[cco]

I think you maybe don't use Linux or Windows 10? Windows 10 is still far and away more friendly and presents a much better user experience than Linux.

Linux will be the "obvious alternative" when the software actually works with off the shelf consumer hardware, compiling your own drivers based off of something you've downloaded from github is a non-starter, and getting things like waking from standby to work isn't a series of frustrating googles.

If you're into computers, not using them as tools just into them in general Linux is fine. But Linux is not ready for someone who is uninterested in how computers work.

[interfixus]

Clearly a matter of perspective. Happily living in Xfce-land on my various Arch-boxes, my rare excursions into the world of Windows are always occasions for disbelief: 'Do people actually live with this, day in and day out?'. The prescribed choices, the licensing popups, the installation and upgrade rigmarole, the opaque policy management, the dependency hell, the anti-virus idiocy, and the Mickey Mouse conventions of the file system. Please, take me home to sanity. But as I said - perspective. I must assume it all somehow makes a kind of sense if you're really into it, and that pacman -Syu could equally freak you out if you came visiting to my side. Windows users rarely do, though.

[free652]

Um the dependency hell is not something I have seen in Windows, but quiet often in Linux.

For my desktops I just want for the system to work and not try to figure out why the new kernel broke my video drivers again.

[orwin]

> Um the dependency hell is not something I have seen in Windows, but quiet often in Linux.

You never had to install 2 different version of php with IIS. My worst internship by far, it took us almost 3 week to get my workstation to work, and my coworkers were windows powerusers. I'd rather spend multiple times 10 minutes to resolve dependency hell than spend again 3*40 hours doing the same thing, just with no understnding of what i'm doing.

[flukus]

If you stick to the distro package manager you should never see dependency hell on linux, in 15+ years of using it I've seen it three times. Once was when I was being too clever for my own good with the package manager, once was from using third part package managers (ruby gems) and once is from co-workers essentially creating their own distro + package manager on top of red hat ( a story in it's own right). The root cause of each of those was ignoring or screwing with the package manager. And the last two started out as deficiencies (non-existence) in windows package management.

On windows I've come across it much more. Installing different versions of Visual Studio, installing some random program that doesn't package it's binaries, various installers including sub-installers, trying to run a program that requires the .net framework and having to install that first.

I spent most of this morning dealing with a windows app that was missing a dll and had to google my way through with lot's of trial and error to find the missing package.

I've also had docker for windows screw up my cygwin install, but I guess that's a point in each column.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> If you stick to the distro package manager you should never see dependency hell on linux

You'll also probably never see up to date applications or anything not present in the repo.

[freedomben]

> Linux will be the "obvious alternative" when the software actually works with off the shelf consumer hardware, compiling your own drivers based off of something you've downloaded from github is a non-starter, and getting things like waking from standby to work isn't a series of frustrating googles.

When was the last time you tried Linux? Unless you're using something very experimental, you don't have to download drivers from github and install them (unless you want to). Even Nvidia, which is the only exception I can think of, is packaged in a way that's pretty darn friendly (a couple of clicks in a UI to enable them). What you described is more what Linux was like in the 2000s era. If you use a distro with an even remotely new kernel (Fedora, Arch) it will likely support every piece of hardware you can buy (proprietary hardware is an exception for obvious reasons).

[prolikewh0a]

>Windows 10 is still far and away more friendly and presents a much better user experience than Linux.

Windows 10 is a definite step backwards in terms of usability and even stability. Peak usability was definitely XP/Win 7.

Linux really isn't bad with usability anymore on popular distros. Any recent install of Linux Mint or Ubuntu will force you to learn where things are (Windows 10 now has essentially 3 'Control Panels', with different settings placed between all three), but I really don't see Mint or Ubuntu as harder to use than Windows 10 in 2018.