> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
But if windows is now objectively worse than linux, normal people also now have a reason to switch.
So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day.
Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times.
This is just how HP names their software deployment packages. Lenovo will have something like "u6chp70us17" or "83wo12ww". You go on your product's page, download the driver, install it. I understand complaining about a device that doesn't work out of the box, but about the name of the driver installer?
To be honest I've never seen an EliteBook that needed any drivers for the common components (I also own quite a few Elites, oldest from 2012), and in general any laptop that needed a touchpad driver to work in well over a decade. And I've played with a lot of different laptops, business models in particular. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's common.
The intel one had some kind of new touchpad, which doesn't work during the windows install. It was apparently some new thing introduced with intel's 11th gen, don't remember the specifics, but apparently other models had the same issue. Windows needs to connect to the internet to fetch drivers once installed, even 25h2 which I installed two weeks ago. Bonus points for the AMD ethernet dongle not being recognized, even though it's some random realtek, so I have to type my wifi password (my AP doesn't support wps). The AMD one works, even though the touchpads seem similar.
For a long time, the AMD's webcam didn't work. There's some USB doohickey that wasn't recognized (showed up with an exclamation point in device manager), and even installing all the drivers from HP's webpage didn't solve it. It solved itself somehow after some windows update two or three years later. Out of the box, it did have the webcam working, but the display brightness was somehow limited to "pretty dim". I was ready to write it off as just another crappy enterprise pc panel, but then I rebooted it into the bios and the thing burned a hole through my eyes. Installing windows manually fixed the backlight. Sleep on windows more often than not hangs for some reason, even now, 5 years in.
The intel had a long-standing issue with 4k output over its usb-c ports. At one point, installing the gpu driver from intel fixed it, but windows update would helpfully update it to an older, borken version. Nowadays we have 5k panels at work. I can only get 5k if the driver is initialized with the monitor connected. So if the screen goes to sleep, it won't run at 5k anymore when it wakes back up. Newer models don't seem to have this issue anymore.
Fortunately I'm only an occasional windows user, so don't care all that much. Everything worked perfectly under linux since day one, so apart from the comically bad display quality, I'm generally a happy camper.
I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them.
I've hardly had hardware issues since I moved to Windows 2000. Sure some, but few enough I can't recall any in particular.
So, man's best friend?
Anyway, while I agree about the slowness (now that I've experienced Linux snappiness and done the benchmarks), it's the constant nagging / dark patterns that seals the deal for me. Microsoft would still have me as a happy customer and MSVC user if they hadn't bricked their OS after Win 7 and shoved AI, MS account, ads etc down everyone's throats.
On that note, even more hilarious/tragic is their turning MS Office into Microsoft Copilot 365 App lol, probably the tech biggest marketing blunder of all time, and entirely unforced (unlike for example Intel mostly abandoning the Pentium brand after the P4).
Exactly: it's like that pit bull that everything thinks is so cute, until one day it goes berzerk and rips your child's face off, and then its owners say "It's your kid's fault for looking at him wrong!"
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?
We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things:
A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership
B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software.
I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used.
But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not.
Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people.
To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years.
The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.
Windows is strictly quite a bit less configurable than Linux. You likely just know Windows better?
However, GNOME is completely the opposite; doing anything differently requires installing special extensions, which break every time an update happens. The devs do not want you changing it from their One True Vision for how a desktop should work (which, apparently, is almost identical to a tablet).
People who aren't Linux experts or long-time users may not even know about KDE, Xfce, etc., and just think that GNOME is the only way to use Linux. Most distros push it very strongly, and even in corporate environments it's pushed hard. My company uses Linux, but the IT department only supports GNOME; luckily I'm able to install KDE but I'm basically a reneage by doing so.
So if we're comparing Windows (which has only one DE, the Windows one), to GNOME (which for many users is synonymous with Linux), I'd say he's right: Windows is much more configurable and easy to customize.
Why the Linux world has gone this way, I honestly have no idea. It almost seems like a conspiracy.
I wish I could agree, but I just can't: the OP may be correct, depending on which Linux desktop environment he's talking about.
*My* Linux is indeed much more configurable than Windows, but I'm using KDE. However, that's only promoted by a few distros like openSUSE. Most users are going to get GNOME shoved in their faces whether they like it or not, and no, GNOME is *NOT* more configurable than Windows. GNOME needs to be used exactly as the GNOME devs want you to use it, because otherwise it'll just break on the next update. For many users who are not Linux experts, and perhaps use Linux at work where their IT departments only allow them to use GNOME, they think GNOME==Linux because that's what most distros push so strongly, so I can see why OP would make such a claim.
extremely bizarre comparison given that 90% of people spend their time on the web which is utterly agnostic as to what operating system you're on.
