First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
Made the switch recently too, I only use the windows box for gaming so went with bazzite-kde. Games were up and running in no time, though I am still noodling over getting Japanese IME working in one though haven't given it any effort yet.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
I have well-specked Windows box dedicated to gaming ONLY. Nothing else on it, just my Steam collection. I keep it updated and re-install it from scratch every few months (Windows is known to slow down with time).
Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.
A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.
Setting up a Japanese IME in a so-called 'immutable' distro is a good way of developing a drinking problem. Tip: you really don't want ibus, you want fcitx5. No offence to the ibus developers, but ibus is garbage, fcitx is way, way better.
Thanks! I have it working in apps via fcitx5 no problem so "just" need to get it to kick in game. Getting that far was really easy though, clicking through some panels I summon with random keywords in the ... sorry I don't know what it's called and will say start menu. But the excellent indexing powering that has been really amazing.
same issue, for me its mostly working but properly recognizing jp keyboard is still a wip for me (can't get forward-slash/yen symbol or kana keys working smh) probably i am kissing something obvious...
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
And they've gone such lengths to hide it! An innocuous text link somewhere to the right, hidden between some nondescript lorem ipsum, or somewhere way down where you'd never know to scroll because the scroll bar is hidden by default... it's a great adventure of discovery, so much fun!
The fact that they have this accumulating crust of interfaces, usually with different capabilities and visual styles stapled on top of one another, really makes you wonder whether Microsoft is really thinking about what they're doing.
My parents run a Windows PC as, from what I can tell, a home for stray botnets. The main uses are checking email and working on Word documents. (They have a laptop and iPad, respectively, which does most of their work, so it's an infrequently consulted machine.)
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
You can center the taskbar. Add a spacer on the left of "Application Launcher" and on the right of "Icons-Only Task Manager", and they'll center what's in between.
Unfortunately, that doesn't completely center the application launcher popup, it's still a bit more on the left. Good enough for me.
Win <= 10 had left side taskbars so that should actually be a plus. I didn't quickly update to Win 11 because of it being in the middle really, then because of the ads, then swore off it because of the AI stuff so in the end it kind of helped that they messed up the UI.
Given that I've been using actively this just month, my opinion is bit biased.I run myself basically Fedora 43 KDE version: https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
Fedora.
I've introduced it to many people, all coming from windows, with great luck.
Based on use case and individual, it may need a few programs installed that otherwise aren't, and about 7 minutes of patience to learn the UI.
Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.
Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.
Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.
For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.
Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.
For most people, Google Docs, Zoho, M365 Online, Proton Docs, or some web hosted instance of OnlyOffice or Collabora Office handily meets the majority of needs.
As someone that is 100% on Linux and is occasionally forced to use Teams (where a fat client is no longer possible and was worse than the browser version when it was), I'm curious what that 5% was for you.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
ZorinOS keeps it easy and consistent if you are familiar with windows.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
The types and degrees of customization they do to their poor Ubuntu base gives me the willies. I can hear it pleading "kill me" from all the way over here...
Mint offers LTS releases (in lock-step with Ubuntu) and Cinnamon is familiar and highly usable, with Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice bundled. Make sure Timeshift is targeting a sane location before you let them loose on it.
I had a Windows laptop set up to dual boot Linux recently, and Mint was the one that gave me the least hassle. Cinnamon edition looks a lot like Windows 10, too, before they broke everything.
Same here, now running Fedora KDE but with an Nvidia card it is exceedingly buggy. Doing a single system update the normal way made the kernel version unbootable. I also had some (I suspect) OOM related full freezed that forced me to hard shut off the computer. The UX is really that good though when things work.
I love KDE Plasma but I gave up on it because Mint Cinnamon runs my RTX perfectly rock solid. I could not find a KDE distro that did not have some issue.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
“Microsoft president Pavan Davulur tweeted on Nov. 10 that ‘Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere”
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
And I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis. I switched back to Linux after a few decades on Windows for work. Been back on Linux for a few months now, and haven't had any problems. My computer doesn't randomly restart (most updates don't require restart at all). No one is trying to push telemetry, half-assed AI, or OS ads on me either. So much better now on Linux.
> I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
My personal solution for my Macbook, which hasn't failed yet, is to simply wait a year or two to apply OS updates. In this case, I'm extending that to "never". I'll take my chances with the script kiddies, who have way fewer resources to infect my machine with malware than my OS vendor apparently does.
Apple is only bottlenecked from doing the same by their AI products not working.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
That's the thing: amazing hardware. I want two things: good hardware and software I trust. It's going to be hard to trust a for-profit company selling a closed source OS, but Apple is doing a much better job of consistently talking and walking respect for user privacy for many years. There may be another reason beyond incompetence that they're not rushing out half-baked chatbots wrapped in privacy disasters.
The other problem is things like DRM being increasingly common. Last I checked, many video streaming providers either don't support Linux, or only serve low-quality videos. With Macs you know they'll get support.
Many content rights contracts I see instruct the streaming platforms that they must detect Linux and either give low quality or deny the playback entirely.
It's because, rightly or not, they don't trust Linux in comparison to MacOS and view it as a piracy vector.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Microsoft has the copilot brand which includes relatively well valued products, apple does not have anything that could potentially work if only it was integrated well.
I’m not saying that to defend Microsoft, but at least they have _some_ measure of product success leading them to push further. With apple the leadership push for ai seems an entirely divorced from the current reality of the company.
I still want to switch, have been trying for like 8 years. Not yet unfortunately.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
I highly recommend you give Shotcut a chance. I am a total beginner with video editing but unlike kdenlive (sorry, still a cool project) it gave me much bigger "professional product" vibes.
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
Thanks for the suggestion and reminder! I remember trying Shotcut many years ago and it was worse (IMO) than Kdenline at the time.
The good news is I gave it a quick spin just now and it has come a -really- long ways since then. Within 10 minutes I had an ok workflow for doing cuts / ripple deletes. You can add text with individually colored words and styles, add a background shape behind the text and also add effects like drop shadows, glows and other things. All done graphically in the video preview.
It's no where near as intuitive as Camtasia but I think it's very usable and over time I'm sure I'll get used to its features.
I just hope it's stable, I'll edit a couple of videos and see how it goes.
Not in a long time but their pricing page says a bunch of paid features don't work on Linux such as advanced titles and other enhanced effects.
I don't know if that will apply to me since their site doesn't explain what they are in detail but it already rubs me the wrong way that they classify themselves as cross OS compatible, but a bunch of stuff doesn't work on Linux.
I would essentially be paying $200 just to export to 1080p since the free version is limited to 720p. Except I'd likely need the $420 version since the pricing page says you can't adjust the h264 bit-rate option without the pro version. I could maybe justify the cost if the paid features worked on Linux but the ones that sound interesting and related to me (title editing, effects, etc.) do not.
Have you looked at the video editor in Blender? I'm not much into video editing, but Blender as a whole is very solid, supports H.264 and AAC as far as I can see.
I wonder if this will effect any sort of a change in the userbase of Firefox, because that's usually the default browser in most of the distros I've used and I don't think people hate Firefox like they do Edge, where their first move might be to download Chrome (albeit a lot of that might be habit because the new Edge is Chromium in a trench coat anyways).
I don't know who said it, but it fits the current Windows vs Linux moment perfectly. "Most people don’t want control. They want optionally having control."
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
ChromOS is Linux in the way that Android is linux. Technically it has a Linux kernel, but that's it. It is not a Linux desktop under your control. It's a strictly proprietary OS you have very little control of. It's not Linux in the way that literally everyone else means the word.
As pointed out downthread this isn't true. It is under your control. All modern chromebooks let you enable developer mode which gives you root access, at which point is is a linux desktop in the way literally everyone means the word.
They are another somewhat closed ecosystem and becoming more closed over time. Better than a TV that runs Linux, (so far still) better than Android, worse than any "real" Linux distribution.
