My 70 year old mother has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years
unixsheikh.com
unixsheikh.com
Yes, if you need your computer to check email and visit websites, and maybe deal with digital photos and do a little light word processing, Linux is rock solid stable and more than up to the task. I can see my own mother being just fine with it for those purposes.
Conversely, if you need to roll some scientific HPC code, it's the preferred solution.
But God help you if you need to do multimedia desktop publishing or do Photoshop-level editing of photos or (in my case) do anything requiring a Common Access Card.
BTW, the music players on Roku, Grace Digital's streaming boxes, and Galaxy Audio's streaming boxes, are all unusable. The only ones that ever worked were the Turtle Beach Audiotron (now obsolete), and Windows Media Player.
I also have an Ubuntu desktop machine. It started pestering me to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu, and I finally relented and did. The new Ubuntu simply would not function with my graphics card. The old one worked fine with it. I spent a whole day trying to figure that one out, but there was no solution other than wiping the disk and reinstalling the older Ubuntu. A proper desktop replacement would:
1. warn me that I needed a new graphics card when pestering me to upgrade
2. refuse to install if I had a graphics card that was abandoned
If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.
If there are scripts that fix it, those scripts should be run automatically by the installer. Otherwise, it's just not a desktop replacement. I'm sorry to have to say this, but to call it a desktop replacement means it has to:
1. just work
2. failing that, detect the problem and explain what to do. Crashing is just not acceptable anymore.
I do support all the time for the D compilers. In my experience, if the install does anything but "just work", you immediately lose 50-90% of your users.
Every error path in the installer needs to be gone over and engineered to "just work". Messages like:
"Unknown Error: TXerr 66x53 failed, aborted"
are so 1980's :-/
I remember I had to do some hackery on a driver to get my sister's printer to work with her macbook/OSX.
I've had all sorts of issues with printers/scanners/random software combinations/drivers/failed automatic update crash loops(!)/etc with Windows.
The only operating systems that might meet the criteria are on tablets and phones (which are obviously not desktops) -- and even then I've had to cross-compile a kernel module to support a wifi adapter w/ USB OTG.
The original WMP was pretty good! But you really can no longer get anything like it. ETA: at least under active development. WMP Classic was a suitable replacement I used to use: https://mpc-hc.org/
Full disclosure: for music I still run Winamp 2.95, and for video it is a mix of Kodi for set top boxes and VLC for PC/Mobile.
iTunes is dead although its replacements aren't much better.
"Modern" Ubuntu is absolutely rock solid as my work machine, the current iteration of the windows media player is total rubbish compared to VLC which does actually work with just about everything.
Interestingly, this Linux box is the first machine I've had with which the suspend actually works reliably, unlike every windows machine I've used.
Funkwhale, Jellyfin, and the dozen Subsonic forks/clones are better than whatever desktop music managers exist, and they have cross-platform clients so you can access your collection on your FireTV or phone.
There's no real reason to run any of them on Linux, though, since they're just web apps. Jellyfin and some others are written in C# using .NET Core, so they'd probably be more stable on Windows, anyway.
1. here's the directory with my music files in it
2. shuffle play it.
That's it. This is not rocket science. I appear to be a unique snowflake, or somebody on the WMP team is just like me. Because that just causes every other music player to commit seppuku.
Also, there are other Linux media players that focus more specifically on music:
- Lollypop (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop): GTK-based
- Elisa (https://elisa.kde.org): Qt-based
- Vvave (https://vvave.kde.org): Qt-based, mobile-first
Whichever music player didn't work for you here, there are dozens of others that might.
How far ahead is Photoshop when compared to Gimp for the type of editing an average Photoshop user does? Do people really find Gimp lacking?
I've used GIMP way more often than Photoshop for the past two years, and I definitely don't feel any more at ease. The transform tool, for example, I always find unintuitive and hard, and everything else is more or less the same. It's a pity.
And beyond that, Adobe’s stuff knows about things like using spot inks outside of the RGB/CMYK spaces. Spot gloss, metallics, etc. Open source alternatives do not.
[2] https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_mode...
[3] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/separate_image.ht...
[4] https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/layers_and_masks.html#...
The main reason I still use gimp as my daily driver is because it didn't change and I still am able to do things. Everytime I worked with Adobe products (every X years) it felt like learning a new software. Which i have zero interest in
I guess a variant of the network effect?
I suspect that Gimp has all of the features needed for the typical editing done by an average user. In cases where it is ill suited to their needs, I suspect it is due to a steep learning curve because it follows an image editing model similar to Photoshop.
Can you expound on these?
It's kind of amazing tbh.
I don’t know if gimp is lacking because I have no reason to use it. I need to use photoshop to work with other people using photoshop… we not only need to send each other files, but know the same interface, share scripts, etc…
Anything earlier than 2018 won’t support high resolution displays and anything later is not currently supported by WINE, but Photoshop CC 2018 is very good.
Biggest UI problems have been fixed by Peter Sikking and a few remaining will be fixed by the switch to gtk3 on version 3.0. Version 3.0 will also improve color management and, at least for a few non-professional cases, good enough CMYK.
Last remaining deficiency for me to suggest professional photographers to consider it is non-destructive editing (adjustment layers) which will (hopefully) be available in 3.2.
Even for ordinary photo retouching the experience is just worse.
Now darktable is a decent opensource alternative for Lightroom and parts of Photoshop for photo adjustment and if your aim is to make your photos look good rather than heavily manipulate them I would go with that. Krita is also ok for digital painting, although it has its issues.
Windows has costs in terms of security and control. But to the end user, Windows is "free as in beer", even more than Linux, since it comes just sitting on your new machine and you only have to sign away vague "rights" to use it. So it's no surprise Windows wins.
