Linux Mint is very usable these days. I switched a few months ago because I couldn't stand how bloated Windows 11 was. I haven't regretted it: it's actually refreshing how Mint just does want an OS should do and doesn't try to shove extra features down my throat.
Yes really. You’re just giving anecdotal evidence, which is fine, but the GP is still correct.
Here’s some counter anecdotal evidence: my high end sound card doesn’t work with Linux Mint. Half my motherboard’s USB ports are not recognised by Linux Mint. And my brand new Apple Studio Display only partially works with Linux Mint.
All works 100% on Windows.
I’d still recommend moving away from Windows, but you must be honest that Linux OS’s still have more problems with hardware (in general). And for novice users/tech-unsavvy peeps, the amount of terminal time is still far too high.
Personally, I was only holding on to Windows for music production. But the other day I logged into Windows 11 after not having used it for a while and - whatever update had installed - it started causing audio dropouts on my 64 core machine, 128gb ram, with nvme drives and pro sound card!
That was the last straw for me. I ordered the new M4 Mac Mini Pro, which I’ll use just for music production. And continue with Linux Mint on my PC for everything else.
I’ve used Windows in one form or another since 3.1, but the amount of crap they keep loading on my machine without my permission and the generally hostile approach to users: “Let’s keep setting up your machine. Yes | Maybe Later”, let’s not. Let’s never use Windows again.
The point I was trying to make is that they're not going to. That would take effort and learning something new. They just want a working computer, yesterday, and they're not going to waste time with "that Linux thing".
For some, I think it's a bit more fundamental than that.
I'll give an example of a conversation with a family member, who bought a used computer a few months ago and claimed it was "broken" (they didn't know where the power button was, and thought the charging cable was wrong (it was USB-C))
Me: "Oh, well since it's used, we should probably do a clean install. I can reinstall Windows for you if you want...but if you're interested, or I could do Linux instead. It works as well as Windows, but if your computer ever breaks, I'm not sure a technician could fix it as easily. It's got different benefits though, and would use this older hardware better."
Them: "Oh? But how could you even do that?"
Me: "Linux installs are pretty easy. As easy as Windows install."
Them: "But isn't this a Windows laptop?" (It was a ThinkPad.
Me: "No...it's just a laptop. Your laptop. You're not required to use Windows. You can use whatever you want. You own it."
Them: "But how could it have Linux if it already had Windows? I thought this was a 'Windows' laptop? Doesn't this only work with Windows?"
Me: "It can have Windows. It could also have Linux, instead. It's just what's installed right now to make the computer work. It's yours to do with as you wish."
I could kind of see a look of surprise on their face. It hadn't even occurred to them that they were permitted to install anything but Windows, because they saw it as a "Windows" laptop.
Ultimately I ended up reinstalling Windows because they were afraid of dealing with the unknown, as you mentioned.
You could try putting Linux on it anyway and just call it Windows. Well it is - X Windows, unless it's Waythingie and who's counting anyway.
Think about how wanky the entire IT experience really is: from phone to laptop to desktop. No one really knows what is going on: a user keeps poking at widgets until it does something.
Most people have no idea what is going on, per se, and I do recall how confusing things looked when I first discovered the concept of folders/directories. That would be the very early '80s.
I certainly did consider it, and even told them as much. Ultimately though, I tried to imagine what it would feel like if I asked a friend to do something to my car, he agreed, then did something completely different because "it's better"; it might be, but I'd kind of resent it on principle. :/
I did make sure to mention that the chromebook they had at home, as well as the smartphone they were using, were both technically (kind of) Linux, which threw them for a loop! Haha. :) I try to "plant seeds" and watch if any trust/interest grows naturally with time.
"It hadn't even occurred to them that they were permitted to install anything but Windows"
Well, Microsoft certainly would like it, if this would not be the case. And some argue they tried to advance this concept with locking down the bootloader a bit.
The point OP was trying to make is that for most people, they don't need to learn anything new - If all they're going to be doing is fire up Chrome and go to Facebook or whatever, then the OS doesn't really matter to them.
The minor UI/UX differences between Windows and say, a distro running KDE or XFCE isn't any greater than the difference between two major Windows versions. I mean, look at Windows 11, a lot of normies were unhappy about the center oriented taskbar. And look at the mess that Windows 8 was - no start button initially, and a fullscreen start menu.
