Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.
For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.
But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.
Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.
But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.
If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".
I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.
Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?
The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems
My main travel laptop is still an old Thinkpad X220, because of the great keyboard.
It lasts considerably longer on Ubuntu 20.04 than in Windows 10 $LATEST. In Windows, it runs too hot to have on my lap, and the fans run constantly.
In Ubuntu, it runs cool and I rarely hear the fan at all.
Check your firmware is current: that's step 1.
On an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U
We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.
AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.
Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.
> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.
> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.
Nobody is kicking MS off of that pedestal, and unless we get some significant anti-trust legislation, we aren't getting that on Linux.
It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.
It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles)
But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cluttered. Now it's a wiki, a file storage thing, a video chat app, an interface to Yammer, not to mention the tons of plugins. Cool idea to have one app that does everything but performance and usability have gone down the drain. It feels very beta to me.
Oh and the choices they make are so stupid sometimes. When I decline a meeting it still adds me to its associated chat and pings me for everything that's said in it. Constant distraction and no way to turn off this stupid default.
I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.
Actually web is getting worse with anti-features and jank as well.
I’m learning rust as time allows.
> Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
There's the challenge.
Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?
Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.
Who cares about the desktop? .....
The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.
Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.