Dual booting can be problematic. Windows is the most retarded OS ever which sometimes decides to overwrite boot partition.
FOr trying out stuff, you van install Linux as a virtual machine. Check there if your sw works there and is available.
Absolutely! Dual booting on a work machine running AV software. Sounds like a nightmare just waiting to happen… It’ll break when you least expect it and your client is gonna flip shit.
VM is definitely the way to go. Give it max resources and run it full screen until you get a secondary tinkering tool or succumb to WSL
This ^ I ended up loading up NixOS and Gnome desktop for my wife’s old computer. She is not a computer person and was struggling with the slowness of W10 but also how complicated and inconsistent the interface became. She seems placated now.
It’s great and I’m using it, but I don’t think someone coming from Linux Mint should use it right away. It can get quite complex even coming from Arch or Artix Linux.
Things that should have disappeared 30 years ago are still problems in the operating system. Not least of which is the handling of locales. I cannot transfer Excel files from my Windows machine to my Linux machine because my Windows machine uses points to denote decimals (as in most companies and homes in South Africa) while Linux does a hard-enforce of the documented standard in South Africa which is a comma for decimal. This breaks my files and I am unable to perform calculations on Excel files due to this. Ridiculous, relevant and sad.
I was previously unaware of the kernel doing such things.
People are indifferent, unknowing, fearful, or just plain lazy to learn new apps. Got to get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux.
Most of these are fringe cases nowadays, and often used in environments where the user has no control over the OS anyways. I don’t really use Office at home (for the three times per year, LibreOffice is good enough and that’s what most Windows users I know run at home anyways).
Also it’s not as easy as to just “get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux”. The wine project is doing miraculous work already IMHO…
While I agree with you on the advantages (performance, stability, reliability, security, customization, privacy, lightweight nature, no corporate bloatware, etc) of Linux, its rate of adoption is considerably weak and consistently weak because of various reasons and causes that your article does not mention.
“Your article doesn’t mention the real reasons, which conveniently enough I won’t list either.”
As others have said, on distributions that go for ease of use, the terminal isn’t really needed.
However, I do consider it a convenience feature even for users who are not savvy with it: You can either troubleshoot an issue by giving instructions like “Open application X, navigate to Option, open Tab, press Button, then enter Text, hit OK and repeat for each” or “copy and paste this command into your terminal”. The amount of work on both sides is likely lower plus there’s less room for error.
There are common programs you need to install via the terminal, you can’t even change sound playback quality without editing a conf file which requires sudo!
There is so much you need the shell for and until people stop defending it and start focusing on UX Linux will never be popular for your average user.
There are common programs you need to install via the terminal
Out of interest, which programs do you need to install via terminal that concern the average user?
you can’t even change sound playback quality without editing a conf file which requires sudo!
What do you consider changing “playback quality”?
Sampling rate? That can be changed in a config file without sudo (~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d), you shouldn’t though because many applications expect 48000 as sampling rate. Unless you’re doing studio recordings you want 48000.
There is so much you need the shell
Correct, there is a lot of need for the shell, for power users. I don’t really see anything that the average office and browser enjoyer needs to do in the terminal. You can even game now in most distros without opening the terminal once.
Out of interest, which programs do you need to install via terminal that concern the average user?
For example installing the GPU driver for an older GPU. Or installing the driver for an obscure printer, touchpad or other weird hardware.
Average user doesn’t mean total noob. Installing Windows and the relevant drivers is something many users in the “Gamer class” can do. These guys usually don’t to command line (except for maybe pinging something), but they are comfortable with installing and configuring stuff in GUI.
They understand how to google the driver to their weird hardware, download the .exe or .msi, start it and navigate the install wizard.
On Linux I’ve had it a few times that you e.g. have to unload/load kernel modules and stuff to get a driver working. I once even had it, that the Linux driver for a device was only supplied in source code to be compiled with an ancient version of GCC that wasn’t available over the package manager. So then I spend an hour or two fixing compiler errors to upgrade that old source code to work with a current GCC.
Getting the same hardware to run under Windows meant downloading the .exe and running it.
And yeah, that’s not something you’ll do on a daily basis, but it is a huge roadblock for someone afraid of white text in a black window.
For example installing the GPU driver for an older GPU. Or installing the driver for an obscure printer, touchpad or other weird hardware.
That’s not quite my definition of “common”.
Average user doesn’t mean total noob. Installing Windows and the relevant drivers is something many users in the “Gamer class” can do.
The “Gamer class” is far from the average user, the average user doesn’t even know what a GPU or a driver is and doesn’t care. As long as the OS installs all drivers by default or the OEM has preinstalled them all is good.
Getting the same hardware to run under Windows meant downloading the .exe and running it.
Until there’s no more drivers for that generation of GPU. The Windows 11 drivers for AMD only go down to the Vega 64, if you have a Fury X or a 7970 you’re out of luck. Not that Windows 11 even lets you install on a machine that old.
AMDGPU goes down all the way to GCN 1.2, which means you can even run a 7970 on a modern Linux OS. Even out of the box if your distro has the legacy flags enabled.
It would be fantastic if there was more hardware that works out of the box in Linux, but that’s up to the manufacturers. Until more people switch to Linux they don’t bother and until they bother everybody complains that XY doesn’t work on Linux.
