I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
The popularity of Windows is largely due to the fact it’s pre installed on most PC’s when you buy them, people literally think Windows ‘is the computer’. Such popularity has little to do with Windows being a great OS. In many ways Windows is like McDonalds: It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just fills that hump in the bell curve.
Due to the fact Linux has no marketing department, it’s unlikely this will ever change.
Windows comes pre-installed on PCs when you buy them because it’s what people are generally comfortable using, because it’s what they use at work too.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale. Windows is expensive. Like, really expensive. If you have 1000 PCs that have Windows and Office E3, assuming a bulk discount, that’s an up front cost of ~$200000 with the subscription costing an additional ~$20000/month. If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
You’re right in that that Windows is not some super great OS, but it does some things way better than anything else that make it an ideal choice for business use.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale.
… Linux being manageable at scale is kind of the reason why Linux is the standard for servers. Many enterprises run Linux workstation distros, and they can be managed at scale just fine, it’s just different tooling. You can deploy a Linux desktop OS with Ansible as easily as a Linux server.
You can replace pretty much the entire Office suite with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice, both of which can be easily hosted on-prem, for a fraction of the cost of paying MS for roughly the same thing on their awful infrastructure.
If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
They have. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s pretty easy (and inexpensive) these days to run Linux desktop OSes like RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu on a VM running on Proxmox or OpenShift, complete with multiple monitor support and GPU. Hell, you can even run a Windows VM if you want. All you need is a system (like a thin client) with enough grunt to run a browser, and enough ports to handle multiple monitors and USB accessories.
And businesses aren’t interested in “free”, they’re interested in support, which they are willing to pay for. This is how companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE make their money. The OS is free, but you can pay for professional support.
No, Windows comes preinstalled on most PC’s due to clever marketing. As stated, it’s more a case of people thinking Windows is the computer as opposed to any form of comfort regarding a fragmented touch/desktop UI making poor use of screen real estate.
I come across a number of Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa types that outright struggle with Windows; the device they feel comfortable with is the iPad.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
And even WSL is essentially just a Linux VM.
Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Macbooks just make really nice ssh terminals for accessing your Linux dev environment. Though these days there are decent options for Linux terminals with a similar form factor, they just don’t tend to be much cheaper.
I think that something like 20% of what’s keeping me using Mac is iTerm2’s integration with ‘tmux -CC‘
Probably an unpopular opinion on here, but the OS I recommend for grandparents and parents is ChromeOS. It’s so locked down that it’s almost indestructible, and they almost never need any specialized software that you’d use Windows/MacOS for. If you’re savvy enough you can also use Linux on it in a container, which is how I prefer to use it for day to day stuff (in my case, data related workflows).
Yep. I’m in IT, so every time my parents’ computer “does something weird,” I get a call. Bought them Chromebooks a few Christmases ago and the calls have all but stopped.
No that’s fair. It just assumes that everything you’ll ever need is on a browser, which in the case of grandparents, is probably true.
I would just um…never tell them about the Android app store because that can get real messy real quick.
It kinda felt like you were gonna break into song about the Year of the BSD Desktop for a second there!
When I worked as a IT Tech at a University years ago we had a lot of MacOS users who believed they could just pick it up and use it like their iPhone. It was absurd how well their marketing worked because those users either forced themselves to learn it or dropped it and went back to Windows.
I know a lot of iOS users who have iPads and iPhones but still have windows PCs because they don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.
I’m one of those guys, IOS phone with windows PC. There really isn’t much out there that is as convenient as IOS, but theres no way I would use a Mac, as compatibility issues and more expensive hardware will ultimately hurt functionality.
I know you made a joke about MacOS, but I am genuinely interested with what issue you have of it.
It sucks in the way you understand and know because nothing else even exists. No one is interested in having to cater to their walled garden unless there’s money to be made. Meanwhile both Linux and Windows have many open source projects and hobbyists working on things. So you might get a mac driver for something you buy but most of the time macos is an afterthought at best in many hobby projects. Also lol mac gaming is a joke. Even Linux is getting better support now than macos in that regard since the Steamdeck.
