9h ago

I see these MFs on a daily basis

221 comments

I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.
Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.
- Linux is American by that definition

I'm running a homelab with tons of CLI Ubuntu and whatnot, but I'm fine with Windows and Mac for desktop laptop, so I've never tried gnome or anything.. I reflect on the last time I saw gui Linux... Creepy basement of dude we called Crazy Eyes around the neighborhood, around 2006, trying to convince us of the future.
- He was right, though.

I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
- I thought the holdup was the graphics drivers (Nvidia mostly) not the de. Normal desktop mode with KDE works fine on my steamdeck.

Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn't work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.
- Based Linux wont run riot games
  
  Is that a bad thing?
  Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
- league of legends used to work on linux. they removed the compatibility, explicitly.
  
  With the most braindead reason,
  There are barely any Linux users...
  Riot... I quit the game because I didn't want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends... That guy gets counted as a windows User....
  Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don't attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn't bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
  
  They're just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
- Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
  
  Because it is.
  Same goes for Valorant, I hear.

The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.
- As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
  I still really don't ever want to work on cars but I understand.
  I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
- It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
  
  Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
- yeah this was the thing.
  it's not even about whether linux is ready. windows got sloppy drunk and rode its motorcycle into a brick wall. it's linux or nothing now.
  
  Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
- I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate "normal" person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
  That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that's for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
  It's based on arch btw
  
  I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
  I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
- Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There's a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn't break everything.
- I've been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don't know why.
  On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
  
  In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
- Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could've gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
  
  I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
  I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
- I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
  Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.
  Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
  This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
  The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
- Yeah that'll happen if you run Bazzite. It's extremely hardware dependent. It "just works" if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it's a shitshow

ah the early 2000s days of fedora.

I run Linux daily, Linux isn't ready, its really not much of a debate. If the average person can't operate it efficiently then the average person will just stick to mac or windows.
I'll admit it is closer than it has ever been thanks to compatibility layers like proton but the average user still can't figure it out so it still has a way to go.
- the average user clicks on the chrome icon to open the internet and goes to gmail.com.
  you can do all that in linux.
  
  Until everything breaks because the average user hasn't bothered updating.
- The average person can't use Mac or Windows efficiently either lol
- Honestly, Windows isn't ready for the desktop, either, it's just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.
  Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). "Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS" shouldn't be sensible advice.
  Windows is horribly janky, it's just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.
- I disagree. I'm running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren't much of a hassle anymore and I haven't had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora's immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
- I've been playing FFXIV on Linux with dlss, reshade and 3rd party mods and it's been a blast.
  Linux is 100% ready for gaming even with the worst case scenario (nvidia) I've been able to overclock and play just fine.

It's ready enough, but at the same time not ready. It could be better

I've been using Linux as my main OS (NixOS btw) for everything for years now. The only things that doesn't work is anti-cheat...
- That's a feature (probably)

Mum wouldn't even notice as long as the wallpaper is the same

My excuse for not switching to Linux for a long time was that it couldn't play games. Now that proton is a pretty developed thing, that's no longer an excuse. I actually tried out mint Linux for a friend to see how easy it was to use and I just kept using it because it did everything I wanted it to. As a power user I had to modify it quite a lot but my friend just wants to basically load into the OS, launch a browser or play games from steam and that's about it, so for him it's pretty easy and straightforward.
I actually ended up installing kubuntu on his computer and modified it to look exactly like Windows 7, which is what he's upgrading from. It's kind of scary how close it got.
- I dual booted with Windows purely for gaming and Linux for everything else for a long time.
  After upgrading to Windows 11 I switched the default boot option to Linux and moved all my games there.
  Now Windows is used exclusively for printing with thay pesky Canon printer of ours.
  Tobii haven't released Linux drivers for their eye-tracker, but that's the only gaming-related problem I've had this time around.