They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
Honestly we could consider Chromebook just as Android. Yes technically they run on Linux kernel but there is so much going wrong. It's far from what everyone think when saying Linux desktop.
PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".
Google has been working on Fuchsia, a new open source OS which in theory can replace Linux as the base of ChromeOS and Android
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
> DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account.
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
This has been true of any tracking. They track but the numbers don’t ever add up and are never the true experience.
(MarTech does a better job but still has error rates)
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
Consumer grade windows machines have been barely useable, for a decade plus, due to pre installed crap ware. I stopped helping family members long ago. I tell them install Linux and I’ll help you. A few have and have been very happy!
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with. Just like if you are vegan it's not toxic to refuse to prepare a meaty hamburger.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
> It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with.
OP never said he is not familiar with Windows anymore ...
He clearly said that his condition for helping them is if they install Linux. Those two are totally different statements.
I even find that a rather flimsy excuse that you made up. I do not work with MacOS, does that mean i can not help somebody with MacOS? Google kung-fu and i can figure it out. How about Linux ... OS2 lol ... If you have even a bit of basic knowledge, a OS or program is all about Googling the answer these days (or even AI / LLM answering it for you).
We can have a discussion about people being lazy and pulling the "but X family member will solve the issues with my PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone". I simply taught the family members who really want to learn, how to properly Google for issues. It did not matter to me that they use MacOS, or Windows.
Same with internet security, Windows is no issue for safety as long as the people using it, know what they can open and what they can not open. The moment you teach somebody the proper way, all those "support" calls vanish as their system stays clean of viruses and bots.
The whole "i will not help you unless you install Linux" ... that is toxic behavior. Instead of helping people by actually teaching them the basics, and those basics are operating system agnostic... his solution is a bit of blackmail.
If that's making it difficult for you to understand the comparison, I can select another. I think most folks could understand the analogy, but I'm happy to accommodate you if it's unclear.
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
This is the way I went - Framework feels like the most mainstream way to have hardware that supports Linux, ships to lots of countries, etc. I installed Fedora first with GNOME but now with KDE Plasma. It's been good!
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
I installed Bazzite on a NUC, and what it did was really sell me on getting a Steam Machine. Bazzite works well enough, but it has a few small bugs (e.g. performance degrades if I run Gamescope), and my NUC is old and underpowered. The general Steam experience, though, is fantastic.
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
The great thing about open source is that there's a whole ecosystem of developers that you can pay to fix your obscure hardware problem. Self-reliance is great, but field servicability without being beholden to the trade secrets of a single monopolist is a much better deal for society.
Another aspect to "just work" is it'd be great if component vendors mentioned the state of linux support. For example with motherboards it's expected that there will be windows drivers and tools there for all the functionality, but while the source of software support is different under linux from looking at a random product page it's a big question mark on which one is wise to buy to get the best experience or if full/partial support is available now or soon. Even for Asus gear which I'm aware has efforts going on for linux (or just their laptops? just their ROG branded laptops?) there's precious little mention of it on product pages to confirm the status.
The last thing anyone would want to spend their spare time is fixing your problems with drivers.
Being able to do it yourself is truly the only liberating thing out there, since paying someone else to do it does not seem to actually work these days (or ever).
Sure. But for most people (even fairly technical people!), that doesn't actually provide any advantage. If one lacks the skills to fix the software, the fact that they have the ability to do so doesn't give them any benefit.
You can fix your own software but it is not at all guaranteed that there is anyone else interested in fixing your particular problem to anything like the level of closed-source OSs.
Even if you run fully Valve hardware you are still going to be subject to the usual finicky-ness when connecting external devices (e.g. if you use multiple monitors, issues with the open source AMD GPU drivers; etc.).
What about a Mac? macOS isn't exactly Linux, but you can run a lot of Linux command line things just fine on it, and Apple will always make sure macOS works 100% on the Macs they sell.
Game selection is terrible on a Mac. I find it mindblowing that my Linux desktop/laptop run all my games, bar none, but a very small percentage runs on my Mac.
The exact same underlying software (Wine) that lets you run all of your windows games on Linux using Proton also works on MacOS using Crossover.
I haven't found anything in my steam library that Crossover (wine with a nice GUI) hasn't handled on my Mac yet. I'm sure a bad game exists, but for most games it is seamless.
I tend not to have unrealistic expectations like running AAA titles at high framerates on a mid-tier laptop, and tend to go for indy games, but the games I have run work great.
Native game selection is - in fact - pretty limited, but who cares if it is being run with a compatibility layer if it plays well.
Interesting. I would imagine the experience would be pretty poor (compared to Linux), and that the state of Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan to Metal translation to not be very mature or performant.
Yes, it isn't as good as Linux in some cases. It hasn't stopped me from running Cyberpunk on a Macbook though. Nobody is under the impression that a Mac running a translation layer is going to be better than a purpose built machine running native code. But is it not worth bothering, at all? No, there are plenty of circumstances where Steam via Crossover is essentially unnoticable.
Really, though, if we are going to nitpick at "perfect or don't bother" level. Skip linux too, Windows beats both on equivalent hardware.
meh, there's gotta be a specific Mac port, and there's not much love put into keeping those working when Apple makes breaking changes like "killing 32-bit addressing" or "switching cpu architectures".
I moved over just to see what it was and one of the coolest things that instantly made me fall inlove was seeing being directed to a system file and finding out it was a text file that I could open and it had instructions explaining what the options were. It felt so inviting, like the computer was showing me how things worked and I could change it if i wanted something different.
I moved over to Linux a month ago and when I plugged in my Kyocera printer, it was insta detected and just worked. On Windows it was a hit and miss, despite newest drivers to get this thing into online mode and printing. With this new setup I stood speechless for several seconds not believing the ease of use here. I'm never going back.
I've been hearing about how Linux is going to replace Windows for at least 2 decades now. I expect it to finally happen some time after we get 'too cheap to meter' fusion power.
I shitposted about the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ for most of my teenage and adult life only to dual boot Linux for a bit as an experiment a year or two ago and have ~never booted in to Windows for anything other than games with anticheat since.
It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse and feeling like malware than Linux desktop being THAT much better than the last time I tried it, but between proton and maybe 95%+ of my work being in a browser window or browser window (Electron) these days, I basically never run in to compatibility issues and never have Candy Crush advertised to me.
Aside: "too cheap to meter" got killed by inexpensive metering more than anything else. Metering used to be expensive, but computers have made it trivial.
Three states in Australia are implementing a requirement that energy companies offer free electricity for the three peak daylight hours of the day (likely 11am to 2pm) as of July next year.
I ended up getting separate hardware, one box for Windows (gaming only), another for everything is Linux. Gaming box is a desktop with latest CPU, proper GPU and everything, my personal is a 5 year old Thinkpad (mostly docked and connected to multiple monitors, good kb and mouse) under Mint Cinnamon that feels snappier than the Windows one.
Edit: I started playing with Linux 8 years ago and about a year later moved all my stuff to Linux Fedora and later Mint and never looked back. No regrets so far.
I'm in a similar boat. I still dual boot "just in case" for a lot of things, gaming among them, but I'm really looking forward to the day that I can just cut it and go purely Linux.
The articles base premise is tenuous at best. It assumes that “unknown” has a best case attribution to Linux with no backing for that assertion.
Unknown could just as easily be windows, chromeOS or macOS or just automation for that matter. Why would only Linux report as unknown for only a portion of users?
Given that the Unknown line is directly mirroring the ChromeOS line, it’s much more likely that it’s misattribution from ChromeOS. (And yes ChromeOS is Linux under the hood but the distinction matters because of the implication of the article)
What is the methodology of the statistics collection? Is it just user agent strings?
I got rid of Windows completely two weeks ago.
I was tied to them because I thought I can't live without Adobe Lightroom for photo editing. Increasing resentment for the subscription model and a recent increase in price made me re-evaluate this and I am happy I did. Darktable has come a really long way since I last tried to use it (years ago). It's amazing to me to see how good these things have become in the last years.
