Most people that I’ve seen go back to Windows are people who tried something like Fedora as their first distro for some reason, and then left because they found it too complicated. Instead of going for an easier one like Mint
That is the quirk of being splintered in so many different distros, and all the users recommending a different one.
It is by far the biggest reason why Linux hasn’t gone mainstream.
New users are having to deep dive into all the different possibilities just to find the one that does what they want, before they can even start the process of installation.
Compare that to Windows: just install the latest one
That is indeed strange, I started with Fedora for some reason and I still use Fedora. Great distro tbh, my only complaint is that more things are .deb instead of .rpm, but .rpm is common enough.
Ok so I am probably gonna curse in the Linux church but please enlighten me
I have one laptop with windows 10 for the simple stuff: internet, movie, ms office. It functions perfectly. Yes it needs a reboot sometimes. I don’t understand what people are saying about how terrible ms in regard for easy users.
I mean I get it that it probably using my data, which would be actually enough to change.
However: all these post about how easy it is to fix stuff in Linux (and thus saying it is not working properly)… Keeps me in ms.
What are you guys doing that needs so much tinkering that needs to be fixed constantly?
I don’t really have to fix anything in Linux, I do a lot of advanced things though (I’m a software dev) where I will manually change executables’ paths, swap them out with symlinks, use custom newer GCC compilers, etc, but even with all of that I still rarely ever have to “fix” anything. I have been waiting, prepared, for when this Ubuntu install craps out so I can finally wipe it out and switch to Arch for this PC… but it still keeps going and going without a hiccup.
I’m not sure what people are referring to that they have to fix all the time, but no two people have the same experience overall obviously, and there are so many variations of a linux system. like take 10 different desktop environments or window managers or different pieces of software or hardware and every permutation is going to have either more problems, or less problems.
Ultimately I would recommend anybody just giving all of the distros and DE/WMs a try. A good try, give it a few weeks and see how each of them feel, you’re not going to know what you’ve been missing, or if anything ever has bugs or quirks at all period, until you do.
No software is perfect, you are going to run into some issue, somewhere, eventually. However, I would say when talking about Linux spcifically, there is a high chance that people talking about stuff being broken are people breaking stuff.
It’s simply fun to try riscy, experimental things. Naturally, people also like to write about it.
However, I would say when talking about Linux specifically, there is a high chance that people talking about stuff being broken are people breaking stuff.
I’m sure you’re right. It used to be complicated to set up printers, bluetooth, audio, but even then once set up they were fine. Now all those and just about anything else you need to manage on the machine has an easy GUI
My wife’s computer runs Linux and she’s never had to use a terminal (she’s not a techie type)
You don’t need to tinker so much Linux if you are just gonna use it for Internet and Movie stuff. We tinker with it so much because we want to make our desktop the way we want it
In windows you can’t fix it. You leave it there. In linux you can fix, you may try to fix it.
Also the real issue to fix must be at install time for drivers. You wouldn’t face that in windows since the devices are preinstalled and configured by manufacturer. If something doesn’t work on windows it would be called manufacturer’s fault and not windows’ fault, so manufacturers make sure its working correctly
It already just works in linux. But what people constantly want to “fix” is not fixable in windows. If you don’t need that, you still can use linux without so called “fixing”
You’re talking about Mac, if something is wrong there like an app being too old, you can’t do anything about it.
Windows allows you to mold it to make it do what you like, but usually the default setup is pretty decent. Even if it can be the manufacturers fault, you can still install older versions of drivers, install open source third party drivers, or compile your own if you are so inclined.
The database that comes with Windows is to make it easy for the user, so they don’t have to go around searching for drivers when they attach a new device. Most of the time it works flawless.
