From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Image shows a tweet with the header "and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH" with an image attached showing the following:
"Operating systems by current version" Mac OS: 14 Windows: 11 Linux: 6
Linux desktop provides entertainment, countless hours of trying to get things running properly / a bearably usable operating system to end up with something that may work fine for your workflows unless you've to collaborate with others.
Windows provides ROI, get a cheap license and be up and running with all the professional software properly supported, easy to install and seamless collaboration with other professionals. Required daily use to work properly.
macOS is a "toaster OS", perfect for your weekend internet surfing activities, all polished, won't nag you much about anything and ready to work even if you don't use the computer for months.
Both macOS and Linux suffer from the same issue when it comes to software, people end up having to virtualize something they require but at least in macOS that's more rare and there's professional software like MS Office and Adobe apps for it :)
"Professional software" yuck. More like proprietary garbage. Also, my grandma uses Linux. It is not hard.
I think what this person is trying to say is that because of the endless customisation options and the not-too-rare lack of support for random things (Gaming Anti-cheat, Support from "industry standard" (vendor lock-in) software that dominates the market because everyone in industry uses them, Nvidia especially on Wayland, etc.). It is true, that with Linux you can end up spending hours on end finding the perfect setup, solving weird little bugs and issues, and distrohopping.
See the free-of-charge Linux distros above. By definition, INFINITE ROI
I disagree with the wording here. All the "professional" software works because it's made for that system. Blaming Linux for lack of Adobe support is like blaming Windows for not supporting valgrind or zsh. It's up to the program's developers to support it.
True, but in my experience, the Windows installer can be more difficult to use and makes things very unfriendly for people who want to dual boot, when compared to Ubuntu and distros that use the Calamares installer. With these, I get a visual overview of my partitions, making it far easier to visualise my drive and remember what partition to wipe. So the Windows installer is very unfriendly in that regard.
If you mean updates, that is kinda true. Only kinda because you can use, say CTT's winutil to switch to security updates only, with feature updates delayed by a few months.
If you mean the lack of features and the level of lockdown by Apple, then yes, I'd probably agree.
And nothing else.
The other stuff below that are pretty much correct.
In short, Linux is a tinkerer's paradise trying to become more easy to use in hopes of gaining marketshare and software support. The issue is that it's a cycle of no support because low marketshare, low marketshare because no users, no users because no software support. Things will get there, to the point where I can see Linux being better than Windows 11 by the time Windows 10 goes EOL (2025). The issue is that Windows 12 is coming with all sorts of AI marketing gimmicks. It's yet unclear how Linux will respond to that.
Windows is the business system. It is a system built from a corporation that bought it off someone else, with that someone else having created a clone of another system (look up Gary Kildall if you don't know what I'm talking about). Over the years, Microsoft has used ruthless business practices (United States vs Microsoft Corp., the Halloween documents, EEE) to build up and maintain expansive market dominance. Then they used that dominance to actively make their product more profitable to them and thus worse for the consumer (ads, forced updates, terrible optimisation, terrible security, terrible system requirements, vendor lock-in, a distinct lack of customisation (they even removed the ability to have the bar at the top!), telemetry that you can't even fully disable, etc.) and it keeps on getting worse with all the AI and cloud PC stuff that's just some bullshit marketing gimmicks used to siphon off more money and data from a consumer that has no choice.
Or do they? Let's look at the last choice, MacOS. What does MacOS have to offer? Nothing really. I mean, it's kind of a middle ground between the two. It's a Unix system meaning the terminal experience is similar to Linux (aka it's actually good) and it has the "professional" apps the OP was talking about, while also having some of the customisability of Linux (from what I've heard, it has a pretty decent tiling window manager called yabai), but also suffering from a distinct lack of power user features or even decent window management features in the default desktop experience that it comes with, which I find quite ironic. It also SUCKS when it comes to Gaming.
And that's without mentioning the vendor lock in where the meh OS is tied to terrible hardware, so to me, it's not even worth it.
There was a very good video on MacOS that I'd recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KYbHJulEo8
I'll even upvote your comment because you make some good points, but there are other things I must elaborate on. Just for context I use Windows, macOS and Linux in different occasions and I like them all in some way shape or form but I also know that none is perfect.