Yeah it was just a joke because I love to piss off the MacOS guys. But its like a brotherly teasing. Like, I love you guys, but I gotta rib you, you know.
I think Apple’s biggest sin is that everything works as long as all of your hardware, software, and co-workers have an apple emblazoned on their back. But the moment you have to work with anything or anyone that doesnt use Apple, you have problems. And Apple seems to encourage this because it gets their users to dread working with Windows or Linux users.
The sad thing is that I like a lot of their software. But using their OS is like having Steve Jobs standing over your shoulder and smacking you on the head when you try to shift outside of their intended workflow. I keep running into situations where Windows and Linux would let me go left or right (after finding a hidden and misnamed switch or running a well researched and crafted bash command), and MacOS just put a roadblock on the left because fuck you we said no.
I know that my ideal of a perfect OS is unrealistic. MacOS is more stable because it’s more rigid. Windows and Linux prove that the more flexible you are, the harder it is to use. But settling for one option and looking down at everyone who chose different isn’t going to help. We should all keep criticising our chosen option and root for others that are criticising their own. Because it seems like Apple, Microsoft, and the Open Source community are all in a rut, safely ignoring basic fucking usage issues because of an implicit assumption that their user base isn’t going anywhere.
I live in a mixed OS household. My wife and I both use windows and Apple machines for various purposes (my wife’s work requires both, my mac is just for dabbling) and I have some linux boxes for streaming or storage or whatever. And while that gives me the benefits of all three, I also have to deal with the problems of all three. And its a lot, guys. Not to mention they all refuse to work together.
I haven’t used macOS in years, so now it might actually be the golden pie in the sky “it just works” OS that Apple’s fans have always pretended it was. But Apple’s condescending “we know what’s best for you” attitude that they take into iOS (and nearly everything else they do) puts me off from giving them a second chance.
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This is a pointless argument even saying that everyone sucks, linux runs worse on the desktop because it doesn’t get even 1/10th the investment from consumer hardware manufacturers compared to windows or mac to make it compatible. nevertheless linux is undoubtedly less difficult and more efficient to integrate than windows, for example the steam deck is done very well but it could be done better since KDE, wayland and arch do not have the same number of employees as microsoft.
Havent had issues with my Windows PC in years. I dont have time to deal with linux stuff at this ppint in my life but used to play with it as a teen.
I guarantee you’ve had “problems” but you’re so used to Windows now that you have the muscle memory to deal with it without thinking much about it.
Using all three in my household kinda highlighted for me how much I was just ignoring or working around the ugliness of Windows every single day.
Sure thing buddy. I’ll say it again: no issues at all in ages.
But do they have a varying degrees of suck?
The OS I direct the technologically-illiterate to when I don’t plan on supporting it myself is invariably iOS. Boomers don’t need anything more anyway.
Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Linux: CPU (optional)
As a person who has used linux i can confirm that my daughter runs linux
I like Linux a lot, but saying you can’t understand why someone would run Windows on a server just shows a lack of knowledge. Linux is great in a lot of server applications in the application realm. However, it doesn’t get close to the power of Active Directory and Group Policy for Windows device management. Besides that, a lot of people are more comfortable with a UI for managing DHCP, DNA, etc in a SMB environment. Even if they prefer a command line for those tools PowerShell allows those people to coexist with those that prefer a GUI. Under certain circumstances, (mainly ones where a business is forgoing AD for AAD), Linux can be the right choice. Pretending that there’s no place for Windows Server, though, is asinine.
This community is very much a “Windows bad” community. I personally find that annoying as I use Windows and Linux. Both have their pros and cons. Windows though is seen here as the shitest OS out there which far from the truth.
PowerShell is amazing and I install it on my Linux desktop.
The main problem are companies forcing windows servers and technologies when they are not the good ones for the task.
