apps with Catalyst which brings even more alien UI elements onto the macOS desktop.
I agree on everything apart for Inkscape. I have used Inkscape and Illustrator and while i'm certain there will be some quirky feature in Illustrator that cannot be be done in Inkscape for my casual needs Inkscape is a breeze to use. I do not doubt for a second there is a "Linux wall" in Inkscape but unlike in GIMP or in LibreOffice I haven't found it. I use Inkscape on Windows though because of the Linux wall in many other programs I use.
>for my casual needs Inkscape is a breeze to use.
Yes but there are professional users that need Illustrator, or Photoshop or Autocad.
It's like saying electric scooters are good enough for my casual use, great I'm happy for you, but if I drive an excavator for a living that doesn't really help me.
Ironically I use a bunch of software for work that only runs on Linux, so I have to have a separate windows laptop for minor corporate stuff - mostly outlook plugins - that only works on Windows
For me it was Lightroom (the installed app, not the subscription cloudy thing). I bought a Mac and binned the Windows machine (because Vista).
My Linux machines still provide a playground for more work related things. One day there may be one desktop to rule them all, but I doubt it. There will always be a choice to be made of the best tool for the job.
"for others it Excel macros"
LibreOffice does macros too. Just not MS ones. So it's not a problem for people wanting to write macros for use on LibreOffice. It's only a problem for people wanting to run other peoples macros from MSOffice. But then those people on MSOffice can't run my macros because they probably never installed LibreOffice. That;s their problem, not mine. On the other hand, LibreOffice run on both Linux and Windows, so everyone can be happy running LibreOffice Macros, but not vice versa. :-)
Yes, and a lot of people have learned to use Excel macros and have done a lot with them. Trying to sell them on dumping and reimplementing it all goes down about as well as the people who tell existing projects written in C that they should use a more modern language. Each argument might have some correct aspects, but it both ignores the user's valid points and completely ignores their preferences and the reasons they have for choosing one tool over another.
> have yet to find a client email package that fully supports Office 365
Thunderbird does the job well enough for me.
In the old days, you needed some middleware (davmail) to speak Exchange's proprietary mail protocols. But Office 365 just does IMAP.
Calendaring? Open your calendar in a web browser, or use the Teams app.
And if your Exchange admin has switched off the IMAP support (*) then you can still use middleware like owl. (https://www.beonex.com/owl/)
(* Do MS say this is a security risk? Is it somehow "best practice" at Redmond to ignore the open standard in favour of a lock-in protocol? Who knows...)
I have tried Linux. I can get most things to work, but have yet to find a client email package that fully supports Office 365. I'd be interested to know if anyone has found one - I currently have 6 different O365 accounts and 4 others which I can display within my Outlook (Office 2019 on Windows 10) client.
Well, Evolution works OK and supports Exchange and MS365, and the fact that it's essentially a clone of Outlook 97 means it works mostly like the original. Still, it looks and feels like a program from the '90s, and not in a good way.
But yes, finding a good email client has become more challenging, even on Windows. Recent incarnations of Outlook became worse in terms of usability and reliability, and while there are alternatives neither one is particularly great (for example, Thunderbird's UX is horrible, eMClient is buggy, Windows Mail is even more basic than Outlook Express of the old days, Mailbird lacks some features and last time I tried couldn't handle large email accounts without crashing). So while the Windows alternatives to Outlook may look more modern, they aren't necessarily better than what's available on Linux.
Personally, while I use all of the three platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) I do all my day-to-day stuff on macOS. Apple Mail and Calendar (which are part of macOS) work absolutely fine despite using multiple, very large mailboxes with 10's of thousands of emails in them (don't ask!). If I wanted I could use Microsoft Office (or MS365) apps as well, since it's a MS supported platform.
-> But yes, finding a good email client has become more challenging, even on Windows.
100% agree. The same on Mac. Apple's Mail is nasty and badly designed. It has three bin-shaped icons, one for archiving, one for spam, and one for delete. X in most GUIs means delete, on Apple Mail it means 'mark as junk'. So I tried Thunderbird. That was even worse. It's horrible junk.
-> Thunderbird's UX is horrible
I wonder who put it together. Somebody who has no idea how to design GUI software, I guess.
There was a 'good old days' when software was 'simpler' and more functional. You mention Outlook Express. People may laugh but it was better than Apple Mail today. There was Eudora Light, which was simple and reliable. There was even Netscape Communicator. What do we have now?
"-> Thunderbird's UX is horrible
I wonder who put it together. Somebody who has no idea how to design GUI software, I guess."
Standard practice these days. There are options that retain the original interface. Someone will be along to say they look like something from the '90s like that's a bad thing.
100% agree. The same on Mac. Apple's Mail is nasty and badly designed. It has three bin-shaped icons, one for archiving, one for spam, and one for delete. X in most GUIs means delete, on Apple Mail it means 'mark as junk'.
Well, actually these aren't all bins. The archive icon is a cardboard box (filing box), the junk mail icon is a similar box with an 'X' on it, and the delete icon is just a trash can. I can instantly recognize what they mean (the archive icon is actually the same as on many other apps), even if I don't enable the label text in the settings.
More important for me is however that Apple Mail works, and has been doing so reliably for years, and without getting slow just because I keep large amounts of email in some of them.
So I tried Thunderbird. That was even worse. It's horrible junk.
Yes, it's shocking, isn't it? I mean, it's not even just a not-so-great UI, it's like its UI has been designed by some meth head on a trip. There is no real recognizable concept behind anything.
I wonder who put it together. Somebody who has no idea how to design GUI software, I guess.
I wonder, too, as I'd have thought that because of the size and reach of the project surely someone must have recognized what CF that UX is. Over the years I occasionally gave the by then current version another try, just to see that it's still the same horrible mess it has been before, so either the Thunderbird developers are constantly high or completely oblivious to the user experience by purpose.
There was a 'good old days' when software was 'simpler' and more functional. You mention Outlook Express. People may laugh but it was better than Apple Mail today.
I would't say it was better (especially since back then I lost a lot of emails because OE's underpinnings weren't that great), but it had a good, usable UI (why the Thunderbird guys didn't just copy that is beyond me) and worked as a simple email client. It was certainly better than Windows Mail of today.
I've had no problems with WhatsApp on Linux. It is one of the message integrations in Opera though I'm sure that there will be other implementations.
Outlook works fine in the browser, Teams less so the last few times I tried. Those, of course, are just for work.
I half hate to say it, but Evolution works actually quite disturbingly well with Exchange/Office 364 accounts.
There have been various add-ons for Thunderbird to use with Exchange, but in the end I moved to Evolution because Microsoft kept changing things (how surprising), making it hard for the under-resourced add-on developers to keep up (work's "official solution" for Linux users was and is "use the webmail"), whereas the fact that Evolution's Exchange support has been assisted thanks to the support of its various corporate backers over the years does show through here.
davmail will work the bulk of it with thunderbird. Tbsync has a couple of tools that fill in some gaps. Teams for linux works pretty well. Still has audio problems. Zoom, bluejeans are just fine. MFA gets fun.
The funny thing I find with win/ad, is first we give you a laptop that can do all these neat things and integrate seamlessly. Then we use ad/group policy, to turn it all off/make it unavailable. No usb sticks, no saving anything in chrome, ....
I'm at the very start of my non-Windows adventure having installed Mint dual-boot on my laptop and managed to get maybe 10 hours of "flight time" with it. Install generally went okay but there's definitely some oddities that have crept in, e.g. the function key behaviour has inverted so now I need to hold down the Fn button to get the basic F1, F2 etc commands rather than the audio playback tools.
I found some unexpected behaviour trying to get programs running through Wine (as there are no Linux alternatives) and I'm still not used to files and folders being jumbled up in the File Explorer rather than having folders all at the top of the list (presumably there's a setting somewhere?).
All in all, it's working (generally), but it's different, and it will take some getting used to. I also find some of the documentation a bit lacking / presumptuous at times for an *absolute* newbie,
Sounds like you're doing okay - keep it up!
Bear in mind that at some point you would have gone through a learning curve for Windows. (Personally I've hardly used Windows from about XP, and when I occasionally need to use Windows 10 for something I'm lost - can't find anything, and everything feels a bit cockeyed.)
Re. Wine... inevitably some stuff will be flaky. Windows in a VM might work out better, if feasible, but I guess that may be a bigger learning curve.
"Re. Wine... inevitably some stuff will be flaky. Windows in a VM might work out better, if feasible, but I guess that may be a bigger learning curve."
I'd say that Windows in a VM is such a shallow learning curve that you might end up with users doing all of their work in that Windows VM, negating most of the benefits of switcing to Linux.
Maybe. Or perhaps you might end up with Windows users running Linux in a VM doing all their work in Linux, negating most of the benefits of running Windows.
Seriously, though, it depends what the user's usage scenario is. Sure, Windows will work out better for some, Linux for others.
Thanks! Aside from some games on my dad's Amstrad when I was really young I've been on Windows since our first Win95 PC when I was about 8 years old, so it wasn't so much learning Windows as "this is what a PC is" - I didn't have any habits to break or processes to unlearn. I'm generally going in with the approach of "this is the same, but different".
Welcome to the "Mint" club
I moved to mint 10 years ago and never looked back.
That said, I still use windows at work, support my daughters and friend's win 10 laptops
But all my personal PC's are Linux.
Just this weekend I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTE on my 15 yo laptop.
Still considering myself as a noob , but a dangerous noob.
> So, the bottom line is, no matter how much someone tells you that "Linux is hard!" They're wrong.
I do not think they say that. What people tell me is that they find Linux to be hard. Impenetrable. Unfamiliar and generally hostile. Even now, after 30+ years of development I still get the impression that the man pages and online information is written in a style that a person would use when answering a graduate-level exam question. Not in the style of a "for idiots" guide.
Sure, these sentiments do not come from IT professionals, but they do come from people who want computers to work the way they expect them to. To deny that is one of the biggest failings of the Linux community. Which could explain why most Linux desktops strive to look like Windows or Macs.
