He gets out of Windows! 😀👍
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Also as a side note, i would recommend new Linux users to not learn the command line. Do not touch the command line if you’re not sure what you’re doing. Like with a knife, it’s a powerful tool but you can also do a lot of harm with it if you don’t know exactly what you are doing.
Everything that most people need (web browsing, writing emails, watching movies, making presentations) can be done with graphical programs only. You shouldn’t ever need to touch the command line.
I only tried Linux once, about 15 years ago, and got scared off because it was all command. When I blow the dust off my laptop I might try it again now that its all user friendly.
Just make sure to pick the right distro. Some are complex still to cater to us veterans
So I agree with you, kinda. it shouldn’t be something scary. It just needs to be understood. The command line is very literal. With a graphical environment, there are design elements that can kind of nudge you towards one way or another of doing or saying something to the computer. A command line is blindly speaking to something. Is incredibly efficient at doing exactly what you already know exactly how to do. The GUI is more assistive.
Finally swapped to Linux last week and loving it! Kubuntu because I wanted KDE for KZones since I was using FancyZones from PowerToys on Windows. The hardest part was migrating my qBitTorrent, Sonarr/Radarr/Plex because they all point to windows drives. A simple replace in the DB file fixed it, and we’re running smoothly!
Gonna get an auto encode/upload working this weekend, and I’m so excited. I don’t feel held back like windows, and it doesn’t feel like work configuring it, which I was afraid of.
A few hiccups here and there, but I think of it like growing pains that will eventually go away.
Wine was actually a good tip hahah
“No, you don’t understand, Linux is not desktop ready, I know that because I installed Fedora back in 2008 and it was kinda wonky.”
"I’m a busy person with a jobbity job and kids and a mortgage on an iPhone 18 Ultra Plus Air and stuff.
If I have to READ to make anything work, it’s not customer ready, and this new thing should take no time at all to completely understand on my part.
It needs to be a perfect ‘free Windows clone’ before I’ll even consider switching from the mega-corporate ecosystem I was coerced into dependency on from the start. If there’s one thing I hate more than reading, it’s asking anybody for help. Especially my friends. The operating system is the problem."
Uh it’s actually called the New iPhone 18 Ultra Plus Air Max Gold Edition. Duh
On a serious note, having used Linux on and off since the 90s (aah, Slackware, how I miss installing you from floppies … not), Linux has, IMHO, actually been desktop ready for ages (though definitelly not in the days of Slackware when configuring X was seriously interesting for a geek and pretty much an impossible barrier for everybody else).
The problem have always been applications not having Linux builds, only Windows builds, not the actual desktop Linux distros being an inferior desktop experience than Windows (well, not once Gnome and KDE emerged and made things like configuring your machine possible via GUIs - the age of the RTFF and editing text files in the command line before that wasn’t exactly friendly for non-techies).
In other words, from maybe the late 00s onwards the problem were mainly the “networks effects” (in a business sense of "apps are made for Windows because that’s were users are, users go for Windows because that’s were the apps are) rather than the “desktop” experience.
The almost unassailable advantage of Windows thanks to pretty much just network effects, was something most of us Linux fans were aware since way back.
What happened in the meanwhile to make Linux more appealing “in the Desktop” was mainly on the app availabilty side - OpenOffice (later LibreOffice and derivatives) providing an Office-style suit in Linux, the movement from locally hosted apps to web-hosted apps meaning that a lot of PC usage was really just browser usage, Wine improving by leaps and bounds and making more and more Windows applications run in Linux (most notably and also thanks to DXVK, Games) and so on.
Personally I think Linux has been a superior experience on the server side since the late 90s and, aside for the lack of Linux versions of most commonly used non-OS applications, a superior experience in the desktop since the 00s.
Oddly enough it seems like Microsoft themselves that’s working towards breaking the network effect. They are pushing people to use the web versions of their software now and since edge is chromium, their web versions should work in Linux.
In the past Microsoft made most of their money from Windows and Office, but now they make more money off of cloud services so the traditional Windows and Office products are becoming more and more about just driving people to their cloud services. But as they they put more emphasis on cloud services they’re actually making it easier for people to dump Windows, and as they make Windows more about marketing their cloud services, they give people more incentive to dump Windows.
Microsoft is digging the grave for windows.