Printers, the bloody cursed things, are far more reliable than Windows.
In terms of hardware support, Ubuntu comes really close. The Linux desktop has come very far in the past few years.
And sadly, no, I do not have good internet, so that's an interesting thing to note.
You could also try Fedora, I ran that for a while and it's also really good.
And honestly all of this would be acceptable except I have zero control over what it’s doing. You can get this exact same experience on Linux except you have full control over everything. So just give me the weird Linux oatmeal, at least I can pick what spices go in it.
BUT. I used to have full control. And then Ubuntu foisted snap on me and now I have to suffer the constant worry that snapd might choose to update some trivial piece of shit right when I need to be doing something actually important.
So, yes, I just did `sudo apt purge snapd` but now I'm stuck with messing with the oatmeal for a couple of applications, and that's likely to increase as time goes by.
I'm in the market for a new distro, but would prefer to stick with something based on Debian/apt because of the rich app ecosystem. Oh, and KDE.
I've never had any issues with application support, but even in the worst case you can always run an Ubuntu container or something.
Granted, I specifically chose my hardware to be Linux-compatible, which meant no nvidia and a bit of googling when choosing the motherboard, but even Windows would have issues with a lot of the shoddy hardware that's out there.
As far as I can remember, nothing actually broke when doing upgrades ever.
I love Fedora's in-place system upgrade, and it just keeps getting better.
We went with Silverblue, because it Just Works™, it's simple to upgrade, and it's difficult to break (and it's what I've used for years now).
One of my criteria when recommending a distro is "if I leave them alone with it for 10 years, would it be EOL (or broken)?" and IMO Silverblue makes major version upgrades much simpler than Ubuntu.
Actually I went a bit further and use i3 as WM. Tiling windows as God meant it to be.
Seriously ? , You look at docs provided by stuff like archiwiki, gentoowiki, man pages, tldr tools, whole bunch of other cool blogs helping you around with setting things up, entire web forums, matrix rooms, irc chats, mailing lists, and all sorts of other places to get help from.
And it is a jerk handing you a “vague” diagram?.
..... idk, if you can’t read a manual, then say so. A person doesn't become a jerk to provide you with one.
I understand linux/bsd variants of open source operating systems can be unviable/hard to use for people. Doesn't mean the builders become a jerk just because you cant match it to your usecase.
There are extensive manuals and documents for those tools, because of the flexibility and freedom they provide, its a lot harder on windows to code a script to change my display screen's color tone , depending on my mood, time of the day, or any way i want to, meanwhile with xrandr and a bash script, its just 3 lines away from me.
To some people it might be unacceptable to even just operate with xrandr or similar such commandline tools, but then, why are you trying to use these tools in the first place ?, use mac, windows or a linux distro which is more hands free like Ubuntu, or Deepin or Pop_Os.
My point was someone isn't a jerk, for providing that flexibility or freedom, no one likes to write huge manuals or documents, they do it out of kindness to help others use their tools, I just think it's wrong to call people like that jerks.
Ultimately I gave up and reverted to Mac. If my choice was windows or Linux, I might choose Linux, but as long as I can keep Mac OS, I’ll probably not use either.
Confused you with those, extremely sorry.
Which is still quite comfortable. Imagine you would have to wait one year for the grapes.
I thought about this in the past and disagree. You can already see it with google docs. Office file format interop is becoming irrelevant because the new format is just an url you point your browser to. I worked at a company that used gdocs and had a total of 0 complaints about sending customers a link to a gdoc instead of a docx attachment. There is no need for an industry standard anymore.
As for adobe tools, ok they might still be an issue currently.
Edit: The multimedia things I find really painfully missing in Linux are Izotope RX9 and Kontakt.
Nobody is grading on a laptop, they are doing it in a proper post production suite with a dedicated workstation, same with audio, and editing
I'm wondering if you deliberately picked an example where the undisputed industry standard runs on Linux.
I think that's a trap Linux Desktop evangelists have fallen into because they can't stand to recognize the truth that maybe a collection of fragmented pseudo-platforms cobbled together from disparately developed software --mostly by hobbyists-- just isn't actually as good at a lot of things as something developed by one well funded professional team as an actual platform.
I think the way some of the Linux Desktop community denigrates people who don't use it and pretends that there are no legitimate reasons anyone reasonably competent wouldn't is doing the community as a whole a great disservice and has been for twenty years. Not only are they driving otherwise interested parties away, but they're also refusing to admit to deep seeded problems that subsequently are never addressed.
Linux works for myriad of usecases the same way that windows and macos do. And it sucks at a fraction of other ones but windows and macos do too suck big times at other things.
The difference with my grandmother and most average people is she hasn't been forced through school and work to the windows or mac ecosystem. She wasn't used to software x and y. When she asked how to do things, she didn't have any preconceptions. Resistance to change is the main deterrent to people. Most people used to amiga or atari suffured when they had to learn windows. Most people are struggling a bit when switching to MacOS, I sure do as well. The difference is you seallow it easily because you actually bought a freaking expensive equipment and feel forced to get used to it. While if you are just a format + reinstall away from windows you will just not have the patience to dedicate the time to discover the UI, shortcuts and softwares to achieve the same thing but with a slightly different workflow.
If anything, Linux and the BSD have never struggled from unsolvable usability or compatibility issues, provided the hardware was chosen carefully, they struggled because they are free, are installable on commodity hardware already sold with other OS and thus aren't taken seriously.