However, the other hard part about Linux is UI design. Making apps that "flow" in a logical manner, So that the right options are presented in a logical order. Getting the user interface to with with the user rather than in the ad-hoc way the coder slapped together options, is so difficult that not even the professionals manage it very often. Just look at the standard options on any windows frame: Linux or Windows.
Now open the option titled "Edit" and see if it allows you to edit your document!
Yup. The Windows interface is a mess (read on). Can I use it? Yeah, sure. Do I like it? No. Do I prefer LXDE? Maybe Windowmaker? Maybe. Do they have issues? Sure! Oh, and I find the look and feel of macOS horrible! I was forced to use it for a couple of weeks. All of these OSes and their desktops do suck, and in completely different ways.
I had my mom use a Linux desktop for emails and web browsing (which she never really did, just not interested) until she got a smartphone (10 years ago? and then it was adios to computers). One of my mates got his retired father (uh... 15 years ago?) on linux, so he could no longer mess up the system, and he could remotely log in via ssh (some dyndns magic was done) if anything was not working, or bookmarks got deleted, or whatever. And both of these elderly parents I would consider to be DNFs in all things IT.
"Sure, these sentiments do not come from IT professionals, but they do come from people who want computers to work the way they expect them to. To deny that is one of the biggest failings of the Linux community. Which could explain why most Linux desktops strive to look like Windows or Macs."
But then I find Windows to be a largely a hard to use mess - why can't I arrange the menu, for example.
Familiarity is the issue. Are Windows or Macs any easier to someone coming from the opposite camp? And can that be eased by making the one look like the other? The big advantage of Linux is that the UI isn't baked in, it can be made to present something close to whatever you're familiar with, even CDE if you want. I can fairly quickly reproduce my preferred UI on any new Linux installation. With the commercial alternatives I'd simply have to adopt the vendor's changes as and when they choose to impose them - and that really seems to be the harder alternative.
"But then I find Windows to be a largely a hard to use mess - why can't I arrange the menu, for example."
But why do you want to re-arrange a menu? 99% of users don't. I customised my Quick Access Toolbar in Word and Excel because I use both programmes a lot, I know how to customise, and it makes my life a bit easier, but most of my colleagues barely use, or need to use, more than bold and underline in Word and they only read Excel, not input.
Other examples further up are red herrings too. E.g. the one about guitars: it doesn't matter if you pick up a Gibson, Flying V or nylon string acoustic. If you can form an A chord it plays an A chord, and you can do that from the moment you pick it up, like Windows (OK, I admit, the installation routine asks for your name and country location), rather than having to know "how to burn an ISO image to a USB stick, rebooting your computer from it, playing with it to make sure it works". That last bit is especially why it's still not for the mass market. The guitar equivalent is alternate tunings and swapping out the pick-ups, but the vast majority of players don't care and don't need to care.
I would like to try Linux but every 'simple' guide I've read to how install and run it has decended into jargon and acronyms within a couple of paragraphs with no explanations, just an assumption that you will know what they mean. This article and a lot of the comments just continue the theme.
"But why do you want to re-arrange a menu?"
Back in '95 and for a few years after that You could arrange the Windows start menu to be easily navigable to find what you want. In recent years it seems to have become an illogical mess. If I pop up the KDE menu it's organised by application group - graphics, internet, office etc. If one of those gets too large I can subdivide it, maybe shunt the less used stuff into a sub.menu. If something seems to fit more than one category I can enter it into those categories.
Of course the expert Windows users go into search and type in the application name. Yes, after all their railing about its supposed prevalence in Linux, they've reinvented the command line.
"99% of users don't."
I think the word you were looking for is "can't".
> I would like to try Linux but every 'simple' guide I've read to how install and run it has decended into jargon and acronyms within a couple of paragraphs with no explanations, just an assumption that you will know what they mean.
Out of interest, have you ever installed Windows from scratch? If so, what was your experience?
> This article and a lot of the comments just continue the theme.
As I read it, the article is not really about starting out on Linux. It does mention that if you are starting out you should start with a user-friendly distro like Mint (good advice), but it seemed to me more aimed at those who already have some familiarity.
> E.g. the one about guitars:
Cheers, that was me.
> it doesn't matter if you pick up a Gibson, Flying V or nylon string acoustic. If you can form an A chord it plays an A chord, and you can do that from the moment you pick it up, like Windows [my emphasis]
Are you're really, really sure you're not just saying that because you've actually used Windows before?
If you'd only ever used Linux - which came pre-installed on your machine - might you not be saying the same about Linux? And might you not, perhaps, want to "play around" a bit with Windows to decide whether it works for you?
(And please... not a Flying V. Just... no.)
...the other hard part about Linux is UI design. Making apps that "flow" in a logical manner, So that the right options are presented in a logical order.
What do you mean? Putting the OK button in the title bar seems perfectly logical to me.
Yep. Early versions of Unix were written and used by the Society To Keep The Masses Out of IT, hence having to know what you were doing. Also hence being able to sneer at those using DOS/Windows. Yes of course I was a member.
Those early obscurantist decisions and philosophies have been perpetuated over the years, and now the Linux distros are having to fight to make it all more user-friendly for the non-professionals.
OK. When UNIX was new and shiny, what other OS's were there out there that had a much better user experience?
Remember, we're talking the 1970s, when there just weren't the shiny GUIs. Almost everything was command-line based, and while some OSs may have had slightly more accessible command names, and in the late 70s we started seeing things like VAX/VMS which had better integrated help systems and command shortening, everything was much of a muchness. At that time, having extensive and comprehensive manual pages was really useful.
What you could say is that the UNIX UI did not really develop when it should, but even in the '80s, what computer users there were were still using CLIs, and the existing UNIX users were happy with the interface until Sun, Apollo et. al. started putting GUIs over the top.
YMMV of course, but I'd argue that almost any of the other "server" (well "mainframe" at the time) OS's were more comprehensible, because they hadn't gone out of their way to name the commands in as obscure ways as possible. Of course, knowing the obscure and non-intuitive ways of early Unix separated us proper nerds from the wannabes.
On the (eventual) PC side, CP/M was ok IMO. I never got that close to OS/2 so can't really comment on that one. The various flavours of DOS were ok as far as they went, but that wasn't very far.
Each to their own n'all.
But I find your post a bit dubious.
Why would any user of a desktop environment (e.g., KDE) need to look at documentation for the underlying plumbing, (X, kernel, shell, etc)? I'm not sure I've ever looked at a man page in 25 years of running a Linux based system.
My go-to for plumbing is a dummies guide to Linux commands. Someone rewrote man to reduce the reading age and no-one sued them for copyright or other infringement. And the book is getting on for 20 years old and still not our of date.
I'm largely OS agnostic - I don't believe that any one system is THE one, but they each have their strengths and weaknesses.
My main personal use for windows is photographic software from Adobe, On1 and DXO. There are shareware/free alternatives, but they work differently and for my uses cannot acheive what I want with as much ease as the software I already have.
I also run a Linux box. This has been through several iterations, experimenting with Mandrake & openSUSE before settling on Sabayon for several years (rolling distributions aren't stable and I got fed up with stuff getting broken regularly) followed by Pear Linux (lovely interface, designer hired by Facebook IIRC & required to stop distro) and then Mint Mate & Cinnamon. The LB doesn't get much use these days, because having most things on a single computer is just easier in the end, when IT isn't my job.
Until last year I also ran a Mac. Good at what it does well, but a sluggish PITA that's restrictive and claustrophobic.
The thing that keeps microsoft office in dominance is compatibility. Produce a word document and you know it will look just the same in Tokyo, belgrade or New Delhi. Likewise Excel files will display correctly. OO/LO does an excellent job, but if you want to be sure your doc will be just right in front of a customer then you have to send a pdf, and there are many times that's not acceptable. Sure you can run office under Wine or use web versions, but MO is likely here to stay, and that's not at all bad unless you hate Microsoft.
Several reasons:
I spend an awful lot of my time shunting large volumes of data around between remote filesystems, and syncing code and scripts. In Windows I found this to be flaky and a general PITA. On Linux everything is over ssh using rock-solid tools such as scp, rsync, etc., which Just Work - and work fast.
I need to run a lot of scripted stuff. When it comes to setting up large-scale processing pipelines, automation is a necessity, not an option. Scripting on Linux seems more natural and simpler. Bash works everywhere, and piping, redirection etc. are built into the foundation of the OS.
A lot of the software and toolchains in scientific computing are developed on and for Linux.
I work a lot on HCP systems, which are almost exclusively Linux.
Possibly for historical reasons, for large sectors of scientific computing you need a good reason not to be working in Linux. I've watched new colleagues struggling with Windows until someone has a quiet word with them.
Actually renting software instead of selling it was the norm in the Unix world. It was with personal computers that software started to be sold. Today there are several Linux applications that are subscription only too.
Anyway from a professional perspective subscription might even be an advantage as they are OPEX and not CAPEX. Not different after all from renting cloud services instead of buying your hardware and software.
For personal non professional users of course that's different.
And of course the freeloaders hate any kind of commercial software.
"The thing that keeps microsoft office in dominance is compatibility. Produce a word document and you know it will look just the same in Tokyo, belgrade or New Delhi. Likewise Excel files will display correctly. "
Not my experience. Paper formats, printer drivers and default printer settings mess up Word documents even inside the company. And don't get me started on Excel's braindead decisions on auto formatting data, the crazy insistence to use US notations in some of the autoformat cases even when the locale is different, the f'ing stupid idea to translate the macro names so I have a hard time to recall the correct names after the muppets changed them and I changed jobs, and some people work in an international environment... sorry.... where was I?
Ah, right. Word. It messes up page layout, then moves around the figures and tables, loses the captions (because even if you create them from the context menu they are not stuck together). Not sure if Libreoffice does the same thing, for documents with figures, tables and maths I prefer not to use this type of programs (word, Star Office, libreoffice, whatever).