Windows allows, yes. But its difficult imo. Its not open and configurable so you have to do hacks if you want to place taskbar vertical or somethin. Then it becomes unstable and i guess that has a chance to get reverted with an update
A lot of the people who are drawn to Linux want to be able to tinker with things. For your use case you would probably be perfectly happy with installing Ubuntu, getting the apps you need, then not messing with it.
okay so sometimes you need to run a twenty year old game made for another OS or cpu architecture
which… weirdly, easier in Linux than win7; Linux has better backward compatibility with windows than windows. was like three clicks to install.
but sometimes that game uses broadcast UDP packets for LAN multiplayer.
and this is where our problem comes from, because broadcast UDP packets are deprecated, and also most modern routers don’t love them, I don’t think.
so, I needed to find a way to manually readdress outgoing UDP packets from broadcast to a specific set of multicast addresses, which…
also, some issues running USB as serial for some exotic peripherals. and by ‘exotic’ I mean ‘I don’t know for sure the PC is the problem; I might have soldered this wrong’.
also some issues in qubes, but that’s literally all virtualization, and not a distro for anyone who hasn’t both been using Linux for a while and considered the cost of making their apartment a Faraday cage.
a few issues with bare arch, which is the ‘do everything from scratch 0 automation bleeding edge tech nerd, no, seriously you need to manually download a file system’ distro. don’t use arch if you don’t know what youre doing.
Ok cool, so you do very specific things (and I lost you at UDP). So since I don’t have a very specific use case, I am sadly still not convinced that I need to switch
no I’m saying weirdshit that made me fudge things in Linux. and I could. it was easy.
in windows my issues were all ‘this isn’t supposed to work, this isn’t allowed’ and I had to fight the system rather than finding the right config file and changing a couple lines.
so my windows problems were much simpler shit. things like getting the taskbar to to what I want, or getting windows to not explode on top edge of screen (literally a checkbox in KDE plasma)
For the UDP broadcast, you should be able to catch and change them with simple firewall rules, you’d catch packets with a destination address of the broadcast address and send them to a chain that rewrites the destination
I just web surf and play video games on my machines, I had to open terminal once to install printer drivers, the printers a MFC-490CW otherwise, nothing needed to be fixed
It’s just nice to HAVE the terminal, lets me go under the hood of my computer if need be.
I mean, if you duel boot, it’s just a matter of time until Windows nukes your other OS. At least with me, my Linux was about to solve world peace, but Windows got wind of that and shut it the fuck down.
11 is crap and I will never upgrade. I only keep 10 because it’s a duel boot and I don’t want to reload everything. I guess I could partition a second Linux drive. But I occasionally like to mess around on Unreal 5 and create worlds.
Maybe that problem occurs in relatively bigger updates, which is not now being pushed to win10, or maybe because the way bootloaders and handled may differ in your setup
Ah damn this is exactly what happened a few days ago. My popos boot entry suddenly disappeared. I can still just boot from the physical ssd it’s installed on, but I found it strange it just pooped out somehow. Any pointers on how to fix it?
I still need to fix mine, thanks for the link. The weirdest break it did once was messing with my Wi-Fi driver, managed to break Linux’ driver somehow, making the Internet a no go. Still no idea how Windows managed that though, they shouldn’t be messing with my bios. :/
I haven’t had it happen to me for a while now. I used to have a boot repair liveCD that’d always do the trick, but I don’t think that specific distro even exists anymore.
The gist is you’ll want to boot a liveCD and use the liveCD to reinstall GRUB, I’m sure you can find the right incantation to do so online somewhere.
I almost wanted to correct you and say its dual not duel, but when I think about it windows will fight to be the only bootloader right when you think its finally behaving.
I have never liked Windows. Unix workstations or linux pretty much since the mid 80’s. My current pet peeve is companies that block email clients except Outlook from connecting to their mail server (Exchange).
You can usually find the solution to Linux problems on the forum for your distro.
With windows problems, the answer is usually “nothing can be done unless microsoft actually decides to fix it”. That’s after digging through 10 or more pages of search results filled with AI generated crap.
“nothing can be done unless microsoft actually decides to fix it”
That is just a straight up lie
I haven’t encountered a SINGLE issue like that in all my years of IT in heavy Microsoft environments. You can always find a solution, albeit having some small caveats like you have in every open source software. Every single issue is documented somewhere since 80% of desktops run it. The community is just so much bigger. You can even straight up contact Microsoft directly if you encounter anything that hasn’t been encountered before.
Don’t blame your lack of Google fu on Microsoft just because you don’t like their design philosophy.
