Edit: here is some context because people are getting mad
the reason i asked because my friend asked me to install linux on his laptop because he wanted to look like a cringey hacker so i installed it but after i installed linux few days after he reinstalled windows(i am not sure why but he said he can’t run bluestack, i suggested other VMs but he wouldn’t have any other way but that’s not reason i think he switched he was being dismissive) and now his mic and web cam is not working and some other stuff, so he’s asking me again to reinstall linux constantly and i don’t want to do that again (why? My school is far from my home around 9km/5.5 and i go there by my bicycle so after school I don’t wanna waste my time installing linux)so i was just ranting didn’t expect to make people mad
It’s installed on their PC. That’s 98% of it. If Linux was pre-installed on everyone’s PC we’d all be using Linux, and the normies would complain about how hard Windows is to use.
I’m convinced my Mom wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Windows 10 and Debian with a Win10 theme.
Unless she uses Peacock. They seem to be the only streamer that’s clinging to the 15 year old idea of just not supporting Linux.
Yup. Lest we forget, Android is Linux-based, and it’s the most popular consumer operating system in the world.
Even if there are Linux preinstalled laptops people don’t buy them. Linux on desktop has too many fundamental Issues and still isn’t a viable option imo. Even top Linux distributions don’t have particularly good interfaces with very questionable design choices.
This type of questions seems too obvious and really childish, there’s no way you don’t know why people use windows despite it being trash. Either you’re dumb or you’re asking this questions for attention.
Yeah, I think there needs to be a push for less of these circle jerk posts. It seem more appropriate for a meme community than something that I at least assume is meant to be about more focused discussion about Linux than a Windows fixation.
other than pre-installed i don’t know and the reason i asked because my friend asked me to install linux on his laptop but after i installed linux few days after he reinstalled windows and now his mic and web cam not working and some other stuff, so he’s asking me again to reinstall linux
- Familiarity
- More games/better gaming support
- Consistency with computers used at work/school or by friends/colleagues
- IT people can benefit from using the same systems as their users to provide better support
- Availability of proprietary software necessary to run specialized equipment
- Non-power users might not run into significant issues with Windows since it does basic tasks like web browsing, game playing, and movie watching just fine
Gaming related: while true Proton put Linux gaming on the map, most problems are anti cheat related. Some games run even better under Linux IT related: this really depends on your job. I work 100% on Linux machines but my client is indeed a Windows machine with regular fuckups because of shitty Updates or things Windows does for no good reason or even worse no proper error handling or logging. Non power user related: most stuff happens in Browsers Today so watching Videos, browsing the web works the same and doesnt need that much bloat and spyware Windows delivers by default
Today there is no real reason to stick on Windows though besides mostly flawless gaming or shitty software which is not available on Linux nor runs proper through WINE
None of this applies to the average user though.
The vast majority of devices sold come with Windows or MacOS, so you’re suggesting that the average Joe should wipe their drive, pick a distro, and self-install and maintain a new operating system.
You and I know that it’s not as difficult as it sounds, but that’s asking a lot from people who can’t even bother to reboot their system when there’s been an update pending for 10 days.
Those are real reasons though.
- Familiarity = Lazy
- Games = Waste of one’s life
- Consistencty… = Need to fit in, low self worth
- IT people can… = You accept being controlled by others
- …proprietary software… = How fcking dare you, sir?!?
- Non-power users - These people need Linux the MOST. They screw up their windows installs and need competent people to fix it for them… again, and again, and again!
I’m not sure insulting people is the most effective way to win them over to your perspective.
You seem to attribute to character flaws what is more commonly just practical decisions.
I won’t be an apologist for people’s shortcomings, especially when those hurt Linux adoption.
- Familiarity: There is Cinnamon, MATE, and KDE that is plenty similar to Windows for understanding the interface. This is not an excuse.
- Games: The fact that games continues to dictate peoples platform choice is simply intolerable. Games are on Windows to make money, not on Linux because it doesn’t make enough money. That simply should not be allowed. It’s a feedback loop. And why? So people can sit on their butts accomplishing nothing. If one is going to be on a computer, USE it for doing something useful. Games are a waste of good computer.
- Consistency: Seriously, be a thorn in the side of proprietary file format users. They promote vendor lock-in with their careless use of proprietary Windows software. Don’t just go with the flow, show them they are wrong for surrendering to companies in it only for money. If it costs you friends, they weren’t good enough people to be friends with, anyway.
- IT people can…: Sure… nothing like Teams and corporate spyware agents on your system. No thank you.
- Proprietary software: Simply shouldn’t exist. It is a harm to society and needs to be eradicated.