There is a point at which usability is not about the specific interface, but that it's about applications and the OS being consistent. I, as someone using and programming computers for upwards of 40 years now feel that software is getting harder to use: it is less and less consistent while features are more and more difficult to discover. I hate the direction Gnome has taken where almost everything about the UI gets thrown out and re-written every few years, with features that I use simply disappearing. I hate newer versions of iOS where more and more gestures are added, while things like the home button are now gone and my phone pocket dials or turns on the light if I put it in my pocket the wrong way (which wasn't a problem in the first few generations). UI changes take mental resources away from the task at hand as one has to figure out how to do something that was easy to do before. An interface that that looks hard to use initially may well end up being easier to use if it is consistent and discoverable.
My number 1 UI complaint about GUIs these days is about the complete lack of keyboard shortcuts. Google Earth is one of the worst offenders: so many of the menus and dialog boxes have no keyboard shortcuts. The ridiculous part is that the Amiga did better on this measure more than 30 years ago. There was even an official Amiga User Interface Style Guide published in 1991 that spelled out how apps should look and feel. Even most MS-DOS apps had a consistent style to their interfaces and menus with shortcuts. MacOS may be one of the few in which menus remain fairly consistent and discoverable.
I now understand why the greybeards were grumpy with us young whippersnappers going and replacing the world. I am become one.
And I always had fun playing hedgewars on linux with some friends, thank you.
It is funny you mention drivers because: - printing and scanning on my fedora laptops is a totally flawless and transparent experience, only requiring at the beginning to install a package which was pretty quick using gnome software. Doing the same on the windows laptop of my girlfriend required spending 10 minutes getting the correct driver on the manufacturer website, installing the drivers including a ton of random unneeded software, rebooting the laptop and now everytime she wants to print anything she gets some annoying popup windows. - the prior scanner I used for 25y before moving country was still perfectly supported on my linux distributions while the last available driver for windows was for windows 2000. Better hardware support from Linux actually allowed me to use my scanner more than 10y longer than if I had been using a Windows or Mac.
Some exotic hardware may not be supported at time of release on linux but all in all if you do your homework before shopping there is no issue.
It is not huge in term of % of computing users. Most computers sold are tablets and laptops without any decent GPU. Most people cannot run less than 10y olds AAA games (and many of those usually works well on linux with proton anyway).
Sure, but we're talking about desktop computers here.
I'm not a graphics person so I can't say if gimp can replace Photoshop, but a lot of little tasks I used to open Photoshop for on Mac are easily handled by GIMP or even imagemagick. The majority of users would be fine learning these tools.
I started using Linux around '99 as a computer-illiterate and became a coder. I see no irony in this. One of RMS' goals was to have the ability to study and learn from the software and systems you were using.
That, I feel led to the ubiquity of high-quality documentation and materials - an embarrassment of riches. I ordered physical copies of TLDP (two phone books, in size). I read the slackware manual and learned the basics of how filesystems work and networking (culminating in redirecting X from my single good computer to a couple of dumpster-worthy systems on my home network). I didn't need to fork over money I couldn't afford for a compiler.
It left me with the lasting bias that free software is liberating and proprietary software leads to learned helplessness.
This is a huge understated benefit of Linux and FOSS. Instead of being hidden you can see how things work, sometimes you might even need to fix them
>It left me with the lasting bias that free software is liberating and proprietary software leads to learned helplessness
I must admit, I do understand this sentiment. Working in a proprietary system its harder to imagine how I would want to change things to better work for you, because I can't see how it works. I wouldn't know what to change because I don't know what's in there, it makes things more difficult to see all the possibilities with the lack of information
If I'm a professional photographer I'm paid essentially by throughput. The more pictures I take, edit, and post, the more money I make. I literally can't afford to dive into the source for GIMP to try to customize my workflow, even if I had the coding skills to do so.
And that's my point really. Yes, IF I'M A CODER, Linux is superb. But if I'm not, those benefits don't really benefit me.
To be clear, I personally am a coder. Even then, though, how many of us really have the time to debug Linux device drivers? I don't.
Yet, I am split; in my older, enervated state, I simply want my tools to get the fuck out of my way. But that is mediated by my understanding of "the way", which was informed by the myriad practitioners eager to spill the secrets of how things really work (i.e. de rerum natura), and to them I give my eternal thanks.
As a photographer, perhaps you can empathize with the likes of Edgard Varèse or Charles Ives. Ives decided to earn his filthy lucre in insurance so that he could write a symphony (the rehearsal of which was hired out to the BSO) in which the 4th trumpet had but one note to play. The artistic and idealistic in a single 4th trumpet tone.
If, on the other hand, you are saying you are owed some factory for your blind impress to stamp out mercantile -- here we part company. Have at you whatever promised fiefdom the FAANG (or is it MANGA) might, of its own beneficence carve out for you.
Have at you: be you artist or manufacturer?
I’ll take it down a notch and start with I agree with both of you.
One thing that maybe is more clear as I have aged, it’s obvious that my lifetime isn’t going to be long enough to see the changes that are most necessary and desired.
This is the end game and the reason why many opensource programmers work the way they do, not only to scratch their own itch, but to instead leave the world in a better digital state than what they found it.
I feel like the misconception Linux tends to break is because of Ubuntu. It's easily the most popular distribution and every time I had the misfortune of working with it I run into packaging issues and upgrade issues every 6 months.
Once I switched to rolling release distros I had way less problems.
This is a little like calling a dilapidated home a "handyman's dream." The vast majority of computer users want to accomplish their task with minimal fuss, not learn about computers.
Well, using proprietary system as a child made me a reverse engineer instead :P
That’s totally it and I’m very concerned about the current/future generations of people who are using fully locked proprietary hardware as their main computer.
I have the feeling that this creates an artificial barrier between technology literates and the rest of the world. Sure, it’s probably good for my career but it sounds terribly wrong to live in such a dystopian world.
