I still have a dual-boot desktop that I keep a copy of Windows 10 on for one or two bits of software that I can’t get 100% working in Wine, and yeah I’m definitely not upgrading. For one thing I can’t because it’s an older CPU that doesn’t have TPM on it, but also because of the AI thing.
The idea that Microsoft is expecting me to purchase new hardware (which is now ludicrously expensive because of companies like Microsoft going all-in on AI slop) so that I can ‘upgrade’ and make it easier for them to use their AI slop spyware to harvest my info is so preposterously arrogant and evil that I actually find it super funny.
It’s like if someone was going to rob you and they expected you to go purchase and supply the gun they use to stick you up with lol.
I have used MS for years and also interacting with linux based server systems daily. I do stick with windows, but I also disable most of AI related features (I used auto captioning in some cases). While I use AI daily it is a local sandboxed instance. I think they should focus on other areas, but every tech company is FOMO on AI.
Finally converted the last computer in my house from Windows to Linux. My wife was the last holdout and she’s been loving her Linux machine.
It really is a perfect storm against Windows/Microsoft:
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AI Sloppifying their everything
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Linux is now very easy to get into
TL;DR: Short Microsoft or no balls
It really isn’t for most people though.
You’re expecting that people will seek out alternatives. I expect the more likely reality. People will just stop using PCs completely outside of work.
It’s not a matter of how easy something is. It’s a matter of human perspective. Right now they think of PCs as being “Windows”. In much the same way some of our moms would say “I bought you a Nintendo game for your xbox!”
And instead of buying non-compliant software, she actually DID buy an XBox game. And called it Nintendo.
Same way down in the south you might overhear someone order a coke. To which the waitress asks “what kind?” And the reply is “Sprite”.
Kleenex/Tissues.
You get the idea. To them PCs are made by Windows and thats all they know. They just know they don’t like the AI they gwt forced to use at work. So instead of using it at home, or using an alternative, they figure they can just watch youtube on their phone.
YOU use a PC as a PC. Most other people use PCs as a browser to go to facebook, and youtube, and instagram. All the things that make you cringe, thats what a PC is to them.
So when you say “You can customize everything in linux!”, their response, from someone who used WindowsXP for 15 years and never once changed the wallpaper, will be “but why?”.
Hopefully that can help you see the difference between “it’s easy” and “it’s a thought that runs through their brain at all”
yep. attention is all you need with the manufactured consent of the free marketplace. behavioralist by design!
you say that, but i’m telling you, every year linux getting more and more popular, if not stopped, will create a tipping point. It just takes a few more waves of youtube videos to get younger people into it, and young people grow into older people with strong opinions
When it comes to whether people will switch I think sentiment is more towards diy PC gamers who are used to putting together and upgrading their systems and doing a fresh install.
When it comes to the general consumer i expect them to have the tech literacy of boomers when it comes to a PC.
Others will do whatever gamers do because only PC builders can build PCs.
Not all gamers can even do something as simple as installing Windows off a usb stick. The tech illiteracy of PC users can’t be overestimated. There’s PC users who buy high refesh rate monitors then use them at 60 hz. Anyone can buy a prebuilt.
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Like apparently everyone else, I moved to Linux Mint and have been loving it! It really is easy to use, but I’ve also realized that my technical knowledge is at a point where I really don’t need it to be easy. Like, I’ve always considered myself kinda tech illiterate in comparison to the people I’m around (I’m a software engineer who specializes in JavaScript/React, but I’m around Rust devs and people who set up docker containers for fun) but apparently just being comfortable using the console is far above what the average user will do. I think there was an xkcd about this kind of phenomenon
Eh. I installed Linux Mint this weekend because I was sick of Microsoft’s bullshit and I had to connect my PC to my router with an Ethernet cable to install a driver for my wifi adapter from the terminal. I am quite tech savvy and was very comfortable with this whole process and it took no time at all, but my wife who knows barely anything about computers would have probably given up the moment the Internet didn’t work when Mint installed. Most people use routers that they rent for too much money from their ISPs and don’t even know you can plug shit into the backs of those routers yourself. The moment the wifi doesn’t work on the new OS even though the password is right, it’s game over for their ability to troubleshoot it. That is why Linux won’t get normies on it anytime soon. After that my experience has been extremely smooth and I have been able to do anything I’ve wanted to do without touching the terminal (although I prefer terminal commands), but that initial hurdle is just way too much to expect from the average person who just wants to get on Netflix and Facebook asap.
