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Wow, so many wrong comments. My parents using Linux laptops for 10 years (which i give them second hand when i buy a new one). Now i set up NixOS with auto updates, and never needed to touch it again myself.
Let’s be real. Most people can’t really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.
Ooofty doofty.
I have to use Windows at work and by early afternoon if I’m not forced to reboot for an update I have to reboot because the machine has basically ground to a halt.
Why does Windows slow down the longer it’s been booted?
I swapped to Arch Linux in the last month and it’s been great. Gaming has been fun. The Nvidia drivers are still kinda confusing, and honestly I wouldn’t put my mom on Arch Linux as of right now, but it’s good enough.
I’m writing a document so my SW engineering friends can swap over as well within a day and be up and running, and it’s just neat to see Linux gradually growing in my circles.
If you’re on Linux, don’t forget to donate to your favorite SW creators even if they’re less flashy than say Larian studios or what have you lol.
The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn’t usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they’d consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.
You don’t see how terrible Windows is until you’ve switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.
The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.
It really feels like your PC isn’t yours.
I have to use Windows at work. Once, apropos of nothing at all, a system pop-up asked me if I wanted to buy an XBox controller. When I lock the screen and come back, sometimes Edge will have opened all by itself, presenting me with the Bing homepage. Nice try, Microsoft!
Honestly, not being able to run Dolphin as root made me feel like my PC wasn’t mine more than anything windows did up until recently.
Your computer is yours… As long as you’re comfortable doing it via terminal… Yay…
I much prefer using the terminal than the GUI if I can.
But I understand that not everyone likes the terminal.
To be fair, I couldn’t tell you how to run my file manager as root from the GUI because I don’t use it that much.
That’s been fixed for nearly 2 years now.
Install
kio-adminThen in the location bar type:
admin:It’ll prompt you for your password and then:
I never see much love for ZorinOS, but I find it a very solid replacement. I still use my Macbook for certain things, but I am slowly moving away from even that thanks to Apple’s spying and whatnot.
I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.
Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.
Yeah, Apple will just cave when necessary. Honestly, even if the USA is removed from the equation, nobody is really safe from any government or corporation. We’re only in better and worse condition because no one has done the unthinkable yet. The UK online safety bill, Signal’s threat to leave Sweden, France busting activists using Swiss VPN. If you can’t host it yourself, secure it yourself, rebuild it yourself, you can’t trust businesses and governments to do these things for you in the long run.
Hell, it’s starting to feel a lot less like freedom and more about the ability to hide, even if you’re doing nothing wrong, because someone may eventually decide that what you’re doing was wrong.
Encrypting your chats to keep them from being sold/mined for government oversight? ILLEGAL!
I think you’re 100% correct.
With all my Apple stuff I thought we were headed for a Star Trek federation. Instead we’re getting a starship troopers federation 😞
Linux is American by that definition
I think by America they pretty clearly meant corporate America and its corporate-owned government, neither of which controls how Linux works.
I hate to break it to you but Linux is maintained by corporate America. Everything from the Linux foundation to Linux focused companies like Red Hat, Amazon and Microsoft.
Sure it is probably better than anything else available but I think it is silly to focus on the region a company is based in when we are talking about international corporations.
I don’t know what argument you’re having, but what I said was that the Linux Foundation doesn’t have any control over the code.
I love Linux, but it isn’t ready.
Two weeks ago my side mouse buttons started working (they require Logitech software on Windows, wasn’t expecting them to work). Last week they stopped. This week they work again.
Is this major? Not at all. Would it drive my mother-in-law into a rage rivaling that of Cocaine Bear? Absolutely. Spare me from the bear, keep Linux for the tinkerers.
By this standard, Windows isn’t ready either. I use Mint, Windows and Mac interchangeably at work, and of the three, Windows is definitely the one with the most unpleasant surprises: computer slowing down for no apparent reason, printers disappearing, updates forcing you to reboot in the middle of something…
Mac is fantastic if you don’t mind feeling like your computer doesn’t belong to you.
they require Logitech software on Windows
This seems more like a logitech issue than a linus issue.
The issue isn’t that they didn’t work, as I said I wasn’t expecting them to when I bought the mouse.
The issue is their behavior has started changing with updates. I don’t mind, but I’m a tinkerer. My wife, my MiL, most of my friends, absolutely do not want to deal with an inconsistent computer experience.
