As there are no references to "Seeing like a state" by James C. Scott, let me recommend it. A great read that explains how hard is to create a city from scratch, how illegible community value is and how big organizations cannot see forest for the trees when using KPIs.
But how would you evaluate performance of those watching models? It'd need an indicator, hopefully only one that's key to ensure maximal ethic compliance.
Interesting, not sure if that's enough of a sample size, but the argument of "this is unreasonable for a 200$/month consumer subscription" will make or break all kinds of services.
To reach my site, users need to get through the AI summary first. Spoilers: they don't get through more often than not. This is based on the drop of views since AI summary started.
And honestly, I don't blame them. If the summary has the info, why risk going to a possibly ad-filled site?
> If the summary has the info, why risk going to a possibly ad-filled site?
I can usually tell if the information on a website was written by somebody who knows what they're talking about. (And ads are blocked)
The AI summary on the other hand looks exactly the same to me regardless if it's correct. So it's only useful if I can verify its correctness with minimal effort.
Kagi has an optional AI summary users can trigger on demand, which feels a lot more useful than google’s - most of the time I want the actual websites, but sometimes I just want an overview of the top results which it’s really useful for
And what if your website is ad free and the AI full of advertising? At least the users get the information and the AI save on your bandwidth (in theory!).
That's assuming one cares about "attribution" and "people following other links on your site". I.e. that's still being a salesman, maybe with extra steps.
In the alternative case, no value is being taken, you're left exactly with what you had before - nothing gained, nothing lost - but some user somewhere gains a little. Apparently even in 2026, the concept of positive-sum exchange, is unfathomable to so many.
> That's assuming one cares about "attribution" and "people following other links on your site". I.e. that's still being a salesman, maybe with extra steps.
No, it's called being part of a community.
Soup kitchens provide free food without requiring anything in return. That doesn't make it OK for you to take as much as you can get and resell it.
> In the alternative case, no value is being taken, you're left exactly with what you had before - nothing gained, nothing lost - but some user somewhere gains a little. Apparently even in 2026, the concept of positive-sum exchange, is unfathomable to so many.
It's not a positive sum exchange. The community is what is lost.
> Soup kitchens provide free food without requiring anything in return. That doesn't make it OK for you to take as much as you can get and resell it.?
It would be if the kitchen soup had infinite soup available.
Whatever volume of soup you take from the soup kitchen, it's gone from the kitchen. This is not the case with information - you consuming or collecting it does not mean there's less of it at the source.
> No, it's called being part of a community.
Soup kitchens are bad example. They're not there to build a community of poor people. They're there to feed them. The only reason they mind people taking in excess is because supply of soup is finite - take too much, and there won't be enough for someone else. Beyond that, they don't really care what people do with it.
> It's not a positive sum exchange. The community is what is lost.
Nobody other than salesmen and marketers want a community around everything. Especially not when they're looking for facts, or providing a helping hand.
Pay-it-forward is not affected by introduction of an intermediary (AI or otherwise), because it's about giving, not trading.
That's another way of putting this concept that so many don't seem to get: not everything has to be an exchange.
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.
Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?
My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.
Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.
I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.
Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.
AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.
How does remote RDP/VNC kill AD and Group Policy? You still need AD to provide centralized authentication/authorization. And you still need Group Policy to configure the VMs according to the corporate standards - disk images may work for the initial rollout but not for applying future changes.
That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.
The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.
You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.
Network boundaries are insufficient. A file share might need to be read-write for some users and read-only for others. Database access is even more granular.
Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
What do you see instead? Aside from a smaller startup that used google-everything every enterprise I've worked with uses MS Office extensively, with a big push to the subscription web version from local installs.
Across the 6 companies in the tech space I've worked in over the years (ranging from 500 - 200,000 employees with the median being 10,000) have been GSuite/Google Docs for their word processing need but with various wiki software (most notably confluence) overlapping quite heavily too.
Yes, but tech is special. And even in tech I presume you're only talking about computer tech, or even more specifically software tech? There's the entire rest of the business world which uses Word because what else would they use? Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft [sic]. Every single OEM computer aimed at businesses is likely to have Office preinstalled, except these days it's the 365 version.
I am encountering it almost not at all. I work in a org that basically doesn't know that Linux exist and outside of top management nobody uses Word. Excel is still massively useful.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
Why not? If it is a small shop, Word has all the features both simple and intermediate ones (like putting shadows on images or removing background). So a 2-5 person businesses can handle their digital needs at very low cost.
The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!
People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.
And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.
Why on earth would you not just send a PDF? LibreOffice even has a handy button just for exporting directly to PDF. Does your customer need to edit your work summary for some odd reason?
I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.
.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux.
Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home.
As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked.
Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.
Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
You might have to give up the applications you are used to, and switch to new ones. This might be easy, or it might be impossible. If all you use is the browser, easy.
I have switched from Windows completely to Linux more than 20 years ago, after a few years of dual-booting.
The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.
I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.
For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.
