Windows has turned itself into spyware. Apple is too expensive and going the same way.
Meanwhile the user experience of Linux has dramatically increased. Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference. You don't need to reply that you can, I know you can. You're on HN. But most people just use their computer for the browser and most people can't tell Chrome from Firefox. Most people get their lockin by their tech friend or child. Really, Microsoft's only lockin remains Office.
It won't be a complete shift but the signs of growing userbase is there. Would be a huge win for open source! If you haven't tried Linux in a few years try giving something like PopOS a go or if you want to say you use Arch then try EndeavourOS. Both are very stable, latter slightly less.
Edit: enfuse was right, I should have suggested EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro.
The problem is, until laptops sold at Walmart or Best Buy start coming with Linux pre-installed as an option, adoption will never happen. Installing an aftermarket OS is just an incredibly unrealistic expectation from the average user.
Microsoft knows this, and they will do everything they can to prevent OEMs from shipping anything other than Windows. Apple of course, forget it. Their profit comes from leeching off FOSS and selling it, they would never allow distribution of it directly.
> until laptops sold at Walmart or Best Buy start coming with Linux pre-installed as an option
This is a circular problem though. They'll do it if Linux starts becoming more popular.
If you want to see this, make sure your browser agent is broadcasting Linux[0]. Make sure you're using Steam in Linux.
But right now Steam has Linux at <3%[1]. It is more than OSX, but not enough. I do think above 5% and it'll start to be taken seriously, and 10% we'll start seeing moves. Linux doesn't need 90% of the marketshare to dramatically change the world. 10% is more than enough. Even 20% would be momentous and force both Microsoft and Apple to change strategies. Don't feel like there's no hope. Just because it is an unrealistic expectation today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. And your actions today change the odds of what happens tomorrow. So don't give up.
You don't have to change the world overnight. But you do need to make steps in the right direction, even if small, to make the world move.
[0] You can even do this while using Windows! Hell, you can use Chrome and tell people you're using Firefox on Linux if you believe in those things but just are unwilling to make the switch yourself. The signaling still does something (it is better than nothing).
I think the overwhelming majority of this is Steam Deck usage. While that's certainly a feather in the cap for Linux, I don't think really counts toward Linux momentum as we're using the term here. Nobody is going to start investing in polished desktop Linux software because there are a lot of Steam Deck buyers.
> I think the overwhelming majority of this is Steam Deck usage
Please click the link and on the OS tab for a breakdown, as your conjecture is falsifiable[0]
MOST POPULAR PERCENTAGE CHANGE
------------------------------------------------------
Linux 2.27% -0.06%
------------------------------------------------------
"Arch Linux" 64 bit 0.21% -0.02%
Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 0.14% +0.02%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 0.10% 0.00%
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.10% 0.00%
"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 0.06% 0.00%
"EndeavourOS Linux" 64 bit 0.06% 0.00%
Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 0.05% 0.00%
We do know that SteamOS is Arch based. So yeah, it is the dominant player there. I'm not entirely surprised, but I don't think anyone was.
But important to note, there's only a 0.05 difference between Arch and Mint. It's important to note because
1) Arch is incredibly popular and we can't guarantee all users in the Arch category are SteamOS users
2) Mint is currently the most popular distro[1]
> Nobody is going to start investing in polished desktop Linux software because there are a lot of Steam Deck buyers.
Maybe not, but also polishing of the Linux desktop has happened regardless of this. In fact, it is what drove SteamOS. Please refer to the items on [1] as literally the top 8 distros were developed for this explicit purpose (making Linux more user friendly).
I came back and found the difference. You clicked "Linux Only". But I'm glad you did, because it gives us additional information helping us actually answer the previous question more accurately. Strongly falsifying the earlier conjecture that they were mostly SteamOS. We can see only a third are. 2/3rds of Linux Gamers are NOT using SteamOS (definitely a subset of SteamOS users are also not using a Steam Deck)
"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 33.78% -0.70%
"Arch Linux" 64 bit 9.45% -0.23%
Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.41% +0.15%
Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 6.20% +0.89%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.62% +0.23%
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.44% +0.26%
"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 2.61% -0.05%
"EndeavourOS Linux" 64 bit 2.46% +0.06%
Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 2.27% -0.08%
Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.23% +0.02%
Other 25.54% -0.53%
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux
With the number of Steam Decks sold estimated at 3-4 million, and the number of monthly active Steam users being around 130 million, I think it's safe to say that 0.21% does not represent SteamOS install base.
As far as I know, SteamOS doesn't show as Arch, but rather as its own thing
The way to make Linux takeover is get kids using it
To get kids using it needs to do lots of cool shit easily
Windows could play games easily when Linux could not even use a USB mouse
The time is right to make Linux do cool shit easily with local generative models that help iteratively create games
Replace all the desktop legacy with some blank canvas and local models that draw on the canvas. Ship some baked in models to generate shells of games to iterate from, boom.
This is exactly the fear of big SaaS and why VCs outside a key handful are done with it.
Apple Silicon is a glimpse of local compute future. Fanless laptops running models that generate entire coherent universes like Marvel and Star Wars. (Don’t need giant models just dense enough to get 80% and let users “zoom and enhance” with their own input)
Show that potential with local models on Linux and it’s over. Three options then; government demands hardware is locked down to preserve Hollywood/gaming/media, open compute wins, or both sides destroy the world over it.
In an interview with IGN during Covid lockdown Gabe Newell was describing generative AI as an existential threat to content creators. It could be temporary as the next gen grows up with a new normal and doesn’t obsess about a career in digital design or web dev, yt video production. It could end humanity as existential dread settles in for millions stuck in some narrative about their existence that no longer holds economic value.
> The way to make Linux takeover is get kids using it
Agree!
> Windows could play games easily when Linux could not even use a USB mouse
I don't think I've ever had a USB mouse (or wireless mouse or keyboard) issue in the last 15 years.
Games? I'll give you that. But honestly, Steam has really made that almost a non-issue. Good guy steam! (their work has affected more than SteamOS)
> Replace all the desktop legacy with some blank canvas and local models
This seems like the opposite of what you initially argued.
Models as in... LLMs or ML models? This seems like a great way to break things. I'd really encourage you to get these things to try to do what you're saying they should do.
> Apple Silicon is
Where are you going with this?
> Show that potential with local models on Linux and it’s over.
I'm an ML researcher... these models are generally made and deployed on linux systems. Explicitly because they work better there and is easier to deal with.
> In an interview with IGN during Covid lockdown
Serious question: you okay? Did a LLM contribute to your comment? Did a LLM make the whole comment? GPT, can you describe to me Act 4 Scene 5 from Henry V but as told by a Pirate from the deep south? (American south)
Kernel-level anti-cheats. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any sort of competitive multiplayer gaming these days, but also increasingly common even for online coop. And they usually only work on Windows.
KDE has seen plenty of activity related to the Steam Desk, I heard. Valve regularly contribute to Wine, which is used for desktop Windows software. If the entire stack is consistent between the two, how wouldn't it translate to better desktop software? It's the same as how server investment in the kernel benefits the desktop users, only with a much greater intersection.
I think a lot of people feel powerless when going against such big entities. I get this. But I think it is important to remind everyone that you don't need to do everything at once.
Our job often involves breaking down big problems into many little problems. So it should be clear that making little steps makes progress towards solving the big problems. It can be easy to feel like that progress isn't happening and it can be frustrating that it isn't happening fast enough. But our experience should also tell us that it all seems to quickly come together towards the end. There was never a magic leap, it was all the small steps put together.
Linux advocacy often reminds me of a favourite quote from Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
I think it’s very promising, if you believe in the potential of Linux on the desktop, that gaming used to be the standard “Linux doesn’t do what I need, so I stay on Windows” argument. Thanks to a lot of investment and hard work, particularly by Valve and others contributing to software like Wine/Proton, that is no longer the case. Many games work fine on Linux today, even among the big names. Some even have native versions. It mostly seems to be “anti-cheat” measures that are statistically indistinguishable from malware that still cause trouble.
Another potential sticking point for adoption by home users today is that few, if any, of the big streaming services work well on Linux. This also seems to come down at least partly to DRM. A cynic might suggest that this is because Linux will give a more appropriate response if a copy protection system tries to do invasive things that it has no business doing on someone else’s computer. In any case, it’s another significant barrier, but if we could get to the point where you could at least watch HD content like users of other platforms when you’re paying the same subscription fees, it’s another barrier that could fall.
This latter example is, of course, more than a little ironic given the subject of today’s discussion. But then the behaviour that the DRM system is being subverted to protect against by Signal probably wouldn’t fly for more than five minutes on Linux in the first place, so I don’t think Linux not enabling intrusive/abusive DRM is really the problem here…
I agree. I think the problem is it is easier to see the distance we still need to go than the distance we've already covered. It is good to reflect and look back, seeing how far we've come. It's the best thing to motivate continued efforts forward.
