Linux

It's nice to get some idea of how many people are switching over, it seems to have had an uptick recently, 3 people I know in real life have tried using Linux as their daily driver in the past few months who hadn't previously

Perhaps we can make a new community here: c/ditchedWindows, for example.

Responding with a meta level tangent comment, but I can't help feeling that when I read these type of comments that it's just Microsoft astroturfing, trying to shape the narrative away from migration to Linux.

Especially when you see those "I still can't get my favorite single game that uses anti-cheat tech or strange peripheral to work with Linux, so Linux sucks for all gaming" posts.

Just kind of seems like there's this stealthy narrative warfare going on.

The F Windows posts are great and can be very therapeutic. But guaranteed those users haven’t issued a command that accidentally wipes out their entire drive accidentally. Or they haven’t had their Window Manager just up and decide it doesn’t feel like working anymore because of an update.

I work with Linux a lot simply because of my 3D printers and I love it. But being on a community driven edge can be a nightmare sometimes when something updates and you’ve got to track down the problem. For me that’s half the fun since I usually get to help someone else out with the same issue.

Yes.

These posts are the "I voted for peace" decorative lapel button of the '60s and '70s. These posts were the leading edge in the '90s and a little of the '00s.

Now they're tiresome. It's like people who've come late to the party and want their fanfare; people who came last in the race and proclaim themselves the leaders. The race is over, the banners are down, the spotlight's off and the newsmedia's gone home. No need to proclaim victory, nor virtue-signal inclusion in a group that isn't exclusive.

I don’t personally get anything from this threads. It’s kinda self congratulatory. I guess I understand being excited about it though

I feel like limiting or discouraging them would really hurt adoption.

Many times people share their use cases.

If someone with similar use cases finds out "wait, it us possible for me yo use Linux?" they could become tomorrow's post.

Most of those posts are fake too, just karma farming.

Uff, where to start? I'm slit 50/50 on your view. I think you're absolutely right that the best option would be a sticky saying something along the lines of "welcome to a new and better life of freedom. We're here to help you. Please start by reading (whatever sticky post to make them feel welcome and give them a jump start), and we look forward to evolving towards full cyber freedom together".

And I agree that, some times, we can be a bit vexing to newcomers. Having said that, most, if not all of us, have been that newcomer all too happy to notify everyone that "I've finally gotten free of the poisonous claws of the devil, Microshot". So, I also understand why people would do that. I was there once, and was so happy I switched, I wanted to put an ad on Cable TV and every newspaper and magazine in the world for every creature to know.

After a while, I still blast windows every now and then, but inly to die-hand windows advocates.

Having said that, the sticky is just one of many potential options to curb these posts, but they will never cease to happen. As I said, the feeling is so awesome that lots of us just want to scream it to the top of our lungs.

Is it a bit annoying to see that every time you come in here there are 10 new posts with the exact same thing? Yes, sometimes it is. But it's also true that I enjoy it when I see another person finally managing to open their eyes and risk having to learn something new, different to the only thing they've know probably for years or even decades. This helps put Gnu-Linux on the map of developers, which in turn can attract more people, so, full-circle benefit.

I can't think of any options right now, but when I feel a bit annoyed by it, I just move on and keep browsing for what actually interests me at the moment. Other times, I may actually upvote, reply while congratulating and letting them know we're here to help navigate these new waters, and share a few tutorials, options and all that good stuff.

At the end of the day I think it all boils down to each of our moods the moment we see those. My mood towards them is pretty "bipolar", to say the least, lol.

If you send the noobs to a noob specific community with other noobs, then you pass the chance to share some of your knowledge that may save the noob from doing some silly stuff because of the bad habits he picked up while using Windows.

I think that it may be slightly annoying and repetitive, but it is important to give noobs a nudge in the right direction.

You can always ignore the posts, or contribute with fresh content. 😉

I'm working on phasing out windows in my office as much as I can entirely because of the end of win10 and the dumb requirements of windows 11. I'm still running it on my main home PC though because I'm insanely busy and like to game for like 5-10 hours a week and and want to spend zero hours getting games to run. If I buy a game on steam and it doesn't work I instantly I refund it even if I could probably figure it out.

It doesn’t help much if there are the same threads every day, with people circlejerking on hating Windows and recommending Mint a hundred times, just like 100 people before did on the same thread.

I hate Windows too, but it feels like we’re identifying and comparing ourselves with the bitter ex-partner we had a while ago. No, not being Windows shouldn’t be the main reason Linux is great.

We should focus on what makes our software great, and not what the “bad ex-partner” did wrong.

I completely agree with you and said many times that while I don't like the fact that Windows isn't open-source it does provide a LOT of value for a LOT of people who work on certain fields and haver certain software requirements. With Windows there's a lot of commercial support when it comes to Linux desktop it simply isn’t there.

If you require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot Linux isn’t a viable options. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration… virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays.

To make things worse the Linux desktop development ecosystem is essentially non existent. The success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.

It's because half the people that post here's entire personality is using Linux.