linuxmemes

I have a PC with a version of Ameliorated Windows 10 on it. At a glance the project seemed promising, but then after install it did this thing where the lockscreen background is supposedly a blurred picture of the guy who made it. No matter how much I dug through the settings apparently I, as the owner of my PC, do not have high enough admin privileges to get rid of that despite my account being the administrator...? Pretty sus.

On top of that the update process takes more effort, so I haven't updated the system in literally years. The whole situation overall leaves me unable to trust my own computer, but even that feels more trustworthy than the default Windows-is-malware experience.

Next time I turn that PC on will be to install Debian.

Anybody know of citation software such as Zotero that runs stably on LibreOffice? I will gladly switch but this is holding me back.

User-friendly Linux distro is a myth.

I wish I could use Linux at work but the software used does not have any alternative (that I can use) and I can't be bothered with debloating and all that jazz. I try to keep work and private seperate instead.

If it takes you hours to debloat Windows, you better stick with an OS you do know.

Just make them install Arch, I did just fine...

Beginner friendly??? Not sure how to explain this to Linux users that post on Lemmy but we’re not the regular pc user and have a very different view on beginner friendly lol

Ehhh....as a Linux beginner on Ubuntu I disagree... I spent a couple hours trying to get an AppImage application as a desktop icon.

Spent an additional hour or two to mount NAS drives. Fstab?? Wtf.

My secondary monitor flickers to black randomly for a just couple minutes after startup and there's no way I'm going to dig through Wayland to figure out why. Monitor orientation is incorrect on startup and I again don't want to dig through Wayland or whatever cfg file I need to open.....yet.

Still needed to browse at least 5 different sources for answers.

I'm glad Firefox doesn't crash at 500 tabs or w/e but Linux still has issues with some primitive tasks that windows has well figured out.

Android and iOS already replaced Windows for normies.

This won’t be popular but I haven’t had a stability problem on my home Windows 11 pro (server) machine. I disabled online login during first boot setup so maybe that’s why … my network handles telemetry shenanigans so I’m not worried about that. Never bothered to put a Linux on it, which was the plan, since it’s not failed once, it’s been a few years since it was spooled up. 🤷🏼‍♂️

My experience is the opposite.

Took an hour just to get a mouse to work on Mint

As a Linux user for a few years now I have to disagree. My friends who still rely on Windows only software for either school or their jobs use Revision OS and installs it with a tool called playbooks which takes only a few minutes and automatically disables feature updates; only allowing security updates to go through. This makes it so all "system updates" are through the playbook app which is pretty cool, it pretty much makes it a Windows fork and won't revert or break anything when updating

I love Linux, a lot. I've distro hopped and tinkered to my hearts content. But I can't let windows go, which is why I dual-boot with Windows 11 and currently, Bazzite.

Windows doesn't have the ghub for my logitech mouse and headset. I can't use my plugins for elite dangerous or extra software, like EDMC. Many games don't work for various reasons (anti-cheat, or many other reasons). Can't say, "well don't play those games.". Well, I want to. I like those games, and they don't work on linux.

There is no AMD Adrenaline for my AMD GPU. I can't use frame gen or many other features my card has. Battle.net games just refuse to work for me, try as I might to follow every tutorial ever (I just wanted to play Diablo IV T_T ). Those features are important to me.

OBS is much crappier on linux than on windows, due to no AV1 encoding support. As a streamer, AV1 looks MUCH better than whatever linux obs uses.

And lastly, Windows (even Windows 11), just works with everything. Any software you want, you just install it. On steam you don't have to check proton.db, you're 100% guaranteed for it to work. Any software you see, it works on windows. Any peripherals, just work. All their associated software, works.

I know not everyone games, but it's the highest grossing entertainment market, so it's important to more people than not.

According to a report by SuperData Research, the global gaming market was valued at $159.3 billion in 2020. This includes revenue from console games, PC games, mobile games, and esports. To put that in perspective, the music industry was valued at $19.1 billion in 2020, while the movie industry was valued at $41.7 billion. That means the gaming industry is making more than three times as much money as the music industry and almost four times as much as the movie industry. source

My home firewall blocks ads and telemetry, no matter device/OS.

Another day another cope post

Where did the 'windows resets all settings after an update' thing start?

Somehow I've never seen this over using windows 10 for years...

I would rather use gentoo on my gaming rig than fuck around with DLLs for even a second

Unless you have an Nvidia card.

I've been on linux for years, I work the Nvidia libraries all the time, I alternate booting wayland and X... I even use my AMD IGP as output these days, instead of the Nvidia card.

And I STILL hold my breath wondering if I'm going to get a blackscreen, and have to go into tty mode or boot from a usb stick to investigate and fix it.

My standard response to "just go Linux" :

I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.

As some background - I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).

I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.

I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even POST.

Windows would never do this, no, Windows can never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it'll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero.

There no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-furst century, something Windows has had since I don't recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it's been what, almost thirty years now).

There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying "you should manage data in a proper database app". While I don't disagree with the sentiment, no, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.

Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?

Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?

Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won't even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95.

Someone else said it better than me:

Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.

So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's of a Windows server.

Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.

Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users.

If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).