> It mostly seems to be “anti-cheat” measures that are statistically indistinguishable from malware that still cause trouble.
This seems to be a big hitch. But we also know that studios will drop these methods (hopefully in favor of ones that actually work without being incredibly invasive) if the userbase pushes back. They can only make these moves because people don't care. Or they care only as far as their mouth, but not to their wallet. Certainly there is addiction here, and that should be accounted for, but it does still warrant push. That's only sufficient as an explanation, rather than an excuse.
This seems like a worldview borne from an era where the PC was _the_ definitive, ubiquitous computing device of choice for the layperson. These days, that crown is taken by the smartphone.
If you need a PC in 2025, you're probably a fair bit more knowledgeable than someone buying one in 2005. You're also almost certainly buying one online, possibly even directly from the manufacturer or builder, which means the seller can simply give you options and doesn't have to worry about competing for store shelf space.
Surely the people who speak of "linux on the desktop" (not me, for the record) are at least in some small sense alluding to being able to have some of the freedoms historically associated with Linux, originating in the GNU movement and all that? The right to study, share, etc.
What I mean is that I would have picked Android as quite a good example of how the technicality of running the Linux kernel under the hood means very little in terms of users being empowered, or anything of the sort.
You are correct. If folks want that "freedom," then these are not the droids they are looking for.
However, folks that want that freedom, are a pretty small segment of the population, heavily represented in this community. Apple is a 3 trillion-dollar company, because most folks aren't like HN members.
iOS is pretty much Apple’s fully bespoke operating system at this point. You might be overestimating how much it actually shares with Unix (it boils down to a few standard libraries and terminal commands and no actual code).
Functionally, iOS and Linux are only about as similar as a penguin and a robotic statue of a penguin.
Well, I'm not sure exactly what's under the hood, but I write Apple software, and I use a lot of the same NSXXX calls that have been in it since the dawn of OSX.
NextStep was a shell over FreeBSD. MacOS X was an evolution of NextStep.
Some time ago, I wrote a network driver for iOS, and used BSD sockets, accessed via standard C. I remember using the BSD manual, to figure out how to use them.
The NS calls behave the same now, as they did, back when OSX was new, and, at that time, MacOS was definitely UINX. iOS is a direct descendant of MacOS.
macOS is literally certified Unix. Apple still shells out for certification of their new releases, although I'm not sure what they're getting out of it given that macOS Server isn't a thing anymore.
iOS is arguably a subset, but whether it's Unix-like or not is a philosophical question depending on how you define the minimal set of features that'd make it one. It's certainly not Unix-like from the end user perspective.
> Microsoft knows this, and they will do everything they can to prevent OEMs from shipping anything other than Windows
You're right and they effectively licensed XP to Asus for free for use on the Eee PC (which originally only shipped with Linux) when it was shaping up to be a hit.
The way that the netbook 'evolutionary branch' went from lean and mean to underspecified bloated windows small laptops is one where I really wonder if MS suffocated something that would have been to their benefit longer term if only they could have put out their own lean OS and an ecosystem of lean software to run on it.
It was at the time mobiles were picking up momentum, and just before tablets arrived on the scene (the ipad launched 2010, the tablet focused Android 3 came out in 2011), and a lot of people migrated away from windows for their personal computing needs. There's also been MS's ultimately failed efforts for their own mobile platform. Besides the established huge momentum of gaming and professional/office usage it's difficult to see why consumers would move to windows, or what MS offers to prevent the momentum slowing and linux slowly chipping away at it.
I worked at a computer shop at the time. Few consumers wanted the Linux versions: they all chose Windows. I'm not sure the license was free, as the Windows machines were more expensive with the same hardware.
So I checked on the Internet Archive; we sold the EEEPC 900 with Linux for €329, and the Windows EEEPC 901 for €409. The Linux had a Celeron M and the Windows an Atom N270, so I guess I misremember them having identical specs.
I assume the Atom is faster(?) The XP machine felt slower though.
Most people just don't care that they're being spied on. Most people don't care about anything actually, they're in a constant state of despair and see no point to anything so they just try to make the best of the time they have.
Adoption is already happening, as it has been for years, but especially now that MS and Apple are producing worse and worse OS/software that treats the people who use it worse and worse. I'm frequently pleasantly surprised by hearing that someone uses a Linux machine with regularity. It used to be a really rare, techie-only kind of thing. Pulling people away from literal decades of complete personal-computing domination with a completely free, near-zero-marketing alternative is a very slow, gradual process. It's great that those dominant vendors are doing their very best to push everyone to the alternatives :)
This is all well and good, but the problem is, I've seen comments word for word like this one back in 2006 - and wrote some of them myself even. Back then it was Vista that was supposed to drive Windows users away, and, indeed, I personally helped some brave folk switch. Some lasted longer than ours but all were eventually back on Windows.
Yeah, for me the big difference is the past year or two people are actually asking me about Linux and wanting my help to try it out because they are sick of Windows and sick of the forced updates. My aunt's external HDD got wiped from a Win10 forced update (no clue why, I didn't investigate in-depth). People are just done with that shit.
Until these vendors break into EDU it’s an uphill battle.
In WA, every school has Microsoft smart boards and laptops running windows. Kids grow up using it and when they buy their own computers they aren’t going to choose a small boutique builder running an unfamiliar OS they won’t know how to use right away.
Apple has a lock on a lot of EDU as well, and the iPhone is so ubiquitous it’s an easy sell to get folk using other products
Those systems look beautiful but it’s a minority of people that will make a large purchase on something like this.
You think kids have brand loyalty to the vendors that scam/muscle/bribe their way into the classroom?
Most of the EDU software is trash, the incentives are all aligned to spend billions on acquiring the contract and close to zero on execution and most of these kids are traumatized from sitting in a classroom with some clueless dope at the front yelling at them to IPad IPad IPad algebra
You can buy a PC with Linux off the shelf in some countries. In practice, it's an open secret that the machines are for people who don't want to pay for a Windows license but will use Windows anyway.
Is it? You can get an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $699 now. That's more than many of the bottom-of-the-barrel Windows machines out there, but it's not an unreasonable price at all. It'll keep away the lowest-end users, but most of those users 1) are not going to care about the security issues, because they don't know anything about computers beyond base utility, and 2) have mostly switched to doing everything on their phone/tablet, and aren't as big of the computer demographic these days anyway.
The $699 MacBook Air has 8GB of RAM. That's hardly enough now, much less if you plan to keep it for a few years. Which hardly matters when you can get 64GB of DDR5 to put in it for less than $100. Except that it isn't upgradable.
I've been using 8 GB of RAM MacBook since 2015, and by then this “8 GB isn't enough” chorus was strong. Nowadays I use a M1 Air, 8 GB of RAM, zero complains, really.
For most people that just browse the web, write some stuff and do their email, 8 GB is still enough.
many people in this thread are saying average users are just using their web browser, so they are “served fine with linux”. But apparently 8GB is unacceptable to run a web browser on mac os.
So which is it? lol.
And FYI 8GB is more than enough for a casual desktop/laptop user, at least on the M series macs. I used my wife’s M1 macbook air with 8GB of ram for a week while my new laptop was shipping in the mail. Even if I pushed it with 1 or 2 heavy apps, such as IntelliJ IDE (java development), it performs pretty well, albeit with some paging to disk on large projects. Barely noticeable and the system remained very responsive. For casual usage (zoom, google docs, gmail, instagram) it didn’t fill up the ram.
> many people in this thread are saying average users are just using their web browser, so they are “served fine with linux”. But apparently 8GB is unacceptable to run a web browser on mac os.
Are these things in contradiction? A web browser can very easily use more than 8GB of RAM by itself.
> Barely noticeable and the system remained very responsive.
"It's fine to run out of ram and start swapping because the SSD is fast."
Yeah, Apple's bottom barrel pricing isn't terrible, but as soon as you start upping specs the price goes out of control (disproportionally from the underlying costs.) Looking at pricing for the current Macbook Air, it's $400 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB. A 16GB SODIMM costs ~$40 retail.
That $40 16GB SODIMM is significantly slower than the memory they use - even on the desktop side 16GB of comparable DDR costs twice as much, and that’s before you factor in the latency and bandwidth hit.
The problem is that there’s no alternative in the Mac world for people who don’t want the fastest option any more. Moving from the 16GB MacBook Air to the 32GB is a mandatory CPU/GPU upgrade and there’s no way to only buy one of the two if you don’t need the other.
> That $40 16GB SODIMM is significantly slower than the memory they use
No it isn't, Apple uses ordinary LPDDR5. The higher end models achieve higher bandwidth in the same way as HEDT PCs: By using more memory channels. The base M1 in that MacBook Air doesn't even do that, it has the same memory bandwidth as dual channel DDR5 PCs.