- Non-power users: Yeah I said it, and I’m not wrong.
The message: Join the Linux and FOSS utopia, quit wasting life gaming (unless you do it to spend quality time with your child, as computer games are for children), make real relationships not based on conforming and not based on promoting non-FOSS solutions, learn how to properly run and secure a computer, as it is a responsibility and a tool, not a toy and not something you should trust anyone else to administer, stop paying for software written for non-FOSS platforms, and finally, again, more responsibility in knowing how to properly and safely use a computer. That time wasted gaming could have been spent educating oneself on how to use, administer, and secure computers. It can also be used to properly call this stuff out in order to help create a more perfect society.
I had a point by point response, but I don’t think perpetuating this discussion is productive, so I’ll just leave you with the friendly advice that adopting a judgmental, nearly religious fundamentalist, and authoritarian approach to FOSS feels like it violates the spirit of FOSS itself and will likely be off-putting to even other FOSS enthusiasts, much less anyone you want to convince.
That’s fair. I’m finding myself more tolerant since I’ve had lunch. Have a good day.
- It’s preinstalled on their PC.
- All their Hardware is guaranteed to work.
- All their preferred Software is available and supported.
- A small but very loud minority of the FOSS advocates are absolute insufferable and people associate this negative experiences with Linux.
- There are thousands of Distros and it can be confusing.
Things have gotten way better on Desktop Linux but changing public perception takes a lot of time and effort.
Pre-installed is the biggest factor. Go to Walmart or best buy. You’ll find windows and Mac and chromebooks.
I don’t think it’s “laziness” per se, but rather people aren’t that technically inclined. It’s too much of a challenge for the average person especially when they don’t understand the benefits.
For me, someone who’s used both, I’m now using a windows machine because there are two applications that aren’t available for Linux os’s that I need for work. You cannot use a substitute program (one is a less common secure video conference program).
Our media pc in the living room is running a Linux OS, but when we try to watch the local web player for national programming (Ireland) Firefox won’t run the player on Linux like it can on Windows, so we have to use Chrome, which I absolutely hate doing.
I’d love to use Linux full time, but I must use a couple of windows/mac OS applications, so I put up with windows. Win 10 isn’t so bad.
I’m waiting on Linux to get proper HDR support before being able to use one for TV use. Been waiting for that for years.
fair enough. wife and l arent, I guess, videophiles and don’t really care about the highest resolutions etc
Also, the reason people eat at the same restaurants regularly, and use the same brand toothpaste etc.
- They feel it meets their needs and are comfortable with it
Because “inferior” is just a perspective. In your pov Linux may be better, but for someone who wants a PC to play games, mainly games with anticheats, Linux is objectively worst.
Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc are just software. You must be able to use the software that best fits in your needs and that’s it.
I wouldn’t say its inferior, different? Sure but not inferior
Exactly. It depends on the user and their requirements. Windows has far more commercial software support and is pre-installed and supported on a huge number of systems. Linux has many advantages in a large number of niches and if you operate in those niches it is hard to understand why anyone would choose to use Windows but a lot of people don’t choose their OS at all. It is chosen for them when they buy their computer or dictated by their job or the software they need.
Because it’s reliable, capable, and comes preinstalled on everything. Linux is better in a lot of ways, but it’s only really good for power users who can install it then can deal with the quirks or people who only use Facebook and need the stability. Everyone else will get confused by the differences to what they’re used to, then when they try to install Microsoft Office or Photoshop, they’ll just ask whoever installed it to “put it back to normal.”
Posts like this are why Linux users have a bad rep. I like Linux but a lot of tools I use are developed for windows, not Linux. I use Nvidia gpus (because I have to for CUDA) which are known to bug out on Linux.
It’s preinstalled.
One word. Distros. If I want windows on a home computer, it’s windows. Maybe it’s Home or Professional, but it’s just fucking windows.
If I want linux at home, it’s Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or Slack or Cent or Mint or some other shit. Then I choose one and I want office and it’s not an option, so I google “office on linux” and it’s libreoffice or wayland or x.org or god forbid open office. Guess what I don’t want to do, explain that shit to my kids.
At work we have red hat and cent. If I’m spinning up private cloud computer it’s cent, if it’s public facing its red hat. No decisions to make. But then I have to research some arbitrary package and all the user guides are Debian based and like clockwork apt-get and rpm are inevitably different versions and installs to opt instead of /usr/local and just fuck.
Yea it’s come a long way, but home pcs need to operate brain dead simple point and click. Windows as successfully abstracted away every component of the concept of an operating system from 80% of end users, and 99% of the last 20% don’t want to deal with it off the clock.
