I finally switched to Linux Mint a week ago. I’ve just had enough of Microsoft and I couldn’t think of any more reasons why I shouldn’t switch.
I’ve got Libre Office for all my productivity needs. All my Steam games work under Linux. My VPN works just fine. Firefox for web browsing. Thunderbird for email. And Wine to run those 1-2 Windows programs that I just can’t do without.
Hey, I replace LibreOffice on my Linux installs every time with OnlyOffice. I don’t really need a full up office suite anymore. And I find OnlyOffice is a bit simpler and easier to use. But it’s not for everybody.
vpn with network manager is amazing. All my client’s vpn solutions just work. On windows I needed 5-6 different vpn clients that bluescreen each other on Linux I need zero proprietary software.
It’s not gonna affect their bottom line though. Microsoft are doing it because they know they can get away with it and drag the bar so low that they’d make RealNetworks circa 1999 look like privacy-respecting saints.
Your average Joe cannot afford the second mortgage needed to finance a MacBook purchase, and they’d have an aneurysm if presented with a Linux terminal.
And don’t even get me started on business and professional use. Many businesses rely on proprietary or even bespoke software that doesn’t run well, sometimes not even at all on Linux. Cheap (even FOSS) alternatives are often dogshit. And before you dispute me on that fact, can you name one web designer that would use Affinity Photo, GIMP or PDN over Photoshop? Or could you name one person that prefer AbiWord, OpenOffice or LibreOffice to Microsoft Word?
PC Gaming is one of those use-cases that has evolved by leaps and bounds… until you realize just how many multiplayer games rely on a form of anticheat. Many of these solutions are straight-up incompatible with Linux.
I think that the article does a good job highlighting how much of a trainwreck this is, because Microsoft is not to be trusted. The Windows users hysterically complaining about this are not expecting Microsoft to behave in some outrageous way; they’re expecting Microsoft to behave as usual.
Opt-in but you get an annoying full screen popup every boot, like for the windows11 upgrade. It’s only a matter of time, til they sell AI recall features as Win12 and then beg you to upgrade for free, pretty please!
Yeah bur for the non tech oriented user it’s still difficult . Most devices bought come with OEM install.
Even for a regular user it’s going to sound like There is a virus that reads and remembers everything on your computer but you can turn it off and trust us it would be off.
Even for PCs that come with Windows preinstalled, there’s still the need to set it up at the first start (account, privacy and such), so I think that the option to enable Recall will be there.
I guess if you want to verify the truth of this statement, look at Unity. They walked back their per-install system, but the indie community still moved away from them because it seemed clear they might try to do that at some point in the future.
It’s what they should have done from the beginning, there must be a horde of MSFT employees holding back the urge of saying “told you so” to their boss right now lol
I really hope the damage is done. They need to be knocked down a peg. This all should have been done first. Whoever thought this was a good idea is horrible.
A couple years ago it wasn’t thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.
Seems the consensus is that telemetry started with Win7, but I swear I remember privacy people freaking out about Win95 or 98 sending system specs or something back with out telling the user. It’s been a slow boil for a long time.
Yeah I think 7 was when it was a big blip on the radar. But 100% they had to start laying that foundation beforehand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either always there or started making its way in 98.
95 was relatively groundbreaking and a part of me thinks the PC was so new they hadn’t thought of it yet or if it was even possible given the nature of internet, but you can’t put anything past the marketing guys that would probably love to know what colour your shit is.
From what I remember from that time it wasn’t really a lot of people going on about privacy at that time. We were more concerned with how they just grabbed the BSD networking stack without saying anything about it.
There were a few things w/rt activation that people were pissed about. That was more towards the XP era though.
Though maybe someone else remembers it differently than I do since I wasn’t paying attention to privacy at that point and I don’t remember seeing anything about it in PCMAG or G4
I vaguely remember something from TechTV or Slashdot. Searches only turn up more recent discussions though. The old stories are getting buried by the more recent shit going on.
I remember when Windows 10 first came around, and people were trying to bring attention to the privacy issues in the TOS. Now it’s been widely adopted just about everywhere, and this is probably going to be the same.
I’ve always trusted them to do what they’re great at… which is get a product nearly 100% perfect, then back it up about 20%, and polish it off by shooting themselves in the foot.
