The only downside of switching is systemd is a mess, and getting kinda creepy with captain TechBro running things, think I’ll be headed to a ditro hop for OpenRC or an older init based setup.
Look, if a guy at the Verge can use Linux then that means almost anyone can.
Random blokes at The Verge do not have the same use cases as anyone else. “Works for me” is never the same thing as “works for you”. Linux doesn’t even have a good vector graphics editor. (No, Inkscape is not good.)
Remember when they had their guide ofnhow to build a PC? It was wrong on so many things, but apparently they edited the guide. I have not read the current version so it could perhaps be good now or at least now misleading.
“He not fighting static, he fighting cancer!” -lyle
The only thing I hate about Linux is not the fault of Linux. It’s Microsoft and Akami’s fault.
Blocking of random sites by Edgesuite when I’m using Linux.
I ran into this recently lol. You can avoid it by changing your user agent. You can do this is dev tools but there’s probably an extension that makes it easy
There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
that leaves browsers,
That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD…
Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that’s a far shot from “ridiculously little difference”. Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it’s OK).
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine. If you have a desktop PC from the last decade and it cost more than $1k, you can also run a VM (or Winboat) specifically for your software with nearly 1:1 performance to bare metal (if you get the passthrough right.)
Which isn’t a permanent solution, mind you, but if it’s just one piece of software holding you back and you don’t care to play with alternatives, then the solution isn’t to keep Windows despite its terrible performance in 99% of things, it’s to switch to windows and emulate or compatibility layer the 1% of software you might use that requires windows.
If you need an emulator (yeah, “Wine Is Not an Emulator” yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.
If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there’s a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?
If you use a Windows “translation layer” for your software anyway, why would you choose Linux as the host platform in the first place?
There are so many reasons. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:
- Windows isn’t free, Linux is.
- Windows isn’t an open platform, Linux is.
- Linux doesn’t track your activity. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t come bundled with a bunch of shovelware crap. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t push cloud products onto you. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t use your hardware to force-feed ads to you. Windows does.
- Linux is infinitely more customizable than Windows.
- Linux lets you choose when, how, and if you download/install updates. Windows does not.
- Windows constantly pushes/forces AI slop products onto users. Linux does not.
All of that is true for most other operating systems, some of which are even more customizable than some of today’s Linux distributions. My question was “why Linux?”, not “why not Windows?”.
There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.
There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
Ive yet to get that working in linux…
Besides that, im a happy linux personEveryone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.
When my college classes went online because of the pandemic, I’d sit in my parents basement and cast my homework to their TV. Those were the days.
Life is more than browsers you know…
Most software can effectively run in a browser at this point, and the bit that can’t can be self hosted on a server and then cast to your browser.
Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient
Counter-example: secure encryption. You can’t do that in a browser.
You’re all over this thread posting bad takes. Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from using any encryption algorithms within a browser whatsoever. I don’t even understand what you could possibly mean. There are so many ways to achieve it.
There are numerous ways to place decryption backdoors into a website’s JavaScript. How would you make sure that there is no MITM when trying to safely encrypt (e.g.) an e-mail in your browser?
Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.
Talking about “bad takes”, aren’t we? There is no way to ensure that your end-to-end encryption is not decrypted on the fly when done by a website (= a potential attacker).
Who said anything about a website? You said browser. You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere. Javascript also isn’t the only option available to solve this problem.
Not sure if you’re just trolling at this point.
You said:
Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.
No, you can’t. I explained why.
Counter-point: Cubeless and platforms like it are close enough to a browser and handle that. Also by the very loose definition of secure encryption, https.
That’s a very loose definition indeed.
“Close enough to a browser” isn’t a browser. GnuPG in a browser just won’t work and most other encryption facilities aren’t quite as secure (and transparent).
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I’ve ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that’s without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.
the verge
I hope as hell they didn’t build that rig themsrlves
I have also been daily driving Debian for about 4 months now.
Admittedly I do still need to hop into Windows - I haven’t been able to get Space Engineers or AFOP among others to run stable or with proper performance through the built in steam proton layer. But when I’m browsing, working on CAD, writing documents, playing Minecraft, or basically anything else I just stay in Linux and it’s fine.
There’s a dangerous bet going on right now that doesn’t make the most sense.
It’s Microsoft.
I just don’t really understand their game right now. They’re still playing like every card in the game is in their hand and they have nothing to lose, so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing. It’s almost as if in the longrun, they aren’t worried about our choices.