I am willing to pay for software, but please don't force me into a subscription model or you'll lose me as a customer.
The switch went smooth as butter for me, my system seems to run more stable and fast now, although it definitely helps that I was using WSL for years.
Funny a the stats he points to show a smaller number of devices being recorded each time. So of course the percentage would go up. There are still more Windows devices in active use compared to all MacOS/iOS devices.
What may make this happen is political risk. The rest of the world outside the US doesn't like the excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US, especially when that may mean snooping or disconnection. This used to be just a theoretical objection, but under the Trump administration it's a practical one.
What on earth are you talking about? There is no "excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US", and even if there is typial consumers are not aware and do not care. And if they did what does server software have to do with end user OS choices?
What on earth are you talking about? Digital sovereignty is a growing concern, and Microsoft (as well as most corp/proprietary tech) is ever increasing online dependencies, to servers that they control. Even typical end users are starting to notice a bad smell.
I think it's the "servers in the US" part. I think Microsoft has plenty of servers outside the US. However the main point is not the location of the servers but the fact that Microsoft as the operating system / service provider is under the thumb of US law no matter where the servers happen to reside.
Which is, as you say, an issue of digital (data) sovereignty.
When the US government acts in an erratic, unreliable, and untrustworthy manner, large organisations naturally look to de-risk their infrastructure and supply chains by removing American products and services from them:
It's the same reason many countries don't want Chinese products in their telecommunications infrastructure. They don't trust what the Chinese government will do, or rather they do trust that the Chinese government will do things that aren't in their best interests:
I have been using Linux for well over a decade now but I still dual boot because of my gaming group. If I didn't play online games there would be absolutely nothing keeping me on Windows. Fedora 43 with Plasma is the closest I have been to being completely satisfied with an OS. My next computer-related purchase for sure will be an AMD GPU, as NVidia is one of the few things that makes Linux a big operational challenge.
I've been a Linux user without Windows for longer than I can remember. My biggest worry is Linux dominates the market because a FOSS OS can't dominate the market. A capitalist market won't allow it. Of course though, if say Ubuntu was heavily monetized in some way, then it simply becomes the new Windows and the FOSS community will simply present an alternative. I'm sorry you had to go on this circular journey with me.
Because the monetization wouldn't work; anyone can just recompile the FOSS code and legally distribute a free build and users & PC manufacturers would flock to that.
That's already how it is, and yet the majority choose to pay for the convenience of two proprietary systems. We still haven't seen a FOSS offering that's well-suited for the typical end user IMHO.
I've just installed Mint on my travel laptop after windows update softbricked it, and then after a restore point recovery insisted on redownloading the update automatically on boot and re-bricking it right back.
Last time I tried Linux on desktop was Ubuntu 16 and it was all kinds of clunky, modifying text configs to make wifi work, random update services taking 100% CPU until I sudo-crippled them, etc.
On mint although everything... Just works. Including Steam and Spotify. It feels like a snappier, non-annoying version of Windows :)
I remember during my last (unsuccessful) startup, I was surprised at how many people actually used linux. It's not just techies, there were lots of plumbers and blue collar workers who used it, and their perception of it was similar to just using another tool (like I can build a dresser by hand, and I can plumb a house by hand, why can't I install an OS by hand?)
Of this demographic I found they were mostly conservative/right wing. It makes me wonder if there are a bunch of influencers like Luke Smith out there telling them how to use this stuff, or if they're just figuring it out on their own through forums. I think the word "flocking" is too strong, but there is definitely a large and growing non-technical userbase of people who use linux.
Oh fuck. The assholes that thought Windows was perfectly acceptable until late 2025 are flocking to Linux.
Maybe get a Macbook?
Do you even know how bad Linux is? The video drivers don't work, bluetooth doesn't work, your laptop won't wake up from sleep, it's horrible. Go the fuck away. Linux is horrible.
Windows is fucking awesome. Mac is OK. Linux sucks. Don't waste your time.
But I still think it's better to have the unwashed masses move to Linux just to give Microsoft the middle finger of realisation that they're, well, making horrible decisions.
Maybe we can compromise by keeping all the n00bs shepherded into the Ubuntu pen?
Last install of Linux (Mint) everything worked fine except the wakeup from sleep ^^ Hahaha, some things never change, I had the same problem years ago with my last Linux test phase.
Getting Mint to correctly wake up took a long search and some command line skills.
Nothing for the masses.
Wow, definitely one of the most unfounded opinions I've seen in HN in a long time. The video driver situation is stellar if you're on a recent kernel and not using hybrid Nvidia, but even that story is decent now. Bluetooth has worked reliably for me for years, and I appreciate being able to use SBC-XQ for my nice headphones, which is noticeably better than LDAC or AptX and not an option outside Linux. Not waking from sleep is usually a hardware problem these days.
Windows is a well documented hellscape of advertising, tracking, poor performance, and disregarding user will. Some people may pay to upgrade to a guilded cage from Apple, but trying Linux on the hardware you already have doesn't cost a dime. I've given Linux to multiple mostly tech illeterate friends now, and they are all happier and asking for less help on those systems. Amusingly, the help they've asked for wasn't even Linux specific and they would've asked the same things on Windows.
Gave a relative of mine my old ThinkPad and installed Kubuntu on it which works great most of the time but I had a typical "Linux moment" a few weeks ago where I had to install Zoom but the official DEB has a linking problem (crashes at start) and the one from the repo (Snap I think) is buggy and can not join calls from a link. Thankfully the website worked but you have to manipulate the URL because some Zoom links don't show the "Join from the web" link. There was somehow no admin password set and the user was not a superuser (this was a stock Kubuntu install!) and there was no root password set so I had to first start the rescue system and do some shenanigangs there to re-add the user as superuser.
Then I had to plug in the LAN cable and the whole system just... froze and needed a hard reboot. I don't know Linux systems deteriorated so much because everything "just worked" ~10 years ago and it got way worse since that.
Why? I’ve been using Unix workstations since the motif days through gnome whatever, but and every single one has seemed clunky as heck compared to the contemporaneous windows. Win 11 file explorer is 20 years ahead of nautilus. Not to mention all of the other windows perks like HiDPI & multi-monitor scaling polish, rdp, vastly superior accessibility, … And you can run wsl2 if you need to.
> Win11 file picker is years ahead of some random file picker option available on linux
First it would be nice to know why you would think this and maybe provide an example, second there are other file pickers. It should also be noted that you don't need one at all, but if you want one, there are so many options, try nemo
> HiDPI
Wayland
> Multi monitor scaling polish
What did he mean by that? Wayland supports different scaling factors between displays.
> rdp
VNC, ssh + pf
> vastly superior accessibility
Hahahahaha
Some examples of what you mean please, otherwise this is just a lazy shill answer
Anyone who has used rdp for more than a few hours knows how much better the experience is compared to vnc. Most things just work. In case someone needs touch screen support, there is no comparison.
File picker has been a strength of Windows for quite a few versions. And the consensus seems to be that it is better than Mac's (based on my YouTube watch history). I have used various Linux desktops, and none of the file pickers are nearly as good as the Windows native one, in yet of being able to navigate/filter/order things and occasionally getting more information about the selection.
I concede that RDP is great (though Sunshine/Moonlight are worth the trouble), but that's been available on Linux for ages. It's hilarious that you're comparing features to GNOME-ecosystem apps. They are allergic to features. Dolphin from KDE would be a much better comparison for Windows Explorer.
not an author, but in same league (have to keep dual boot because of photo editing)
neither nautilus nor nemo provides you convenient way to navigate, to check free disks space, to check photos in an album view, to see all the file properties and customize table views.
if you don't have this usage scenarios, it doesn't mean its a ragebait.
and btw, your attitude is one of the reasons people don't want to move to linux. One more toxic community? Naah, I'm good.
But I guess you are right. If one wants to use a computer like you use it on windows, then linux is a bad choice. The best choice in that case is windows.
Your file manager is not your operating system, use something else to view images.