99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they'll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won't make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it's forced on them... which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
- Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
  Hardware compatibility issues.
  Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
  Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
  Personally for me the list is:
  Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
  Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
  Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
- You say it like it's a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them... I don't want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn't work. I already spend all day doing that in my work's linux servers and my home server.
  This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn't work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I've paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
  
  Here's an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
  This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they'll mysteriously "forget" and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
  Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don't have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
  (A previous version of this comment involved the word "lube". I'm sure you can imagine the rest.)
- More user friendly doesn't mean you won't have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that's a real problem...
  (and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can't tell what they do, that's a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don't understand)
  
  Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
  It's not the terminal, it's the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn't customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes "oh, but Windows command line is so annoying" is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you're trying to do something Windows doesn't want you to do.
  The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it's a feature.
  
  Windows 11 doesn't even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
  Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
  
  Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
  Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
  *my personal thinkpads wifi board didn't work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
- They want ReactOS.
  
  But they don't want to pay it to develop it fully
- This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
  It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
  Not Linux's fault, necessarily, but hardware got... weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn't do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I'd have been on Linux full time.
  These days it's a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
  
  It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
  This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
  
  it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn't support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
  for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs great
  
  Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I'd call user friendly...

If you have to use a command line or terminal ever then the OS is not 100% user friendly.
In Linux you still have to use a command like, the average windows user does not.
- They forced him to type sudo apt update
- I think that's a bad comparison honestly. People keep thinking that Linux is going to somehow be useful for the average user which isn't really the case. Linux is perfect for those who are interested in computers or computer related things.
  It would be really cool to see something like Chrome OS but with Linux native tech. I haven't seen it yet but Bazzite is interesting.
- Nothing that requires the command line in Linux can be done in a "friendly" way in Windows.
  
  I have to disagree with you on that, sometimes even running certain apps needs some command line knowledge there might be a way to run them without but it's a lot of hassle
  not to mention people are very familiar with windows so learning a new OS feels way more complicated than it actually is
  I love linux and always try to get people to use it but lying to ourselves about the current state of linux does not help at all
- My wife uses Linux Mint Debian Edition and never uses the command line. She has literally never opened it because she's intimidated by it lol.
  Even if you are right that using the terminal ever is not user-friendly, that means that Windows is not user-friendly since I was forced to use it every time the OS fucked up randomly and I had to do sfc /scannow to fix my boot drive.
  Not to mention the countless times a Windows forum power user posted a command for people to run that was supposed to fix everything.

It depends on who you are

Until I can run special K or RTX HDR to inject HDR into games that don't support it I'm not going to switch to Linux on my main gaming PC. Its hooked up to my Nice OLED TV in my living room and games look too damn good with HDR to give that up for Linux. Yes I know HDR works on Linux now. But it only works with games that support HDR and the only "Auto HDR" solution I've found is a janky reshade plugin that only works with dx11 games and doesn't really produce very good results. I'm really holding out hope that valve figures out a nice auto HDR solution they can build into gamescope.

I have Linux dual booting on my machine. No it isn’t there yet. I’m tech savvy but still it has issues where I prefer to use windows.
I keep going back hoping it will work.
For example a Simple task that has an issue for me, in KDE I browse to watch videos on my network share. Double click to open but none of the video players can see the file. Works fine on gnome, but not on KDE. This isn’t something I should be dealing with in 2025.
- same i'm using Fedora KDE also my filebrowser crashed 3 times, when i tried copying my Photos to a Harddrive. I don't want to look at logs, because i'm not tech savvy enough to understand them. AND BECAUSE I DON'T CARE

Bad experiences from the past are valid reasons to be apprehensive.

"Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?"
"WTF is a computer?"
- Everything's computer!
- I don't quite remember whether it's the rectangle with all the buttons you press or the TV with all the funny pictures on it, but one of those.
- https://youtu.be/KQwOwuC9hLM

Linux is not ready for most people
The last time i used it was 30 minutes ago
- That's because the computer most people actually need is a tablet.
- That depends on your definition of "ready", and of "most people".
  My mom, for instance, could pretty much do all her stuff on a Linux machine, and as soon as her current laptop with Win11 gets a tad too old and she starts complaining that everything is so slow, I'll switch her over to Linux.
  All she does is edit her photos, read emails and does online banking and some web-only games (like boardgamearena). She needs an image editor (she still uses Picasa, so Shotwell could be a valid alternative), an email program (she already uses Thunderbird), text processor (she already uses LibreOffice).
  
