Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Havent had issues with my Windows PC in years. I dont have time to deal with linux stuff at this ppint in my life but used to play with it as a teen.
I guarantee you’ve had “problems” but you’re so used to Windows now that you have the muscle memory to deal with it without thinking much about it.
Using all three in my household kinda highlighted for me how much I was just ignoring or working around the ugliness of Windows every single day.
@eochaid @OsrsNeedsF2P yeah… I’m sorry but that’s like saying all screwdrivers suck. If you don’t take the time to learn how to use a tool you will always have a negative experience using said tool. You are never going to find an advanced technology that’s been dumbed down to the point where you can’t break it.
Except that there’s a ton of actual competition in the screwdriver market that has forced innovation and improved screwdriver functionality that it is essentially “solved”.
Even cheap screwdrivers are easy to use and will do the job, they just might break after a few years. Expensive screwdrivers add extra features and are built to a higher quality. You can absolutely look up reviews and find “the best” screwdriver.
You also don’t need to learn to use a screwdriver. They’re all built to be self explanatory. If they have advanced features that need explaining, they’ll include a manual that explains each feature at a high school reading level because that’s their target market.
Also, there is no locked in loyalty to screwdriver brands. If a brand releases a shit driver, they’ll get roasted. If a new contender puts out a screwdriver that’s better than the rest, tradespeople will flock to it.
I would love it for OSes to be treated like screwdrivers are.
Lol Linux is easier than Windows, you don’t need to know any troubleshooting secrets or bash. Even the installation is easier
How many people do you know with Android phones that know bash?
Terminal isn’t any more necessary on Linux than Windows but the commands are simpler
The downside of Linux is that it’s free, that means they can’t afford to pay manufacturers to include their OS at the same scale as Microsoft. Thus Windows will have more users and be a more profitable ecosystem to target software for
Equating Android and desktop linux isnt very accurate. Terminal on android is very limited compared to linux. Many common softwares are still installed with commands and occasionally need maintenance and most are done via commands.
Recently helped a few setup ubuntu as dual boot. Installation isnt always smooth and most accompanying software stores are buggy or dont have many commonly used softwares.
Been using Ubuntu on my desktop for a couple of years, following a couple years use of WSL (so I’m very comfortable using the terminal etc)
Off the top of my head, some of the stuff I ran into almost immediately:
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the package manager has been essentially unusable - the home page will work okay, but trying to view or install any applications through it, it just hangs forever. So I just go and use apt-get, but that’s not what I’d call ‘easier’ or ‘just works’
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Firefox windows regularly break - the contents of the page still work fine but I can’t resize or move the window, have to close it and open a new one. This happens multiple times a day
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only way I could get the discord app installed was with a .deb (since the package manager didn’t work), so as soon as it’s out of date I just get a message saying “you need to update”. So I have to use it in the browser
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speaking of discord - I like to use push to talk. Guess what, push to talk is impossible with Wayland. Supposedly this is a feature, not a bug
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also couldn’t get vnc working to remote home while travelling, due to Wayland. Maybe if I persisted with troubleshooting I could have got it to work, but it took me 30s on windows.
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installed zoom - it won’t launch from the gui, I have to launch it from the terminal. Also, ‘join this meeting’ web links don’t work, I have to copy paste them into the app
There’s plenty more quirks I run into all the time but thats just shit I run into with a clean install and very typical hardware.
I love interacting with Linux through the terminal - I hate interacting with it through a gui. That’s not my definition of easier lol
just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma
TempleOS satisfies all of these conditions
It depends. It could also be a better idea to introduce a sort of “IT driver’s license” for everyone to have basic understanding/skills to use their devices. Sure, modern software stacks are ridiculously complex and no one understands every detail down to each machine code/assembly instruction, so there’s always a big amount of abstraction or simplification needed, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to request that someone with literal zero knowledge whatsoever should be able to perfectly use an OS or device. That’s also not even possible. I see it with my mother, she started from zero knowledge but she had to learn some basics to be able to do the few things she needs to do. Of course she uses Linux. No prior Windows knowledge means a much easier start with Linux of course. She wouldn’t have been able to use Windows either with zero knowledge. So this is a point that some forget: even Windows users need knowledge to be able to use Windows, and they probably already earned that knowledge in much earlier years. This Windows knowledge also works against you building up Linux (or even OS X) knowledge because Windows works quite differently from a Unix-like OS. This is not irrelevant: a Windows user who spent like 30 years in Windows has a much harder time learning Linux, than someone who didn’t have that. But, again, not really the fault of Linux that you indoctrinated yourself with Windows-only MS product specific knowledge over the last decades. This is probably the biggest problem there is, because almost everyone on the planet has already acquired some amount of Windows knowledge in the past. This works against you when trying to switch. Windows knowledge is mostly Windows-specific. When learning about IT, you should make sure that you learn things in a preferably OS agnostic way. Which is also the reason why schools etc. should never teach “using MS products”. They should always teach fundamentals, irrelevant of what you use afterwards. And those fundamentals should of course not be taught using commercial products, but rather open source software.