I have all those "usage scenarios", which are in fact absolute basics and thus it's worth remembering 3 commands. The problem arises when one uses a Desktop environment with a dock and all other bloated nonsense. Maybe computing is solved once people reverse the brain damage inflicted by Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sorry for my attitude, because OP is the reason computing sucks and becomes more bloated and telemetry ridden every year. It's pure laziness to learn something new. Linux should be there for everyone, but shouldn't be called "immature" just because someone needs a perfect clone of the windows file picker, or wants his proprietary windows programs to run. Thats all good and fair, but not linux' problem.
Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
Hard agree. I work in digital accessibility, use Macs and Linux at home and work. It's unfortunate, but Linux is a long distance from how accessible Windows is. It's improving, but there's a ways to go.
I don't think there is anything more accessible than lines of text in a grid. Maybe you don't need to make every button of every GUI program ever accessible.
I would like for Linux to be able to replace Windows.
I run Linux on some of my computers with various levels of success.
But even with Windows 11 being as annoying as it is and Ubuntu/Mint/Cachy/Fedora/etc having some really good points they are not as easy to use as Windows.
Sure, web browsing is almost the same and simple home office tasks are close enough.
But all of the complaints that GP has mentioned are valid.
Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close.
HiDPI and multi monitor scaling on Linux has gotten better and it might approach what Windows had for the last 10 years but it is not 100% there yet.
Wayland is just a protocol with many incomplete and incompatible extensions that may or may not be implemented by your DE.
VNC is not even remotely close to RDP in features or performance. It just isn't.
I have used RDP over dial-up that was more responsive that VNC over LAN.
Not to mention sound, printer, disks, USB, etc all being available over one RDP connection.
Accessibility on Linux is a joke. On screen keyboard may work 80% of the time, screen reader might work 20% of the time. Sound might come out of random output or it might not. You may have to play with random settings, good luck with that if you are vision impaired.
One big reason Linux isn't there yet is people who just dismiss all of the above and go with "it works for me so it must be good for everyone."
The GTK file picker, which is frustratingly the default even on most KDE installs, is the one that sucks. The KDE-native one would much more closely match the experience you're looking for.
VNC is highly dependent on implementation. Sunshine/Moonlight runs circles around RDP in terms of performance and includes audio. For situations where you need the extra functionality is RDP... You can just use RDP. It works just fine on Linux, especially if you're on recent KDE.
On-screen keyboards are admittedly a pain point, but I've usually seen people say nicer things about the screen readers than Windows. Probably lots of different experiences depending on implementation.
> Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close.
I remember KDE copying that a few years after Microsoft introduced Active Desktop. That was, what, 25 years ago now?
funny, windows 11's explorer has been the most infuriating experience for me over the years in all my personal and workplace machines (hangs, wont preview whatever files it decides doesnt want to, slow context menu startup, and many more) and frankly one of the reasons I've been daily driving kde+dolphin. I'd say I miss the out of the box cloud integration (you can install kio plugins but theyre not in a good state now. Dropbox have their own dolphin plugin as well), but I really couldn't care less when weighing in everything else. multimonitor support in kde wayland is just as good. Actually, its better, since you can control monitor brightness without a external program like Monitorian. wsl2 has some quirks if you're using a company VPN but overall pretty solid. Accessibility really is a pain point for linux in general
> "Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release." What makes it especially interesting is that over "78% of these downloads came from Windows" users.
That's not interesting, the most common os is Windows, ergo most downloads are going to come from windows.
It is interesting because most people installing a new linux distro are very likely already running linux. Every download of a linux distro from a windows machine is a potential conversion.
I switched to Linux in the past month.
First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
Made the switch recently too, I only use the windows box for gaming so went with bazzite-kde. Games were up and running in no time, though I am still noodling over getting Japanese IME working in one though haven't given it any effort yet.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
I have well-specked Windows box dedicated to gaming ONLY. Nothing else on it, just my Steam collection. I keep it updated and re-install it from scratch every few months (Windows is known to slow down with time).
Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.
A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.
To be fair, most forks - especially of Wine - are more like testing branches. The useful stuff tends to find its way upstream eventually
Setting up a Japanese IME in a so-called 'immutable' distro is a good way of developing a drinking problem. Tip: you really don't want ibus, you want fcitx5. No offence to the ibus developers, but ibus is garbage, fcitx is way, way better.
Thanks! I have it working in apps via fcitx5 no problem so "just" need to get it to kick in game. Getting that far was really easy though, clicking through some panels I summon with random keywords in the ... sorry I don't know what it's called and will say start menu. But the excellent indexing powering that has been really amazing.
> kind of like the old Control Panel.
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
It's worse than that - the older the layer, the older and typically more powerful the UI you'll find. Such a crazy hodgepodge.
And they've gone such lengths to hide it! An innocuous text link somewhere to the right, hidden between some nondescript lorem ipsum, or somewhere way down where you'd never know to scroll because the scroll bar is hidden by default... it's a great adventure of discovery, so much fun!
“It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
The fact that they have this accumulating crust of interfaces, usually with different capabilities and visual styles stapled on top of one another, really makes you wonder whether Microsoft is really thinking about what they're doing.
My parents run a Windows PC as, from what I can tell, a home for stray botnets. The main uses are checking email and working on Word documents. (They have a laptop and iPad, respectively, which does most of their work, so it's an infrequently consulted machine.)
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
Kubuntu.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
Nice! Reusing old hardware is great.
You can center the taskbar. Add a spacer on the left of "Application Launcher" and on the right of "Icons-Only Task Manager", and they'll center what's in between.
Unfortunately, that doesn't completely center the application launcher popup, it's still a bit more on the left. Good enough for me.
Win <= 10 had left side taskbars so that should actually be a plus. I didn't quickly update to Win 11 because of it being in the middle really, then because of the ads, then swore off it because of the AI stuff so in the end it kind of helped that they messed up the UI.
... I also need to point out that the other suggestions here eg Fedora and Zorin co are also valid choices in my opinion.
You should revel in the fact that you now have choice and not a single option. That does mean you will have to pick one.
All of the options you have been presented with will work fine - there is literally no wrong answer here!
All of them are very well documented and you will not get a "SFC /SCANNOW" type answer if you have a problem.
Given that I've been using actively this just month, my opinion is bit biased.I run myself basically Fedora 43 KDE version: https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/
However, for folks who don't want to install some random packages, maybe Atomic version of the distro is better: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
Fedora. I've introduced it to many people, all coming from windows, with great luck. Based on use case and individual, it may need a few programs installed that otherwise aren't, and about 7 minutes of patience to learn the UI.
I would recommend Fedora only hesitantly.
Fedora's release cycle is usually a little over a year from final release to EOL, at which point, you need to upgrade. My Mom and Dad ain't gonna wanna do that. For them, better to install the latest Ubuntu LTS once, and then I can upgrade for them at Christmas in 4 years.
Fedora is usually a bit...evangelical about open source software. If one of the things you really want is closed source, you'll have to take a few extra steps. Notably Nvidia drivers, but also stuff like Discord or Steam.
Fedora tends to move fast and break things. They tend to adopt things before they're good and ready. I believe Fedora was the first to switch to Wayland, and they did so before it was really ready, but I might be mistaken.
For a lot of users, #1 and #3 above are good things; they want the latest and greatest stuff, but don't want the occasional breakages that result from using a rolling release distro like Arch or Gentoo. For a lot of users, notably my Mom and Dad, they don't want to deal with shit like that, they just want to turn their computer on and forward funny pictures to me and their friends and do their word puzzles.
Fedora is a great distro, and it's the perfect distro for a lot of people, but some of its core philosophical principles make it a suboptimal distro for the less computer literate.
How can they manage without Office suite? I really can't without teams that's why I keep coming back. PWA doesn't have the "5% feature" I need.
For most people, Google Docs, Zoho, M365 Online, Proton Docs, or some web hosted instance of OnlyOffice or Collabora Office handily meets the majority of needs.