RTFF? What’s a fanual?
Read The Fucking FAQ.
1990s Usenet reference.
A fan of manuals, obviously. There are dozens of us!
Ironically, for me, Arch has been the “Just Works” Distro lol.
Can confirm. In over 10 years of Arch I had only three breakages, two of which were self-caused by not checking for required manual intervention before upgrading. The third was because my laptop’s battery died during an upgrade.
And the fix was always the same. Boot a life image, chroot into my install and fix it.
To make a long post short, windows is shitty but its setup bullshit is very straight forward and clear to deal with, linux is great when it works but its setup bullshit is byzantine as all hell. I got Linux working with only light bullshit on a laptop but just gave up entierly after 3 days of trying to get different distros at different advice working on my desktop.
windows is shitty but its setup bullshit is very straight forward and clear to deal with
Unfortunately, you definitely get a false sense of simplicity when you’re essentially forced down a lazy river of:
“Accept all these corporate agreements, make an account with our centralized authority structure, try to deny a litany of invasive ad permissions (you can’t turn it all off lol nice try.), enable our one touch AI button, shut up, and click go.”
"(Pulsing blue light) We’Re TaKiNg CaRe Of YoU. . ."
Some setup things in Linux can be confusing at first, like how I’ve agonized over the implications of which file system to use. (Settled on BTRFS for rollbacks, otherwise it doesn’t matter for 99.9% of people lol.)
But also I think we’re just at a sad point in history where computers are everywhere but people have terrible computer education (self included), and it’s left up to private interests who mainly want a cattle-like customer base.
…So everything seems scary and complicated.
I imagine cars would be the same way if we weren’t required to test for a license. They’re getting that way quickly though, people wanting a “Push ignition and turn off brain” machine that seemingly “just works” until it doesn’t and they must take it to Special Wizards. A black box which they ultimately have no control over, but feels “easy”.
I think it’s because people are forced to use these devices. Like driving, some people enjoy the act of computing. Linux is for those people.
When everybody is forced to use computers every day and most of those computers run something by Apple, Microsoft, or Google, anything else feels like yet another stupid thing to deal with.
TL;DR: Linux respects the user, but respect is built on a two way street of understanding. People hate learning because they’re systemically stressed TF out all the time.
True. Linux supports a lot of hardware. However some distros support some better than others.
Basically before you buy hardware you need to check if it works on Linux. Usually it does, but better check throughly
Is there some distribution or tool i could search my hardware specs for the best distro?
Uff, that one is difficult.
In theory all Linux distributions support the same hardware. Its just that sometimes you need to manually install drivers and configure sth. And on Other distros you don’t need to do that for certain hardware.
I guess Linux Mint is usually pretty good at default support, but of course not everything will work.
Now about if certain hardware has Linux support:
Check if the manufacturer is claiming Linux support. This is the best case, you can assume it just works.
If there is no mention about it from the manufacturer it is still possible to have support. Use an online search machine and enter “specific hardware Linux support” or use linux mint instead of linux so that you can be sure it works for your distro.
What usually works almost always:
Motherboards(except if they are a few months old from release)
Keyboards (unless they are gaming keyboards with special tools like razer, then only the normal keyboard functions are working without special config)
Monitors
Grafic cards (they don’t work from day one release, you should always wait a few months)
I suspect Mint would work fine on that same desktop at this point, since it was just very new at the time and support take a bit to come in, but now its all set up how I want. Perhaps when windows next shits itself and I need to re-format anyway.
it was in 2012
Moved around 2010, didn’t look back. I have even installed Linux for people that didn’t really know what an operating system is and they are fine with it. Actually if anything its the technically incapable people that manage the best because they usually don’t know how to break it. Sure, they need someone to install it for them but they needed that for windows too.
yea that makes sense. I installed Mint on my wife’s laptop when Windows was dying of self-inflicted bloat, suddenly she could use her computer again!
I have been online linux mint for a good while now.
I don’t know, the most whining I see here on Lemmy is from Linux people.
That’s just the ones who don’t use Arch.
No no, the ones using Arch are the most vocal whiners.
What would they have to whine about? They set up their system exactly how they like it since the OS comes without any preinstalled software and only minimal defaults for the ones you install.
Wine?