I've been using an M1 MBP with 8GB of RAM since 2020 for video editing, Blender, music production, and web development, and it's fine. It's not perfect, but it's totally serviceable and I rarely think about it, which tells me that 8GB is enough for the average computer user who's doing much less intense work.
If your SSD is near its max-capacity, then any extra wear has a bad affect on its longevity. But modern SSD’s handle excess writes very well if they are not near capacity.
A few extra GB written to disk daily is a drop in the bucket in an SSD’d TBW rating, no??
I’d say for a casual user with low storage needs, it’s perfectly fine. Otherwise it’s a bad idea imo.
What's telling for me is that SSDs have been a readily available consumer part for around 15 years now, a default option in PCs for quite a while now, and to my knowledge there hasn't been many tales of SSDs dying (specifically for write endurance or otherwise) beyond occasional bad models like the old OCZ vortex2s. Even early torture tests were finding that you'd need to push around 2PB of writes (on smaller drives than we have now) to get failures, and that was on a sample size of 1 for each model. I wouldn't expect a SSD to die more than any other electronics.
I've got a few dozen tales of SSDs dying in machines I've managed. Some dying slow deaths with lots of bad reads, some locking themselves in a read only mode, some just disappearing from the system.
Wear leveling spreads the wear out. If there is no free space, it can't do that, and you're completely screwed.
The problem with swapping is that SSDs are fast. If you have 8GB of RAM and manage to pick up any workload with a 10GB working set size, you're short 2GB, so the OS will have to put 2GB on the SSD. But your working set is 10GB and now only 8GB is in RAM, so it needs that 2GB back immediately. To do that it has to swap out some other 2GB, which it also needs to have back immediately. The result is that your SSD is the bottleneck and ends up maxed out doing writes.
NVMe SSDs will do something like 4GB/sec. Not a few GB a day, a few GB a second. A 256GB consumer SSD that can handle 100 full drive writes over its lifetime can thereby hit its lifetime wear rating in just two hours. Under ordinary storage use that doesn't happen because you're not maxing out the drive for hours on end -- after all, if you were storing ordinary data, writing at 4GB/s would cause the drive to be completely full after only 64 seconds.
But swap is deleting stuff and overwriting it and deleting it again. In a pathological case it could burn out a brand new drive in an afternoon and in more realistic cases could plausibly do it over a few months.
> But swap is deleting stuff and overwriting it and deleting it again
I'd imagine modern systems wouldn't bother deleting a page in pagefile unless modified, but I don't actually know. Why would one bother deleting pages from the page file unless you have to? After all, if you're swapping a lot, there's a good chance that page will be evicted again and need to be copied back anyways. Leaving it there gives a chance you don't have to actually rewrite the page, assuming it was unmodified. You then also don't have to spend the time doing deletes on all those unmodified pages.
Obviously, your percentage of modified pages to unmodified pages during swapping would be highly dependent on workload. But I imagine a good number of workloads have a lot of stuff in RAM that are somewhat static.
> I'd imagine modern systems wouldn't bother deleting a page in pagefile unless modified, but I don't actually know. Why would one bother deleting pages from the page file unless you have to?
They presumably use TRIM/UNMAP on SSDs when they're done with it because you'd otherwise have pages in the pagefile which are unused but the SSD can't erase to reallocate. Also, to keep track of whether a page has been modified after it has been swapped back in, memory writes would have to generate page faults just to allow the OS to mark the page as dirty, which is slow.
> Obviously, your percentage of modified pages to unmodified pages during swapping would be highly dependent on workload. But I imagine a good number of workloads have a lot of stuff in RAM that are somewhat static.
Memory reads still cause swap writes because a page has to be evicted in order to make room in RAM for the one being swapped back in, even if neither is being modified.
Also consider what would happen if pages were kept in the pagefile even after being swapped back in. You have 64GB of RAM and a 64.2GB working set. If pagefile pages are reused after being swapped back in, your pagefile is 0.2GB. If pages are left in the pagefile after being swapped back in, after one pass over the working set your pagefile is 64.2GB.
> because you'd otherwise have pages in the pagefile which are unused but the SSD can't erase to reallocate
> Also consider what would happen if pages were kept in the pagefile even after being swapped back in
In Windows, the pagefile doesn't grow and shrink based on you reading and writing pages. The pagefile.sys is usually a fixed size managed by the OS, and it will usually be several gigs in size even if you have say 100MB of "active" pages in the pagefile. On this Windows machine I use right now, the pagefile is set to ~25GB. pagefile.sys is this size regardless of if there's only 5MB of active pages in it or 20GB of pages in it. The pagefile.sys is the size it is until I go and modify the setting.
In Linux, swap is often a dedicated partition. It isn't going to shrink or grow based on its usage. And generally, a swapfile cannot be dynamically shrunk while online.
In fact, while there is an option to enable discards on swapon, it seems it doesn't always actually increase performance. I've been seeing a lot of debate with a lot of suggestions to not enable it.
> memory writes would have to generate page faults just to allow the OS to mark the page as dirty
The OS already knows the page is dirty and would need to be rewritten to properly swap out the page. It wouldn't have to always go to update the page in the swap/pagefile immediately on being marked dirty, only when it wants to swap out that page. In Windows, it reports this memory as "Modified", with the description of "memory whose contents must be written to disk before it can be used for another purpose". Meaning, it knows these pages are dirty, but it hasn't bothered touching the pagefile.sys yet to sync the page, largely because it doesn't have to as my machine still has plenty of free memory.
> Memory reads still cause swap writes because a page has to be evicted in order to make room in RAM for the one being swapped back in
Assuming it always deletes when a page gets read in. If both pages have previously been swapped, the page isn't dirty, and it doesn't just automatically delete on paging back in, it wouldn't have to do a write. Once again, significantly increasing performance. This is precisely why you wouldn't want to immediately delete the page from swap, because if the page is going to go back and forth between active memory and swap you might as well just leave it there.
You're also assuming that reading the page back into memory from swap inherently means another page has to be moving to swap. But this isn't always true; maybe some page was swapped out during a period of memory pressure, but now the system has more available memory. In this case (which probably happens often), reading that page back wouldn't require pages moving to swap.
Reading more about swap, it sounds like modern Linux uses an LRU caching strategy for memory pages in the swap cache. It doesn't explicitly go around deleting pages from swap unless it is going to reuse the page, or one has enabled discard=pages.
> When the reference count to the page finally reaches 0, the page is eligible to be dropped from the page cache and the swap map count will have the count of the number of PTEs the on-disk slot belongs to so that the slot will not be freed prematurely. It is laundered and finally dropped with the same LRU aging and logic described in Chapter 10.
Neither of those assertions is correct. You personally may have a workload which requires more RAM, but there are many people – even developers – who have direct experience otherwise. macOS is notably more memory efficient than Windows and the M series hardware has efficient compression, and that configuration holds up fine for the usual browser+editor+Slack+normal app usage which a lot of developers have.
SSD wear is a concern, but they aren’t using low-end components so you’re looking at 5+ years of daily usage. I used an 8GB M1 for years and when I upgraded to an M3 there was no indication of SSD wear either in measured performance or the diagnostic counters.
> You personally may have a workload which requires more RAM, but there are many people – even developers – who have direct experience otherwise. macOS is notably more memory efficient than Windows and the M series hardware has efficient compression, and that configuration holds up fine for the usual browser+editor+Slack+normal app usage which a lot of developers have.
Sure, it's physically possible to use a machine with 8GB of RAM without running out. If all you do is open some terminals and a single-digit number of browser tabs to well-behaved websites, 8GB is an ocean.
But that use case is the exception, not the rule. Worse, ordinary people don't know what causes it. If you're a developer and your machine is sluggish, you know enough to realize it's because it's swapping, and in turn to know that it's swapping because you opened up some ultra-high-res NASA images in an image viewer and forgot to close them, or because you have the tab open for that awful news website that will suck up 20GB of RAM all by itself with its ridiculous JS, or simply because you have 10 different apps running.
For most people, all they know is that their computer is slow -- which it wouldn't be if it had an adequate amount of RAM.
Meanwhile, because they don't know what causes it, they don't know what to do about it, so they just suffer through it. Which has the machine continuously swapping, which is what wears out the SSD.
But in your example the OS should be smart enough to realize "hey these pages related to the image viewer application aren't being messed with much in the last 12 hours, those should be high priority to swap out". So when they switch back to the image viewer app with the 100 gigapixel or whatever image they'll get that slowness hit but otherwise not experience it. Then the machine isn't constantly swapping, it just quietly hides those apps nobody is really touching.
