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I Love Linux (because it isn't Windows)

I just have to say, after having booted into Windows, that Linux is so much nicer than Windows when it comes to doing system “updates.”

So, here I am, sitting in my chair for about 20 minutes looking at a mostly black screen and a highly dubious looking percentage number going up very slowly. It tells me that Windows is “updating” and that I should keep the computer turned on. Good thing I have the computer turned on or I wouldn’t know that I shouldn’t have it turned off, right?

Anyway, I start to think about how this experience goes in Linux. In my experience, I do “system” updates about once a month, and I can see each individual package being installed (if I glance away from my browser session, that is). In Windows, I have no choice but to sit here and wonder if the system will even work again.

Windows decides that it wants to update drivers, apparently (I honestly have no idea what it’s doing, which is part of what pisses me off), because it reboots the computer. Then it reboots again. Then, eventually, everything goes back to the familiar Windows desktop. WTF?

How anyone could prefer Windows to Linux is truly a mystery to me.

lvxferre ,

I don’t even remember how updates used to be like in Windows. Except perhaps the nagging associated with manual updates.

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

How anyone could prefer Windows to Linux is truly a mystery to me.

Easy of use. The “Click here and I’ll do the stuff for you” kind of “easy of use”.

…I mean… Linux CAN be EASY to use – even MORE than Windows. But for that, the user has to dig in deep. Really deep.

Krzd ,
@Krzd@lemmy.world avatar

You don’t have to dig in that deep to get a good OOTB experience with Linux today, but you have to know and research which box you’re gonna “open”. Which I think is the biggest hurdle for most people that could adopt Linux.

Eldritch ,

I have a relatively recent ryzen system. With a 2070 super and windows 11. Sitting next to it is an i4790 system with a 1060 and no nvme. I use it daily. Love the hell out of it. It just runs. Windows 11 actually refuses to use the KVM. It’s just a constant pain in the ass. So lately I’ve turned it on maybe once a week at most. One of these days soon I’m going to bite the bullet and get a new nvme drive just for Linux on it. That way I don’t have to risk windows clobbering it for how little I will use it. My most recent heavy use of it was free games off of Amazon games. So that I can install and use them on the Linux system. If there’s no proper Amazon games client for Linux. There is a CLI downloader. But it doesn’t let you clean things Etc or notify you.

jeffreyosborne ,

Heroic games launcher has prime gaming support

Mango ,

Click button. Fugheddaboidut

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Good thing I have the computer turned on or I wouldn’t know that I shouldn’t have it turned off, right?

Sometimes people have their computers turned on, but then they turn them off. I know, it’s wild.

In Windows, I have no choice but to sit here and wonder if the system will even work again.

I’ve never, in multiple decades of using Windows, and thousands of updates, ever had an update installed and not had my computer work again. I suspect this is most people’s experience, or they wouldn’t use it.

How anyone could prefer Windows to Linux is truly a mystery to me.

Because most people are not system administrators and don’t have the time or knowledge to debug their computers every 5 minutes, or to figure out how to do what they want it to do or run the program they need to run. I’ve used both extensively and Windows is, by a landslide, the easier system to use, regardless of what the reasons are.

s38b35M5 ,
@s38b35M5@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve never, in multiple decades of using Windows, and thousands of updates, ever had an update installed and not had my computer work again. I suspect this is most people’s experience, or they wouldn’t use it.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you aren’t trolling and instead congratulate you on being a lucky Windows user. That’s unicorn-level awesome to me. As a former tech for public universities for 14 years, I can attest to the validity of OP’s description.

Faculty and staff begged for methods to postpone updates that randomly introduced breaking changes, and its easy to recall the many times I was in a lecture hall rolling back audio drivers that broke the A/V setup after updates. Professors would be mid-lecture or mid-exam and have a video card driver update without warning and set their screen to mirror instead of extend, putting their notes or answer key up for the class to see and breaking their lesson plan. Disabled hardware would be updated and reenabled, breaking input or output devices.

I’ve certainly had updates (especially when they began including BIOS updates without asking) break system function irreversibly as well, like when whole campuses had a new TPM version (1.x > 2.x) pushed without warning, which caused them to fail to boot with the static image they were running. The state was slow to fully-implement WSUS, but got on the ball by 2018. That changed everything.

Suffice to say that while you my have gotten lucky and never experienced any downtime resulting from an unscheduled Windows update, others definitely have.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

No one said others have. I want claiming it’s never happened to any of the several billion Windows users. I was claiming that it’s not common.

Schmeckinger ,

I mean I had arch break grub with a update, which would really suck for a computer beginner. And I had a OpenWRT router boot loop after a update. On my windows machine the only updates that led to a boot problem were Nvidia ones.

Nachorella ,

We have found the one Windows fan on Lemmy!