The reality of Linux in 2025 isn't that you have to live like Tom Hanks in Cast Away and talk to a football as your best friend, it's that maybe you have to spend a few hours learning how the OS works. Almost your entire Steam Library runs on Linux courtesy of Valve and a lot of ambitious individuals.
If people are too lazy to invest even the tiniest bit of personal effort into trying out new things that's one thing, but at least be honest about it instead of giving me the "I don't want to live in the jungle" spiel. Don't be the tech equivalent of the person who runs around telling everyone they can't get into shape without a million dollars and a personal trainer
As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source.
It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem.
Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
I don't have hard numbers on this, but in my experience it's pretty rare for an open source codebase to contain malware. Few malicious actors are bold enough to publish the source of their malware. The exception that springs to mind is source-based supply chain attacks, such as publishing malicious Python code to Python's pip package-manager.
You have a valid point that a binary might not correspond to the supposed source code, but I think this is quite uncommon.
It's something we as techies like to believe due to solidarity or belief in the greater good, but I'm not sure it's actually justified? It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.
If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source). If you're anonymous there is little actual downside of detection, you can just try again under a different project.
Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
Not really. There's a long history of seemingly credible closed-source codebases turning out to have concealed malicious functionality, such as smart TVs spying on user activity, or the 'dieselgate' scandal, or the Sony rootkit. This kind of thing is extremely rare in Free and Open Source software. The creators don't want to run the risk of someone stumbling across the plain-as-day source code of malicious functionality. Open source software also generally makes it easy to remove malicious functionality, or even to create an ongoing fork project for this purpose. (The VSCodium project does this, roughly speaking. [0])
Firefox's telemetry is one of the more high-profile examples of unwanted behaviour in Free and Open Source software, and that probably doesn't even really count as malware.
> If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source).
I already acknowledged this is possible, you don't need to spell it out. Again I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me that in practice this is quite rare compared to malicious closed-source software of the 'ordinary' kind.
A good example of this was SourceForge injecting adware into binaries. [1]
> Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.
Right, that was a supply chain attack. They seem to be increasingly common, unfortunately.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Installer_with_adw...
Ultimately there needs to be trust at some point because nobody is realistically going to do a detailed security analysis of the source code of everything they install. We do this all the time as software developers; why do I trust that `pip install SQLAlchemy==2.0.45` isn't going to install a cryptominer on my system? It's certainly not because I've inspected the source code, it's because there's a web of trust in the ecosystem (well-known package, lots of downloads, if there were malware someone would have likely noticed before me).
> still running a random binary
Again "random" here is untrue, there's nothing random about it. You're running a binary which is published by the maintainers of some software. You're deciding how much you trust those maintainers (and their binary publishing processes, and whoever is hosting their binary).
That's a pretty high bar, I don't blame your friend at all for being skeptical.
Hard disagree. Total control of my computing environment would be to allow an application access to my documents, a space to save a configuration, perhaps my Videos folder or even certain files in that folder. Or conversely, not.
At the moment, none of the desktops give me the ability to set a level of trust for an application. I can't execute Dr. Robotniks Ring Run (or whatever the example was) and be able to specify what it can, or cannot access. There may be a request for permission at a system level access, but that could be explained away as usually is for iApps and Android when requesting some scary sounding permission groups.
And it also doesn't stop malware from accessing my documents. Sometimes my Mac asks if an application is allowed to access Documents, but it isn't consistent.
That's really the main point for me. Flatpak could also a lot of this, but Flatseal isn't the default, nor is it easy for users.
MacOS has a bunch of switches for access, but they are hidden away inside the settings, and they are not granular.
If it's not the default, and it's not easy then it may as well not be there for most people.
The switches default to off though, with a prompt on first attempt at accessing the protected resource.
The problem is that they're leaky like a sieve and the permission model and inheritance works is unclear (I once had the Terminal app ask me for permission - does it now mean anything I run from the terminal automatically inherits it - and so on).
Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true.
> Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same.
> Github archive with an appropriate track record
How do you judge the "track record"? Github stars can be bought. Marketing can be used to inflate legitimate usage of a program before introducing the malicious behavior.
> the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same
But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source. If you're just relying on a binary download you're no better than downloading proprietary software in binary form.
My point was that an open-source program cannot rug-pull its users without the obvious remedy of forking the project and removing the offending code. Open-source: commonly seen. Closed-source: not possible and often illegal.
For both options, you have to trust the source, which makes that a non-issue. You can checksum the Linux kernel to satisfy yourself that it came from a trusted source. You can checksum the Windows kernel to satisfy yourself that you're about to be screwed.
> But that's my point - open-source doesn't really change the equation there unless you are actually auditing the source and building & running said source.
