He touches on my major issue with all these companies, data mining without compensating the people that created that data. I have to pay for the operating system, get served ads, AND you get to make extra money off my information too? This kind of shenanigans would be tolerable with a free OS, or maybe one that compensated you like brave browser. The blatant fleecing of the consumer here is sickening. I’m glad data mining your screenshots is the last straw for people.
I’ve been screaming about this since I found out Re:CAPTCHA was using us to train AI. We should definitely be compensated.
Let me be the Devil’s advocate here.
You/we (as users) are being compensated by being permitted onto whatever service is being gatekept by Recaptcha. We profit further by having that service not be completely tainted by bots. Sure, recaptcha ain’t even close to perfect and can be easily bypassed, but any barrier of entry is better than none at all.
Google profits by getting free training for their models.
And the service provider profits by saving on bandwidth, moderation etc., which in turn benefits the users too in the form of a less degraded service.
There are many things to dislike about Google and what they are doing to the web. Recaptcha should not even be in your top 100.
Too bad he didn’t touch the real issue with Linux for most people: lack of their industry favorite proprietary software.
If Linux suddenly started gaining traction on a bigger scale, Microsoft would make a user-facing proprietary distro and those bastards would still flock to it.
You clearly are just talking because you have a mouth. Proton/Wine has just reached 15k game playable. And they are currently porting around 1000 games per month. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/05/steam-deck-hits-15000-games-rated-playable-and-verified/
What games? Games with Anti-cheat WORK, its the companies that dont allow players to play them on Linux.
I’ve been toying with the idea of getting back into Linux for a while now. While I’m still on W10 I’m not rushing, and haven’t installed a TPM Module so Windows doesn’t force W11 on me yet, but when I have no choice that may push my hand. There’s some stuff I find easier on Windows but Linux has really caught up in the past 20 years and I reckon I could daily it in the coming years.
Most likely yeah :D After all even the other community got burned by CentOS and decided to move to Ubuntu in mass instead of picking a true open-source distro…
unless youre using Photoshop or Adobe as a senior youre just barking at a tree. Several of those software can be used on linux through Wine or they have a professional direct app. Krita/Gimp/Inkspace, KDEnLive/DavinciResolve, LibreOffice, etc.
unless youre using Photoshop or Adobe as a senior youre just barking at tree.
That’s the point. The problem is that it doesn’t require the user to be senior to run into issues, it just requires them to be a professional user who has to collaborate within an industry that is standardized around some specific propriety software and people expect formats from that specific software.
I wish I could switch to Inkscape, but it’s not there yet.
It is really good lately and only getting better, but there are 2 major issues I have with Inkscape.
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Tabs (as in, tabulation, the \t character) in text objects. You can find workarounds, like splitting your text into multiple objects and aligning them on your canvas, but it’s just not as good as being able to align your text using proper text alignment tools. Tabulation doesn’t work in Inkscape because it’s not in SVG spec, AFAIK.
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Object styles. Again, there are workarounds, but they’re not as good. Can you create a text style called “numbering”, use it to number a lot of stuff in your document, then just change font family (or make it italic, or bold) all of the numbers at once by changing the “numbering” style? I don’t think it’s currently possible. Sure, inkscape is not a word processor. But can you make an object of style “banner” with a blue gradient fill, orange 2 px stroke and 50% transparency, use it multiple times, then when you need to change from blue gradient to red gradient just change the “banner” style? Again, there are ways to achieve this, but if you do this kind of stuff, inkscape is just not ready to replace your tools.
Don’t get me wrong, I really want to switch to FOSS all the way and wait for these things to get implemented. As soon as they’re there, I’ll be the first to make the switch. But it’s not now, unfortunately.
If I’m wrong, I’ll be happy to stand corrected.
Most of this stuff works with compatibility programs like wine if you really need a windows app
God i wish. And most everyone here could install a new operating system in about 20 minutes. But nobody else is going to because the learning curve for a regular user to install an os is basically perpendicular. Even if they had a linux installer already on a flash drive.
Oh just boot into the bios and find the option to boot for a flash drive and then boom installed.
Which requires a user to know, What a bios is
What booting means
What boot options mean
What the model of their flash drive is
What button on their keyboard they need to press to get to the bios
What secure boot is
Where they need to go to turn off secure boot
How and where to back up their important files
What a disk partition is
How to reverse the changes made to the bios so that it doesn’t boot to usb by default.
And that’s assuming they know why they want a different OS, why they care and that they know about Linux in the first place.
Most people dont and never will. All you can do is install Linux for the ones you like the most and say a prayer to your favorite deity for the rest.
It’s worth noting that the same applies when installing Windows.
Most people never do that either because it’s already bloated with malware installed on the PC they buy.
Same with macOS, you buy the hardware with preinstalled software.
Same reason most non technical people using Linux today do so on the Steam Deck. If you want to spread Linux, trying to convince individuals is going about it all wrong.
You need to convince Canonical or Red Hat to spend more on partnerships with manufacturers. I’m not sure if anyone else has deep enough pockets.
That is why Microsoft spent a total of gazillion dollars to have its OS pre-installed on all PCs. We need more PCs with Linux pre-installed. This should be an antitrust issue but I am not knowledgeable enough to say how.
