> Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise

Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.

> Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.

Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I don't have a problem with people who use the Linux Desktop. Hell, if I bother to count all the desktops in my house then I use it on 4/5 PCs myself. What I have a problem with are evangelists who believe that anyone not using a Linux Desktop is doing so for stupid reasons. I can't even count the number of times over the past 2 decades I've had to listen to some Linux Desktop evangelist proclaim that there was literally no reason to use anything else, and then proceed to argue the case with no knowledge whatsoever of the needs of the person they're arguing against. It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

It is a mindset I really can't stand about tech people: assuming that because something works for them that it therefore is the right choice for everyone else. That they are so superior to the rest of humanity that they can instantly understand everyone's use cases, and anyone who claims otherwise is just being a stubborn fool.

As a dev, but not really an OS power user: I've tried switching to Linux (ubuntu and mint) full time before and I really don't see any major shortcomings vs windows for regular desktop use - I know anecdotal evidence is pretty useless but it's all you really can get about this on here.

The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?

Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?

Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.

Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.

dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.

It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

> It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux

Anecdote: I recently purchased a laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 10. After trying 6 different Linux distributions -- Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, Suse, MX Linux -- and none of them working (issues ranging from the installer not working to being totally unable to boot after the install to frequent freezing), I gave up and have gone back to Windows. I think I could've made Gentoo work with enough effort, but I don't have the patience for Gentoo that I used to.

I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.

I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?

(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)

New laptops (or hardware in general) need a while to get going in Linux, I've noticed.

My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.

Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.

This was maybe a year or two ago.

It really depends on your dev workflow. If you're a Visual Studio user, you might find it quite jarring, but if you are, there are probably plenty of other reasons not to switch (it's switching away from your target environment).

For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.

Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.

Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.

Proton is nearly there and integrating in to wine in to Steam.

However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.

Proton is improving but a lot of games still don't work or have random issues.

And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.

Yep, Proton is really good for lots of things.

Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(

Things have really, really come a long way. I've got Centos 8 running Steam, and huge swaths of my library just work. I was not expecting that.

I recently started to change over to linux for gaming and I was pleasantly surprised by how many games work through lutris.

For gaming, as long as you're not playing a Microsoft-exclusive game, Lutris seems to work pretty well for most stuff.

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I tried Linux a few times at home for 6m to a year, in this regard I missed nothing of Windows. However twice my instance was killed by Nvidia driver updates. People claim AMD has better drivers on Linux so I recently bought a Ryzen 7 3700x and 5700XT.

But after being burned and /never/ having anything similar happen on Windows, I can't bring myself to put Linux on my computer in fear of the same shit happening again...

The entire problem with Nvidia's drivers is that they aren't in the kernel, and the kernel driver API/ABI isn't stable, so potentially any kernel update could break the drivers.

That's not true for AMD on Linux. The drivers are in the kernel itself so any changes made to the kernel interfaces will include changes to the drivers that use them.

It's not the case for either vendor on Windows because Windows has stable driver APIs.

Basically, if you're on Linux and your hardware has mainlined kernel support you are not likely to ever have that kind of problem.

Thanks for the info! Appreciate it. Will definitely try out linux again.

There is one thing to know about though.

On Windows, since the vendors control the drivers, they can ship out new hardware support immediately.

On Linux, if the driver is mainlined, it's tied to your kernel. So if you have a really new graphics card you might need a new kernel also. If your preferred distro isn't Arch or Fedora (which have very up-to-date kernels), that might also be an issue. Debian Stable for instance might not have support for a new graphics card.

The other elephant in the room is hardware acceleration in browsers. Fire up a Google Meet (or YouTube for that matter) on your distro of choice using Chrome/Chromium/Firefox and watch those cores shoot through the roof, the fans ramp up, and battery life nose dive. Now, try the same thing on Windows or macOS ... night and day.

I use a linux desktop personally, but when you open up a powerpoint presentation or submit a proposal you need to be reaaly sure it looks as is intended. That means real powerpoint or word inside a real windows OS. It's unfortunate, but it's just required. I wish VMware hadn't killed the mode where applications looked like they were on the real desktop.

>It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement. Imagine if everyone whined about windows and also recommended windows. What would that achieve ? It's not like Nadella is lining up to listen to your whining either.

The license cost of Windows is less than 1hr of most people's time who post here. Focus on making Linux desktop a positive opportunity cost vs calling people whiners.

Also, Windows users tend to pay for software, Linux users less so. Guess which user base is going to be more valuable to 3rd party devs.

I have no dog in the game. Each person should use (or develop for) whatever they want. But coming to a thread that is critical of windows and still somehow bashing linux is beyond pointless. Either do something productive, or let others do their bit.

> Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement.

And that's an extremely arrogant mindset. They think because they know some tech shit that they understand all of that person's needs. I mean, they've converted an image from BMP to PNG in GIMP once, so clearly that's a suitable Photoshop replacement right?

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

The irony is delicious.

