What’s easier in Windows compared to Linux? Except the fact that you have to install it, since it doesn’t come preinstalled on as many PCs. But many people who think Windows is easy would probably still consider installing it difficult.
Application support; some popular software is built with Windows in mind.
One-click installers; Software usually comes with user-friendly installation wizards. No command lines or dependency juggling. Also better compatibility woth past versions
Driver availability; Linux is getting better, but Windows is superior
Better peripheral support like for printers, webcams, game controllers.
Gaming performance; although Linux is gaining ground, Windows is just better in this regard
Media codecs and formats; again, Linux is getting better, but this isn’t always an out-of-the-box experience
Business integration; Windows plays nicely with enterprise tools like Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and legacy business apps.
Don’t get me wrong. I use Linux as my daily driver. That also means I get frustrated on occasion when again I must consult man pages instead of just running a troubleshooter or fiddling with Nvidia drivers instead of just running the game.
I’d argue with the installer point - if it’s in the repo, and it almost always is for anything a newbie would be using, it’s actually easier. Search, click, done. BUT…
Drivers though, specifically companies not supporting Linux drivers, is shit. I’m helping a friend transition to Linux and am dual-booting myself so I can help with the actual os available for troubleshooting. And fuck me, sound drivers fucking suck ass on Linux. It’s because Creative is a bitch and won’t make Linux drivers, but also apparently literally nobody is both running a creative card and anything above 2.0 speaker setup. I have two creative cards, a decade apart, neither works with my 5.1 speaker setup. FL and FR work, the rest are some sort of fucked and come from an incorrect speaker(s). One of these cards is like 15 years old now, and nobody has noticed or rectified it. And if I reboot straight from windows to Linux, the sound is mangled. I need to shut the system down and boot it cold. Then FL and FR work. Hours of troubleshooting last week got me absolutely no progress.
Then I need software for my Logitech g903 (there is 3rd party software available) that does profiles and switches on the fly based on the application in the foreground (crickets).
Then there is an issue where if my monitor goes to sleep, when I wake it up I get patches of graphical artifacts. On the 2D desktop. Every few seconds, for about a quarter of a second. Random location each time. Random size. I’m on a Radeon 7900 XTX, which isn’t terribly new now. But the friend I’m helping, no issues at all with drivers or hardware. An older 6700 XT. But come the fuck on.
Both of us are on bazzite (I suggested it so they wouldn’t nuke the system as they learn) so it’s just Fedora silverblue with a few tweaks, not some out-there distro.
And, shit. If you need cellular connectivity on Linux, as far as I can tell you’re fucked if you don’t go the Ubuntu route. Debian doesn’t work, Fedora doesn’t work, Mint doesn’t work, I went down a rabbit-hole and tried a dozen distros. I ended up with kubuntu, since I wanted kde, but I tried anything just to see what would work. This is on a modern ThinkPad, still under (extended) warranty. I thought ThinkPads and Linux were supposed to be like this holy-grail of free-as-in-freedom computing? Ugh.
So yeah if you have a basic system, aged a bit, nothing special, it works well. Take one step outside of that perfect-scenario bubble, and paaaaaain.
Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.
Driver availability
Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.
I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.
Driver availability; Linux is getting better, but Windows is superior
Doesn’t Linux have pretty much every driver built into the kernel with the only notable exception being the NVIDIA closed source drivers. Even those drivers are a single command away from installation, it even configures itself correctly out of the box for Wayland support.
To be fair, a lot of those are due to a Windows legacy of dominating the market, which isn’t going to change until there are more people elsewhere. It’s a bit of a catch-22, and yet even being a small percent use in desktop Linux has started to get distros that feel and run similar to Windows enough so people who don’t dabble in Windows specific software don’t miss it. It’s also a bit much to weigh Windows as better in many of those above features when it still have its own issues often, even though it is the dominate and supported OS.
I laughed at your last part. I have never not had to do the same for Windows as I have for Linux when a problem pops up. Google the problem. Those troubleshooters are such a waste of time, and honestly the only time I’ve had an automated fix that worked to resolve a situation was in Linux via purging the old driver and reloading it. The Windows troubleshooter is like the first tier on a tech support line, where you tell them, yeah, I already did all that.
it’s easier because they’ve been using it all their life. If they’d been using linux all their life, they’d say that windows was too hard to use, nod oubt.