Then there are some fantasies which MS and Apple could establish in the broader population which aren’t true, for example that CLI/terminal usage is archaic and has no place on modern desktops anymore. CLI usage will always remain as a fast alternative to a lot of tasks which are hard or even impossible to do via GUI. Even MS has realized this and introduced Powershell, a new terminal, and winget, for example. As well as WSL (which was originally and still mostly is being used to have access to powerful Linux-based CLI utilities). Yet still a lot of people seem to think that CLI is obsolete or that it’s “hard”. Sure, if you do some scripting or complex one-liners, it can be too hard for someone without strong IT knowledge. But most commands are really basic and easy to understand. Even my mother is able to use basic commandline utilities, and she even prefers it sometimes over clicking around in the GUI. To claim that this is impossible or too hard to learn for a Windows user is, I don’t know. At least untrue. Probably even an insult to your own intelligence. And the main reason why most Linux users suggest doing things via commandline is that this is an almost distro- and desktop-independent way of doing things.
Also, not a big fan of the “fan” label here. Regardless of whether or not you like Linux (I like Linux as an OS more than Windows, because I think the Unix-way is better, but it’s also about so much more), I see a neutral, free/libre open source (FLOSS) operating system as the base for our digital lives as a necessity, and so I see Windows or OS X as intrinsically worse. I don’t see it as a kind of war between different products on equal footing. One product denies you any rights and control (and in more recent times, also extracts even more value and data from you than just the price you paid for the license to use it), and one that gives you full rights and control (and pretty much never extracts any more from you). It’s not OK that we use our devices for so many things in life nowadays, that all aspects of your life are being done via digital means nowadays, and yet the most popular operating systems are still 100% proprietary black boxes fully controlled by big US companies. This needs to change, and it should have happened a long time ago already. And Linux is simply the most mature and most well supported FLOSS operating system out of all of them. I actually wouldn’t care if it would be FreeBSD or OpenBSD or whatever instead, but I see Linux as being the most mature, well-supported and mainstream-viable option here. I only care that it’s not a damn black box I don’t have any real control over.
We need (almost) everyone on such open technologies like Linux, because the future (or even present) for Windows users looks like this: no control, no privacy (plus AI being trained on your work/data as well), big vulnerability when (not if) MS gets hacked (and they’re a huge, juicy target, and we already saw them being compromised twice in the last couple of years), pricey subscription to MS’ services which continues to get pricier once you’re successfully vendor-locked-in (once all your servers, desktops and data is in MS’ cloud, you won’t be able to easily leave their services anymore, so they are free to increase prices until it hurts you). Even if you happen to like the offering MS gives you, does that really seem like “the future” of computing to you? To me, that’s backwards. Or mainframe history repeating itself. Moving into proprietary clouds with vendor-lock-in only really benefits the cloud provider, which is why they want all users to join the “party”.
I’m not a big fan of Stallman in general, but his fundamental propositions e.g. that FLOSS software is intrinsically better than proprietary black boxes, is true. I wonder how long we still need as a society, to arrive at that realization. I assumed that the Snowden revelations as well as the desaster that Windows 10 was for privacy, would have already started a change in thinking about such things. But that probably wasn’t enough (strangely). I’m not sure what else would need to happen, but I guess something like first MS shoving all their users into their cloud, and then MS being hacked (again) but this time with malicious auto-updates being pushed to all MS software users as well, impacting tons of businesses. Then, maybe, people will start thinking whether this was such a great idea to begin with to play along with what MS envisioned as the “grand future”. Unfortunately I see parallels with the human behavior concerning climate change here as well. It’s like we have to first destroy our climate and suffer the consequences, before we realize it’s a bad idea and we should do it differently RIGHT NOW. We are just incredibly short-sighted and we only learn AFTER disasters, which were even announced long before. It’s tragic.
