Okay, look, I don’t want to be a hater, I promise. I have a setup with a Linux dual boot in my computer right now. But man, the crazy echo chamber around this issue is not just delusional, it’s counterproductive. Being in denial about the shortcomings isn’t particularly helpful in expanding reach, if that’s what you all say you want.
So, in the spirit of balance, my mostly unbiased take on the listicle:
1 - Web tools get the job done: This is true when it’s true. I work with Google’s office suite, so yeah, many tools are indistinguishable. But not all tools are web tools. A big fallacy in this article is that just because a subset of items have embraced a solution doesn’t mean that the solution is universal. If you need to work with Adobe software you’re still SOL. MS Office still lacks some features on the web app. Some of the tools I use don’t work, so I do still need to run those in a native Windows app. Since I’m not going to switch OSs every time I need to push a particular button, I’m going to default to Windows for work.
2 - Plenty of distros to suit your preference: This one is an active downside, and it pisses me off when it gets parroted. When I last decided to dual boot Linux I had to try five different distros to find one that sort of did everything I needed at once, which was a massive waste of time. I’m talking multiple days. Yes, there are a ton of distros. I only need to use one, though. But I need that one to work all the time. If one of the distros can get my HDR monitor to work but not my 5.1 audio and another can get my 5.1 audio setup to work, but not my monitors, then both distros are broken and neither is useful to me. This actually happened, incidentally.
3 - Steam has a decent collection of Linux games, plus Steam OS: Yes. Gaming on Linux is possible and works alright, but it’s far from perfect. Features my Nvidia card runs reliably on Windows are hit-and-miss under Linux. Not all games are compatible in the first place, either. And while Heroic does a great job of running my GOG and Epic libraries, which are themselves just as big as my Steam one, it is a much bigger hassle to set up to run under the SteamOS game mode UI. Don’t get me wrong, this has made huge strides but again, I’m not going to change OSs every time I hit a compatibility snag. This is the least fallacious of these points, though.
4 - Proprietary choices on Linux: Yes, there are some. Like the web app thing, the problem isn’t what is there, it’s what’s missing. Also, as a side note, I find it extremely obnoxious when you have to enable these manually as an option in your package manager. As a user I don’t care if a package is open source or not, I just want to install it.
5 - Electron makes app availability easier. Cool. Will take your word for it. Acknowledging the ideological debate behind it goes to the same argument I made in the previous point. And as above, it’s not about what’s there, it’s about what’s missing.
6 - No ads in your OS. I mean… nice? I still get ads for my selected distro on first boot, as well as on web apps and notifications for installed apps. Beyond a few direct links to first party apps in the one page of Win 11’s settings app I don’t find anything in Windows particularly intrusive, either. Which is not to say I don’t dislike some of the overly commercial choices in Windows, they’re just not a dealbreaker… yet.
7 - Docker, Homelab and self-hosting: This is… off topic, honestly. I do self host some things. Even used Docker once or twice… in my NAS, where the self-hosting happens. You don’t need to switch your home desktop to Linux for that, and nobody is questioning that Linux is the OS of choice for a whole host of device ranges, from servers to the Raspberry Pi. Linux is great as a customizable underlying framework to build fast support for a niche device with a range of specific applications. We should be honest about how that breaks down if you try to use it as a widely accessible home computer alternative where the priorities are wide compatibility and ease of use.
Well, that became a huge thing, but… yeah, I guess I was annoyed enough by the delusion to rant. Look, I’d love to step away from Windows, and it’s a thing you can do if you’re tech savvy and willing to pretzel around the limitations in your hardware choices and your willingness to tinker… but it’s not a serious mainstream alternative by a wide margin. I wish it was. Self-congratulatory praise within the tiny bubble of pre-existing fans (and why are there fans of operating systems in the first place?) is not going to help improve or widen its reach.
I literally tagged you a Linux hater months ago because you were raging about Linux. So I don’t believe you’re not a hater.
Also I tried to read what you wrote and the idea that it’s unbiased is laughable to me. Claiming to have a dual boot doesn’t sell me that you’re remotely unbiased.