The OS shouldn't be swapping hot pages when there's lots of things sitting around not doing much.
No, $699 is too much. That being said price isn't the only thing that keeps me away from Apple. They are beautiful systems but very annoying to use IMO. Speaking as a long time Linux user who occasionally helps people with their computer problems (Mac and Windows).
For some perspective: Computer Shopper 1993 GW2K 386SX at $1300. Today that is $2800. That $699 Mac is getting you a machine that would have been a TOP500 supercomputer in the 90s.
And your credit card has a more powerful computer than the Apollo lunar lander.
But software development (for both OS and applications) is continuing in parallel with hardware improvements, so there's a strong implicit demand of you to also continue upgrading, at least if you need to interoperate with any other computer in the world.
If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike. Yes, things change over time. I cringe to think of what some of the original 42" flat screen displays cost relative to the huge (much better looking) OLED panels of today.
Here's one data point. My grandmother and mother now both use Raspberry Pis as their primary computers and are 100% satisfied. My father is looking to switch as well and he's been setting up a GrapheneOS phone I made for him which runs flawlessly.
If year of Linux doesn't arrive by choice, authoritarianism will force the issue one way or another.
My kids have an old Thinkpad T440p that's their Scratch/Roblox/Minecraft machine, and overall it works well enough running Ubuntu (originally 22.04, then 24.04, now 25.04). But it has been far from seamless:
- the built in bluetooth and wifi can't be used at the same time; for a while we mitigated this with a USB wifi module, but that eventually broke and so now bluetooth is just disabled.
- it's hard to figure out what apps and app data are shared between users. AFAICT there's one Steam install my kids are sharing, but each one installs their own copy of a game, which is terrible for disk usage.
- a bunch of games don't work, especially from non-steam sources like Epic and Itch.io. I've heard about the Heroic Launcher, and I will try it at some point, but it's just... one more fiddly thing to have to mess with.
- several Minecraft launchers / mod-managers have been tried, but I can't seem to keep my Microsoft account logged in on there, so I eventually just put my password on a sticky note so they could re-auth it whenever needed (fortunately I don't use it for anything else).
- unattended-upgrades pulled a new kernel and the thing just panicked on startup until I went into the grub menu to get the previous one and reverted.
- until 25.04 the power management story was terrible, the machine would chew through the whole (newly replaced) battery in less than an hour.
As a competent nerd I've been ~fine with all this, but it's honestly right on the edge of acceptable. I expect a normal person would immediately give up in the face of most of these— either give up in terms of ditching the machine/OS or give up as in accepting a limitation like it just doesn't play that game or I just can't use my earbuds.
I have been using thinkpads since forever and bluetooth and wifi both work (at the same time, yes). It seems more likely to be a broken machine. Which can happen.
I had a faulty keyboard on a thinkpad that was causing a lot of seemingly unrelated problems, like freezes or suspend not working. Replacing the keyboard resolved everything.
It was kind of a subtle failure, tbh— like when bluetooth was active (game controller, headphones) then the wifi would suddenly have huge packet loss resulting in a bunch of retransmissions. So it would kind of still work but be really annoying to use. That said, I haven't fully re-tried it since updating to 25.04, so maybe the story is better on the newer kernel.
The keyboard has already been replaced once, though at the time I just bought whatever was cheapest on eBay, assuming they were all the same, and I think I did get a bit burned with a crappy knockoff— the keys are weirdly clicky and several feel like they're about to pop off at any moment; I have the LiteOn keyboard standing by which I'd like to try out, as that's the one that comes recommended most often online.
The bluetooth problem predated the installation of the replacement keyboard.
Anyway, I'm not going to fight for this, I'm just saying my "Linux desktop for non-technical users" experience in 2023-2025 timeframe was such that I don't know that I would do it again, and certainly would be extremely hesitant to recommend it to a household where no one is standing by with the willingness and aptitude required to tackle a boot-to-grub situation.
The minecraft thing is a problem regardless of launcher, to the point that I actively condone people pay for the game then find ways to not require online auth.
Some moron at Microsoft decided that if your password is serving its purpose and people aren't able to get in but that there are a bunch of attempts that you should need to reset your password. Because of this, I have to reset my password. Every. Time. I. Want. To. Play.
But that means multiple 2FA codes to both my non-mirosoft account email and to my phone. All in all, it usually takes about 7 or 8 minutes each time I want to play, which is an ABSURD amount of friction for an account I don't want to be using to play the game anyway, given when I bought it it was a Mojang account without all the associated, creepy TOS changes.
Don't be afraid to look around for ways to play without a legitimate account if you've paid. If that's the better experience, it is what it is.
I used to work on a T440s on Debian from 2013 - 2017. I am surprised that your battery life is so poor on Ubuntu. I was able to frequently push my 9-cell battery laptop to 12 hours with careful usage.
If I forgot my charging cable at home, I could do a full day at the office with music and internet on battery.
Might be the nature of the task, game playing vs text editing, or there was something wrong with a driver or background process.
Or another factor is that I think often the "new" batteries for old devices are in fact themselves old and have just been sitting around on shelves for years. Obviously that doesn't wear them as hard as actual cycling, but it's not nothing, particularly if they're allowed to discharge down to empty.
>- several Minecraft launchers / mod-managers have been tried, but I can't seem to keep my Microsoft account logged in on there, so I eventually just put my password on a sticky note so they could re-auth it whenever needed (fortunately I don't use it for anything else).
This is a perspective I'd like to hear more often. Too often I hear all these supposed ideal solutions without mentioning the pitfalls of having to support a non-technical family.
Pi hole is a good example. Do all websites (and other services) still work perfectly but without ads, or am I going to have to endure sighing and eyerolling everytime someone asks me why their site isn't loading (again)?
The main annoying thing about piHole with a non-technical family has been that it blocks google shopping.
You know, when you search for a thing you want to buy and google shopping shows a list of common stores on top of the search results like a bunch of little cards? Yep. Clicking one there causes a failure because that link is a google ad link. Same thing if you tab into "Shopping". All links are broken.
Otherwise, it's been 4 years and no other complaints at all.
GP here and yes I've experienced that too— I run a pihole-style blocklist on my OpenWRT router and never got a good workflow together for adding exemptions to it.
On a phone it's not a huge deal as you can just momentarily switch to data, click through, and then switch back. But it's more annoying on a computer where you have to figure out where that link was going to go and then get there by an organic path.
> Do all websites (and other services) still work perfectly
Like 99%? I've rarely seen problems running it for years
> but without ads,
No. It is only a DNS blocker. Most browsers these days will bypass that anyways. But it is definitely helpful for lots of other things on your network. You can also point the browser there to get the same benefits but still won't replace an adblocker.
Linux is great for technical people, or at least technically-inclined and patient people, who can overcome the inevitable technical obstacle that most of us don't even think about. It's also great for people whose needs are so basic-- email client and web browser basic-- that once they're set up with a default everything, they have no interest in doing anything that might present a technical obstacle.
Neither of those user groups are the problem. The problem is the majority of computer users that have real practical skill born from computer use at school, work, while gaming, doing art, etc. They want to do enough with their computer to run up against technical obstacles, but
a) don't have the significant amount of prerequisite knowledge we take for granted to generalize what they know to other operating systems
b) don't have the subject matter interest to inspire them to get that knowledge
and those two things mean
c) view any extra steps required to do something on Linux (e.g. use wine to run software they've been using for a decade) as a needless hassle that prevents them from doing what they really want to do, rather than a satisfying problem to solve because configuring the computer is part of the fun.
So if they hadn't already given up on Linux, they might ask one of the bazillion "Hey I'm a bit of a noob here, but..." questions on reddit or whatnot only to receive a barrage of conceited responses by zealots who make it very clear how put-out they are by their question-- which they didn't have to read, let alone answer-- and how rude it was for them to not read entry 427 on the FAQ which leads to a page of resources that might have addressed part of their problem. If nothing else has already discouraged them from continuing, that sure will.
Unless someone with those users' needs at the forefront of their design practice Bluesky's Linux (some like pop os are making a solid effort), it will never ever work as a general-purpose desktop OS.
Please give Linux a try. Don't let the perception deceive you. Perceptions are slow to change and a lot has changed in that time.
> They want to do enough with their computer to run up against technical obstacles,
They will solve those problems the exact same way they solve them on Windows: Google, StackOverflow, forums, GPTs, or whatever. There's even an advantage in Linux as there's a large number of highly technical users already doing exactly the same thing and will share knowledge.
> use wine to run software they've been using for a decade
Wine for what? Word? I think most people will use the browser.
If you mean games, I think Steam has got most of that covered. Proton hides in the background for most people.
But these users also happily will install engines for game modding and other things. Give what I see these people doing, Wine seems like child's play.