Even the grandmother of the author is very lucky. Because once your grandmother of the future buys the cheapest Surface/Chinese android tablet… good luck installing Linux on this.
Several people in the computer lab were standing behind my back, watching me live code the x86 context switching routines in GNU syntax (which I knew from coding some graphics demos using the DJGPP environment supporting writing extended DOS (DPMI) programs with GCC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
Let linux forever be the desktop of the not-middle. Keep linux different.
For the vast majority of people, “a little light word processing” involves Microsoft Word, which instantly rules out Linux for the near computer illiterate.
Speaking from experience dealing with near computer illiterates, including my mom.
Of course you can argue that it’s easy to learn to export to .doc/.docx.
Sometimes even if you just ask for photo.
As an aside, before we moved entirely to Google docs in my job, I used LibreOffice to edit Word documents without major problems.
[1] https://www.libreoffice.org
[2] https://www.wps.com/office/linux/
[3] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.wps.Office
[4] https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
I, kinda know both, and by far prefer libre mostly because it's UI doesn't change every other year.
Common Access Card's are one of my favorite examples of regulatory capture. You can use them on any OS you want, as long as it's Window's. The software to use them on Linux is free to anyone with military credentials and has no good way to test it works except by logging onto a military website.
I tried it for a year on Linux. Really, I truly tried. I threw out my MacBook and bought a Dell, put Ubuntu on it, and tried to integrate it into a DoD corporate network environment.
It was hell. And it was LONELY hell.
I have an XPS 7390 with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (developer edition, so it shipped with Linux) that I'm afraid to upgrade to 20.04 because of a known Bluetooth issue that would prevent me from taking any zoom calls. And the Bluetooth already barely works as is.
I do all my zoom calls on Windows. Have you tried WSL lately? It's increasingly reduced the necessity for a dedicated Linux machine.
Foss came about because RMS wanted to fix his printer, other academics wanted to share their code, devs didn't want to have to go through finance to buy software, and internet companies wanted to reduce their costs. The rest is just post hoc rationalization.
I would go further and say that browsing, email, and light word processing doesn't require a laptop/desktop at all, whatever the OS - this is what a tablet (perhaps with some kind of keyboard) would be perfect for.
But what if their children all use FaceTime to communicate?
I think the illiterate place is already taken by Apple.
Except that most software developers at FAANG and other large companies almost always use MacBooks.
Getting hardware video decoding working is hit-and-miss to this day, even with forced flags, which naturally the computer illiterate don't have a clue.
I put Pop_OS on it. It has Firefox and Minecraft which are the only two things he cares about, and it runs so much more quickly. She wanted to throw it out but now it’s less junk in the pile.
I've kept some version of Linux in a dual-boot configuration ever since (Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian sid, and for 10 years Debian testing). I've never been able to find native Linux tax programs so have needed to boot into Windows each tax season - but this year I may use a cloud/online tax service, so after 24 years I may be able to nuke the windows partition and use it for additional ext4 storage. But I'll wait till after my taxes are filed this year to see how things go - I'm a bit conservative!
The only reason I still have a dual boot is for video games now. But once I can afford a new graphics card, I'll keep my current one in the secondary PCIe slot, and pass it through to a virtual machine so it's basically native performance, and I will no longer dual boot.
I've since switched to the web-based FreeTaxUSA (https://www.freetaxusa.com), and the operating system became irrelevant.
Linux has its problems, support is none of them.
I've tried so much to make Linux suck less as a desktop OS, only to realize that it's all a waste of time. And for the ordinary person out there, firing up a terminal to do things is just not intuitive, and frankly, this cli thing belongs to the past when good gui and excellent monitors were not a thing.
I really didn't want to deal with walking her through this so in an attempt to brush her off I said: "I dunno, I guess you could install Ubuntu."
Didn't hear anything more about it for some time. Many months later I asked what happened to the laptop. She said she installed Ubuntu and it was working great.
Wait, what!?!
And compiling your own kernel, that feeling when it actually booted and worked after your many attempts failing and having to remount the install image...quite amazing.
After the first few service calls, my repair formula became:
- backup data
- clean install windows + restore data
- create user with only User permissions
- create strong admin password shared to both I and them
- rename the admin user account to root :)
- enabled "run as" option in context menu
- setup that HP printer with just a print driver! lol
If anyone's missed it, giving uneducated computer users admin/root perms by default is a bad idea. A little education goes a long way. Those windows-pcs remained rock solid/fast and matched any linux-pcs uptime. Watching those "pesky computer smart grand kids" being stopped dead in their tracks from mindlessly installing "games" was weirdly satisfying. You get that "ah ha! it was you feeling"
The typical use for those computers was word, excel, some-app-to-print-cards-for-grand-kids, aol/msn chat, media-player, and some simple games.
Am equally comfortable in windows||*nix. and harbor impure thoughts of linux as DOS and the desktop-environment as windows 2000 experience (WoL - Windows on Linux)
Well, uhm, I knew for a fact that proprietary antivirus software for Linux* makes the system unstable, and two of them will crash the whole system. I know that Windows has ELAM APIs, but I'm still impressed on some of my relatives' computer on how their computer still runs despite having McAfee/Norton and Avast (for example).
* The kind that closely matches Windows' (aka with real-time scanning), not ClamAV scanning mail attachments.
Your repair formula is the same idea behind this post called Setting Up a Windows System to Protect Untechnical Users from Themselves:
I'm happy the author's mother is happy using GNU/Linux, but as someone that's used Windows, MacOS, and Linux, I don't think this article is giving Windows a fair shot. I'd rank all Linux distributions I've used relatively recently (Mint, Ubuntu, Rasbian) a distant last place when it comes to reliability and robustness. Even trivial things like upgrading minor versions of hugely popular distributions with out-of-box configurations is fraught with highly technical problems that need hours of internet searching. I'd say my experience might be an outlier, but it's consistent year after year.