I would say so far, I can find the solutions just like i can with Microsoft, i can even leverage it with AI to get my problems solved. and actually, in linux mint, they have a irc and forum i can contact from my desktop.
But the same can be said with windows. My life long windows user friend occasionally (a few times a year) reaches out about some significant issues they are experiencing with windows on their modern desktop.
I truly wouldn’t recommend Linux for a fairly tech illiterate person like him, but really Linux is better in every category that matters to me.
I truly wouldn’t recommend Linux for a fairly tech illiterate person like him
I would actually argue the opposite, linux is way more intuitive for new people who hasn’t used a pc before or hasn’t used windows long enough to fill their brain with their unconsistent mess. I’ve seen 3 variants of this already with people close to me ( last one of them encouraged by me). Kinda mind boggling.
Untrue statement plus in some distros you don’t need the terminal at all. Fear to the terminal is included in windows’ inconsistent mess, as i said, to real first time users it’s not that horrible to “talk to the pc so it does what you told it to do”.
Also you don’t get to decide if an experience i had felt mind boggling or not (?
I mean he’s tech illiterate when it comes to anything semi complicated but with the way he uses his pc and the software he uses it would just not be possible for him to switch at all, would be unable to do 70% of the stuff he wants to do.
Linux is only good for the truly tech illiterate/pretty noice users in my opinion. After that you hit a point where they are literate just enough that they would need to solve problems on linux they wouldn’t have to on windows and their inability to solve problems on Linux make their experience bad.
One level above that Linux is the better option again though.
Gamepass isn’t for me, but dual booting for it is understandable. But office? I’ve found LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are usually “good enough,” and if you really need true MS Office, I believe they offer web editors now
The web editor isn’t nearly as good as their desktop app counterpart. LibreOffice is fine for basic usage, but Excel is still king if you’re using any kind of advanced feature.
I was just about to give up on it the other day after using Mint for the last 6 months because I was having weird instability issues. Anytime I would play a game it would freeze within 15 mins. Turns out XMP had somehow gotten turned on in UEFI settings. Must have done it by accident the last time I was in there. Anyways, disabled it and all my issues disappeared. I would have been pissed if I wiped Linux and reinstalled Windows only to still have issues.
I actually switched back to Windows a few weeks ago because I was so tired of all the NVIDIA problems I had on Wayland. A few days later I read that explicit sync finally got merged, lol.
I’m definitely planning on switching back to Linux, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it before getting a new AMD GPU.
Yeah, that’s what I i did, first tried Nobara, I liked it but encountered some issues, tried to fix them but I realized I spent too much time and there’s no clear fix, so I hoped on Fedora and everything works nicely, exept for the Multimedia drivers which I’m still trying to fix…
It’s the stupid US patent law, and they don’t wanna deal with any “legal” issues, showing you how to install those drivers is how far they can go… But this is Exactly why these drivers are broken, they’re not well integrated and not tested by Fedora devs…
That’s why Distros like Ultramarine promise you a working Fedora experience OOTB, because they’re not US based and such laws don’t apply to their software…
IMO many will leave Linux just before finding the fix!
I had tried dual boot but kept going back to windows because i knew how to do things there without having to mess with anything
Its only after i removed windows altogether and only ran Mint, that i was forced to seriously look for solutions. Once you do find them though, you dont need to mess around with anything that much any more
“When he reached the New World, Cortezh burned hish ships. Ash a reshult hish men were well motivated.” —Capt. Ramius, played by Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October
I don’t really get how that worked. If I was in a group of people arriving to a new and mysterious land and our leader decided to order the ships burned so that we couldn’t head back, I’d assume he’d lost his marbles and elect a new leader.
A suggestion for everyone that’s kinda new, and to be honest, grizzled vets too… Use chatgpt as a trouble shooting tool. It’s really surprising how good it is sometimes. I’ve had it write bash scripts in minutes, solve obscure Firefox issues, fix game settings for barely compatible games… So many things
Not very accessible, in the vast majority of (troubleshooting, nothing private) cases free gpt is the best option (fast, free, openAI training on that chat might even be beneficial to the community). Decent GPU’s for LLM are stupid pricey.
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