It isn’t your computer, user license clearly states you’re renting the software. You always have been, it’s just now they can enforce that agreement more readily. Microsoft is making a lot of bad decisions at the moment, but the majority of consumers really don’t care - adverts and surveillance are what they grew up with.
You can switch to Linux, but as much as I love it (it’s my daily driver for work and for travel gaming, oh and the community is absolutely amazing), it’s not 1-1. You will have to jump through hoops sometimes to get things to run (but damn me there are amazing people out there who can and do help). Then again, you own it because it is free, and it will run most things with the right tweaks.
I can’t speak for MACs (too poor to use one, my devices tend to be upgradable or VERY long life), but I hear they’re a better experience in terms of less bloat/adverts. Again though, you are renting with Apple, and are largely trapped in their ecosystem, and they have a ‘reputation’ for lack of repairability…
I’ve been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they’re not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don’t know how easy it is to use a local account.
It’s not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren’t innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.
When I switched to Linux (year 2011), jumping through hoops reduced significantly, because:
running games on builtin Intel cards etc, that is, kinda second-class citizen hardware, was anyways PITA ;
it made my stuff run terribly faster ;
those hoops are not too different in complexity from installing mods for games under Windows ;
for trying to learn programming Linux is much less problematic (have ADHD, so didn’t learn much back then, but) ;
the main issue of uninstalling McAffee went away for free ;
I was at school, so didn’t have any problems with office suites’ incompatibilities and such ;
and also Linux in 2011 was in general easier, don’t believe RedHat fanboys and such, it was very nice before PulseAudio, systemd and widespread adoption of GTK3, say, to change colors you just needed a 20-line .gtkrc-2.0 and .Xresources, and your WM’s config file, it’s 20 minutes from fresh install to feel normal ;
the community was friendlier, somehow back then RTFM was considered acceptable, but people rarely used it, now everybody behaves as if RTFM was very bad, but also too many people use it, sometimes to avoid admitting that they are wrong and a certain thing is absent in TFM.
Whoa whoa whoa an operating system is not software depending who you ask lol. It’s the program that manages both your PC’s hardware and software resources. /s
It’s not that people ignore it, it’s just that they don’t really have an alternative. You can rent from Microsoft or Apple, or go the Linux way where you don’t have the proper UX an average user needs and is accustomed to with Windows or macOS.
He prescribed me a medication but when I went to get it from the pharmacy they just gave me a bunch of precursor chemicals which are just toxic if not combined in the right way. When I asked for help the pharmacist just said “RTFM”
I’m struggling to transition still, honestly… Windows visualised as a street gives me access to all the shops and window browsing I need, everyone wants to be there and get my attention, and despite the masses of intrusive advertising and shady people around every corner watching me, I don’t have to actively navigate the street itself very much. It’s a dystopian street of neon distractions and side hustles but you can mostly shut it out and walk.
Linux as a street is a lot barer, the street is cleaner and less intrusive, I’m not being watched from the alleyways… but there are knee high walls every few meters, there are open manhole covers here and there, and I have to actively persuade some shops to let me in or even open.
I don’t walk down a paved street for the joy of navigating an assault course, I walk down it to get places with the least amount of friction possible and I just can’t seem to get that from Linux yet. Then again Windows would like to start stopping me every few meters and asking intrusive questions or hocking me tat, so my move is inevitable.
I always found that deeply problematic. Here is some obscure path to follow to set some obscure value where half of the naming does not indicate what exactly you are doing there. Also if you don’t set the data-type exactly it wont work. For a fucking 0 or 1 off/on value flag.
It sucks, but at least it’s in a centralized location. Back in the INI file days you’d have to set the config in various places. Which, come to think of it, is kind of how things work in Linux.
Related to the OPs problem, do you know if there is a Startup folder in Windows still? Back in the Windows 95 days we could just drag a BAT script to that folder and it would always run on login.
Not like Linux and it’s loads of shell scripts and commands is so much different.
Yesterday I booted an antivirus live-cd compiled by a computer-magazine (aimed at IT-professionals and tinkerers). The ISO is a Ubuntu 22 release. The things I had to find out (as a mainly Windows user) to set a static IP was way too annoying. When I finally found out how to configure netplan and when I did I got a nice error that gateway4 is deprecated and to please use routes.
As someone else in a thread said: It’s nice and all that Linux fits some specific uses and users but it’s not really fit for every user.