I’ve spent significant time trying to turn these off and allow me to run them manually. No luck. I think I was able to turn one of them off but not the other, don’t recall.
So it might be stable but it’s not usable unless you leave the device powered on 24/7.
It still boots so I just ignore the update nags since I don't really use it for much that is important.
But the install is extremely vanilla and I'm a little shocked the update had issues.
Half way through I cursed myself for not having documented my set up well enough to just wipe and install clean latest LTS image so I wouldn't have to wade through various forum question/answers.
Updates are frequent in both worlds because the high-speed always-on internet enables and requires it. But while Linux gives you options to deal with this, Microsoft decided to remotely manage your computer instead.
Recently I switched to NixOS and she to Arch, and it’s stunning how much better everything runs. All of my issues disappeared, and everything is super smooth now. Definitely neither NixOS nor Arch is for the non-tech-savvy, but it seems we may be in a time now where you’ve got to search out the more minimal distributions if you want an actually pleasant, stable Linux install. I have heard good things about Manjaro in that regard.
Unfortunately, Manjaro's been... not the greatest.
A little while ago they forgot to upgrade their SSL certificate. Their suggested work around? Users setting the clock back.
That is the one thing that drives me nuts about Linux advocacy. Windows is not the same thing as it was 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago, so stop criticizing it based upon outdated experiences. Heck, stop criticizing it altogether since Linux has many benefits of its own.
In my case, I like how it works perfectly on my two year old laptop and how its lighter footprint allows me to do more with less. I deeply appreciate how open source software makes my life easier since liberal licenses let distribution makers automate things that are difficult to automate with restrictive licenses (such as software installation and updates). It is wonderful that I can freely use software, especially for those one-off tasks that I would not do otherwise.
1. Connect external webcam due to poor quality of laptop camera. Looks like a grainy 90s CRT TV.
2. Connect AirPods because speakers on laptop sound blown out.
3. Start Zoom. Zoom stops responding during test call and continually crashes every time I try to re-launch.
4. The Windows audio system itself crashes. I can't hear any audio or attempt to switch audio devices.
5. Restart computer. Now, the audio system is running, but Bluetooth isn't running, and I can't connect my AirPods.
6. Restart computer. Now, the audio system and bluetooth are both available, and Zoom starts! Hooray!
7. Have Zoom call.
Don't even get me started on printers. I've been dealing with this for years. It may just be a Dell driver thing, since my husband claims to have no problem with Windows stability with his PCs. I'm buying a Mac next week.
Nothing against Linux, either. I love it for software engineering. I just find Macs nice to use for their integration with my phone for personal use.
Jumping major release version, yes there are always new things to learn. Windows is no different in that regard.
I agree that the Windows kernel is pretty stable. The driver and application landscape is another story altogether.
The amount of telemetry installed and ran within Windows is obscene. That, alone, should drive people away.
Back in the Windows 95/98/Millenium days this was sooooo common and problematic that, as "the computer guy" in my friends and family circle, and because I hated Windows with a passion (I was already using Linux), I'd use the same ballistic solution: I'd perform a clean install, once. Then I'd use Ghost to image the install (Ghost from already way back before Norton bought it and it'd became Norton Ghost). Then I'd keep copies, on HDDs, of everybody in my circle's Windows clean install. Once every x months someone would call and I'd re-image the clean system.
What a piece of turd.
My review is this:
The UI change from XP/Vista is jarring, people are _still_ not used to it. I can understand wanting to consolidate the user experience across touch and non-touch devices, but at what expense? I _really_ suggest to offer a 'classic' mode, bring back a proper taskbar and startbar that your customer base recognises. It's not that hard, it's one program (explorer.exe).
The menus are ultra confusing. I type 'config' into the start search and open some configuration menu. I select the one that has 'power', opening a menu of the configuration (which is not clear). I then go through the power options, randomly find what looks like a hyperlink to adjust power configurations. This then opens a new window that looks different and allows me to adjust the configuration.
I then asked them how they wanted to set the configuration, and explained how the behaviour would be experienced. The average person for example does not know what the difference between sleep and hibernate are, but they will certainly know when their battery is drained. The person looked at what I was doing and said "I would never have figured this out".
It's like Microsoft Windows is still stuck somewhere between XP (probably older) and Windows 10. A lot of the tools in the background look like legacy tools (and have a legacy UI). The experience is simply broken. How hard would it have been to write a wrapper library around their new UI layout and compile the old tools against it?
And then don't get me started on user accounts, privacy settings, a virus scanner that is essentially broken unless you are constantly networked, an OS that is essentially baked into all UEFI firmware - it's just insane. It's not even obvious how to fix it at this point. I'm not sure there is even meaningful levels of kernel abstraction that can be built upon.
And why would they do that? Make a solid business case for it.
Pretty much the only situation I see this happening in, aside from some company deciding they just want to try breaking Windows down, come hell or high water.
There is no way this is happening anytime ever since quake iii drummed up zero support.
A hardware platform like the steam deck is the only hope. And I wonder how many will be running windows within a year of launch
SteamDeck is a Trojan horse in disguise, designed to get their gaming platform off the dominance of Windows.