  Oh, boy. Go on. Try that experiment. A regular person will encounter problems you could never imagine would be a problem in the first place. Say what you will about Windows but it at least has ~30 years of experience dealing with regular people. Switching my mom to Linux because "all she does is browse the internet anyway" is exactly how I became part of the "Linux isn't ready" crowd.
  
  I have had problems with those tasks
  The screen completely freezing, requiring me to restart the computer and lose everything i have not saved; putting the computer on sleep sometimes wouldnt let me open it unless i held the power button to shut it down and then restarted; connecting the certain wifi networks doesnt work
  These arent enough to stop me from using linux, but other people probably wouldnt ignore them so easily

I'm at the point where printers, bad WiFi, local file sharing/casting, crash recovery, GPU compute, even some driver issues, stuff like that just works in Linux (CachyOS specifically), but doesn’t in Windows.
Windows is getting progressively worse.
I still dual boot a very-stripped Windows for games, HDR stuff, and anything that requires a weird driver (like phone tethering), but man, Microsoft just keeps removing or hiding things I use to make Windows sorta functional.

For server hosting it's the only way to go.
Gaming has improved significantly, although it's rather frustrating that it's by all these compatibility layers and such rather than native run.
For desktop, as a workstation and general purpose it's 'ok' with rough edges. Things like (limited tests with a couple common distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Bazzite) the nextcloud app not supporting virtual files that have been available for a while in Windows and domain auth being twitchy where I've tried.
For the end user a big part is being able to just find an app and use it, no compiling or tweaking of settings needed for it to do what's expected. Package managers help greatly, but with the huge number of distros out there it makes it really hit and miss to say just go for it. The relatively few times you can just download a Linux version of an app from a site (as people are prone to doing if they go read about something on the web) you often would have to go chmod +x it and quite possibly have to run it from a CLI rather than just click the downloaded app.
So usable yes, but in a place where I could just drop it on someone and say go to town less so...
- I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.
  But to be honest, I'm just not the target demographic for that.
  I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.
  And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.
  Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
  
  Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
  They actually are ! I have seen a few posts talking about it. Not sure about SuSe/Mandrake, but they are talking to implement Linux or try to somehow get away from Microsoft.
- Absolutely 100% agreed.
  I'm frustrated by app managers because on principle they all work so much better than the Windows alternative, but the moment you have to explain to people how and why they need to manually add repositories or what a flatpak is you've lost the battle.
- Agreed. Just put Debian on a 17" i7 Asus laptop tonight as win11 didn't like the track pad or the display adapter.
  To get Chrome on, had to download a deb file, then manually open it with a right click and choose software installer since it wanted to open an archive instead.
  Just little things like that are tedious for the n00b.
  
  had you installed mint or pop, you could just install multiple chrome variants from the software manager
  
  Is it Linux's fault that Google doesn't provide an apt repository? Chromium is available in DebianStable
- For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
  How I wish
  
  It’s like someone’s never used GroupPolicy.

I am one of these people.
Last I used the desktop was 1996: modelines, xfree86 errors, etc. Not since. I've used Linux every day of the last 30 years, 28 as a pro. It's fed me, housed me, delighted me and frustrated me.
But even when I worked at a distro that shipped two Unix variants and an Enterprise Linux distro of its own, everyone at the shop was on windows 98se and vandyke for ssh. It was simply more reliable for the tiny use case and the time : we didn't want Devel upended because the team had a crashing wm, and our use case was Mozilla, VanDyke, WinAMP. Really-really.
Do I understand it's improved since then? Of course. Do I want to support my mom running Linux desktop or run it myself? The thought frightens me to my core. I don't have time in my day for the added hassle when we just need SeaMonkey, zoom, and (for me) putty and WoW.
But win10 is dying, and ImTiredBoss.jpg of learning the shit of a new MS desktop every goddamned time so I can coach them over the phone as their eyesight and hearing declines like my patience. This year stands a good chance of seeing my return to a Linux desktop and theirs too.
Wow works, right?
- https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/