If it's any "consolation", tables are pretty flaky in LibreOffice too.
WP is Devil's Spawn, period.
Anyway, 90% of my text processing requirements are technical documentation with a lot of maths, so I use LaTeX. Tables in Latex are a giant pain, but damn, they look right. And they look right everywhere .
Produce a word document and you know it will look just the same in Tokyo, belgrade or New Delhi. Likewise Excel files will display correctly. OO/LO does an excellent job,
Produce a PDF maybe...
It's all about the fonts. Of course Suzy found this really neat font, that looks stunning 'Whispering Forest and used it in the slide template on the pp deck. "Your email must have messed it up in transit", "It must be the TV your are presenting on, it's just fine here"
Use the corefonts for everything and this will generally be true.
Hmm. As an old school techie, with much the same history as you, I don’t see it that way.
Firstly, I dispute that Apple is looking over your shoulder on the Mac. On iPhone and iPad, sure, they keep a tight rein on everything you do (albeit that they still aren’t spying on you), but on the Mac - and even on the M1 - you can do pretty much anything you want software wise (I certainly do)
Secondly, and don’t get me wrong because I love Linux and I have more Linux machines than anything else - even if my daily desktop driver is MacOS, Linux does not have a great desktop experience. I don’t think it ever will. To have a great desktop experience requires great consistency and great consistency requires an iron grip on the platform with rigidly enforced standards. This is antithesis to Linux and would take away from Linux one of its most compelling features - it’s freedom.
Linux has some really nice desktop interfaces (and some bloody horrible ones - but that choice is a good thing), but applications written for one UI (KDE or Gnome for example) don’t necessarily play well on a different UI. And that’s before we get into any conversations about individual application interface design choices (and the lack of enforced guidelines).
For example, I like OpenOffice and I like KDE. OpenOffice does not look like it belongs on KDE. I like the JetBrains suite of tools, and I like their UIs - but they don’t look like they’d be at home anywhere other than on an imaginary JetBrains OS. And Gimp is just ugly (to my eyes).
Until Linux can present a consistent face to users then the day of Linux on the desktop for everyone will never come.
I agree with your comments about the general ugliness and inconsistency of Linux desktops (plural). The penguins will tell you to try another desktop rather than admit one of the key problems with Linux on the desktop.
-> And Gimp is just ugly
It is certainly one of the ugliest apps out there.
"The appearance of applications shouldn’t clash with each other or with the desktop UI."
I'd suggest consistency of function is more important than consistency of appearance. You're never going to get consistency of appearance with, say cross-platform applications. Either they present one appearance on multiple platforms and get slated for not looking native or they're made to look native on their platforms and then there will be complaints about them not looking like the tutorials.
The worse problems are in functional design. There would always be the occasional individual developer or small company going off at a complete tangent and usually producing something really awful, very likely because they wanted to show how different they could be. But the mainstream started off with the old character based CUA and evolved interfaces which were consistent in at least general approach even if their cosmetic appearance varied slightly from one vendor to another. Now we seem to have all manor of variations. Ribbons, flat design, minimalism achieved by removing functionality, or at least hiding it. We have iconography that looks like it was designed in crayon by a three-year-old with no artistic inclinations or a Babylonian making an attempt to draw hieroglyphics with a cuneiform tool set. The best you might hope for is consistency in the current release of a vendor's product line as each team of designers tries to look cooler than their rivals.
Yep, the inconsistency of visual styling across applications does affect learning curve and ease of use. That's not a "linux" thing per-se, more of a GTK / GUI toolkit problem.
And then when you have 20-odd different GUI front ends; developers working for nothing realistically are not going to go to the trouble of porting everything to every option.
Throw into that mix a whole bunch of crap applications that don't work and you have a problem. Though Windows Store is perhaps a worse example of a festering hole of crap applications Ubuntu or RedHat repos.
Still; for all the "difficulties" associated with a linux GUI, the underlying system being crapware free is generally a good thing. Especially for anyone that considers themselves more than just a consumer. And even then, as a gamer; slap a copy of steam on distro of choice and off you go. Most of the rest of the interface is irrelevant. Proton isn't 100% yet, but it's not half bad especially for newer titles.
I haven’t been able to get Proton to work at all in my (admittedly limited) testing with Kubuntu. I’m sure if I gave it some thought I could get it to work but that’s the point isn’t it?
I know this stuff, I like this stuff, I enjoy this problem solving. Until it ‘just works’ for everyone then this OS isn’t suitable for everyone to use as their main, and probably only, platform. It’s great for aficionados and pretty hopeless for everyone else.
Linus Tech Tips came to a similar conclusion recently.
I'm very much in the same camp as Steven. After cutting my Unix teeth on HP-UX in the early 90s, I've run a Linux distribution as the basis of my working and home environments since then. Most of the software development work that I do has to be on Windows, but that's always run as a virtual machine and Linux provides a rock-solid foundation on which to run those virtual machines.
I have been a big fan of Linux Mint over the years, but have recently switched away from Mint to use Debian instead. The reason for this is the reliance on the Ubuntu distribution. I'm not a fan of Canonical's proprietary "snap" packaging solution, or the way it gets installed behind your back if you install Chromium. (Which led to the Mint team's wise decision to drop snap from Mint.) I'd noticed a set of scrips called "ubuntu-advantage-tools" running on Mint and wanted to remove them. However, the ubuntu-advantage-tools package is a dependency of a core package "ubuntu-minimal", which makes it hard to remove. The fact that Canonical are using package dependencies to force the inclusion of Ubuntu-specific code which calls home daily to Canonical's servers and is deliberately made hard to remove was the straw which broke the camel's back.
So now I'm running Debian Bullseye on my machines and liking it very much. Basing Linux Mint on Ubuntu is becoming a liability for Mint and removing all dependencies on Ubuntu would be the best thing they could do!
Maybe that's whey the've also got Linux Mint Debian Edition. It's now on version 5, so hardly a new thing.
That said, I moved from LMDE to Debian 11 as I prefer things to be the way I want them to be, and as I've used Debian on servers for the past 2 decades it seemed to be the best use of my hard won experience.
Yes, I also have Windows in a VM to use my old Epson photo scanner, its rather good software (which SANE isn't) and paid version of Acrobat XI, but that's all. The rest is native Linux, with a smattering of Crossover Office for a few windows-only programs that I prefer to use.
IMO much easier than what Windows has become, and MO is the most important thing to me. The rest of you can do as you please, as I'm sure you will. Carry on.
But, if all you need is basic image manipulation, Gimp will serve you well and it's also free.
My idea of simple image manipulation is paste in a screenshot and crop a section to put in an email, doc or to print. Perhaps draw a red circle round something I want to highlight. I can do those in paint in less time than it takes Gimp to fire up. Gimp is far too complex for simple crap little jobs like that, which of the zillion selection options was it I need again?
I have tried about a dozen alternative graphics programs as I use Mint at home exclusively but I am yet to find a graphics program as simple and effective as mspaint. When I want Gimp I'll fire up Gimp. 99% of the time I don't.
Agreed on greenshot (work is still on windows). Great for those online training death-by-powerpoint sessions where they won't give you the slides & expect you to write everything down for the test at the end.
Only minor grumble is I always get confused by the auto number setting when I need to do the inevitable re-sync.
I had the same problem a while back - so I looked around and installed both Pinta and Krita for comparison sake and ended up using Pinta for the task at hand simply because it looked simpler at first cursory glance.
But then again, I haven't touched either of them since - since I normally don't do graphics stuff :)
Have you tried either of them?
"... paste in a screenshot and crop a section to put in an email, doc or to print. Perhaps draw a red circle round something I want to highlight."
I just did a bunch of almost exactly those in Paint yesterday (I prefer orange circles). But Paint is only good because Microsoft hasn't broken it yet. As I remember the early Paint, it was pretty limited. MS improved it over time until it was actually pretty good at what it did -- which wasn't everything. More recently MS have been disimproving it.
I want Miracast.
I want bluetooth with HFA/HFP so I can use my laptop to make voip calls.
And I want them - like Windows - out of the box just working.
More to the point, so do my 50 or so users. And I am not pissing around to try and create a custom distro for that.
And that's despite me running Mint at home for 5 years.
You're 'out of the box' means out of the box the pre-built system was delivered in, for which the manufacturer has done all of the hard work making sure all of the drivers are installed.
If you were to start from a bare machine, and Windows install media, then I suspect that you might have a different experience.
A few years ago, I installed Windows 7 from Microsoft media on a (then) contemporary system (it was a built from components gaming rig for one of my kids). From the Windows media, the network adapter would not work to allow it to access the online driver repositories!
Now the motherboard did come with a drivers CD (remember those), which did actually contain the correct drivers, but it was an extra step that I did not have to do when using a live Ubuntu distribution on a USB key on the same system.
The problem is the identification of the drivers. Windows does not have generic device drivers for the underlying chipset of an adapter, and needs to match vendor and model strings, whereas Linux generally just looks at the chipset on the adapter, and uses a generic driver. So Windows may already have a perfectly functional driver for some hardware, it just does not know to use it.
Things have changed a bit since then. I have never done a Windows 8 install of any type, but I have done several Windows 10 installs from Microsoft media. At least the network worked, although I did have some problems with unidentified devices on a HP laptop that took some time to sort out (most, at least - there is one device that comes up that I don't even know what it is, let alone what driver to use. It was originally a Windows 7 system, which HP don't provide all of the drivers for Windows 10).
Sorry, a bit late coming back on this. On your recent installs, was the first thing that the system did to go out to the Windows device driver repository to fetch the drivers for devices that weren't on the install media? I'll bet it was (I believe that it comes up with a message box "Searching for drivers", which is after the network is configured).
And was it Microsoft who wrote those drivers, or were the drivers inserted into the driver repository by the hardware manufacturer?
