This is gonna be an unpopular opinion here but telling people who have used Windows their entire lives to just switch to Linux as if it's that easy is entirely unhelpful and makes the Linux community look elitist and out of touch.
I mean... they are out of touch. I'm sure its possible to have a pain free switch over but when I had trouble the advice was interspersed with quite a few caveats. In essence Linux is 'easy to setup but...' Still gonna try again though, also guys that laptop you all said was dying because linux made it crash is still working fine on windows with no sign of trouble.
Life is a long learning experience. Installing (or asking that nerdy relative to install) a Linux distro is no biggie anymore and when picking a good all-around distro like Mint, for example, pretty much anyone who has some basic experience on computers can do it.
I do agree that life is a learning experience, but I might say that you're overestimating what "basic experience on computers" means, and I tend to find that this is fairly typical of people who have more advanced skills because this stuff is basic to us. But we can sometimes lack perspective in that regard.
Basic experience on computers for most people means "can use Office apps, can send emails, can more or less use the internet". Essentially, they can use the computer for their work or for some light entertainment. It certainly doesn't mean that they know how to or that they even can configure the BIOS to boot from a USB, or for that matter what the BIOS is or that it exists. It doesn't mean that they can use the terminal, or use WINE to run their favourite Windows applications or troubleshoot an operating system that is entirely alien to them. I'd even go as far as to say that most people don't even know what an operating system is - to them, Windows is the computer and they don't know or care about anything different. This is the kind of person I'm talking about. Everything you said might as well be Ancient Greek to that person.
The simple fact is there will always be that one little thing that stops windows users fron switching. If 99.999999% of all windows software worked on Linux windows users would say "well ill switch when that extra 0.000001% works". The fact is when Windows users come to Linux they dont want Linux, they want Windows but not made by Microsoft and the fact is Linux is not that. I would take that one step forward and say that when Windows 10 goes EOL half of people wont care and the other half will get new computers, the amount of people who switch to Linux will be statistically insignificant.
Linux mint and pop os are winner so far
I'd switch in a heartbeat if Linux can play all my games including non-steam ones
the penguin migration was going just fine, until nvidia 570.124.04 dropped, which is when the misery started. :|
Got to check if I can roll back to earlier version.
Linux is super reliable, and unless you use cutting edge distro, it's pretty rare than anything breaks. Even Fedora is pretty stable from experience
The only true problems I ever had (and still has), were with Nvidia. And switching distros ain't saving you. Linux mint? Breaks on suspend. Nobara? Memory leak. Trying newer versions to see if it fixes it? Where's my bootloader...
I do understand that laptop RTX 3070 are not common, but still. I just want it to work, and have cuda on it. Is that too much to ask?
unless you use cutting edge distro
yea well, "arch btw". Haven't had issues really, been running it for years on other systems but my gaming pc with nvidia is the only one with issues... because of course it does. :D
Of course. Mileage may vary. On some systems it may always work, on others it's "what's broken this week".
word. some devices just have angry machine spirits which just can't be pleased.
Have you tried feeding them your youngest children?
haven't forked, no children. will neighbour's do?
Good idea. Try and report back. If it does not work, sorry!
Linux is super reliable
It depends on what you want to do with it, which version of which component you run and a couple of other things. In my own experience, if you want a "super reliable" system, get OpenBSD. Linux has a severe lack of QA, mainly because of its decoupled nature.
Laughs in rolling release
laughs in kernel panics
At work we run some software that while you can get it to run under Linux it's not worth the effort even for me to bother.
One supplier is slowly moving towards the runtime being available on BSD at least. They also somewhat decoupled from visual studio in the latest release, while still being mandatory still it's a step in the right direction.
This always falls on its face for work. No one does collaboration as easy as Microsoft and that’s not changing anytime soon. I mean, everyone would have to move all at once. I can move to Linux on my personal devices and it’s not going to change stats one bit.
No one does collaboration as easy as Microsoft
Try Apple.
Games and especially modding. I'm holding on to 10 until I can't. Then i'll figure out Linux.
Coming from windows 10, last year I tested installing linux mint which is one of the most accessible distros. I found that around a third of the stuff I had running perfectly under Win10 didn't work. I didn't find alternatives that were good enough either...
So I said fuck it and did a clean windows 11 install, It's been a month now and I can really say that it's way easier to upgrade to windows 11 and turn off all the shit, than to deal with all the stuff that won't run under linux.
Hopefully this changes in a few more years...
Rolling releases go brrrrrr.
I stopped using windows while using Win XP, maybe 16 or 17 years ago. When I try using current windows I become useless, I can barely figure out how to use it.
That's how I feel when I use Linux or MacOS
I used windows for over 10 years, I just feel like its changed a lot since I last used it, to where I barely recognize it.
Opposite for me. Windows 8 was the big change for me haha.
I didn't pay much attention to the changes after XP. Next thing I saw (years later) was the win version with flipping windows all over the place, that worked more like a cell phone. I was totally lost. Anytime I've used windows at a job, they were always using older versions that I could figure out.
Too bad, only 1 out of my approx. 150 customers have their IT dept. using Linux as server during my 6 years in - the rest of it is Windows... all the users have either Windows 10, 11 or they use Apple.
Halp.
Edit: not counting the educational users, as they come in hordes
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