Same but that's not good enough. It has to be such that, say, an IT department could deploy and manage machines to an office of 500 people with questionable computer literacy. That's the market windows has nailed down. I remember reading about some German city trying to switch over to Linux and being forced to eventually switch back.

I'm a total libre evangelist but we don't have the power to overcome multi billion dollar engineering and sales departments...

Its not worse. Not anymore. And arguably better in many desktop areas.

But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.

And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.

> But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.

For non-techies, it is actually a non-problem; they are already used to fact there are systems different than Windows (they know about Android, iOS or ChromeOS). This kind of users are so undemanding, that sitting them behind stock Ubuntu machine they will relatively quickly go their way and are able to do everything they need.

It's Windows power-users who have it most troublesome. They learned something about one platform, and to move to another platform they have to start from scratch.

> And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.

Very true. I would add bizdev there too.

Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there. Its a little ironic that NTFS isn't faster than ext3 (in fact its slower for many use cases) but Explorer is amazing - Finder is a joke and most Linux fm's are modeled after Explorer, so is taskbar and start menu.

>Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there

Last I checked, windows explorer lacked split windows and a popdown console, both of which i use constantly. Windows also lacks focus on hover, proper session restore, a simple, readable, usable applications menu, the settings were scattered between at least two different places with no real rhyme or reason. It also has built in ads which honestly kills whatever positives the ui might have.

I agree. When I switched to Mac, I missed Explorer more than anything else. Still do. It's a fantastic design. Finder annoys me still, 4 years after my switch.

> Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there

Ehm, no, you are just used to it. In my not-so-humble opinion, it is Finder > Nautilus > Explorer.

In Linux, the taskbar and start menus are not a part of the file manager, but part the desktop shell. The most used one is Gnome, which doesn't have taskbar and start menu.

Meh, I disagree. I use a mac, but finder annoyed me so much that I've paid for forklift. I was happy with both nautilus and explorer.

This is clearly a matter of individual preference. Personally I cannot stand Explorer, but know many people who swear by it (although many of those are in the category of "know enough to be dangerous but not enough to download Midnight Commander").

Anecdotal, but the first time I tried to use windows explorer in win10 it hung for 5 minutes trying to extract a zip archive then crashed. I also use tabs in nautilus all the time, they're far superior to opening an extra window.

The old strategy that you're referring to was called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" in their internal memos [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Wow, I never realized that phrase was used internally at MS. I always thought it was an outsiders description of their practice. Shameful.

> No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world.

Also mind that "professional" editions of windows contain less of the crapware than Home or similar editions...

Note however that "Windows 10 Pro" is not one of the reduced-crapware editions.

Pro has slightly more knobs exposed than Home letting you adjust behavior but it’s nothing like the corporate version of Windows, no. I use tron script regularly to cut out what I can and it does help. Reading online the true believers load LTSB or LTSC licenses instead although they give up latest-gen CPU support by doing so.

I'd really like to believe that the embracing open source is different than the embrace, extend, extinguish mantra they had. I really do see a different attitude towards developers with VSCode, GitHub, Bash on Windows, etc (long time Mac user here - not on the Microsoft bandwagon).

For the OS Ads... I also see red. But I try not to forget that a corporation isn't a person, it's a large group of people. History doesn't mean that a corporation always acts the same with the same incentive structure. Look at Apple over the years. Now corporations do have a culture derived from history (and leadership obviously). And that culture is different in different places of a large company. I believe the ads in the OS is something that is culturally wrong with the group developing that OS. And likely, knowing nothing of Microsoft's structure, the culture of the people working on the projects I mentioned above is drastically different than that team.

Point is, because Microsoft is a large organization it can be "evil" and "good", it depends where you look. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

> Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

In Brazil we used to say that the year of linux (desktop) was current year + 1. Because people who used it would always tell others that "next year is going to be the year of linux on desktop", only for that not to happen and then they adjust their prediction for the next year again...

Well, at least you had GoboLinux in Brazil...

We had Conectiva as well.

Linux desktops are rare because there are few companies selling them. See for example Redhat. This is a pretty lucrative business opportunity. I think Microsoft is seeking other revenue models (ads) because once they get competition prices will drop.

> Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs.

Sure if you ignore the fact that their major projects were not extensions, and they're MIT licensed. Their past tactics was to extend open standards and become the corporate standard.

>I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise

ubuntu just werks

Embracing open source may be even sincere as companies go. But being a company means that it may eventually all change without notice. Companies change people and their positions, but even people change minds.

LTSC can be purchased individually legally. But it is indeed expensive.

Luckily, there are also all those shady eBay “key resellers”. (They are all cracked of course, but they also work, so it’s worth it.)

Is there really a difference between key resellers and just cracking it? You don't have a license for it either way.

easiness

> Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

I often ranted about this: after running Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017 (and a few years before that in dual boot and since 1993 on servers) I switched to Windows + WSL in early 2018 and I am OK with it.

I use an eGPU. Now, of course, Linux does not even support changing the video card under X Windows. And I am not so sure about supporting hotplugging an nVidia card either.