As someone that is 100% on Linux and is occasionally forced to use Teams (where a fat client is no longer possible and was worse than the browser version when it was), I'm curious what that 5% was for you.
For an office suite, I use LibreOffice. The fact that it has a normal/standard WIMP interface instead of the ribbon is a plus for me.
It probably depends a lot on your parents.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
ZorinOS keeps it easy and consistent if you are familiar with windows.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
The types and degrees of customization they do to their poor Ubuntu base gives me the willies. I can hear it pleading "kill me" from all the way over here...
Linux Mint worked fine for my mother.
Mint offers LTS releases (in lock-step with Ubuntu) and Cinnamon is familiar and highly usable, with Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice bundled. Make sure Timeshift is targeting a sane location before you let them loose on it.
I had a Windows laptop set up to dual boot Linux recently, and Mint was the one that gave me the least hassle. Cinnamon edition looks a lot like Windows 10, too, before they broke everything.
Solus. Same install for five years running, rolling release, no breakage.
Same here, now running Fedora KDE but with an Nvidia card it is exceedingly buggy. Doing a single system update the normal way made the kernel version unbootable. I also had some (I suspect) OOM related full freezed that forced me to hard shut off the computer. The UX is really that good though when things work.
I love KDE Plasma but I gave up on it because Mint Cinnamon runs my RTX perfectly rock solid. I could not find a KDE distro that did not have some issue.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
That's how I feel about KDE on AMD or Intel graphics. It's just buttery smooth and problem-free.
Gnome is something and gast multiple tasking which takes away me from windows like button program switched. Fedora gnome is snappiest for me
Which libraries have you tried for writing small Wayland GUI apps?
kde and fedora.. a thing of beauty.
“Microsoft president Pavan Davulur tweeted on Nov. 10 that ‘Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere”
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
Apple could, but this is more or less their tagline[1], as well.
Granted, I think Apple has slightly better execution, but that's pretty subjective, I suppose.
1. https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
There a single toggle setting for Apple Intelligence in MacOS (currently toggled as 'off' on my machine)
> Apple Intelligence > currently toggled as 'off'
There's a good joke in there somewhere
Too bad you won’t be able to find it in that mess
And I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis. I switched back to Linux after a few decades on Windows for work. Been back on Linux for a few months now, and haven't had any problems. My computer doesn't randomly restart (most updates don't require restart at all). No one is trying to push telemetry, half-assed AI, or OS ads on me either. So much better now on Linux.
> I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
My personal solution for my Macbook, which hasn't failed yet, is to simply wait a year or two to apply OS updates. In this case, I'm extending that to "never". I'll take my chances with the script kiddies, who have way fewer resources to infect my machine with malware than my OS vendor apparently does.
You might want to quote the tagline in the comment. When I visit that link I see "Fresh faced. Timelessly Mac.".
That quote looks indistinguishable from some middle manager LinkedIn post ... from a middle manager who has no clue what they said ...
Apple is only bottlenecked from doing the same by their AI products not working.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
That's the thing: amazing hardware. I want two things: good hardware and software I trust. It's going to be hard to trust a for-profit company selling a closed source OS, but Apple is doing a much better job of consistently talking and walking respect for user privacy for many years. There may be another reason beyond incompetence that they're not rushing out half-baked chatbots wrapped in privacy disasters.
The other problem is things like DRM being increasingly common. Last I checked, many video streaming providers either don't support Linux, or only serve low-quality videos. With Macs you know they'll get support.
Many content rights contracts I see instruct the streaming platforms that they must detect Linux and either give low quality or deny the playback entirely.
It's because, rightly or not, they don't trust Linux in comparison to MacOS and view it as a piracy vector.
> AI products not working
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Microsoft has the copilot brand which includes relatively well valued products, apple does not have anything that could potentially work if only it was integrated well.
I’m not saying that to defend Microsoft, but at least they have _some_ measure of product success leading them to push further. With apple the leadership push for ai seems an entirely divorced from the current reality of the company.
Resurrect the "Think different." campaign with an AI twist?
I still want to switch, have been trying for like 8 years. Not yet unfortunately.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
I highly recommend you give Shotcut a chance. I am a total beginner with video editing but unlike kdenlive (sorry, still a cool project) it gave me much bigger "professional product" vibes.
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
Thanks for the suggestion and reminder! I remember trying Shotcut many years ago and it was worse (IMO) than Kdenline at the time.
The good news is I gave it a quick spin just now and it has come a -really- long ways since then. Within 10 minutes I had an ok workflow for doing cuts / ripple deletes. You can add text with individually colored words and styles, add a background shape behind the text and also add effects like drop shadows, glows and other things. All done graphically in the video preview.
It's no where near as intuitive as Camtasia but I think it's very usable and over time I'm sure I'll get used to its features.
I just hope it's stable, I'll edit a couple of videos and see how it goes.
Have you tried Lightworks? https://lwks.com/
It dates back to the 1990s and has used in Hollywood movies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks
There is a free version to try out with limited features, then subscriptions and also options to pay just once ($200 or $420).
Not in a long time but their pricing page says a bunch of paid features don't work on Linux such as advanced titles and other enhanced effects.
I don't know if that will apply to me since their site doesn't explain what they are in detail but it already rubs me the wrong way that they classify themselves as cross OS compatible, but a bunch of stuff doesn't work on Linux.
I would essentially be paying $200 just to export to 1080p since the free version is limited to 720p. Except I'd likely need the $420 version since the pricing page says you can't adjust the h264 bit-rate option without the pro version. I could maybe justify the cost if the paid features worked on Linux but the ones that sound interesting and related to me (title editing, effects, etc.) do not.
Have you looked at the video editor in Blender? I'm not much into video editing, but Blender as a whole is very solid, supports H.264 and AAC as far as I can see.
Yep, it's not really aimed at this style of video editing.
Blender is amazingly designed and robust but it's really optimized for 3D design, not editing screencasts.
I wonder if this will effect any sort of a change in the userbase of Firefox, because that's usually the default browser in most of the distros I've used and I don't think people hate Firefox like they do Edge, where their first move might be to download Chrome (albeit a lot of that might be habit because the new Edge is Chromium in a trench coat anyways).
I don't know who said it, but it fits the current Windows vs Linux moment perfectly. "Most people don’t want control. They want optionally having control."
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
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"By my count"...
Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.
And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.
Chromebooks are quite literally linux...
ChromOS is Linux in the way that Android is linux. Technically it has a Linux kernel, but that's it. It is not a Linux desktop under your control. It's a strictly proprietary OS you have very little control of. It's not Linux in the way that literally everyone else means the word.
As pointed out downthread this isn't true. It is under your control. All modern chromebooks let you enable developer mode which gives you root access, at which point is is a linux desktop in the way literally everyone means the word.
They are built on Linux fundamentals but are miles away from being a _Linux desktop_.
Oh right they are a Linux laptop.
They are another somewhat closed ecosystem and becoming more closed over time. Better than a TV that runs Linux, (so far still) better than Android, worse than any "real" Linux distribution.
They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
> They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
All modern Chromebooks can be put into developer mode without opening the case, which gives you root access.
They're pretty hostile to it though. With normal developer mode, every boot it actively prompts the user to factory wipe it!
And until very recently you could install whatever apk you wanted on your android phone.
Honestly we could consider Chromebook just as Android. Yes technically they run on Linux kernel but there is so much going wrong. It's far from what everyone think when saying Linux desktop.
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PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".
Until ChromeOS get its own OS (wasn't it supposed to be in 2019?), it's still a Linux.
Google has been working on Fuchsia, a new open source OS which in theory can replace Linux as the base of ChromeOS and Android
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
I think aluminum OS is next. Still Linux based.
> DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account.
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
[0] https://www.quantable.com/analytics/whats-blocking-google-an...