> only to receive a barrage of conceited responses by zealots
I agree! That sucks! I do try to fight this and there has been serious strides in this direction over the last decade. In fact, I'd argue that the suggested distros were part of this response. The attitude you see on EndeavourOS, PopOS, or Ubuntu forums are very different. Hell, even the Arch forums are getting better! Sometimes they provide links to the "dupe". They're almost to the state of StackOverflow! But I mean... let's not expect that to be ever fully resolved. We lost the war for the Noob Guide (I fought for that and was a contributor!), but at least we got Manjaro and Endeavour in return ;)
I really do mean it, things have changed a lot in the last 10 years. I'm sorry for those experiences. I hated them when they happened to me and I step in when I see them happening. It's the only way we can make change. But what you describe does not seem to be the state of things I see today, but it does describe the state of things I saw (and experienced) in the past.
> Please give Linux a try. Don't let the perception deceive you. Perceptions are slow to change and a lot has changed in that time.
I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years-- professionally and as a desktop OS-- and am also a UI designer. I've even used everything from AIX to Solaris and even HP-UX on an old phone switch. What I'm saying is coming from the usability designer focus on the experience of new users and the problems they have.
>They will solve those problems the exact same way they solve them on Windows: Google, StackOverflow, forums, GPTs, or whatever. There's even an advantage in Linux as there's a large number of highly technical users already doing exactly the same thing and will share knowledge.
The difference is they don't generally have those problems on Windows or MacOS. How many windows users encounter serious problems... say... updating their video card drivers.
> Wine for what? Word? I think most people will use the browser.
Trivializing the needs of non-technical end users while also trivializing the difficulty of adopting new tech paradigms is really at the root of the problem in FOSS usability, in general. Lots of people use adobe products, video editing software, games, random utilities for hardware peripherals, CAD software, industry-specific or worplace-specific programs... there are lots of things that users who sit between software developers and users that would be fine with a chromebook.
> d argue that the suggested distros were part of this response. The attitude you see on EndeavourOS, PopOS, or Ubuntu forums are very different.
For users that don't want to 'use a computer,' but want the computer to solve whatever problem they're having in the way they're used to solving it, that's already a nonstarter. I'd wager that no more than 10% of computer users have seriously researched a technical problem trying to troubleshoot it. I'd wager about 20% of that already small crowd has consulted formal software documentation. It's just not a natural process for most computer users. It would be great if people were more interested enough in how computers work, even superficially, but many are not. It's just the way it is. People don't need encouragement to try linux-- they need a fundamental shift if the way they approach computer usage-- as a complex tool rather than a flexible appliance. There's a gulf of requirements that aren't being met to bridge that gap for all but the lowest-level users.
> one of the bazillion "Hey I'm a bit of a noob here, but..." questions on reddit or whatnot only to receive a barrage of conceited responses by zealots who make it very clear how put-out they are by their question-- which they didn't have to read, let alone answer-- and how rude it was for them to not read entry 427 on the FAQ which leads to a page of resources that might have addressed part of their problem.
Today's Linux support forums are nothing like this. You only get an angry response when you start out by whining about how Linux "can't" (doesn't, with your current understanding) do what you want, or doesn't behave exactly like what you're familiar with. You might get asked to pay attention to the forum rules and guidelines banner that tells you to use some inxi invocation or whatever to get your system info - and that will link to a fully detailed guide on how to do it, as well as how to format your post properly.
If anything, the Mint forums for example are too eager to assume you're a noob, and will suggest awkward foolproof approaches to everything that don't respect what you're trying to accomplish if it's a bit advanced.
Okay, the Arch forums will respond to you with just a link to the Wiki if you're asking something that's well covered in the wiki. That's supposed to be a hint to read one specific wiki page (and they told you which one); they won't waste breath on "how put-out they are by your question" because a) they aren't, and b) typing more words is the thing that would make them put out. The point is that if you can't make sense of the wiki, then you should ask something more specific. And if you don't know what a word means, you should look it up.
And if we're talking about "users that have real practical skill born from computer use at school, work, while gaming, doing art, etc." then they should be capable of those things.
Back when I was developing said "real practical skill", being assessed as having that "real practical skill" entailed understanding that far fewer people seem to have nowadays. I don't just mean things like poring through manpages or reasoning about command pipelines. Nowadays it seems that people can be perceived as computer literate without things like having a working mental model of a "file" or a "path".
It honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that this is feasible - my mental model of a "Raspberry Pi" is basically what the first-gen models were. But apparently it's been a while now, and their newest models use an ARM Cortex-A76 CPU, which is actually pretty respectable - only a bit behind my 2014 desktop, from the numbers I can find. Absolutely capable of running a web browser on modern Linux.
The Raspberry Pi 500 series with the CPU built into the keyboard are very capable little computers and extremely easy to setup, maintain, and re-image. I could literally mail them a new microSD card to plug in if they needed a new system but it's never been a problem. They use the default Raspbian image or whatever it's called these days, Raspberry Pi OS. It's perfectly suited for their needs and is rock solid.
My household of 5 has been running exclusively Linux desktops for the past several years. Coming from Windows, I installed KDE distros and nobody has had any trouble with it.
They average user needs to be able to turn on the machine and have it boot, log in, use a web browser, connect Bluetooth devices, and print stuff. Linux desktops are more than capable of that sort of thing with zero additional training.
This weekend, I actually booted an old Windows XP machine that I've had sitting in a closet, and was astonished at just how...clunky Windows XP felt to me. It's not that it was hard, but it really helped highlight to me just how actually-usable Linux desktops have become.
Which models have you given them? Linux has been my computing best friend for more than a decade and I have also enjoyed using the Raspberry Pi 400.
But the Raspberry Pi 500 (keyboard model) is even better and (literally and figuratively) a cool design. You get 8GB RAM, boot from NVME, Debian with Wayland (labwc), and the R.Pi community.
They both use Raspberry Pi 500s. Seriously the support requests are zero. They both know that if anything weird happens, they can just pull the USB cable out of the back and plug it back in and everything will go back to normal. They seriously mostly use web browsers and my grandmother absolutely loves her gigantic monitor.
+1 for setting up parents with Linux.
In my case, a Chromebook I hacked to run Mint.
Like fucking hell I'm going to let senior parents navigate the virus known as Windows 11, complete with forced updates and reboots, disappearing customizations, and the constant and unrelenting spyware?! No thanks.
I'd like this to be true, but Windows has been getting incrementally more user-hostile for a long time now. I'm not sure this change is going to mark any particular tipping point.
I think it can be true, but we have to make it happen. One of the biggest problems I see is that we complain about things like Linux in these comparative settings, as if we don't have to make a choice. It's like saying you don't want to eat a cookie because the chef sneezed in it and instead giving you a cookie the chef took a shit in. Sure, I'd rather have neither, but if I have to eat a cookie I know which one I'd choose.
I just want to vent here about the recent experience I had buying and installing MS Office 365 for my wife’s small business. I had assumed since the competition is effortless and free, MS would at least make Office for Desktop relatively easy to pay for. Instead I got suckered into paying for “Basic”, which doesn’t support desktop apps. The “supports desktop apps” version costs more, but the big problem is it’s not explained within the apps what you need to upgrade to (there are many plans.) Then once you finally figure out how to upgrade, the subscription and payment sites repeatedly error out. Once you force through an immediate upgrade, it turns out that it’s not immediate and takes an hour to go through.
This is mostly just venting, but if the “please take my money” pathways of MS’s most popular product work this badly, I don’t even want to think about ever going back to Windows.
What many have yet to notice is that Microsoft now makes more money from Cloud than they do from Windows, so the purpose of Windows is now as the funnel for Microsoft's cloud services. It's like using an operating system made by GoDaddy.
Average computer users could probably switch... but it would require one of two things:
Some way to make it ridiculously low friction for existing hardware owners to get into Linux. Like, less friction than downloading an ISO, mounting it, and installing it on your computer.
Or make computers come with it when people buy them. (This is still vanishingly rare.)
**
As a power user... I still have a few issues, some that might be common, and some that might be quite rare/unique to me. For example, post-concussion I really can't stand low refresh rates, and screen brightness is important to me. During my last 2-month Linux experiment, I had issues with controlling those things which was a mix of hardware, drivers, Linux kernel, GPU modes, etc. These sort of issues seem to be less and less common in Linux, and I'm optimistic, but I also am hesitant to sacrifice my own health to make a switch away from Windows. (Mental health aside.)
And some games still don't work right, at least not on launch. Which can make me sad as someone who plays games socially.
As a photographer, I bought and use DxO PhotoLab. I've compared alternatives, and I like it much better. It doesn't mean I couldn't use darktable but I definitely don't like it anywhere near as much. (And no, DxO does not support Linux.)