Because it isn’t inferior.
Ubuntu barely can run programs from 5 years ago, backwards compatibility is terrible. Red Hat was doing good but it just shit the bed. To have any degree of consistenty, you need to wrap all apps inside of a Docker and carry with you all the dependencies (but this leads you to obscure musl bugs in practice, because musl has different bugs than glibc).
For better or worse, Windows programs with dependency on kernel32.dll (at the C++ level) have remained consistently deployed since the early 1990s and rarely break. C# programs have had good measures of stability. DirectX9, DirectX10, DirectX11, and DirectX12 all had major changes to how the hardware works and yet all the hardware automatically functions on Windows. You can play Starcraft from 1998 without any problems despite it being a DirectX6 game.
Switch back over to Ubuntu land, and Wayland is… maybe working? Eventually? Good luck reaching back to programs using X.org dependencies or systemd.
Windows is definitely a better experience than Ubuntu. I think Red Hat has the right idea but IBM is seemingly killing all good will built up to Red Hat and CentOS. SUSE linux is probably our best bet moving forward as a platform that cares about binary stability.
Windows networking stack is also far superior for organizations. SAMBA on Linux works best if you have… a Windows Server instance holding the group-policies and ACLs on a centralized server. Yes, $1000 software works better than $0 software. Windows Server is expensive but its what organizations need to handle ~50 to ~1000 computers inside of a typical office building.
Good luck deploying basic security measures in an IT department with Linux. The only hope, in my experience, is to buy Windows Server, and then run SAMBA (and deal with SAMBA bugs as appropriate). I’m not sure if I ever got a Linux-as-Windows-server ever working well. Its not like Linux development community understands what an ACL is in practice.
You might have some valid points here, however bringing Ubuntu into the argument and saying things are broken is exactly like saying you are running last night’s upload and complaining that you can’t get it to start. You run Ubuntu if you don’t care one cent about having a stable computer. If you want a system that will work reliably even with older software then use something like Debian that doesn’t push beta releases to end users.
like saying you are running last night’s upload
If only. I’m running old stuff, not by choice either.
Ubuntu 18.04 and up literally fails to install on one of my work computers. I’ve been forced to run Ubuntu 16.04. BIOS-incompatibility / hardware issues happen man. It forces me to an older version. On some Dell workstations I’ve bought for my org, Ubuntu 22 fails to install and we’re forced to run Ubuntu 20.04 on those.
Software compiled on Ubuntu 16.04 has issues running on Ubuntu 20.04, meaning these two separate computers have different sets of bugs as our developers run and test.
I’m running old LTS Ubuntu instances, not because I want to mind you. But because I’ve been forced with hardware incompatibility bugs to do so. At least we have Docker, so the guy running Ubuntu 20.04 can install docker and create an Ubuntu 16.04 docker to run the 16.04 binaries. But its not as seemless as any Linux guy thinks.
CentOS is too stable and a lot of proprietary code is designed for Ubuntu instead. So while CentOS is stable, you get subtle bugs when you try to force Ubuntu binaries onto it. If your group uses CentOS / RedHat, that’s great. Except its not the most popular system, so you end up having to find Ubuntu boxes somewhere to run things effectively.
There’s plenty of Linux software these days that forces me (and users around me) to use Linux in an office environment. But if you’re running multiple Linux boxes (This box is Ubuntu, that one is Ubuntu 16 and can’t upgrade, that other box is Red Hat for the .yum packages…), running an additional Windows box ain’t a bad idea anyway. You already were like 4 or 5 computers to have this user get their job done.
Once you start dealing with these issues, you really begin to appreciate Windows’s like 30+ years of binary compatibility.
You know there are distros other than Ubuntu and CentOS right?
You know that doesn’t matter when commercial software often only releases and tests their software on Ubuntu and RedHat, right?
I run Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. because I’m forced to. Do you think I’m creating a lab with a billion different versions of Linux for fun?
Linux kinda-sorta works if you’ve got the freedom to “./configure && make && make install”, recreating binaries and recompiling often. Many pieces of software are designed to work across library changes (but have the compiler/linker fix up minor issues).
But once you start having proprietary binaries moving around (and you’ll be facing proprietary binaries cause no office will give you their source code), you start having version-specific issues. The Linux-community just doesn’t care very much about binary-compatibility, and they’ll never care about it because they’re anti-corporate and don’t want to offer good support to binary code like this. (And prefers to force GPL down your throats).