If one needs to set up desktops for accounting, windows is fine. But I saw companies setting shared NFS drives used by Linux severs on windows machines! Not joking!
I know companies that even deploy kubernetes clusters on windows servers!
Just because finding cheap windows engineers is easy, everyone has had an experience on windows to put on a cv. Than some of that cheap labor go up the hierarchy as head of a random infrastructure team because all good sys engineers moved to manage linux servers after some time, he recruits people like-minded, and in few years you ends up with a team refusing to do the right thing because “we know windows and windows can do the same as Linux and Microsoft is good for governance and Linux bad”. Execs don’t understand the difference and force architecture to go along because they don’t believe it’s worthy to rebuild a team, we are anyway using windows for accounting and execs laptops, it can’t be that bad! Even accenture and mckinsey consultants us it! And they told us that wls2 is the holy grail
Corporate IT is the peak of suboptimal tools for the job because politics and money
We use both. Its not my department but i know the server guys are using windows for some servers and linux for others and the decision is normally made based on which is going to be best for the specific needs of the function of that server.
Pretending one is outright better than the other is childish. Just use whats best at the time.
You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.
I switched to arch using qtile wm a few months ago. Couldn’t be happier. If a game doesn’t run on my rig either though stream or lutris well I just don’t play it, there’s way more games to discover and play.
This! I literally give Windows a chance every version. I even kind of liked Windows 11 this go around.
But something always breaks and no matter how much I trouble shoot the fix is to reinstall windows. To which I say screw that and start distro hoping.
11 with 2022 gaming laptop just stopped updating. The only non native app I had on the thing was STEAM! I have been using Linux for 18 years because it’s the only way I know how to fix Windows.
I’d rather stick my head in the rotating blades of a combine harvester than deal with HP printer drivers…
Well, you’ve got me on that one.
I was flirting with Linux for 20 years. There was always something that put me off an I went back to Windows. Recently I installed ubuntu with Kde plasma and I’m not going back. It just works and is heaps faster on older hardware. The old driver issues are gone, compatibility is awesome. The only issue is getting used to new software names.
Same. I started with Ubuntu like a decade ago. I hated it and didn’t really see the fuss, kind of gave up.
But then I started putting in tons of time in rasbian, and windows kept getting more and more… Well, windows. I eventually realized how much more I liked working on stuff on the pi, and just needed proper hardware. That’s also when I started to understand the differences between distros. I’m not flaming Ubuntu (I’m not really smart enough to have an opinion), it was just a lot of hastle for something I didn’t understand the upside of yet.
Been wrestling with my first all Linux (Debian) box. It’s a bit of a learning curve but there’s this weird headspace it frees up. It does what I tell it. There’s no random software that shows up. There’s nothing I can’t nuke. No surveys on my favorite BBQ dish in my Taskbar (true story). It’s so godamn nice. It’s the opposite of a black box.
Im getting another (3rd) box specifically to slowly replace my current desktop. Ill be fooling around with WINE and whatnot for the software I need for work, probably setting up a small windows partition for when I absolutely need it. But all in all I’ll be 90% penguin by years end.
It gets better when she shows you a secret room she has, “Baremetal”. That is where we started kissing and we bang for the whole night long.
How’s gaming support?
Decent, with proton I can play most games with no issues
For single player, the majority of games should work just fine. Most gaming issues nowadays are either because of invase DRM or anticheat, but more and more games are getting support. A large part of it is thanks to the steam deck.
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You need better eyesight then, because there are more than 2 in that photo
He was talking about the 2 windows users
They have a point. I’m in the market for a new laptop and I have, so far, returned two of them.
First, I tried a Huawei Matebook 16. I was foolish, but I thought it was “easy”. No NVidia, no dGPU at all - just part that looked very standard. It was based on the info I had gathered from a few years of Linux usage: “Basically avoid NVidia and you’re good”. It was anything but. Broken suspend, WiFi was horrible, random deadlocks, extreme slowness at times (as if the RYZEN 7 wasn’t Ryzen 7-ing) to become less smooth than my 5 year old Intel laptop, and broken audio codec (Senary Audio) that didn’t work at all on the live, and worked erratically on the installed system using generic hd-audio drivers.
