During about 10 years in the late 90's, early 2000's, I was a kind of Linux zealot, with anti-MS signatures on my emails, which survive on some BBS and Usenet archives.

Nowadays with the exception of a travel netbook, I mostly run Windows or Android on my computers.

Because GNU/Linux never managed to get their act together what means to have a full stack experience for UI/UX focused developers, specially on laptops.

And I just won't pay the Apple prices for less hardware than I can get with a Thinkpad/Dell/Asus workstation laptop, usually about 500 euros cheaper.

I've heard it said, with Linux, you pay with your time, with Apple, with your money, and with Windows, you pay with your dignity.

That really explains neatly the success as standard office equipment, now that whips are out of fashion.

Sounds like Apple is the least of three evils. Too bad some people invested in programs or hardware that only run on Windows.

For most people there is no other choice.

I mean MacOS requires a relatively expansive machine to run it, and many business-critical software either doesn’t run on Macs, or has drastically reduced functionality.

Linux isn’t even worth bothering with if one isn’t technical.

So really, we are left with Windows.

Linux one is just untrue.

If you're not technical, just go with Mint. Looks like Windows 7, behaves like Windows 7, doesn't break. You don't have to leave GUI environments once, neither in installation nor in usage. Doesn't break. Gives you the opportunity to optimize your workflow if you want to.

Mint broke all over the place on all the machines I've ever installed it on. Couldn't get graphics, sound, or networking running smoothly. Complete disaster with my built-in Bluetooth and my BT mice & keyboards. And doesn't behave like Win7 when it comes to actual programs. .deb is not .exe, .bat files didn't work, programs needed to come from a central app store or else be "compiled". Drive names were completely whacked as well. My optical drive wasn't D:\ and I had no idea how to find a DVD through that version of VLC, my main HDD wasn't C:\; and my USB floppy drive (yes, I still have one) didn't plug in as A:\.

No version of Linux "behaves like Windows 7". At best, it's like Linux wearing a bedsheet-ghost costume labelled "Windows 7" and screaming BOO! at you every time you do anything from a DOS/Windows background.

All of it works flawlessly as long as you run only Intel/Amd. The moment you go to nvidia(which unfortunately has a near monopoly on laptops) is the moment you start paying with performance on nouveau or major features (wayland) and battery on proprietary driver. And this is before we even get to optimus and prime.

Yes, there are solutions for these problems but you need to be technical for them.

Mint isn't great on high-dpi displays, KDE is probably best for that but has other issues.

This thread is about OS upgrades. Mint's support of in place upgrades at all is... mixed.

I know completely computer illiterate people who use Ubuntu. Your opinion says a lot about you.

Hmm. I'm skeptical that those 'computer illiterate' people don't have a computer literate person providing them with support that's key to enabling that situation.

I've had Ubuntu running on a few cheap desktop machines for some years now used for light duties in a few living spaces. So far we're at 100% failure rate on version upgrades: Both LTR release upgrades have bricked both the machines.

When they switched the window manager on one of the recent ones, the UI simply died and the simplest resolution was to just re-install the OS from scratch.

Steady state, with apps installed and running and only doing basic patching via the GUI, Ubuntu is 'operable' by avg. Joe. But app installs and beyond are fraught with problems.

@FooHentai: “I've had Ubuntu running on a few cheap desktop machines for some years now used for light duties in a few living spaces. So far we're at 100% failure rate on version upgrades: Both LTR release upgrades have bricked both the machines.”

Bricked you say, I don't recognize that from my experience, as for 'light duties' it's a little more useful than that:

"Ubuntu Linux Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI-YIO0OKz0

"Using Play On Linux For Windows Games On Linux!)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YVCY0rnI90

Illiterates need support on Windows too, and the Genuis bar at the Apple store.

You know, when I go shopping for tools what I do is I find people who know nothing about tools and ask them what they use.

So for the purposes of discussion, there are technical people and non-technical people. The claim up-thread was that technical people are fine on Linux. So then this commenter comes along and points out that there are non-technical people who do fine on Linux. In this context, this assertion is completely relevant and useful.

They are still not many choices out there: either Apple with high-priced defective keyboards and no desktop solutions or Linux which is still a gamble especially on laptop. In some regards, the situation is worse than a decade ago.

