You’re either memeing, and you use Arch btw, or you are a decade behind. Most PC users surf the web, print a PDF, and possibly look at pictures from their phone on a larger screen. All of those can be done from a vanilla install of most Linux distros. Before you say “yeah, but windows comes pre-installed on my pc” congratulations you’ve discovered why monopolies are bad, but also I can install Linux on my hardware before you’re done watching the “please wait while we are setting up your computer” and “just a few more moments” screens that give you absolutely no information about what is actually happening.
“please wait while we are setting up your computer” and “just a few more moments” screens that give you absolutely no information about what is actually happening.
Fun fact, Windows actually does have a verbose mode for these screens. It’s completely convoluted to get it to do it though, but you can lmfao 😂
It’s been awhile, but the gist of it as after the boot disk installation you have to stop it from rebooting and go back into the boot disk, open a command prompt, open the boot disk’s regedit, connect it to the registry hive installed on the drive and set some flags there and reboot
If you like pain, there’s a YT video of a madlad installing windows completely manually
If you want to do anything beyond using linux as a web browser, then nothing is simple.
Windows and mac also have web browsers, but in addition to that they can also do a lot of other things easily.
You don’t have to open a single terminal window if you don’t want to, nowadays. Hardware compatibility is mostly excellent, outside some specific vendors that keep giving trouble (fucking Nvidia, go fuck yourself). I’m not sure what’s inherently complicated about the modern Linux experience otherwise, outside having to figure out what’s a distribution. Most have app stores with bunch of stuff available OOTB, excellent software, etc.
Now, I’d have agreed with you 10 years ago. Just installing Ubuntu on a laptop meant dealing with shit power savings and non functional sleep unless you were ready to tweak obscure config files and install stuff manually. Wifi support was a nightmare.
Unless you’re speaking about software availability, which is not something you can really blame the OS for. Unless vendors make their software available natively, of course trying to mess with compatibility layers like Wine will always be complicated. I still can’t fully get rid of Windows because of media creation software mostly - music/audio DAWs are slowly coming over to Linux, but most commercial plugins obviously aren’t following. The rest is pretty smooth sailing though. I haven’t had a single fluke with my PopOS partition in years, while I’ve already had to repair my Windows partition twice in the same period - once for a borked update, and the second it just broke itself after a power outage.
“I just heart my Ubuntu, and my computer friend was right: this was easy to install!.. wait a sec. What do you mean it’s only got 3 months of support left?!? You told me to get the latest version!”
except the time is spent learning something instead of waiting for the pc to update(or you can, of course, use one of the many common distros that require no time to understand, eg. linux mint, fedora, tuxedoOS etc)
It’s the same with windows though, I can’t get Windows 11 on my laptop.
Same with many things, it’s just not feasible to support decade old hardware with new updates.
hav ye herd a linux?
You pay for linux with your time and sanity.
You’re either memeing, and you use Arch btw, or you are a decade behind. Most PC users surf the web, print a PDF, and possibly look at pictures from their phone on a larger screen. All of those can be done from a vanilla install of most Linux distros. Before you say “yeah, but windows comes pre-installed on my pc” congratulations you’ve discovered why monopolies are bad, but also I can install Linux on my hardware before you’re done watching the “please wait while we are setting up your computer” and “just a few more moments” screens that give you absolutely no information about what is actually happening.
Fun fact, Windows actually does have a verbose mode for these screens. It’s completely convoluted to get it to do it though, but you can lmfao 😂
Wait, how? (out of curiosity)
It’s been awhile, but the gist of it as after the boot disk installation you have to stop it from rebooting and go back into the boot disk, open a command prompt, open the boot disk’s regedit, connect it to the registry hive installed on the drive and set some flags there and reboot
If you like pain, there’s a YT video of a madlad installing windows completely manually
If you want to do anything beyond using linux as a web browser, then nothing is simple. Windows and mac also have web browsers, but in addition to that they can also do a lot of other things easily.
You don’t have to open a single terminal window if you don’t want to, nowadays. Hardware compatibility is mostly excellent, outside some specific vendors that keep giving trouble (fucking Nvidia, go fuck yourself). I’m not sure what’s inherently complicated about the modern Linux experience otherwise, outside having to figure out what’s a distribution. Most have app stores with bunch of stuff available OOTB, excellent software, etc.
Now, I’d have agreed with you 10 years ago. Just installing Ubuntu on a laptop meant dealing with shit power savings and non functional sleep unless you were ready to tweak obscure config files and install stuff manually. Wifi support was a nightmare.
Unless you’re speaking about software availability, which is not something you can really blame the OS for. Unless vendors make their software available natively, of course trying to mess with compatibility layers like Wine will always be complicated. I still can’t fully get rid of Windows because of media creation software mostly - music/audio DAWs are slowly coming over to Linux, but most commercial plugins obviously aren’t following. The rest is pretty smooth sailing though. I haven’t had a single fluke with my PopOS partition in years, while I’ve already had to repair my Windows partition twice in the same period - once for a borked update, and the second it just broke itself after a power outage.
If you’re definition of simple is just clicking things until you get the response you want then you might be correct.
“I just heart my Ubuntu, and my computer friend was right: this was easy to install!.. wait a sec. What do you mean it’s only got 3 months of support left?!? You told me to get the latest version!”
except the time is spent learning something instead of waiting for the pc to update(or you can, of course, use one of the many common distros that require no time to understand, eg. linux mint, fedora, tuxedoOS etc)
It used to be the case yea, but my experience last 5 years or so has been that especially for old hardware everything works out of the box.
Might be extremely hardware or distro dependent though.
You can, but not officially.