As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
XFCE is actually a great example of the problem with Linux
It's wayland support is utterly broken right now and getting very little attention. The major distros are about to put X11 in the grave and then XFCE will die (or more likely it'll live on in some weird offshoot distro).
That's not really an acceptable situation for a consumer product.
now obviously xfce is not one of the main DEs pushed by the distros, but it's plight is a symptom of a couple of problems that plague linux
Compatibility is important. MSFT, for all their faults, puts a shitload of effort into making sure that even old ass software keeps working. They're not perfect (especially in the last few years) but they're miles ahead of linux here. As a user, I shouldn't ever have to know or care about wayland or pipewire or whatever other nonsense, but that's not the case. I have to know just so I can find software that works with my system.
X11 is not gone yet, XFCE is working on wayland support, and in addition to that, there are projects that work on allowing X11 window managers to run on wayland.
XFCE just has not updated.
If this is a "linux problem", then what about android and ios? its a million times worse, but somehow thats a perfectly good situation for a consumer product?
there isnt? then how come theres several apps I want to install on android 15 that isnt compatible with newer android because google removed/changed APIs?
you may just not have seen them, because other people work around them.
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
Use Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS , do not upgrade every 6 m0onths to get the latest bugs from upstream just because they GNOME/KDE made some small improvements for some feature you probably do not use. There are PPAs with latest kernels and NVIDIA driver if you really need to upgrade for your work or gaming. This shit on upgrade happens on cool distros too, just Google Arch broke on update and you will see that there were cases where the efi partition was deleted and the user data was lost or some font customization a dude done to GNOME broke the login after an update.
If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
TBH some gaming bound distros enable RT based optizations for gaming not seen in any OS. Also, with Flatpak, there's no excuses, you will get the same software everywhere.
(My current gripe is with KDE on Wayland - i decided to move from Gnome on X11 for $reasons and it's so hard to get a thing as simple as clipboard, multiple monitors to work consistently. Apparently devs have very strong opinions on workflows...)
I mainly use various Linux distributions since 90s, also while working in systems administration for most of that time, but to say that "all Linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software" and suggest that's all is a vast...... understatement to say the least.
Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.
It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.
Then yeah.
Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)
I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)
The combination of
- a programmer's text editor
- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)
- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files
- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)
- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)
...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.
So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
OK; you got me. I was insufficiently prepared for pedantry. Let's add another couple of critical points:
- Must be a GUI application.
- Must integrate at least somewhat reasonably with the platform's keyboard shortcuts and similar, not have its own entire way of doing things that needs 6 years to learn.
Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.
BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.
You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.
I've used both emacs and vim before. Long enough to actually know how.
I don't like using them. (I know, this may come as a shock to a diehard advocate.)
I like GUI text editors much better.
But also: How do vim and emacs do with these points from my requirements?
> - that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
> - that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
To the best of my recollection, they don't do either of those. Which, if true, means that even your initial "genuine" response not actually in good faith, because I did say I wanted one that did all of those.
...So maybe keep your snide remarks and scare-quotes to yourself?
I don't want to be little your experience, but your self professed difficulties are not universal. Especially calling Linux hostile to users (as opposed to friendly Windows??) just seems like you don't like pepperoni pizza so you're going to tell us how horrible pepperoni pizza is for everyone.
> given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
> "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
You really haven't given desktop linux a chance in the last two to four years have you? I will agree its not "ergonomic" enough _yet_ for many casual and intermediary users but I assure you a competent intermediary user or advanced user can do all those tasks without much fuss nowadays. I've been using desktop linux for almost 20 years now and its so much easier nowadays to throw random programs (flatpaks, snaps, appimages, distroboxes and whatnot helps a ton) and have them work correctly, build up a generalist linux workstation that does just about anything you want.
> Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I wish this could be communicated more clearly to prospective desktop linux users but usually what you want is to be using the bleeding edge. Arch is too bloody and complicated for most users, Fedora strikes a nice balance but will leave you with some cuts and Ubuntu is usually the safest choice, but can be a bit stale.
> Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Try a gnome based distro (without all the prejudice like "eww it looks like a tablet ui") and tell me if it isn't a damn good, modern and intuitive UI. It has it's faults and own goals I wished the knucklehead gnome devs would fix but its a far cry from anemic linux desktop environments of yore.
As far as linux supporting everything under the sun... I just don't think thats a prerequesite for it to be a good windows alternative and amass a critical mass of users. Maybe once it has 20% market share being everything to everyone will be a goal but for now the best you can do is give it an honest try every few years and see for yourself if it's good enough for your use case. See if existing FOSS software is adequate for your needs or weather it's possible or you are willing to run some of the niche windows apps in wine.
There is no chance of linux becoming more popular if even the crowd here at hacker news isn't willing to give it chance once in a while.
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb?
Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.
I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
Honestly, Chess.com isn't the shining beacon of 99.9999 SLA - sometimes this just happens. Give it a break, take a drink, usually it's back up in couple minutes.
