[SV_BubbleTime]

Worth watching. But if you don’t... [Linux desktop sucks because application writers don’t make binaries that “just work”, pushing the user to always just have to recompile for their system, they try and address this in the kernel by not breaking things, but the distributions to and screw it all up, because breaking is fine so long as it’s “improving”]

Tons of contrary points I’m sure, but duh. It’s really nice to be able to run Windows 3.1 code on a Windows Server 2019, the idea is nice, practicality aside.

As someone who could run Linux desktop, I see it as the same reason I don’t root an android phone, I do enough tweaking and tinkering in my own code that sometimes I just want tools that immediately work. So I can do my other work. Linux as a system, great, as a desktop, I’ll never set one up for someone I don’t want to hear from all the time.

[loudtieblahblah]

I use Linux top to bottom in my home.

My work laptop. My wife's PC. Our plex/jellyfin media server.

My sister's pc and my elderly parents PC are also ubuntu.

I have found my support time for all of them dramatically went down after I got them off windows.

Windows slowing down over time. I longer happens, lengthening the age of hardware and pushing off OS reinstalls, which can at times cost money based on the OEM model.

I can still suck more juice out of a machine with a RAM and add drive upgrade, again, without paying for a reinstall, and saving them lots of money in the process.

LTS/stable distros just work, out of the box, for most people.

Its people like me who have an incessant need to tweak everything that will mess up a Linux desktop.

[watermelon0]

> LTS/stable distros just work, out of the box, for most people.

Do you have any source for this? I know a few people who use Linux (or used it in the past, including myself), and number of complaints is definitely a lot higher than from the people on macOS/Windows.

[loudtieblahblah]

This has just been my experience.

The only real difficulties I've had is someone else buying them a scanner/printer combo and manually having to get drivers from the manufacturer's site and install them creating a problem when the driver packages depend on libraries not available in the repos any longer. But for me, it takesa bout 20 min of googling around to find the solution.

And other than that problem, I rarely if ever, have to support them for anything.

Half the time when i do, it's because they got banned from a website and didn't understand it, or they were having internet problems and it was unrelated to the OS.

My mother doesn't "like" Linux, but she can't articulate why. She's been wanting to "upgrade" my dad's computer for years as this sneaky way of getting away from Linux. But the reality is, as old as my Dad is - the XFCE desktop environment is more familiar to him, coming from Windows XP/7, than Windows 8.1-10 is.

It's also pretty helpful, frankly, that when something - other than updates - requires root access, he just backs away and doesn't mess with things. Same for my sibling.

This, in itself, has prevented a lot of problems IMHO. People just click "yes" and escalate their privs in Windows without giving a second through about it.

[philliphaydon]

I tried Ubuntu with my parents. Caused lots of problems. Moving dad back to Windows and my mum to a MacBook Air. I haven’t done the whole support call in 3 years now.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Is it a preference or a requirement that when someone points out issues with Linux, in this case from Linus... that Linux users must come to tell you all about how they use it successfully?

[macksd]

Instead of thinking of Linux for non-technical users, I think you can actually segment non-technical users into people who use a computer and people who use a browser. People who just use a browser for virtually everything (i.e. people who can use a Chromebook and think that it's basically the same as a normal laptop) are actually very common and can use Linux just fine. I had a friend who needed a home computer but was desperately poor. I gave them a machine I picked up at a garage sale with Ubuntu on it. They've been using it for years and have never looked back. After they had been using it for a while I mentioned something to them about their computer having an unusual operating system, and they really didn't have a clue what I was talking about. Because they had never paid attention to the operating system beyond the clicking the browser icon.

Now yeah that's not true for people who will want to plug in different printers all the time, and install Microsoft Office specifically, etc. Surprisingly I think it's actually the people with a medium amount of technical knowledge that have the most trouble adapting to Linux.

But even as someone who virtually never uses anything but Linux, I don't really get the constant drive to have this "year of the Linux desktop". It works fine for me and I love it. I make my smug comment when Windows and OS X users have problems but I'm not in a rush to help them with their problems or give them new ones. If you're bothered enough by the mainstream options to switch, you can learn a few new things. If not, I don't see the problem.

Edit: and I think Linus focuses too much on Debian here. Even in 2014, Ubuntu was already a very easy to use and out-of-the-box distro. Even Fedora was pretty good. My distribution doesn't package Zoom, but if I go to their website and click install I get the right binary and the experience is comparably easy to Microsoft Windows installers. If you're on a fringe distro, you almost certainly love the power that comes with (and requires) building everything from source regularly. So again, I don't see the problem. If you want to be included in Debian, using Debian's shared libraries doesn't seem like an unreasonable policy. It's quite easy to ship an application that is easy to install and upgrade independently. Google Chrome is another app that does it super well. More people would do it if there was demand, but there isn't, and I don't think that's just an app packaging problem at all.

[schmorptron]

For Zoom: Even better, you just type flatpak install zoom or snap install zoom and get a community maintained version that has many potential incompatibilities taken care of. Or any user that doesn't want to use the terminal can just search gnome / ubuntu software and find zoom in there and click install.

[myk9001]

>> It’s really nice to be able to run Windows 3.1 code on a Windows Server 2019

You can also run the same version of a newest app on Windows 7 and Windows 10. At least, you could back when 7 was still supported, and you probably still can, but I didn't check.

Try installing a package targeting Ubuntu 21.04 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? :) (Replace Ubuntu with a distro of your choince in the previous sentence.)

For all its flaws -- and it has many -- Windows is a platform while a Linux distro is a ball of tightly-coupled packages.

>> I just want tools that immediately work.

Totally agree with you here.

[schmorptron]

Flatpak solves this :)

[bachmeier]

> I do enough tweaking and tinkering in my own code that sometimes I just want tools that immediately work

Interestingly, that's exactly the reason I continue to use Linux. Depends on what you're doing, but for the boring work I do, I never have to tinker. Install and use. Once in a while do a boring update.

[bawolff]

> Windows 3.1 code on a Windows Server 2019

Can you? I was under the impression 64bit windows dropped support for 16bit windows.

[yyyk]

Windows 3.1 had some 32bit support - via Win32s. I think that these apps should still work.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Good point. IDK, it was figurative, and I may have gone back too far.