This has been true of any tracking. They track but the numbers don’t ever add up and are never the true experience. (MarTech does a better job but still has error rates)
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
Consumer grade windows machines have been barely useable, for a decade plus, due to pre installed crap ware. I stopped helping family members long ago. I tell them install Linux and I’ll help you. A few have and have been very happy!
*torture screaming at the background
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with. Just like if you are vegan it's not toxic to refuse to prepare a meaty hamburger.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
> It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with.
OP never said he is not familiar with Windows anymore ...
He clearly said that his condition for helping them is if they install Linux. Those two are totally different statements.
I even find that a rather flimsy excuse that you made up. I do not work with MacOS, does that mean i can not help somebody with MacOS? Google kung-fu and i can figure it out. How about Linux ... OS2 lol ... If you have even a bit of basic knowledge, a OS or program is all about Googling the answer these days (or even AI / LLM answering it for you).
We can have a discussion about people being lazy and pulling the "but X family member will solve the issues with my PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone". I simply taught the family members who really want to learn, how to properly Google for issues. It did not matter to me that they use MacOS, or Windows.
Same with internet security, Windows is no issue for safety as long as the people using it, know what they can open and what they can not open. The moment you teach somebody the proper way, all those "support" calls vanish as their system stays clean of viruses and bots.
The whole "i will not help you unless you install Linux" ... that is toxic behavior. Instead of helping people by actually teaching them the basics, and those basics are operating system agnostic... his solution is a bit of blackmail.
So we compare living creatures killing with helping to setup a wi-fi.
If that's making it difficult for you to understand the comparison, I can select another. I think most folks could understand the analogy, but I'm happy to accommodate you if it's unclear.
Grilling a hamburger isn't killing a cow sorta like how an analogy is a useful illustrative tool even when not literally accurate.
See! Even a terrible analogy can get the point across.
Sometimes setting up wi-fi feels like it requires an animal sacrifice to the elder gods.
(not OP)
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
What I want is some hardware that, if Linux stops working on it, it's someone's job to fix that.
Which is why I'm strongly considering a Steam Cube.
What about Framework? They support Fedora and Ubuntu: https://frame.work/fr/en/linux
This is the way I went - Framework feels like the most mainstream way to have hardware that supports Linux, ships to lots of countries, etc. I installed Fedora first with GNOME but now with KDE Plasma. It's been good!
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
I installed Bazzite on a NUC, and what it did was really sell me on getting a Steam Machine. Bazzite works well enough, but it has a few small bugs (e.g. performance degrades if I run Gamescope), and my NUC is old and underpowered. The general Steam experience, though, is fantastic.
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
The great thing about open source is that there’s always at least one person who can take on the job of fixing your obscure hardware problem…you.
The terrible thing is that you are probably unqualified to do driver surgery without taking on more work than the problem is worth to you to fix.
The great thing about open source is that there's a whole ecosystem of developers that you can pay to fix your obscure hardware problem. Self-reliance is great, but field servicability without being beholden to the trade secrets of a single monopolist is a much better deal for society.
How common is that? Are there a lot of bounties on defects that actually get paid out?
Yeah, with two small kids, the last thing I want to spend my spare time doing is playing with drivers. I want things that just work.
Another aspect to "just work" is it'd be great if component vendors mentioned the state of linux support. For example with motherboards it's expected that there will be windows drivers and tools there for all the functionality, but while the source of software support is different under linux from looking at a random product page it's a big question mark on which one is wise to buy to get the best experience or if full/partial support is available now or soon. Even for Asus gear which I'm aware has efforts going on for linux (or just their laptops? just their ROG branded laptops?) there's precious little mention of it on product pages to confirm the status.
The last thing anyone would want to spend their spare time is fixing your problems with drivers.
Being able to do it yourself is truly the only liberating thing out there, since paying someone else to do it does not seem to actually work these days (or ever).
Its not about "you must fix your own software", but that "you CAN fix your own software".
Closed source OSes like MS Windows and OSX dont permit you to see, let alone fix things internally.
Sure. But for most people (even fairly technical people!), that doesn't actually provide any advantage. If one lacks the skills to fix the software, the fact that they have the ability to do so doesn't give them any benefit.
You can fix your own software but it is not at all guaranteed that there is anyone else interested in fixing your particular problem to anything like the level of closed-source OSs.
A thinkpad then? Not exactly someones job, but hardware support for them is very good.
Even if you run fully Valve hardware you are still going to be subject to the usual finicky-ness when connecting external devices (e.g. if you use multiple monitors, issues with the open source AMD GPU drivers; etc.).
This hasn't been my experience with the Steam Deck. I've plugged it into all sorts of shit and it's worked with almost all of it.
https://starlabs.systems
There's also System76, Tuxedo, Slimbook, a few models of Dell and Lenovo...
you can get that both from Lenovo and Dell
https://system76.com/
RIP Zareason
What about a Mac? macOS isn't exactly Linux, but you can run a lot of Linux command line things just fine on it, and Apple will always make sure macOS works 100% on the Macs they sell.
How are they at running all of the games I own on Steam?
About the same as Linux, if you use Crossover. Which is the functional equivalent to Wine/Proton.
This isn't true for Apple silicon, which is the main reason to use a Mac.
Are you just ignoring Rosetta translation? You can totally run x86_64 windows games just fine on Apple silicon.
Game selection is terrible on a Mac. I find it mindblowing that my Linux desktop/laptop run all my games, bar none, but a very small percentage runs on my Mac.
The exact same underlying software (Wine) that lets you run all of your windows games on Linux using Proton also works on MacOS using Crossover.
I haven't found anything in my steam library that Crossover (wine with a nice GUI) hasn't handled on my Mac yet. I'm sure a bad game exists, but for most games it is seamless.
I tend not to have unrealistic expectations like running AAA titles at high framerates on a mid-tier laptop, and tend to go for indy games, but the games I have run work great.
Native game selection is - in fact - pretty limited, but who cares if it is being run with a compatibility layer if it plays well.
Interesting. I would imagine the experience would be pretty poor (compared to Linux), and that the state of Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan to Metal translation to not be very mature or performant.
It absolutely do runs worse than on Linux, it's not equivalent. Do not bother, especially not with newer games.
Yes, it isn't as good as Linux in some cases. It hasn't stopped me from running Cyberpunk on a Macbook though. Nobody is under the impression that a Mac running a translation layer is going to be better than a purpose built machine running native code. But is it not worth bothering, at all? No, there are plenty of circumstances where Steam via Crossover is essentially unnoticable.
Really, though, if we are going to nitpick at "perfect or don't bother" level. Skip linux too, Windows beats both on equivalent hardware.
At least Cyberpunk is now natively available for macOS ;)
meh, there's gotta be a specific Mac port, and there's not much love put into keeping those working when Apple makes breaking changes like "killing 32-bit addressing" or "switching cpu architectures".
I moved over just to see what it was and one of the coolest things that instantly made me fall inlove was seeing being directed to a system file and finding out it was a text file that I could open and it had instructions explaining what the options were. It felt so inviting, like the computer was showing me how things worked and I could change it if i wanted something different.
This! When I got started on Linux way back then, this is what I noticed. I get to learn how things connect and how things work.
Yes, things breaking adds to this experience but when you are young, there is a lot of time for things you enjoy.
I moved over to Linux a month ago and when I plugged in my Kyocera printer, it was insta detected and just worked. On Windows it was a hit and miss, despite newest drivers to get this thing into online mode and printing. With this new setup I stood speechless for several seconds not believing the ease of use here. I'm never going back.
I've been hearing about how Linux is going to replace Windows for at least 2 decades now. I expect it to finally happen some time after we get 'too cheap to meter' fusion power.
I shitposted about the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ for most of my teenage and adult life only to dual boot Linux for a bit as an experiment a year or two ago and have ~never booted in to Windows for anything other than games with anticheat since.
It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse and feeling like malware than Linux desktop being THAT much better than the last time I tried it, but between proton and maybe 95%+ of my work being in a browser window or browser window (Electron) these days, I basically never run in to compatibility issues and never have Candy Crush advertised to me.