The proof in the pudding is the relative success of Chromebooks - normies buy it knowing that all they need is a browser, and they didn't need to take any big effort to learn anything new.
>The proof in the pudding is the relative success of Chromebooks
Actually, I think Chromebooks are a failure. Google used the wrong strategy, namely being too controlling and restrictive, with Chromebooks. This is diametrically opposite to Chrome or Android. Chrome and Android's pitch was simple, "No matter how shit your hardware is, we'll give you a good operating system/browser". It was a lost closer to the linux ethos. Chromebooks on the other hard are integrated and licensed devices that manufacturers make in collaboration with Google. They are all crap because Google's needs are different from the manufacturer's or the market's. Outside of the education sector, where there is some product market fit, they are useless trash. A waste of so much good technology.
"Outside of the education sector, where there is some product market fit, they are useless trash"
Give me another ultramobile and rugged linux laptop for 300 bucks with touchscreen and I gladly take it. I also would consider a more expensive one, but for outdoor use, I never found a better working device than chromebooks.
Of course the OS by itself is terrible. Via VMs every app is possible, but for me I have a very simple dev device with node and chrome dev tools (in developer mode)
When I said success, I didn't say that in terms of technology or market share, I meant it in terms of normies being able to adapt to a different OS without having to undergo training. The fact that normies were able to simply pick up and use a Chromebook shows that people can use a different non-mainstream OS, as long as their needs are simple.
My wife rocks Arch. She calls it Facebook and email and internet.
On a more serious note, my work intranet wiki page for turning a stock Ubuntu (Kubuntu but I also allow any Ubuntu variant) box into a corporate one is getting quite short these days.
It's a lot shorter than the Windows equivalent one. They are hamstrung by the lack of a central software source.
> Also, the main problem with linux on laptops are still drivers. Standby issues, broken keyboard backlighting, mousepad not working after resume, ...
This simply doesn't happen when you buy from an established vendor that sells computers with Linux out of the box. My suggestion these days is: even if you're going to use windows, buy a computer that comes with Linux; drivers (even windows drivers) are usually better. Use windows on a VM and only install it baremetal if performance is an issue.
I installed Linux Mint on samsung 500c chromebook, 3 thinkpads, 2 optiplexes, an old gateway, an old lenovo ideapad, a new lenovo yoga, one of those weird Dell laptops, an x64 tablet, in a VM on my phone...
All of them, including the thinkpads with the weird hybrid GPUs, worked out of the box with 0 immediate issues. For the thinkpads, I did all the updates and chose the proprietary Nvidia drivers, rebooted, and...
Yup, no issues, the drivers work fine, I can switch power profiles and over/underclock the GPUs without any issues and without any extra software. Keyboard backlights work fine. Camera works fine. I can set up the fingerprint sensor to do fancy things like output the fingerprint to a png. WiFi has no issues.
I think most of the naysayers think it's still 2014 when these things were actually an issue.
Well, I installed Linux on 2 Asus, 2 HP, 1 Acer, 1 Dell Laptop. And tried out, Ubuntu (Lubuntu), Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Mint and now Fedora. None of the laptops worked stable, like my chromebooks do. I do close and open and resume a lot, maybe your use case is more stationary? Mine is mobile - and I gladly take recommendations for reliable lightweight linux laptops (with touchscreen).
If the old laptop runs the 'windows things' just fine under Linux and word goes around about that old pile of chips suddenly being much faster and less intrusive 'people' might just go around and install Linux or have other people do that for them. It is not Windows people want, it is the software running on the things they want.
Yes and no. I think at the base, everyone just wants their software to run. The challenge is, people don't want to have to learn anything new to do that. What are most people comfortable with? Windows. Why? It was on their school computers, probably on their parents' computers and most likely on their work computers.
I think if schools had their computer labs (if that's still a thing), running Ubuntu 24.04 and taught computer basics on Libreoffice, that is what people would want on their home computers, if they could go to Best Buy and buy a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed.
Maybe over the next 5-10 years we see this change as some schools issue Chromebooks?
The people who are 'used to Windows' will often be none the wiser if they're confronted with a Linux installation which is configured to look like Windows. Windows has many faces going back all the way to Windows 3.1 and many of those faces can show up when clicking around on a 'current' Windows version. This rather inconsistent look and feel means it is fairly easy to create something which more or less looks and acts like Windows in the eyes of those 'used to Windows' since they're used to things sometimes looking out of place.
