Software. What’s a computer without software other than an over glorified calculator.
That was my first experience with Linux back in the early 2010’s and pretty much up to recently. However with changes to my workflow and Steam improving and sharing the improvements with Wine. My software library went from web browsing and office software t
99% of games, and all of my business software.
The UX experience needs some work under the hood. There is still a nasty tendency to over rely on the terminal to fix basic problems. (IBT=off for VM to work).
But its close enough that I can almost recommend it to my grandparents… Almost.
Linux is perfect for grandparents or non tech savvy family if you set it up for them. Once it’s up and running, there isn’t much of anything they can do to break it.
Not so, it was true for my 86-year-old mom. I installed Linux Mint and put the Chrome browser icon on her desktop, and that was all she used. She only checked e-mails and browsed like Facebook, etc. Every month or so when I went to visit, I’d just run the updater. Never broke and I never really had to do anything. The reason why I put it on, was her PC was getting old, and Windows was getting super slow. So it was win-win. She did not even know it was Linux.
If the only thing you’re doing is turning it on and firing up a browser, I can see that working for just about any device with just about any operating system…
Yeah, but Mint is completely free and doesnt come with much of the software bloat that might be confusing to an older person. It’s a simple user experience by design.
Not in my experience. They don’t know how to use the terminal and downloading anything shady online won’t install. No auto-updates, no bloat, nothing but what I put there. How would that not work?
I’ve tried Linux a few times each time would seem to be good apart from gaming but every single time something I Didn’t Even realise I did broke it completely. I’d say I’ve never had linux work for more than a few months.
With windows an install no matter how inconviant and annoying with forced updates has always lasted me years. Don’t get me wrong though I hate Microsoft but I need my games and I want reliability.
To me following linux guides has mostly ended in an unbootable system.
Yeah. I wanted to build a custom theme from source, and installed all the dependencies. Tried the theme, realized it had the usual issues just like every other theme, uninstalled it. Then I uninstalled everything I needed to build it, as the terminal history was still there and I could tell exactly what was installed. Guess what? apt would’ve nuked my desktop environment if I didn’t stop it, almost as if what I had installed was a required dependency. Pretty sure it was optional though, since everything was more or less working before installing
–Edit
Forgot to mention the custom theme was for qt5ct, not for the desktop environment
I tried to use Ubuntu for a bit but I just wanted to have regular Firefox with the built in updater, turns out this is way more of a hassle than it is on Windows.
It shouldn’t be that hard to “install” a program like Firefox directly from a website but all you get is an archive thing that you have to manually “install” basically, it’s tricky enough that someone wrote a tool just do do this: gitlab.com/…/Firefox-automatic-install-for-Linux
APT and Flatpacks are all cool but an offline installation should still be available and easy to use without being forced to use a terminal. Maybe I’m incorrect and I would love to hear about it but this is my experience.
Steam for whatever reason is basically installed the same way on windows as on PC in terms of user experience, you download a file and double click it. Maybe it’s Mozillas fault? Who knows, it’s frustrating in any case.
Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) have a slightly different way of installing programs and applications. It has an app store, similar to Android and iOS, you can search for Firefox (and other apps) from in there. If I’m not mistaken, Ubuntu searched and notifies you for updates regularly.
The philosophy of Ubuntu (and most other linux distributions) is that you don’t need to go to a bunch of different sites to download your software, you can just download all your software from the “app store”.
And all of these tools are GUI’s (so ‘point and click’-based), so you don’t need to open a terminal, if you don’t want to.
Everything you said is true but it’s beside the point, all this app store stuff shouldn’t affect how easy or hard it is to install something the old fashioned way.
I know Firefox is there but I would to have the option to install it and programs like it without some kind of app store.
You mentioned android and it’s a perfect example of what I want, you have a nice app store but you can if you want download any app or anything from a website and it’s just one file that’s easy to install and it won’t update along with everything else or they can often check for updates on their own.
to me this is a feature rather than an issue, whenever a package is updated in the package repository it’s super convenient to just update them from the same place instead of having auto-updaters built into all applications on the system. i guess that’s a preference thing though.
Yes but my main issue is that installing software can be a pain in general. The script that someone made just to download and install firefox from mozilla.org is evident of that:
“The objective is to provide a method to easily install Mozilla Firefox directly from Mozilla’s website and enable Firefox’s automatic update feature for the latest releases. Providing a pure stock Mozilla Firefox experience for everyone using your Linux computer at home.”
Isn’t it kind of odd that this has to have a script in the first place? Or is it actually easy and this script is redundant? From a windows perspective the fact that you can’t just download an installer that works it’s pretty weird. I notice that other software often offers .deb or .rpm files and maybe those are more what I want…
But also repositories can be a pain, I remember trying to install the emulation thing RetroArch via the app store thing on ubuntu and that was outdated and installing cores was very different from how I did it on PC.
“Cores should be downloaded from within the program using the Online Updater’s Core Updater, if possible. Some distros patch out the Online Updater, in which case you’ll need to install cores using your package manager. There are core packages available in the PPAs, as well, and they will continue to be updated, but new packages for new cores will not be created.”