On Microsoft side, as soon as they announced Windows 10 would be rolling release OS (i.e. a perpetual beta one) I knew I was done with it on bare metal.

What other choice though? I mean especially for Laptops. I find Macbooks now completely unacceptable, as a 13 year mac user, and Linux still seems to have the old issue of unreliable driver support.

There are other choices but they all have limitations as well therefore it always ends up with better than devil you know.

There are choices, better than ever before, but to vast types of users this doesn't matter.

Some examples - corporate users (nobody big seriously considers Linux for desktops for various reasons, Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value), gaming (again some good options, but subpar to windows on probably every aspect).

Everybody knows Windows, everybody can somehow get by with just clicking around. If I've put Linux on my fiancee's notebook (she is a doctor), I would have to do 24x7 support for it, forever. No, thank you.

>Apple would be easily 3-5x that expensive for no good enough added value

Well that's straight up not true, in fact IBM has over 100,000 Macs in the field and they estimate it's saving them $535 per machine over four years.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3131906/apple-mac/ibm-...

In our branch we have tiny windows desktop boxes (20x20x3cm), they cost below 300 USD to buy. Our corporation has around 100,000 of those around the world. Good enough for any office work you will ever need. We devs are forced to use them too, and they are OKish with 16gb RAM. I've seen these kind of computers in every single employer I ever worked for in last 15 years, corporate or tiny. There are 100s of millions of similar computers in offices around the world.

What does Apple have that's cheaper? To save 535$ they would have to pay us to take them.

Topic might be different for high-end notebooks, especially with some sweet corporate deals. That's NOT the bulk of computers used for office work around the world. Cherry-picking some specific relatively marginal scenario doesn't affect the big numbers.

If the machine is more expensive to buy but significantly less expensive to manage (if, say, OS updates don’t delete all your data necessitating hours of recovery), the total cost goes down.

The initial purchase price of a machine is near-insignificant to the TCO of a corporate machine.

You don't know much corporate environment, at least you give off such an impression. We don't get patches straight from Microsoft servers, we have our own update servers. Only tested patches get through with some delay, something like this wouldn't make it. This is standard in big companies.

And we don't use Win10 at all, no sane CIO would ever approve it and stayed in his position for more than a week. Windows 7, no issue paying directly to Microsoft to produce patches long after public support is finished.

You're claiming that your internal IT department does better QA on Windows than Microsoft does. That's amazing. Do you have evidence to support this? How many major bugs do you report upstream? What's your QA system like? Can you confirm that your test suite checks upgrades using Known Folder Redirection when the default path is still in use?

I find it awfully hard to believe that you're arguing for using Windows on the basis of TCO, while on the other hand apparently have (and need) a QA department and test protocol that exceeds Microsoft's, and are willing to pay Microsoft to produce patches for an old OS just for you.

You've got 100,000 systems in a highly constrained environment. You pay for the licenses, and to run your own upgrade servers, and to do your own QA on their software, and to get patches for it, and you can't even run the current version because you think it's not "sane". I'm sure there must be external constraints you're not telling us, because this doesn't sound rational.

Windows 10 is rapidly becoming the standard, the "no sane CIO" remark is absurd. The entire DOD has standardized on Windows 10, and they're the largest enterprise in the world.

> You don't know much corporate environment, at least you give off such an impression.

Based on one post, where I point out TCO is not significantly driven by hardware purchase price? Ok then.

Anyway, the argument of lower TCO cited by the GP comes from (not exclusively) IBM, who I’d say know their own business, also used WSUS/SCCM and claimed they were better off with Apple and Jamf.

If there's anything IBM does better than anyone else, it's metrics. It's almost like they invented the field of IT metrics measurement and analysis, in fact.

There is no other choice that runs Win32 and DirectX well.

Wine is hit-or-miss, but when it works it tends to be a good option.

XBox. :)

Not even comparable to the capabilities of a gaming PC. I'm unfortunately locked in to Windows for the foreseeable future for this reason.

XBox OS is based on Windows.

Why do you think I added a smiley?

Technically they are calling it "OneCore" now

not for those of us who prefer mouse-first games (FPS, RPGs, strategies) compared to gamepads.