| ▲ | voxleone 7 hours ago |
| It’s worth acknowledging the real challenges raised in this thread: desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds. But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom. Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? |
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| ▲ | bachmeier 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work. |
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| ▲ | mjr00 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet. I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS. To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general. I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source. It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem. | | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > plus it's open-source Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it. Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source. | | |
| ▲ | MaxBarraclough 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's no guarantee, but it's a positive indicator of trustworthiness if a codebase is open source. I don't have hard numbers on this, but in my experience it's pretty rare for an open source codebase to contain malware. Few malicious actors are bold enough to publish the source of their malware. The exception that springs to mind is source-based supply chain attacks, such as publishing malicious Python code to Python's pip package-manager. You have a valid point that a binary might not correspond to the supposed source code, but I think this is quite uncommon. | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Of course this is true. But you can keep going down the rabbit hole. How do you know there isn't a backdoor hidden in the source code? How do you know there isn't a compromised dependency, maybe intentionally? Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software developers; why do I trust that `pip install SQLAlchemy==2.0.45` isn't going to install a cryptominer on my system? It's certainly not because I've inspected the source code, it's because there's a web of trust in the ecosystem (well-known package, lots of downloads, if there were malware someone would have likely noticed before me). > still running a random binary Again "random" here is untrue, there's nothing random about it. You're running a binary which is published by the maintainers of some software. You're deciding how much you trust those maintainers (and their binary publishing processes, and whoever is hosting their binary). | |
| ▲ | lutusp 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it. Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true. > Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source. This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same. |
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| ▲ | wat10000 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | How do they know they’ve found the legitimate Ring Racers download and not some scammer who managed to get their search result above the real one? Nothing wrong with downloading and running programs you trust, but there needs to be a good answer to that question. |
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| ▲ | wilsonnb3 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do. |
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| ▲ | freeopinion 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough. This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined. Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user". | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists. Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories. The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis. OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot. But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad. You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers. Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi. On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both. So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support. |
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| ▲ | mrstackdump 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware... | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable. Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications. When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there. Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste. |
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| ▲ | mrstackdump 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected. Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience. | |
| ▲ | pluralmonad 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are right. Most will never care. I think of it like, lets try to keep the lights on for the folks that inevitably get burned and need an escape hatch. Many will not, but always some will. At least that's my way of not being a techno-nihilist. | |
| ▲ | graemep 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The same with multiple people I know. Its not perfect, but neither is Windows. > There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works. They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows. | | |
| ▲ | buran77 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows. The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way. Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume. |
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| ▲ | Terretta 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? Define "our". Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances. So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers. Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen. Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing. Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so. |
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| ▲ | freeopinion 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison. Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds. Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users. You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.) For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip. |
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| ▲ | koyote 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison. I think this sentiment is often overlooked as people are used to their 'poison'. As someone who uses Linux a their main personal machine (with dual boot to Windows every now and then) as well as W11 for work, it's amazing what you get used to. I was almost agreeing with OP, remembering bluetooth issues I had with Linux just last month when one of my headphones couldn't connect properly and I had to spend 10-15 minutes messing about with bluetooth stacks to get it working again. But reading your comment I just realised that my current work machine doesn't even detect my bluetooth headphone's microphone and I have not found a fix yet.
That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations. I also get Windows blue screens far more often than I get Linux kernel panics. You're just so used to the issues and inconveniences that you don't even recognise them as such anymore.
