[fnimick]

The thing is: with Windows I don't have to do any of the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc. You might have had to in the past, but you can't compare past Windows to Linux today.

I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications. Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't. I haven't had a Windows update break things in years, where my last Linux experience had the Ubuntu live USB work fine and completely fail to boot to a GUI environment after the install. I don't have time in my life to troubleshoot kernel issues anymore.

[julianeon]

I'm getting the sense of a category error here:

Windows is the standard bearer of paid OS's - yes, true.

Ubuntu is the standard bearer of free Linux OS's - not really, and (this is important) less true over time.

What's happening is that, as Windows is improving, Linux appears to be getting worse. But that's really just an Ubuntu problem.

I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly, but it seems to be performing less well over time, and is, increasingly, not the default choice. I would understand if other distros are harder to learn or simply unsupported, but that's not the case.

It feels like 90% of these issues could be resolved by saying "Start with Fedora. In 2023, that's the actual default Linux distro that fixes these problems."

[bacchusracine]

>I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly

They asked for it. Red hat the former bearers of that crown dropped the ball and walked away, leaving it open for Ubuntu to step in.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031127055732/http://zdnet.com....

https://web.archive.org/web/20030812095615/http://www.linuxa...

https://web.archive.org/web/20040508195941/http://www.newsfo...

People forget now but Fedora was created because Red Hat abandoned the home desktop market in 2003. Then Fedora was spun off to be a test bed for their enterprise offerings and it was no longer possible to buy a copy of workstation in stores. So when Canonical showed up in 2004 and was focused on the desktop they were able to get a lot of people to move over fairly quickly. The fact that they were using a different type of desktop interface with Gnome that had the two panels unlike Fedora which still had the single large panel like Gnome 1.x made it stand out even more. That and the way almost every other Linux desktop at the time was KDE based...

So yeah, Ubuntu took the crown because it wanted it. It maintains that crown because outside of it and its various spinoffs and flavors no one else is really seeking to be a desktop operating system. Since Canonical has made it clear that its focus is now also Enterprise at the expense of the desktop experience, I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone else steals that crown by focusing on the desktop again. We just need one of these billionaires to fund a company to make it happen...Say what you will about Shuttleworth, he did put his money where his mouth was and I for one am grateful for the many years of good use I got from Ubuntu as a result. I will be sad for the day when inevitably the pain points out weigh the benefits and I must switch away from Ubuntu-Mate to some other system.

[vetinari]

> The thing is: with Windows I don't have to do any of the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc. You might have had to in the past, but you can't compare past Windows to Linux today.

I suspect you are talking about some other Windows that the rest of us.

> I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications.

Don't we all?

> Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't.

You, ok. Others? It's the other way around.

> I haven't had a Windows update break things in years,

Last time? Cumulative update 2022.12 for W19 22H2... that's not that long time ago.