I had a ~€1500 budget, but I raised it to buy a €1700 ThinkPad P16s AMD. No dGPU to speak of, sold with pre loaded Linux, boasting Canonical and Red Hat hardware certifications.
I had:
- Broken standby on Linux
- GPU bugs and screen flickering on Linux
- Various hangs and crashed
- Malfunctioning wifi and non working 6e mode. I dug, and apparently the soldered Wi-Fi adapter does not have any kind of Linux support at all, but the kernel uses a quirk to load the firmware of an older Qualcomm card that’s kinda similar on it and get it to work in Wi-Fi 6 compatibility mode.
Boggles my mind that the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors took this laptop, ran a “thorough hardware certification process” on it and let it pass. Is this a pass? How long have they tried it? Have they even tried suspending?
Of course, that was a return. But when I think about new laptops and Windows 11, basically anything works. You don’t have to pay attention to anything: suspend will work, WiFi will work, audio and speakers as well, if you need fractional scaling you aren’t in for a world of pain, and if you want an NVidia dGPU, it does work.
Furthermore, the Windows 11 compatible CPU list is completely
unofficialarbitrary, since you can still sideload Windows 11 on “unsupported” hardware and it will run with a far higher success rate than Linux on a random laptop you buy in store now. Like, it has been confirmed to run well on ancient Intel CPUs with screens below the minimum resolution. It’s basically a skin over 10 and there are no significant kernel modifications.To be clear: I don’t like Windows, but I hate this post as a consumer of bleeding edge hardware because it hides the problem under the rug - most new hardware is Windows-centric, and Linux supported options are few and far between. Nowdays not even the manufacturer declaring Linux support is enough. This friend of mine got a Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition, and if he uses ANY ISO except the default Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 audio doesn’t work at all! And my other friend with a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition has various GPU artifacts on the screen on anything except the relative Dell-customized Ubuntu 20.04 image. It’s such a minefield.
I have effectively added €500 to my budget, to now reach an outrageous €2000 for a premium Linux laptop with no significant trade-offs (mostly, I want a good screen and good performance). I am considering taking a shot in the dark and pre ordering the Framework 16, effectively swaying from traditional laptop makers entirely and hoping a fully customized laptop by a company that has been long committed to Linux support will be different.
Why would you throw away so much money for new and shitty hardware, if Linux runs perfectly on old robust devices, which can be bought for a fraction of what you invested?
I’ve never had suspend work correctly on Linux. It’s always been buggy in Windows as well. You can boot from SSDs about just as fast as waking from suspend, so I don’t even try to use it anymore.
Linux will run on anything
Ps3. Raspberry pi. Phones. All computers ive ever tried to install it on… and even M-chip macs.
Even the gotdam Leapfrog runs Linux
To be fair, Nvidia support on Linux has been historically quite poor, with users having to manually install drivers (something the average person shouldn’t have to think about). Though even that has gotten much better recently, with Debian now allowing forks to have proprietary drivers built in.
I would say Nvidia historically (10+ years) had great support for Linux.
They were officially releasing drivers with feature parity to Windows. To get real manufacturer supported drivers, for a GPU none the less, was a breath of fresh air. This was in the era of having to be careful what wifi card you choose.
Sure, you had to manually install the drivers, which was not the norm with Linux, but that was still the case with Windows too. It wasn’t until Windows 7 that “search for a driver” feature in Windows actually did something.
It’s really only been recently, with AMD releasing official GPU drivers for the kernel, that things have changed. If you were putting a GPU in a Linux computer 10 years ago it absolutely would have been Nvidia.
There’s also pop!_OS which can come preinstalled with Nvidia drivers
Pop is a fork of Ubuntu, which is a fork of Debian.