I think Windows is close to the end of being ubiquitous. The more Microsoft forces online features onto its users, the more those users will see Windows as that thing which launches the browser and with that the easier it will be to get people used to alternatives, especially if those alternatives offer many advantages over whatever Microsoft is peddling under the Windows moniker.
My mother - 86 years old - uses Linux (Debian with Mate, default theme), she knows it is Linux but it does not matter since she uses it in the same way as she used Windows 7: as a launcher for Firefox and Thunderbird and occasionally as an interface to her phone so I can help her remotely given that she lives in the Netherlands and I live in Sweden. Apart from Linux being faster and less intrusive there are no real differences as far as she is concerned. She used to click on Firefox and Thunderbird icons on the desktop on Windows 7, now she clicks on Firefox and Thunderbird icons on the desktop on Debian Mate. There are many more people like her who use personal computers in this way and they are much better off running some Linux flavour which is kept up to date, which does not spy on them, which does not try to upsell them, which does not insist on contrived expiry dates after which they need to buy new hardware so as to run the next version of the intrusive spyware called Windows 11/12/...
> People would rather go to Best Buy and get a new laptop than try something different.
Some people simply don't have that option. Other people may have that option, but would end up with something worse simply because their budget only allows for a hobbled machine. In the past they may have been able to resort to the second-hand market or cast off machines in order to get something much better.
Granted, most of these people are also willing to run an unsupported operating system. Perhaps a handful would be willing to jump zealously into Linux.
I occasionally use my steam deck as a desktop replacement but I'm always relieved to go back to my windows 10 desktop, for two reasons:
1) No native Onenote app. Nothing else checks all the boxes I need for a note taking app - easy enough for a non techie to use, shared notebooks, mobile apps, easy formatting (i.e. no markdown, etc)
2) A bunch of things are slightly "off". Can't customize mouse scroll wheel behavior, things like sleep/wifi occasionally don't work, other things I've forgotton.
I'm resigned to de-shittifying windows 11 when I eventually replace my new desktop.
> They bought a Windows laptop, for Windows things... People would rather go to Best Buy and get a new laptop than try something different.
If they want to go that route and they can afford it, so what? I think the recommendation was for those who want a way to keep their current device functional.
We are 100% truly in the time of "desktop linux". It has never been better. Unless you have a video game that 100% must run on Windows, or a specific application, there is really no reason to be there. If you want a desktop environment that looks and feels like Windows, I would suggest KDE. Out of the box it is pretty close, but it is one of the most customizable DE's out there and can truly be made to look and feel just like Windows.
I've never seen anybody using the Web version of Office 365, outside the Outlook web client. All the companies I've worked at in the last 10 years are still using the installable versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint etc. The web versions are not even comparable.
Not for everything. Microsoft still don't have a working set of Rules for the web version of Outlook, so if you have anybody who uses rules to organise their inbox into different folders they are stuck with the desktop version of Outlook.
You can create server-side rules via “Settings → Mail → Rules” in Outlook Web. While more limited than Outlook for Windows client-side rules, they're fine for simple "move emails from x to folder y"-type rules, and are particularly useful for people like me who rarely use Outlook at all.
You can also create server-side rules in the Exchange admin center if you have access.
The web version of Word is a bad joke. I couldn’t even use it for editing a story the last time I tried it because it either didn’t have change tracking or it didn’t work correctly. At least the iOS app is useable.
Web apps in general are a bad joke. They never, ever work as well as a real desktop app. At best they are a port in a storm because you can't use the real version of the application for whatever reason, but they aren't viable as a replacement and likely never will be.
No COM integration, no VBA and no Active Directory support.
Business and engineering software uses Windows APIs to integrate with MS Office and Active Directory. The APIs are not portable and hard to replicate on emulation layers. The software is old so expect a huge pile of examples of Hyrum's law. So you need bug-for-bug API layer implementation to run those software elsewhere.
Migrating companies off from that software is actually harder than creating a clone of Windows.
WRT gaming its mostly just some anti cheat that is standing in the way, like Ars [1] so gently put it:
> As detailed in the r/macgaming subreddit and at r/SteamDeck, many players who successfully got Marvel Rivals working would receive a "Penalty Issued" notice, with a violation "detected" and bans issued until 2124. Should such a ban stand, players risked entirely missing the
much-prophesied Year of the Linux Desktop or Mainstream Mac Gaming, almost certain to happen at some point in that span.
