By this i mean, grandma checking her email and the IT pro with 10 NAS setup are the perfect linux users.
But us in the middle who pretend we’re smart…its a damn hard road. And then helping others to switch when youre not yet a pro is even harder, though a good learning experience.
Getting games to work perfectly, audio issues, Bluetooth issues, vr setups are far harder to do, running older obscure software, hooking up obscure hardware, using external drives, music production, these are some examples of things that will be extremely hard on linux vs windows for the majority of middle users.
However id say it is worth it if you like learning thousands of weird terms and phrases and putting in many hours of frustration to solve a problem. (Have you tried using floop to Docker the peeble?). It is very satisfying fixing an issue and figuring out why it happened!
Still, when im forced to use windows I see how bad its become, so im sticking with linux!
Still, when im forced to use windows I see how bad its become, so im sticking with linux!
That’s the right attitude. A lot of the comfort of Windows comes down to habit and mere exposure. Every Windows user who dives beyond the surface also spends a lot of time learning, but with the added burden of having to sift through every forum post suggesting
sFc /ScAnNoW. And if you keep the same hardware for a few years, the Linux experience ages like a fine wine as drivers improve and features get some subtle polish.Sometimes I wonder if my health takes a toll each time I help someone set up Windows. I can literally feel my heart rate increase as I go through the privacy-related settings.
I keep breaking my setup when I update my Nvidia drivers. Feels like shit, but I am never going back to windows
My nvidia drivers used to break sometimes but I just switched to dkms drivers and I have had a stable experience for years. Only downside is the upgrade takes a bit longer.
Gonna be real, I haven’t had to bother with my OS for the past two months, so I disagree with a lot of this post. The take I disagree with the most is that things that would be difficult regardless of OS are somehow “harder” in Linux though. Getting old games to run on Windows is also a massive PITA, and oftentimes can be easier on Linux since you can always just run a WINE instance using whatever version of Windows the game was originally intended for. Same for old obscure software, anything from like the XP era does not play nice with Windows 11 in my experience. It sounds like the bigger issue is that you have learned a lot about Windows, and haven’t learned a lot about Linux, so your knowledge base for Windows is better.
The actual issue I think is huge for your hypothetical “middle user” is hardware based. Some hardware is just better for running high performance applications on Linux than others. In my fancy, shiny, top of the line rig, my experience in getting games to work is I download them and run them with Proton. I’ve done no troubleshooting, barely use any applications other than Steam for gaming, and so far have not found a game I wanna play that doesn’t work. On my old Nvidia-based rig that I replaced, however, it was the exact opposite story. Nothing ever worked, I was constantly looking through error logs and trying to troubleshoot, and most of the time the answer was hardware that wasn’t properly supported.
External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.
I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.
As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.
I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.
Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.
IIRC Pipewire isn’t really designed for pro-audio / music production. So if you want to do these things, Jack is still kind of unavoidable.
Not to say you are wrong in general, just a personal anecdote: i run Debian, everytime i need to upgrade from one major Version to the next I work for a day, dont get it done, cry, and then setup all my 3 PCs from scratch. (And NO a rolling release like arch or tumbleweed is not the solution, as I am not smart enough to manage different versions of dependencies and everything breaks at somepoint, Debian is at least stable between the major releases) My vive wireless will not work under Linux so I need to keep a dual boot windows on the workhorse which is difficult to maintain itself sometimes. And on my low spec PC audio is never synched with video and no matter what I do I don’t get it fixed
I love Linux for its philosophy and hate Microsoft for theirs, I will go back under no circumstances and agree that Linux gives better error messages and docs to fix things, but I never needed to do that with Microsoft. I never needed to open the registry apart from escaping out of box setup…
User experience for someone with high technical expectations for what should be possible (vr, games, hi-fi cinema, CAD, DAW) but only moderate technical skills (I can navigate GUIs and make basic use of the terminal (grep, nano, apt) but if I try to understand English primary source docs I don’t get it as after ~7 years of Linux I still only know about 30% of the necessary concepts and vocabulary just isn’t that good… Like, Damm, its hard for someone without any technical training who only has a few hours a month to work on his PC (meaning having time to fix and learn stuff, not just using the PC) to get the stuff done which is a no brainer on win
A few months ago I wrote out some recommendations around the same theme here. Extracts:
A good start is to install tldr. You use it like man, but it gives you shorter explanations – or rather, a short list of illustrative examples.
Going further, check out Fish instead of Bash. I haven’t use Fish yet, but it’s said to be much better for learning Linux commands as a beginner. Later on, you may switch to Zsh. In any case, hitting Tab once or twice will often give you a list of possible completions to the command you are typing.
Also, I hugely recommend reading at least one book about Linux. I’m now almost through with the O’Reilly book “Classic Shell Scripting” by Robbins and Beebe (ISBN 9780596005955). Despite the fact that it’s 20 years old, it helped me hugely – primarily with the shell and its commands, but also with understanding things like file structure.
It presupposes some familiarity with Unix-like systems and with the shell, so if one’s just starting out, the book “Learning the Unix Operating System” may be better.
I had a crisis too some years ago, when Windows 7 was the shit, I heard Windows 7 was very good (for Windows).
So I tried to dual boot Windows 7, goddam a load of crap!! I’ll never believe anyone claiming Windows is good again.
The structure of security is a bloody mess, providing worse security, while taking control away from the owner of the system.
And lack of package manager makes it ask for updates at the most inopportune moments. Just a tiny program like Adobe reader was super invasive, and was a major pain in the ass.Windows is not in any way user friendly, it’s just what most people are used to.