Different definitions of ‘ready’ I guess. Been using primarily Linux for years, so it was ‘ready’ for me back then - but nothing has changed in the mean time that would change my recommendation for people who just want a boring stable computer.
Was the logitech mouse not supported by libratbag (backend of Piper)?
This sentence alone is why Linux is a hard sell for the average person.
I don’t know what defines “the average user”, but the average user does not use a mouse that requires proprietary software for its side buttons to work, in my experience.
I agree with you on that one, but since we do not have official support we will have to get by with the hard work of the community.
Steam OS is getting us closer as far as gaming goes.
You given bazzite a run on a gaming setup? Works remarkable well
I am sorry, is your mother in law really buying logitech mouses that specifically require a software to run even on Windows?
Probably KDE settings can deal with this. At least that worked on mine. Hyprland also has stuff for remapping extra mouse buttons.
What distro are you on? I’ve been out of Linux for like 3 months now but never had issues with my mouse randomly changing behavior in the year or so prior to that. Whether they work or not is up in the air, but random behavior changes seems like a weird practice
Sounds more like your hardware isn’t ready for Linux.
Same. I have a Kensington trackball with a decent config and button mapping software in Windows that I will NOT give up. I tried Mint for a few weeks, but it just became too stupidly cumbersome to Google every single thing. Like I wanted to implement the Windows PIN thing for startup on my PC… Yeah no.
Linux has come a long way but it’s not ready for the commoners like me. And a free open source OS probably cannot be developed for the masses without some major funding with a dedicated team.
So back to Win 10, Enterprised with massgrave.
implement the Windows PIN thing for startup on my PC
If you’re that specific in your requirements, you’re gonna have a bad time. I don’t think Microsoft makes “Windows PIN” for Linux.
KDE has settings for extra mouse buttons. Linux Mint is kind of behind in several areas unfortunately.
I just tried using Linux as my main Gaming OS desktop probably about a month and half ago after using it for college for 5 years.
I love Linux but for NVIDIA drivers and gaming it still very much isn’t there.
I use an NVIDIA card, running bazzite on my gaming setup, and it works really well. What issues where you having?
Nobara’s got you covered.
Maybe try a distro that is known for compability with NVIDIA such as popOS or bazzite. I have used both for the last 4 years, and other then some specific games where anti-cheat or kernel level anti cheat is an issue (and honestly, fuck those games anyway because those developers spend extra effort to make sure their games dont run on Linux), the rest just works flawlessly.
Linux was awesome 15 years ago. They probably just had driver problems. Those used to be much worse.
In the command-line-only world of the 80s I thought Unix was awesome already!
I mean, the core utilities are all from then and there.
TBH as a developer on an old system called VMS I’ve never loved Linux. VMS syntax was a beautiful thing. Commands and command options were all real words, which made it all very intuitive. For example, the command to print 3 copies of a file in landscape orientation would be PRINT /COPIES=3 /ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE <filename>. You could also abbreviate any way you wanted, as long as the result was unambiguous. PR /C=3 /O=L would probably work. But the natural words were always in your head. By comparison I’ve always found Unix/Linux syntax much harder to remember.
It was.
Month and a half into using Mint Cinnamon… frankly it’s hard to feel like I’m not still using Win10. What comes to mind immediately is that file management dialogs in apps are less consistent with how the file manager itself works, whereas in Windows it’s all more uniform. But IMO that’s very minor. Overall UX feels the same to me.
Note: I am not a computer gamer so can’t comment on how games work on Linux, and also I’ve used Ubuntu and BSD in the past. Just had Windows at home to be consistent with work. I retired several years ago and it still took me this long to switch over.
I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”
One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).
I thought the holdup was the graphics drivers (Nvidia mostly) not the de. Normal desktop mode with KDE works fine on my steamdeck.
Fair point. But even so I think SteamOS has the most viable potential to achieve something like a 5-10% adoption rate that could get entities like nVidia to pay more attention.
Lol can’t disagree with you there, they just need to release it already!
Only a small fraction of people use Steam so I don’t see that happening.
Steam apparently has about 130 million monthly active users and about 70 million daily active users. About half the planet has a computer at home. So, Steam users are somewhere between say 2% and 10% of the world’s active PC users.