For non-gaming, things are not moving fast enough. Microsoft Office and Adobe CS is still complicated to get running, if possible at all with recent versions.
For me, when I switched to Linux, I had to start thinking out of the box. Microsoft's OS and Adobe's Cloud are hostile environments that are designed to lock you into a ecosystem that isn't in your best interest. As people start figuring this out, and have had enough, like I finally did one day, more and more people are going to look to alternatives.
I dropped Adobe and Windows[0] because of this. I can do this because I am tech savvy, but as more technically inclined people do this, it creates incentives to make it easier for the rest.
I agree with you and also don't use either of these apps. (for context I use LibreOffice and some Gimp, and I have been running Linux on my desktop for more than half of my life fwiw).
I also don't play online games so I personally don't care for anti-cheat games.
My point was about the resistance for moving to Linux in the first place.
With out-of-the-box support for the mentioned apps, we could see much more organizations/companies consider moving over to Linux.
Not having Microsoft Office is a show-stopper for many organizations and companies.
Anti-cheat is a show-stopper for many tech savy individuals who already tried making the jump.
Also I had to finally come to the conclusion that if I wanted control over my own house, I'm going to have to make sacrifices. Like Games with anti-cheat that don't work on Linux right now. More and more games with anti-cheat are starting to see the benefits of Linux. So I started letting go of products that don't let me use them the way I want to. It took some discipline, but my life is more stress free now. Now some of the games that require anti-cheat that were not playable on Linux 2 years ago have migrated their anti-cheat to steam's implementation.
Unless we get a stable ecosystem for closed source apps and drivers it is not going to happen. Android is the very example of that. A closed source software friendly OS with the backing of a tech giant. It also has to provide an almost complete translation layer. Wine is fine for simpler programs using contained APIs like games. It is far behind for any business app.
The polishing required for the masses requires people with huge talent and years of experience to work on the software. That talent doesn't want to work for scraps. So unless a tech giant decides to hedge tens of billions against Apple and Microsoft and give it away for free like Google did with Android, we are not going to get an OS that has good OOTB experience and a thriving business grade software.
I don't think so. Linux still hasn't figured out how to install programs smoothly. In fact, installing a Windows program on Linux is easier than installing a Linux native program. Anything released in AppImage format requires you to write your own config file to get a shortcut and icon? Seriously? Until they figure that out the average person is going to quickly give up on it.
While this is an issue for some smaller programs, for the vast majority of stuff installing and updating programs is just so much easier on Linux than Windows. I don't have to go searching for a download link, I just open up my distro's package manager and search for what I want. One of the major things that has helped Linux is that a lot more things are just web apps now.
What I really think is the unacceptable thing that will hold people from using Linux permanently is the abysmal power management for laptops. I cannot get my Framework 13 to reliably last more than 24 hours with the lid closed when Windows easily lasts multiple days.
Who's still distributing with AppImage? Most desktop distros these days are based on flatpak or snap, which are as one-click-easy as any other app store, and certainly don't require writing any config files. When you do need to configure the packaging, e.g. to access different directories, there's a standard GUI for that purpose (buried deep in settings, but most people won't be using it).
Which desktop environment did you select? I run Debian 12 bookworm with the Gnome desktop environment. But I suspect KDE or MATE may be more appealing to Windows converts.
KDE is leaps and bounds better than gnome. It can be customized to be minimal. Gnome is just minimal and painful for the sake of trying to mimic macOS but in a terrible manner.
What's the actual attack surface for an outdated home PC? My understanding is the threat to win PCs is 50% you clicked the wrong link (outdated browser problem, not OS) and 50% lateral move (probably not meaningful in a home environment?). Like if I plugged my Windows 7 laptop, last updated 2018 into my network, what would happen?
What I'm getting at is "instead of throwing out your old PC you can install Linux" is just a long winded way of saying "throw out your old PC" for many people. I think "here's how to keep running an old PC safely" would be more useful advice.
