Image text: “Fact: 90% of Linux users switch back to windows right before all their problems are about to be fixed”
I don’t have problems in linux
I am the problem in linux
Linux pros: You have control over everything Linux cons: You have control over everything
That’s why immutable distros will bring more Linux users in the future.
Are we talking something like NixOS?
NixOS is semi-immutable but not really designed to be user friendly. I think we are more talking about Universal Blue, Fedora SilberBlur, OpenSUSE microOS, VanillaOS and so on.
Tbh I’m pretty new to nixos, but I’m starting to believe if we had that the exact same config (at least without flakes, I’m still having trouble undertanding them) but with a slightly abstracted UI, it would be one of the most user-friendly distros out there.
Like just imagine being able to click “Add program”, write the name of a program, having all the options appear below as dropdown menus or on/off switches, then click big blue button “Apply” to rebuild.
We need more beginner distros like that.
So that begs the question: whY THE FUCK haven’t i search for that before?
Thanks, I’ll be looking into it
Not yet ready for daily use!
We were on the verge of greatness, we were this close.
*mint (nothing else)
-windows 11 user
Mint is not immutable.
sinde when did linux have to make tables immune?
Yup! NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, Guix etc.
And steamdeckOS… whenever valve decides they’re gonna release it for general use.
Apart from the game mode update notes being hard coded to show steamos updates, bazzite is a drop in replacement that doesn’t get rid of your non flatpak packages each update. It also bundles or has easy installation options for all the recommended third party software everyone uses with the deck.
Pretty sure that 90% of Linux users don’t switch to Windows.
I thought it meant 90% of the ones switching to windows
That’s what I had in mind
I still boot to windows every now and then to play games. But each time windows painfully reminds me why I hate it
I have never liked Windows. Unix workstations or linux pretty much since the mid 80’s. My current pet peeve is companies that block email clients except Outlook from connecting to their mail server (Exchange).
Actually more like a self fulfilling prophesy
IMO many will leave Linux just before finding the fix!
I had tried dual boot but kept going back to windows because i knew how to do things there without having to mess with anything
Its only after i removed windows altogether and only ran Mint, that i was forced to seriously look for solutions. Once you do find them though, you dont need to mess around with anything that much any more
A suggestion for everyone that’s kinda new, and to be honest, grizzled vets too… Use chatgpt as a trouble shooting tool. It’s really surprising how good it is sometimes. I’ve had it write bash scripts in minutes, solve obscure Firefox issues, fix game settings for barely compatible games… So many things
Principally not a bad idea, but run a local model while at it!
Not very accessible, in the vast majority of (troubleshooting, nothing private) cases free gpt is the best option (fast, free, openAI training on that chat might even be beneficial to the community). Decent GPU’s for LLM are stupid pricey.
“When he reached the New World, Cortezh burned hish ships. Ash a reshult hish men were well motivated.” —Capt. Ramius, played by Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October
deleted by creator
It wasn’t until windows shat itself and I couldn’t boot into it anymore that I took my Linux drive more seriously.
This is true, I wanted to play a game and it looked broken in Linux. When I went back to Windows I discovered that it was a problem with the game. Then I went back to Linux and it ran better than it did in Windows.
Typical Ubisoft experience.
I mean, if you duel boot, it’s just a matter of time until Windows nukes your other OS. At least with me, my Linux was about to solve world peace, but Windows got wind of that and shut it the fuck down.
Meme is correct, they’re coming for you.
I almost wanted to correct you and say its dual not duel, but when I think about it windows will fight to be the only bootloader right when you think its finally behaving.
Wanted to say the same: the typo made the comment better. There has to be a community for this.
Windows basically never nukes the actual linux install. It DOES like breaking the bootloader though. Which is fixable but still deeply annoying.
Ah damn this is exactly what happened a few days ago. My popos boot entry suddenly disappeared. I can still just boot from the physical ssd it’s installed on, but I found it strange it just pooped out somehow. Any pointers on how to fix it?
Here’s an article on how to fix it.
TLDR: You need to boot from a live disk, mount your install and reinstall the bootloader.
I still need to fix mine, thanks for the link. The weirdest break it did once was messing with my Wi-Fi driver, managed to break Linux’ driver somehow, making the Internet a no go. Still no idea how Windows managed that though, they shouldn’t be messing with my bios. :/
Make sure you disable fast boot in Windows. I’ve read that can put devices into a state where Linux can’t use them.
I haven’t had it happen to me for a while now. I used to have a boot repair liveCD that’d always do the trick, but I don’t think that specific distro even exists anymore.
