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Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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For PC gamers Linux is the only alternative but I don't expect a major migration. The last ten years have shown that the average gamer is willing to accept a lot of hostile behaviour from companies as long as they are able to keep playing their games. Microtransactions, Loot boxes, kernel level anticheat, and broken buggy releases haven't killed that industry yet. Windows 11 is just another thing that will be loudly complained about in gamer circles but not much will come of it.
This is it. Everything “just works” on windows. Until that exact same experience is available on Linux it will never take over. And no, I don’t mean “there is an app you can install for a distribution that makes it easy to…”. That is an immediate failure. It needs to be easy to do everything, out of the box, with no additional setup.
I say this as someone that uses windows, Mac, and various flavors of Linux every single day. I want this for Linux, but it isn’t there.
🤔
"It works fine if you follow a 10 stage guide filled with terminal commands to configure it properly, which describes commands that are different in your distro."
Cool.
Exactly this. I'm comfortable in both windows and Linux. I tried Linux as my daily driver multiple times on my main PC but it was always not worth the effort. I don't have days of free time anymore to mess with Linux as my main OS. I put Ubuntu on my laptop and while it worked I was often spending days troubleshooting some bug, either with the touchpad not working or with with the disro itself trying to something as simple as an image preview when selecting pictures to upload to discord or whatever.
I've spun up dozens of virtual machines on my server at home and that's where Linux just works. After I get it configured I've almost never needed to touch it again. Until Linux gets the basic user experience as easy as windows then people will stay with windows.
I get paid to deploy and troubleshoot Windows. I use Linux at home. Do I do this because after spending hours forcing Windows to behave as desired I want to come home and do the same to my Linux box? No, I do it because Linux is reliable and easy, and it's not built on a premise that someone else knows how I want my computer to work better than I do.
Having to fight against what MS wants (or throw up your hands and accept it) is now baked into Windows. Even if I had to spend hours to use something else, I would.
I don't intend this to disparage you, I say this because comments like quoted always ruffle my feathers. As if everyone who uses Linux has said, "Welp, I know this takes hours a day of my time to use, but dammit I'm just stubborn."
NO, this is not what using Linux is like for the majority of people who choose to use it, even for gaming. If it's like that for you, then you need a different distro, or different hardware, or you aren't actually as comfortable with Linux as you think you are.
And it's OK not to be comfortable with it, no one sprang from the womb knowing Linux - but to imply that Linux requires hours of time to use vs Windows is IME very false. Yes, it requires people to learn new things, but no one came from the womb knowing Windows either - most of us have just been exposed to it continuously and have invested that learning time without even realizing it since we've always been "forced" (to one degree or another) to use it.
You're wrong but okay. I've tried it on and off for over a decade and I always come back to windows. Not because it does everything I want but because it just works. As I've said, I used it for both desktops and servers and it's always the same for desktops. Linux has always given me some sort of problem for every day use no matter the distro or hardware. I've used Debian, Ubuntu, red hat, and opensuse. First laptop I tried Ubuntu on ages ago the wireless never worked and dozens of attempts to fix it didn't work. Tried it again a few years later on a gaming PC I built and had to tweak every individual game to get it to work with wine. Plus there was always some audio bug I had to fix with sound or microphone just not working. And I could never get the same FPS as in windows. Once that PC died I built another one with windows. My previous build I dual booted windows and Linux and I had to switch to an ultra buggy alpha version of Debian to get my 1080 to work. When I went to uninstall that distro because it was too unstable, grub nuked the boot record and I couldn't even get back into windows despite all the attempts I made to repair the MBR.
This is all coming from someone who is college educated in this field so no I'm not some random chucklefuck who doesn't know what their doing. I really dislike it when you Linux fanboys just brush off legitimate critisms because you personally haven't had issues. Linux is not a mainstream OS and quicker you guys accept that then maybe we can move past this bullshit of having a free and open source OS that is unfriendly to use and move in to fixing the issues that's preventing people from switching.
Man, I don't care if anyone switches or not. Convincing people to switch isn't something I consider any kind of priority, and I don't think it should be a priority for anyone. Linux is here, and happily used by many without these hours and hours of problems, and it's constantly getting better. It's there for the folks who want it. Windows has been on a downward spiral since Win2K went EoL, and each and every year I'm more and more surprised by the abuse they heap on their users. But, it's fine with me for that to be fine for some folks.
