Last time I used Linux (well, Ubuntu specifically) every time I searched for anything in the file system I would see at least half a dozen ads for products on Amazon. Significantly worse than anything I've ever seen in Windows 10 personally. Uninstalled it and never using it again.

EDIT: 12.04. Time flies. Memory sucks.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-deskt...

You should check out https://fixubuntu.com nonetheless, which surfaced at that time, is still up and relevant.

Ubuntu has 50% market share.

In other words, if you really don't want to pay, Microsoft still seems desperate to get you to "upgrade" to Win10... precisely so they can monetise you with ads (and might make more from you eventually even if you never paid for their OS). As a mass-exodus to Linux and macOS curretly seems unlikely, their strategy appears to be winning so far.

... or people just install windows 7 / avoid upgrading to 10. Hard to call that a "win"

Take everything with a grain of salt, but metrics still point to Windows 7 dominance:

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de...

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

It took me a few hours of research (having never had to add drivers to get a machine to boot into a Windows installer before). I imagine that a lot of other people wouldn't have had any idea where to start.

And even after getting everything working smoothly, the touchscreen doesn't work (no drivers available, and the hardware isn't detected at all; good riddance), and there are some bits of power-management hardware that still show up as question-marks in the device manager.

New hardware will be increasingly difficult to run a reasonable Windows OS on. At least in my case, there were drivers for everything that matters to me.

That claim doesn't stack up. Windows 10, for example, works fine on older hardware. As Microsoft said, they're blocking updates to Windows 7 and 8 if you try to run those OSes on newer hardware.

Wait, what if you were to redirect the download links for the automatic updates to a Linux installer? Assuming Microsoft's security is still as lax as it was during the XP era, you could get this to work without much difficulty.

[1] Secure Boot comes into play only when 1) you use distribution in SecureBoot enforcing mode (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) and 2) want to build your own kernel modules. Then, you have to enroll your Machine Owner Key into UEFI and sign your modules with it. However, building kernel modules is not something that grandma is going to do. For normal use, all the mainstream distributions come with a signed bootloader (shim.efi).

I'm liking lots of things microsoft is doing as of late, but I still don't like a lot of their business practices and they are ruining their operating systems infesting it with ads.

Here's why most people don't: they like editing Word documents, using Bluetooth, playing AAA games, printing and scanning, connecting to external monitors, watching DVDs, and transferring files from their phones.

LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.

>using Bluetooth

Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.

>playing AAA games

This is your only legitimate point, but it grows less legitimate every day.

>printing and scanning

Works fine OOTB for nearly all printers and scanners using only GUIs to configure and use the devices.

>connecting to external monitors

This has worked perfectly fine for at least 10 years...

>watching DVDs

Also works just fine.

>transferring files from their phones

I do this all the time. Works OOTB on popular distros.

The real problem is that people are change averse and that people like you spread uninformed FUD. Cut it out.

> LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.

I run LibreOffice on my Mac and documents ALWAYS render differently than on Word. I always have to proofread on an office computer before I send files out to my colleagues.

> Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.

I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.

If you're authoring the documents, you don't need to use docx. Use a more open format that's supported better by both. As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? So long as you can read it that's enough.

>I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.

I was only referring to using your computer for bluetooth, not your phone, since that's the only subject that's relevant to the discussion. Audio is a fair point, though, but I'll point out that I have a pair of bluetooth headphones that works fine with Linux.

You know what happens when you give someone .ODF in the real world? "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"

As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently?

People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.

And ISO and Microsoft. Microsoft cared enough about ODF, that they implemented importers and exporters for the MSO.

> "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"

Do you realize that you can open and export ODF formats in the MSO?

> As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? > People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.

They are already used to this - each version or language version of the MSO displays the documents slightly differently. Some layout calculations even depend on the printer driver installed!

ODF is basically XKCD 927. It solves no problems in the real world. It has no new features. The effort spent by OpenOffice in implementing it could have been better spent on making the Word filters not suck - to this day I still have Word2003 format documents with tables that OO won't render properly.