The gist is you’ll want to boot a liveCD and use the liveCD to reinstall GRUB, I’m sure you can find the right incantation to do so online somewhere.
Reminded me how Windows would set the hardware clock to different timezone that Linux uses, can’t remember which.
It would make my blood boil, that’s when I decided to never boot it again. 100% Linux everywhere, I get it on routers when I can.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time, Linux sets it to UTC. It’s possible to tell one to respect the others preference
I will never expect Windows to respect any preference. Updates burnt me too many times.
Linux for life.
Linux for life.
Then you’re clearly not dual booting and this advice wasn’t for you
Not anymore I’m not, you are correct.
Also wrote that earlier.
So that’s why windows always has the wrong time after I’ve been in my Linux install…
It should change it back eventually if you didn’t disable setting the clock from Microsofts ntp servers
I have never had this issue on Mint/Windows duel boot
- yet
I have been running it for at least 6 months if not longer. So , I think that’s a valid sample size
Do you receive windows updates?
I do update both OSes routinely
Hmmm maybe that depends on your configuration are you on windows 10 or 11?
- 11 is crap and I will never upgrade. I only keep 10 because it’s a duel boot and I don’t want to reload everything. I guess I could partition a second Linux drive. But I occasionally like to mess around on Unreal 5 and create worlds.
Maybe thats why. Or do you have dual boot in two different drives?
Nope it’s a partitioned M2
If you really want to run Linux : Distro hop
If you are not happy, then try a few more distros.
Yeah, that’s what I i did, first tried Nobara, I liked it but encountered some issues, tried to fix them but I realized I spent too much time and there’s no clear fix, so I hoped on Fedora and everything works nicely, exept for the Multimedia drivers which I’m still trying to fix…
Seriously, how can a huge distro like Fedora still be so horribly user-unfriendly when it comes to basic things like multimedia playback.
It’s the stupid US patent law, and they don’t wanna deal with any “legal” issues, showing you how to install those drivers is how far they can go… But this is Exactly why these drivers are broken, they’re not well integrated and not tested by Fedora devs…
That’s why Distros like Ultramarine promise you a working Fedora experience OOTB, because they’re not US based and such laws don’t apply to their software…
This is what seems to have helped for me on Fedora:
-
Install free and non-free RPM Fusion repositories: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
-
Then run the following:
sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin sudo dnf groupupdate sound-and-video sudo dnf install mozilla-openh264 rm ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin
I was having trouble with many h265 videos until I cleared my gstreamer cache (I only needed to clear the 64-bit cache, this thread suggests clearing both 32 and 64-bit):
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h265-videos-wont-play-in-totem-after-installing-all-codecs/87341/17Oh, Thank you very much multimedia playback behaves weirdly on my machine, I’ll try these fixes and let you know
-
Temple or nothing
I’ve not distro hopped in ages, ever since I found my one true love arch btw
Every child should be introduced to linux. Will help them understand better they don’t need to be treated as products and certainly make them more computer literate, and hopefully more security conscious.
But to be honest, not every child is technologically-inclined. Most are just gonna get annoyed and hate it. This is not a good idea.
I’d have loved it as a child though
Dude he said “introduced”, not forced to learn it well enough to duel Torvalds on the mailing lists.
Was introduced as a teen. Recently even looked back at my book from the times and it had a whole goddamn chapter with linux propaganda.
Hated it. Felt like high maintenance windows. No reason to even get near. Also, hated it doubly because nobody asked.
Best way would be to switch school computers to linux. That way there’s no active part - it’s here, you have to use it anyway, deal with it. Then you can taste it neutrally, and it becomes just a quirk. Quirk some may like.
Exactly this. Barely any child would have cared about free software or whatever. I’d be concerned for the ones that did care.
Check on EducaandOS. It’s my region’s school distro. It was absolute crap around 15 years ago, when they launched (names Guadalinex Edu), but it was preinstalled in school laptops so we learned to use it.
Right now it’s pretty decent and simple enough to just throw it into a kid’s computer, but sadly nobody gives a fuck about it. It would be so cool if more institutions tried to pull projects like this
Linux doesn’t have to be high maintenance though. Definitely not more high maintenance than Windows for basic use cases.
It doesn’t have to, but for most users on the level of teens/kids it is. You wanna do something in windows? Done. Just done. No problems whatsoever, most devs bend over backwards for compatibility. Meanwhile finding shit for linux is pain. Most things you heard of are not even there. You have to go through weird apps just to run things you’re used to, and meanwhile OS asks weird questions like which graphic driver to install,
Linux changed a whole lot from the time I was introduced to it, and it became reaaaaally close to being as easy to use as windows. Hell, I even was considering switching to Mint some time ago ( Then bricked my boot. Thrice. And it’s not fault of Linux. I think. ). I like how it looks and feels, and with proton and stuff it’s best time to do so but it still isn’t on the same level of being non-problematic as windows.
