This, a lot of ppl talk about the pre installed thing but Linux has a lot of friction yet. Linux is big, it’s open and made to run in almost any device with an arm or x86 processor, yet Linux is usually a pain in the ass on edge cases and we cannot ignore. Some years ago dealing with drivers on Linux was a hell, today is better but still has edge cases (this is not a Linux fault usually, vendors are shit usually but it cause friction. Audio just recently was resolved with the adoption of pipewire but pulseaudio had a lot of caveats. Now we are getting rid of X11 that is great for usual usecases but is full of workarounds if you want to to a simple thing like having two monitors with different refresh rates. There is a lot of things but linux is going forward, last year I could made my full switch since gaming on Linux became a thing but definitely was not plug and play.
Like, were nerds and we fuck with our computers n stuff. But most people are lucky to know what a power cord is.
Honestly if Linux with a good DE like KDE or Cinnamon was already on their PC at boot they would figure it out. Most people just use a web browser anyways.
This is definitely how I feel as well. None of the other shit matters unless it comes already on the machine. Even then, it absolutely has to be rock solid stable long term for it to be comparative. Of course that’s asking a lot, considering people still take their PCs into geek squad or wherever else when something goes wrong (or their printer won’t connect).
This always reminds me of the Dell XPS option of having Ubuntu installed but of course that’s far away from “Microsoft literally pays us to sell their shit”. So, until that - or some type of adoption occurs on a B&M level/online-storefront - it’s going to be pretty “voluntary” in terms of adoption. It’s just comparatively so much more work in the layman’s sense.
It’s in a weird way the same with cars. It’s been statistically proven that most people specifically won’t go out of their way to get a simple utility pickup truck. They buy the big fuck you truck because that’s what the dealerships have. It’s the same thing with kids going to college and the parents taking them to buy a laptop for class. My point is that it’s far more easier to just use what you get than try to rehash it. Maybe you don’t even know that’s a possibility so you just settle. Of course this isn’t the only issue, but imo the largest determining factor. IBM had businesses sucking from the teet since computers dropped, and we still deal with the ramifications.
I have my dad on Mint for years. Setup browser and email program and told him to click on that little shield and do updates when it’s there. You can set the shield icon to only appear in case of updates. I sometimes have to update between versions. I think he is still on 21.0 and now 21.2 is out already.
I have put my dad on Kubuntu. Don’t like anything *buntu, personally, but I have to admit it’s quite stable and with sane defaults. He hasn’t complained ever since and support calls dropped considerably. He spends most of the time in Firefox anyways, where I’ve added ublock.
The problem with Windows was, he’d occasionally browse the web with Edge by mistake (or because MS forces it down your throat), and as soon as an 80+ y.o. browses the web without ad blocking, getting a virus is just a matter of time.
All this is to say that I agree with the fact that preinstalled is key. I wish that more effort was focused on fewer distros and I feel that so much talent and energies are being lost in marginal projects.
But many people do this for passion and it’s of course their choice to decide where to contribute, or whether to spin up a brand new distro entirely, can’t judge them for that. I’m just observing that those energies could be better used to smoothen some rough edges on more popular distros to make them even more appealing to OEMs and convince them to ship those on their hardware.
This is the correct answer. If Linux was pre-installed, most problems would vanish. My Linux computers are far, far more stable than windows once they run.
Whenever I try to go full Linux, 80% of the time I revert back to Windows due to lack of compatibility with games. The other 20% Is due to something breaking or being a pain in the ass to get working. Need to install a program? Here is a .deb file that you have to right click, allow execution. Then you go to execute it and it opens in a text document that has a run button that ends up taking 2 hours to load and ends up failing. Turns out you could go to terminal, CD to the file location and it seems to install.
Need to install a program? Here is a .deb file that you have to right click, allow execution.
Don’t do this if you can avoid it. If you want to install something use the application store installed on your distro. This way the dependencies will be handled. Installing using a Deb file should be the last option or second last option
After being on Lemmy for the last month, it has really driven me to try out Linux again. I’ve spun up unbuntu (Desktop) on my home server and currently utilizing it as my docker host.
My server is a bare-metal host with ESXi so I’m interacting with it via the VMRC Client. This works great for doing what I am doing but the latency is a bit to much for using it for my day to day workload. if I could get a proper remote console setup using some native built in protocol that has low latency. I’d be happy to use it for my day to day operation on top of my Windows OS…any suggestions?
I’d say its probably, among other thigs, hardware compatibility issues.
Running Linux on a mashine, most notably portable, that is somewhat recent and is not specifically built with linux in mind is, imo, almost certainly going to cause some, for the average user unfixable, issues. Things like wifi, bluetooth, audio, etc. not working due to missing or broken drivers.
The best way to fix that would be official Linux support by the OEMs, which realistically is never going to happen. Or extremely time consuming reverse-engineered community drivers.
That’s a wrong take. The issue is when you install Linux. Once installed and running, it works fine.
And users don’t install computers. So it’s not their problem. You merely need to not break you distro once it’s working. And if it’s not arch Linux it’s been a long time since I read it can break on an update.