In LibreOffice defense, it is kind of difficult to implement specification, that says things "works like Word95".

In the end, these inconsistencies are not a big deal. Neither between different Office versions, nor between LO a MSO. If you want pixel-perfect layouts, use tools intended to do that (i.e. InDesign or other DTP).

The idea behind word processing is that how you've authored your work should be rendered accurately and consistently without unintended side-effects.

As a gamer I've not seen much more progress (outside of WINE workarounds, some GoG ports and Valve-specific games). Most AAA games still exclusively windows due to things like DRM (Denuvo is windows-only IIRC)

Let's see: 183 games listed on my Steam account, 54 of those are available for SteamOS+Linux. A lot of those 54 are great games, but so are a lot of the 129 others. In my game catalog here, I've got about a 30% chance that the game I want to play right now will actually run in my current OS without rebooting. I don't like those odds much.

Wine? It's got the same issues that complex compatibility layers usually do. I consider it an option of last resort.

Perhaps I am missing the ever elusive combination of distro and machine.

If you hit other problems, did you do any research? Did you ask for support anywhere?

Manual screwing around in .conf files, having to care about what GPU is in use and fussing around with configurators before using certain ports, features dropping out between driver upgrades.. and all this just from your link on one model of one computer that supposedly "supports Linux".

Look, I'm sorry, this is 2017, not 1997. This is not even a sorta okay standard of usability anymore. Not for home, not for enterprise, nor should it be accepted or defended as such.

On the other hand - I would rather fiddle with Linux drivers than fiddle with Windows ad/telemetry settings. So I suspect I'll be switching back once Microsofts decides to force me off of Win7.

I'm a "computer guy" so I'll take the former. Most every one takes the latter.

If someone has to do a hundred trivial fixes then you might start to believe that there is something fundamentally broken with whatever software confronts me with a hundred trivial problems.

I'd absolutely love to get away from windows but I tried it multiple times in the past and linux just isn't close to being an alternative in the desktop market. There are so many problems and almost everytime the solution involves doing some arcane stuff in the terminal. This isn't going to win your average user over to linux.

Linux runs on all my servers, where it does an excellent job, but I can't see it replacing windows on my desktop systems, not until they fix some fundamental usability and driver issues.

That's a 156 page thread. The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine.

And that machine isn't particularly unusual in its class.

It's a considerable amount of work for an average user to get a working Ubuntu, and even after all that work there are still things (headphone audio ffs) that don't work.

This thread is about how people today should move off Windows, and how it is trivially easy to do so.

I agree people should move off windows. I disagree that it's trivially easy to do so, especially for these class of netbook style machine. I think that your advice (basically "wait until the kernel is updated") is proof that there are problems with these machines.

Ubuntu 16.10 wouldn't boot from a USB stick, with some PM error and the CPU watchdog errors.

Fine, go to all the trouble of plugging in a DVD drive, go out, buy a blank DVD. Same thing. The Ubuntu installation media just hangs with an error. Googling that didn't help.

How weaselly. His conclusion is plain to see:

"The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine"

You seem to misunderstand that thread.

If you do a stock install of Ubuntu you'll have very many, showstopping, errors.

If you use a custom script that forces a custom bootloader, custom kernel, and a bunch of other fixes, you end up with a machine that still doesn't have headphone audio and some problems with bluetooth.

A self-defeatist attitude won't make this more comfortable. If you don't like that Windows 10 is full of ads and spyware, the time investment to get this laptop working seems pretty small in exchange for a better OS. Throw in a little extra time to get these fixes applied in the form of patches to the relevant projects. If everyone gave up because they can't put a few minutes into troubleshooting and tweaking their setups, Linux will never grow to the threshold necessary to get vendors to support it OOTB.