Additionally there are too many ways to do the same thing. And it applies to distros as well. A Debian-solution might work to some degree in Ubuntu but if a RHEL way works in Debian or Ubuntu is your best guess.
In atleast 3 distros I wanted to add program at start-up, easy peasy on windows , Linux is mess , some has gui for that but these three distorsion HAD ZERO option for it and I still don’t know how to do it.
In windows i want to serch for here is program installed, so easy to know and find . In Linux I had to fight multiple terminal commands ( in 2024 no less) and ev n then indid not come across whwre is the program installed
In Linux I plugged in hdd and wanted a program to acess its content, turns out I can’t do that without mumbo jumbo or wv n with it Whwre as in windows , inplug it and VOILA! I can access it across anything.
Linux MAY be good at something , but it still sucks for real Common usage.
I had none of these issues and i don’t know what you are talking about.
If you install programs through your package manager they come with a start-menu entry just as easily findable as in Windows. If you don’t install programs with an installer in Windows you get the same problem.
Also mounting HDDs made its content accessible to all my programs so far, without any issue. I think you must have chosen extremely obscure distros or fucked things up by yourself during install processes.
With all due respect you seem like a friendless cunt that everyone cringes at when you enter the room because you act like you can’t be bothered with any conversation that doesn’t involve a lone condescending atoadaso without any further contribution to the conversation because that would take effort. We’ll done! You have lived up to the asshole IT guy noone liked way before you became useful.
Edit didn’t mean to imply Linux is easier than Windows to learn in general.
It is though. People just neglect that in today’s world, no one “learns” Windows from scratch.
Learning to do anything from scratch is easier on most Linux distros than on Windows. The tools are better and the documentation is light years ahead. Windows is a steaming pile of horseshit in comparison. But once you’ve made yourself a cozy nest in the middle of said pile, getting to the comfy whirlpool hot tub that is linux requires you to scale over the walls of horseshit surrounding your nest. And that is what makes people claim “but Linux hard, muh duh!”
Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.
Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.
So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.
Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.
I’d like to leave a warning for anyone working with Uber or Lyft as well, a friend of mine flashed his phone with a custom ROM and couldn’t work for a week until I managed to reflash the original ROM on it.
It took a while cause his phone was from a not so well known brand and it took a lot of hours on russian forums to find the stock ROM.
Note that if you are Uber user (idk about driver) their website is good enough; for me it works in Firefox mobile (in “Desktop” mode only). Lyft is app only…
Yes, I was talking about the driver apps. The apps won’t work on custom firmware, I know there’s some magisk thing you can do but there’s reports of account blockages in my country following that method.
Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.
And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.
Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.
As it so happens my banking app works fine.
That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.
Banks are a bunch of dicks anyway. I recently received a ToS that forced me to have all my OSs on their latest update, and never install anything that doesn’t come from official stores.
Most people believe they will start seeing problems where there were none before. They need to invest time into research about their use-cases, which is a cost even before switching.
The typical user used Windows since before they became scared of change, so that’s what they’ll stick with.
The pain of using Windows still can and will be higher without the majority of people switching to anything.
The typical user used Windows since before they became scared of change, so that’s what they’ll stick with.
In some ways this was me, then win 11 came around and I really didn’t like it, and it was pretty unstable for me, so I was stuck between two options for change, neither being what I would call “comfortable” (I had to, win 10 was blue screening literally every other day) which was when I saw the steam deck announcement, (also the LTT Linux Challenge) and I haven’t given win 11 a serious try sense
I don’t want to point fingers/cast shade or anything. Hell, I myself resist change where I can.
It costs incredible amounts of energy and time to change, and that change might even be counter productive to some or most of the things you do.
Gratulations on starting Linux, I hope it does everything you need it to do. Even if you should end up using it only for a short amount of time, I hope the experience enriches you.
Yes, because I need Adobe to do my meh wage part-time job in developing country from my one and only working laptop and I don’t have the luxury of surplus money, time, and mental energy to do anything about it.
But I get your point. If I have the means, I will fix my broken Thinkpad and definitely install Linux there the first chance I get. Either that or Adobe finally release Linux version, which will probably be released after Half-Life 3.
I can’t wait to try Endeavor (so I can finally be an obnoxious person who say “I used Arch^-based^ ^distro^, btw”)
Either that or Adobe finally release Linux version, which will probably be released after Half-Life 3.
