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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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 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.
traceroute66|1 month ago
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.
KronisLV|1 month ago
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.
nephihaha|1 month ago
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.
immibis|1 month ago
CalRobert|1 month ago
1313ed01|1 month ago
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.
Telaneo|1 month ago
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.
viraptor|1 month ago
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.
izacus|1 month ago
quchen|1 month ago
grepfru_it|1 month ago
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
nephihaha|1 month ago
iLoveOncall|1 month ago
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."
zahlman|1 month ago
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.
adrian_b|1 month ago
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.
traceroute66|1 month ago
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
beeflet|1 month ago
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.
pluralmonad|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
redeeman|1 month ago
amlib|1 month ago
> "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.
matltc|1 month ago
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.
shiroiuma|1 month ago
DetectDefect|1 month ago
esafak|1 month ago