99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
I wish I could do that, but CGNAT makes ipv6 the much preferred option for a lot of things.
But it’s good to know that this might be the cause…
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
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.
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…
That’s been fixed for nearly 2 years now.
Install
kio-admin
Then in the location bar type:
admin:
It’ll prompt you for your password and then:
You’ve given me instructions that require terminal use, your argument is invalid. If it doesn’t either work out of the box or is immediately fixable without going into the terminal, then it’s not ready yet.
if installing a plugin and typing something into the admin bar requries a terminal then every password prompt on windows is also a terminal.
I’m not making an argument, I’m telling you how to fix your problem.
Even if the instructions required terminal use, you’re on Linux. You’re not going to make it very far if you confuse having to use the terminal with a failure in the software.
Regardless, literally none of what I said requires you to use the terminal. It requires you to install a specifically named software package and type 5 characters into the Dolphin bar (note, the picture).
Counter arguments are not allowed on Lemmy. Especially this topic. It’s non negotiable and you will always be wrong or downvoted for being right
“Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?”
“WTF is a computer?”
Everything’s computer!
If you see this meme and think “well actually, I had a really difficult time last time I tried to install Linux” - did you ask for help? That’s what the internet is for.
did you ask for help? That’s what the internet is for.
And wait 3-5 business days for whatever menial problem
It’s almost like people have gotten really used to instant gratification and it’s not reasonable. A certain amount of figuring it out should be expected.
It’s almost like people have gotten really used to instant gratification
Being able to work is not “instant gratification”. People need it to be able to afford to live, and often in doing jobs that are directly essential for the life or quality of life of others. Incredibly out of touch take imo
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’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.
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.
Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn’t want, etc.
Rose tinted glasses.
I think you guys have hit the nail on the head. So much of the Linux argument has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with what people already know.
Everyone forgets the bugs and crashes they’ve always had to deal with even exist, because they become background noise. Then they change to a new OS and might run into completely new “roadblocks” and cry about how broken and useless the OS is even though their new problems are just as minor (or more so) than the problems they left behind.
In reality, any OS is a complicated piece of kit. The more you do with it, the more likely you are going to run into something that does something you don’t expect - and the more tech literate you believe yourself to be, the more likely you think the OS doing something you don’t expect means it is broken.