I think that Microsoft added a policy a few years back so that in order to get the full Microsoft driver signing that allows a device to be used in Windows, the product developer has to make the driver available to be installed in the repository. If the manufacturer doesn't, the driver will not get signed, and would not be usable without jumping through hoops.
So, was it Microsoft who provided the driver?
No. It was the device manufacturer. So it's not unreasonable to expect them to do it for Linux as well, and it is the fact that they don't that prevents the device from working in Linux, not any deficiency in the Linux community as a whole.
Problem: What's the incentive for a manufacturer spend time (i.e., money) porting or writing a driver that will work with Linux? The user base is just too small.
Of course, there is a solution: an industry-standard OS-Hardware interface, which would make any driver work with any OS. Which is unlikely. (No points for detecting sarcasm).
First, Linux is far more secure than Windows – or macOS for that matter.
Given the number of known exploits over the years, this is crap. For years, most exploits have been based on getting the user to install something and this is just as easy in Linux as it is in any other system.
Most people can probably use any of the modern distros but that is far from being "the best desktop".
...to install something and this is just as easy in Linux as it is in any other system.
Is it? Is it really?
A few weeks ago I needed to debug some OpenGL code on Linux. So, I head over to the Nvidia website, log in, and find the Nsight Graphics download page. (Yes, I could use RenderDoc - I am more familiar with Nsight.)
It comes as a .deb file for Ubuntu.
I download it, and double click it...
Something called Software opens and gives me the option to install it. I click that button and wait. After a while that button changes to a red Remove button.
Great, I think. It's installed and ready to use.
I click the Applications button in the bottom left corner, and look for Nsight Graphics.
It's not there.
I blink.
It persists in its absence.
I look in Software again. It's still saying it's installed and I have the option to remove it. (But no option to run it or even open the install location, because those would, apparently, be too convenient.)
I click the back button to return to the software list.
It's not listed.
In fact, the only way I can persuade Software to acknowledge its existence is to double click the installer again, at which point it tells me it's already installed, but if I like, I can remove it.
There's nothing on the desktop. Nothing in my home folder.
To this day I have not worked out where it was actually installed, or how to start it. (To be fair, I gave up pretty quickly and just debugged the problem using our OpenGL renderer on Windows with Nsight, but... I really shouldn't have needed to do that.)
In my experience, any claim that anything is as easy on Linux as any other system seldom holds to be true.
Although to be fair, you did just mention installing software. Nothing about actually being able to run it afterwards.
Nope. What actually happens, is that the "Linux community" will curse NVidia for distributing shitty can't-be-arsed drivers for Linux. Then they'll go out of their way to help you find the magic version+settings voodoo which might kind-of-almost-work-most-of-the-time on your setup. At least until the next firmware update breaks it. Then they'll curse NVidia again because... NVidia. (Sigh, been there, done that.)
To be fair, this is 100% NVidia's fault.
I totally agree. To a point.
Apparently there are three different locations where .desktop files (I read up on how the Applications list is supposed to work) can be located on Ubuntu.
Why three? (Install for everyone, install for the current user, ...? Install for no-one, perhaps? ;)
And why does one of them not exist on my machine? (Could it be that the installer tried to put the .desktop file in the missing location and then just pretended everything was fine even though it wasn't? That wouldn't be Nvidia's fault.)
Where are you getting the third? /usr/share/applications is where all apps (installed system-wide) should put it. Anything in $HOME is not for package install to write, ever.
Did you mean /usr/local/share? /usr/local/ is kind of a relic that's rarely used. It's supposed to be for apps installed without consulting the package manager, I think? Like local builds.
The relevant spec is https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
You can read up on all the folders in https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
The third was ~/.local/applications or something like that. I saw it mentioned in a StackOverflow post explaining how things worked. (Not near a computer right now, so I can't find the link, or check which one was missing on my machine.)
It could be legacy or non-standard, but the comment had received quite a few votes, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least one person took its advice.
Yeah, .local is for user-specific stuff. (All in the spec!) However, this is a deb package that is installed as root, so it shouldn't ever never ever touch any user's home dir. What if you are installing it for another user? What if a new user is added?
StackOverflow propagating misleading information is extremely normal. Always take it with a grain of salt, especially when you don't know enough to judge if the information sounds fishy.
>> ...to install something and this is just as easy in Linux as it is in any other system.
> Is it? Is it really?
You tried to disagree, but your own experience of downloading and double-clicking a .deb was more agreeing than disagreeing. Without question you installed _something_. It seems you just don't know where it is or how to run it. It didn't work for you in much the same way that malware wouldn't work for a phishing victim.
...easy in Linux as it is in any other system
The average fraudster seems to work as if Windows is the only operating system. They don't even seem to know about Macs. They seem to be able to find out your Windows by asking questions like "what shape is the picture at the bottom left corner of your screen?" or trying to get them to a command prompt.
When people are on a Mac, Linux or even Chromebook, it goes wrong for them. This is not me saying that we should all drop windows. I just think it would be better if it was less of a monoculture.
I’d argue that even if Linux *were* difficult to use, Microsoft are steadily dismantling that argument by taking a brilliant OS (Windows 7) and gradually making a hash of it (8, 10 and now 11) to the point that a tipping point is probably imminent where learning a new Linux environment is as difficult.
Why did Dell discontinue Linux in the UK? Because there were not enough Linux customers!
Penguins have complained for years and years that nobody offers Linux laptops or desktops, so people use Windows. When a company offers Linux desktop about 5 people buy them.
Yes, but don't forget that the bundled crapware makes the hardware cheaper for the end user. Why pay more for the Linux version when it's so easy to reformat the drive with whatever flavour distro you want? The fact that most users put up with the bloat instead of reinstalling windows on arrival should tell us techies something.
Most end users don't care about computers. As long as the "blue e" connects to the internet then all is well in their world. I have long since stopped trying to convince them otherwise.
I have listened to a number of Linux podcasts over the years, and learned from the European ones about several apparently outstanding PC makers that install Linux exclusively on their systems. I'm sorry I can't name names, I have forgotten who these companies are, but I'm sure they're still out there.
Of course, living in the US, I was never able to try any of these out, and shipping to the US was not offered.
So, I'm prepared to think that Dell may simply have surrendered to the competition in the UK when they discontinued their Linux systems...
Any Linux-enabled Dell I've looked is way above my budget and AFAICR a poxy small screen job. The current laptop, as near as it gets to be suitable for ageing eyes, came sans-OS from PC-Specialist. In fact they seem to build them with the Windows in the form of an installer but not installed, IYSWIM but installing it would presumably cost money so you still have to blow it away.
Look, I don't care what OS anyone prefers to use. I really don't. You can use Linux, Windows, BSD, or something you wrote yourself if that's what serves your needs. Linux does not serve my needs.
Does this mean I think Linux is somehow "bad?" Not at all. It just means that Windows, for me, is the best choice. Complaining about Windows (or Microsoft) isn't an argument for using something that will not run the software I need nor support the hardware I use.
Not every desktop user is an 82-year-old grandmother who only browses the web. Some of us use our computers for far more than that, and for the vast majority of us, Windows serves our needs just fine. Use Linux if it does what you need, absolutely, and be so kind as to stop trying to make the rest of us feel inferior. Please?
Hear hear! And imagine if one ‘side’ or the other won the ‘war’, and we ended up with a computing monoculture - as almost happened in the late nineties with Windows. How did that work out? Badly - with Windows ME, that’s how.
Let’s celebrate the diversity (which is invariably a good thing), and enjoy a variety of operating systems (even if, ultimately, we might stay on the one that we’re already familiar with). We’re human - we’re not clones, and each of us has a different lifestyle and a different use-case - so isn’t it great that we have a choice of systems to fulfil those different needs?
And all the arguments about which OS and which software are really all one step removed in any case.
What is it that's the really important thing? It's your data, whether that be a formatted document, a spreadsheet, a database, a bitmap image, a vector image, a 3D object, audio, video, whatever.
It all started going wrong when certain companies started wrapping people's data in their own secret proprietary formats, and needing their own special programs to work with them. What we need are standardised and open data formats and then any software development team can write tools to work with the data. The reality is also that, while open source and collaborative development have brought us many things, and are a literal gift for less well-off people or (perhaps especially) less well-off parts of the world, anything big or complex does either need a commercial version, or a healthy stream of donations, or generous business, charitable, or even governmental, backers helping to cover the costs of development.
It is becoming increasingly common for software to be ported to multiple platforms (including some commercial software, particularly scientific software), thanks to various toolkits (or, perhaps rather worse, 'thanks' to running in a mutated embedded web browser environment), and with the computing world constantly changing, I don't think I would be developing any new software application that tied itself too strongly to Windows that would make it harder to make available on multiple platforms now or later (and although at present, that might be mostly unix-like elsewhere, even that might not always be the case…).
That feels just a tiny bit disingenuous. You stress that people should use whichever OS works for them (totally agree). You say that Windows works better for you (fine, Linux works better for me). Then you have a gratuitous pop at Linux users for "making you feel inferior".
What's that all about? I happen to be a Linux user, but I also happen to agree with you about OSes. Am I making you feel inferior? I genuinely hope I'm not. On this forum alone there seem to be at least as many Windows zealots busting a gut to make Linux users "feel inferior". Or something.
It's childish. Can we just stop it?
Linux didn't need to get better when Windows and macOS are getting worse at a much faster rate.
No matter how terrible the Linux/BSD desktop is (and I must admit, I am unfortunately fairly underwhelmed), there is zero other choice if Windows and macOS are becoming cloud only, DRM, advertising, privacy leaking monstrosities (By consumer design!).
So I highly recommend looking towards Linux, not because it is great, not because anyone is a fan but because it will be the (fairly disappointing) future!
I ran a Linux desktop for 10 years, ironically while managing Windows networks for a living.
I stayed with Windows for 7, 8 (yep, even 8) and now 10.
And I look at 10 and what 11 is becoming and am seriously considering Linux again.