These Linux wins all over the place are cool and all, but the lack of any sweat whatsoever from these bozos has me on edge. Wtf is their game? From AAA gaming to your email client, it’s all getting worse and they know it, they just keep doubling down.
They now earn much more with cloud and ai, getting it all packaged to companies as saas, and are just switching markets. The desktop isn’t their target anymore.
What if that’s they don’t care, as they’re the evil empire.
It reminded me that scene in Andor (2022) in the first season, episode 9, ‘nobody’s listening’ the protagonist says they’re not listening to prisoners as they don’t care, so much they don’t believe they can lose their domination. You have to be in the context of the show (which I highly recommend, if you like the Star Wars universe) to get the reference. But I think that could be the case here.
Microsoft may not care, not because they know something, but rather the opposite. Them being pedo oligarchs not really caring much. Perhaps they’re still into the illusion Linux is some very niche thing for dorks.
I have an interesting story about it (I’d write it in my blog, it’s somewhat long). If in a few words, at my kid’s school, they (a few teachers) have a very old PC that struggles with Windows (also, It’s HDD there), so I reinstalled Linux there. Prior, I asked what they use. ‘Not much really’ was the reply, and so I explored, and diagnosed it’s just browser (which was obsolete and couldn’t be updated), Word, and Explorer (files manager). Not much else.
Sure thing, Linux can do all of them many times better!
I picked Fedora Silverblue (that’s the atomic version with Gnome) thinking it’s so much better than the KDE version, as it’s simpler. It’s not more complex than Chrome OS. My mistake, even advertising it as a macOS (good, right?) clone did not help, they were terrified. The very next day I rebased it to KDE, and applied some Windows 11 theme. It was very similar in its looks. They said ‘OK, we’d try to use it’ but the very next day they asked me to bring their system back. (I never erased it, just swapped their HDD with my SSD.)
I gave up, perhaps quite quickly, but I have no resources to push them at the moment. For you to understand, their computer switched from being very noisy to being so silent I was asking (every day while it was with Linux, like 3 or 4 days in total) whether it’s on or not. Back to Windows, and it’s super noisy back again. The difference was night and day. Right now, the machine boots within like 5 minutes. A couple of minutes to desktop, and a few minutes for it to become usable. With the SSD and Linux, half a minute tops. And when it’s booted, it’s pretty much instant.
- browser is the same, but updated
- Word is Libre Office Writer, which is simpler. They don’t use it heavily, so it should work for them. I set it to save the files as docx. The icon is from MS Word.
- file manager is many times simpler visually, yet million times more advanced. A Linux user would surely know the difference, especially given Microslop did theirs in Electron, lol.
Yet, they were afraid of Linux. Perhaps, my mistake was stressing that. Maybe I should have Only Office installed (is it more alike? Haven’t used it for many years), and invest some time into tuning the theme to be identical, it had some minor difference. And tell them that’s Windows 11, and I just updated their system. I don’t know. Their concern was they didn’t know how to work with it, not even trying. I explicitly offered to babysit them for a few days, to help them adapt, but they refused.
Perhaps, I should have tried Zorin, if it’s more similar visually. But I have no experience of it, so I’m not sure.
Apart from that, I believe Linux is more than ready to be a desktop OS, it has everything needed, or almost everything. Only some software is lacking, I’d say.
Your mistake was telling them something scary and leaving, the very first pixel out of place and they gave up. People don’t want you to give them projects, they want you to fix their problems.
If it’s a system you’re sure of the use case then set it up to be a Windows clone like you planned and tell them you found a (locked down and lightweight) long service life distro based on Windows 8 or something. Yes, it’s a lie. Nobody will care as long as it works generally like they’re used to, I promise. But if you have to explain caveats to their normal workflow like you’re giving a tutorial then you might as well not bother.
It’s called incumbency.
I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.
Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.
Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.
It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.
They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.
Business. The End.
Doesn’t matter how many people switch at home, MS has the business segment captured, and until one Linux distro decides to target this, it won’t change.
And then there’s everything that’s built around Office, especially Excel. No OSS comes close to Excel at the business level, and attempting to make an OSS app work there costs so much in time that it’s simply not worth it.
Now running servers and services - what do you think VMware ESXi is but a Linux Kernel with a management layer on top?
Proxmox - Probably best competitor to ESXi is just Linux KVM with a lot of great capability added to it, just like XCPNG.
But for a desktop, there’s simply no comparison. Plus you have a workforce that’s well experienced with windows. If you lose 1 hour a week per person due to switching, that’s a metric shitload off lost productivity.
It’s almost as if Microsoft and every other hardware and mainstream software developer is secretly betting on the loss of private home computing.
