Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can’t.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn’t really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I’m not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don’t think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
Spy on users
drivers for lots of printers. no fuss gpu drivers. zero computer knowledge required.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can’t do things that it can do.
Can Linux mess with my default browser preferences every other time it applies updates? I’m pretty sure it can’t.
Shit you got me there
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
Fusion 360 actually works under Linux with Bottles. Some other Autodesk products also have native Linux versions.
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I’ve used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
In what world does Windows have an intuitive, consistent UI/UX?
You just got used to the mess that Microsoft calls a “user experience”. Gnome and KDE are consistent platforms for their respective apps with Gnome having one of the most flushed out HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) of any desktop interface to make their DE in the most hands off/out of the way experience for you to focus on your tasks (subjective)
I would argue both have evolved in the opposite way though. Windows has become so unintuitive for me with every version after win 7. Splitting up control panel in many different locations. Multiple methods to remove different applications,… On windows server, it was even worse, and as soon as I moved away from Microsoft’s default built-in crap to third party tools, things actually became much easier.
While with Linux, things worked out of the box for me for a long time already and the process of things make sense a lot times, taking into account the requires minimal knowledge is there.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language – that doesn’t make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you’re already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you’re dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.
Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).
Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a ‘hope it works’ but are most definitely unsupported.
Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.
Wine is ‘fun’(?), but it’s a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows’ tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it’s not 'supported.
Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn’t have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).
I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work “well enough” to move on from windows but it’s just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it’ll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it’ll be easier to switch.
For now, I’m stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows’ direction).
This commenter used “NI Maschine” as though everbody’d know what “NI” stood for…
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the “Maschine” is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn “whack-a-mole” “game” for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but … if ever the spyware in MS’s products gets made illegal, then … Linux’d be the only lifeboat left?
( don’t tell me that Apple isn’t every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren’t a real alternative )
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Windows is definitely easier to install older programs on. Linux is getting better, especially thanks to steam/valve imo, but it’s impossible to recommend Linux to just about anyone that’s not in IT or interested in tech as everything seems to have a caviat or workaround you have to do to get stuff either working or just limping along. For instance…I installed endeavor on my msi gaming laptop and getting it to use my 2070 card over my Intel graphics was a nightmare for a first timer. I can’t recommend it especially when I just wanna game.