System 76 makes a great product in this space honestly. I always recommend them to people who are interested in trying linux. They ship with linux pre-installed, its exactly like buying a dell with windows.
This. I bought a System76 laptop in 2011 which is still working very well with lubuntu for office and browser and such, it's now the laptop of my neighbourhood association. I could without problem upgrade RAM and drive to SSD, I could even swap the keyboard after I broke it.
I bought a new one from them this year, still incredible hardware.
My only issue with them, which is a big one, is that they ship only from USA. So as EU customer I have to pay VAT on top!
I concur. I own a System 76 laptop, and it runs PopOS. It's been stable for years (taking the regular updates). They make a variety of hardware products ranging from portable/lightweight laptop to beefy engineering workstation.
(also not affiliated with them, just want to support good products/company)
People say more Linux availability would make it mainstream. However, Chromebooks are one of the most available laptops. The software is 100% compatible with hardware, and in many cases, the Play Store is included to address the lack of software. That is more than enough for casual computing and office work—two massive segments of the PC user market. And people still don't like them. ChromeOS's market share is similar to that of all the other Linux distributions.
I think the Windows and MacOS brands have become lifestyle choices. Windows is the "gamer" and "corporate" choice. MacOS is the "student" and "luxury" choice. Linux is the "hacker" choice (they use Arch, by the way). Like iOS vs Android, Xbox vs PlayStation, Toyota vs BMW, and all other brand tribalisms, it seems like most people are emotionally drawn to one or another.
> The software is 100% compatible with hardware, and in many cases, the Play Store is included to address the lack of software
The problem is that the Play store and Linux environments on ChromeOS are both run in VMs.
On a machine with good specs, this is perfectly fine. But when cheaper ChromeOS devices ship with 4GB of RAM, older mediatek APUs, and emmc instead of SSDs, it's just an outright bad experience.
If Google starts pushing Android Desktop as a replacement for ChromeOS, I think that could be interesting. Being able to run the Play store without the overhead of a VM will make Android potentially a much better experience than ChromeOS.
> On a machine with good specs, this is perfectly fine.
I think the VMs are fine on the type of machines most people would buy for Windows/macOS. Chromebooks go exceptionally low-spec on the low-end to the point that I'd say their lowest-spec machines probably aren't direct competition for Windows laptops, wouldn't you agree?
I agree making ISOs is too cumbersome now. But I think the install is 90% there. Realistically hiding options under an advanced menu would make it no different than when you first get a windows or Mac.
Fwiw, you can get it preinstalled on System 76, makers of Pop. I'm a bit surprised Framework doesn't do it. But this seems easy to expand
**
Maybe I or someone else can help out. What's your distro, GPU, Linux kernel, and driver? Sometimes that interplay can create weird mismatches but I have rarely experienced them in the last 5 years (but extremely common prior to that!). Pop and EndeavourOS specifically target NVIDIA GPUs and can be the easiest "fix". Pop being more Ubuntu like and EndeavourOS being more Archy. Being power user I'd suggest the latter as it has a lot less bloat. Fwiw I daily drive EndeavourOS with a 4080S (previously 3080Ti) without too many problems. Only getting HDR at 60fps when trying to use my TV as a display. Other then that two issues where a kernel driver mismatch happened, solved by a rollback and avoidable by using stable releases.
I'm not much of a gamer but will play some AAA and a handful of indie games. Occasional issues like Steam not loading the GUI (right click menu bar and directly open library fixes), and occasionally sync issues because VPN, or minor like needing to launch a game twice. But FWIW, past 3 years I've never needed to touch proton. I'm really hoping SteamOS gets a broader release soon. I'm not sure if I can help much here but I do know graphics cards which might help?
I'll definitely agree UI/UX in many apps needs major improvements. I've seen a trend in the right direction though. Alongside the same improvements in OS. We need people to realize that your backend doesn't matter if people can't use it. Design is hard. The magic is the interaction between awesome backend and awesome design. I think this philosophy is growing. Hopefully. Momentum appears to be building
Appreciate it but this was like 18 months ago, on a Lenovo Legion 5 which I've since sold to my niece. Main issue was brightness - basically having to reboot Linux twice to get it to work. Once to switch GPU mode and once to select a kernel because it would often fail to boot for some reason until I went through that. I don't remember the details too well - I documented some here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm
Linux Mint w/ KDE for most of the two month period.
Nowadays like 95% of my gaming is Digital Board Games on Steam which I'm mostly quite sure would run fine on Linux. Anno 1800 was one of the rare instances of LAN multiplayer which is rare in games these days and poorly supported.
When I'm really active sometimes as a group we'll start a new Survival game together, and it's nice when you can be involved. Games like Valheim run awesome on Linux, and I had no issues with Conan, ARK, etc. Occasionally a game isn't supported and that's when it's a bummer.
Still, sorry to hear the experience. I'd have been frustrated too.
For the brightness, hard to say what's wrong without more details. But I hope someone pointed you towards xrandr, which would allow you to manually set the brightness and help determine if it was just a bad setting (edit to /sys/). But could be a kernel issue too. Which sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.
I'll admit, fractional scaling sucks every time I've used it. There are some settings that can help, like letting applications control their setting instead of system. But I don't have enough experience with this, but can confirm it can be frustrating. (xrandr can help here too btw)
The booting is super weird. But that's also something I would have definitely been able to help with. It can seem like black magic at first but it eventually makes sense. Just most people don't bother learning because it usually isn't an issue (my friend and I had a dumb competition to get the fastest boot... We each got under 3s cold and under 2s warm. It was silly, but learned a lot)
Re Steam: I haven't had to do this in a while, but sometimes changing the proton version can make a world of difference. I haven't tried those games though so I can't speak from direct experience.
I will say, I'm not a fan of Mint. I do think Pop and Endeavour are better entry ways. So if you ever try it again, I'd recommend one of those. I'll also say that laptops tend to be a bit more finicky than desktops, especially around display issues. Things are worlds better than they used to be but it is definitely an uphill battle. Lots of variance and not enough resources dedicated to tackling the problems. Hopefully the continued momentum makes this completely a thing of the past. (Battery issues are also a common issue with laptops. In particular putting mobile GPUs into their hibernate state. NVIDIA hasn't been the kindest here...)
As a "not linux expert" I think distribution selection is... a pain point.
It's a bit like the Fediverse. I'm quite happy now, on Hachyderm.io, but it took some trial and error, and the median social media user is ill prepared to go out, select a Fediverse home, and begin piecing things together.
But back to Linux. It's hard to know which distribution, and why you'd select it, when you don't know about Linux. Coming from Windows, it was "Home" or "Pro" (once upon a time). Linux is... though you might not know it, Debian or Fedora, and then a dozen or two varieties off those branches, and then the Window Manager, and then the desktop.
I know nothing about Endeavour, but I've heard of Pop, and I thought it was a thin layer on top of Ubuntu? Not sure why Mint is so different? It's Ubuntu-based too? This adventure actually started with Nobara, which is "marketed" if there is such a thing, as being good for gaming. But I actually had no good experiences with it at all. And did some research and Mint seemed very friendly (and largely was!) But I didn't like Cinnamon much. Anyway, my point is... distribution can have a huge impact on overall experience, but it's very hard to decide on distribution without knowing a lot more about Linux. That pre-education is much more investment than most Windows users would want to make.
EDIT: Oof, I found EndeavorOS on Kagi and... the home page loads, and it says "Mercury Neo with Linux 6.13.7 and Arch mirror ranking bug fix"
I know a few of those words. What am I looking at? I think Linux needs a marketing team!
Yeah distros can be confusing. For the most part it isn't too big of a deal and the main difference is the package manager. apt and dpkg for distros based on Debian (includes Ubuntu), dnf for RedHat (Fedora, CentOS, etc), and pacman for Arch. There's more but you'd run into these the most. I'll be honest, it mostly doesn't matter and it is nerdy quibbling. That said, I still think PopOS is probably the best to start out on because it has some focus around making NVIDIA drivers work. They also build their own laptops (System76) so have some extra experience there. Endeavour is good, but it is Arch based so "rolling-release", meaning you're essentially always using beta software. Mostly not a problem but can lead to some additional instability. I wouldn't expect any real issues, but should be clear.
> "Mercury Neo with Linux 6.13.7 and Arch mirror ranking bug fix"
Yeah... that is weird to put at the top. It's a link to a new blog post. Mercury is their codename, the 6.13.7 is the Linux kernel, Arch mirror being where packages are hosted, and just prioritizing bug fixes. You can read the article if you want. Better would be looking at their about[0] or scroll down further on the front page past the mirrors. IDK why they don't put these things at the top. Definitely a mistake. Pop definitely does this better[1]
> Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference.