>It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse
No disagreeing on that. I hate how intrusive it is. I feel that I am paying for something AND I am still the product.
Aside: "too cheap to meter" got killed by inexpensive metering more than anything else. Metering used to be expensive, but computers have made it trivial.
SPARC is scheduled to start operations in 2026, with the goal of demonstrating net power in 2027.
I really hope they are successful. But I'm not holding my breath.
Also even if it works the too cheap to meter thing seems unlikely with fusion. Solar on the other hand is showing signs of that when it's sunny.
Three states in Australia are implementing a requirement that energy companies offer free electricity for the three peak daylight hours of the day (likely 11am to 2pm) as of July next year.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/millions-to-receive-free-e...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/11/04/electricity...
I have been a dual booting user since 2008. I tried to get rid of the dual boot around 2010-2012 but gaming just didn’t work well at the time.
To this day I only ever use windows for gaming. Wonder if it’s time to try gaming on Linux again.
I ended up getting separate hardware, one box for Windows (gaming only), another for everything is Linux. Gaming box is a desktop with latest CPU, proper GPU and everything, my personal is a 5 year old Thinkpad (mostly docked and connected to multiple monitors, good kb and mouse) under Mint Cinnamon that feels snappier than the Windows one.
Edit: I started playing with Linux 8 years ago and about a year later moved all my stuff to Linux Fedora and later Mint and never looked back. No regrets so far.
I'm in a similar boat. I still dual boot "just in case" for a lot of things, gaming among them, but I'm really looking forward to the day that I can just cut it and go purely Linux.
The articles base premise is tenuous at best. It assumes that “unknown” has a best case attribution to Linux with no backing for that assertion.
Unknown could just as easily be windows, chromeOS or macOS or just automation for that matter. Why would only Linux report as unknown for only a portion of users?
Given that the Unknown line is directly mirroring the ChromeOS line, it’s much more likely that it’s misattribution from ChromeOS. (And yes ChromeOS is Linux under the hood but the distinction matters because of the implication of the article)
What is the methodology of the statistics collection? Is it just user agent strings?
I got rid of Windows completely two weeks ago. I was tied to them because I thought I can't live without Adobe Lightroom for photo editing. Increasing resentment for the subscription model and a recent increase in price made me re-evaluate this and I am happy I did. Darktable has come a really long way since I last tried to use it (years ago). It's amazing to me to see how good these things have become in the last years.
I am willing to pay for software, but please don't force me into a subscription model or you'll lose me as a customer.
The switch went smooth as butter for me, my system seems to run more stable and fast now, although it definitely helps that I was using WSL for years.
Funny a the stats he points to show a smaller number of devices being recorded each time. So of course the percentage would go up. There are still more Windows devices in active use compared to all MacOS/iOS devices.
The year of Linux on the desktop, at last.
What may make this happen is political risk. The rest of the world outside the US doesn't like the excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US, especially when that may mean snooping or disconnection. This used to be just a theoretical objection, but under the Trump administration it's a practical one.
We don't like it here in the US either!
What on earth are you talking about? There is no "excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US", and even if there is typial consumers are not aware and do not care. And if they did what does server software have to do with end user OS choices?
What on earth are you talking about? Digital sovereignty is a growing concern, and Microsoft (as well as most corp/proprietary tech) is ever increasing online dependencies, to servers that they control. Even typical end users are starting to notice a bad smell.
I think it's the "servers in the US" part. I think Microsoft has plenty of servers outside the US. However the main point is not the location of the servers but the fact that Microsoft as the operating system / service provider is under the thumb of US law no matter where the servers happen to reside.
Which is, as you say, an issue of digital (data) sovereignty.
every single government use of it is being looked at with that view courtesy of the recent attacks on bodies like the ICC
They care.
When the US government acts in an erratic, unreliable, and untrustworthy manner, large organisations naturally look to de-risk their infrastructure and supply chains by removing American products and services from them:
https://dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dutch-universities-do-without-...
It's the same reason many countries don't want Chinese products in their telecommunications infrastructure. They don't trust what the Chinese government will do, or rather they do trust that the Chinese government will do things that aren't in their best interests:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450
I have been using Linux for well over a decade now but I still dual boot because of my gaming group. If I didn't play online games there would be absolutely nothing keeping me on Windows. Fedora 43 with Plasma is the closest I have been to being completely satisfied with an OS. My next computer-related purchase for sure will be an AMD GPU, as NVidia is one of the few things that makes Linux a big operational challenge.
made a it holiday weekend project to install omarchy. It does what I need it to so far, web apps and basic dev stuff
I've been a Linux user without Windows for longer than I can remember. My biggest worry is Linux dominates the market because a FOSS OS can't dominate the market. A capitalist market won't allow it. Of course though, if say Ubuntu was heavily monetized in some way, then it simply becomes the new Windows and the FOSS community will simply present an alternative. I'm sorry you had to go on this circular journey with me.
Why can't a monetized OS also be FOSS?
Because the monetization wouldn't work; anyone can just recompile the FOSS code and legally distribute a free build and users & PC manufacturers would flock to that.
That's already how it is, and yet the majority choose to pay for the convenience of two proprietary systems. We still haven't seen a FOSS offering that's well-suited for the typical end user IMHO.
I mean, Elementary OS exists... but it doesn't seem to be very popular for some reason.
I've just installed Mint on my travel laptop after windows update softbricked it, and then after a restore point recovery insisted on redownloading the update automatically on boot and re-bricking it right back.
Last time I tried Linux on desktop was Ubuntu 16 and it was all kinds of clunky, modifying text configs to make wifi work, random update services taking 100% CPU until I sudo-crippled them, etc.
On mint although everything... Just works. Including Steam and Spotify. It feels like a snappier, non-annoying version of Windows :)
No one at Apple or Microsoft seems to care to serve the users. We are at an interesting point in the history of computers.
This failure mode of capitalism should've been easy to anticipate: owners of capital eventually become the customers.
Capitalism is great for technology development. But stable markets don't generate the returns VCs and public company shareholders demand.
I predict a return to simple commerce: pay money for a good or service without third parties. It doesn't need to grow or generate returns.
Find macOS very capable and user focused.
But escaping windows is a pretty great reason.
Desktop Linux is still clunky and apps break so often with updates, it's not ready for non-tech savvy users.
I just don't have the time anymore to waste hours of my day to get apps working, when it just works on windows or mac.
Bazzite and other immutable distros are doing wonders to fix that. Have you tried one of them?
I remember during my last (unsuccessful) startup, I was surprised at how many people actually used linux. It's not just techies, there were lots of plumbers and blue collar workers who used it, and their perception of it was similar to just using another tool (like I can build a dresser by hand, and I can plumb a house by hand, why can't I install an OS by hand?)
Of this demographic I found they were mostly conservative/right wing. It makes me wonder if there are a bunch of influencers like Luke Smith out there telling them how to use this stuff, or if they're just figuring it out on their own through forums. I think the word "flocking" is too strong, but there is definitely a large and growing non-technical userbase of people who use linux.
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Oh fuck. The assholes that thought Windows was perfectly acceptable until late 2025 are flocking to Linux.
Maybe get a Macbook?
Do you even know how bad Linux is? The video drivers don't work, bluetooth doesn't work, your laptop won't wake up from sleep, it's horrible. Go the fuck away. Linux is horrible.
Windows is fucking awesome. Mac is OK. Linux sucks. Don't waste your time.
LOL
But I still think it's better to have the unwashed masses move to Linux just to give Microsoft the middle finger of realisation that they're, well, making horrible decisions.
Maybe we can compromise by keeping all the n00bs shepherded into the Ubuntu pen?
Last install of Linux (Mint) everything worked fine except the wakeup from sleep ^^ Hahaha, some things never change, I had the same problem years ago with my last Linux test phase. Getting Mint to correctly wake up took a long search and some command line skills. Nothing for the masses.