Graphics drivers. I can’t say I ever had a graphics driver update in Windows that rendered my system borderline unusable, but I 100% blame Nvidia for me running windows until recently. I tried a dozen times over a decade and ended up back on windows when the Nvidia update trashed my system and I got sick of dealing with it.
installation of software on Linux is very bad. Literally everything else on Linux is very ready for the mass market, but installing apps is horrible to the point of making the whole OS not ready for the general public
Most of them are bundled terribly, forcing you to use flatseal or similar to make it work - way to much to do and understand for the average user
Roughly half of all the programs I install are flatpaks, and the other half are appimages. They both largely work the same, but the fact that there’s a difference will be crippling to the average user. Especially if you ask them to choose between one or the other
Believe it or not, a lot of people are not comfortable with the app store mentality flatpak seems built around. Googling “chrome download” is far more ingrained in the average person. Aside from browsers and projects of similar scope, this is difficult to achieve on linux
Can 800 year old grandma Doris use the feature? Can the average person who writes comments on YouTube videos? Minion meme posting facebook aunts? If not, it’s not ready for mainstream.
That would be totally true if every software was distributed as a flatpak and every distro had flatpak enabled in the package manager out of the box. That’s just not reality.
I said “usually”, and I’m talking about mainstream distros.
Also the original comment says “the whole OS is not ready for the general public”, which is also vague. I don’t expect the “general public” to install Gentoo and suffer from this issue.
Not even then. For example the biggest Linux distribution in use is Ubuntu, and it doesn’t have flatpak built in. So even if a flatpak of an app is available, a user of Ubuntu would have to already understand what a flatpak is, and already know that it would make the app installable on Ubuntu, and know that flatpak itself can be installed separately, and know how to use a different install method already just to get the flatpak system onto their computer in the first place
Doing anything requires the memorization of thousands of commands that must be formatted perfectly and are specific to your distribution, into a black box that rarely provides any feedback at all, and when it does it’s extremely generic.
I’m sure my inbox will be blown up by delusional people claiming you don’t need it but it’s just not true.
The simple act of installing software is crazy complicated and different on every distro.
My current distro has 2 separate system update apps and I don’t really know how to use either of them, nor do I understand why I need to use them at all. Why does the system need me to click buttons to make it go? Just do it in the background. Then as soon as it’s done I get another popup 3 minutes later saying another package needs to be updated.
Hardware compatibility is a huge problem, fingerprint readers, WiFi, facial recognition, Bluetooth, etc. etc. Very few companies make computers with Linux compatibility being considered at all. Everything will have drivers day 1 on Windows and then they’ll trickle down to Linux a year or two later.
Nvidia GPUs are by far and away the most popular and they’re still very painful to use. And even though that’s entirely Nvidia’s fault, the problem remains.
I dislike Linux the least but there’s no way I could recommend it to anyone who isn’t a giant nerd who likes fixing computers.
I don’t use Linux except on my steamdeck and even I know there are a bunch of distros that look and act (minus lots of the bad stuff) just like windows
What’s easier in Windows compared to Linux? Except the fact that you have to install it, since it doesn’t come preinstalled on as many PCs. But many people who think Windows is easy would probably still consider installing it difficult.
Sadly, quite a few things. Here’s a few:
Don’t get me wrong. I use Linux as my daily driver. That also means I get frustrated on occasion when again I must consult man pages instead of just running a troubleshooter or fiddling with Nvidia drivers instead of just running the game.
(venting frustration)
I’d argue with the installer point - if it’s in the repo, and it almost always is for anything a newbie would be using, it’s actually easier. Search, click, done. BUT…
Drivers though, specifically companies not supporting Linux drivers, is shit. I’m helping a friend transition to Linux and am dual-booting myself so I can help with the actual os available for troubleshooting. And fuck me, sound drivers fucking suck ass on Linux. It’s because Creative is a bitch and won’t make Linux drivers, but also apparently literally nobody is both running a creative card and anything above 2.0 speaker setup. I have two creative cards, a decade apart, neither works with my 5.1 speaker setup. FL and FR work, the rest are some sort of fucked and come from an incorrect speaker(s). One of these cards is like 15 years old now, and nobody has noticed or rectified it. And if I reboot straight from windows to Linux, the sound is mangled. I need to shut the system down and boot it cold. Then FL and FR work. Hours of troubleshooting last week got me absolutely no progress.
Then I need software for my Logitech g903 (there is 3rd party software available) that does profiles and switches on the fly based on the application in the foreground (crickets).
Then there is an issue where if my monitor goes to sleep, when I wake it up I get patches of graphical artifacts. On the 2D desktop. Every few seconds, for about a quarter of a second. Random location each time. Random size. I’m on a Radeon 7900 XTX, which isn’t terribly new now. But the friend I’m helping, no issues at all with drivers or hardware. An older 6700 XT. But come the fuck on.
Both of us are on bazzite (I suggested it so they wouldn’t nuke the system as they learn) so it’s just Fedora silverblue with a few tweaks, not some out-there distro.