I doubt it. Common people can't interpret GUI and discover features unlike developers who'd prefer dynamic "intuitive" interfaces. They rely more on dumb fixed rote memorization.
Most recent example of failure of this approach is Windows Settings app. Not only a lot of configuration panes started to mimic old Control Panel in both features layouts, even verbiages, many had become a mere shortcut links to old Control Panel applets.
To be fair, I can't figure out how to use OSX. I'm constantly going down the wrong menu paths. Same when someone asks me to use Windows, and in a completely different manner.
My point is that it's not like there's an objectively good way to do this. That people just get used to doing things one way or another. And frankly, with Linux you can copy those same structures and that's what I mean by "skin". You really can make it feel a lot like Windows or OSX and that really reduces the dissonance.
So it's not from skin and down, but from metal up to the skin, or the kernel and userland. It'll have to be ReactOS approach that don't necessarily have the exact Windows 11 theme.
Linux marketshare is steadily increasing, especially among English speakers. It's complicated by how you want to count the Steam Deck, but the steam hardware survey has a clear upward trend: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Average people nowadays don't really use general-purpose computers at home. They use whatever their work provides at the office (which will continue to be Windows for most people and macOS for prestigious or highly-paid jobs), and use phones at home.
> Meanwhile the user experience of Linux has dramatically increased. Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference.
As someone who spends time using MacOS, Windows, and Linux ... even if you managed to make them look pixel perfect identical, everyone would notice something is off immediately. MacOS, Windows, and Linux desktop environments all feel distinctly different.
MacOS feels like you're waist deep in the shallow end of the pool trying to run. You feel like you're being held back in terms of speed but never out of control. Window max/min is easy, want to resize a window? That'll be 5 minutes of your life you'll never get back.
Windows is like an overeager dog, it's fast and nimble but don't blink or you'll loose your mouse cursor. Max/min/resize? Sure it's effortlessly easy right up until your mouse hits a zone and then it snaps the window exactly how you didn't want.
Linux gives you the freedom to do whatever you want, and that's exactly what every single app developer has done with their app experience. Will a click of the scroll wheel move at light speed or a glacial crawl? You never know, but what you can count on is that it will be entirely different if you use a touch pad. Want to resize a window? The mouse cursor might change to the resize icon, but damned if it doesn't activate the window beneath when you try to click and drag.
It will never be the year of Linux. That statement doesn't even mean anything. Businesses desktops run on Windows. Linux wont replace the ease in which MS allows you to manage thousands of people in the near future. There will be billions of Windows computers for the forseeable future because they can be managed easily by sysadmins with AD/M365.
Out of curiosity, have you had any experience managing 100s or 1000s of users/workstations?
Just keep in mind that widespread Linux adoption means it will lose something special it has had from being relatively small on the desktop. This would be another Eternal September ... including a massive influx of entitled users and all that.
Because of that effect, I think there needs to be one or more for-profit Linux OS vendors prepared to absorb all the support and feedback needs (and contribute upstream, of course), and OEMs should only use it/them for anyone besides "advanced users and developers" or similar verbage.
I've never understood why Red Hat never tried breaking into this space. People clearly don't mind paying for an OS and RHEL is pretty much as polished and well supported as you can get. A fork of RHEL geared towards home use would be fantastic. I know Fedora exists but it isn't backed by RH the way RHEL is.
the problem is really that selling operating systems just doesn't work. people buy devices with the OS preinstalled. the only way to change that is to make that practice illegal, and force people to choose and pay for an OS at the time of purchasing their device.
Just like other companies, home users do not make much money compared to enterprises. No home user will pay $10,000 annually for example and think nothing of it.
Enterprises is where the money is, that is also why a company like Cisco do not make consumer devices
The reason people buy RHEL is because you can get support for any problems. Consumers are not gonna get that so they might as well just run CentOS Stream for example.
> This would be another Eternal September ... including a massive influx of entitled users and all that.
Isn't that Ubuntu?
Jokes aside, I'm not too worried considering the plethora of distros. There's always been a range of them that target different subgroups. Which I think is where a lot of the magic comes from. Realistically, the kernel is about making an environment that everyone can build on top of. You can't make a product that meets the needs or desires of everyone, but you can certainly build environments which can be transformed to meet any needs. (Actually, I think that's the magic of programming and something we kinda lost sight of. Too focused on making "products" instead of environments)
A couple years ago was "the year of" open source OSes for me. I only have one remaining machine running Windows, and it just sits there doing nothing because I don't actually use it anymore. Same with my one remaining Apple machine. Well, I mean I have a couple retro machines that aren't in everyday use of course. Everything else is running Linux or BSD.
They're great little computers but you're kidding if you think $400 to upgrade to 1Tb (from 256G) is not priced. I can get 2Tb of gen 5 NVMe for under $300. Same issue with RAM, but at least at 16Gb most people don't need to upgrade.
Come on. You can still think they're great while admitting they're over priced. Those aren't in contention.
your typical casual user needs 2TB of local storage (outside the cloud)? that’s news to me.
I agree it’s overpriced, and it bugs me too. But i still recommend mac’s to my less tech savvy family and friends. Why? I’m not interested in being their tech support, and also, it’s trivial to buy a portable 2TB thunderbolt 4 SSD for $200-$300, if the need arises in the future. In fact an external SSD is even easier to replace/upgrade than an internal ssd (generally speaking). i think we’re losing sight of the topic here. CASUAL USERS :)
> your typical casual user needs 2TB of local storage (outside the cloud)? that’s news to me.
That is *NOT* what I said... and you know it...
I don't believe 256GB is sufficient for the typical casual user. Apple knows it too. But $200 to upgrade FROM 256GB TO 512GB is, as you asked "too expensive".
It is "too expensive" BECAUSE comparable off-the-shelf hardware is significantly less AND has better performance. We're also talking about a level of performance most people will not notice the difference between.
I cannot find a 512GB NVMe drive that is PCIe 5.0, but here is a 1Tb one that costs $170[0]. They key point here being that you get twice the storage for 85% the price OF UPGRADING. That drive suggests it gets 14.7GBps reads and 13.3GBps writes while this Reddit user shows their Mac Mini M4 gets UNDER 3GBps for both read and write[1]. It definitely would go higher with the 512 variant because those disks are suffering from the same issue that the M2 Air suffered from... but that doesn't change the price that you pay more for less. You pay more for SIGNIFICANTLY less.
> I think we’re losing sight of the topic here. CASUAL USERS :)
It wasn't me... The question wasn't what you'd recommend to your less tech savvy friends and family, the question was if something was over priced.
P.S. iPhones won't capitalize a singular "i", as would be the proper grammatical usage.
P.S.S. External drives aren't just annoying, they're slower too.
I feel like we are getting closer to the year of convergence... but with Android. Google is apparently working on it.
Many of my friends don't even have a computer: they do everything on their phone. If they could plug their phone to a dock station for the few times they need a keyboard and a bigger screen, they would be fine.
>If they could plug their phone to a dock station for the few times they need a keyboard and a bigger screen, they would be fine.
Samsung DeX does this, and I think similar solutions or workarounds are available for other manufacturers via USB-DP Alt Mode and BT for input devices.
I don't know anyone who uses it, though, and can't vouch for practicality.
It was definitely a thing for awhile. IIRC Mozilla made a phone OS that could do this and I think Ubuntu too. I think those projects gave up too quickly. Sometimes things take time and idk why in CS we have to always be in a rush. If Goodyear, who's made tires for 100 years, can take 8 years to make a tire, I think we can take that time to make a new novel OS that has a phone mode and desktop mode. Certainly such a thing is going to take time for people to even wrap their heads around
I think it needs to become "standard" on Android. Then developers will write apps for it, and I could imagine hotels offering "docking stations" (e.g. the TV with a keyboard/mouse).
If it's only the Samsung thing, probably developers don't care? Also it feels like Google may make Workspace work on wide Android screens (for their XR stuff).
I know it's a running joke, but we had a decade (+) of Linux in many other consumer use cases, such as smartphones. The problem is that if you're selling a consumer computing platform, you're subject to the same exact incentives as Microsoft. You want to be Microsoft! You want their revenue, their profit margins, their nice offices, their talented engineers.
Android is Linux, but your typical Android phone ships with invasive AI features, has a locked bootloader, a variety of components that collect data about you... and unless you jump through hoops, it only lets you install apps from the company store.
This is the crucial point that makes the whole question somewhat moot. Only one other of the 20-odd peers in this thread acknowledges it. Once again I'm disappointed by how out of touch the techies here seem to be.
I just use Windows in a seamless VM with Office 2013.
It's fun, every time somebody sends me an exploit or dropper I am eager to click on the attachments to find out how it works. And after seeing what it does I just reset the filesystem snapshots back to the lsst step.
