Asklemmy

I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.

It's just too much work, and I've only ever experienced Gnome in the distros I've tried and hated it. Windows is far from perfect but I know it like the back of my hand. Every step of the way in trying to use Linux for me was a chore.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it's a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won't catch on for the average PC user.

Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.

Too much of a hassle. I don't wanna risk having my setup break when... Never, really. I want to use my machine and that's it.

Weird edge cases. You would think that edge cases are a minority, but a setup without any edge case is the real minority.

From screens that decide to not power up (Nvidia !!!) to programs not wanting to start (Minecraft flatpak who doesn't run from desktop but okay from command line), sometimes when you want it to just work it's exhausting.

On my side I've totally given up on windows and happily run a full AMD household, it's fine, but still.

Linux works well if you need something to function as a tool, be it a NAS, network appliance, server, etc. You can setup it up with the small subset of things you need it to do and trust it’ll just run without further interference.

When it comes to a consumer device, it fails the “just works” criteria much harder the OSX or Windows. Software tends to be maintained by an army of unpaid volunteers passionate about their specific use case with a lot of infighting around how things get done. Such functionality is often developed by people with such a warped idea of usability that they consider VIM to be the ideal, modern, text editor. This is a piece of software that started life in the mainframe days, where input lag was measured in seconds rather the milliseconds, in order to minimize number of keystrokes, no matter how convoluted. This leads to multitudes of forks of functionality with subtly differing functionality often with terrible UI and UX catered to the developer’s specific workflow.

Whenever a lay persons asks how to get started with Linux, they get sent down a rabbit hole of dozens of distros, majority of which are just some variant of Ubuntu, with no clear indication of what’s different as they all just describe themselves as the ultimate beginner distro. With the paralysis of choice, they can pick one at random and hope it’ll work with their hardware without issue, spend hours figuring out the nitty-gritty differences and compatibility issues, or just give up and keep using what they already know.

People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.

I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.

The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.

As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.

If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.

To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).

Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.

People told me "oh yeah, gaming on Linux is a comparable or even better experience compared with gaming on windows." Well after a whole weekend spent troubleshooting and trying different distros only to get 20fps max and no controller support for a 5 year old pc game I went back to windows and was playing within about 30 minutes including the time to install the OS.

Edit: Before you go giving me tips: yes, I tried that too. You're missing the point if your solution to the above is "more troubleshooting, I guess."

Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.

A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don't think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.

Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that's required is insane to the average user, and most people won't want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.

20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I've already tried and fuck off.

I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it's got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.

Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.

Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user

Linux would have to manifest a physical fist that punched me in the face every so often in order for me to quit using it. (I'm just shy of 20 years since abandoning Windows)

My reasons:

• So far there hasn't been something I've wanted to do on Linux that wasn't doable - and most of the time (especially these days) it's easier.
• Everything MS has done in the consumer space post Win-2K
• Everything Apple has done.

It's more of a hobby than a daily driver for someone that games on PC games ranging from the early 90s to modern games. Too much hassle when I just wanna install and play.

I managed to get someone online to try out Linux because their Windows 7 install was dying. Turns out the problem was hardware, but he used Linux for a while and stuck to it for his new PC.

A whole bunch of utilities he got used to had no Linux equivalent (people online claiming the average user can replace GUIs with awk and sed are fools) but I have quite some experience with Wine, so that wasn't too bad.

HDR is an issue. It just doesn't seem to work right. Media players do all kinds of weird stuff. I've seen six screencaps from six media players taking snapshots of the same file, and they all had their colours wrong in different ways on Linux. VLC managed to get the colours right, but then lacked some other features. The Linux version of his previous media player uses different codecs on Linux so it suffers from the same problem.

Thank to Valve, many games work out of the box, but even Valve's settings need patching every now and then. Elzen Ring didn't work right because the version of Proton Steam decided to ship was broken, and needed to be changed in the config settings.

While debugging something else, we also ran into an issue with Teamviewer, which still doesn't seem to support Wayland. That was a quick workaround, but it still sucks. I hope Teamviewer fixes their stuff soon.

I can troubleshoot, debug, and work around these issues, but normal people can't. The big things all work. Browsers, settings pages, email, you name it, your average office worker can get through their day out of the box. For the technically skilled, Linux is amazing, with tweaks, source code, and tools available for every purpose under the sun if you're willing to read some documentation and maybe a little source code.

However, if you fall anywhere inbetween "I just need a browser and basic word processing" and "I know how to program in C", Linux requires a lot of reading, Googling, and replacing with slightly inferior versions.

Linux may be full of great freeware, but Windows has decades of history of free shareware that seems to just work better. I think the difference is that a lot of Linux tools were written by developers for developers, whereas Windows tools were often written by developers for users.

With Flatpak maturing, things are becoming better and better, but there are still times where I need to tell the guy I helping to open a terminal, and that's the point where Linux as an OS for normal people fails.

I'm happily using Linux on practically any computer I own, but there's no denying that Windows was better in a lot of ways for the general public, even back in the XP days.

Performance and reliability when gaming is my only reason for keeping Windows installed.

Steam and everything else have already exceeded my wildest expectations in Linux, however I am somebody who wants to come home from work, fire up a game and have it work perfectly with the best settings and framerates I can manage. I don't have the time nor patience to troubleshoot why some update just broke the game in some way after I've spent the last 10 hours dealing with other people's problems.