Linux is ready, but not the professional software devs. Literally only thing stopping me from fully switching

People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks

Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/

By all standards, a completely understandable outcome

It like the endless and useless fight between Android and iOS fan boys, it’s much simpler than that, you use what you like/comfortable with, you don’t need to convince anyone how right you are and how wrong they are, never really understood this weird behaviour from supposedly well educated people. You enjoy Linux, good for you , you like windows, kodus, you’re mac person have at it .

Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.

I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.

When I’m not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can’t substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.

This was me, to an extent. At least with regards to gaming.

I’ve used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready

On Linux I’d have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn’t user ready

Yeah, Linux was ready long ago

It is in mixed states of ready. Each distro has something it’s ready for and something it isn’t. It’d be nice if all the ready parts were in a single distro, but that’s an XKCD 927 issue. I am hopeful that Valve puts thought and effort into making SteamOS a solid desktop on top of a solid gaming platform.

But it’s not ready because insert niche use case that only applies to me and no, I will not seek out open source alternatives to insert closed source software

The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.

I’ve been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.

Before I bought a Steam Deck I had never used Linux but now I really like it, honestly I’m tempted to install SteamOS on my PC as it’s only ever used for gaming anyway

The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn’t there yet, because I can’t use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as “no big deal”, you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won’t work. Well yeah, that’s a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?

Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don’t game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.

How do I make the change less scary? I made my pc like 10 years ago and not looked at it since. I just use it for personal admin now and Rome 2 total war twice a year.

Ok, I’ll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn’t work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.

The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don’t have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.

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The average ‘advanced’ window user: CLI is scary!

Also the average ‘advanced’ windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it’ll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it