And for newbies to Linux I'd heavily recommend trying out KDE as a desktop environment. They're are really nicely integrated, even phone sync and other shenanigans work out of the box.
Do they use MS Office for work, or just simple hobby stuff? If it's work stuff - leave them alone. For hobby stuff LibreOffice is a good replacement that you can trial on Windows. As far as distros go, I don't like some of the decisions that Canonical has made with Ubuntu, but it's hard to argue with how simple, reliable, and complete it is. I don't want to run it for myself, but it's great for some people.
just saying, the comment you just wrote could have appeared, word for word, on any HN discussion in the last 20 years. The only words that would have to change are "PopOS" / "Arch" / "Manjaro" for more timely distros. (and Chrome didn't exist until ~2009)
I really don't think so. We didn't have GUI installers 20 years ago. I think you're undermining the advances linux has made. I think it is harder for us on the techy side to see but having been getting people to switch to linux over the last 10 years I can say that the last 5 have been significantly easier.
We did have GUI installers in 2005. At least SUSE did. Linux hasn't made much significant changes to its core architecture. There are better implementations for many things like Pulseaudio and Pipewire or Wayland compositors are a bit more streamlined than X11.
The core issues existed in 2005 still exist in exact form: how do you make money for the software devs on Linux, how to bring good closed-source software support for decades. If Linux cannot solve those two problems, it will not replace Windows. I think, without changing the software architecture to look more Windows-like, the latter problem cannot be feasibly solved.
Has anyone had success setting up a Linux machine and handing it off to a less tech savvy friend? I've had some people asking about it but I have techie brain and I don't know what's usable to normal people.
On literally what metric? Even if you do the most naive comparison of compute and storage, Apple now comes out ahead much of the time, to say nothing of differences around quality, display, controls, etc.
On the metric that people see PCs as disposable appliances and don't consider a small format box like a Mac Mini to be a real computing device. They don't give a crap about "compute," they care if they can open their web browser, outlook, and play their little slot machine game. You're not gonna get Meemaw who spent her entire career as a secretary working with Windows machines to go to Mac just because you like the specs. Hell, my mom has owned the same PC for 15 years now and I can't get her to move away from THAT.
I don't want people who want Windows to come to Linux because Windows has become a spyware. The result will be a bunch of entitled users asking for Linux to look more like Windows.
Anyone who has maintained an open source project knows how consumers of open source suck. "Your free project that you develop in your free time sucks" or "I won't make you the honour to use your project if you don't spend 2 weeks adding this feature I want". A mass influx of Windows people who want Windows-without-the-spyware would probably make this worse for Linux.
"I want BSplayer, how do I make it work?", and no other player will ever be good enough as BSplayer. And sometimes it's not even a good piece of software, but some stupid windows only thing that not even windows users use anymore.
I have plenty of hard disagreements on the "user experience improvements" in Linux. "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard (GNOME is sort of successful at an extreme cost and plenty of limitations, KDE is still an incoherent mess with plenty of bad defaults starting from the base CDDM skin). It's full of things like the missing icon view in the GNOME/GTK file chooser [1] and while it's true that Windows11 is atrocious, all those little things add up.
I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...
I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)
I've been reading about the "year of linux" for years now, it's a meme for a reason. People that are not "prosumer" will keep using the preinstalled OS even if it's garbage - assuming they buy a laptop or desktop at all - and the prosumer will probably keep an OSX or a Windows machine close by anyway. Linux is usable as a browser kiosk sure but there is still plenty of friction on everything else. Enshittification will continue, and possibly infect also linux.
> "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard
I don't mean to imply this is easy. But I also do know that these efforts have been in the works for quite some time. They can get more dedication if that's the direction we need to go.
Quick Google
- 3 free Linux distros that look and feel like Windows: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2532994/3-free-linux-distros-that-look-and-feel-like-windows.html
- 5 Linux Distributions That are Inspired by the Look and Feel of macOS: https://itsfoss.com/macos-like-linux-distros/
> soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line
IDK how to tell you this, but for 90% of people this is "throw the machine out, buy a new one." I'm really not sure what the critique is here. Even if running with more problems seems unsurprising given what you described. And you're talking about the kernel.
I don't deny that there are problems with Linux, nor that things need to improve to get better mass appeal. But I do think you should look at your own words. They're highly technical. And we should not forget how this would compare when discussing Windows or OSX. That's the choice! It's that these conversations of "Linux sucks" are not just complaints about Linux, they are also suggestions of using Windows or OSX. The context of our conversation is about choosing between these systems, not the existence of problems.
I want to be very clear
Linux is a dumpster fire.
This does not mean Windows isn't!
This does not mean OSX isn't!
The argument I'm making is that this doesn't matter for the general user. Fuck, it generally doesn't matter for the technical user. But there is a good reason why technical/power users have a strong bias towards using Linux. Because at least it is a dumpster fire they can fix. It is absurd to have the framing that we should not encourage people to use Linux in favor of them using systems that are user hostile and destroying all sense of personal privacy!
These arguments become equivalent to: "You don't want to eat that, the chef sneezed in it. Here, eat this cake instead. The chef only took a shit in it."
Idk about you, but give the choice, I'd rather take the sneeze than the shit. I'd (strongly) prefer neither, but frankly that isn't an option now, is it?
And let's be honest, if you want to get more resources to put out more fires, the only way that's going to happen is if there are more users.
Could have happened 5 years ago. Could have happened 5 years before that. But it won't ever happen if the techy people that have the capabilities of making it happen are too busy self-righteously laughing about how it hasn't happened yet. Luckily that doesn't stop progress, but it sure doesn't let it get to the speed it could.
Meanwhile, I hope you're happy with the state of things. You have every right to point and laugh if you are happy with the direction Microsoft, Apple, and Google have led us. But if you aren't, it isn't too late to make efforts to change those directions.
If we're going to reference the past, let's not hyper-fixate on every failed "call to arms" while ignoring how future they were trying to fight actually happened...
You will need to cite your sources that Apple is going the same way.
From what I see, Apple has launched private cloud compute with better privacy safeguards than any other big tech firm. In fact, their personal assistant is the worst one because it is so dumb.
They don’t seem to make money from your data because, as you say, they have already made huge margins on hardware and apps.
Why quiet downvotes? My links demonstrate that Apple is collecting a lot of data, not giving an easy choice for the opt-out and starting to use that for ads. Also the software is getting worse.
I am definitely moving to Linux this year.
I'm a not a developer, but I am willing to tackle the learning curve.
I have been a Windows user from my very first computer, my first internship was at Microsoft. But I am done with the directions they have taken these past years!
There definitely can be some hurdles depending on what your goals are. If you're mainly browser user, don't stress. If gamer, go PopOS (if want to be a bit more, EndeavourOS is a good recommend).
If you do want to learn linux, then I actually suggest doing things "the hard way". That is installing Arch (fastest newbie I've seen is install on the 4th attempt) and try living in the terminal. The failures lead to a lot of learning. But it is a good way to learn because it forces you to get your hands dirty and makes you quick to not be afraid because well... you will have already experienced fucking up and it is less scary once you have haha. It's one of those things where you don't feel like you're making progress but boy do you learn fast this way.
But this of course is not what everyone should do! I just wanted to offer the advice in case you or anyone does. I am being serious about it being the hard way. But it pays off.
Linux still suffers the same flaw as always, though: it's just bad. And the projects that claim to make it better end up being a lot like Microsoft or Apple.
You or I can use Linux, because we're the same type of people who visit Hacker News. It's also completely possible to get your great-grandma on Linux, since the web browsers work the same and you can install the specific apps they need to use and they'll never care about anything else. But the middle user is working in an office exchanging Microsoft Office documents all day, making video calls through Teams, and using one out of a zillion business apps developed specifically for Windows.
We need more free and good projects, and the problem is, that costs time, and in between Richard Stallman's heyday and now, the rent's quadrupled.
I'd like to see stats about that middle user though, I would think that this usecase decreases fast as things are moving to the browser (Office366, Drive, mail, even corporate apps).
Other types of usecases have gone very Linux-friendly recently (e.g video games thanks to Valve).
Windows has turned itself into spyware. Apple is too expensive and going the same way.
Meanwhile the user experience of Linux has dramatically increased. Put on a good skin and most people wouldn't notice the difference. You don't need to reply that you can, I know you can. You're on HN. But most people just use their computer for the browser and most people can't tell Chrome from Firefox. Most people get their lockin by their tech friend or child. Really, Microsoft's only lockin remains Office.
It won't be a complete shift but the signs of growing userbase is there. Would be a huge win for open source! If you haven't tried Linux in a few years try giving something like PopOS a go or if you want to say you use Arch then try EndeavourOS. Both are very stable, latter slightly less.
Edit: enfuse was right, I should have suggested EndeavourOS instead of Manjaro.