I never seem to have one of those unicorn hardware/driver combinations that perform well, don't drain battery, don't run hot and don't break on dist-upgrade. I have researched my issues every single time because I would prefer to use Linux for many reasons, but the fixes I find are often partial, temporary and fragile. Eventually I give up and go back to macOS or Windows.

dist-upgrade almost always breaks things for me, especially all those hard fought for fixes. And it's not just minor things that break. Last time (Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10) networking stopped working completely because some maintainer had decided that network manager should no longer manage wired connections on my particular variant of Ubuntu.

Debian doesn't connect with android phones OOTB. What's the opposite of FUD?

That would make sense if the benefits were more than the costs. Which, for the average people, aren't.

Just the hassle of using a new interface, much less one that needs more admin work like Linux, is enough. And let's not go with compatibility with the various tasks people do.

(And no, most people don't just "browse and read email". They also want to be able to see all kinds of videos, they want to be able to do stuff with Office documents they receive, they want to transfer and/or edit their daughter's birthday videos, and so on...).

I'm not so sure any more. The average home user probably does most of their stuff online these days, and you can see your friends' photos on Facebook or write a message in Google Mail or access your online banking or watch a show on Netflix just as well on pretty much any platform today.

What desktop applications do most home users really run now? Gaming, sure, for part of the market. Maybe some basic spreadsheets or word processing documents or accounting for organising household stuff or writing the odd letter that still needs sending on paper.

Other than that, you're probably into niche territory. There are a lot of niches, and no doubt some of them still rely on Windows desktop software or Windows drivers for related hardware, but they're niches because most people aren't that interested in them. And even then, for significant fields such as programming or graphics/creative work, many of the interesting developments in recent years have been on non-Windows platforms and it's the Windows software that tends to lag behind.

Remember, one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead.

Each individual niche is tiny, but once you add up all the niches, it adds up to a significant part of the market. Windows has a huge "tail" of niche software on it, and just finding substitutes on Linux is a daunting task, to say nothing of actually getting back up to the same level of productivity as one had on Windows.

>Remember one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead

Is that an actual trend? Yes, PC sales have slowed down. All that means is that the PC market has reached saturation. Pretty much every household already has one PC that meets their needs. I don't see any evidence to indicate that people are throwing away their computers and using their phones and tablets exclusively.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

> Is that an actual trend?

It points to a solution anyway. Have one family PC with Windows to run the one niche app you need, but don't put Windows on anything else. Even if the other devices are laptops and not tablets, it still works.

Perhaps, but certainly not all of the market, and (I'm guessing) probably not even most of it. It won't be everyone all the time, but surely there are numerous people using Windows PCs today who could switch quite easily to another platform and carry on using their online services without too much hassle.

Is that an actual trend?

I'm pretty sure it is. Over the past few years, we've watched access patterns on B2C sites shift steadily from mostly PC to mostly mobile, and Android dominates most segments of the mobile market today. I suspect that at this point the PC, smartphone and tablet markets are all close to saturation, but device lifecycles are longer in the PC market so people are getting access to more powerful and higher spec mobile devices sooner, which is making the shift more practical.

Not to detract from the point you're making, which is quite valid.

It was once possible to disable advertising about OneDrive, but Microsoft has reconfigured things so that's no longer possible without deep hacking (no user-level configuration options). There's an "Uninstall" option attached to the OneDrive client's listing in the Start menu, but if you choose the option, instead of uninstalling the OneDrive client, the system opens the Control Panel Programs & Features applet, where OneDrive is nowhere listed.

As time passes the advertising is becoming more aggressive and less controllable. On February 14th a commercial announcement related to Valentine's Day appeared, but I wasn't able to track it to its source. Just one example -- Microsoft is jealous of Google and they're becoming an imitation.

The deep issue here is that corporations have to decide how to most efficiently grow their companies. Do they pay attention to customers, or stockholders? At some point in the past (I think it was during the Reagan years) corporations turned their backs on customers and made stockholders the focus of their attention. And from a corporate perspective, it was a good choice, because customers are fickle and unpredictable, but stockholders only care about quarterly earnings reports -- no earnings and they walk.

Also, there's plenty of distros that look great out of the box.