The only real reason I've found to stay on Windows is games. And Steam Deck / Proton are currently proving what I've known all along - Linux can run "Windows-only" games faster than Windows can, and in a much simpler fashion and without being weighed down with a ton of legacy junk just to run a game. We just finally have the tools and hardware to prove it, and that's coming from someone who's owned copies of Crossover Office for as long as it's existed.
My next desktop "move" (which doesn't happen often in my personal life) will likely be to Linux again, and then virtualising Windows, the flip of what I currently do and harking back to the past.
I actually used to use Slackware as my desktop and Ubuntu on servers... because of the reasons hinted at in this article... Slackware does exactly what I damn well tell it, but Ubuntu just made it nice and quick to get something secure and working when you want headless setups.
Windows 11 is literally pushing me off Windows, and Steam Deck / Proton are pulling me towards Linux again.
I'm very much the same.
My personal PC (built myself), is mainly there for gaming and WWW, with occasional light use of docs and spreadsheets.
I already use Libre Office for most office use. I do have a licenced Visio (standalone), but it's rarely used, and I've been playing with yED as a potential replacement (testing on Windows), which seems to cover most of my uses cases, and also has a native Linux version.
I've been watching my Steam news feeds, for my games, and it's been a steady stream of Windows only titles announcing things like 'Now optimised for Steam Deck' etc. Seems most games (that I play) just worked anyway under Proton, with many of the Deck issues being more around UI scaling for the small screen, or control issues, both of which are specific to the Steam Deck, so wouldn't impact my desktop use case.
I've used Linux on and off for years, both personally and professionally. I currently have a Linux micro server acting as a NAS, backup, media streamer etc. Plus a Pihole, so it's not like I'm not used to Linux itself, including SSH and the command prompt (did a lot of AIX UNIX back in the day).
My main worry would be games that insist on working via other launchers, such as EA/Origin, or Ubisoft titles, but I don't buy these often, and typically play them till completed. (I don't do mutiplayer on PC)
Might go dual boot for a while, so I've at least got my current Windows 10 as a fall back!
Other than the fact that it won’t run on my HP Z800 (which I’m not going to replace, because I don’t use Windows enough for it to be worth it), what’s wrong with Windows 11? Genuine question - why is it in some way ‘worse’ than Windows 10? (Not comparing it to Linux or macOS - just a Windows to Windows comparison)
If their use case is gaming, such as the OP, then Windows 11 has shown a marked decrease in performance over Windows 10 in gaming benchmarks. Seems Windows 11 has more going on in the background that 10, and it competes for the same resources.
11 has also been shown to be very inconsistent, where one bench run will be beyond margin of error with the next (typically benchmarking will involve multiple runs of the same bench, to get consistency, and rule out outliers etc).
Windows 11 also broke a lot of games on launch, this mostly seemed to be around breaking DRM and/or anti-cheat systems, especially in competitive titles. This seems to have been mostly fixed now, but some older titles, that are no longer supported, still appear dead, as the games themselves needed patching to fix.
As such, the general recommendation for someone primarily or only, using Windows for gaming, is to not upgrade to 11, at least not yet.
it sounds like my background is similar in terms of experience to the author. I have been using Linux since kernel version 0.21 - before there was a desktop and therefore probably longer than the author. In all that time, I've seen article after article saying Linux is easy. It may be true now but 25 years of "Linux is easy" when it wasn't has put anyone who cares (which is not many people) off. Linux supporters are the boys who cried wolf and now, no-one will listen. The other big thing is software. No-one (or almost no-one) wants to dig around for a third rate alternative to the software they've grown used to.
Linux has shot its bolt and missed as far as the desktop goes. Linux has taken over the server world but non-techies are not interested in learning anything new and nor are they taught to use Linux at school (or work or home) so they won't. I am very familiar with it but I have given up mainly due to the lack of software support and now I'm Mac all the way (although I do still use Linux for specific tasks on a regular basis).
Linux may genuinely be easy now, but it's too late.
You have an excellent point about teaching in schools.
To an average user, the computer is the desktop and apps. They don't care about the OS. So here the multiplicity of *nix desktops is a large impediment.
If you're going to teach kids in the classroom, which desktop/set of apps are you going to present - a selection of distro/desktop/apps that the local teacher likes (which may be good of course), but which may be a combo never seen again by the kids, or the MS pile that they will see everywhere?
The vast number of desktops is an advantage for Linux users, I think, rather than a pain.
The point is that Linux users aren’t general users - for whom the sheer amount of choice is a disadvantage.
I don’t think that Linux will ever be for the common man, nor should it try to be. It’s found its evolutionary niche - so why compromise by becoming easier for the average user, and in doing so ruin itself for all the users who love it for what it is?
"If you're going to teach kids in the classroom, which desktop/set of apps are you going to present - a selection of distro/desktop/apps that the local teacher likes (which may be good of course), but which may be a combo never seen again by the kids, or the MS pile that they will see everywhere?"
A combo never seen again is very likely to describe how that particular version of Microsoft Orifice (and Windows itself) compares to whatever the future-current version of Orifice has mutated itself into by the time those kids have left school…
In fact, that process is probably quite far progressed already: web apps like Google Docs, or Office 365 (or possibly even Collabora Office + Nexctloud), and more lightweight phone/tablet apps are already increasingly commonplace, perhaps there will be much less usage of 'traditional' desktop apps (for some use cases). There really isn't much point in a school teaching more than general WIMP desktop principles and the very basics of generalised program use (and how to RTFM or search for help), as how programs work will (probably) always continue to evolve (for better or for worse).
"Teach concepts, not tools."
If you're going to teach kids in the classroom, which desktop/set of apps are you going to present - a selection of distro/desktop/apps that the local teacher likes (which may be good of course), but which may be a combo never seen again by the kids, or the MS pile that they will see everywhere?
Training people to use the Microsoft ecosystem is not education. Education is about teaching the underlying principles, which might be achieved by showing multiple different examples of a (desktop) GUI, a file manager, a text editor (e.g. Notepad, vi, sed), layout processor (e.g. Pagemaker, TeX, Word, LibreOffice, troff), scripting (Powershell, bash, ECMAscript), and so on. You then go on to work out what might be the best tool to achieve your objectives, and/or meets your use case, looking at benefits and disadvantages.
95% of people will still go on to use Microsoft Windows and software for that platform, but the 5% are worth nurturing.
No-one (or almost no-one) wants to dig around for a third rate alternative to the software they've grown used to.
Also: no one wants to learn to use a first rate alternative to the third rate software that they've grown used to.
Unlike many here most people have zero interest in software, many stare blankly at you when you ask them which web browser they use - it is "the Internet", they are unaware that there is a program that they use to get there.
They buy a PC/laptop and just accept whatever it comes with to use the Internet. Everything else (eg view an image, open a document) just happens - they do not think that programs are involved, even less that there might be a choice as to which program to use.
We are the strange ones: those who think about such things.
(Speaking as someone who got into Unix 40 years ago and now just uses Linux)
I suppose Linux (Mint user now, remember downloading disk images from tsx-11.mit.edu) will always play second fiddle to Windows (and Apple).
However, there is not a chance in Hell that I will ever run Windows on my personal machine. MS seems to be headed towards wanting complete control over your (their?) machine with a pay-to-play subscription model, with advertising and telemetry, and I'm not going there. Linux allows me to do most all of what I want to do on a PC (or laptop, I'm typing this on a Dell Latitude 7480, vintage 2017, running Mint 20.2) with no Big Brother deciding when the UI and/or functioning is going to change, or offering me discounts on whatever.
Word and Excel compatibility is still an issue, but from painful experience, it's also an issue on corporate installations of Windows...and the O365 versions of Word and Excel are painfully crippled versions of the local apps.Trying to work with multiple editors on a Sharepoint document, with everyone using a different version of Word is...frustrating (and very...very...VERY slow)
I don't think Linux is better than Windows, just horses for courses. If you require the latest Word, Sharepoint, shared calendars (as someone above pointed out), it's got to be Windows. If you don't, Linux is an excelent option. If you have money to burn, go with Apple (like the rest of my family does). But, I like Linux.
Bollocks, mail merge in LibreOffice is a right pain compared to MS Office, in fact most Linux alternative programs have some quirk or another.
I recently bought a cheap laptop (a HP 6710b running XP) for my hi-fi (it's got a 500GB HDD, a large screen and a disc drive, it was also a lot cheaper than a HDD based media player, hi-fi CD player and visualiser). I initially felt Linux would be ideal but the Winamp alternatives in Linux may support Winamp skins but I use the Winamp classic skin and have done since day one (about 1999 IIRC) the library feature is invaluable. One of the Winamp alternatives I used claimed to have a library but really just dumped all my files in the playlist.
The closest I found with a decent library setup was Quod Libet but it didn't support visualisations and so after a few hours of testing all sorts of media players I gave in and used XP and Winamp.
Gimp is another example "it can do what Photoshop can do" is trotted out occasionally but in reality it's a mess of convoluted processes that in Photoshop are easy and intuitive and I've not been trained in either so it's not a case of being "used to" Photoshop.
I use LibreOffice but If I did serious office work , like mail merging, i'd pay for MS Office though I mostly use it for spreadsheets. I'[ve often said that over 905 of the text documents i've created could've been done in WordPad and it's true, most could be done there. In fact it probably extends t most people.
The only 2 open source programs that I love are Scribus and Inkscape, I love using them and they feel much better to use than Microsoft Publisher and Gimp/Adobe Illustrator but as both are available for Windows these are not reason enough to use Linux for day to day desktop use.
I like Linux and for servers it's great but for the desktop it's a solution looking for a problem. I used to recommend Linux to people when I was younger but I got fed up with saying "Well it's not X, it's a bit like X but free." Because often people would come back to me and ask how they did something in their FOSS program i'd recommended and find out that it was either not there at all or available in a separate program and have to spend time learning about this obscure feature in a paid for program that is done in a couple of clicks but in a Linux program is a series of hoops that includes compiling from source.
What is it with the FOSS community being allergic to compiled binaries?