It’s not a claim, I do have a dual boot set up at the moment. Manjaro (on KDE Plasma using Wayland, hence my whining about HDR setups) and Windows 11. Also a Lenovo Legion Go dualbooting Bazzite and Windows 11 and a Steam Deck. Plus a bunch of Linux handhelds, Raspberry Pis and assorted devices around the house that also count, I suppose.
You can ignore me all you want, it’s your prerogative, but I’m as much a part of the actual userbase as you are.
You can tag people on lemmy? Great! I’ll tag you as an asshole. Can you please tag me as a shrimp-dick bitch? Thank you.
I’m not reading all that- anyway
I switched to full-time Linux this year. One of my programmer friends, whom I never expected to embrace Linux, switched to full-time Linux and is not going back. Our libraries have switched to Linux on all user-facing computers. 2 of my e-friends have approached me about Linux. Another friend is, despite not being a computer nerd, going to switch because Windows is forcing him to- and that’s my point. It’s not that Linux doesn’t have deep flaws inherent to its development model, it’s that those flaws are now less significant than those of Windows. Nobody likes Windows 11 and it’s pushing people off.
Nobody even thinks about Windows 11, they just use it if it comes preinstalled. And from the data we have, the people that don’t like Windows 11 are more likely to be on Windows 10 (or Mac OS).
There is no mass exodus to Linux. No data point we have shows that. The biggest Linux uptick we’ve seen recently is related to Steam Deck, which is as much Linux as Android or ChromeOS are.
Desktop Linux is better than it was, and it will be closer to its competitors if people ever agree that one consolidated system to support features that have been standard for years is the way to go… but it’s not a mainstream option. Yes, even against Windows 11.
Steam OS is just a Linux desktop with the Steam client in fullscreen. With two clicks you are on an ordinary KDE desktop. It’s not at all like Android or ChromeOS. If it were, Android would be a much bigger market for Steam to want to put their games. Everyone outside the US having their Steam library in their pocket would far outweigh however many thousand Decks they’ve sold.
Your ignorance on this tracks with the less obvious clues that you don’t know what you’re talking about, like your talk of “Linux games on Steam”. Linux games on Steam vs playing Steam games on Linux are two different things.
I didn’t imply a mass exodus, I’m just telling you that ‘linux has issues’ isn’t a good argument when both W10 and W11 also have issues of the same grade and that it is, in some nerd circles, pushing people into Linux because they’d rather deal with Linux problems than Windows problems.
It works for me and has done so for almost 10 years.
Sure it won’t work for everyone but to say it isn’t viable isn’t true either. It depends on the person.
It’s not viable for the mainstream. “It depends on the person” suggests it’s luck of the draw, but the Linux desktop penetration is something like 1-4%, at best, and that’s inlcuding SteamOS and PiOS in the mix.
That’s not, “depends on the person”, that’s “doesn’t work for the vast majority of people”. There is a reason for that.
It is not a problem of whether it works for most people or not. It is a cultural problem. People hate change. That’s largely why people hate windows 11 even.
And it even leads people to spend an hour arguing with strangers about how completely unacceptable Linux is for most people when there’s actually a lot of arguments against that and very few in favor of it.
Rage on. No one believes you’re unbiased lol
That is not true though. The vast majority of people are people that don’t do much on their systems at all. Maybe look at Facebook or a few sites, write the occasional document or email and maybe play a few simple games. The type of people that have never heard of Linux or even know what an OS is let alone able to switch to another one. Those types of people will be perfectly happy on Linux if it came pre installed.
The people switching ATM and having issues are the highly technical people that have far more complex requirements and for those it does depend on the person and what they need to do.
The low percentage of users is not a sign of of it not being ready, just the sheer marketing and effort Microsoft has put into making windows the default option.
There are more people who only browse and use cross platform apps that don’t realise they could switch easily, than there are people for whom a switch would be problematic.