If someone is a daily active steam user, they spend a lot of time on the computer. If they have to make sure their drivers are up to date and their frame rate is high enough to support their games, they’ve probably developed a bit of knowledge about the system. My guess is that people who play Steam games tend to be the tech support people for their friends and family more often than not.
So, it’s a small group, but it’s an influential group. If enough of that group becomes comfortable with SteamOS, they may be comfortable setting it up (or a variant of it) for a friend or family member, even if that friend or family member only uses their computer to watch videos, check emails, etc. In a world where Windows was free and just worked, that might not happen. But, in this world Windows 10 is about to lose support, and Microsoft is suggesting that if your computer can’t run Windows 11 you should just throw it away and upgrade. In that world, more people might end up switching to Linux.
Why would you set up Steam OS for a family member. That is problematic in many ways.
I could care less if Linux explodes in market share or not. It serves my needs fine and that’s all that matters for me.
I haven’t used SteamOS so I’m speculating. But, it’s probably possible to boot to a desktop instead of to Steam. It’s probably easy to install Firefox (or Chrome) and Thunderbird. I would expect that Valve has made the desktop experience easy to use.
So, why install SteamOS for a family member? Because you have a desktop OS that’s easy to use that a big, rich commercial company is spending a lot of R&D effort to make as good, easy and smooth an experience as possible. Even if the primary use case is playing Steam-based games, if you have a family member who just wants an easy-to-use OS that just runs their web browser, an email client, and a few other odds and ends, that might be the easiest way to do it.
It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.
Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.
So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.
It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.
Maybe. I just mean once(if) there becomes an OS that reliably runs Steam and the games on Steam, there will be a viable alternative to Windows for a significant population of users.
I disagree
Most people just want Windows
Will ValveOS be useful for anything besides playing games?
Games are pretty demanding, there will probably be widespread support just coincidentally. Also companies build software for where the market is, a big Linux population will command more development time for drivers etc.
If it is useful at only playing games I think it will be a popular option nonetheless.
Sure, lots of people mainly use their computers for games, but I would think even they would demand at least a web browser and/or social media apps.
SteamOS has a web browser.
It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.
In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.
But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.
Last time I tried was last autumn. It didn’t go well (again). I try regularly because computer OS is pretty much the last thing I have to switch to get rid of spytech. I suppose I’m not skilled enough, but it’s not fair to suppose that people don’t switch to linux on pc because they’re lazy, or ignorant, or bad or things like that.
What are you having trouble with? Which distros have you tried?
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it’s not really an app store, because it’s not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I’ll agree with you that Linux isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I’m tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn’t been fixed. I’m also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there’s another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven’t had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are “chicken and egg” things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn’t fixed quickly because there aren’t enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it’s hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don’t switch because it’s glitchy, it’s glitchy because there aren’t enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won’t switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn’t sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers… but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it’s not that things don’t break in Windows, it’s just that it’s a bigger emergency when they do break.
I’m not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I’m having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you’re trying to change doesn’t show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that’s not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the “DOS prompt” but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the “power” shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn’t quite there for the end-user, it’s getting closer and closer. Really, all that’s needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That’s an easy one.
Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
If Steam OS getting a wider release happens around the same time as Windows 10 hitting end-of-life, that could be a game-changer.
I know what you mean about it being frustrating when flatpak apps don’t work right though. I had an app that would just start to open and die, no error message, no feedback, just it started to open then closed. Because I was new to Flatpak I didn’t know how to poke at it. But, then I discovered how you can run flatpak apps from the commandline, and when you do that you get access to flags and you get error messages you can read. But, if you’re just some dude/dudette who wants to sit down and run an app and it doesn’t work, that kind of behaviour is ultra frustrating.
The problem is that there’s still a lot of flux when it comes to packaging and running Linux apps. There’s the old way – debs and rpms. There’s flatpaks, there’s the snap store, there’s homebrew, there’s mise and of course there are manual installs and/or building from source. Each one’s a bit different and has its own benefits and drawbacks. And, standard things like showing an error message that helps you sort out the problem when things break isn’t universally handled in a clean way.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate “normal” person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that’s for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It’s based on arch btw
I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.
This is exactly what keeps me from switching. I don’t have the time or pull to do knuckle down on an important PC. Maybe when I have a backup one, I’ll do it. Who knows.
You’re not wrong. This is an argument for sticking with Windows. It will suck. But, you know exactly how much it will suck and in what ways. Switching to Linux will suck in new and expected ways.
This.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
