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Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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This is it. Everything “just works” on windows. Until that exact same experience is available on Linux it will never take over. And no, I don’t mean “there is an app you can install for a distribution that makes it easy to…”. That is an immediate failure. It needs to be easy to do everything, out of the box, with no additional setup.
I say this as someone that uses windows, Mac, and various flavors of Linux every single day. I want this for Linux, but it isn’t there.
Exactly this. I'm comfortable in both windows and Linux. I tried Linux as my daily driver multiple times on my main PC but it was always not worth the effort. I don't have days of free time anymore to mess with Linux as my main OS. I put Ubuntu on my laptop and while it worked I was often spending days troubleshooting some bug, either with the touchpad not working or with with the disro itself trying to something as simple as an image preview when selecting pictures to upload to discord or whatever.
I've spun up dozens of virtual machines on my server at home and that's where Linux just works. After I get it configured I've almost never needed to touch it again. Until Linux gets the basic user experience as easy as windows then people will stay with windows.
I get paid to deploy and troubleshoot Windows. I use Linux at home. Do I do this because after spending hours forcing Windows to behave as desired I want to come home and do the same to my Linux box? No, I do it because Linux is reliable and easy, and it's not built on a premise that someone else knows how I want my computer to work better than I do.
Having to fight against what MS wants (or throw up your hands and accept it) is now baked into Windows. Even if I had to spend hours to use something else, I would.
I don't intend this to disparage you, I say this because comments like quoted always ruffle my feathers. As if everyone who uses Linux has said, "Welp, I know this takes hours a day of my time to use, but dammit I'm just stubborn."
NO, this is not what using Linux is like for the majority of people who choose to use it, even for gaming. If it's like that for you, then you need a different distro, or different hardware, or you aren't actually as comfortable with Linux as you think you are.
And it's OK not to be comfortable with it, no one sprang from the womb knowing Linux - but to imply that Linux requires hours of time to use vs Windows is IME very false. Yes, it requires people to learn new things, but no one came from the womb knowing Windows either - most of us have just been exposed to it continuously and have invested that learning time without even realizing it since we've always been "forced" (to one degree or another) to use it.
So have you tried music production with Linux? Installing VSTs is exactly that: hours upon hours of banging your head against a wall with Wine.
There simply are usecases that don't work out of the box with Linux that do on Windows because the companies don't support Linux.
I know this to be true, but generally folks who are in a corner case know they are a corner case and express it as such when they make such comments. 99.999% of people will never have to experience what it's like to produce music on any platform, for example.
I tried to explicitly capture this in my comment:
I think you vastly underestimate how many edgecases there actually are. Every one edge case might be a small userbase, but combined, all those small userbases make a significant userbase for whom Linux is less than ideal. And (just a hunch) on Lemmy, this % of users is actually larger than the population at large. Tech-savy people tend to use more obscure programs.
Some edgecases I happen to know(because I happen to fall into three edgecase groups!)
Those are two creative edgecases. And I believe using your PC for creative work is actually quite a significant userbase.
And sometimes even IF a product is supposedly supported on Linux, it doesn't work straight up. I recently tried to install Ubiquity's Unify program on my Pop!OS, but nope, errors before even installing. Happened to need all kinds of weird dependencies that are outdated and are hard to install. Even when following Ubiquity's install guide. On windows it just worked. Another edgecase, but it adds up.
So I disagree on your "majority" statement. Especially on Lemmy, I don't believe that to be true at all.
But meh, maybe agree to disagree.
Fair! I have some rebuttals, but they are likely to end up with a conversation that would be fun in person over a beer but cumbersome and a lot of typing via text. 🙂