More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Sure AMD’s drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
It’s telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn’t, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It’s because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won’t face those problems in the first place on Windows while they’ll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn’t a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can’t tell what OS they’re using in the first place) and the solution doesn’t come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with “don’t just trust random people”.
The “What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!” argument falls apart when you realize that it’s not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you’re trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don’t even need to know that it has a terminal.
You can’t bullshit me man. I ‘ve been using solving peoples’ issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won’t see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends’ pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus.
Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
The difference is that if you’re using hardware that’s compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that’s supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there’s load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn’t. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you’re applying solutions by trusting that people aren’t doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there’s no issues with the hardware itself.
And the “small subset” of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it’s only Windows 11 that doesn’t support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
You can reinstall a driver without ever touching the command line on windows.
Can you do that with Linux? Idk maybe on some distros but the default would just be to uninstall the package from terminal.
Pretending these are equivalent is not cool and it just drives new users away for not understanding things the community takes for granted. It takes effort to learn the terminal if even tech-savvy windows users may not even use the command line
The deliberate misrepresentation here is that the Windows registry supports importing keys from a text file, so most of the time you have to mess with it you just download a file and double click on it.
Is that super secure? Nope. But hey, anytime you need to do something on a Linux terminal you’re also copy/pasting random crap you found online, don’t pretend you’re not.
The ultimate point still stands. None of these matter to normies, it’s how often you need to tinker or troubleshoot to begin with. For most users the acceptable number is zero.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Sure AMD’s drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
Frankly you are comically biased.
Yeah, I run Linux as my main OS and am able to say that it’s not ready to go mainstream, biased as fuck
It’s telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn’t, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It’s because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won’t face those problems in the first place on Windows while they’ll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn’t a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can’t tell what OS they’re using in the first place) and the solution doesn’t come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with “don’t just trust random people”.
The “What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!” argument falls apart when you realize that it’s not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you’re trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don’t even need to know that it has a terminal.
There, happy?
You can’t bullshit me man. I ‘ve been using solving peoples’ issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won’t see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends’ pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn’t support first gen Ryzen either!
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
The difference is that if you’re using hardware that’s compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that’s supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there’s load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn’t. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you’re applying solutions by trusting that people aren’t doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there’s no issues with the hardware itself.
And the “small subset” of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it’s only Windows 11 that doesn’t support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
That “small subset” is hundreds of millions of devices made in the last 5 years alone.
The problem with Linux (not their fault), is that most of the problems appear in hardware made in the last 3 years.
Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
I wish I could do that, but CGNAT makes ipv6 the much preferred option for a lot of things.
But it’s good to know that this might be the cause…
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
You can reinstall a driver without ever touching the command line on windows.
Can you do that with Linux? Idk maybe on some distros but the default would just be to uninstall the package from terminal.
Pretending these are equivalent is not cool and it just drives new users away for not understanding things the community takes for granted. It takes effort to learn the terminal if even tech-savvy windows users may not even use the command line
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
This is a common meme but essentially is never needed
The deliberate misrepresentation here is that the Windows registry supports importing keys from a text file, so most of the time you have to mess with it you just download a file and double click on it.
Is that super secure? Nope. But hey, anytime you need to do something on a Linux terminal you’re also copy/pasting random crap you found online, don’t pretend you’re not.
The ultimate point still stands. None of these matter to normies, it’s how often you need to tinker or troubleshoot to begin with. For most users the acceptable number is zero.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.