While I agree with you here and I exaggerated the thing a bit... the lack of Adobe and others is also Linux's fault, not only on those companies. It is really fucking hard to develop and support software for Linux when you've to deal with at least two major half-assed desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) and one of them decides to reinvent the wheel every now breaking APIs with little to no regard for software. To make things worse you'll end up finding out that most of the time people are running KDE + a bunch of GNOME/GTK/libadwaita components creating a Frankenstein of a system because some specific App depends on said components.
Some time ago I did a simple test, installed Photoshop 6.0 (from 2000) and MS Office 2003 on Windows 10 and guess what? Both worked just fine at the first attempt, zero hacks required, zero effort. Linux doesn't offer this.
You're citing the advanced special use case where the Windows installer isn't nice. C'mon regular people don't dual boot, they just have an OS and that's is. This also makes me question one thing, why is that Linux users are always so focused on "attacking" the Windows installer and saying their is better because it handles dual boot better? It does, but tell me, how would you know if your system is so perfect? Why would you ever need to dual boot? :)
I'm not sure if Windows will handle itself correctly even with that. It looks like the thing requires to be powered on everyday or it will eventually fail to boot, be slow, still ask for some kind of update or some other random issue. All the Windows machines I see failing (software wise) are always the ones that aren't daily driven.
That's essentially because Microsoft decided to make Windows 11 considerably worse than every other version before it. I don't believe they'll EOL Windows 10 that soon, after all Microsoft will have to support Windows 10 in some way shape or form after 2025 because there will be some stubborn governments and large businesses that will pay for it. They'll make those update available for everyone else because, from a business perspective, it makes much more sense to keep supporting those millions of systems than have their reputation crushed by the amount of security vulnerabilities that will pile up.
I hope Linux doesn't react to that at all. But well we don't know what the absurdly funded and inept GNOME team will do. They'll most likely come with some bullshit about how AI is the the way to come up with their messed up view of a DE.
Oh yeah and they'll continue to do so and somehow that makes them great. Without the amount of ruthless business practices they've been employing Windows would not have the position it has nowadays and we wouldn't have so much productive tools as we do. Even considering the Office case, the format thing is bad but frankly do you think (the community and open-source companies) would've ever be able to build something to complex, solid and feature-rich as MS Office is? Who would've set to finance and develop such a complex spreadsheet software for instance? Mind that LibreOffice doesn't have all the features Excel does and even when it does they sometimes aren't as good. Look at Google's pathetic attempt at spreadsheets, its still a for profit entity with a large interest and ecosystem capable of developing something better than MS but still it even lags behind Libre/OnlyOffice. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, suddenly we're talking about Dynamics NAV and other very complex solutions that all integrate very well with Office.
This isn't true. Microsoft, unlike, let's say Apple, has all the spyware very well documented here and it can be disabled. In fact Microsoft has to have those things documented and toggles in place to disable them because they've a lot of costumers (some govt agencies) that wouldn't be able to use Windows without disabling those things.
Yes, that's a very good description of macOS. That's why I called it the "toaster OS" and is good for your weekend surfing but still has a better position on the market because there's "professional" software for it. Too bad you can't disable the spyware.
You should try macOS for a month or so, because their DE is way better than GNOME.
At least Apple isn't delusional about desktop icons, doesn't force people into the activities view and provides toggles to manage the DE. If the GNOME team decided to just do a pixel-perfect copy of macOS and removed most of the customization, 3rd party themes / all the crap that makes GNOME unusable and focused on making it properly then KDE would've already faded away and we had the chance to have a single, solid and stable Linux DE for the masses.
All the current themes, versions and tweaks of GNOME are inconsistent bring a very poor experience and thing every looks good. Here's a good example, both macOS and Windows have the ability to run containerized desktop applications but it is only on Linux that you launch an App and suddenly it doesn't respect your theme and goes back to some basic thing because it runs on flatpak and there's some bullshit about it. Or... your password management can't communicate with the browser... Or there's some incompatibility between the GKT version the app uses and something else on the system.
And btw, this video is bullsht. The guy goes to review macOS in 2023 and instead of using the latest version of the system, macOS 14, goes for macOS 11 that isn't even supported anymore. This is the same as taking Windows 7 or Mandriva Linux reviewing it and saying "FEELS OLD". lol
Well, I upvoted your response as well because there's a lot I agree with.
