I find it hard to believe that, outside of work computers, many people would be choosing Windows over Mac or Linux, especially is AI is their goal.

I’m also curious why the comments are turned off for this article unless it is a paid ad for Microsoft.

    • snownyte@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      Ubuntu and it’s spin-offs are really are as close as we’re ever going to get to a full, user-friendly Linux OS. At least one that isn’t going to scare off as many people.

      It’s just when you tell people the part where you have to keep track of some of the software that they use through the terminal, that’s when you start seeing them trickle off back to Windows.

      Because the average user doesn’t have the patience, time or know-how to utilize commands in a terminal. If you plopped them down during the era where DOS was prominent, they’d be so lost and be begging for a UI to handle everything.

      • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Ubuntu and it’s spin-offs are really are as close as we’re ever going to get to a full, user-friendly Linux OS

        Why do you think it will not progress much from now on?

        You don’t need to use the terminal for Linux at all now AFAIK. Ubuntu / GNOME already has a nice software store as a UI.

        There are some rough edges I really don’t understand why they haven’t addressed yet that seem like very low hanging fruit, but overall IMO it’s very close to being there.

        • snownyte@kbin.social
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          5 months ago

          I’ve never mentioned the software store.

          And not every single piece of software is on it.

          And yes you’ll still need to use the terminal for more than just updating and installing software. Kinda routes back to my problem in regards to transitioning from one OS to another.

      • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        There are some little things / low hanging fruit that I personally find very annoying, and don’t know why they haven’t addressed yet. Average users coming from Mac or Windows notice these things easily and will immediately write off Linux as being janky when they run into them. Most Linux users I see are fairly apologetic about the rough edges since 1. they know how to figure out how to fix them, and 2. believe in the principles of FOSS.

        • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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          5 months ago

          Well, I was comparing to my experience with both Windows and MacOS or whatever is the thing called.

          Windows PC gets slow and laggy after around half a year, it goes slowly so you don’t notice at first, but around half a year later it’s shitty. No matter the hardware. Sure, your $2k laptop won’t be as slow as a random $300 laptop, but the ratio of new/half-a-year-later is more or less the same.

          With Macs I have limited experience, but my partner’s Mac was shitting itself all the time, weird issues with login screen being stuck and needing hard reboot, the thing generally being laggy when you try to do more than two things (neither of which necessarily needs to be a demanding task), Finder is pretty much an abomination that no one really knows how to use well and so on.

          Sure, Linux is fucked up all the time as well, but my point is it’s not worse than the other two systems, both are broken all the time as well. And the argument that you need terminal to work - have you actually fixed any problem on Windows? Unless a reboot of the system or of some service solves the problem, within 10 minutes you’re either running PowerShell or you’re deep in the registry.

          Well, at least Windows seems to be a problem that’s solving itself (albeit very slowly) with how shitty it’s become.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            I’ve never had a Windows pc get slow after 6 months… Unless I’ve beat the snot out of it as I just don’t care. But I’m an Admin, user boxes don’t usually have such an issue. I have a 10 year old Windows 7 box that’s as fast as it was 10 years ago.

            But… If you install/uninstall a lot of stuff, over time that can cause issues (because Uninstallers are notoriously lazily compiled - I say this as an app packager of 20+ years.)

            I used to say Windows Reg cleaners are snake oil, but on some systems it can really help with the uninstall issue - lots of crap, especially stuff related to context menus, can really slow it down. The only one I’ve ever recommended is Crap Cleaner - I’ve seen it revive a test machine that had gotten slow from a billion installs/uninstalls, testing lots of iffy software, etc.

      • atocci@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        I still can’t connect my 360hz monitor and 165hz monitor and get HDR at the same time in Linux. Only two of these things work at once. Hoping the eventual new Nvidia drivers fix that, but otherwise I’m out of ideas.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Not even close.

        Though it’s really impressive how much it’s improved over the years.

        I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.

        As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).

        I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

        There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.

        There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

        Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.

        Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?

        Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.

        Someone else said it better than me:

        Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.

        So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

        And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

        I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

        I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

        Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.

        Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.

        Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.

        If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

        These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

        All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).