I'm with several opinions around. I keep a windows box with office just because of the intrincated format of a long frequently updated bunch of related docs (about 15 years now, time flies...). Used windows 8 until the hdd "expired" recently, now 10 in an inexpensive little cube. For all the rest, mint and cinamom are a perfect fit. Simple as that. I had enough of complex machinery in my (professionally active) time...
okay, i should have been more specific. how would one activate an LTSC installation? last time i looked into it, you could not actually purchase a single LTSC license as an individual user.
Those are trial versions. You cannot fully activate them without doing the equivalent of a full OS install. You need to find a corporate partner and buy a whole bunch of regular Win 10/11 Pro licenses and you're eligible to get LTSC which costs a fair bit of money.
Can you give me the link I should forward to my parents? They're still on Windows 10 home and I don't think they're even aware that they'll need to either pay up or figure something else out this year.
Might as well use Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 at that point, supported until 2034. Been using as a daily driver since it came out last year, pretty much the same good experience as with the Windows 10 LTSC.
I don't expect third-party desktop application developers to continue supporting Windows 10 until 2034, given that the IoT Enterprise license agreement prohibits desktop use.
Which is not to say most applications won't continue to run, but it wouldn't surprise me if, say, Valve stopped supporting Steam on Windows 10 in five years or so, as they did with Windows <10 last year.
My laptop has been running Pop OS for the past 5 years and its been a delight to use for dev stuff and random gaming, really wish i could move my desktop to Linux too but i mostly use that for gaming and don’t really want to reboot my PC and switch OS when i need to play a game with anticheat.
Posting YT links here feels a bit lame, but this amazingly-produced animation by James Lee actually got my hopes up that people are finally starting to break up with proprietary programs and operating systems: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lm51xZHZI6g
I had a brief (one week) love affair with Wubuntu because it tried as much as possible to have everything with the same name in the same menu in the same location etc. etc. as Windows 11. People spend years building up their muscle memory and hate having to throw it away...then I found out it was basically a malware distro. Pity. I'm always looking for the perfect distro I would reccommend to Grandma.
I'm still a distro hopper. Pop_OS! and Cinnamon Mint until something better comes along.
'The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring interest in Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.'[1]
A better metric is the "Average visitor rating", which is included on every distro page. Mint is rated 8.75/10 from 751 reviews. Here is a page listing distros by Average visitor rating: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ranking
Distro watch's ranking isn't a good metric since it could be gamed easily. My understanding is it's just based on the number of clicks on the website, which I bet is gamed. I doubt MX Linux is actually that popular. I've never known a linux user who runs it, I have ran it myself several times. But I have known more Void users than MX users.
Addition: This isn't a dig at MX. I enjoyed the times I've installed it. I personally like it, although it's not my main go to distribution. Just that distrowatch's ranking isn't reflective of reality.
I installed MX Linux years ago and have not looked back. It has been incredibly stable and easy to upgrade. While I had ubuntu and mint regularly get trashes on system updates in the past.
Zorin OS is the closest thing I've tried to the Windows experience. It's not 1-to-1 but it's pretty close. It's got a Wine compatibility layer that makes .exe files click-to-install in most cases but I've only needed to use it a couple of times for a workstation setup so I can't vouch for advanced use cases like gaming.
I bounce off Linux every few years because I always run into a "that's just broken and if you don't like it go eff yourself" situation. Maybe sleep doesn't work right, or battery health charge limiting doesn't work, or I can't change the order of the window control buttons without throwing the whole WM out, or my 1% lows go absolutely in the trash, or some other obscure things just doesn't work.
Also the whole "Wayland was supposed to replace X twenty years ago but a third of software doesn't work on Wayland" thing is just super embarrassing and makes me feel like the entire Linux ecosystem doesn't know what it's doing.
Over the past decade I've had far worse luck with Windows for power-management-related problems.
Wayland is indeed an embarrassment, but it adds approximately 0 value for most users, so you can just tell everyone to use X11 still and everything will just work.
(my most recent peeve stopping me from using Wayland: Firefox no longer remembers which windows belong on which virtual desktops. I don't know whose bug this would be by normal rules, but if you want to replace the entire ecosystem, you have to take responsibility to fix ALL of the bugs)
i don't think any of the distros in that list come with KDE Plasma as their default/flagship offering; it's not the same as windows but i think it will be a lot more familiar to a windows user than the more macos-like offerings like Gnome
specific distro recommendations with plasma ig are Fedora KDE Spin[1] and uBlue Aurora[2]