How painfully and uncouthly reductive. Making your products skip the whole "getting infected by Malware before they show you advertisements all the time" is not the solution to making money, or growing your brand, or having long-term success. Rather, it looks more like the final hoo-rah of a sinking ship.

Microsoft is doing exactly the right thing here, loading up their OS with spyware and adware to make money from their users. I see nothing at all wrong with them abusing users as much as they want, with forced reboots, forced ads, poorly-QAed driver updates causing system malfunctions, etc. Their customers have proven over and over and over that they will not abandon the Windows platform no matter what, so it's perfectly sensible for Microsoft to exploit this for monetary gain. And given that the techies on sites like this are generally libertarian, anyone who complains about MS's behavior is most likely a hypocrite.

I have never seen an ad on Windows 10 Pro except:

- Candy Crush - Edge Homescreen (hardly counts)

For example, the ads for Edge that now show up touting that you can stream longer with Edge. Really? I don't know anyone that that would convince to stop using Chrome. How about maybe something more basic like changing the logo, since every non-technical user that I know just thinks it's Internet Explorer and it's been pounded into their brains for years (and for good reason) to use Firefox or Chrome instead.

Firefox was paid by Google in the past and I believe Yahoo these days.

macOS had a connection with Bing in Spotlight.

The current incarnation is just a dog with different fleas.

This is the most relevant of your 3 examples and Canonical got heavily criticised for it. They ended up reversing their decision. Which makes it all the more important that people take this example not as "It's ok for Microsoft to do it as well" but rather "We also shouldn't allow Microsoft to get away with this".

>Firefox was paid by Google In the last and I believe Yahoo these days.

The thing here is that when you type something in the search bar you are actually wanting to search for something online - given that it's a "search" bar. It kind of made sense for Google to be the default search engine as that is the most popular search engine in the west (ie what most people would prefer to default to) so even without Google's investment I can see the logic of having a Google search bar. In fact I would go further and say that's a well received productivity tool.

However It's also very easy to change which online service is used in the search bar - or even to remove it entirely. So the Google investment does not lock you into using Google services on Firefox.

Thus I see no conflict of interest with regards to Google's donations to Firefox.

There's a good and simple lesson here: if you don't like a company's behavior, you need to be willing to jump ship. If you're not, then your complaints are futile and useless. Why should the company listen to you if you're not going to abandon them?

Hopefully most people wont use the "well it happened in Ubuntu too" excuse and instead think more along the lines of "people were mad then and it changed things so lets get mad again".

Then why say anything? You're referencing an article from 2014, on howtogeek.

It's a bit desperate.

It's like a comical game of chicken because in less than a decade all of this software is going to be in a web browser anyway.

Will it, though? On the surface it stands to reason, but I distinctly recall seeing this exact argument a lot back in mid-00s already, during all the initial RoR craze. And yet, here we are.

I know one of the big issues with adopting Linux on the desktop in companies is the issue with access control (something like AD's Group Policy). It's amazing how you can control pretty much every permission/policy imaginable within your domain using AD, and until something like that comes out for Linux it won't get adopted.

Most people I know seem to prefer the old Workbench. Big customers are also switching to web-based tools, where they can, among other thing, track the progress status easily.

same goes for another major Chinese phone producer, their virtual phones in browser are just horrible, something I would check even with screenshots and Excel in 30mins take with virtual phone 1.5hour, complete waste of time

I am yet, to experience any web based tool which would be superior for my work compared to offline apps

oh, now that I mentioned it, certain big Japanese phone brand have really nice web tool where you can work superfast no problem 150-200 screenshots per hour including editing and highlighting bugs, but that was only exception to my experience with all other companies

However, I did use the Studio few times and I didn't like it for the same reason you don't like web apps - it was big and slow like molasses. I did most of my work with (Trados) Workbench and TagEditor - these were lightning fast compared to Studio.

So I guess, that it comes in cycles: fast forward few years and people will be complaining about the latest tools and how the previous web apps were quick and easy :).