And, shit. If you need cellular connectivity on Linux, as far as I can tell you’re fucked if you don’t go the Ubuntu route. Debian doesn’t work, Fedora doesn’t work, Mint doesn’t work, I went down a rabbit-hole and tried a dozen distros. I ended up with kubuntu, since I wanted kde, but I tried anything just to see what would work. This is on a modern ThinkPad, still under (extended) warranty. I thought ThinkPads and Linux were supposed to be like this holy-grail of free-as-in-freedom computing? Ugh.
So yeah if you have a basic system, aged a bit, nothing special, it works well. Take one step outside of that perfect-scenario bubble, and paaaaaain.
Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.
Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.
I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.
Doesn’t Linux have pretty much every driver built into the kernel with the only notable exception being the NVIDIA closed source drivers. Even those drivers are a single command away from installation, it even configures itself correctly out of the box for Wayland support.
I mostly agree with you but this contradicts everything I’ve seen. Presumably you have evidence of this?
To be fair, a lot of those are due to a Windows legacy of dominating the market, which isn’t going to change until there are more people elsewhere. It’s a bit of a catch-22, and yet even being a small percent use in desktop Linux has started to get distros that feel and run similar to Windows enough so people who don’t dabble in Windows specific software don’t miss it. It’s also a bit much to weigh Windows as better in many of those above features when it still have its own issues often, even though it is the dominate and supported OS.
I laughed at your last part. I have never not had to do the same for Windows as I have for Linux when a problem pops up. Google the problem. Those troubleshooters are such a waste of time, and honestly the only time I’ve had an automated fix that worked to resolve a situation was in Linux via purging the old driver and reloading it. The Windows troubleshooter is like the first tier on a tech support line, where you tell them, yeah, I already did all that.
it’s easier because they’ve been using it all their life. If they’d been using linux all their life, they’d say that windows was too hard to use, nod oubt.
Graphics drivers. I can’t say I ever had a graphics driver update in Windows that rendered my system borderline unusable, but I 100% blame Nvidia for me running windows until recently. I tried a dozen times over a decade and ended up back on windows when the Nvidia update trashed my system and I got sick of dealing with it.
On team green and running Bazzite with no issues
That’s more of an Nvidia problem than a Linux problem.
installation of software on Linux is very bad. Literally everything else on Linux is very ready for the mass market, but installing apps is horrible to the point of making the whole OS not ready for the general public
What? When was the last time you tried Linux?
With flatpak, it’s usually a one-click process to install anything nowadays.
Except:
Can 800 year old grandma Doris use the feature? Can the average person who writes comments on YouTube videos? Minion meme posting facebook aunts? If not, it’s not ready for mainstream.
That would be totally true if every software was distributed as a flatpak and every distro had flatpak enabled in the package manager out of the box. That’s just not reality.
I said “usually”, and I’m talking about mainstream distros.
Also the original comment says “the whole OS is not ready for the general public”, which is also vague. I don’t expect the “general public” to install Gentoo and suffer from this issue.
They don’t all have that either
Not even then. For example the biggest Linux distribution in use is Ubuntu, and it doesn’t have flatpak built in. So even if a flatpak of an app is available, a user of Ubuntu would have to already understand what a flatpak is, and already know that it would make the app installable on Ubuntu, and know that flatpak itself can be installed separately, and know how to use a different install method already just to get the flatpak system onto their computer in the first place
Me fail reading.
Me forgive. Reading hard.
I use Linux regularly, and the last time i installed an app was probably within the past 365 days
Ah. I see. That’s very informative.
I can install apps well enough, but I’m very techie, the general population isn’t gonna be able to do it reasonably
Doing anything requires the memorization of thousands of commands that must be formatted perfectly and are specific to your distribution, into a black box that rarely provides any feedback at all, and when it does it’s extremely generic.
I’m sure my inbox will be blown up by delusional people claiming you don’t need it but it’s just not true.
The simple act of installing software is crazy complicated and different on every distro.
My current distro has 2 separate system update apps and I don’t really know how to use either of them, nor do I understand why I need to use them at all. Why does the system need me to click buttons to make it go? Just do it in the background. Then as soon as it’s done I get another popup 3 minutes later saying another package needs to be updated.
Hardware compatibility is a huge problem, fingerprint readers, WiFi, facial recognition, Bluetooth, etc. etc. Very few companies make computers with Linux compatibility being considered at all. Everything will have drivers day 1 on Windows and then they’ll trickle down to Linux a year or two later.
Nvidia GPUs are by far and away the most popular and they’re still very painful to use. And even though that’s entirely Nvidia’s fault, the problem remains.
I dislike Linux the least but there’s no way I could recommend it to anyone who isn’t a giant nerd who likes fixing computers.
I don’t use Linux except on my steamdeck and even I know there are a bunch of distros that look and act (minus lots of the bad stuff) just like windows
They act like Windows (minus lots of the good stuff) too.
i wouldnt know where to begin if i had to switch, since im not in the tech industry, only 2 of my bros would switch since they are programmers.