You nailed it. This is what EVERY hardware and software company is hoping for, subscription based everything. Hell HP is already rolling it out on their laptops. If you don’t outright OWN the hardware and you’re using it on a sub then you don’t have any choice but to use Windows. RAM Shortages? who cares. if you and I can’t build our own PCs anymore than we have to sub a machine from Microsoft or HP or Dell or whomever. Those companies will ALWAYS get first dibs on RAM. And of course there’s going to be tiers to this shit. Pay more than the base sub price and you get access to the gaming tier meaning your machine will have a dedicated GPU for gaming. so on and so forth. this is the future these companies want and thanks to stuff like Netflix and Spotify we’ve now been conditioned to accept it.
“Hell HP is already rolling it out on their laptops.”
Holy fuck, you weren’t kidding: https://hplaptopsubscription.hp.com/
so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
Oh, you know it, you just don’t want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.
This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald’s has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.
In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues
There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation).
Do you remember when CEOs would make announcements at conferences they’d be trying to convince consumers about how good their product is? Pretty frequently they were lying, but now they’re not even talking to us, when they speak they’re addressing stock holders and other companies.
They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s.
I want an apology letter from all the “stop hating on Microsoft, its not 1999 anymore and they have a new CEO :) :) :)” people.
ya got me! I knew
My prediction is that by 2040, Windows and your entire online existence as a… “normie” will be encapsulated within walled gardens via client access almost entirely.
Those of us still able to host anything will be doing it with ebay finds and crowsourced parts.
…but this is but one of my many branching possible timelines, maybe we get the “America goes KEN mode” timeline, “Mother nature rolls her sleeves up” or the “Humanity finally stands up for itself and realizes a leftist/socialist utopia” timelines. There’s always the “China sics robot dogs with machineguns on everyone” timeline.
Hell, maybe a blend, idk.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s. The only blend I know of is the coffee. (J)
Microsoft isn’t exactly doing anything new. It’s the same strategy that’s worked for them forever ago:
Get kids used to Microsoft products by vendor locking K-12 schools with cheap contracts.
Monetize those kids when they graduate (they never had privacy to begin with, so there is little pushback) and hope they don’t switch to Apple’s subsidized MacBooks in college.
When all else fails, lean heavily on corporate contracts, since corporations can’t change their ecosystem set up 40 years ago.
Linux wins factor very little in the equation… and anyone switching to Linux is quickly replaced by the next kid who has had a Microsoft Windows keyboarding class every year since age 9.
That’s why Linux in schools is so important.
Maybe they’re interested in finding exactly what the public’s critical breaking point is. Without gauging exactly what the demand (for distraction-free, private use) is, they cannot optimize their sales. They sure lost big with France, but we’ll see who else follows suit…
My take isn’t that they’re dumb, it’s that a larger and more malicious bet is being made, that people won’t be able to choose.
They may indeed be dumb, but they’ll do anything they can to chain us to them forever.
Well, for one they and their buddies can make new consumer PCs as closed as phones are. Old hardware will eventually run out if they’ll keep the cartel knit tight enough.
Besides that, there is a slow but steady push to get rid of cash. Once it’s gone, the only convenient way to use money for regular people will be digital banking. I think tech buddies won’t have a hard time convincing bank buddies and gov buddies that any device/system not coming from authorized corpo is not safe to support. It would make those resisting assimilate, or quickly fall to the society’s bottom.
a couple weeks ago, i have seen for the first time laptops with linux (ubuntu) preinstalled for sale in a store
Dell laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled were available in mainstream stores in Poland in 2000s, not sure if it continued into 2010s. I’ve often seen them as a kid but didn’t understand what Linux was back then… Were cheaper than ones with windows keys.
It’s already happening. Google’s device attestation means that apps can insist you run a signed OS (signed by Google, or an authorized partner) or refuse to work. I use GrapheneOS and because of this, I can’t tap to pay or use my phone as a car key. No chance they’ll ever allow GrapheneOS to join that program because it undermines their data collection and control.
What are you going to do? Not use Microsoft Excel? It’s got Copilot now. I don’t see Libreoffice coming with AI. AI costs money!
I imagine that they don’t care for the small segment of users that can install another OS. Even if they stay at Windows we probably hamper and sabotage the telemetry/adware parts of the OS and become less profitable.
When looking at their Q4 earnings the Windows and Devices and Advertisement revenue should be high enough to warrant some effort. That effort is probably to increase the Advertisement revenue though.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2025-q4/segment-revenues
Sunk cost?