Issue and inconveniences from a new piece of software you're trialing stick out like sore thumb though... | | |
| ▲ | broodbucket 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The thing I like about Linux is that if your thing doesn't work you have a way better chance of being able to wrangle it into working (odds increasing as your technical skill increases) Meanwhile on Windows if something doesn't work you're generally SOL. |
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| ▲ | volkercraig 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now. |
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| ▲ | BuddyPickett 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No hardware problems in the version I run, not sure what version you use. It's also not frustrating for me but what I do get frustrated with is trying to get software to run and Linux but just won't work. Most people are smart enough to be able to use windows without getting frustrated. | | |
| ▲ | alisonsandy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That is the same thing many people using linux say. It not frustrating or have any issues. | |
| ▲ | graemep 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So why are so many people complaining about Windows 11? | | |
| ▲ | magicalhippo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As a Windows user since 3.x days, I complain mostly about UX issues these days. It's also clear leadership is not aligned with what I want with my desktop. I've hardly had hardware issues since I moved to Windows 2000. Sure some, but few enough I can't recall any in particular. | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People have complained about every version of Windows, including the ones that were considered to be good milestones (like 2k and 7). |
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| ▲ | pixelpoet 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Windows 11 is a dog. So, man's best friend? Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats. On that note, even more hilarious/tragic is their turning MS Office into Microsoft Copilot 365 App lol, probably the tech biggest marketing blunder of all time, and entirely unforced (unlike for example Intel mostly abandoning the Pentium brand after the P4). | | |
| ▲ | vo2maxer 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic? |
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| ▲ | GlacierFox 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I take it you just read the first sentence and darted to the reply button... | | |
| ▲ | normie3000 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Or GP knows that anyone who finds the following appealing has already been using linux for years: > Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? But if windows is now objectively worse than linux, normal people also now have a reason to switch. | | |
| ▲ | vladvasiliu 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together. So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day. Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times. | | |
| ▲ | buran77 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer? To be honest I've never seen an EliteBook that needed any drivers for the common components (I also own quite a few Elites, oldest from 2012), and in general any laptop that needed a touchpad driver to work in well over a decade. And I've played with a lot of different laptops, business models in particular. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's common. | | |
| ▲ | vladvasiliu 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I have two similar laptops, 840 g8 and 845 g8. The first is intel, the other amd. The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar. For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in. The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore. Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper. |
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| ▲ | leptons 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Frustrating UX? Nope. Slow? Nope. Constant hardware problems? Just no. I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them. |
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| ▲ | the__alchemist 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is an clarifying perspective. In particular, I think this sheds light on understanding the various perspectives in the thread: > Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things: A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software. I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used. |
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| ▲ | bb88 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The people who wanted A created B. It's not really a conflation but more of a causal reality. | | |
| ▲ | TheCleric 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes but the headwinds of Linux adoption are (to some extent) that Linux is the best choice for A, but it is not far and away the best choice for B (not saying it’s bad or even worse than Windows, it’s just not CLEARLY better). But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not. Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people. To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years. |
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| ▲ | meetingthrower 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux. |
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| ▲ | graemep 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application Why? You can edit MS Office documents fine in LibreOffice and other similar software. | | |
| ▲ | Cu3PO42 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you're working in a corporate environment, this may not be viable. LibreOffice is great software, but it's not 100% compatible. Things may look slightly different, get lost or otherwise cause problems. I've really tried, but at the end of the day I occasionally do need to use actual Microsoft Office. | | |
| ▲ | MegaDeKay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. And then there is Visio which gets used a lot where I work. LibreOffice Draw doesn't come anywhere near it. It saves a lot of grief just to give our Linux users a Windows VM with Office on it if they need to do any significant docs or drawings. | |
| ▲ | chris_wot 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability. |
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| ▲ | vel0city 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How do I join a live editing session of an Excel file with several people using regular Excel with LibreOffice? I can't. Or the same with PowerPoint. I can't. In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share. |
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| ▲ | acheron 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don’t do corporate work on my home computer? I don’t know who’s suggesting corporate IT departments should convert everyone to Linux. “Work computer” and “home computer” are entirely separate use cases. (Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.) | |
| ▲ | lpcvoid 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am also forced to use "productivity" software from MS, but I make do with the web versions on Linux at work. I hate it all, but it's okay. I am playing the long term game of trying to get my whole org to Linux. It helps that I can influence technical decisions, slow but steady process. | |
| ▲ | drnick1 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Check out WinApps. | | |