The average user doesn’t give a shit about what OS they’re running. They also don’t know what tools they need. I remember a client who dropped $700 on Photoshop because “How else can I resize my photos?”
Linux is to hard for someone who doesn’t know why it’s bad to install multiple antivirus suites. People who don’t know the difference between a web browser and a search engine.
Linux will only ever be for hobbyist because they the only ones who give a damn.
It does. I am disappointed in the game studios who refuse to allow Linux players, though, such as Bungie. I’m certain that Destiny would be playable if not for their obstinacy.
I saw this in a YouTube video about some indie video game. They had a native linux port. The userbase was like 99% windows and 1% linux, but 99% of the crash reports were from linux users.
This and the “problems” with adding anti cheat software that works with linux is just too much for most to bother.
Might be because the average Linux user is way more aware of how useful a crash report can be and therefore actually submitted them. At least most Linux users I know actually read error/ crash messages and not just call someone saying there was some pop-up, I just clicked ok and the game was gone.
I found repartitioning the harddrive by far the biggest hurdle. That’s a complicated and scary process that can delete all your data if you hit the wrong button. Picking the right partition sizes is another problem, as the Windows default EFI partition for example is far too small to be used with distributions that put their kernel on there (e.g. NixOS), but there is nothing warning you about that and resizing it, is complicated since there is a Windows partition in the way. The solution already existed in the form of Wubi, which made your whole Linux installation a file on your Windows partition, but that got sadly abandoned.
Next biggest problem is the boot manager, they still suck and are far to brittle. I’d wish we got rid of boot managers as is, and instead just booted into a mini-Linux has boot manager, that could not only be used to fix bad boot configuration, but also used as full recovery system. Having a full OS as boot manager means you can update and change the whole OS without fumbling with USB sticks and stuff, you can even update or switch distributions remotely. It’s an extremely powerful setup, that as far as I know, none of the popular distributions uses.
Finally, just having stuff work. My amdgpu driver still crashes regularly. There is always some obscure crap I have to configure to make things work. And I regularly have to search the Internet to find solutions for my problems. Can we have some (opt-in) Telemetry here? A tool that can scan my hardware and error logs, tell me what I have and tell me if it works in Linux or direct me to an bug tracker with workarounds? ProtonDB for hardware, kind of. Why do I still have to do that manually?
Another big hurdle of course is just the software, even if everything runs perfectly on the Linux side, moving all your software over is always a big hurdle. Wine/Proton helps a lot, but still fiddle for stuff outside of Steam. Not really seeing any easy solution here. Something like Xen installed by default that lets you switch OSs without dual booting might work, or a VM that can boot into your actual Windows partition, but no idea if that would work well enough to solve more problems than it creates.
All that aside, the problems for new users are a bit overrated. Installing Linux is something you do once or twice, that process of course needs to work well enough to function, but it’s far more important that the OS works well once you are past that point. If the OS fails in daily use, that’s when people abandon it. Enduring a shitty installer for a weekend is not really that big of a deal in the bigger picture, if the OS you’ll end up with is actually worth it.
Little aside: Why the f’ is ‘parted’ not the command line version of ‘gparted’? As far as I know, there is no command line tool left that allows you to move and resize partitions via command line in a single UI. That functionality was ripped out of ‘parted’ years ago, so you are stuck with manually fdisk, ext2resize, etc. which is not fun at all, since they all take sizes in different units and have different UI.
Installing Linux is not a user problem. Most users wouldn’t be able to install windows. You will never have users easily partition a computer, especially if you want to keep data. Even most people working with computers wouldn’t be able to that!
You’re gravely misunderstanding what users need. If a computer is pre-installed and working, 90% of the problems are solved already. The actual problems are 1) to not break the system with an update, and this on two computers I updated once a year it didn’t happen for 5 years ; 2) have the softwares working
is the big part : people will moan about not having office, but office365 is a thing and you can tell them to deal with it. Video games are the next big part, and with proton it’s almost as smooth as it could get
If a computer is pre-installed and working, 90% of the problems are solved already.
That’s a fantasy solution to a real world problem. Computers will never come with Linux preinstalled in large numbers. Even if they did, they’d come with a shitty distribution filled with adware that you’d want to reinstall anyway.
Installation of Linux on an already existing Windows system is an important problem that needs solving, and it feels like we barely made any progress there in 20 years (anybody remember umsdos?).
You hit the nail on the head about telemetry. Every program that asks me to share crash reports I always turn it on. That’s just too useful for them to worry about some ideological puritanism about “privacy”.
The problem with telemetry is that it often happens in secret. You can never tell what it’s collecting and when it is sending it. When it happens in the open, than it can be great. Steam Hardware Surveys are a great example of this, you can see exactly what it sends and when, you can opt-out of it before it sends anything and you even get to look at the results of the survey.
That’s the kind of thing I’d love to have for Linux. Couple that with what errors are showing up in the kernel logs, what software versions people are running, and it would make it much easier to chose the right hardware for Linux.
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