Figuring out how to solve a problem on an OS I’d used for a few weeks fortuitously solved a problem I’d created trying to solve a different problem on a different OS a few years ago. We learn by doing!
I loved this bit, I think everyone in tech has a similar story of some kind.
same, and i have had this annoying problem with network drivers that my internet cuts off randomly and i have to restart. Linux with problems is superior to well functioning windows for peace of mind alone.
The average user is not going with Linux,unless it’s hidden. Microsoft knows this. Go Valve!
once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids
This was shockingly bad last time I needed to do it (years ago) and only had access to Linux devices. I now use my phone for scanning and printing and I’ve given up on trying to figure it out on my Linux machines.
I love that there’s a big jump in adoption for Linux, but I feel it is still stuck in the “hobbyist” space, more suited to people who love to thinker with everything.
There would be wider / faster adoption if there would be some desktop environment with coherent user experience available, but this is the hardest problem to solve and unfortunately one people don’t really want to pay for so I doubt we will have it in the near future
https://opensource.com/article/18/9/linux-scanner-tools
The first one, Simple Scan aka Document Scanner works like a dream on my Fedora laptop. The UI can be a bit finnicky though when selecting scanned pages, but the keyboard shortcuts have helped me immensely when scanning documents from my Brother LaserJet.
I’m sure there’s a command-line tool that’s even more efficient than the tools from the article. That’s the magical thing about Linux. I was able to use a file recovery command-line tool to recover files after I botched a transfer to an external SSD. A to I would’ve had to pay for or use some sketch asf site on Windows.
Oh, nice. I ran simplescan and it just worked. I’ve never actually tried to scan anything with my MFP Brother.
Last time I tried scanning and printing on Windows, it took me over an hour to get the device recognized, the right drivers installed, the printer to actually receive the print job, and so on. Printers are just shitty pieces of hardware, Linux or not.
I have no experience with Linux+printers, but everything I’ve read suggests that it usually just works and has way less friction than printers in Windows
Funny enough, my shitbox HP Inkjet is actually faster to install on Linux and Gnome Scan is way better than any proprietary scanning software I’ve used
I could never get the scanner to work on that cannon printer. For printing, I couldn’t get the paper size to work at all. My PDF paper size was A4, my phisical paper was A4, my printer was set to print on A4, but it still the footer was truncated from the page.
Canon does make Linux drivers for at least some of their printers (like mine), but they can be hard to find. I can’t remember exactly how I got to mine but I know it took a few attempts.
Maybe you’re particularly unlucky though, because my Canon works perfectly with either the built in CUPS driver or the one from Canon.
Brother printers are pretty miserable. I’m on bazzite and no joke, there is a solid 10 minute delay from when I hit the print button to when it prints. It used to scan, then stopped one day with not explanation. Ive use the same printer on the same version/release of fedora on my laptop and it works fine now but it didn’t when it worked on my bazzite desktop. The driver/CUPS thing shows up nothing sometimes, and sometimes finds the printer after 400 attempts even if I search by mac address, ip address, hostname, doesn’t matter. The little gremlins in the machine decide when I can print or scan.
Brother printers
You’ve had this experience with multiple Brother printers, or is this anecdotal?
My anecdotal experience is that my Brother printer works just fine, after installing the driver of course. Delay until printing is in seconds. 🤷♂️ It’s a WiFi printer, too.
Don’t even need a driver with modern IPP supported printers, they just work. At least with basic printing needs, but probably some gaps for complex stuff.
Yeah, my particular one needs a driver unfortunately, but it’s fairly old I think.
@victorz @Know_not_Scotty_does “Just install the driver”, so you must have a windows with it, too, only to use your own printer…
Yeah I went through the whole process to download the linux drivers and generate the package as outlined on the Brother website. I could never get it functioning properly that way. The generic driver that the bazzite/fedora print manager used occasionally works but again, it does weird stuff sometimes.
Arch wins the day again, yaay
@Know_not_Scotty_does If the manufacturer gave linux drivers, they are probably inserted into your linux distribution. So you do not need to install anything.
My specific printer wasn’t listed in the default print manager but it also didn’t make a difference when I tried to manually add it via the brother website. Its an old and shitty printer, I need to just replace it.
I don’t have Windows, no. The drivers are packaged in the AUR. If you install the driver on your Android phone you can also print from your phone. Android is also Linux-based. 😁
On the contrary, I’ve had exactly opposite experience. Had to use “connection repair tool” every time before printing on windows. On Linux I had to learn what to install at first to make my printer work, but once I did I have never had any problem occur.
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