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| ▲ | tombert 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have been running desktop Linux for a very long time, but I actually agree. There's a lot of rough edges. I do think a lot of these problems do go away if you are a bit proactive in choosing compatible hardware. I bought my mother in law a laptop for Christmas, and I put Linux Mint on there [1]. There were no issues getting it working on Mint with Cinnamon, but that's in no small part because I double checked all the common hardware (wi-fi, GPU, trackpad, etc) to make sure it worked fine in Linux and it did. If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience. That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root. [1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows. |
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| ▲ | anonymousDan 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How do you check the hardware is compatible in practice? Is there some reliable resource for doing this? | | |
| ▲ | tombert 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | As a rule AMD stuff is pretty safe, but to answer your question, I generally go look at kernel sources, or sometimes I go and see if I can find the model in the NixOS Github and see how many workarounds that they have to do to get it working. |
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| ▲ | nottorp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > hardware support isn’t always perfect It's not perfect on windows either. Crashes, non working sleep on almost any windows laptop... at least compared to what Apple can do. |
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| ▲ | WheatMillington 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >niche professional software may lack native support Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software" |
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| ▲ | ipjrms 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What is Microsoft Office? Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot? | | | |
| ▲ | jraph 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I suspect the person you are responding to wasn't including everything that doesn't work on Linux, in particular Microsoft Office, in this phrase, but domain specific / specialized business software. | |
| ▲ | kazinator 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have two Windows systems; I use LibreOffice on them. It's just so much better. |
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| ▲ | xattt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > … desktop Linux still has rough edges … My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using. KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution. The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature. |
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| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >> … desktop Linux still has rough edges … > My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using. Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least. Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should. Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux? I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot. | |
| ▲ | faust201 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is only for people that know choices. We at out Uni provide default Ubuntu installs on laptops. Most people just live with whatever UI. I have a feeling that many have stopped configuring, themeing etc. those only from 80s to 2000 were just spending lots of time building and creating many themes like matrix etc. Also people are so addicted to smartphone. That is the main place for their heart. |
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| ▲ | HeavyStorm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You overestimate the level of investment the average person can and will make for these freedoms. People buy Kindles because they work (and are heavily marketed), they buy Apple because they simply work, and will keep preferring windows to Linux until Linux offer a easier barrier to entry. Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux. |
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| ▲ | faust201 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | May be in the US (as Apple products are cheaper and people are dependent on iMessge) Rest will remain on pirated windows or linu.many often don't even use computer. |
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| ▲ | DetectDefect 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives? The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems. |
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| ▲ | BuddyPickett 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not everything that runs on windows is proprietary I use a lot of open source software on Windows myself. Windows is also a lot easier to configure to run exactly the way I wanted to run and to be the OS I need it to be. It's extremely customizable and easy to control. It's also modifiable in many many more ways. | | |
| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are using subjective claims to back an objective assertion… Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux. You likely just know Windows better? | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think there are two factors that lead people to make statements like that. The first is a given: they're talking about configuring it as a user, not a developer. Obviously Linux can do whatever you want it to do if you build your own distro from source. But additionally, while Linux is also substantially configurable in userland, those configurations might not actually cover the cases people need. You can, for example, pick between GNOME, KDE, etc -- which, on a pedantic level, is "objectively" more customizable than Windows, where you have exactly one option. Yet, if the settings within all of the off-the-shelf GUI shells do not serve the use cases the settings of the single option on Windows does, users will have every reason to assert that, on a practical level, the degree of customizability is inferior and not sufficient for them. |
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| ▲ | Barrin92 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals extremely bizarre comparison given that 90% of people spend their time on the web which is utterly agnostic as to what operating system you're on. The reality of Linux in 2025 isn't that you have to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and talk to a football as your best friend, it's that maybe you have to spend a few hours learning how the OS works. Almost your entire Steam Library runs on Linux courtesy of Valve and a lot of ambitious individuals. If people are too lazy to invest even the tiniest bit of personal effort into trying out new things that's one thing, but at least be honest about it instead of giving me the "I don't want to live in the jungle" spiel. Don't be the tech equivalent of the person who runs around telling everyone they can't get into shape without a million dollars and a personal trainer |
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| ▲ | jdthedisciple 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain. |
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| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;) > I want to switch but I just don't feel confident Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything. IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom. You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it. | |
| ▲ | TheCleric 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Here’s a simple decision tree: Do you run any exotic hardware?