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I misread your comment, I’m super tired. But afaik pop has been the only distro to have an ISO with Nvidia drivers built in for years now, I think
Fyi Manjaro also has the option to install with proprietary drivers.
The option to install, or an ISO that comes pre-installed with the drivers?
Pre-installed, you can choose between proprietary or open source on booting the installation ISO, and depending on what you picked it will install.
I know hardware compatibility has massively improved, but back when I was messing with Linux in high school compatibility was a huge issue. I managed to end up with two laptops and some desktop hardware that were truly difficult to get running. It’s like I somehow found a list of incompatible hardware and chose the worst options.
The most frustrating were an evil Broadcom (I think) wireless card and an AMD switchable card (they did actually make a few). That graphics card wasn’t supported for very long and was a bother even in Windows.
Edit to add: I was just saying that to point out why some people might have that opinion, even if it isn’t valid anymore. I’m actually thinking of jumping back on the Linux bandwagon.
Linux will be my next OS. Win11 is a nightmare, and now with the huge progress Linux has made in the gaming space, is just a no brainer.
I’m not very experienced with it yet, but I did dial not it for a while back in college, back when Ubuntu’s Feisty Fawn was the newest shit, and Edgy Eft was the more established version. I didn’t do a whole lot with it, because I mainly used the PC to write papers for classes and gaming. And Linux gaming back then was mostly non existent.
But I did ok with using it for browsing and research and using LibreOffice to write the document. Actually had to manually write a cfg file to get the extra buttons on my mouse to work like they were supposed to.
Long story short, I don’t have much knowledge of it these days, that was back in 04-06ish. But I know enough to know how to look for what I need. And I have a friend who’s already made the switch for the same reason. I’m just paranoid to switch to it completely, as I’ve never done that, but I think I’ll be building a new rig soon anyway, so I might just start fresh with Linux for that.
Either way I’ll switch by the time Win10 ends support. I will not be installing 11 on anything of mine. I’ll probably still have family that will need it, but I’m not doing it.
To be fair… Mac works 90% with Mac hardware. It’s third party things that can screw you up… Like that pesky “USB” everyone is talking about. Who knew reading the official documentation and creating a USB driver for your own chipset would break all the USB devices not made by Mac? Who would have thought? At least there is an Intel emulation layer you can run in…
Wha? Even a bleeping potato can run Linux nowadays, with zero issues at day 1.
t. Got a Orange pi zero 3, and the lil’ bastard is rocking solid – even with (near zero) support.
Imagine not having all your drivers baked in into your kernel
More important IMO is the fact that Linux re-detects hardware on every boot! Try moving a Windows hard drive to completely new hardware and getting it to boot. Not a chance…
I’ve done that multiple times without issue.
The windows boot drive? Dont think thats possible anymore. If its completely new hardware.
Im not sure what the trigger is but if enough hardware has changed it wont boot.
I had to install windows fresh on a new hard drive when i bought a new pc last year.
If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.
You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?
Were you using BitLocker? You need to disable that before moving the drive.
Now that i think about it, i think it was an activation issue. I had a dodgey made legal copy of windows 10 when they offered the free upgrade to even those with illegal copies of windows, but when i moved it, i needed to activate and didn’t know the key.
But two replies offering different bits of advice to my comment shows that at least in part its true that this is not straightforward
Active directory and it’s integration with services such as DNS and DHCP is pretty great though. I wish Microsoft started focusing less on cloud and improved the user (or rather admin) experience of their server tools, they are quite awful is some cases.
I swear to god most of Windows Server’s tools have barely changed since NT 4.0
And sometimes they make a new tool that’s better, kinda. And then they never bother updating it to make it good. Looking at you AD admin center.
GPedit is the most annoying tool ever. Why the hell can’t I just edit GPO settings values from the active settings menu, without having to open the entire GPO and navigate the huge mess of settings.
Linux is cool and all but can it tell if I’m watching porn and suggest me other porn like windows 11?
Is the other porn at least relevant?
For Microsofts sake it sure better be