I’m not a computer person at all and the most I did with my Windows laptop was gently prodding the drivers to fix themselves. I have experience with basic C++ and Javascript but thats back when I was in high school and I was never really good at it. I would love to move to Linux but honestly yeah the hurdle seems too big. The thought of rendering my laptop unusable for a few days and fucking it up even further to the point of no takesies backsies scares me.
But oh well, I need to save up for a new laptop first before worrying about these things lol
I’m glad you’ve had a good go of it. I’ve been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn’t expect it to just…not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just…not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of “well that’s not a problem, it must be your machine’s fault” when it’s happening to multiple people?
I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I’ll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she’ll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it’ll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.
It’s customizable as hell, it’s free and open-source, and it’s helping my computer skills, so I’ll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn’t love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction… I can’t imagine sticking with it.
I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn’t get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.
Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn’t seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn’t supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.
yess, that’s exactly the one I had in mind!
This is the absolutely perfect way to describe what it’s like listening to Linux fans give advice to newcomers.
Yeah, the average user doesn’t want to do scary console shit. Linux won’t replace windows until people don’t need to type console commands.
Which is kinda sad. The console always feels like a more precise way to deal with a problem. So it’s like people are saying “Using a mouse is too scary, I’d rather use a WiiMote while wearing mittens”
It’s more than that, too. Even when there are GUI things (like the network manager in my system now) the GUIs are badly designed (because it turns out that UX design is an actual, learnable, technical field!), and, further, inconsistent from one piece to another so there’s little in the way of shared learning. When you learn one of these little GUI utilities you’ve learned … that one … GUI … utility.
At that point you might as well be typing stuff like
ls -laR ~/Documents | awk '{print $9}' | grep -v '^\.' | xargs -I{} file {} | grep -i 'ascii\|unicode\|utf' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -I{} sh -c 'head -n 5 "{}" | nl -ba -s": " | sed "s/^/$(basename {}): /"' | less -N(Fake command line supplied by long-suffering SO who got a kick out of making something incredibly stupid.)
This is self-fulfilling bullshit. Everyone is saying that typing words is somehow scary, so everyone is scared of typing words.
Average user doesn’t really has more problems with console, either they care enough to google how to fix the problem, and do whatever Internet tells them, or they don’t and they ask for help and kick the problem down the chain. Will the solution involve typing words or clicking checkboxes is kind of irrelevantPeople don’t need to type console commands. They’re just the easiest way to tell someone how to do something in text.
Every computer on every operating system, will inevitably face an issue of some kind at some point. Something you need to troubleshoot.
And if 100% of the troubleshooting is to copy/paste commands into terminal? Yeah. It IS necessary to type things into terminal.
This isn’t a case of “Terminal is the easy way, but you can find help tutorials using the GUI.”
This is a case of every tutorial is “copy/paste these commands into your terminal, and if something goes wrong you better know what the errors are even saying”
So when a non techie sees “python error”, their reaction will be “THERE ARE SNAKES INSIDE MY PC??? THEY’RE CAUSING ERRORS!!!”
You’re about a decade or two out of date with your knowledge here.
Some of my favourite ones from trying to learn this new system include:
invalid argument
Uh… I just typed in a magic incantation that takes up two lines on this text thing.
Which. Fucking. One!?
no such file or directory
The final three words above apply here too. I got this one because a file I downloaded that was supposed to do something had …insert long string of technobabble from SO that included the word shahbang, I swear! It took him over ten minutes to find whatever all the treknobabble he uttered meant and then half a second to fix.
So it’s not even fear that’s at issue. It’s blank incomprehension when the error message is about as useful as those dummy lights in '80s-era cars that just said “ENGINE”.
I‘ve switched to Linux mint. 95% of my time I am using it instead of Windows and this is just because of that stupid kernel anti cheat software…
My Linux mint partition broke almost immediately :(
The windows boot loader has a tendency to erase the GRUB for booting Linux, borking it as soon as you load into windows. It’s probably because windows is still in dual boot.
So that explains my Zorin install disappearing several times. I just gave up and got a Mac.
Yeah I would assume so too but I can’t drop windows and if I can’t rely on dual booting to work it’s not worth messing with. I have a laptop with bazzite on it but that only gets so far.