Now we need a windows compatibility program called “com-plain”
Simplified communication, components, compatibility, whatever makes the backronym work
CON-plain
alias complain=protonComponent Object Model?
Using Wine directly is a bit of a pita.
Hence why there are things like Bottles.
It helps but it’s too expensive to distribute to everyone.
Where’s Jesus when you need him?
“I can’t switch, there’s this one function of this one programme that I may need in the next 50 years.”
“I need quickbooks.” Use the web version. “Yea but that one sucks.” They all suck. Use something else. “There is nothing else. My account says quickbooks is all there is.” He’s wrong. “Well what am I supposed to do? People with money use quick books.” No, people spend money to use quickbooks. You have an accountant. He can use quick books. You can use whatever you want. -continues to bitch about expensive things he hates, dismisses anything free as hippy crap-
There’s a Linux app for that but the buttons are in different places
“There’s this obscure function in Excel that I know somebody who knows somebody who used it that won’t work in LibreOffice Calc”
I mean, you can keep putting up strawmen, but that is not going to convince anyone that Linux is superior.
“They told me to type words into a black screen with green letters, and the mere suggestion burned down my house and killed my family.”
“But I am more than happy to root around the registry and make changes to obscure variables that will be reverted in the next update”
You mean through a GUI?
Geez, I wonder why.
I mean, just now I was talking about dual booting Linux and Windows, and they fight over the RTC, Linux wants UTC, Windows wants local time. It’s a line of bash to set Linux to use local time, it’s changing a registry key in Windows.
That man’s home address?
/dev/lp0Yes, do as I say!
Ah yeah that’s a bug. Should be a fix in a few days
No, it’s a feature.
Still needs a toggle. What is this? North Korea?
It’s Microslop so… yeah same thing.
Ahem… I believe you mean BEST KOREA.
Excel tables.
No Linux/OSS app can do this (and will likely never). Open Office devs have outright declared they won’t.
Or the automated process that export/import data via excel.
Let’s see you rebuild all those things, without man hours or errors. Costly errors.
Whenever someone gets on a “just switch” campaign (whether it’s something like Linux or Metric), I know they’ve never had to work on a migration project and seen the challenges, difficulties, and risk.
I use Linux for servers, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna spend time converting my workstation - there’s zero value in it for me when I have decades of tools and process. The value proposition just isn’t there.
Don’t go taking down a fence until you fully understand what it’s for.
Can the web version of Excel do tables? I know that it’s a lesser version of the desktop app, but if tables was the most advanced feature you need, that could be an option.
OnlyOffice is supposed to be better than OpenOffice for Microsoft documents
Not to mention that LibreOffice has all but replaced OpenOffice as the latter is virtually unmaintained.
Can confirm
Fair enough. Excel is pretty complicated.
I:
A) Try Wine. No? Ok…
B) Hello windows using friend or relative, can I borrow your PC for 30 min? No? Ok…
C) Hey work IT man, so, I know this is dumb but I need to run a program called pkhex. Yeah it’s a hex editor specifically for pokemon hex files. Yeah I can get you anything on your cart. I can get you a legit Mew, even change your OT name from whatever you thought was cool in 1998. Ok so I need admin to download that real fast because I run Fedora, you bring your cart tomorrow and we can do this on lunch.
Typically option B is enough lol.
There is also option D.
Huh, neat! Never seen this, how is it?
It’s VM based, so it’s perfect for niche applications that don’t work on Wine and don’t need GPU acceleration. That’s the only shortcoming.
Good to know, thanks!
You jest but the pain is real. Developing a Windows only software for work in a Windows only environment.
I use Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarch
I read that as “I use arch by the waaaaaaaaaaaaayy…!”
I bet that, like most Arch users, that one kept on thinking"So far so good" all the way down.
There’s a “defenestrate” joke here somewhere.
Yup, fella left Windows through the pain of installing Arch
More like Parabola, judging by the trajectory!
theres a plasma window decoration called klassy that has a bunch of presets. all the windows-like presets are called defenestrated (followed by the number of whatever version of windows it is like).
Integrate, adapt, overcome.
😭 😮💨
🍷 🫡
Why not all 3? I love complaining.
We had a quip in the bug tracker at a company I worked at:
Man developed speech because of his deep need to complain.
W
hine