Which I’ve always found it insane that EVERY product they ship is like that. The only exceptions (IMHO) to that were Office, DOS5, Win7, (Maybe XP)
Microsoft lost my trust a long time ago. For the last 10-15 years, my only relationship with them is, “how much sh*t am I willing to put up with before I switch to something else?”
“We won’t turn it on and will never use it to spy on you” says government backed surveillance monopoly know for sneaking spyware into products and making it impossible to remove.
This raises an excellent point not considered. This goes for all texts as well if the other person uses the “your phone” app. Discord, matrix, signal, telegram etc are all compromised by this existing on a system.
Will my browser’s “private mode” be respected or it is going to store every inappropriate thing I search?
Are password managers safe? How about bank security questions? How often are those actaully obfuscated. The last 4 digits of social security numbers are usually unobfuscated, which is also what a lot of intuitions (stupidly) use to verify your ID over the phone. What if I want to look at the PDF of my tax documents?
What if my HR manager has this enabled and starts viewing PDFs containing private information about employees, payroll data, finances and whatever else is sellable on the dark web.
How about govermnet data? Sure maybe the pentagon IT staff will completely block it, but what about local gov committee ABC that’s collecting voter information?
That type of data is valuable enough that it will be targeted regardless of what protection MS attempts. Based on the fact they didnt bother encytping the data from the start, my faith is low.
When I first tried it (back in 2010) it was pretty rough all around but after trying it again recently due to the whole TPM requirement for Windows 11 I’ve found it to be really straight forward
Linux Mint is really user friendly and is what I’ve even put on my grandma’s pc
Your grandma probably hates the fact that you did though. There’s a small chance that’s not the case but I’d be shocked if she hadn’t complained about it many times to other people.
If you trust Zoom enough, then you can install its official client from its webpage, without “a whole ass sandbox program” that restricts its access to important parts of your system.
But it’s your call, I prefer the other way around.
You say that but at the same time there’s a linuxmemes post in my feed right now where people are joking about how broken drivers require an OS reinstall so you know
Also there are distros that are more volatile, but all of the most popular ones are extremely dummy proof and intuitive. See Pop_OS!, EndeavourOS, or Mint for example.
Your grandma would hate and complain about upgrading from Win10 to Win11 just the same, though. Everyone hates change itself. What the change is made to doesn’t really matter.
People do hate change. The bigger the change the more they hate it. That’s exactly why Windows to Linux is much worse for them than Windows 10 to Windows 11.
People in my family are straight forward and blunt with their opinions and how they feel about things. She did mention it was weird looking but she was willing to try it out because her system was going to be insecure before the end of next year.
She’s had no complaints so far in the last few months.
I think it is pretty grandma-proof; less is more. Windows xp-like start menu with no web results or other nonsense there, just internet button, picture viewer, and solitaire. Updates can be automated and there’s no easy way to break the ui, like accidentally removing the task bar.
It’s not that it hasn’t gotten better, but that the entire infrastructure that’s underpinning the GUI is simply completely different than what people are used to. And I’m not just talking CLI here, because the average Windows user likely doesn’t use that to begin with – it’s things like filesystem organization, software management, driver installation, configuration files, etc.
And it’s not that these barriers are insurmountable either, but they DO require a significant amount of cognitive effort that not everyone is willing to put in.
It isn’t impenetrable. ChromeOS and Android are Linux based after all. If you don’t want to be prayed upon by Google you can use things like UBlue (inc. Aurora, Bazzite), PopOS, or Mint.
The advantage of PopOS and UBlue being you can download an image with Nvidia drives pre installed.
PopOS is a very mac like interface so you might not like it. Otherwise it’s pretty much install and go, has good community support, and even comes pre installed on some high end machines.
In the case of UBlue they include images for specific manufacturers of laptops like ASUS, Framework, and Microsoft surface. You also get fully automatic atomic upgrades with rollback in case of failure, similar to Chrome OS. This means even if you do something very stupid like reboot in the middle of an OS update, it won’t matter. It’s engineered to be almost unbreakable even for new Linux users thanks to being partly immutable. You get a choice as well between varieties for normal users called Aurora, one of gamers called Bazzite, a development one called Bluefin, and a server version too. Being based on Fedora it’s also reasonably up to date as well, but without sacrificing stability like Arch does.