Windows has more supported software, but many people use a small range of common software. Gamers are just one niche. Just like you think Linux users are an echo chamber here, you are not considering the echo chamber of gamers you’re in that dont represent most windows users.
I agree with some of your points but in this one and other comments you are referencing “data” multiple times to provide validity for your opinions, yet you either fail to understand what the data is able to measure or you are using it dishonestly to further your argument.
A usage percentage does not provide reliable data about the usability (“viability for the mainstream”). There are too many factors at play distorting it to make a reliable connection between these two.
“It depends on the person” suggests it’s luck of the draw, but the Linux desktop penetration is something like 1-4%, at best, and that’s inlcuding SteamOS and PiOS in the mix […] that’s “doesn’t work for the vast majority of people”
The only way in which the percentage would be useful is, if you are implying that the other 96-99% chose to not use linux, because it doesn’t work for them, which is obviously not the case. Otherwise it is completely meaningless, as users were never exposed to linux, thus didn‘t have to make a decision, and thus didn’t deem another operating system superior.
Yeah I’m not going to lie that’s kind of a weird take.
By that logic captain crunch cereal isn’t ready for mainstream because it doesn’t have enough market share.
Regarding Office, fear not! Microsoft is working hard to remove functionality from the Windows and Mac desktop apps, so soon we’ll have feature parity! See: “New Outlook”.
They’ve been pushing this shit for years already, nobody wants it, and they’re forcing it next year despite still not fixing shared calendars (among other things). New Outlook is basically just the web app in a wrapper.
I mean, cool. Works for me. As soon as there is feature parity between their web app and their native app I no longer have a problem working with Office out of Windows. Not that I want to use Office in the first place, it’s just not my choice.
But right now I need to push a button that doesn’t exist on Linux, so I have to do it on Windows and that determines what I boot, which is the same situation from anybody who hates Adobe but has to use their software suite as well.
I must be nobody, because I like the new Mac outlook. Granted it’s because I like the option to pin emails in top and I don’t recall any missing feature. Why the hate?
Granted I am used to the web version from the time I used Linux at work. The windows version seemed much worse in comparison
Personally I’m a fairly basic user, so for me it’s “fine”. But I also work in IT so I’m aware of some the problems preventing wide adoption across the org.
Shared calendars and delegation still don’t work correctly. It’s a dealbreaker for a lot of the admin assistants, who are generally the most advanced users.
On the Windows side, PST support is basically gone. Microsoft will claim they support PSTs, but their idea of “support” is to use old Outlook to manually copy your PSTs into server-side folders. That would be bad enough even if it were reliable, and in practice it would take eternity for some users to migrate all their stuff. We have nearly unlimited storage in O365 but it’s still a pain.
The only things I actually like about new Outlook are a couple UX changes that would have easily been applied to old Outlook if MS still gave a shit. Instead, old Outlook has been nearly frozen in time since…2016? Maybe 2019?
why are there fans of operating systems in the first place
Operating systems are huge endeavours of engineering and design by entire teams of people over decades, which are used literally daily. Is that not enough of a reason for people to be fans of them?
Hah. Of the concept of operating systems, maybe. I can see one appreciating technical solutions and UX choices just as a matter of skill and execution. Actively fanboying for them? Getting into playground-style arguments where you root for your favorite? Nah. Seems super immature to me.
There aren’t even that many of the things anymore. It’s not like the old days, where every computer brand had their own. Where are the TOS fanboys these days? All them kids and their obnoxious modern software interfaces. That’s not a OS, it’s just graphics.
playground-style arguments
Perfect description of your angry ranting ITT
Your derisive laughing in response to this valid question validates anyone’s negative opinion of your trolling here
That is true for any fandom. Why is being a fan if flavour x software bad but being a fan of flavour x car or flavour x sports team is OK?
Well, that’s your opinion. For others it works fine. I’ve been using Linux since 1995 and exclusively for both home and work for well over a decade now. And there are rarely issues these days. Teams is a piece of shit, but my coworkers on Windows agree on that. Apart from that everything works for me.
