I would switch in a heartbeat if MS office would be on Linux. I have tried all alternatives, including MS office online and I always encounter some kind of formatting fuck up. That’s just not acceptable for my job.
you could run it in a vm if you really have to, they have very low overheard on modern computers. mine isn’t even modern, it’s a thinkpad x230 laptop, it can run a win10 vm without slowdown. also hlps to have a vm sitting around in case oyu need it for anything else
Can I ask what you’re using? I tried virt-manager with a win 10 installation and it barely works. Granted an i5 5200U is not beefy by any means but at 100% CPU usage everything just stutters.
Just made the switch at the end of December alongside making my new PC. Feels very refreshing to actually be in control of my own computer. I’ve barely run into any issues gaming either, which is a welcome surprise - Proton remains one of the best things Valve has ever done.
I suspect that it’s not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.
In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.
It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
Can’t do that if you play games.
Also that’s half of the reason Windows hasn’t lost the war on home desktop PCs yet. Another half is office applications.
Actually, these are thirds.
Another reason making me say so is that no major user-friendly distribution wants to be just that, they all have a particular madness with no good reason for it.
So I don’t know what to recommend, there should be something off the top of my head, but that’d be “just install Debian, it’s fine”.
So, any single reason of these going away would accelerate Linux adoption notably. Any two would make it a trend visible to housewives. And all three would resemble the flight of ICQ users to Skype.
What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.
I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.
And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.
I remember that it does too much, but without specifics. It’s been 4+ years since I touched Ubuntu.
They used to be a little FOSS-only
I vaguely remember that “Amazon lens” for Unity, I don’t think they ever were that much FOSS-only.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives.
It’s fine. That’d still be goal fulfilled.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it.
How so?
There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
I recently had a problem with LO, while editing a document with lots of math formulae - from time to time while adding a formula about half of others (in the whole document) would just become empty.
Not sure something like that would happen under Apple suite’s analog of Word, whatever it’s called.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both.
With that I agree, somewhere in 2012 I somehow realized that it’s already much better than the alternatives, and yes, for a housewife’s desktop just as well, if one’s honest and thinks of their own needs.
And if one’s comparing it to advertising of the competing commercial products, then it’s hopeless.
I recently been arguing with some dude about some PUBG mechanics. It took me quite some time to realize that he was playing PUBG mobile, never played the PC version or even knew that it even existed for that matter. For him, PUBG simply meant PUBG mobile. For those people, they don’t even consider using PC for gaming. They might consider console, but PC to them is just more or less a typewriter for school/office tasks.
I’ve been thinking for some time what to answer and concluded that the normie world is a world of pain.
We - as in FOSS OS users and FOSS paradigm users - desperately need open hardware, so that the rest of the industry could eat all the rubber dicks they want without affecting us significantly.
And I mean not only hardware design, but fabs.
It may seem an impossible future, with semiconductor deficit etc, and Taiwan being that important.
And with starting a fab being so expensive.
Still, they only way a conclusive FOSS victory resulting in even balance happens is if there is a public fab producing general-purpose hardware with public design.
Because right now lots of resources are being wasted on catching up in inherently disadvantageous areas, like supporting proprietary hardware which is always harder for FOSS developers than for MS or Apple.
Without full-chain FOSS hardware production it’ll always be bare survival.
And yet here I am looking to expanding my devices with a replacement server (linux) and a NUC (linux).
Finally ditched Windows on the desktop forever, about 7 months ago.
I agree with you on mobile. I my country many ppl ditched laptops and desktops for their phones.
Although I have a hard time understanding how they can actually get some work done on the phone, if they do any work from home that requires a computer. Well those ppl probably have an old laptop laying around.
I remember looking at pc sales data, and they have been shrinking in the last decade, with the curve flattening until the pandemic, when sales grew substantially, almost to the 2000s level. Now it’s shrinking back slowly. I’m not sure if people are abandoning desktops in favor of phones as much as we think. desktops are durable and we tend to have only one, while mobile devices are gaining different forms, and people are getting more of them. Perhaps the desktop market has not much more room to grow while mobile devices are still booming.
But that’s just one possible explanation, I might be wrong. I was going to post the data, but statista requires login to see it.
I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.
What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.
I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.
I mean it’s a locked down gento system that now allows you to install popular open source software, and it’s linux-y enough to get businesses to be less linux-hostile in their software and webapps
I just installed Linux on a six-year-old budget laptop this morning. My first time using Linux. What was a uselessly slow machine is now just humming along.
Nice. That is what started me into Linux. Wife’s 2011 laptop became useless with W10 upgrade, now it runs linux and she has fast browsing, zoom calls etc, and it is peppy like a new computer.