-> I used claimed to have a library but really just dumped all my files in the playlist.
What is wrong with using vim, sed, and grep to make your own playlists? Are those playlists in an open format?
-> so after a few hours of testing
A few hours wasting your life on this nonsense rather than getting things done.
-> Gimp ... it's a mess
A summary.
-> I like Linux and for servers it's great but for the desktop it's a solution looking for a problem.
Here I disagree. Linux on the desktop is like 8,000 solutions to a problem. Instead of making one or two good solutions, there are umpteen different and incompatible solutions. And none of those solutions are complete solutions. Instead they are partial solutions with caveats.
The FOSS community is not allergic to compiled binaries. It's just that it is often not the place of the writers to compile for all of the distro's out there (unfortunately Linux is not a compile once, run anywhere platform, at least not until Snaps or Flatpak become more mainstream).
The way it works is that if the software is accepted to be useful, it will be picked up and packaged by the distro repository maintainers.
Where a piece of software is too niche or new to be noticed by the distro maintainers, or possibly has fallen out of grace or is no longer maintained by the package owner, then it may be that the only way to get the software is from the source, but this is the nature of many pieces of software, regardless of the underlying OS.
I'm actually quite surprised Winamp is not in the category of discarded software. What does selling the original Winamp skin as an NFT actually mean?
I like Grip as a CD ripper, but it's fallen out of the distro repositories now, but I can and do download the source, and compile it, so I can still use it.
While I recognise that your post is made with helpful intentions I will have to pick it apart a bit.
-> The FOSS community is not allergic to compiled binaries.
Some people definitely are. And they have loud voices.
-> not until Snaps or Flatpak become more mainstream
Don't forget AppImage. Why can the Linux so-called community just make one of these frickin' things? Have the Linux so-called community not learned the lesson? The only reason for these Snaps or Flatpaks is to get round problems with the built in package managers like yum and dpkg and several other not-very-good package managers. So what do they do? Instead of making one universal solution they make multiple new ways. Duplication of effort to the same goal.
Perhaps while we're about it we could persuade Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon to get their shit together and provide a single primary upstream source for their fragmented software ecosystems. What could possibly go wrong?
It is not the distribution managers that are the problem that Snap, Flatpak and Appimage are trying to fix, it's the problem of what you might call DLL Hell.
Different distros provide different sets of dynamically linked libraries. By letting the distro maintainer package the software, they can resolve the issues of different versions of libraries for a particular release of a Linux.
What the distro neutral packaging formats put all of the required libraries in the package, making the method incredibility inefficient both on disk space and in memory use.
It would be better if the packages were statically linked, rather than packaged as Snaps et. al. It would actually be more efficient.
The alternative is for all distros to commit to having the same versions of all of the libraries. But then that would mean that that there would effectively only be one distro.
I understand what you're trying to say, and I effectively agree with you that we need a dominant distro, but it can't happen. As I said on another post, choice is both Linux's biggest strength and it's weakness at the same time. Leaving all the software as FOSS allows people to make different versions, and thus we have the problem all over again.
I've previously found LibreOffice's spreadsheet to be slow compared to Excel when handling large amounts of data. Excel is just better.
LibreOffice is pretty good for the resources that have gone into it. But MS have had a large number of developers working on Office for decades, and it shows.
> What is it with the FOSS community being allergic to compiled binaries?
Mm b'duh, what? All the software on my FOSS Linux system is compiled binaries. (Oh, alright, except for some stuff I wrote myself.)
Hint: FOSS means that the source is available if you want it - not that it's only available as source. But of course you knew that.
To be fair, I've just had to compile a driver for a WiFi PCI card - the Realtek 8821CE - from source.
Luckily, Ubuntu kindly packaged it up as a .deb file, so it wasn't particularly onerous.
Disabling 'Secure Boot' so I could install it, however...
Linux Mint offers an easy to install OS when default options are accepted.
Recently, I was obliged to go through the installation process for MS Windows 10 home edition. This was because although I opted not to buy Windows it was necessary for the laptop vendor to set Windows up for pre-sale testing. I could have installed Mint directly but wanted to give the laptop a run under Windows to check basic operability; the vendor does not guarantee Linux compatibility although I have not have trouble in the past.
Windows setup was excruciatingly horrible. It was simple enough but long-winded and necessitated sharing (false) personal information with MS. There was a step where choice was required about advertising trackers: personalised or pot luck. Eventually reboot stage was reached; if I recollect correctly, at least twice plus security updates. During the process I was begged to allow immediate "free" update to Windows 11.
Once logged-in, I was exhorted to take out an MS Office subscription. I had option of a personal licence or a family licence: neither cheap. The GUI was a complicated clutter of garish icons and messages. The entirety was compatible with the notion of Windows 10 home edition being aimed primarily as an entertainment and shopping centre enabling contact with Microsoft's "trusted partners"; I won't speculate upon whether MS "trusted partners" merit trust by other than MS itself.
To give the new laptop a run at video rendering I opened Edge and linked to YouTube. When running a randomly chosen piece of popular crap presented on the opening page a message popped up inviting me to install a free add-on for subduing adverts and sponsorship messages. I assented and the add-on worked. I was puzzled by MS endorsing this type of tool.
Running a second video led to the pop-up returning and telling me I had only a couple more free uses of the add-on before having to take out a subscription. Following a link led to a webpage purporting to be an independent company, perhaps a "trusted partner". One year subscription to best of my recollection was in excess of £90. In other words I was being offered a slightly discounted equivalent to "YouTube Premium" for which monthly subscription of £11.99 is demanded.
My conclusion was that MS, YouTube, and an intermediary were in cahoots to extract money from naive users of Windows. Readers here are likely to be aware that YouTube add-blocking is attainable using Mozilla Firefox add-ons or even better by deploying "FreeTube" which in addition enhances privacy.
Then there is the Microsoft Store to consider, but enough is enough.
So. the experience offered by MS Windows 10/11 home edition is best summed up as tacky.
However, Microsoft cleverly crafts its home-use products to appeal to the interests and tastes of what market research deems the average home-user. Clearly, MS believes these users are flattered by personalised advertisements, are enthusiastic about "special offers", and sanguine about parting with modest sums of money, particularly on monthly basis.
For comparison it would be interesting to obtain market demographics of people who install widely known flavours of Linux.
".... I mean Windows has its own day of the month – Patch Tuesday – just for fixes"
That's because that was requested by large corporations well over a decade ago, so scheduling change controls didn't become a daily event. So much so, multiple other software companies roll theirs on EXACTLY the same day.
I find ALL OS have some great features, but also most have some utterly stupid ones as well.
The is NO single best OS. The one that is the best is the one that works for you.
It's been a while since I looked, but the thing that kept me off Linux last time I did was Quicken. I want my decades of data available, but I don't want to pay a monthly fee, which is where Intuit is pushing everyone now. I'm pretty sure I'm running Quicken 2011, the latest version you could actually "buy" instead of rent. I don't use any of the online import and bill pay features, just track my spending and reconcile statements manually. I don't need my data to be in the cloud.
For me Linux desktop basically work very well. Thus, I agree with the author.
However, there is no such a thing as "The Linux Desktop". You have a choice of different solutions that deviate from each other quite much. I guess nobody we just looks at the GUI would guess from e.g. Gnome Desktop and XFCE that they have the same OS behind the frontend.
This balkanization is a blocker for both beginners and organizations who think about migration to Linux desktops.
Don't know what model of dongle you have, but the last time I used my Huawai Three USB dongle, I plugged it in and it worked. But it worked silently.
You have to open the Network Manager and enable "Mobile Broadband", or at least that is what I had to do on Ubuntu. It was pretty seamless. It even knew the correct setup for the Three network.
In fact, I would say that it was easier than on Windows!
Have you tried usb-modeswitch ?
From the package description:
"Several new USB devices have their proprietary Windows drivers onboard,
especially WAN dongles. When plugged in for the first time, they act like
a flash storage and start installing the driver from there. If the driver
is already installed, the storage device vanishes and a new device, such
as an USB modem, shows up. This is called the "ZeroCD" feature.
On Debian, this is not needed, since the driver is included as a Linux
kernel module, such as "usbserial". However, the device still shows up as
"usb-storage" by default. usb-modeswitch solves that issue by sending the
command which actually performs the switching of the device from "usb-
storage" to "usbserial"."
Also, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuk1T5KQD4U for "Ed's Super Fix-it".
Very NSFW, but I've "been there" several times!!
B.
Excel is so deeply embedded into accounting systems that the core of any company IT estate must be Windows, for both workstations and servers. A lot of systems use Excel Add-Ins to bridge securely between Excel and the underlying SQL database, using the gatekeeping security settings of the accounting system to check the user's privileges for which data.
Even without such deep integration with an accounting system, too many functions exist only in Excel (subsequently copied by WPS Office, thankfully) and no-where in the brotherhood of the Open Document formats. Even where a function looks similar, the latter cripple it in ways which Excel does not.
And that is the real killer for the corporates. When they email a spreadsheet to an outside party, for processing, and receive the same spreadsheet back, the underlying mechanics must be congruent. If a non-Excel alternative decides, "Oh, this formula isn't allowed to work with linked workbooks! I'll destroy that formula and replace it with a constant!", then that is an instance of sabotage. What corporate would be foolish enough to take that risk?
And, guess what, Microsoft knows this. Which is why Excel will never likely come out for Linux. Because if it does, Microsoft will see its sales of MS Windows Server and MS 365 tank.
The Open Document Fraternity ought to wake up, but I get the impression they prefer to live the difference.
100% Excel is one of best software packages ever made, especially because of VBA programming. However, I literally just use it to write and run macros. Admittedly LibreOffice not as pretty or functional, but it loads faster and uses less RAM so for general use I use linux/LibreOffice. Never see that many corporates using VBA or even knowing it exists, so seems wasted money and increased vulnerability for them.. it's just they don't know any different.
