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submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/linux@programming.dev
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[-] Zacryon@feddit.org 10 points 3 hours ago

The article mentions how basic programs are missing. They acknowledge the existence of FOSS alternatives, e.g. GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements, but complain about it being too difficult or that some alternatives are simply not to be found via Mint's "Software Manager".

Which is not news and probably one of the reasons why desktop Linux-based distros have still not become mainstream. There's just a lack of all that "user-friendlyness" less tech-oriented people need.

These things can be changed, although there is an economic barrier. FOSS projects are great and we see how many of them took off. However, if the main portion of users are not on Linux, but on Windoofs, then it doesn't make much sense to invest time and money into developing and maintaining software for Linux while having commercial interests.
The sad reality is that Microsoft has gained that market dominance. You won't get end-user oriented software companies on board with Linux as long as the user-share is so comparably low. This is a self-reinforcing cycle.

Windoofs meets UX needs and there is a lot of software people need -> most people use Windoofs -> companies develop and distribute for Windoofs -> people keep using Windoofs, etc..

To break out of that, people need convincing alternatives. Not just for Linux alone, but especially for the software running on it.

Which is hard to achieve, given how a plethora of Linux projects have to survive on donations alone and too few companies take the leap.

There is a silver lining though. With the Steam Deck and Proton, Valve really got a lot more people on board with Linux. I can only hope, that this trend continues.

But at the moment I fear that this will be short lived, especially with Microsofts "handheld Xbox" on the horizon.

So let's see, how this unfolds. The EOL of Windows 10 is really a strong incentive to switch to Linux. For my part, I will go for the full switch, since I've used Windoofs mainly for gaming anyway and am using Linux systems daily for my job. But then again, I am an engineering scientist and I can't picture, e.g., my parents being satisfied with a Linux distro.

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 8 hours ago

sounds like an easy choice

[-] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world 10 points 7 hours ago

How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.

[-] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 0 points 6 hours ago

It's not about sales, 11 is a free upgrade.

[-] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 5 hours ago

On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.

[-] venotic@kbin.melroy.org 6 points 7 hours ago

Linux. Each Linux OS, breathes new life into an old laptop. Least if that laptop is at least 15 ~ 20 years old. Laptops from the late 90s though? May have to go very old school Linux.

[-] The_Caretaker@lemm.ee 28 points 12 hours ago

Install Linux on them and give them to school children so they can go to school online and not have to worry about being shot. I also see a lot of lithium in that pile.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 46 points 15 hours ago

That doesn't sound like a tough choice at all...

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 8 hours ago

seriously i just deleted windows and put mint on my laptop (which is only like from 2020ish) and it runs better than it ever did on windows

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 3 points 8 hours ago

Yeah, both my Linux PC's probably wouldn't even run Win 10, let alone Win 11. As long as they work, pretty much any PC from the last decade can still run any distro and be sufficient to do any kind of productivity workload.

[-] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 88 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

The right answer is definitely not landfill.

Most people use their computers to run a web browser, maybe a word processor or media player, and... not much else. Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.

If the charities are unable/unwilling to provide support for Linux, they could give computers away on Craigslist before dumping more e-waste into our environment.

[-] earphone843@sh.itjust.works 27 points 17 hours ago

My wife's 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.

[-] MooseyMoose@lemmy.world 15 points 16 hours ago

I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 3 points 13 hours ago

PySolBSD :)

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 30 points 18 hours ago

Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.

You'd think....

[-] ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Lol, I switched to kde plasma and because the windows logo bottom left was replaced with a K, neither my dad or my sister knew how to shut down the pc 🤦‍♀️

[-] hollyberries@programming.dev 11 points 15 hours ago

Edge is on Linux (bottom of the page). Throw a windoze skin on KDE and it would be like they never left.

[-] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 19 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It breaks my heart that so much of these will end up in landfills. Resell them. Or send them to device recycling. There’s a shitload of rare earths in modern-ish but obsolete computers. And downcycling is possible too - my router is an old Lenovo thin client with a dual port 10g SFP+ card slapped in it.