I wanted to dual boot linux and windows but installed linux on the wrong drive partition and wrote over all of my data. Decided i was too stupid for linux. To be fair that was 3 years ago, maybe ill try again soon
I spent three days installing Arch from scratch. After I got it working, I wiped everything and did it again and again, I wrote 2 simple script to automate the process, and after I was done, I wiped everything and installed Manjaro lol.
It’s a good learning experience, I recommend every new Linux user do it in a sandbox at least once.
If you try again, follow a dual-boot guide for your distro. Also, make your root and home partitions separate, so if you run into issues, you can reset safely.
The miserable drivers for my video card and all the other little things that required hours of fiddling with to get working right. Also, how very few programs ran 100% with WINE. I went back to the simple life to get through school but I’m now eyeing Linux for the dev experience.
It happens lol I got someone telling me that “I just need to use the right settings!” D’oh, silly me, I always try to use the wrong settings. Nevermind the time it takes to look up & set that all up, if I only knew the right ones from birth 😆
Right!?! I don’t think this post actually wanted to hear anything bad about Linux, and if they do you just get called a potato for being a dumb ass. 🤷♂️
Yeah, and I have nothing against Linux, I think it’s wonderful and I’d switch in a heartbeat if it were more convenient than Windows. But the reality is that it’s not for many of us who have tried it as our main OS
I used Linux Mint for several years on a dual-boot laptop. I rarely found myself booting Windows. While there was a learning curve, Mint was fairly accessible out of the box and was generally a delight to use. Until it wasn’t. At some point, the drivers for my video card updated, and just flat broke everything. And I can’t really use a computer on which I can’t see the desktop. I waited. And waited. A fix for the driver may have eventually come, but after awhile, booting into Windows just became my default, until eventually I just wiped the Linux partition to recover the storage space.
It was fun while it lasted, and I may choose one day to give it another go for the fourth time. This wasn’t the first time I’ve had something like this happen. First time was with Fedora, and the second was Ubuntu. Each time, I had the same “it worked until it didn’t” experience, and each time it stopped working was usually some kind of broken driver making my hardware incompatible.
It crashes at random times without any forewarning. One moment I’m browsing lemmy, the next moment I get a black screen and the computer starts to reboot. Also sometimes after waking up from hibernation, the computer freezes, not even switchting off/on caps lock works in those moments. It doesn’t matter which distribution I use, they all crash on me (tried Fedora, EndeavourOS, Debian). I guess Linux isn’t compatible with my hardware, but I don’t know how to fix it or where to start.
I use both. Linux as a homserver runs a bunch of docker containers and a Nas/personal cloud. Desktop and notebook runs Windows because compatibility and honestly Linux as a desktop still sucks ass. I tried it the first time in the mid 90s and even after all the promises and a quarter of a century later its still shit. Just take the L Linux and be what you are; the best server os.
See, I always find it funny when people say Linux is rubbish for desktop. I main Linux and boot Windows for some games, and Windows continues to find ways to bug me while my Linux desktop feels great.
I’m using Linux for desktop since years - even my non tech savvy girlfriend uses KDE without issues on her laptop.
What was your issue?
I can’t stand to work with Windows. Is gruesome slow and confusingly designed. Configuration is splittered across the system. Some parts in GUI setting tools, some part in registry, some part in specific files.
Error codes are completely useless under Windows. In Linux the error message gives me at least a clue what’s happening.
I can’t understand how anybody can really work with Windows. Gladly I can do 99% of everything in Linux. Only some industry hardware configuration tools are still stuck on Windows.
Yeah proton works very well, in some rare cases running the games in question better than windows. Right now the main issue is games with super invasive kernel level anticheat, eg. Valorant, Siege, Fortnite, etc. So really mostly shooters.
Some don’t even need to. EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye both have support for Linux and it’s up to the devs to enable support (or upgrade to a version that supports Linux). But in some cases, the companies just refuse to support it (Bungie with Destiny 2 for example)
Multiplayer games often use a third party anti-cheat software. Some of them work on Linux, some of them don’t. What the previous commenter was referring to specifically is that some anti-cheat, like easy anti cheat has been updated to work in proton, but it requires that game developer push out an update to enable that functionality. Some do, and some (Bungie) have outright refused to do it, and even threaten bans for players that try to play on Linux.
Stuff like East Anti Cheat needs to have support for Linux essentially turned on. Otherwise the game won’t run even if WINE/Proton can run the game fine. I think a lot of devs don’t bother because they don’t know Linux in case OS specific support might be required, and the market was fairly small up until the Steam Deck came out.
For an example. A few weeks after the Steam Deck came out, suddenly Apex Legends and a few other games could be run on Linux without anti-cheat issues. The developers just turned on a switch and made a new build essentially.
For the longest of time is Linux users were mostly just told that people use Linux to cheat in games and that’s not really the case.
Overall though there is no real reason why anti-cheat software shouldn’t be able to work on Linux.
When I’ve tried Linux in the past, it’s way too much work with limited selection of apps. It’s more of a toy to play around with. Learning all the command line stuff, editing text files and selling up jobs, etc. It wasn’t for me.
Mind you, last time I seriously looked at Linux was when Red hat was still free. I know things have changed since then.
Oh boy have things changed. The big headline distros of today are more stable, functional and have a much wider variety of software than 2 years ago, let alone a decade ago.
I really don’t want to delve into details, but even when I made gpu work there was noticeable drop in performance in games compared to when I ran them under Windows
Add comment