I disagree with the specific sentiment I quoted for the specific reasons I described. I don't claim it's for everyone, nor that corner cases don't exist. It's entirely fine for us to disagree on this.
Edit--
I went back to reread my comment to see what was so offensive or could have been taken so negatively. I do think I should have included a "probably" near the beginning of the sentence below. Aside from that, yeah.
Why don't you just fuck off? I really don't care about your personal experience. Mine wasn't good and I've been using it for over a decade. Congrats you had zero problems. Your experience doesn't match mine. Here's a fucking cookie.
Asshole.
So have you tried music production with Linux? Installing VSTs is exactly that: hours upon hours of banging your head against a wall with Wine.
There simply are usecases that don't work out of the box with Linux that do on Windows because the companies don't support Linux.
I know this to be true, but generally folks who are in a corner case know they are a corner case and express it as such when they make such comments. 99.999% of people will never have to experience what it's like to produce music on any platform, for example.
I tried to explicitly capture this in my comment:
I think you vastly underestimate how many edgecases there actually are. Every one edge case might be a small userbase, but combined, all those small userbases make a significant userbase for whom Linux is less than ideal. And (just a hunch) on Lemmy, this % of users is actually larger than the population at large. Tech-savy people tend to use more obscure programs.
Some edgecases I happen to know(because I happen to fall into three edgecase groups!)
Those are two creative edgecases. And I believe using your PC for creative work is actually quite a significant userbase.
And sometimes even IF a product is supposedly supported on Linux, it doesn't work straight up. I recently tried to install Ubiquity's Unify program on my Pop!OS, but nope, errors before even installing. Happened to need all kinds of weird dependencies that are outdated and are hard to install. Even when following Ubiquity's install guide. On windows it just worked. Another edgecase, but it adds up.
So I disagree on your "majority" statement. Especially on Lemmy, I don't believe that to be true at all.
But meh, maybe agree to disagree.
Fair! I have some rebuttals, but they are likely to end up with a conversation that would be fun in person over a beer but cumbersome and a lot of typing via text. 🙂
Well yeah Ubuntu is shit. I haven't had nearly this many problems. I also don't use the latest hardware which helps immensely.
It's not just Ubuntu. "Just don't use modern hardware" is not a solution.
Fedora, Arch, Void, and other distros with newer kernels have less issues with new hardware. By not using the latest hardware I mean hardware that's been out a year or two. Not stuff that's ancient. You probably won't have any issues with the latest CPUs and GPUs on say Arch or Fedora, but it can be an issue for things like WiFi cards or on distros like Debian, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu.
How do you not see why that's a problem? Telling someone to not use new hardware is not a solution, it's a shitty work around. You're just proving my point that Linux is not ready for main stream use. Unless all you do is read email and Facebook then sure Linux will work but for people actually trying to enjoy their PC, it's bad. You people are actually delusional.
I do a lot more than browse email.
Also you seem to have lost track: new hardware is only really a problem with distros like Debian and Ubuntu. Even then you can make it work by adding a newer kernel - I actually did this to run Ubuntu on a brand new machine.
CPU and GPU companies put a lot of effort to make their latest stuff work with Linux, but that only holds true on recent kernels. Intel WiFi will also work fine, again on newer kernels. The issue is companies like Broadcom, and distros with old kernels.
You still are missing the point and I doubt you'll get it. To the average user they don't give a fuck why it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And until it does then the average user isn't going to jump through hoops to make their hardware work.
Yeah that's actually a valid point. More distros should use newer kernels for hardware support reasons, to improve the OOB experience.
It wasn't what you said before though was it? I don't think that was me not getting the point so much as you changing what you said.
Installing drivers on Windows used to be quite common, still is common for some devices, and it's actually often easier to install drivers on Linux than it is on Windows. So I don't think it's too unreasonable to make people install drivers or kernel using an included utility.
The most regular pc user probably only got a work computer that runs 10 or 11 and they will likely have no choice since most companies don't support Linux clients. My work actually does which is neat. I would absolutely use Linux at work, if working with Windows wasn't my job.