I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
"suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times.
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux.
Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home.
As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked.
Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in a movie.
You pull out the plug, but nothing happens. A shape resembling a human face appears on the screen. It has an evil grin.
Exits: N W
I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that.
Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".
I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I always place laptop with vents on the top
I did too, it ran Linux.
"suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times.
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
https://xkcd.com/1172/
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
> End users don't care, companies don't care
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
Do people actually use Word? I can’t remember the last time I saw a docx file at a job. At least five years ago…
They do but the mode has changed from Word.exe to https://www.o365.com/word or sharepoint -> word doc.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
This what is a moot point, but line chefs wouldn’t be the ones writing menus or signing catering contracts.
Otherwise I think we’re in completely agreement.
> Do people actually use Word?
I mean, for starters just walk into any law firm.
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
End users mostly don't know what Windows is. You can see this when someone picks up a tablet and opens Google Docs.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...
> conversion to Word 2003 format
That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.
> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.
Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?
> not until office for Mac reached feature parity
It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
That's right.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
IMX people often care more about which web browser is installed than which OS.
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
> Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
Essentially your argument boils down to "linux is bad because you have choice".
The slop articles you get are the result of the natural SEO competition.
The real problem is that anyone is propagandizing the concept of a "gaming distro" in the first place.