I know it’s a joke, but if linux keeps growing steadly, without saturating, it can reach a point in which it breaks the “I don’t use it because no one else does/ I don’t use it because my software isn’t supported” barrier and start to grow exponentially.
I have spent 3 days trying to install 64bit Linux on a mini PC which has 32bit UEFI. The funny thing is that this device is so slow probably I will not use it, but I still want to make it work.
It is a ViewSonic, but I don’t know the model. I have it’s PCB and power supply only. CPU is Intel Atom x5-Z8350. Btw I have already installed Linux on it, was a really good feeling, now it is collecting dust on the shelf :D
Yes, it does use a Linux kernel but no one would consider it open unless you limit yourself to AOSP. Google branded Android is closed and is regulated and restricted.
For me the turning point was when a failed Windows forced upgrade ended up deleting me important files. I had backups, but I lost days of work because Microsoft felt so insecure in the face of piracy that they had to upgrade my computer despite me constantly telling them not to do so.
That was around 10 years ago. I went through various KDE distros; in the end I settled for Kubuntu.
The recent developments in KDE plasma are excellent. I haven’t had to open a command prompt in years. I hadn’t had a tech problem until this year when my tmp folder got full.
I’m from the other side, though. I’m a developer and systems administrator on Kubuntu and I live by the command line. I use yakuake, which is totally awesome, and have about 50 or so shells open pretty much permanently, all nicely tucked away in tabs and sub sections in a programmable drop down that automatically starts all those command line shells when my computer boots. It’s pure awesomeness, Linus os pure awesomeness!
Damn, you know, I love automation and customization, and your description sounds awesome. I certainly will jump the gap at some point, but the thought of having to relearn an entire OS and suite of tools, and inevitably make mistakes that will cost me time and -probably- multiple reinstalls discourages me quite a bit. I remember using Fedora 20-something ten years ago on my laptop and the amount of things for which I needed a terminal was overwhelming. I also remember trying to learn file management by copying/backing up files from the terminal, and ending up batch-deleting entire folders worth of pictures. I never had a reliable “readme” for learning all this, that didn’t already assume I knew all the lingo and was proficient in some programming language.
I started using powershell more because it comes with a lot of bash aliases out of the box. Besides a brief period of using ubuntu in like 2006 because my windows install got corrupted, its my first foray into linux. Ive been daily driving debian 12 and i love it. I feel like getting used to the lingo helped ease the transition.
But if you actually use powershell for more than simple tasks and take advantage of its object oriented nature, it might make the switch harder. If you plan to use the command line as little as possible i think the switch is trivial. Your biggest worry is going to be analysis paralysis with all the options, but i just installed debian with the defaults and trying out different desktop environments is really easy and i havent yet had a problem that wasnt simple to solve with a google search.
I’m one of the converts. Didn’t like Windows 11 at all, decided to try Ubuntu/Zorin before going back to 10 and ended up staying. I’ve tried various distros many times over the past ~15 years but it never felt “ready” to me until now.
The last few years have had great improvements. For any average user (like a kid or adult that just browses web, streams video, zoom calls, etc) there is no reason a Linux desktop can’t be their main system.
On my laptop, I’ve switched to Linux since, despite being built in 2017, doesn’t meet Win 11’s min requirements. This is horseshit, I don’t care how MS explains it or justifies it, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure during development, they realized a 20 year old computer could run Win 11 and decided to make up requirements to force people into buying new PCs.
Anyway, I’m using KDE Neon and I’m loving its ease of use and simplicity. I have barely needed to dive into the terminal to fix anything and KDE Plasma feels very polished and user friendly. To me, it feels like the new “normie-friendly” Linux. And without the horseshit telemetry and Microsoft spying, it’s like a brand new PC.
I’m a sysadmin and we are in the very early stages of rolling out windows 11 to our users. Windows is windows, but I just can’t help but have observations that windows 11 looks like KDE did maybe 10 years ago? It’s like a badly themed linux distro from 2015…
It is arbitrary: my HP Zbook initially offered W11 upgrade, but we use corporate stuff and our software wasn’t certified on W11 yet so I held off. Months later we get a notice that the Zbook no longer meets requirements for W11 LOL
Windows 11 has irked me on my main laptop. I still use it due to various applications (not just games) that require Windows, but the slowness of the OS and the tracking drive me away from it. I installed Linux on another drive on the laptop.
Additionally, I purchased a desktop from my friend, and completely wiped Windows from it to install Linux (KDE Neon). I realized there is nothing that I’d want from that desktop, possibly aside from a couple of games my more powerful laptop can run, that Linux cannot run.
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