Wow, definitely one of the most unfounded opinions I've seen in HN in a long time. The video driver situation is stellar if you're on a recent kernel and not using hybrid Nvidia, but even that story is decent now. Bluetooth has worked reliably for me for years, and I appreciate being able to use SBC-XQ for my nice headphones, which is noticeably better than LDAC or AptX and not an option outside Linux. Not waking from sleep is usually a hardware problem these days.
Windows is a well documented hellscape of advertising, tracking, poor performance, and disregarding user will. Some people may pay to upgrade to a guilded cage from Apple, but trying Linux on the hardware you already have doesn't cost a dime. I've given Linux to multiple mostly tech illeterate friends now, and they are all happier and asking for less help on those systems. Amusingly, the help they've asked for wasn't even Linux specific and they would've asked the same things on Windows.
Gave a relative of mine my old ThinkPad and installed Kubuntu on it which works great most of the time but I had a typical "Linux moment" a few weeks ago where I had to install Zoom but the official DEB has a linking problem (crashes at start) and the one from the repo (Snap I think) is buggy and can not join calls from a link. Thankfully the website worked but you have to manipulate the URL because some Zoom links don't show the "Join from the web" link. There was somehow no admin password set and the user was not a superuser (this was a stock Kubuntu install!) and there was no root password set so I had to first start the rescue system and do some shenanigangs there to re-add the user as superuser.
Then I had to plug in the LAN cable and the whole system just... froze and needed a hard reboot. I don't know Linux systems deteriorated so much because everything "just worked" ~10 years ago and it got way worse since that.
Why? I’ve been using Unix workstations since the motif days through gnome whatever, but and every single one has seemed clunky as heck compared to the contemporaneous windows. Win 11 file explorer is 20 years ahead of nautilus. Not to mention all of the other windows perks like HiDPI & multi-monitor scaling polish, rdp, vastly superior accessibility, … And you can run wsl2 if you need to.
Linux doesn't spy on you, though, or install rootkits against your will.
Epic ragebait.
> Win11 file picker is years ahead of some random file picker option available on linux
First it would be nice to know why you would think this and maybe provide an example, second there are other file pickers. It should also be noted that you don't need one at all, but if you want one, there are so many options, try nemo
> HiDPI
Wayland
> Multi monitor scaling polish
What did he mean by that? Wayland supports different scaling factors between displays.
> rdp
VNC, ssh + pf
> vastly superior accessibility
Hahahahaha
Some examples of what you mean please, otherwise this is just a lazy shill answer
Anyone who has used rdp for more than a few hours knows how much better the experience is compared to vnc. Most things just work. In case someone needs touch screen support, there is no comparison.
File picker has been a strength of Windows for quite a few versions. And the consensus seems to be that it is better than Mac's (based on my YouTube watch history). I have used various Linux desktops, and none of the file pickers are nearly as good as the Windows native one, in yet of being able to navigate/filter/order things and occasionally getting more information about the selection.
I concede that RDP is great (though Sunshine/Moonlight are worth the trouble), but that's been available on Linux for ages. It's hilarious that you're comparing features to GNOME-ecosystem apps. They are allergic to features. Dolphin from KDE would be a much better comparison for Windows Explorer.
> It's hilarious that you're comparing features to GNOME-ecosystem apps.
Someone that is not me started the debate of RDP vs VNC and file pickers in the first place.
Gnome has a desktop sharing feature these days, and it's actually RDP.
not an author, but in same league (have to keep dual boot because of photo editing)
neither nautilus nor nemo provides you convenient way to navigate, to check free disks space, to check photos in an album view, to see all the file properties and customize table views.
if you don't have this usage scenarios, it doesn't mean its a ragebait.
and btw, your attitude is one of the reasons people don't want to move to linux. One more toxic community? Naah, I'm good.
>to navigate
cd where/you/want/to/navigate
ranger (if you want interactive)
>check free disk space
df -h
> check photos in an album view
nsxiv -t *.{jpeg|png}
> see all the file properties
ls -l
But I guess you are right. If one wants to use a computer like you use it on windows, then linux is a bad choice. The best choice in that case is windows.
Your file manager is not your operating system, use something else to view images.
I have all those "usage scenarios", which are in fact absolute basics and thus it's worth remembering 3 commands. The problem arises when one uses a Desktop environment with a dock and all other bloated nonsense. Maybe computing is solved once people reverse the brain damage inflicted by Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sorry for my attitude, because OP is the reason computing sucks and becomes more bloated and telemetry ridden every year. It's pure laziness to learn something new. Linux should be there for everyone, but shouldn't be called "immature" just because someone needs a perfect clone of the windows file picker, or wants his proprietary windows programs to run. Thats all good and fair, but not linux' problem.
> Hahahahaha
Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
Hard agree. I work in digital accessibility, use Macs and Linux at home and work. It's unfortunate, but Linux is a long distance from how accessible Windows is. It's improving, but there's a ways to go.
I don't think there is anything more accessible than lines of text in a grid. Maybe you don't need to make every button of every GUI program ever accessible.
I doubt a blind or very nearsighted user would appreciate your lines of text in a grid very much.
So using a screen reader with a terminal is somehow worse than using a screen reader on a cluttered gui?
I would like for Linux to be able to replace Windows. I run Linux on some of my computers with various levels of success. But even with Windows 11 being as annoying as it is and Ubuntu/Mint/Cachy/Fedora/etc having some really good points they are not as easy to use as Windows. Sure, web browsing is almost the same and simple home office tasks are close enough. But all of the complaints that GP has mentioned are valid. Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close. HiDPI and multi monitor scaling on Linux has gotten better and it might approach what Windows had for the last 10 years but it is not 100% there yet. Wayland is just a protocol with many incomplete and incompatible extensions that may or may not be implemented by your DE. VNC is not even remotely close to RDP in features or performance. It just isn't. I have used RDP over dial-up that was more responsive that VNC over LAN. Not to mention sound, printer, disks, USB, etc all being available over one RDP connection. Accessibility on Linux is a joke. On screen keyboard may work 80% of the time, screen reader might work 20% of the time. Sound might come out of random output or it might not. You may have to play with random settings, good luck with that if you are vision impaired. One big reason Linux isn't there yet is people who just dismiss all of the above and go with "it works for me so it must be good for everyone."
The GTK file picker, which is frustratingly the default even on most KDE installs, is the one that sucks. The KDE-native one would much more closely match the experience you're looking for.
VNC is highly dependent on implementation. Sunshine/Moonlight runs circles around RDP in terms of performance and includes audio. For situations where you need the extra functionality is RDP... You can just use RDP. It works just fine on Linux, especially if you're on recent KDE.
On-screen keyboards are admittedly a pain point, but I've usually seen people say nicer things about the screen readers than Windows. Probably lots of different experiences depending on implementation.
> Windows file chooser is essentially small Windows Explorer and you can do almost everything that you can in the explorer while you are in file chooser mode. None of the Linux desktops have anything close.
I remember KDE copying that a few years after Microsoft introduced Active Desktop. That was, what, 25 years ago now?
funny, windows 11's explorer has been the most infuriating experience for me over the years in all my personal and workplace machines (hangs, wont preview whatever files it decides doesnt want to, slow context menu startup, and many more) and frankly one of the reasons I've been daily driving kde+dolphin. I'd say I miss the out of the box cloud integration (you can install kio plugins but theyre not in a good state now. Dropbox have their own dolphin plugin as well), but I really couldn't care less when weighing in everything else. multimonitor support in kde wayland is just as good. Actually, its better, since you can control monitor brightness without a external program like Monitorian. wsl2 has some quirks if you're using a company VPN but overall pretty solid. Accessibility really is a pain point for linux in general
Feels at least an order of magnitude too high!
> "Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release." What makes it especially interesting is that over "78% of these downloads came from Windows" users.
That's not interesting, the most common os is Windows, ergo most downloads are going to come from windows.
It is interesting because most people installing a new linux distro are very likely already running linux. Every download of a linux distro from a windows machine is a potential conversion.