Do you run MS Office regularly?
Do you run any highly specialized software? If the answer is no to all those then Linux is worth a shot. | |
| ▲ | everdrive 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome? I'd ask you the inverse question: If Linux never got any better than it is currently, what would it take to push you away from Windows? I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious. | | |
| ▲ | qwerpy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not OP but I have a couple of red lines that if crossed, I would move to Linux: things stop “just working”, and ads/nags/notifications/behaviors that I don’t want cannot be disabled. Things are very occasionally annoying right now when a new update enables some new idiotic thing but 99.9% of the time things just work. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | michaelsshaw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It isn't an issue with Linux, it's an issue with the companies that make proprietary software and devices with only windows support. A better world is possible, but you need to accept the fight isn't easy. Switch today. | |
| ▲ | NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Will these issues with "the other side of the road" ever be overcome? > I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain. For people like you who think like this. FOREVER You'll always dream up some reason why this side of the road, is just better. |
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| ▲ | tobadzistsini 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some desktop versions of GNU/Linux have rough edges. Self-important grognards think everyone should "git gud" and install Arch or waste a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile in order to optimize the install. This article along with this one (https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desk...) go on about using an Arch-based distro rather than a Debian-based distro. Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major. The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple. Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles. Keep it simple. But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans. |
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| ▲ | taf2 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fusion360 is the one tool I wish had better wine support |
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| ▲ | whatever1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nobody cares about what runs under the hood (I mean the real market, not the dozen of us nerds), as long as it looks and plays nice. Market already uses linux both in the form of android but also as a server OS. For both of these the financial incentive was there for someone to write the drivers, make the UI user friendly (android users never have to open a terminal), create sales channels. Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals. |
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| ▲ | jama211 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah but folks around here like to stick their heads in the sand when reminded that this is a very real and concerning barrier to adoption of desktop Linux. It could happen 1000 times and they’ll still scream that it’s either user error or even worse “it works on my machine”. Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. |
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| ▲ | givemeethekeys 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe not for everyone, but it will never be the year of the Windows Desktop for everyone either. | | |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand. For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over. > Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux. |
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| ▲ | dessimus 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | >The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. The reason most people run Windows is because that is what their jobs IT department put on their computer, and those IT departments run Windows because of the enterprise tools Microsoft has provided for lifecycle management with AD, GPO, etc. Linux will have difficulty making progress with enterprises for the non-SecDevOps staff until it's as easy to centrally manage user and computer polices, accounts, and upgrades across the entire end-user fleet as it is with Microsoft. | |
| ▲ | NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's the problem that you highlighted. It's not -their- software is it. |
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| ▲ | kazinator 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases Windows is shit from the total management viewpoint: what it means to own and operate Windows over the long haul. windows is okay when there is some program on it that works well and that you like, and you're interacting with that while avoiding Windows. If Windows were the dominant platform and Windows were trying to eke out share, it wouldn't stand a chance. |
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| ▲ | xedrac 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would argue that hardware support in Linux is superior to any other operating system on the planet. |
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| ▲ | znpy 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom. Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work. The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do). So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work. |
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| ▲ | vladvasiliu 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work. Well, I think MS took care of that by removing the hibernation option from the start menu. You have to manually turn it back on from the old control panel. |
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| ▲ | 112233 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'll be glad if someone tells that I'm wrong but doesn't current windows 11 present even more of the same challenges? Last I tried, old driver compatibility in newer windowses was not fantastic, Wine slowly is becoming more compatible with legacy windows programs than the windows itself, forced updates are dealbreaker for many usecases. And need for workaroubds and poking around has reached Windows XP levels. I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft... |
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| ▲ | AlienRobot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux. Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same. But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try. This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux. |
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| ▲ | jrnng 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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