Are publishers seriously going to turn down the best of consoles (the Switch) combined with PC? Exclusives aren't even needed. While I broadly agree with the article, I consider building a bridge to Linux (Proton) pure egoistic altruism.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
i helped her buy it and put OS/2 on it with emacs and LaTeX.
some time after i left, when she had trouble a helpful friend replaced OS/2 with a pirated copy of windows.
i then put linux on it and she continued to use that until she passed away almost 20 years later.
it helped that i was nearby so i could help her and she could learn from watching me.
i had set up a gui with shortcuts for her commands but eventually she started using the commandline as she saw me do it.
i created a LaTeX template for the reports and letters she wanted to write and a spreadsheet with a script to convert it to a LaTeX table.
beyond that she liked to play a few of the games that were available at the time.
Telling him he won't have to bother about antivirus and making sure it had applications and drivers for all his uses (chess, emails, internet navigation, picture and video) was the only things needed.
So far he is really happy it and loves that you can get a high contrast user interface with large font size out of the box.
The idea that major games companies should spend 10s or 100s of millions to develop games just for Linux isn't commercially viable. I mean why would They do this? They don't have any kind of emotional investment in Foss which is the only real motivator. They would go broke AND they would get attacked by every other Linux user because the game wasn't free (as in beer and as in speech).
Granted linux is not exactly a single uniform platform, the market is small, and the users are the most vocal about submitting issues. However Valve proved it can be done, and other vendors are just hiding their laziness with "market share" excuses.
And to your last point, to my knowledge nobody is really up in arms against Valve because "closed source" because if you want to support a open source OS you inadvertently contribute to the ecosystem one way or another, and their work with Proton and flatpak and Steam OS is more than worth it.
Edit: I guess I should have read TFA before replying to you, but as a linux user of almost 20 years I disagree with some of the fringe opinions in it, as you can tell from what I wrote. :D
But since then, it's been all downhill. Ads on the desktop? Come on.
With respect to computers, people can learn to use anything. With computers, most people exercise little choice. Most do not care about computers or software (i.e., they are not like you, dearest HN reader). These things are just a means to an end. They learn what they are forced to learn to do what they have to do. I once read the majority of "smartphone" owners do not even install any "apps". This sort of indifference is not something the "tech" crowd will ever acknowledge, but that does not make it less real. There is life outside of "tech" hype, lots of it.
In the 1980's I watched many people who cared nothing for computers (i.e., not people like you, HN reader) use text-only programs to get things done. The lack of obsessively manipulative "UI" did not stop anyone from using computers back then.^1 Unlike today, not everyone had to use computers. Those that did used what they were forced to use.
1. I reckon it wouldn't stop them today either, if that was what they were forced to use. But we will never know. For a fun example of how things might have turned out differently, check out this Netflix series from 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)
Yeah, I quite liked those videos. This is the channel:
I couldn't disagree with this more! Operating systems are designed to run programs and an OS designed to run more programs is better than one that runs less.
Windows 11 can run Linux, Android, and Windows apps and is better for it. The ultimate OS, in my mind, should be able to run everything.
I went through half a dozen distros and none actually worked ok with my PC (an older Asus laptop) - either the external monitor wasn't seen, the touchpad kept registering ghost movements with the lid closed, the KVM lagged (mouse movements or -worse- virtual keys stuck pressed), or the main monitor switched to the (closed lid) built-in randomly. Installed Windows 10 and everything just worked flawlessly :(.
All this on a PC were I literally only needed / used a browser, didn't even venture into the native programs space.
That said, I am running Linux on a home server (Docker everything) and a bunch of Raspberry Pis and it works awesomely, but they're all headless (just managed remotely through SSH / Portainer / etc).
I don't doubt there are some setups where Linux on the Desktop works, but so far it never did for my needs.
Weird that no one starts with "I bought hardware designed for the Linux distro I installed" and nothing worked.
It's like "I bought flip flops and live somewhere really muddy, flip-flops are obviously not ready for walking in yet; I'll stick with welly-boots". But if you'd bought a house on the beach to start with then the flip-flops would be better and you be complaining that welly-boots are bad!?!1one
I wasn't in the market for a new computer, just wanted to use an old one I had lying around (from the Windows 8 era BTW).
I recently replaced an older Acer laptop with a newer Lenovo but otherwise you're describing a system that's worked for me for literally years, down to the software KVM (I'm using Synergy rather than Barrier).
It was gnome 2 and seamonkey back then and it is mate & firefox right now. I wish seamonkey/netscape suite (web/email) could have stuck around, but the banners of "unsupported browsers" from banks et al. was the tipping point.
I really feel for those who don't have someone like me to support them... if I wasn't around, my mom would be certainly paying someone for either windows or macs. It kinda makes me sad, but that's the reality.
Several of my family members are in the same boat as the author's: they run Linux in spite of having low computer aptitude. I do typically have to help them with, say, installing software, but so much of their experience happens in a Web browser that it's a rarity (the last install I helped with was Skype, the web app not being terribly great). Given that they're also somewhat change-averse, the Linux desktop has been pretty great for them: the UI metaphor of Cinnamon is more or less the same as Windows XP's or Windows 7's, which is what they were used to, and it doesn't seem at risk of changing anytime soon.
Not going to happen unless the community comes up with something better than DirectX and port it everywhere.
The problem is nothing more than a lack of will on game developers part to move the needle.
Unfortunately, there's no comparison. DirectX is much, much nicer to work with. As for Vulkan, it's... okay, in the sense that it lets you write fast code, but unless you're building a major engine it's a terrible idea.
Developing for anything but Windows and DirectX adds cost and friction, and even if you use an engine that abstracts all that "away" you still have to deal with testing and support costs for niche platforms that do not pay for their costs in revenue.
So no, if you want to play PC games, it's Windows or gtfo.
I think you mean, if you want to develop PC games.