In the open-source world, knowing how computers work is essential. In the closed-source world, knowing how computers work is somewhere between pointless and illegal. This is how open-source "changes the equation."
Modifying open-source code is welcome and accepted. Modifying closed-source code breaks the law. Take your pick.
Nothing wrong with downloading and running programs you trust, but there needs to be a good answer to that question.
It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.
Downloading and executing other people's compiled software is how things worked for many decades. It's only been in recent years that people have come to believe that Google/Microsoft/Apple should be the final authorities on which executables are safe to run.
I mean, the OS package repositories at least have some vetting and processes behind them, as opposed to a random website found online - so there's surely middle ground there!
You don't need to give everything up to a few big corpos to have at least a bit of a sense of security - I personally trust the Debian maintainers quite a bit due to their track record, short of bad actors infiltrating the community or accounts getting compromised.
This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.
Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".
Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.
Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.
The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.
OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.
But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.
You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.
Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.
On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.
So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.
Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.
When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.
Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.
The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.
Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.
Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.
Define "our".
Because having general compute under developer/engineering control does not mean end-users want, need, or should, tinker inside appliances.
So there are two definitions of our: our end-users, and ourselves the engineers.
Worldwide, in aggregate, far more harms come to users from malware, destroying work at the office and life memories at home, than benefits from non-tech-savvy users being able to agree to a dialog box (INSTALL THIS OR YOUR VOTING REGISTRATION WILL BE SWITCHED IN 30 MINUTES!!!) and have rootkits happen.
Our (hackers) tinkering being extra-steps guardrailed by hardware that we can work within, to help us help general computing become as "don't make me think, and don't do me harm" as a nightstand radio clock, seems a good thing.
Not hard to see through the false "only two cases" premise of the quote, however un-hip to agree so.
> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
They like it given a chance. My daughters for example far prefer Linux to Windows.
The two topics are orthogonal. GP talks about "local computing" vs. "black box in the cloud", the difference between running it vs. using it. You're talking about various options to run locally, the difference between running it this way or that way.
Linux or Windows users probably understand basic computing concepts like files and a file system structure, processes, basic networking. Many modern phone "app" users just know what the app and device shows them, and that's not much. Every bit of useful knowledge is hidden and abstracted away from the user. They get nothing beyond what service the provider wants them to consume.
100% of the people I have spoken with, from uber drivers to grandparents, have all noticed, hated, and are sympathetic to the fight against the rental/subscription economy. In 2025 I don't think I've had a single person defend the status quo because they all know what's coming.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
Why? You can edit MS Office documents fine in LibreOffice and other similar software.
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
I'd ask you the inverse question: If Linux never got any better than it is currently, what would it take to push you away from Windows? I don't mean this as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious.
Things are very occasionally annoying right now when a new update enables some new idiotic thing but 99.9% of the time things just work.
As a Linux user forced to run Windows at work, I only see issues with Windows ;)
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident
Live distros make it very easy to dip your toes and try, without committing to anything.
IMO Linux has much better UI options because there are so many choices and freedom.
You can likely find something that looks/works EXACTLY like you’ve always dreamed of - but maybe you have to try a few options to find it.
Do you run any exotic hardware? Do you run MS Office regularly? Do you run any highly specialized software?
If the answer is no to all those then Linux is worth a shot.
> I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.
For people like you who think like this.
FOREVER
You'll always dream up some reason why this side of the road, is just better.
I’m no longer using it professionally so I could explore other options but FreeCAD kinda sucks (I will die on that hill), and OnShape offers the choice between my designs to be publicly visible, or a subscription that assumes I have a corporate expense account makes it not viable. (I don’t mind paying for good tools but there has to be a middle ground).
If Autodesk ever ported Fusion to Linux… I’d probably pay for a subscription just out of sheer elation ha.
I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...
It's not perfect on windows either. Crashes, non working sleep on almost any windows laptop... at least compared to what Apple can do.
My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.
The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.
We at out Uni provide default Ubuntu installs on laptops. Most people just live with whatever UI.
I have a feeling that many have stopped configuring, themeing etc. those only from 80s to 2000 were just spending lots of time building and creating many themes like matrix etc.
Also people are so addicted to smartphone. That is the main place for their heart.
> My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.
Is this perhaps an issue of fractional scaling? I’ve run Openbox/Blackbox on Linux for ~15 years and never had these issues. Not 100% sure I understand the issue at least.
Things look mostly fine (to me) and even if they don’t, the apps still work as they should (no blur). AFAIK Openbox/X11 just uses the DPI the monitor reports and things scale as they should.
Sounds like an issue with Gnome/KDE to me, not with Linux?
I may be wrong, I’m not seeking a super polished look or want to tweak my UIs a lot.
Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess, might not be bothered by follies such as proper text rendering, but it is an issue if desktop environments have any chance to compete with mainstream operating systems.
I believe you when you say it.
> Linux Greybeards, a hypothetical man with astute technical and sexual prowess
No need to be snarky. I was speaking from my own Linux experience (just like you did?), not trying to impress anyone.
Text renders fine in Openbox, hence the question about the issue being with Linux or GTK/KDE. I’ve honestly never heard of these issues or experienced them myself. Perhaps because Openbox is simpler (no fractional scaling AFAIK) so I’ve likely been “shielded” from such issues (never heard about theming or issues like this tbh).
Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major.
The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple.
Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles.
Keep it simple.
But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans.
Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software"
Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.
The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).
So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.
Well, I think MS took care of that by removing the hibernation option from the start menu. You have to manually turn it back on from the old control panel.
Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.
Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.
Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.
You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)
For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.
I think this sentiment is often overlooked as people are used to their 'poison'.
As someone who uses Linux a their main personal machine (with dual boot to Windows every now and then) as well as W11 for work, it's amazing what you get used to.
I was almost agreeing with OP, remembering bluetooth issues I had with Linux just last month when one of my headphones couldn't connect properly and I had to spend 10-15 minutes messing about with bluetooth stacks to get it working again.
But reading your comment I just realised that my current work machine doesn't even detect my bluetooth headphone's microphone and I have not found a fix yet. That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.
I also get Windows blue screens far more often than I get Linux kernel panics.
You're just so used to the issues and inconveniences that you don't even recognise them as such anymore. Issue and inconveniences from a new piece of software you're trialing stick out like sore thumb though...
Meanwhile on Windows if something doesn't work you're generally SOL.
1. You reboot. 2. You try sfc /scannow 3. You try Dism 4. You reboot again. Doesnt work? (like 99,99999% of cases, like with a pc i had to fix yesterday) 5. Reinstall windows
Doesnt work? Have fun trying to get information from microsofts documentation where the same thing got documented 3 different ways 3 different times, and when you change from/to your native language you get another 3 different documentations. All telling you entirely different things, each screenshot showing a ui that doesnt resemble yours because it gotta change every month.
Very fun, not annoying at all :)
Are you required to make it sleep (perhaps due to a security directive)? If so, then why are you doing this? You should simply refuse, and tell IT it doesn't work. Then let them fix the problem, since it's a security issue. It's not your job to come up with workarounds for the IT department's failures.
macOS is the easiest endpoint platform to manage. Apple’s MDM capabilities are amazing, and don’t leave me wanting for much at all other than application control, but there are plenty of commercial apps to do this.
Windows (in an Active Directory environment) is pretty good, but Group Policy has grown unwieldy over the decades. Policies can conflict in strange ways, and Microsoft has no made no effort to keep their policy language consistent. Sometimes ‘enabled’ means a feature is enabled, other times it means it is disabled, and vice versa.
Deploying hardware-bound machine certificates for 802.1x, VPN etc to Windows or macOS is extremely easy. Takes 10 minutes to set up.
On Linux, this is a very significant engineering effort that would take months, assuming you happen to have people with the skills on your payroll at all.
Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.
For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.
For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.
> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:
That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.
It's not -their- software is it.
The reason most people run Windows is because that is what their jobs IT department put on their computer, and those IT departments run Windows because of the enterprise tools Microsoft has provided for lifecycle management with AD, GPO, etc.
Linux will have difficulty making progress with enterprises for the non-SecDevOps staff until it's as easy to centrally manage user and computer polices, accounts, and upgrades across the entire end-user fleet as it is with Microsoft.
Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.
Rest will remain on pirated windows or linu.many often don't even use computer.
Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux.
Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same.
But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try.
This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux.
Windows is shit from the total management viewpoint: what it means to own and operate Windows over the long haul.
windows is okay when there is some program on it that works well and that you like, and you're interacting with that while avoiding Windows.
If Windows were the dominant platform and Windows were trying to eke out share, it wouldn't stand a chance.
If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience.
That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root.
[1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows.
The answer is: it doesn't matter. Linux desktop doesn't exist because of privacy nerds, free software evangelists, anti-capitalists, or European protectionists, and it won't change because of them either. Sit here on the internet and pontificate all you want. Pontificating doesn't fix bugs or write code. It is what it is. If there was money in it, people'd be going after it. If there was some "higher calling" to galvanize people into action, it would've galvanized them already. This is the best it's going to get.
The much, much bigger issue is control of applications, and the browsers (and their owners) won that long ago. Doesn't matter what OS you use, you need a browser to do anything useful on the internet. And if that ever gets "solved", it'll just pass on to the next shit-show of humans letting things get as bad as they can stand. Technology is made by humans, so it follows human values.
Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?