Have used Linux for decades. Switched over full time a few months ago and have generally been happy but all your points are extremely valid.
Plasma will occasionally freeze the taskbar/desktop when it wakes up or I switch back to my desktop from work laptop using a KVM, effectively connecting a monitor.
For me that’s fine, manually open a terminal and kill the process so it’ll restart. For all but a handful of my extended friends and family that means the computer is broken until you log off or restart. It’s not a smooth experience.
The only reason I have a windows laptop at home is because my employer forces me to. It’s true that Adobe and MS stuff doesn’t run or runs bad, same with some specific live service games. Personally I hate all of those and am more than happy to avoid em like the plague outside of work hours. They’re horrible inadequate tools and horrible predatory games. Everything I actually wanted personally, has so far run just fine for years.
Edit: Remembered one specific thing that does really suck on Linux, and that’s music production. That area is absolutely cluttered with proprietary shit. Even switching between windows and macos is a pain as many of the tools are just not compatible.
The only point I can really agree with you on here is Adobe products (and some other niche proprietary stuff like AutoDesk – I don’t consider MS Office an industry standard and if your job does I’m very sorry). And that’s just corporate lock-in, if you’re already paying hundreds of dollars a year to use those programs then yeah you’re gonna stay on the corporate OS.
Other than that, everything you brought up just isn’t quite accurate, or evaporates as you get more comfortable with the Linux ecosystem. The distro point, for example: every distro is just a starting point. Outside of some niche exceptions like Gentoo and NixOS that will radically redefine how you configure the system, any distro can largely be made to work similarly to any other. The major differences are just a) initial package set, b) the package manager, and c) the set of available packages. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to “what software should be on a computer”, which is why there are so many distros and spins out there.
I would say gaming is actually pretty close to perfect, provided you don’t play any of the games that have decided they just will never work on Linux – almost exclusively games that use invasive kernel-level anti-cheat software which I wouldn’t want to install on Windows either. There are a handful like Fortnite and Apex Legends which use EAC, which works great on Linux now, but the devs explicitly decided to disable it. Just like the corporate lock-in point, if you’re committed to those games stay on Windows. Heroic and Lutris take a few more clicks to set up than Steam’s one-click magic, but it’s generally pretty straightforward for any game with any popularity.
The point about ads is where I start to think you’re deliberately being obtuse. You think that, what, a splash screen telling you how to use your computer when you first boot it, and notifications from apps you installed, are advertising? And you find them similarly annoying as the actual sponsored content that shows up in your start menu, on the lock screen, in Edge, when you use Cortana… Not to mention the constant pressure from the OS to use those things? The only way I can interpret this without you just trolling is that you’ve spent too long in the Windows ecosystem and you’ve just adjusted to not notice how often it’s shoving something in your face.
I just started using W11 after reading up on how to install it without all the bloat and spyware, and how to configure it to my liking
25 years in and I still don’t see a reason to switch to Linux
You can’t install Windows 11 without bloat and spyware, all you can do is minimise it and much of it cannot be disabled or removed. Linux can have 0 bloat and spy ware.
That is the difference.
You can get pretty close and go far by Ameliorating your Windows install.
Meh, it’ll take them at least an hour to get their keyboard drivers working 😂
I know you think this is funny but I haven’t dealt with a driver issue in linux since I switched to it. However in windows I’ve sunk hundreds of hours of my life into trying to get a driver working. So that comment is unintentionally funny lol
2025 year of the minutes desktop 🤣
It’ll never happen because Linux zealots write this crap when 100% seriousness.
I’ve been using Linux on my personal desktop system since 1997 and I think it’s great. However as a user I fucking hate Linux so much. It is so frustrating to use, it always breaks in weird ways.
It can do anything because you can configure so much and you can even go into the code and make thing your own. But at the same time it can’t do anything, there usually isn’t a basic framework to do what most people want. Each user is just supposed to figure it out for themselves and put their system together in a way that makes sense. Even someone like me who can understand all this crap and can read, understand and contribute to the code, doesn’t always want to do this. And most users wouldn’t be able to do it anyways. Let me just spend 12 hours of my own free time to figure out something that isn’t documented very well, with often wrong or outdated information, weird bugs with quirks and workaround and fun interactions with other bugs and workarounds I have on my system.