Only when the pain of bowing to Microsoft, and their increasing intrusions and demands, exceeds the (IMO) minor pains (multiple) of switching to Linux, do people make the jump. That threshold is low for some, and high for many.
I'm a Linux Mint exclusive guy for one year next month, and I'm never installing Windows again. No, it didn't "just work", but it did work 85% out of the box, and the rest I was able to figure out. I'm NOT "an IT guy", and the only OS I used before Windows was MS-DOS (so, yeah, I'm old).
I play Fallout 4, and Half-Life 2, and run Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, LibreOffice, Calibre, Jellyfin, Forge AI, PrusaSlicer, Meshroom, SABnzbd, etc. etc. Everything works fine, now, and I'm perfectly happy without Microsoft all up in my shit.
Oh, and, BTW, Gimp 3.0 is the shit. I've used Gimp off and on over the years, as a Photoshop user for nearly 30 years. Gimp doesn't do everything Photoshop does, but it now does everything I ever used Photoshop for as a graphic designer for 20 years.

So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.
(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)
I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.
But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.
After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.
I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.
- If you do try again try lmde (Linux mint Debian edition) you should have less issues Ubuntu has weird permission issues that I’ve ran into before
  
  There’s actually a good UI for managing permissions I eventually found in Mint, I think the main issues I’m having with it now are the lack of it running headless and unreliability with running my native scripts. I’ll try the Debian version though, that sounds intriguing. When y’all talk about distro hopping, how much re-setup are we talking?

Most people's measure of whether it's ready is "How soon until I have to type into a console to get something done".
If it's within the first three months - then it's not ready.
- I've definitely had to do that with Windows so is it not ready?
- Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won't kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.
  It's like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that's becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.
  
  There's a guy at work proudly reminiscing about how we had to fuck around with autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day to get things to work
  But refuses to use linux because CLI...
  
  Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS
  People for the most part haven't had to deal with the command line since Windows 95 was released, and that was 30 years ago. Which means anyone old enough to had regularly used DOS is at least in their 40's now.
- By that definition Windows 11 isn't ready for people too. You'll need the command line at installation to circumvent the mandatory MS account requirement.
  
  No, you need the command line for that. Most people will just create an MS account and continue.
  
  You need a command line to install it on unsupported hardware.

it still surprises me that something like linux exists.
- Lots of high quality FOSS projects exist. Interrogate that feeling of surprise!
  
  Not talking about quality or utility. But how gigantic the project is and how diverse its users and developers are. All that for nothing being asked in return, just some evolved monkeys satisfying their curiosity of tinkering.
- Hello Tim Sweeney
  
  Didn't get that reference?
- Not everything is about capitalism.
  
  Do you think it‘s all unpaid volunteer work?
- It is surprising that it has prevailed against all the billion dollar companies and their hatred for it. The many people making, maintaining and testing the kernel and all the applications should be applauded.
  
  Which billion dollar companies hate Linux? The likes of Microsoft and Google actively contribute to it and make money from it!
- And it's all because Richard Stallman got pissed off at Xerox.
  
  I mean, who wouldn’t? Two sounds for X in one name? Surely it’s eckserocks or its zeroz. Make up your darn mind!

Maybe when it has a GUI. If I wanted to use glorified MS-DOS, I'll just open the command prompt.
- Are you talking about the OS/DE or all of the software? Most Linux distros have a GUI (and have had them for over a decade if not longer) so I'm really confused by your comment.
  Almost all of my software has a GUI, and my GUI file manager is more than capable, so I don't even usually use mv, cp, touch, mkdir, etc. for files anymore. I use a GUI text editor, email client, browser, music player, etc. Even Steam looks exactly the same as on Windows.
  
  I was just running with the joke and did it a little too well, I guess.
- Very recently they revealed this new graphical user interface called GNOME. Maybe it's time for you to try Linux again.
- Far enough

The main push back i get is in order to maintain soc2 compliance the IT department needs to run auditing software on the laptop. Microsoft intune barely support linux and is years behind on the os versions it will work with. IT does not want to run multiple audit software packages.

