This is gonna be an unpopular opinion here but telling people who have used Windows their entire lives to just switch to Linux as if it's that easy is entirely unhelpful and makes the Linux community look elitist and out of touch.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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It's like they are not even trying. I have a laptop with 7th gen CPU that works perfectly fine. I don't have any choice than install Linux, lol.
Probably what I'm gonna do. I used to live in a country where it was completely normal to illegally download software from ThePirateBay, and that's how everyone got their Windows versions, but I don't even feel like doing that anymore.
Windows is becoming increasingly uncomfortable in that regard. I've been thinking about switching to Linux Mint for a while now.
Make a flash drive bootloader so you can preview what it is like? Why not?
if it is something I would like to do.
As someone tried to build the snes9x-nwaemu fork from scratch today after spending hours fighting the Linux mint updater getting stuck, ahhhhhhhhjjj. I still have to have windows for a couple of things anyway which makes this all the more annoying. The update also wrecked my davinci install which I need to produce videos. Also, I work two jobs so not a ton of time for this.
Don't build from scratch then. I also use resolve in Linux, other than the odd Nvidia driver botch it works fine
My alternative is to try to run a bunch of stuff in wine (not sure if it would work) for the one case and I'd rather run it natively. I don't know, for the video editing case, if it would run in wine (and if it did, would I lose my ability to use hardware rendering).
This is the problem I see with most people adopting Linux.
It's great when it works but when things go awry you end up sinking hours of time into an issue. Generally on Windows or Mac, the most you'll have to do is remove it and re-add it.
If more is needed, the userbase is so large that there's a high probability that someone has had your exact issue and posted a solution about it somewhere online, you just need to go and find it.
Linux is very hit and miss on a lot of these points. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it sucks.
Windows tends to suck all the time, but the vast majority of the time it only sucks a little bit, because it's Windows... It works, but it's not great.
I'm all for Linux, but as someone who is more interested in doing useful work on my computer, not troubleshooting my system to get it to operate at all, I've stuck to Windows for a while now. I support Linux and prefer it to alternatives when running any server-based service, but for my desktop? I can't justify the time investment in getting it to the same operational level as my current Windows install.
This is the same reason I bought a Dell, knowing full well that I could get more performance and a better value by building my own system. I absolutely can build a system for myself, I choose not to because it's simply more work that I don't care to spend time on. To be fair, my system is a precision 2RU HEDT, but that's another discussion entirely.
Please don't take me wrong: Linux is great and should see more adoption. My argument is that there's a nontrivial number of people who want a system that simply operates, not one that turns into a science project because of a borked update. Windows updates have caused problems, but usually not everything-is-broken type problems... More that printing doesn't work or something like that...
Windows tends to suck all the time, but the vast majority of the time it only sucks a little bit, because it's Windows... It works, but it's not great
It doesn't work though, and official windows tech support is basically useless anyways.
I have tablets that run android and an old laptop I run on Linux and it's great. For video editing, games, and niche software, it can suck for someone with little time.
This comes up with every windows EOL announcement and it never really ends up with everyone switching to linux
Well the thing about the future is sometimes the thing that always happens doesn't, or sometimes the thing that "won't happen" suddenly does.
I understand the cynicism and I don't think anything will radically change overnight, but we are CLEARLY in a new status quo, you will start to see serious uptick in linux users, for a million different reasons.
Switching from Windows to Linux on an older computer is like when you finally get around to clearing the bathtub drain after years of hair and crud building up. Who knew a bath could drain that fast!? And now there's no pool of water building up when I shower. Anyway, I highly recommend both Linux and clearing the drains.
Nice analogy. I should clean my shower.
Having to use windows 11 for work for the last few years.
(1) Randomly a program on the taskbar just has an invisible icon. Like you can click it but if you don't know it's there it just seems like that program is gone. I keep waiting it to be fixed after every forced update 3-4x a week. Still happening.
(2) Sometimes the entire process just disappears graphically. Not even an invisible icon on the task at. Still running in the background but it's gone in the UI. Have to manually kill it or restart.
(3) I can't unzip multiple ZIP files at the same time. Like I can't select multiple ZIP files and extract them all into their own folder. Something that worked since I've used windows. Worked on windows 10, 7, and XP. It now just unzips only the file you right click even if multiple are selected.
I'm sure there are more but I avoid using windows and mostly just use it to connect to a work VPN and SSH into my redhat VM. Still, all 3 of these really common issues have existed for at least two years. The first two are constant on MS teams and Outlook. Literally no excuse, they are windows apps. Total garbage OS.
At my work IT requires admin privileges to kill processes in the task manager and it's some real psycho shit.
If it gets bad enough I just yank the cord, fuck em.
Yeah, when I started at my workplace it took me a week to realize my computer was on W11 and not something archaic. Definitely did not impress.
LOL the suppliers I work with ONLY Support IE 6 to 9. If they could still get away with DOS and intranets they would.
i've only ever used linux for servers as a web dev but friday i decided to erase windows on my laptop and install mint and i'm basically obsessed now (the best part is how updates just happen but they don't restart your computer randomly when you don't ask)
Everything seems to be pretty plug and play flawless on mint. With the exception of some not so good kernels the last 2 updates resulting in little hiccups on steam. Everything else is polished and great.
i think the only thing i found that doesn't have an equivalent is google drive (which mounts as a drive on windows and streams files) :(
You can mount Google drive (even better, Koofr) in Linux.
does that use space on your drive? the thing i liked in windows was it just streamed the files so I didn't need all the space available (my full drive is like 400gb)
It doesn't. You can mount it as a network drive.
oooh great, that was my main concern! (i didn't want to try it and then end up filling up my hdd)
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feel free to donate them to me, they work great as servers.
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