I still use windows almost entirely because of certain software I need for work. But if not for that I’d switch in a heartbeat, I’m not the most tech savvy person but in my experience Linux is much nicer and easier to use and if you need to debug it every 5 minutes you’re doing something very wrong. The only downside is software support which I’d argue isn’t the fault of Linux.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

We have found the one Windows fan on Lemmy!

Yeah, definitely not. I still use Linux on like 6 computers.

But if the reason people use Windows is truly a “mystery” to you then you’re simply delusional. I am not a genius but I’m competent enough to make it functional.

It just frustrates me less than a remote server constantly fucking with my computer and actively preventing me from doing what I want.

if you need to debug it every 5 minutes you’re doing something very wrong

Probably. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

The only downside is software support which I’d argue isn’t the fault of Linux.

Whose fault it is is completely irrelevant. If ya can’t do it, ya can’t do it.

ZarkleFarkle ,

I have seen storage corruption on a Windows 10 computer cause a boot loop where it constantly tries to verify the integrity of the filesystem or something like that. I forget what happened to that computer though. I think it was just replaced.

Also, niche types of computers like tiny laptops tend to get blue screens a lot more than more common computers because there’s probably some faulty driver, but you can say that’s not really gonna be Microsoft’s fault.

All computers can crash if you encounter rare or weird bugs and hardware failures. How often it happens is a statistical question that might be hard to answer when there’s so much going on and opinions about what could be happening.

I would think generally that relatively new computers running Windows, especially gaming PCs, tend to very rarely encounter significant issues (outside of actual manufacturing faults). They have well supported hardware and that hardware runs fast.

Slowdowns and weird behaviour are another category too. You could have a super fast computer that’s always crashing, or a slow old computer you’ve never ever seen crash (a lot of servers are kind of like that). I had an old computer running Windows 10 (someone gave me it when it was being got rid of for an upgrade), and it was horrible because everything in the interface would take actual seconds to load, even though this computer could run fairly recent games fine around 5 years ago. I installed Linux on that instead and everything was silky smooth, smoother than it ever felt to use that computer before.

Linux often works a lot better when it comes to old computers. The drivers can even in some cases be supported and updated long after it stopped being a new computer, by both a handful of enthusiasts and by big companies that hire people to prevent servers crashing. Thinkpads can be like this, so if you ever wanted to get a computer specifically for Linux, it would be best to get one a few years old that’s popular in tech company offices.

How well you can use an interface is a bit of a skill issue, or rather an experience issue. It’s a bit like the stereotype of a possibly senile old person who can’t use the menus on their TV because it’s too complicated. If you’re used to a certain interface, it shouldn’t take any thought at all to do the things you usually do on a computer.

Interfaces are also a matter of preference, and Linux has lots of different interfaces you can use. If you tried them all you’d probably find that one was your favourite for a few different reasons, but most reasonable people don’t have time for that so they’ll stick with whatever they can work out how to use and find alright.

It doesn’t seem like you’re gonna be using Linux much (at least not by choice) any time soon, and you might even have had some bad experiences with it before. That’s fair; I’m not trying to convince you that you need to use Linux and it sounds like Windows works very well for you.

You do seem to have the impression though that all Linux computers are constantly crashing and glitching out in weird ways, which is simply not true. Most servers around the world that build up the internet use Linux, and most of the popular ones rarely ever go down. That means these computers are constantly running, humming away with their bits in a big room somewhere, and Linux almost never has any issues that stop them, especially full system crashes. Power outages are a more common reason for servers to be down, and you don’t need to be a sysadmin constantly making intricate bugfixes to keep a Linux PC running while you play games.

TL;DR: All computers can have bugs or crash and Linux isn’t constantly crashing. That’s probably why everyone seems like they’re seething at what you said. Lol

superkret ,

I ran both an immutable distro (which downloads an entirely new image for every update) and Arch (which if you let it sit for a while basically reinstalls everything in an update).

I have no fucking clue what even takes so long during Windows updates. Both the download and the installation are slow as hell.

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

Which immutable distro and what was the user experience like when compared with a traditional one?

superkret ,

Fedora Silverblue, and it was buggy and limiting.

mox ,

Want to see a really big difference? Try doing updates (or using Windows at all) with “only” 4GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive. You can do it in a virtual machine if you don’t have a spare system sitting around. Use Windows 10 or newer for best effect. (Good luck if it needs more than a few weeks of updates; you might be waiting and rebooting for quite a while before it finishes.)

One might argue that this is unrealistic, because modern Windows system requirements state up front that such modest hardware isn’t enough, but that’s not the point.

Do the same thing on any modern Linux distro, and notice the difference. Now consider how much more efficient Linux is at making use of your hardware, no matter how much RAM or how fast the disk.

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