And when I was running Linux I ran into problems with enterprise wifi and VPN all the time and my multifunction devices and bluetooth.

https://xkcd.com/619/ rings painfully true. Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.

I have a Linux laptop and an eGPU. I dual boot Windows when I need to use it. I didn't even try to get it to work on Linux because that's a good way to lose a week and gain nothing. Switching between dedicated GPUs and integrated ones is still barely functional after heavy tweaking, and laptops have been doing that for I don't even know how long.

That xkcd is extra painful because there are still, 11 years later, zero Linux browsers that support hardware-accelerated (i.e. smooth) video playback.

On my desktop with a GTX 1060, Chrome can play 4K60 YouTube videos without issues.

But yeah on my laptop with Intel integrated graphics (I thought Intel was supposed to be better supported vs Nvidia under Linux?) I can barely play a 1080p video without frames being dropped. It even struggles displaying a 4K desktop so I have to run at 1440p, while Windows handles it fine.

Two notes:

1) Chrome does not use hardware video acceleration under Linux. Some distributions' Chromium build does (the code is there, and is enabled under ChromeOS). Why Google didn't enable it for desktop Linux is a question for Google.

2) Intel GPUs do not have problem with 4K desktop under Linux, they are capable enough to run two 4K display at once, at least since Broadwell. It's 8K capabilities that are currently under development.

If you don't believe, choose 2160p60 on this video and see the CPU utilization under Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ

>Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.

Especially the most popular flavor, Ubuntu.

Between releases which require reinstallations to get new features, hardware support, and bugfixes (bugfixes are supposed to be backported, but fresher DE versions have worked much better than old ones for me, so I'm skeptical) and the awkwardness of PPAs, it's sad it's the go-to assumed distro which everyone writes articles for and tests hardware/software against when rolling release is such a better model (that Windows now ostensibly uses with 10).

Manjaro seems to be gaining popularity as a user-friendly, nerfed rolling distro which offers safety and fast features+hardware support+bugfixes and can use the AUR, where everything in the Universe is and can be browsed with a GUI package manager -- no PPA terminal imports needed. But so is MX Linux, a Debian-based, Xfce distro whose selling point seems to be "no systemd", which speaks to a misalignment of priorities between many Linux users and the average PC user... if "average PC user" means "vaguely technical person who games and wants fast drivers + new hardware support", which is already wrong.

But FWIW, >>Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though; I don't even know what an eGPU is. For me, there seems to be a magical effect of using Linux for a long time and then returning to Windows. Windows doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. There's permission problems with the new 10 Settings interface when trying to access the core system apps like Device Manager. It can't connect to the Internet when I turn off my VPN, when Linux works fine on the same VPN. So many little things.

Suddenly, Windows seems like the janky, ersatz OS I force myself to go to sometimes while Linux feels like the more intuitive "home" system. But I've been on it for like 2 years now, so I'm probably brainwashed. And in 10 years Linux will get worse so I'll boomerang back to Windows like you? Or maybe something better will take over, like Fuchsia.

Funny how things go! I had been using Arch Linux for about 4 years and recently I switched to PopOS.

I never had problems with updates, but had a lot of problems with non-standard locations. For example, getting Vim to work inside of Tmux with eslint and auto complete just wouldn't work perfectly no matter what I tried.

It's a different world with Gnome and PopOS, and I really miss the AUR and Pacman but other than that I feel like I'm spending more time on my system than before.

>Between releases which require reinstallations

You got your facts wrong, Ubuntu supports updating in place no need to reinstall, maybe you confuse Ubuntu/Debian with other distros that require a reinstallation.

Ubuntu has a LTS version and it officially backports video and other drivers to allow support for recent hardware.

> Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though;

Windows desktop usage is somewhere north of 80%. Consider that Linux can't even do many common use cases right, it's just that it can do your use cases.

Windows 10 LTSC is great - it doesn't have Cortana or the Windows Store and it even has a nifty search icon beneath the Start menu which says "Start typing to search..."

Not that I would recommend it but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay for about ~20 to 30$. That is where I got mine... Sketchy? Yes, but worth a chance in my book

> but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay

Doesn't sound like you purchased it. It sounds like you gave some [random] place money for a pirated (and maybe backdoored) copy of Windows.

That's likely a very bad approach. ;)

No problems yet...

Updates work just fine and are only performed at reasonable intervals

Sure. The approach seems like it works for you (so far), and sounds like it worked out well for whoever got money out of you.

But, please don't encourage others to put themselves at risk. aka fall for a scam on Ebay

I disagree, but I admit it is risky.

the keys seem to be about $2

you could get scammed or have your key deactivated a hundred times and still be ahead

That's assuming there aren't backdoors in the software. Not a safe bet to make.

At least, not without (at a minimum) having the SHA256 (or better) checksum of the ISO match that of the MSDN equivalent download.

MS provide the digests on MSDN if you have a login

and there's plenty of dumps of them kicking around if you don't

Most are MSDN license which will invalided and deactivated sooner than later.