Yeah, I’ve seen what Adobe’s support looks like. I remember the Linux version of Flash Player. The guy in charge of it whined on the official Adobe blog on the subject that he had to support “minority browsers” which at the time was everything but Internet Explorer on Windows.
What I am saying is that if Illustrator breaks on Windows, you might have to reinstall Windows. If it breaks on Linux, you just reinstall in a new wine prefix, or restore from a backup or snapshot. The rest of the system remains unaffected. Does that make sense?
Not really. If illustrator breaks on Windows at the most I’ll have to power cycle the PC. I’ve never heard of it taking Windows down with it.
To even get it functional on wine I’d have to invest untold hours of research and tomfoolery, and then any time it didn’t work I’d not know if it was adobe’s fault or wine’s.
I wouldn’t mind doing this kind of thing for a hobby, but not for production software unfortunately.
It’s not a failure to consider the alternatives that slows adoption, it is the very real material problems with those alternatives.
It’s not fair that a multinational corporation gets to wield virtually limitless power to starge the alternatives of oxygen and create as much friction as possible in the process, but it is very real, and blaming the users won’t solve anything.
The comment I replied to didn’t source their claim that it’s the users’ fault, but I notice you didn’t ask them to source their claims.
Perhaps you could explain why your skepticism is so selective before I answer your question.
And perhaps you could be more specific about what claim you want “sourced”. That the switch to linux has a lot of friction? That it’s difficult? That Microsoft has deliberately cultivated that friction? That users aren’t simply failing to consider it? That blaming the users isn’t the solution?
I didn’t notice or care about their comment, it was meaningless bs. Yours is something for which it’s feasible to provide evidence, it’s a novel claim, and I saw nothing to back it up other than hostility.
That the switch to linux has a lot of friction? That it’s difficult?
Everyone mostly agrees on this, not interesting. Also you didn’t even directly claim this in your post, so obviously I wasn’t asking about this. You’re just seemingly using this hostile badgering approach to stifle the conversation.
That Microsoft has deliberately cultivated that friction?
This is the interesting claim. After all Linux deliberately shoots its legs off every few years, why does Microsoft need to help?
Honestly your original question was so vague and terse I almost didn’t reply, it just seemed so pointless. If you don’t want hostility, don’t come with an attitude like that. Do the work to make yourself understood the first time. And don’t just demand citations - you’re not my professor. Just ask questions like a normal fucking person. Ask for information.
Given you’re asking for evidence of Microsoft’s sabotaging of open source projects including Linux, I’m going to have to assume you’re coming from a place of actual curiosity and not bad faith. It’s actually one of the most famous examples of anticompetitive behaviour in history. Start there: en.wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis…
I used to help maintain a Linux distro, and there is a level of polish Windows has that I feel cannot be reached by the FOSS ecosystem due the resources dumped into hiring dedicated teams at MS. Microsoft has tons of money. I’m sad about the direction of windows, but it generally works pretty well for how it’s designed (which is in some cases awful).
Sure. I could accept hearing “Windows is more polished than most Linux distro’s”. But to say blankly that Windows is polished is crazy talk. It’s jank as balls. Its got like 3 totally discrete and independent UI frameworks for the menus operating in parallel, and somehow none of them provide all the functionality you would need, have to mix and match them.
That’s just a single example. I could rant for hours.
there was a time where that may have been the case, but microsoft has been chipping away at any polish they had for years. sure there’s still some rough edges in linux, but it’s only getting better where windows continues to get worse
A good amount of Linux distros don’t seem to want to get the basics down. Constant churn vs stable but way out of date is more how is describe the choice, while windows at it’s core is actually a pretty stable platform. I don’t have to, for example, get annoyed at Firefox middle mouse scroll not working because I forgot this distro still defaults to x11 even though it installs Wayland too blah blah blah.
Firefox middle mouse scroll works fine in X11. I use it all the time. But I guess that’s beside the point; I’m sure we could come up with a different example.
I wonder how many years until all mainstream websites and web based apps like steam refuse to work because you’re os isn’t supported by the latest browser version.
I mean they don’t need drm if updated requirements can’t be met by the host system. Steam stopped officially supporting windows 7 because of some core platform security libraries that is needed for newer versions of chrome just doesn’t exist on windows 7 and won’t because windows 7 is EOL.