Join the Linux club. You'll never go back once you get the hang of it! Nothing in my house has Windows. Left it years ago and have had zero regrets.
How do you deal with the lack of natural light?
Once per day I enable light mode for two minutes
This is the way
Despite not being nearly as user-friendly as Windows, the problem with Linux, at least in my many attempts to use it as a daily driver, is that system failures are often catastrophic and involve expert-level skills to work through.
In constant, I haven't had a Windows system in the last 20 years force me to reinstall the OS.
But if Microsoft goes this route, I will absolutely have no issues with switching to Linux and working through any pain points.
Personally, I find KDE Plasma to be extremely easy to use. I prefer it to Windows, but that could also just be familiarity.
I've also not had a catastrophic failure in I don't know how many years. I have several machines running Linux and the only time I reinstall is when I get a new computer. 20 years ago we were still running XP or maybe Vista and I absolutely remember reinstalling XP several times. Windows even today has it's share of "expert-level" fixes too. I find the incantations to fix Windows problems even more mysterious, and often coming from sources I'm not sure I can trust.
In any case it's all anecdotal, but I wanted to offer a counterpoint in favor of Linux. :)
I do recommend giving it a go, as it's really improved a lot in the last several years.
I will keep giving it a go. I mean, I've been trying to get into Linux for like 25 years 😂
What I mean by windows being easier to recover from, if there's ever an issue, is that it has multiple layers of restore, repair, and other modes that are very user friendly.
Just installing a simple app in Linux often involves numerous lines in the terminal. My wife would 1000% never be able to use Linux. LMAO
Mind you, I've only really tried various flavours of Ubuntu, so many there's a better distro for me.
You don't need to use the terminal to install a program at all, at least on Debian with KDE Plasma. You can either download a .deb file and install it with the graphical deb installer, or you can open the software centre (Discover for KDE) and search for it.
I've also never had Linux break on me, unless I broke it myself after poking things I shouldn't poke.
Installing software is one of the big blockers I see with people, especially when they're used to downloading a random executable from a website somewhere. (haha! Anyone remember Tucows?) Ubuntu has also been making their installation worse lately with pushing Snaps, which always seem to be only partially integrated into the rest of the system. I have been playing a bit with Flatpak distributed software and it seems to work well, with some nice UIs to browse the various repos. I'm also a fan of AppImage for the ease of distribution. But yeah, just the fact I have to type this out means it's quite different and yet something else to learn.
Good luck with your Linux adventures! :)
Fedora Silverblue has a read-only OS and uses Flatpak for apps. It’s pretty hard to break while being pretty simple to install software.
appimages just got less easy…
i don't know which update did it - i think it must have been os-level (i run pop_os, derived from ubuntu) - but appimages silently stopped working. double-click, nothing. finally i looked in the log out of desparation, which said 'appimages require fuse'.
more accurately, appimages require fuse 2 and the os had just upgraded to fuse 3. the fix is to heat-seek libfuse2, and don't mess with any other fuse-related package as things can start wrecking themselves:
sudo apt install libfuse2
originally seen on an omgubuntu post
Oof! That's unfortunate.
say to hwr that's like in her cellphone, just download from the native store, maybe it's easier that way
personally the problem for linux to me is lack of support from companies
Honest question(s) from someone who's been using Linux as a daily diver for well over a decade:
What distro were you using as a daily driver that encountered "catastrophic" system failures? What sort of use case? Was this recent?
If you really want to tinker, you can certainly break your system if you don't really know what you're doing. I'm sure I encountered that in my early days of playing around with home servers and whatnot; but I can honestly say that I haven't had this experience at all with my "daily driver". I've been running Fedora for a couple years now on my laptop; and everything just works. I run updates (at my leisure) once every week or two. I can't remember the last time something just "broke". I certainly can't remember the last time (if ever?) I had to "reinstall the OS" due to a catastrophic failure.
Most of the time Linux fails on me it's nvidia related. I hate nvidia.
In the past month I’ve given up Reddit, Windows and Nvidia. If I had a carbon-fibre submersible, I’d give that up too!
That is the exact opposite from my experience. Winodws has always been unstable, slow, and requires rebooting and reinstalling often. Linux is none of those things.
And I want to move Windows fully to my past
shit if I could go back in time and remove it from my past that'd be even better
Making everything a service for the sake of revenue sucks ass.
I’m not interested in a future where my computer is literally useless without an internet connection.
The thing that I don't get is that moving everything to the cloud kind of destroys their moat, doesn't it? The only reason Windows has maintained it's place in the OS ecosystem is because people claim everything runs on Windows. I think it really speaks to how far software on Windows has fallen (e.g. scammy nonfree programs being required for basic tasks like managing hard drive partitions) that Microsoft thinks that's worth blowing up. Of course, I understand the justification of Microsoft is a huge cloud player, but why wouldn't they try to maintain OS dominance?
MS Windows as a subscription service. What a nightmare.
Are they going to add ads to the task manager or something next? At this poinr I feel more and more compelled to keep using Fedora.
Microsoft is doing anything to push me towards Linux…
I understand it from a business perspective. They make the user more dependent and can earn more money. But the day you force me to store MY business data on some cloud servers which do not belong to me you lose me as a customer.
Maybe I should load my old Nixos config and have a look how my Laptop is doing now 😉
Agreed. Forcing me to rely on my inconsistent home wifi when trying to work on documents is just going to push me away as a long term advanced Office user.
Guess this is the year for change - time to start looking into alternative options.
if the rumors are true & microsoft is planning to make windows 365 the de-facto way to purchase windows in the future like with office, it'll be the dumbest move they've ever made & proof some new leadership is probably needed at some level. individual apps are one thing but no one wants something as critical & expansive as the os to just be a glorified rdp session, nor do they want it to be dependant on a subscription. i've told some of my non techie friends about this (all lifelong windows users) & they all said it'd be the one thing that makes them go to something else.
You will own nothing and be happy
Hopefully Microsoft will do that. Then maybe I'll finally stop putting off switching from Windows to Linux on my main PC.
What could go wrong
Christ, how to push away a lifelong windows user...
Companies seem to love making moves that destroy themselves recently
So like Chromebooks, or something weirder?
Sounds like ChromeOS?
Hey, even ChromeOS itself runs off of the computer.
Great how basically the only argument for this from the consumer side is AI-stuff, which perfectly works already and even has foss versions which can run locally
But why on consumer gear? Stadia failed due Google; how is this going to be better?
Debian.
Ah, the Adobe f u I want more model.
Hey, another company that wants customers to RUN away.
Is this a trendy thing to do in the business world now?
Apple: “write that down! WRITE THAT DOWN!”
Microsoft can move fully to deez nuts.
Windows as a service. Yuck.
Do I want an OS that can offload to remote servers? I mean kinda actually, that'd be neat. Do I want another thing in my life to be a subscription I have no control on, absolutely not.
right, this would be cool if it's self hostable. i wouldn't hold my breath though, knowing microsoft.
You might.
I'll keep booting into Linux, and I would recommend anyone that Microsoft pisses off to try the same.
If only Linux had an official Xbox and Game Pass app so that I could play my Xbox games on it natively without having to stream it from a webpage :(
As someone who is working as an Azure and M365 admin for a living... yeah, nah, Microsoft. Nah.
I am glad I already made the jump to Linux at home, and frankly, I think Microsoft would be a fool if they pulled through with this.
I bet they'd revert the decision of making Windows cloud-only within a year.
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