So far the following have worked out of the box on Linux, via Steam's Proton compatibility layer:
Elite Dangerous
Halo MCC
MSGV
Sable
Dark Souls Remastered
Cloudpunk
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut
Psychonauts (Windows version works better than Linux
Native version -- Had to switch to Proton
5.13-6 to remove a log item appearing on
the screen for whatever reason, but it was
just selecting a different menu item)
Journey
The Witcher 2
The Witcher 3
Doom [2016] (I had to tinker with it to get it to have
a decent framerate, but it was basically
just switching an option to Vulkan and
adding an option or two in the little box
that I copied and pasted from
https://protondb.com/ )
Risk of Rain 2
Sekiro
Silicon Dreams
Mirror's Edge
Worms: Armageddon
Supposedly these actually run better, since a fair few of them are written using OpenGL, more than you would expect, actually.
In the end I bought them a macbook air. I've had 1 call in 5 years due to internet not working and it turned out the ISP had an outage.
I can never find anything with Outlook search, but Thunderbird gets me what I want straight away. Maybe we're holding it wrong?
- Add-on: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/expre...
- Source: https://github.com/opto/expression-search-NG
It's a nice substitute for Outlook's Advanced Find feature, but without the GUI. (Despite the description, it is working on Thunderbird 91.)
When I (rarely, just to game) boot into Windows, I'm always surprised to see how much CPU it eats up just... sitting there. Being Windows I guess? I don't think my system is totally virus riddled or anything, and I'm sure Windows is doing something useful in the background, but jeez. Mine appears to be completely allergic to idle.
Me: How do you know you have a virus?
Her: It told me
Me: Ummmmmm
I go look. She'd get a "fix your virus" popup and download whatever sketchy .exe file, but it couldn't launch. I think I added a ad blocker at some point, but not having the ability to launch whatever random exe she inadvertently download was a huge win for me.
And here's the beauty: The interface is exactly the same today as it was then!
This would be impossible to achieve with any commercial system where they break and change the UI and UX all the time.
The setup is build on fvwm, mutt, emacs. All of them heavily customized to be minimal and simple. She's very non-technical, so the goal was to have a kiosk-like experience where everything is straightforward. But the most important criteria was stability, so once she memorized how to do something, it will never change.
The browser is of course the most problematic one as that keeps changing, to endless frustration. I try to lock into extended support releases and keep them as long as possible but that's been the only difficult part.
Before, I'd have to go to her office at least a couple of times a month to deal with Windows issues (I don't recall what but I was there frequently).
Now? Never. Like twice a year I have to go help her.
I've been a Linux user primarily for 15 or 18 years and even made my own distro at one point (it was for fun and not that great). I'm not sure she would have had the same ease of use 15 years ago but now? Many Linux distros are very usable for non power users and much more stable and trouble free then Windows (which to be fair may have changed as well, I haven't used Windows in a long time).
Of course she has very straightforward needs. If Firefox and VLC work she has 95% of her needs met, and the remaining 5% are related to her printer which has not been a problem for a long time now. For some people who need specific Windows software this is probably much harder, and likewise for anyone who purchase some obscure hardware that only has Windows drivers.
My wife mainly uses the browser, LibreOffice, and Google Docs+Sheets. Same with my daughter, who also plays Steam games and does a bit of relatively simple Python programming.
I like Linux on the server, it is a server OS primarily after all, then adapted for other uses. And my personal use of it is usually in Android form. To each their own, but in no world do I see eye to eye with people who think Linux-all-the-things makes sense. As someone whose choices include a Linux VPS, iPhone, Windows desktop, Windows laptop, Android set-top boxes, I'll always be switching up my gear to whatever I consider to be best-of-breed for the task at hand. As always, my opinion subject to change upon receiving new information. I don't recommend going on crusades.
Whether it is a server OS or a desktop OS or an embedded OS depends on the configuration. By itself Linux and even most of the distros are completely application-agnostic.
I spent several years with 68k/PPC Mac, and was recently given an older MacBook with Snow Leopard. Both of those systems were equally touted as being intuitive. I learned the old Mac by having friends who showed me the ropes, and reading manuals. The newer Mac was completely opaque to me.
A potential issue is that the Mac is touted as "intuitive," but that's a marketing buzzword. In reality, "intuitive" means it uses symbols and workflows that you've already learned to recognize. And the training process has changed, or has simply vanished. My mom (89, taught programming in the 80s), first learned to use Windows from manuals. And it's harder to learn when you get older.
For myself, I've learned to be platform-agnostic. Realistically, I seldom interact with the operating system, except perhaps for the file explorer. Things like setting up networking are O(1), meaning you do them once and forget about it. The rest of the time, I'm working inside apps that are remarkably consistent across platforms, such as the browser and programming tools. A bad website design is equally bad across platforms. I choose a new computer and platform based on a few simple needs such as good battery lifetime, and a touch screen.
But I'm practical. If Windows machines never get close to the battery life of the M1s, then I'd eventually jump ship. I suspected Intel's 12th gen chips will be the beginning of a new era on that front.
For me, it's about getting things done and running smooth while doing it. Whatever that takes. I bailed on Android phones after the Samsung GS3 because my 5S was just more reliable. iPhones have their pain points, like Lightning ports, USB 2.0 speeds in 2022, and software limits on how large of files you can transfer by a cable, requiring workarounds like Simple Transfer Pro. But I weight it all out and decide if any given trade off is worth it in the end. I don't understand illogical stances about tribes and grudges against the other team. Use what works.
As a developer, I've had good luck requesting Thinkpads at work. I use an X1 Extreme at work and it's very reliable. I'd never request a Macbook, but I've had the urge when most PCs were squeaking pieces of plastic.