Dualboot might work better with ltsc iot version of windows, which even if you only use Windows you should be opting for anyways over the copilot and account requirement forcing consumer version of Windows that pushes out unstable new features people don’t want to try to boost their stock by showing increased use of AI.
Don’t dualboot with a partition and you’ll be fine. Give Linux it’s own drive and Windows stops messing with it.
And vast majority would rather become ransomware targets than try Windows alternatives.
Breaking the preview pane in the final update for windows 10 was a nice touch.
I have had 3 more friends in the last 24 hours tell me they are now going to make the switch in the near future. This is in addition to 2 who already have. This makes a total of 8 people I know personally who have already or will be switching this year/early next year.
I do not know a tonne of people, it’s really pretty impressive.
Good
I used windows 11 for too damn long before switching to Mint. I feel like I already damned myself.
Wash yourself in the soothing glow of Mint’s DE and be born again!
I still need to use it at work. Sadly.
Yeah, work machines really make avoiding Windows difficult/impossible. And the worst part is that IT’s group policy often prevents individual employees from disabling all of the super invasive telemetry and data sharing BS. So if you want to be able to use the same accounts across work and personal devices, (like using the same browser profile, so your settings and bookmarks automatically sync), then your personal stuff inevitably gets sent to Microsoft. They’ve deliberately built ecosystems where separating your work and personal life takes extra effort, and that is enough to trap plenty of people.
I asked them at work to disable most of the internet. I do talk to copilot when I am bored and ask it stupid or pointless questions. But Google search works (clicking on results are blocked) and i do Google meaningless shit. Google probably knows it is me even if I never used Google at home.
“upgrade”
I’ve been
hereimproving the whole timeFTFY
It’s probably been good enough for non-gamers for ages. There have been a number of attempts to make wine personable enough to run games for the average user. I think Valve finally nailed it.
Now we just need enough marketshare to break through the kernel game protection bullshit and for Adobe/Autodesk to get on board.
It’s a reference to Game Changer.
Man MS,…
-W8=> dude, we just want an OS that works
-Voice commands=> please don’t give hackers that kind of acces through our speakers
-Vista=> just fkn work already
-Onedrive all over the place=> nope
-365=> no thx
When will these assholes learn? If this is the straw that breaks multiple camels then good.
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
🐧
Working as intended by the shareholders.
Windows users want a menu button in the lower left corner and shit to work after a short installer. How the fuck do you keep messing that up?
Capitalists are literally Mt Krabbs:
“Squidward! New rule! All customers must fill in this survey about the details of their day before they order!” Drops a giant stack of papers on the counter
Squidward sighs “Why are we doing this?”
“Because then I can sell their information for more MONEY! Hyukukukukuk!”
Also UI that operates near instantaneously. Not waiting for the option I want to pop in.
Also not having online search results posted above the locally installed programs. If I search for “cmd” and hit Enter, I want it to open Command Prompt. I don’t want to do a fucking Edge search for “cmd”, or have it open some internet ad for something else named “cmd”.
So fucking irritating. Why does it prioritize web searches over local programs?!
Because fuck you! That’s why!
-365=> no thx
Actually, being able to collaboratively work on the same document is a game changer. Not unique to 365 but a step up from sending PowerPoint files back and forth.
SharePoint predates 365. 365 is just saas.
So is 365 just the web browser hosting?
It’s the subscription model.
Who can ever forget the “Remind me in 3 days” bullshit.
Every update it tries to dark pattern me into setting up a one drive backup to prepare to update to windows 11. Which my pc isn’t qualified for.
I’m still on W10 and this is what’s happening to me, my hardware is good enough, but I don’t want W11. It keeps forcing me to upgrade, it even downloaded the update without my consent and one day it just started installing, despite me telling it not to at every possible point. Something went very wrong with the update and after I rolled back to W10, my OS got corrupted and now I am moving to Linux Mint, as soon as I make sure nothing in my actual PC broke (event log says harddisk has bad blocks, but this only started happening after the forced update screwed things up).
How anyone at Microsoft thinks this is ok and a good way to treat a reliable user since W95, is just beyond me. But I am really excited to dip into the Linux world, finally!
Moved 5 home PCs from Win10 to either Mint or Bazzite this year. No complaints from the family; we’ll not be going back to M$.