Just the other day I raged my head off because some kind of update broke my shit. There is this protocol that allows for the OS to tell monitors what brightness they need to be on. This is awesome for tablet/convertibles/laptops/all-in-ones, but for desktop systems I don’t really see the use case. But it can’t hurt the feature is there and you choose not to use it right? However it turned out this latest update had a nasty bug in it. At boot it somehow set all my monitors to 100% brightness, which was highly unpleasant and kept resetting it to 100% every boot. Not only that, it turned out my main monitor had too much clever for its own good. It has two modes of operating, one mode where the builtin OS inside the monitor does everything, it handles all the settings, profiles, color shit, protocols etc. The other way of operating is where the OS inside the computer does everything, they have a driver for Windows and some neat software that allows you to do everything in there. It has game recognition software and tweaks the monitor to work perfectly with that game etc. However me being a Linux user, they ofcourse don’t have any of that, not even a driver etc. but I know this when I selected the monitor so I made sure it could handle everything inside the monitor as well, so I could use it to it’s full potential on Linux. But this update broke all of that, because the monitor saw the OS was telling it to go to a certain brightness setting, so it assumed the OS inside the computer would be running the show and reverted back to some default safe profile until the software utility could tell it what to do. This made my monitor borderline unusable and flash bang me every reboot (which was a lot of times whilst I was trying to figure out how to fix it).
I put in a lot of hours and was able to somewhat consistently block the brightness control so the monitor could again be in charge. But not after the monitor was fed up with all my shit and just completely doing a factory reset, so I lost the personal profile I had been tweaking for years.
Now I know the monitor probably shouldn’t work this way and it’s bullshit the manufacturer doesn’t create Linux drivers and makes sure the software utility is available on Linux. But on the other hand, this is just the way the world is. Blaming it on some huge corporation that doesn’t give a shit and runs on cost/benefit calculations doesn’t fix my monitor. In my experience this is a huge problem in the Linux community (me included), we tend to get mad at other entities that cause the problem as an excuse for not fixing said problem. Which is perfectly valid from a person point of view, but very frustrating from a user point of view.
Most people who went through what I went through with my monitor wouldn’t be able to fix it and simply give up on using Linux forever. Or at least till they get a new monitor 5-10 years down the line.
I gave up daily driving Linux and reverted to Win11 Pro and do all my Linux shit in WSL.
Debian WSL has been legit more stable for me than running it as the primary OS. Dunno what to tell you, because you can’t change my past experience with what I have been dealing with for the past two decades using Linux as my daily driver coming up as a broke student and now have money to pay for an OS that is less robust but more stable and better driver development.
Ok Grandpa let’s get you to bed
In all seriousness you have a fair point. Linux does occasionally have weird bugs if you are using something closer to upstream. Fedora does a pretty hood job of catching most stuff but it misses some things. If you want a more stable experience you want something that’s for of a LTS such as Linux Mint or Debian. Also there is nothing stopping you from rolling back a update.
The self contradictions here are astounding. I love this thing that I hate. Now let me write 12 paragraphs about how much I hate to love to hate it
Humans are pretty complex so what may seem like a self contradiction actually isn’t in fact.
But I can hit you with another one for me personally: I fucking love a big juicy burger, especially with cheese, pineapple, lettuce and spicy sauce. However I am normally a vegetarian and try to restrict my meat consumption as much as reasonably possible. I’m not a full vegan, because that just seems like self torture without a lot of extra gains, but maybe I’ll become one in the future.
And I can write you essays upon essays about how much I hate Windows and other Microsoft software. Even though it has a special place in my heart, because when I got my first computer in 1984, it ran Microsoft BASIC as its primary “OS”.
Let me give you 2 big reasons:
- Linux does not work with the particular hardware or software you want or need to use.
- It’s a PITA to just do basic stuff.