There’s certainly some advantages and disadvantages to Linux’s choice here (or really, Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. since each different distro really is its own OS). But in the corporate office world, Linux is a very poor performer in practice.
Fair point. I think I’m just too used to dealing with the bullshit of building the packages myself cause I find it fun. Definitely not viable for commercial use.
And here I just installed Debian 11 on a poweredge 860. No trouble at all, it just works. I’ve installed newer versions of debian of older laptops as well, I have a thinkpad T42p sitting here that runs it although it hasn’t seen much use lately. I dunno, it doesn’t sound like you have a linux problem, more like an ubuntu problem.
Maybe I’m just sour with ubuntu because they literally ignored a network driver bug for a decade before closing it despite the kernel driver working fine, rebuilding the kernel with their own instructions worked fine, and yet the problem persisted through all of their releases during that period. I completely ditched ubuntu a few months later but I kept getting the emails from the bug tracker over the years as other people continued to experience the same problem. Using ubuntu in a business environment is just insanity.
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Yeah, cause the Win32 API + DirectX is more stable than the rest of Linux.
There’s a reason why Steam games prefer to emulate Win32 API on Linux, rather than compiling to Linux binary native. Wine is more stable than almost everything else, and Windows’s behavior (both documented, and undocumented) has legendary-levels of compatibility.
For better or worse, Windows programs with dependency on kernel32.dll (at the C++ level) have remained consistently deployed since the early 1990s and rarely break. C# programs have had good measures of stability. DirectX9, DirectX10, DirectX11, and DirectX12 all had major changes to how the hardware works and yet all the hardware automatically functions on Windows. You can play Starcraft from 1998 without any problems despite it being a DirectX6 game.
Many (non-WPF) C# executables also work great on Linux! Mono makes compatibility easy and practically guaranteed.
With the Steam Deck, Valve has proven what we all feared: the best SDK for proprietary Linux software is win32 + Wine.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Linux works great for the people who prefer open source software. However, if you can’t recompile your software for every major update, you need a workaround.
Linux development community understands what an ACL is in practice
Sure they know! That’s got something to do with SELinux, which is the thing that breaks everything so you disable it every time you follow a guide online!
I kid (sort of), but Linux is starting to get there. systemd has some great sandboxing features (like dynamic users and file system isolation) and Flatpak is doing some nice things on the GUI side. It’s getting there, slowly but surely.
Honestly, Docker is solving the problems in a lot of practice.
Its kinda stupid that so many dependencies need to be kept track of that its easier to spin up a (vm-like) environment to run Linux binaries more properly. But… it does work. With a bit more spit-shine / polish, Docker is probably the way to move forward on this issue.
But Docker is just not there yet. Because Linux is Open Source, there’s no license-penalties to just carrying an entire Linux-distro with your binaries all over the place. And who cares if a binary is like 4GB? Does it work? Yes. Does it work across many versions of Linux? Yes (for… the right versions of Linux with the right compilation versions of Docker, but yes!! It works).
Get those Dockers a bit more long-term stability and compatibility, and I think we’re going somewhere with that. Hard Drives these days are $150 for 12TB and SSDs are $80 for 2TB, we can afford to store those fat binaries, as inefficient as it all feels.
I did have a throw-away line with MUSL problems, but honestly, we’ve already to incredibly fat dockers laying around everywhere. Why are the OSS guys trying to save like 100MB here and there when no one actually cares? Just run glibc, stop adding incompatibilities for honestly, tiny amounts of space savings.
People use tools that work best for them. There really is nothing much more to it than that. An operating system is a tool, not a religion.
not a religion
Terry Davis would disagree
You get dragged back to Windows by a lot of employers and schools. Nobody has time to fight the system when everything depends on your Windows based outputs.
Microsoft specifically engages and sponsors technology in governments around the world for this reason. Their whole schtick is ‘embrace’.
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This frustrates the shit out of me but I have a feeling it has everything to do with mindshare. Windows just has the majority of the mindshare and a lot of decisions about information technology are not necessarily made by technically savvy people. Even technically savvy people make poor choices. I had a director once tell me that he prefers proprietary software to open source because it gives him somebody to sue if the software fails. Obviously he is neither a lawyer nor much of a reader because the terms of use and conditions basically indemnify the software company.
Linux and BSD are superior in almost every way. You could literally run an entire organization on Linux Mint as the desktop. Even before Linux Mint was a thing, I had a contract job supporting a rollout of CentOS to the desktop at a small publishing company and this was back in 2005. This company did absolutely everything systems related on CentOS. If this company could do it 18 years ago on CentOS, I can only imagine it is going to be even easier today.
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