I started playing with Linux OS's in 1990's. My current job is as a UNIX Engineer (fancy way of say high level System Admin in an automation environment).
I have played with a lot of Linux Releases on desktop, Laptop and VM's. I prefer RPM based, mostly because I deal with it in my job and my fingers know what to type without to much thought into it. With that said I do like UBUNTU and SUSE as well. Installing the OS's are very easy, configuring a desktop environment is not so easy. I prefer a KDE type desktop but they have moved to gnome desktops which I just find hard to deal with. Luckily my experience with and GOOGLE searches I was able to find a link that helped me configure the perfect version I needed.
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/rocky-linux-8-perfect-desktop.html
Even though that was designed for Rocky 8, I am sure it will work great for other Linux releases.
Interesting, but nothing as complicated as that. Something which allows the second user to log in to see any sound devices would be nice. Something which stops ALSA, Pulse and occasionally Jack fighting a grim war on my computer? Something which meant that my USB microphone worked every time, rather than at random intervals?
when you said:
"First, Linux is far more secure than Windows"
without evidence.
IMHO It's only more secure because it's user base is smaller so it's targeted less, fewer Muppets to download virus laden executables, and because intrusions can go noticed due to lack of standard antivirus.
Just look at the number of Android and embedded Linux exploits - systems that don't get updated, to see which systems are ultimately more secure.
No patch Tuesday for those.
Disclaimer: Regular Windows/Linux/MacOs user here - cut my teeth on Sun Solaris.
Technical merits is one thing, freedom is another.
The MS dictatorship made itself felt again with the release of Windows 11.
They implement changes nobody asked for, it feels like stepping in a new car where someone decided it was a good idea to replace the clutch pedal by a small joystick besides the interior light switch.
A choice for windows is a choice for no freedom, a choice to be subjected to random decisions made by people in Redmond a choice to pay money for a system that has backdoors for the authorities built into it.
Choosing Windows desktop is a choice to have no choice and live in the shadows of corporate dictatorship.
Choosing Linux opens the gate to all the alternatives human creativity has to offer, be it good or less good.
Choosing Linux reduces the endless flow of money into the coffers of Big-Tech, enabling more people to make a living with support.
Granted, Linux is a superior OS. Granted, there are Linux desktops and apps that will suffice for most daily tasks. But my use case is recording and editing multi-track audio, and even if I wanted to go with the audio apps available on Linux (much more limited than what's available on Windows), my audio hardware requires drivers that are simply not available for Linux at all. These drivers are finicky enough on native Windows, and I would be very reluctant to try to get them to work in a VM with acceptable latency.
I also use Illustrator and Photoshop quite a bit, and the Linux equivalents that I've tried seem to have a non-instinctive interface and steep learning curve. It may just be what I'm used to, but since Windows is basically trouble-free for me, there's just no incentive to put in the hours that I've already invested in the Adobe apps.
If/when the day comes that MS makes Windows absolutely too cumbersome and unworkable, I'll decide between Linux and Mac, but till then my current Windows 10 box is relatively friction-free.
Your post is a bit contradictory. You write that 'Granted, Linux is a superior OS', but then list the reasons why it isn't - lack of the audio apps you want, lack of drivers. That make Linux an inferior OS.
I do seem to recall YALD (Yet Another Linux Distribution) targeted towards sound apps but I can't remember what it was called.
Driver or software not available for Linux? Then ask the product developer for them.
What you are describing is not a deficiency in Linux, but a decision by the product developer to not provide support for Linux.
After all, if the drivers are so 'finicky' under Windows, they're unlikely to be provided by Microsoft.
You seem to be under the mistaken perception that the Open Source community owes you Linux equivalents to these packages.
Try telling Adobe that you are prepared to pay for the software on Linux, then when there is enough demand for it to make economic sense, they will. There is no intrinsic reason for functional software, even paid-for software, to be available for Linux, although you do have to be a bit careful about reuse of software and libraries published under the GPL.
These are not problems that the FOSS wlll solve, not unless you are prepared to contribute.
The same economic argument goes for Mac OS as well.
I've used mint with cinnamon for a few years now as my main os / desk top. The user experience has been fine.
But.
The brutal fact is that if you are not using 100% conventional hardware then you are in for a world of pain getting it to install
My 3g wan card only works if the wind is blowing in the right direction and my laser printer only works if I install virtual box.
I have no idea why.
It's all stuff that used to work fine under Windows.
You need to be an enthusiast or a zealot to deal with this stuff.
YMMV. I've installed Mint on about a dozen systems (laptops and PCs) over the last few years without problems. Linux is essential for my work, and I'm happy enough with it for extracurricular use. No zealotry required; I have been known to use other OSes. Windows 7 was pretty good.
Hell, sometimes shit Just Doesn't Work (TM). Especially where hardware is involved. Couple of years ago I bought a well-known brand DAW suite for my son's birthday (not cheap). It point-blank refused to play nice with his system (Windows 10). Seemed to be in some terminal battle with the sound card. Then with another sound card. After a month of hair-pulling to-and-fro with the vendor and the internet (all of it), got a refund. Clearly it worked just fine for most other users. Ended up installing a FOSS DAW suite - it worked just fine out of the box. Should I blame that on Windows 10? The software vendor? The sound card vendor? Bad karma? Who knows?
Most laser printers either have Linux drivers, or work with generic Postscript drivers. but they may not be installed as part of the base install.
There is one caveat. If it is a modern printer which works using IPP, then you may have to set it up as a locally connected IPP printer, rather than use named drivers. And in my view, driverless CUPS support is still maturing for IPP printers. I've had real problems setting up a directly connected printer on one system to be used remotely from another with recent versions of CUPS. It's almost as if the CUPS developers have deliberately ignored older modes of printing on Linux.
The CUPS process for IPP seems to still be requiring some work.
Not sure about the 3G. The ZTE, Huawai and Broadcom internal 3G systems I've used have all worked without problems on Ubuntu for me, but that's not to say that all hardware works.
Whilst entirely true, the only people who are reading this article are those who already use Linux. Most windows users know little about computing, have never heard of Linux and would never read an article on computing.
Since running windows on virtual box (specifically so I can use Excel and its VBA) I see zero reason to use Windows or mac as my main OS.
" the only people who are reading this article are those who already use Linux."
From the comentards, it seems there are plenty that are if not actively advocating Micro$oft, recognise its "universal" appeal &\or its simplicity of use in their environments or where a Linux equivalent does not exist or not easily implemented despite it's benefits.
I am happy with the status quo - a small and gradually growing number of Linux users, and a huge number of Window users.
I am equally happy with the knowledge that black hat hackers are doing it for the money and consider Linux users a bit too savvy and the system a bit too robust for it to be worth their time and effort to crank any ill-gotten gains out of it, especially when most of the world are merrily sitting in front of a Windows machine desperately trying to give their money/data away to any passing criminal.
I remember an old friend of the family who was a watch maker and repairer, who had a large collection of antique watches and other valuable trinkets. He was burgled and when the police visited they remarked that none of his priceless collection was stolen, despite them being in a not very secure safe, because next to it was the bundle of cash that did get stolen. They just went for the low hanging fruit. Which is why I am more than happy for Windows to carry on providing their excellent service in distracting criminals from bothering me on my trouble free Linux machine.
I got an Apple Macbook Air 11" from 2011 (i5) which is too slow for macos to be intersting, but it runs Ubunto Desktop 20.04 LTE without problems. What is intertsting is that the Apple TB1 GbE adaptor works without a flaw .. also it's nice to have an linux when the rest does not want to do what you want it to do.
Most Linux distros are still too buggy and too many Linux applications are either in alpha and beta state or a total mess when it comes to user interface and usability.
Also, it is inexusable that a simple kernel update distroys the default screen resolution and force it to something like 720 p.
Or how on earth can a Linux desktop be useful when some of the applications are not HiDPI aware, so you can't resize them to fit into the desktop? Take for example Fedora and its dnfdragora software manager.
Why is still happening that an application totally freezes your Linux desktop so you have to restart it by powering off your computer?
No thanks, MacOS is million times better than any Linux desktop.
Kernel updates are generally installed with other packages. It is not impossible, but it is unlikely, that it is the kernel update itself has caused the problem (although if you have kernel modules installed outside of the distribution repositories, they may only be compiled against one kernel version).
It is more likely that a binary driver downloaded with the kernel, but provided by the graphics manufacturer, has dropped support for your graphics chipset, as they do. And it is likely that the system will drop to VESA resolutions that are the lowest common denominators for most graphics cards. Use the open source drivers if you can to minimise this effect.
It is unlikely that a single application will completely hang a Linux system. It may hang the graphics driver, but you can probably recover by restarting X. It is possible for an application to drive a Linux system into paging if they are too memory hungry, but that is not a problem unique to Linux. Try dropping to the text console to see whether the system is really hung or crashed.
The reason why MacOS may appear better is because of the stranglehold Apple keeps on the hardware and software, so they can prove the available configurations work. It's a tribute to the design of Linux and the open source software writers that it works as well as it does on the myriad of hardware combinations, especially given the poor support of the majority of hardware vendors!
I am the perfect computer layman having no programming skills whatsoever. I still love to fiddle with computers and in this case, I've been playing with Linux on and off for a number of years. I've seen it grow from an OS where even getting Youtube to work required some tweaking to a box that will let me playing CSGO, which is a feat in its own right. I'd tried the game on a Ryzen3 laptop but just couldn't get the thing to launch. So I acquired a gaming laptop running eight cores and put Fedora 35 on it as a dual boot option. I could not help but feel excitement for the fact CSGO was now running on Linux. Mind you the frame rates are not as good as PC but it's still rewarding. The odd thing about this laptop and Linux is that I experience severe hanging randomly when executing, mostly during startup and at shutdown. I guess this is probably just a case of surveillance dealing with a machine faster than their tools: "Want to close our back door, not before we sync your data".
to this
The prime reason for linux not being on the desktop is business.
