I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.
Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?
EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
> Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies.
It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.
These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.
> The name is stupid
I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)
A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42862560/should-one-create-a-bond-with-a-bluetooth-le-device/42916081#42916081
https://www.cve.news/cve-2024-53144/I fight for the average user for respect of privacy and security, because, go figure, the average user only knows what there is a browser or an app, and they can logon and use it.
They have no clue of what is really going on.
So how we fix this? Give the average user the power. And show them what is going on and what are the options.
GNU/Linux desktop is not an alternative to Windows or mac. It is the only one who respects you.
If should be the only option you learn in school and learn about open source.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
Not going back anytime soon either way.
disable swap. Programs will crash instead, which may be more useful.
Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.
Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.
A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?
> and makes everything slow while doing it
It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.
And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.
I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.
For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).
If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.
It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.
> It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior.
> I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
> pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes
> Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
> But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcom...
I read that as “playing computer games feels like work” rather than “getting games running feels like work”.
I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>
The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.
well, Firefox did, until Mozilla (of course) removed it
Chrome still supports it
Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.
There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.
Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.
A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.
But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.
Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.
Windows has changed too, their bad practices are increasing and the public perception is suffering by that.
"Windows 11 is a hate crime."
I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.
[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.
For people who have been using Linux for decades, it is not so shocking.
Definitely frustrating it has taken so lone.
I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.
I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.
Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.
She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.
Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.
But with the end of life for windows 10 in October, I switched back to Linux and I'm quite happy.
I'm running Manjaro with Xfce on my 4 year old LG Gram and it's really snappy while only using 900MB idle memory.
Do any other companies do the same?
Then there are more bespoke vendors that cater specifically to Linux. System76 is probably the most well known, but there are many others.
I'm speaking mainly for laptops/desktops. For servers it's always been you just put whatever on.
Linux gets the most time on servers and containers but the desktop base continues to grow, so expect most problems to be there (bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Accessibility is getting much better.
There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.
Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.
Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
Underrated point.
Most Linux distros have historically catered to an ecosystem of open source software with the distro repository model, and cross-distro software distribution is probably the biggest papercut still remaining with Linux today.
Thank goodness things are so much better these days with Electron, Steam, Docker, FlatPak and WINE. But there are still gaps that need filling.
The main problem is that Windows comes on laptops.
So how can we fight this? It might be hard to make this illegal as also Apple creates hardware and put's the software on it.
So the only way is to teach people about their options.
Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.
Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.
This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.
Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
True, but mostly because they see software as a binary number on a disc.
If they saw software as an artefact to build, as Free Software does, this would not be a problem.
A pox on all their (propitiatory) houses. All they are all beneath contempt. They want money, above all. They love money, above all. They care not for their users
Timothy 6:10
That sounds like skill issue (i.e the company developing the software doesn't have engineers experienced in developing apps for Linux). There are many proprietary software available for Linux.
In fact I was able to open some huge Excel files more easily in WPS than in MS Office (I have a work laptop that runs Windows 11).
But, I think you have a point, and that point is that the most stable Linux API to release software is actually the Win32 API provided by Wine. Native libraries treat backwards compatibility like a liability.
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.
Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
Using local time for the RTC theoretically makes it simpler to schedule wakeups at user friendly times, but that seems less impactful.
On Linux with one command you can switch between UTC or local RTC time to match Windows. On Windows you need to change a bit in the registry if you want it to adapt to the Linux way - i.e. the correct one.
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
Back in university RMS came to a neighbor uni in Stockholm for a traditional lecture about software freedoms etc. I think everyone thought he was a bit crazy or idealistic (I guess most still do). But the warnings of how you weren't going to own anything, that you have to ask permission, that your devices can be disabled etc, that sounded like fiction at the time. But looking back to that era (2011 or so), it slowly did change for the worse exactly like he warned.
While a lot of the early internet idealisms have fizzled out, I think today those ideas and passions were much more important than we thought. For instance, I usually say that if the web was invented today, browsers would not be approved by the app stores. We take some things for granted, and a lot of those things came from a different era, arising out of preconditions that largely no longer exist.
I don't remember exactly what company (I think it was Novel), but one made a fortune bridging them.
The bad is that Apple is just like Windows, just wants to look better. It is not.
Better than Windows? Ok, a little better yes.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-Lua-Plugin-System
And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.
If you think Windows is bad for the world, stop driving eyeballs to their same strategies in the f/oss world as well.
There is a good progress with the likes of Lenovo (who for decades refused to refund Windows tax) selling computers with Linux pre-installed.
If you want gaming on Linux, get an AMD GPU.
Not judging you, but for me I just couldn't tolerate it any longer.
I had it set up with a network bridge so that each VM looked like an actual PC on my network.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)
I was at my mum and dads yesterday and I was asking my dad if he'd seen any messages or nag screens about upgrading his computer from Windows 10? It's ancient and I wouldn't put Windows 11 on it, even though I can burn a copy with Rufus to remove all the requirements. As it happens, he had. In fact, he thought Microsoft wanted him to pay for it, such is their confusing marketing!
Now, my dad is no dumbass. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, all his faculties are still present and correct and he's used computers for years and he won numerous awards as uni for being smart af! Anyway, I put him off the idea of Windows 11 and onto the idea of a Chromebox instead. He seemes keen to try it.
Also, my dad only uses the web, the odd spreadsheet to keep track of his money, the odd YT video and that's about it: he's not a power-user.
My reasoning for the Chromebox is that I can't be about all the time when he needs tech support and I'm worried he's scammed by someone wanting him to "install an anti-virus, quick, before all his money is gone" or something. Plus, he has an Android phone already... it makes sense I think.
Next week I'll drop off my Chromebook and set it up for him to try. I think it'll work out, and if it does, I'll buy a Chromebox for about £300 and that'll do him for ever I think.
On a side-note, I've switched back to Windows 10 a few weeks ago: specifically Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I used the Massgrave script and it's valid until 2038 or something. I've had it with the latency and general dystopia (and the broken printer... ffs Microsoft!) around Windows 11, which I'd been using for a couple of years until last week.
It may sound trivial but I still can't get over the volume slider latency in Windows 11: When you change the volume slider in the quick launch area and the "ding" sound happens 400ms later, not at the same time, it drives me nuts!
Anyway, my £0.02
What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game. Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.
Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine. If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.
SV_BubbleTime•12h ago
If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
zdw•12h ago
This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
globalnode•12h ago
adamors•12h ago
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•12h ago
mvdtnz•10h ago
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•10h ago
If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).
mvdtnz•9h ago
> I am ok with that not being solved
Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•7h ago
It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.
It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.
mvdtnz•6h ago
Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•6h ago
mvdtnz•2h ago
Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
bawolff•12h ago
I'm sure there are users with specialized needs who need something more complex, but i dont think microsoft office is quite the moat it used to be.
ejiblabahaba•12h ago
bawolff•11h ago
SV_BubbleTime•9h ago
I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.
So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.
This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.
n3storm•12h ago
SoftTalker•12h ago
bigstrat2003•11h ago
zaruvi•7h ago
uncircle•2h ago
trinsic2•5h ago
SoftTalker•12h ago
roscas•12h ago
The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!
I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
BrenBarn•12h ago
jamiek88•12h ago
Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.
roscas•12h ago
Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.
So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.
Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.
bee_rider•10h ago
upboundspiral•4h ago
rahkiin•12h ago
roscas•11h ago
Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.
p_ing•6h ago
And that’s the issue with every alternative, it lacks 1:1 features/bugs so what’s usable for one isn’t for another.