And for those people who know or think they could start using Linux but still use Windows because it’s more “aesthetically pleasing” or whatever else irrelevant aspect they make up to “justify” still staying on that sinking MS ship in 2023, please reconsider your priorities.
I know you made a joke about MacOS, but I am genuinely interested with what issue you have of it.
It sucks in the way you understand and know because nothing else even exists. No one is interested in having to cater to their walled garden unless there’s money to be made. Meanwhile both Linux and Windows have many open source projects and hobbyists working on things. So you might get a mac driver for something you buy but most of the time macos is an afterthought at best in many hobby projects. Also lol mac gaming is a joke. Even Linux is getting better support now than macos in that regard since the Steamdeck.
Yeah it was just a joke because I love to piss off the MacOS guys. But its like a brotherly teasing. Like, I love you guys, but I gotta rib you, you know.
I think Apple’s biggest sin is that everything works as long as all of your hardware, software, and co-workers have an apple emblazoned on their back. But the moment you have to work with anything or anyone that doesnt use Apple, you have problems. And Apple seems to encourage this because it gets their users to dread working with Windows or Linux users.
The sad thing is that I like a lot of their software. But using their OS is like having Steve Jobs standing over your shoulder and smacking you on the head when you try to shift outside of their intended workflow. I keep running into situations where Windows and Linux would let me go left or right (after finding a hidden and misnamed switch or running a well researched and crafted bash command), and MacOS just put a roadblock on the left because fuck you we said no.
I know that my ideal of a perfect OS is unrealistic. MacOS is more stable because it’s more rigid. Windows and Linux prove that the more flexible you are, the harder it is to use. But settling for one option and looking down at everyone who chose different isn’t going to help. We should all keep criticising our chosen option and root for others that are criticising their own. Because it seems like Apple, Microsoft, and the Open Source community are all in a rut, safely ignoring basic fucking usage issues because of an implicit assumption that their user base isn’t going anywhere.
I live in a mixed OS household. My wife and I both use windows and Apple machines for various purposes (my wife’s work requires both, my mac is just for dabbling) and I have some linux boxes for streaming or storage or whatever. And while that gives me the benefits of all three, I also have to deal with the problems of all three. And its a lot, guys. Not to mention they all refuse to work together.
I haven’t used macOS in years, so now it might actually be the golden pie in the sky “it just works” OS that Apple’s fans have always pretended it was. But Apple’s condescending “we know what’s best for you” attitude that they take into iOS (and nearly everything else they do) puts me off from giving them a second chance.
When I worked as a IT Tech at a University years ago we had a lot of MacOS users who believed they could just pick it up and use it like their iPhone. It was absurd how well their marketing worked because those users either forced themselves to learn it or dropped it and went back to Windows.
I know a lot of iOS users who have iPads and iPhones but still have windows PCs because they don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.
Probably an unpopular opinion on here, but the OS I recommend for grandparents and parents is ChromeOS. It’s so locked down that it’s almost indestructible, and they almost never need any specialized software that you’d use Windows/MacOS for. If you’re savvy enough you can also use Linux on it in a container, which is how I prefer to use it for day to day stuff (in my case, data related workflows).
As much as i dislike google, chromebooks are perfect for anyone tech illiterate that just need a simple web browser that works. Every family member I’ve recommended a chromebook to has not needed additional tech support for it, which IMO, is a truly impressive accomplishment on google’s behalf.
This is a pointless argument even saying that everyone sucks, linux runs worse on the desktop because it doesn’t get even 1/10th the investment from consumer hardware manufacturers compared to windows or mac to make it compatible. nevertheless linux is undoubtedly less difficult and more efficient to integrate than windows, for example the steam deck is done very well but it could be done better since KDE, wayland and arch do not have the same number of employees as microsoft.
It kinda felt like you were gonna break into song about the Year of the BSD Desktop for a second there!
Originally but afaik they rewrote basically the whole OS over the years and nothing of the original BSD remains. That’s what I heard but I never verified.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
I laughed hard on this one hahahahaha
Macbooks just make really nice ssh terminals for accessing your Linux dev environment. Though these days there are decent options for Linux terminals with a similar form factor, they just don’t tend to be much cheaper.
