this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 150 points 11 months ago (23 children)

Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.

I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 11 months ago (12 children)

The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.

That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (4 children)

This is something that too many people don't understand.

For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.

For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.

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[–] [email protected] 110 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Natively run Windows software. Do I win?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 73 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 11 months ago (5 children)

At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.

I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (4 children)

so, due to those gaps, it currently can't do those things.

This argument boils down to "yes it could, if someone bothered to implement it". Well... nobody has, so it can't

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 11 months ago (15 children)
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[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (23 children)

Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."

[–] [email protected] 79 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (10 children)

And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Embed ads on your desktop.

Play games with kernal level anti cheat

Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.

Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (21 children)

Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton's advancement and the steam deck's popularity, too.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:

  • Domain integration, e.g. ActiveDirectory
  • Group policy configuration

You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (12 children)

Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago (14 children)
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago

I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to go with "be normal".

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not.

That’s funny because IMO it’s the exact opposite. Every mainstream operating system is a Unix or Unix-like. MacOS, iOS, Android, the BSD’s, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc. etc.

Windows is the only non-Unix OS that has any significant marketshare.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (42 children)

Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.

Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it's an adventure each time.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (3 children)

seamless sleep

On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Play all my laptop's speakers

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

Just run stuff out-of-the-gate

Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)

Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)

Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)

*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box

*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)

*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (15 children)

Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).

Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a 'hope it works' but are most definitely unsupported.

Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.

Wine is 'fun'(?), but it's a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows' tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it's not 'supported.

Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn't have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).

I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work "well enough" to move on from windows but it's just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it'll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it'll be easier to switch.

For now, I'm stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows' direction).

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Restore the screen resolution when an old game crashes

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.

ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Change your audio device seemingly at random.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Blue screen. Embed advertising and spyware in everything.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

Ads in my notifications and my lock screen.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (15 children)

Being intuitive.

On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.

On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.

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