That's great.
Here's why most people don't: they like editing Word documents, using Bluetooth, playing AAA games, printing and scanning, connecting to external monitors, watching DVDs, and transferring files from their phones.
Here's why most people don't: they like editing Word documents, using Bluetooth, playing AAA games, printing and scanning, connecting to external monitors, watching DVDs, and transferring files from their phones.
LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.
>using Bluetooth
Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.
>playing AAA games
This is your only legitimate point, but it grows less legitimate every day.
>printing and scanning
Works fine OOTB for nearly all printers and scanners using only GUIs to configure and use the devices.
>connecting to external monitors
This has worked perfectly fine for at least 10 years...
>watching DVDs
Also works just fine.
>transferring files from their phones
I do this all the time. Works OOTB on popular distros.
The real problem is that people are change averse and that people like you spread uninformed FUD. Cut it out.
Perhaps I am missing the ever elusive combination of distro and machine.
If you hit other problems, did you do any research? Did you ask for support anywhere?
Manual screwing around in .conf files, having to care about what GPU is in use and fussing around with configurators before using certain ports, features dropping out between driver upgrades.. and all this just from your link on one model of one computer that supposedly "supports Linux".
Look, I'm sorry, this is 2017, not 1997. This is not even a sorta okay standard of usability anymore. Not for home, not for enterprise, nor should it be accepted or defended as such.
On the other hand - I would rather fiddle with Linux drivers than fiddle with Windows ad/telemetry settings. So I suspect I'll be switching back once Microsofts decides to force me off of Win7.
If someone has to do a hundred trivial fixes then you might start to believe that there is something fundamentally broken with whatever software confronts me with a hundred trivial problems.
I'd absolutely love to get away from windows but I tried it multiple times in the past and linux just isn't close to being an alternative in the desktop market. There are so many problems and almost everytime the solution involves doing some arcane stuff in the terminal. This isn't going to win your average user over to linux.
Linux runs on all my servers, where it does an excellent job, but I can't see it replacing windows on my desktop systems, not until they fix some fundamental usability and driver issues.
I never seem to have one of those unicorn hardware/driver combinations that perform well, don't drain battery, don't run hot and don't break on dist-upgrade. I have researched my issues every single time because I would prefer to use Linux for many reasons, but the fixes I find are often partial, temporary and fragile. Eventually I give up and go back to macOS or Windows.
dist-upgrade almost always breaks things for me, especially all those hard fought for fixes. And it's not just minor things that break. Last time (Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10) networking stopped working completely because some maintainer had decided that network manager should no longer manage wired connections on my particular variant of Ubuntu.
That's a 156 page thread. The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine.
And that machine isn't particularly unusual in its class.
It's a considerable amount of work for an average user to get a working Ubuntu, and even after all that work there are still things (headphone audio ffs) that don't work.
This thread is about how people today should move off Windows, and how it is trivially easy to do so.
I agree people should move off windows. I disagree that it's trivially easy to do so, especially for these class of netbook style machine. I think that your advice (basically "wait until the kernel is updated") is proof that there are problems with these machines.
Ubuntu 16.10 wouldn't boot from a USB stick, with some PM error and the CPU watchdog errors.
Fine, go to all the trouble of plugging in a DVD drive, go out, buy a blank DVD. Same thing. The Ubuntu installation media just hangs with an error. Googling that didn't help.
How weaselly. His conclusion is plain to see:
"The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine"
You seem to misunderstand that thread.
If you do a stock install of Ubuntu you'll have very many, showstopping, errors.
If you use a custom script that forces a custom bootloader, custom kernel, and a bunch of other fixes, you end up with a machine that still doesn't have headphone audio and some problems with bluetooth.
A self-defeatist attitude won't make this more comfortable. If you don't like that Windows 10 is full of ads and spyware, the time investment to get this laptop working seems pretty small in exchange for a better OS. Throw in a little extra time to get these fixes applied in the form of patches to the relevant projects. If everyone gave up because they can't put a few minutes into troubleshooting and tweaking their setups, Linux will never grow to the threshold necessary to get vendors to support it OOTB.
> LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.
I run LibreOffice on my Mac and documents ALWAYS render differently than on Word. I always have to proofread on an office computer before I send files out to my colleagues.
> Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.
I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.
If you're authoring the documents, you don't need to use docx. Use a more open format that's supported better by both. As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? So long as you can read it that's enough.
>I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.
I was only referring to using your computer for bluetooth, not your phone, since that's the only subject that's relevant to the discussion. Audio is a fair point, though, but I'll point out that I have a pair of bluetooth headphones that works fine with Linux.
You know what happens when you give someone .ODF in the real world? "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"
As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently?
People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.
And ISO and Microsoft. Microsoft cared enough about ODF, that they implemented importers and exporters for the MSO.
> "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"
Do you realize that you can open and export ODF formats in the MSO?
> As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? > People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.
They are already used to this - each version or language version of the MSO displays the documents slightly differently. Some layout calculations even depend on the printer driver installed!
ODF is basically XKCD 927. It solves no problems in the real world. It has no new features. The effort spent by OpenOffice in implementing it could have been better spent on making the Word filters not suck - to this day I still have Word2003 format documents with tables that OO won't render properly.
In LibreOffice defense, it is kind of difficult to implement specification, that says things "works like Word95".
In the end, these inconsistencies are not a big deal. Neither between different Office versions, nor between LO a MSO. If you want pixel-perfect layouts, use tools intended to do that (i.e. InDesign or other DTP).
The idea behind word processing is that how you've authored your work should be rendered accurately and consistently without unintended side-effects.
As a gamer I've not seen much more progress (outside of WINE workarounds, some GoG ports and Valve-specific games). Most AAA games still exclusively windows due to things like DRM (Denuvo is windows-only IIRC)
Let's see: 183 games listed on my Steam account, 54 of those are available for SteamOS+Linux. A lot of those 54 are great games, but so are a lot of the 129 others. In my game catalog here, I've got about a 30% chance that the game I want to play right now will actually run in my current OS without rebooting. I don't like those odds much.
Wine? It's got the same issues that complex compatibility layers usually do. I consider it an option of last resort.
Debian doesn't connect with android phones OOTB. What's the opposite of FUD?