Linux Mint is the classic easy to use Linux that runs on most computers made in the last 10 years and often older. It does sometimes struggle on newer machines with drivers though as it’s not using an up to date kernel. What it’s good for is that it pretty much just works when you have it installed and set up. It’s popular so you should get plenty of community support. It’s a quite similar interface to Windows while arguably looking better and definitely using less resources.
I don’t think a casual user would in many cases even be able to tell the difference. I mean you have a desktop with some icons which most of people only use to start the browser which is absolutely identical in both systems.
You have a start menu with other programs and you have a task bar which shows the open programs and some status icons and a clock.
It is really not that different. Most people just start a browser and go on Facebook or eBay or whatever, use a simple word processor for the daily needs. I don’t think they would be able to tell the difference.
The only real limiting factor is that most computers that you just walk into a store and buy (and are not made by Apple) come with Windows, and people just use whatever comes with their computers.
People rarely switch even default settings, let alone the entire OS.
I’m sure if computers came with Linux, there wouldn’t be that many complaints from casual users after they got used to it.
The hardest people to switch over are the Windows power users in my experience.
There are vendors who sell laptops that come pre-installed with Linux. Only thing is that they’re a bit more niche. Dell is probably the biggest name who sells computers with Linux as an optional OS on their website, but IIRC they brand it as “developer editions”.
Otherwise, you get vendors like System76, Tuxedo, Purism, etc. (Maybe Framework, but IDR if they even install an OS)
I still don’t think that you can walk into a store and buy any of the above.
Not that installing Linux is difficult; in fact, it’s easier than installing Windows IMO. Most distros come with easy-to-use graphical installers with easy-to-understand language, even for newbies. They also come with a live environment that lets you try out the distro before installing it. Thing is, most people aren’t even going to bother trying it.
I’ve heard this a few times lately. It makes me curious how recent the impenetrable experience was.
I’m shocked at the idea that an average Windows user who tried this year’s version of Debian Stable would find it even mildly confusing, much less impenetrable.
I switch between Windows 10 and Debian 12 Stable, daily.
I find that, on Debian, all the expected features are in the same spots, acting the same ways.
Disclaimer: I don’t have an Nvidia graphics card to cause me headaches.
And I do understand that depending on hardware, installation can be tough. That’s true with Windows, too, of course. At least installation doesn’t have to be an issue for new purchases, since enough PCs can now ship with either pre-installed.
Same. Never had a problem. I installed Linux Mint and it simply worked correctly without any modifications. Quite a bit of care is taken with the UX which is outstanding considering it’s a volunteer project.
Quite a bit of care is taken with the UX which is outstanding considering it’s a volunteer project.
Yeah. I am frequently delighted by excellent usability experiences on modern Linux!
Maybe I’m biased, since it’s so much better than when I started. But I still have a Windows 10 PC for my work, and - while the usability on Windows 10 is no slouch - I honestly would have a hard time saying which is better, overall, now. (Ignoring, for the sake of discussion, really obvious anipatterns like the start menu ads in Windows.)
I’d say it’s really easy. The only requirement is making a choice to use something else, which most unfortunately is already asking too much for the vast majority of users.
It’s just a little different nowadays. Like the other user said, they just don’t know they have a choice or what to choose and follow whatever they know…
And what was one of the early bolsheviks’ regime strongest points? They created schools and made people literate en masse, and did it with their own curriculum. People became less suspective to ex elites and religious propaganda, and became their target audience.
Adobe, Google, MS give discounts and special programs for education because this way people get used to their products. Many local organizations that touch these casual users don’t have a real IT department and just flow with what’s given, they don’t make an informed choice like corporations. And that’s probably the place where this switch may even start to begin. A class of students who started with e.g. KDE Plasma would be used to it more than they used to Windows, same with other software. They can already do their homework and play most games. What else do they need?
The sharp corner is to find money to fund select schools to show others it’s not scary and makes it even cheaper for them in the long run, maybe some special troubleshooting team to teach them the ropes. I’ve heard from some users there and on reddit that their computer classes with a geeky teacher who installed Linux is how they’ve rolled in without a problem.
They’ll always play right on or just over the line to see when/how people push back. They knew what they were doing, they started at a 9 intentionally so that people push back to and live with a 7
I mean… Yeah? That’s kind of the point isn’t it? Test the waters and figure out just how far they can push it? Find the limit of acceptance and ride that?
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