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On this day in 1991, Linus Torvalds announced he was working on what would become Linux
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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And since 1992 people have been claiming every year that this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
It was the year for me. Windows is bad enough and Linux is good enough to make the switch. People are getting tired of the big tech companies with privacy concerns and anti consumer practices - pretty much the reason most of us are on here on lemmy now.
This year is the year. All you have to do is switch. With products like Ubuntu, there's no reason not to. It. Just. Works.
People who say that severely underestimate the time, effort, and expertise they've accumulated that makes it easy for themselves, but hard for others.
I tried to switch once before COVID. It was horrible. Oh, I now need to learn about file systems and NTFS and ext3/4(?) - i guess i'll try Linux on a separate, old hard drive. Ok, something didn't work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn't supported and what I need to download. Great, people on forums are helpful but they're asking me a bunch of gibberish. Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don't need to play with the command line, but then the GUI doesn't work occasionally and now I have to figure out if it's the GUI that broke or something else. And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.
Unsurprisingly, I'm back on Windows. It sucks, but at least it really just works.
For majority of people, an OS isn't something they want to think about, nor something they know a lot about. For example, I'm not a gearhead, so when I buy a car, I just want to drive it off the lot on Day 1 - sure not everything is perfect the way I want it, but i don't need to do anything if I don't want to. I don't want to buy a shell of a car and have to go to 5 different shops to choose a tire, install my own seats, get used to the stick shift being on the roof of the car instead of beside me, and have it break down on me all the time because "you aren't using it right".
It all depends on your hardware. If you run standard hardware with an AMD card, all the drivers you need should (theoretically) be in the kernel and will magically just work. As soon as you start using running hardware with proprietary drivers then you have to put in a little effort. Might require you to install separate package(s) from a third-party repo or something, and that will require terminal. It's just three commands usually: add the repo -> update your package manager -> install the driver. Not hard but if you are used to the Windows way of doing things it can be intimidating.
Even still, some stuff just doesn't have Linux support at all or it's completely community-maintained. If every company just open sourced their drivers and did things the "Linux" way then there would be no issue but unfortunately Linux doesn't have the market share for those companies to care. So you get into the negative feedback loop of: Linux has low market share because of lack of support, and companies don't support Linux because of low market share.
No. It. Doesn't
You all keep saying it works but it still doesn't work with a whole load of software even with Wine.
If all you do is internet browsing then Linux is fine, but if you need specific software it can be a pain.
Have you heard of QEMU VMs?
Yeah seriously lol that's what they were saying 20 friggin years ago and it was okay at best. Idk how it's come along since then but honestly Windows is quite stable now, I literally can't remember the last time I got a bsod or had any real issues. I used to screw around with different builds and dual booting, had strong opinions about which boot loader was best etc, these I just don't see the point. All I use my computer for is web browsing and excel.
I don't think being able to run programs designed and compiled for windows is a requirement to be considered a usable os. For example, you can not run safari on windows. Does this mean windows doesn't count as a usable os?
I think the definition of useable should be that software exists that can do the kind of things you want to do on your computer. In that sense, Linux is perfecty useable on the desktop, at least for people who have similar computing requirements to me.
Valve has done amazing work with Steam Play. Seeing how well the steam deck plays games convinced me not to put windows on my new rig.
I don’t agree, however, that it just works. My graphics card needed a mess driver outside of the default repos for Ubuntu lts, and my gpu has been out for almost a year.
I also have one high dpi monitor and one standard-ish dpi monitor, and scaling them independently, moving windows back and forth, and going into and out of full screen games all produce undesired behavior. It’s annoying enough that I now just use one monitor.
And I'll just sit there and watch my OS since I'll have no software to run. No thanks.
Else I'd just sit there and watch my OS show me ads and it'd tell me how I should switch to Edge and use Bing. No thanks. /s
Maybe stop believing all the Linux propaganda you read on here.
I'm usually not on this community and just wanted to make a sarcastic play on your words.
E.g. if your in computer science it's almost a requirement to be comfortable around Linux and it's up to anyone if they want to use it bare metal or in a VM on Windows. So I agree that my comment was wrong but that also applies to yours. Anyones OS choice depends on the application you want to run. That's why I definitely won't recommend anyone using Adobe and other creative software to use Linux.