As of right now the biggest hurdle is Nvidia without drivers included in Linux. Without a distro that takes care of installing their drivers they are essentially out of luck.
Using a GPU under Linux is not common? And installing Linux on old laptops isn’t either?
As of right now the biggest hurdle is Nvidia without drivers included in Linux. Without a distro that takes care of installing their drivers they are essentially out of luck.
I can’t say anything about AMD, since the last time I had an AMD GPU is ~15 years ago.
When I installed an Ubuntu variant on my G580, which has a Geforce 635M it automatically installed the current driver for Geforce GPUs when I setup the OS, but that driver doesn’t support the 635M. That one needs a legacy driver. And getting that to work was a major pain.
I first installed the legacy driver over apt, but it didn’t do anything, because apparently installing the driver doesn’t actually load the kernel module for the driver. So I had to load it manually, and it still didn’t do anything. Turns out, uninstalling the original driver didn’t unload it from the GPU either. So I had to re-install the old driver, unload the module, uninstall the old driver, install the legacy driver and load the legacy module. Took me a few hours to figure all of that out.
No way someone without CLI experience will be able to do that.
Using a GPU under Linux is not common? And installing Linux on old laptops isn’t either?
Installing drivers for an older GPU, obscure printer, touchpad or other weird hardware is not common.
When I installed an Ubuntu variant on my G580, which has a Geforce 635M it automatically installed the current driver for Geforce GPUs when I setup the OS, but that driver doesn’t support the 635M. That one needs a legacy driver. And getting that to work was a major pain.
Which is an issue with Nvidia, they have no drivers for that GPU for Windows 11 either. Not saying that this is not an issue but there is absolutely nothing Linux can do to make every legacy GPU work without help from Nvidia. It uses the open source driver out of the box, which works sometimes but not for everything and definitely not for gaming.
Not saying that this is not an issue but there is absolutely nothing Linux can do to make every legacy GPU work without help from Nvidia.
Yes, they can. They literally have the correct (legacy) driver in the Ubuntu repo. But the autoinstaller installs the wrong driver during installing the OS. And if you try to manually install it, there is not even a text prompt in the CLI saying “You just installed that driver, do you want to actually use it to? (Y/n)”.
They could have even gone so far as to make a CLI wizard (like many other packages do) or even a GUI wizard. But no, the package just installs and does nothing by default.
It uses the open source driver out of the box, which works sometimes but not for everything and definitely not for gaming.
Also that is not correct. All the *buntu installers ask you when you install the OS whether you also want to have closed source drivers installed, and then it installs the closed source Nvidia drivers. Just the wrong ones.
That driver does not list the 635M but only the desktop version. Which is still impressive but I think they have separate drivers for their mobile chips? The latest driver listed for the 635M is only available for Windows 10 on their website.
Yes, they can. They literally have the correct (legacy) driver in the Ubuntu repo. But the autoinstaller installs the wrong driver during installing the OS. And if you try to manually install it, there is not even a text prompt in the CLI saying “You just installed that driver, do you want to actually use it to? (Y/n)”.
They could have even gone so far as to make a CLI wizard (like many other packages do) or even a GUI wizard. But no, the package just installs and does nothing by default.
Does ubuntu-drivers devices list the correct driver or is the recommended one too new? The driver packages in Ubuntu should install and activate themselves unless you have multiple installed, sounds like you ran into a bug.
Also that is not correct. All the *buntu installers ask you when you install the OS whether you also want to have closed source drivers installed, and then it installs the closed source Nvidia drivers. Just the wrong ones.
That does not change that Nouveau is used by default for the installer itself and by default for the OS if you don’t select anything.
You would have to Give SUSE / OpenSUSE a try. It has Yast2-GUI so everything from setting up a samba share, ftp server, to kernal tweak, system services, and boot setup can be done entirely in the GUI environment. Very similar to how the older Windows Control Panel looked. Also One-click install for rpm files. Oh and system rollback if you blow up the system, no command line fixes needed.
While I do like Excel, its handling of values as dates is also a big issue that has hit a lot of people in the past – the format is just not very portable or exchangeable. It’s not just an issue from Excel to other solutions… my point was rather that it’s not a “Linux” issue and the way it was worded sounded like the kernel had something to do with it.
I get your point, but the guy you quoted also has a point. For a non-techy person it’s really hard to understand the boundary of the OS, so where the OS ends and Apps begin. And tbh, even to a techy person, there isn’t really a hard border there.
For example: Is the DWM part of the OS? On Windows, definitely. It’s not the kernel, but it is the OS. You cannot remove or replace it.
On Linux, maybe, maybe not. It’s definitely part of the Distro, but you can replace it. But on the other hand, on Linux you can even replace the kernel if you really want to. So maybe replaceability is not the criterium? But if it isn’t, wouldn’t that make everything that came in the distro part of the OS?
On Windows, that’s kinda the case, with e.g. Edge being an integral, non-replaceable part of the OS.
And then you get into the territory of the “Linux is only the kernel” purists, that follow Stallmans fever dreams. They might say, Linux isn’t actually an OS at all.
And at the latest once Stallman’s speech has been quoted will anyone who is not a hardcore Linux philosopher say “Screw you guys, there is no point to this”.
I always made sure my laptops had tlp installed. Now it seems openSUSE has cpu power profiles daemon or something by default, which it says conflicts with tlp when I tried to install it. So, I’m giving that a shot.
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