Agreed. All those things in your list are the hardest part of modern linux, if someone gets past the UEFI, BIOS secureboot hurdle the modern GUI experiemce is superior to Windows
Mostly just so they know which boot device to pick.
Admittedly that’s probably not necessary or the least of someone’s issues.
Yes.
Really the hardest part of desktop linux for a regular, so called “internet user”, in the installation.
They don’t have no clue how to install an operating system, even windows.
I once installed CentOS workstation for my father on his ThinkPad. Firefox and Libreoffice is all he needs. Automatic updates in the background make sure all the latest security patches are applied. There have been few time when, after the update, the laptop hangs at boot. I’ve since told him to choose the second-to-last boot option from the “start-up menu” until the fix for the bug has been deployed (usually in within a 24h).
So really using Linux isn’t the hard part. Back in 2004 (ish) I went the painful route of installing my first Linux - Gentoo. But boy I learned a lot from it. Yes, I had a helping friend to get me over the hardest parts.
Fedora does btrfs snapshots on boot also, which is such a great feature that I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t copied it for Windows.
Linux distros have gotten friendlier and with better HW and SW support but PC makers and already established ecosystem have also made customizing more difficult. This means end users are increasingly discouraged to do anything that is not “authorized”, further driving away adoption of alternatives.
You can watch a 5min video on how to do it. It’s really not rocket science
Not all BIOS look the same. Not all computers have the same button to push to enter the BIOS
When are we going to riot to have the same button to enter bios setup everywhere? For me personally grinds my gears every time I have a different machine, check the bios boot message like a hawk to get what key I need to press to enter setup (after a while you sort of know by vendor, but for me that should not even be a thing)
Unfortunately, most people have the far simpler issue of “just not giving a fuck.”
I test Linux rhetoric on my sister to see what works. She often says Linux sounds so cool and aligns so well with her values but then she says she doesn’t care about computers and goes and buys a $2000 Mac to use as a web browser. It makes no sense to me and it’s hard to find out what will get people to make the jump to Linux.
She could have tried Linux on her current laptop for free and probably saved $2000 and knew this but instead buys and entirely new laptop and throws out the old one.
I’ve said this multiple times in other comments, but what would be amazing is a linux-installer.exe that shows the normal installer wizard with non-techie, beginner, and advanced options that allows installing linux from windows and booting right into it.
The ultimate goal would be for the desktop environment to have a windows theme by default, have all the alternatives installed for previously installed software with desktop icons that look the same, and all files to be where they were previously. That way you could just say “go to https://windowsupgrade.com / https://linux.install and run the installer” to anybody non-technical and have them running linux in under an hour.
It should be so simple and unassuming that people don’t even realise they installed linux. If they message back “I ran it, but I’m still on windows”, that’s a success.
That would lower the barrier to entry significantly. It doesn’t address the issues with the bios but someone mildly adventurous would have a much easier time going forward.
I think something like that would have to be sponsored by and maintained by a big distro though. I’m afraid if it was a community effort the amount of bikeshedding would stop it before it even began.
It would completely eliminate the bios issue, would it not? It would prevent them from ever needing to enter the bios at all.
I spent too much time with corpo brain rot to give linux a chance on desktop and realize it’s how I’d always imagined proper computing would be. It changed my outlook on the world when I finally did and it’s liberating (much libre. Very wow). Glad to see more and more people catching on to the possibility of a better future.
it really is crazy how different it feels to use a linux pc after being conditioned to think that windows is just how using a computer is. the way i relate it to my friends is that using windows feels like i’m constantly compromising with the computer, but using linux i own my computer and it works for me - not the other way around.
I’ve been 100% on Linux since July of last year. I thought I was currently having my first major Linux fucked up situation that I just could not figure out this weekend.
It has been very depressing, after trying to convince friends and family to give Linux a chance and keep an open mind for months, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a liar.
But, after hours of software troubleshooting turning up nothing I’ve discovered I’m in the early stages of a dying ssd… My first major problem, and it’s hardware related. It sucks but it is also a relief in a weird way.
And I’m finding out about it way earlier than I likely would have in windows thanks to btrfs. But it’s also funny because if I had been having similar issues in windows I probably would have ran hardware diag much sooner, but because I’m still a bit of a Linux newbie I assumed I broke my OS and wasted hours troubleshooting software.
If you’re running btrfs, you can send live snapshots to another btrfs volume on another drive, or use Timeshift which will do it for you amd keep track of expiring old copies. Clonezilla is OK for when you are able to take the system down entirely.
My install does use btrfs (but unfortunately since I reused the other drives they are still ntfs formatted) and it does regular snapshots, but to the same drive. It isn’t completely borked yet so I’m hopeful I can “clone” to a new drive and rma the bad one (10 months old so should still have mfr warranty). I’ve used clonezilla in the past but had read it doesn’t support btrfs, maybe that info is outdated? I did see some promising tools for doing basically the same job through btrfs though. I planned to work on salvaging what I can tonight. Worst case scenario, all my personal files are synced to a cloud storage service so I’d just be out installed programs and configs if I have to reinstall from fresh.
Do a block copy, takes longer but it should handle pretty Mich any filesystem. Downside is I don’t think you resize on the target.
You could also put the new drive in, target Time shift to it and let it buck. Then pull your old drive out and let it boor to the new one, see how that goes.
It is satisfying to see stuff like this. Thank you for sharing.