Home PCs are a sideline for m$, all it cares about is making sure office sells, because "nobody gets fired for buying m$"
Once a business is locked into office, then its m$ all the way in, even if the actual products are buggy and crash prone.
And of course home users want something they are used to and windows is installed already(with bloat) so theres no problem.
Thats 95% of the market covered and thats why you'll never get linux on the desktop.
And looking back on things, the best thing to have done with m$ was break it in half, so that its split into applications and operating systems.
Then you'd may see signs of other OS's on the desktop when people get sick of the bloated and buggy windows series.(and maybe m$ would make a better windows because it would have to compete with other OS
On my mum's Windows 10 PC the start menu broke. Wouldn't open. I was summoned to fix it.
Oh look, Microsoft's support is a forum run by volunteers now. How... familiar...
The first "solution" was to open a command prompt, and run a series of Powershell commands. There was no explanation of what they did or anything of course. Spent about 20 minutes watching various messages fly up the terminal window, all going too fast to read. Didn't fix it.
The next "solution" was to wipe the OS and reinstall. Anything installed from the Microsoft Store would reinstall automatically, and anything backed up to OneDrive would reappear automatically. Of course, my mum's PC had a bunch of programs installed from CDs and she doesn't trust OneDrive, so this was a non-starter too.
In the end, I made her a new login. Six months later she re-tried the old one and it had magically fixed itself after an update. "Why didn't it tell me it had fixed it?" Why indeed...
As far as I'm concerned Windows10 has exactly the same support and approach to problems as Linux. It also has problems running ancient hardware such as my dad's old scanner (no 64-bit driver - that's right, no driver available. Sound familiar?).
When I built my last PC put (free) Mint on it, rather than pay £95 for a Windows licence.
I don't believe you.
I've spent an unseemly amount of time over decades on forums and helplines, Linux and Windows, for an unseemly range of hardware and software problems. For Linux the answer has never been "wipe the drive then re-install everything". For Windows that has frequently been the default answer.
To clarify this.
Storage can be split into four parts.
UEFI 512mb
Root 50Gb
Swap How much system memory you have.
Home what ever is left
Home contains all your data and never needs to be formatted.
Root can be formatted to take what flavor of Linux you want.
I've been doing this for 20 years. I'm old, crusty and lazy to boot.
Windows cannot do this.
IIRC there was a specific clause in the Select and Enterprise licence agreements which prohibited using non-Windows desktops for users. I can't remember the exact wording but essentially we could use non-Windows OSes for 'line of business' applications only. In addition the 'no downgrade' clauses (If you buy an Office 2007 licence you can't run Office 2003 to remain compatible with colleagues) forced us onto the upgrade treadmill. These licence restrictions made it extremely difficult to experiment with alternatives.
There is something in the terminal server licensing as well. We were using Linux based thin clients to talk to Linux terminal servers and a Windows terminal server. We had the correct number of CALs, but an audit showed that those Linux based thin clients weren't covered by the TS CALs...
It was a while back and the audit had taken place just before I joined the company, so I don't know the particulars, just that they had to pay for extra licensing for each of the thin clients, because they weren't running Windows.
To make headway on the desktop, Linux needs to standardize on a single desktop environment that looks good out of the box on every distro.
Yes make it customizable for those who want to, but the majority of end users will at the most want to change the background picture and that is it.
It needs a standardized App store that is cross Linux compatible, i.e. double click the app you want to install and the store automatically determines
which distro you are using.
And fix application dependencies. I use various UNIX/Linux/Windows/Mac computers on a day to day basis.
90% of the pain on Linux is fixing apps at the command line to install dependencies as all the documentation, discussions all focus on fixing via
command line. The average user does not want to touch the command line.
> 90% of the pain on Linux is fixing apps at the command line to install dependencies
Seriously, when did you say you last used Linux? I can't recall having hit dependency issues in about a decade, let alone having to fix them on the command line.
Linux package management indeed used to be flaky (around the same time as Windows was mired in DLL Hell), but in my experience pretty much got its shit together quite some while back.
A standard single app is fine, say gimp or libra office.
The second you want to do anything out of the ordinary, say set up a development environment, it's one package after another.
I'm a noob programmer (Basic and Fortran from the 80s is where I cut my teeth).
On Windows I just install Visual Studio and have a single environment with everything I require, right there. The programing language, the Editor and any dependencies, I can then download any add-ons via a menu and the entire environment is set up for me.
On linux, setting up something as a simple Python development system, involved command line after command line of installs.
True, Linux doesn't in general package up monolithic development environments. Development on Linux is arguably aimed at more sophisticated coders. I suppose on Linux there is a steeper learning curve, but the payoff is that you end up with a much deeper understanding of what you're actually doing.
> On linux, setting up something as a simple Python development system, involved command line after command line of installs.
Well, if you look at a Linux Python development environment like PyCharm, it seems installation does indeed involve the command line - and some cut'n'paste (I think there's a package for it on Ubuntu as well, and in fact installation doesn't really look that much simpler on Windows). I mean, if you're going to code/develop, then noob or not, if a command line frightens you, you may as well just pack it in right now! (FWIW, I started with Fortran in the 70s - everything was command line, of course.)
Yes, you do get a deeper understanding when you poke around under the hood, and write your own code, etc. , But most users (you know, that's the rest of humankind) don't care squat about knowing what they're doing. They just want to use the appliance. They want devices that are as easy to use as a washing machine. Easier, if possible.
"But, honestly, it all boils down to knowing how to burn an ISO image to a USB stick, rebooting your computer from it, playing with it to make sure it works, and then pressing the install button."
I have three PCs that are now good for either doorstop duty or Windows re-install that would beg to differ.
Software requirements.
I currently work at a place that uses a cloud based front end system. The system requirements are Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 version 1607 or higher, Microsoft.NET framework, and either Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome must be set as the default browser on the system, though they highly recommend Internet Explorer.
First, Linux is far more secure than Windows – or macOS for that matter. I mean Windows has its own day of the month – Patch Tuesday – just for fixes.
And Linux has Patch Daily. And those patches aren't bundled into a single patch bundle, you have hundreds of patches (there were over 500 patches waiting on my Linux Workstation last Saturday - that was about a week's worth), or rather you have to let the PC download and automatically install those hundreds of patches.
Just because Linux is open source doesn't make it more secure. macOS is based on BSD, so that should be just as bomb proof, in theory. Likewise, Windows gets regularly patched. Yes, the default configuration of Windows of having the main user be the administrator is damned stupid and should not be happening in 2022 - the same for macOS. The first thing I do with both of them is demote the default user to a normal user and create an extra admin account.
But, you can misconfigure a Linux box in exactly the same way you can misconfigure a Windows box or a Mac to be insecure. Likewise, if you know what you are doing, you can configure any of them to be relatively secure. But which is the most secure? Which month are we talking about and what zero days have just been announced for which operating system? And how quickly have they been patched? And a lot of open source software "defaults open" when it is installed to make it easy to see if it is working, you then have to tighten up the security, add encrypted connections etc. but a lot of people don't know that or can't be bothered, meaning a lot of big databases out on the Internet over the years have been left in that "default open" configuration for all to see.
Linux is more open about what is patched when, but to ridicule Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, whilst not mentioning that many Linux distros have daily or weekly patch drops, or randomly drop critical patches is opening yourself up to ridicule. As an admin, the planned update cycle for Windows makes things much easier to manage, rather than having see each day, if new patches have arrived for my Linux boxes or whether Apple has released another patch, silently. Obviously there are out-of-band patches for Windows as well, in an emergency, but they are, thankfully, few and far between.
I do agree that Linux isn't the nightmare many people think. My mother came to visit and was using my spare laptop and commented "your Windows is so much easier to use than my Windows!" She was using my old laptop running SUSE. She ended up taking it home with her and the weekly support calls stopped and she started ringing up to brag about her Tetris scores instead!
For the record, I started on a VAX 11/750 in the early 80s, running VMS. I've used Windows and Macs since 1987 at work and first used Linux around 1993 and swapped to using it as my main desktop in 2003, going to OS X in 2007 and back to Windows in 2010 and back to macOS and Linux last year as my main desktops. But I've always had a mix of Linux, macOS and Windows PCs at home.
As someone that started out with Windows 3.1 through to W7 who turned to Linux Mint, as I did so the underlying problem came into view; well expressed by many other comments herein . . . a refusal to understand the problems caused to, what one might describe as, the common computer user . . . the absolute refusal of what one might describe as Linux enthusiasts to accept that many will not know all of the subtleties of managing the software. As I see it, the great achievement of Microsoft, right from the beginning, was the creation of books that set it all out, in plain English, how to manage their software. There very simply is no comparison to such as; Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out . . . with Linux Mint. of even greater importance, try asking the Linux enthusiasts for answers and find your self being treated as an idiot . . . not worth the bother; as many have also described herein. It is Microsoft documentation that delivered their dominance, because it gave answers to any and every question, without any suggestion that asking was a demonstration of the users stupidity. Until Linux creates documentation to the same standards of understandable quality, they will not break through to the majority of Microsoft users.
This is where the fragmentation and self-documentation of tools are problematic. There isn't an integrated system that decides what and how every part does things.
When we are talking kernel, GCC and essential command line toolchain, the man pages are pretty good.
But when talking full, integrated system; documentation is woefully inadequate.
I'd credit MS with a historical edge on this subject, but the adoption of "search for everything" rather than single reference text is severely eroding that edge.
but but but ... there are all these user forums no? Where everything ends up in endless discussions of Vi vs emacs, KDE vs gnome and what color scheme is best...
Oh you are using flavor x of linux , should be using flavor y...
It's 2022 , can we move past it?
All that matters is the software and Linux lack support for all the major software packages from gaming to office work to design.If you can't run the software you depend upon, then all the bells and whistles in the world don't matter when you can't work.
Linux is only really suited for server work. Everywhere else it is simply lacking in what people need.
Also, GIMP is in no way a replacement for Adobe Photoshop. That comparison alone casts everything else the autor says into serious doubt.