[-] dukeofdummies@lemmy.world 15 points 14 hours ago

... that's a really compelling reason for linux.

I mean the next few years are going to be rough. Being able to recycle these things for basic use is going to be huge. Windows, mac, people need the internet more than anything else. It's a sad way to gain adoption but it could be insanely impactful...

[-] sudoku@programming.dev 10 points 13 hours ago

Looking at the used market where I live, quite a large number of laptops are already sold with Windows 11 installed even when officially unsuported. Activated with MAS as well, probably.

[-] PokerChips@programming.dev 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I think there are a lot of gunky software out there that only works on Windows. I tried getting my mom on Linux but I was unable to find any good open source sewing and graphic alternatives to the expensive lock in hardware that she had already bought.

Although I doubt these are the kind of road blocks charities are facing.

[-] zloubida@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

“Companion softwares” for hardware are the only thing that still makes me use my Windows VM. In my case it's my children's educative computers which need a real computer to add content.

[-] unquietwiki@programming.dev 5 points 13 hours ago

One thing I wonder about Linux is the OOBE for new users. A lot of Linux distros have you create the user and whatnot when you install the OS; it's not always intuitive on making a new user account to personalize. It'd make it a lot easier to preinstall distros and then let the user deal with finishing setup to their needs.

[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

At least Mint has an OEM install; on the first boot after installing the system, it asks you to create a user (plus language, layout etc.). I never used it though, but I expect other distros to have a similar feature.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 15 points 18 hours ago

Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn't worth it.

But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run ... well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 3 points 8 hours ago

Yeah, I've always wanted to do something like that. I've always got a bunch of computers running virtually idle and it would be nice if they could just help out with whatever your main PC is doing.

[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 8 points 18 hours ago

Some modern workloads can take advantage of multiple computers. You can usually compile using things like distcc and spread the load across them.

If you make them into a Kubernetes cluster you can run many copies or many different things.

It's still an unsolved problem: we still end up with single core bottlenecks to this day, before even involving other machines altogether.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 7 hours ago

Yes. It's always the bandwidth that's the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.

Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.

[-] fubarx@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago

One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

[-] haverholm@kbin.earth 8 points 19 hours ago

This is the honest headline we deserve.

[-] Merlin@lemm.ee 5 points 17 hours ago

I understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help

[-] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 5 hours ago

I'm tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.

Linux is no easy switchover. It's problematic, regardless of the distro (I've tried many over the years).

My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.

Mint can't use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn't work out of the box.

Typical user would be stumped by these problems.

I can go on for days about "Year of the Linux Desktop" (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it's capabilities. But if you're an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn't exist in Linux?

Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.

Linux is the opposite, it's about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include "out of the box" (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).

This is also the power of Linux, and why it's so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs "just in case".

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 6 points 14 hours ago

Only tech savvy for installing an OS, other than that Linux is a better experience for less tech savvy users. My wife struggled with Windows and how things don't make sense (it was also slow) so I setup nixOS with GNOME, no more complaints

[-] mat@linux.community 3 points 13 hours ago

Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 hours ago

No, she is very bad with tech. I have added everything she needs for her web, email, spreadsheet, zoom call use. NixOS is super easy for an average person who can edit a text file though. You go to this site https://search.nixos.org/packages , search what you want, it gives you the code to paste into your config, and run a rebuild...or options for a temp install. Seems painless.

[-] mat@linux.community 1 points 6 hours ago

Good point.. I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install...

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

For somebody that can install software from a store fedora or Zorin or Mint would be solid suggestions.

For your dad you could try OpenSUSE, it has nvidia hosted repos for Nvidia with the GUI package updater, but I think bazzite has an nVidia spin doesn't it?

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 14 hours ago

Get new machines

That sounds unreasonable until you realize that an 8th gen CPU isn't bad. Other option is to pay for long term support.

[-] TwanHE@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Or just install win 11 anyways, it's not like it's actually incompatible

this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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