However:
Simple. Ignore them Both!!!! Why should they follow the same UI and design guidelines as either of them or work to be well-integrated with either? Last I checked, OnlyOffice and Chromium both are not following either of them. Just do your own thing and that's fine. Last time I used Adobe products, their UI wasn't like Windows 10 OR Windows 11. It was a different vibe entirely.
Outside of UI elements, that's what universal packaging formats like Flatpak with Portals are trying to address. The application lives in its own container/sandbox and doesn't give a fuck about your DE or any of that.
Yeah, I'm 99% sure that would not happen on Linux. As in, both these specific pieces of software working just fine, but also ancient software that "just works" on modern systems. Unless of course, we're talking about universal packages that will probably still work 10, 20, or 30 years down the line.
Because it sure as hell ain't perfect. I wish it was, but it is not there and I'm not sure when it will be (if ever). There is some software that is Windows only and there are no alternatives for it. An example I personally deal with is AutoHotKey. A game I play practically requires Macroing at a certain level and THE macro made for it is written in AHK and is so advanced that it will likely never be ported to anything else. I even experimented with creating a proof-of-concept to see if it can be done in Python with Pyautogui and image detection didn't work. Pixel detection did but it was just too goddamn slow. But I digress.
It usually does for me.
They did, but that's not the only reason Linux will be better than Windows. Linux already beats Windows in some areas (Resource usage, Telemetry or lack thereof, CLI experience) even though most users don't care about any of these.
So do I.
Please forgive me for not checking the link before responding, but I already agree with the statements you make about GNOME. Maybe I'll check the link out for fun after I write this.
I completely agree with the points you made about Office.
Wow. That's new. I genuinely didn't know that. I'll have to keep that in mind.
The second part isn't surprising. The first part is something I will consider. I tried using QEMU with those scripts that make it easy to set up MacOS inside QEMU but it was still just too slow so I never touched it again. I'm too broke to afford Apple Hardware and don't have spare cash even for preowned stuff. I'll check if my university's CS dept (where I'm studying) has any Mac machines I can try out.
On the short rant about GNOME, I pretty much agree. And going back to a previous point you made: both DEs suck in their own ways.
On containerized apps, they are still pretty new. I'm hoping they become good, but the idea of a Single DE for Linux is not something I ever expect to happen. Maybe if the distros get their shit together and realise GNOME sucks and then start financially supporting KDE instead so that Plasma finally irons out the bugs and UX issues to become the dominant DE (because let me tell you: KDE is poor, and they shouldn't be if they ever want Plasma to become the major DE and finally rid us of GNOME).
I apologise. I'm not familiar with MacOS, the video is old, and I haven't watched it in ages, I just so happened to remember about it when writing my response.
Microsoft did a good job with Windows Terminal and WSL, one of the reasons I use less macOS today is precisely that. I would love to run full Linux and I've given it a few attempts but then when there's no (real) MS Office, Adobe etc. things go downhill. To be fair if one has to virtualize to get stuff done I would rather be on macOS, at least I would have less to virtualize.
Yeah that's a common issue with virtualizing macOS. Even on VMWare it can be painful, the issue isn't lack of resources it's a 3D acceleration / GPU thing. macOS has limited support for GPUs as well know and with Apple "ARM" CPUs things will get even worse, so what happen is that the drivers and virtualization solutions can't provide anything compatible to the OS that will render 3D graphics at a recent framerate and with Metal support.
If you don't want to run macOS and have the time / access to hardware / interest / money an hackintosh is an interesting solution. My latest attempt on that was a HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini that I was able to get second hand for 300€. Intel Core i5-10500T / 16 GB RAM / 256GB NVME.
That machine runs macOS very well, mostly because the CPU is supported out of the box by macOS and the iGPU was also the same of some other intel CPU included on some real mac. The trick with hackintosh is making sure your CPU and GPU are supported by the system natively otherwise it will be painful and never work properly.
Obviously not the fastest Mac out there but for web surfing in general, editing documents and some light coding it will get the job done. I got everything working including sleep/wake, filevault, iservices, dual display, 4k output and internal speakers on the first attempt without much effort and I can share the config with you or someone with this machine that comes across this post.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=-KYbHJulEo8
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