I think the only reason anything but a CLI is necessary is due to the internet. Without it, I wouldn't see the need for it. Applications would simply have to be full featured, absent the multitasking required today.
Around 2008 I got myself a new personal laptop and gave her my old one (2003 compaq, setup with Ubuntu) and taught her basic usage during a short trip to home. She picked it up quite well and managed to do all her work on her own, and even used it for general browsing. She continued to use it till around 2015 when she retired and decided to live with us. It functioned just fine even then without slowing down like a typical windows machine, even though the battery had basically become useless and it needed to be plugged on to be used.
Recently we emptied our old home (set to be sold) and she got that laptop back. It still functions the same way, though she has no use for it now as she's used to smartphones/tablets so its set to be donated.
An 80 year old grandmother was 65 in 2007. She could be a retired tech company CEO.
Somehow I never see anyone do this for any demographic category other than age and sex.
I appreciate the piece but you lost me here. I get that Proton isn't as good as a native title, but how do we get from there to being told what I'm "supposed" to run on my computer? Emulators are a pretty valid use case I think.
I'm glad the author's family is comfortable on Linux, but I hope they won't get this type of bad advice if they happen to ask about Linux gaming (or emulation! or compatibility libraries for foreign systems, or ...).
no game company could ever justify this, their primary goal is profit, not Linux adoption
I visit every month or two and keep their system updated. The only issue came when they needed to use a Wi-fi dongle, and after trying four different dongles I ended up having to downgrade to an older version because none of the newer kernels seem to work with these dongles.
It's just a peace of mind, otherwise I will be paranoid about their online security. They still do usual stuff on their smart phone and their windows laptop.
They can really use Ubuntu for all their needs at this point. I'm just too lazy to go there and install it on their laptop.
I still remember the regularity they found new viruses to fuck up their computers (15+ years ago). Hasn't happen once since.
The problem lies with certain proprietary software or ex Windows 'power users' who insist on doing strange things to their DE. Like people talk about changing config files and whatnot, I've never done that in a decade of using Linux on laptops.
Linux always runs well on HW that is a few years old. or HW that was specifically certified for Linux, such as Thinkpads.
So, just a browser then.
This feels like a very common use-case, but it’s not like Linux is tailor made for it. Any basic OS will handle it. Chromebook would be ideal and even easier to setup and powerwash where necessary.
truth be told, it's been quite usable out of the box since canonical/ubuntu. previous incarnations were also usable, but required time or skill to bring to a stable state.
Doubt
I definitely would not recommend that to anyone out of the box. More for power users still.
- APT randomly breaking and require some CLI magic. - Installing french translation packages was awkward since they we're not part of the official repos. - He unfortunately was running 32bit Mint which is much less fresh when it comes to the repos.
Not bad overall, but I wouldn't throw my Windows for 25 years aunt in there!
I could also put a pi-hole on her network rather than a browser plug-in.
Pi-hole is great (and can block some ads in other apps), but it's not as comprehensive as uBlock Origin in the browser. For example, Pi-hole doesn't block YouTube video ads. It also doesn't cover any other network than the one it's on, a blind spot for devices that are used in locations you don't manage.
Youtube and Java Minecraft!
For what it's worth, I'm a 66 year old who's been using 'ix's since 1981. Is that remarkable?
However, for people with old crappy windows laptops, installing Linux on them is usually a massive upgrade. Hardware support can be an issue sometimes but mostly the old stuff is supported well enough. And it's not like getting a cheap new laptop with only 4GB is going to help people like that a lot in terms of performance. Crappy hardware like that is better with Linux on it.
I switched out my own mac book pro for a linux laptop a few weeks ago. The mac broke and I needed a replacement urgently and the shiny new M1s were a combination of expensive and unobtainable in a hurry. So, I opted not to put money in getting an Intel based obsolete on day 1 replacement and picked up the cheapest windows laptop with 16GB I could find at a local store instead (700 Euro).
I dutifully sat through the windows onboarding, which is ridiculously horrible these days. Just endless questions, nagging, and waiting. What a load of crap. After it finally activated, I rebooted it in disgust with a Manjaro USB stick, wiped the disk and I haven't looked back since.
I've dabbled with linux on servers, in vms, and as a dual boot thing since the nineties (Slackware in 1995) but never really committed to using it full time as my primary driver until a few weeks ago. But it was always an option for me. I do mostly server and a bit of frontend development and spend a lot of time on the command line.
All the development tools I use professionally are open source and actually run best on Linux. I've not used Microsoft Office since 2012, which is the last time I worked as an employee for a big corporation. These days, I do all my office stuff in a browser. Google Docs is good enough for me. Gmail & calendar work fine as well. I have zero need for native software for that stuff. I guess, if I ever needed it, I could use Microsoft Office 365 in a browser as well. In addition to that, I installed a variety of snap applications (slack, vs code, etc.).
For photography, I've been using Darktable for several years on my mac and that of course works great on my new Linux laptop. If you are not familiar, it compares quite nicely with Adobe Lightroom in the sense that Darktable has way more features and capabilities. It's the opposite of Gimp vs Photoshop. The Darktable UX has gotten loads better with recent versions and its masking tools are fantastic. And it's a tool designed by photographers for photographers so it makes no compromises on quality. Lead developer Aurelian Pierre is doing some commercial work as a photographer and he is a hard core color theory and tone mapping nerd.
And best of all, Steam works great on Manjaro and a lot of games that no longer worked on my mac are now usable again. It was really easy to set up and to my surprise Intel's Iris XE isn't half bad as a GPU and unlike my mac book pro, there is no thermal throttling. I was not expecting this laptop to be this good. This is the best laptop I've had since I got my 2012 mac book pro. And it only cost me 700 Euro.