It's ready if you use a Linux device, you get dedicated laptops for as low as 600€ by now.
Unfortunately people keep comparing diy machines with Windows and Mac. That's simply not a fair comparison, there are reasons a Linux vendor often charges a few hundred bucks more for a Clevo or Tongfang design laptop (not just because they have to finance their support). Thousands of work hours are needed for every detail of a device-software combo to be prepared for the average user. And most of that hard work eventually get upstreamed or is about fixing FOSS bugs in the first place, so buying from Linux computer vendors is a win for everyone.
That's also the reason why Channels (or "Influencers") like The Linux Experiment are talking so positively about everything while still aiming at a relatively "average" audience (meaning no Linux nerds). They use Slimbooks, Tuxedos, System76's, Star Labs…
If you got the money, get one of those. If you absolutely hate it Windows will, in 99% of all cases, still work on them.
- I bought a cheap arm based Linux laptop a couple of years ago. The official distribution with full hardware support never received any updates. ARMbian didn’t fully support the hardware more than a year later. E.g. no sound output.
  
  A couple of years ago must mean it was either a kit aimed at developers (like the current RISC-V machines) or some chinese garbage (they often just ship one distro and never update or push any drivers upstream). 🫤
  Unfortunately bad companies (incl. those who do not label their products correctly, as in "for developers & enthusiasts) can be found in any space.

It’s funny how little has changed since 15 years ago

I always loved the "it's not polished" excuse withoutb a single example
- Let me check dmesg:
  amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: amdgpu: failed to write reg 291c wait reg 292e
  or
  [46531.357889] amdgpu 0000:c5:00.0: [drm] ERROR lttpr_caps phy_repeater_cnt is 0xff, forcing it to 0x80.
  Let me know if more examples are needed ;)
  
  It's not because you can't check on Windows, that it doesn't exist ! I'm sure there are a lot of different boot issue logs in Windows, they are just hidden behind a "beautiful" Welcome page.
- How is support for HDR colors nowadays?
  
  Support for HDR is fully implemented in Wayland last I checked

Last time I tried? Last year before new computer.
Next time l try? I dunno. It will happen again, not sure when.

2 days ago, and about 4 different distros to get one that would even load on my laptop with discreet video cards...
- Have you tried bazzite? I use it on my laptop with dGPU and it works fine out of the box.
  
  That is the one I finally got to work.

I tried this year.
It's not ready.
Don't get me wrong, it's fine for most things, but end-user, normie fire-and-forget stuff? Nah.
- But by that standard, Windows isn't ready either...
  
  It is by far more "ready" than Linux. But even if it wasn't, that's where 80% of people already are. Whatever quirks Windows has, they are already aware of them.
  But seriously, no, that's not a valid argument. Forget software. Hardware compatibility alone makes those two things entirely different from each other. Tell me again what types of GPU I should buy for my Linux gaming PC using an HDR VRR display and what DE I should choose. Is the answer "any"? No? So it's not ready.
- I've put Fedora on my mum's pc after it became clear that Win10 will EoL soon, and that Win11 would refuse to run on it. Have had significantly fewer support requests since then.
  Her work is mostly done via Citrix, which has an official Fedora Client. Everything else happens in the Browser, or sometimes in OnlyOffice, which so far has worked as a drop-in replacement for MS Office.
  As always, it really depends on the use case.
  
  There's always one "I gave it to my mum" post on these. I don't know if it's always you, but man, it's starting to get very funny.
  Yes, my parents are on an Android tablet now as their sole computing device. Want to start arguing for the year of Android desktop? Sure, "for most applications" everything happens on a browser.
  That's not what people have desktop PCs for, though, is it? You may be surprised to know I also don't run Windows 11 on my phone. For the same reasons it's less comfortable to run Linux on your desktop PC, incidentally.
  For the record, I actively tried to use my Manjaro install to work whenever possible. I only switched back and forth between it and Windows when one broke or something didn't work, as a bit of a test. Turns out I ended up in Windows like 80% of the time.
  It's fine, but not ready for mainstream.

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