Edit: Cannot talk about Win 11. Touched it once. If I need to upgrade, fuck that, going linux. Not worth it. At all.
Not really most detect the graphics card automatically, unless you are on Nvidia in which case you probably built the thing anyway or are a PC gamer which would know that anyway.
Windows isn’t as easy to use and tends to break if given to the computer illiterate from viruses, not doing updates, not rebooting, and so on. I’ve dealt with these kinds of people, they are better off with Linux Mint, ChromeOS, or similar as it doesn’t have these issues. If you are talking about mac then yeah it’s easier, you have an argument there. I would point out as well that most of the easy to use devices run Linux, like Android and ChromeOS devices.
Windows 11 is the new default, so that’s what we are comparing to here.
Dual boots on a single drive and EFI partition are expected to break at this point. This is because Microsoft like to overwrite the Linux boot loader. You should use a separate drive or at least a different EFI partition. REFIND can be helpful too. Dual boots have always been an advanced use case though.
Most people who don’t know their stuff uses nvidia. Happily slowly changing, but nvidia is everywhere, at least where I live. And people who don’t know stuff still hold onto “green good, red hot and bad”.
How do you break Windows except by downloading malware? It literally hides, or rather masquarades it’s settings from you and makes it hard to do anything bad to it. My grandpa uses Windows - I thought about introducing him to linux to breathe second life into his PC but…I doubt he would be able to do much with it. I cede point towards Android.
How is Win 11 new default? I may be out of the loop, but is it now majorly used? If so, I cede all because the only time I tried to use it, goddamn first-time registration died on me. Like, fully. Unfixable. What a mess.
And yeah, again, the boot bricking isn’t on linux it’s just me being an idiot. Also I love how fast you picked up how I broke the boot.
Something like Linux Mint is very easy to use and doesn’t require much maintenance. You don’t need to reformat every year or two either when Windows inevitably shits itself.
I use arch btw
Linux mint shares all the flaws that are common to every Linux distro
My point is Linux doesn’t have to be hard to use. You are going out of your way and making things difficult when using something like Arch Linux.
I’m not undermining your point in the first sentence, I was just saying that I use arch, btw
Linux mint shares a few ubuntu bugs, and even if you use LMDE someone like a child cannot understand the essence of linux in a controlled environment.
I’ll repeat. You cannot teach linux in a controlled environment to a child.
I’ve heard of cases where parents are putting kids in front of linux recently!
They are windows illiterate i think is what the kids posted.
Yeah, that’s nice to hear.
But that’s not necessarily a controlled environment.
Yes you can! What do you think a Chromebook is or an Android tablet. Modern Linux is quite easy to use, in some areas easier than modern Windows. This is especially true if you have the kind of children who get viruses all the time.
Oh awesome. Leave it to lemmy to be pedantic.
I obviously meant normal linux distros when I referred to linux. Not chromebooks or android.
Also, using those is in no way the same as learning linux. In a chrome book you’ll just be using a browser. In a phone, all the apps are locked down and you have no access to cli.
thanks you for not forcing people to use arch, now I don’t have to shit on it for a milliont time
Lol, putting the worst documented distro on the planet on the table is interesting. The majority of people new to linux would switch back to windows within minutes if they had to install and use nixOS.
NixOS isn’t bad but your right it could be explained better.
In terms of stability and packages, it’s an amazing OS. Gone are the days of being afraid that of updates or system upgrades that might leave your system borked. Unless you’re experimenting with filesystems and boot parameters, it’s not straightforward to fuck things up.
On the flipside, by Linus is it difficult to get things working as a beginner. Good luck packaging new stuff, good luck creating new options, good luck cross-compiling, good luck configuring stuff with hardcoded config paths in
/var/or whatever, actually good luck understanding how to configure existing packages, good luck getting any kind of PR merged without the say-so of a chosen few, good luck changing anything in the community without getting past the gatekeepers, and have fun understanding why some random package is being installed and/or compiled when you switch to a new configuration.Good luck packaging new stuff
Packaging is generally hard on any distro.
Compared to a traditional distro, the packaging difficulty distribution is quite skewed with Nix though as packages that follow common conventions are quite a lot easier to package due to the abstractions Nixpkgs has built for said conventions while some packages are near impossible to package due to the unique constraints Nix (rightfully) enforces.
good luck creating new options
Creating options is really simple actually. Had I known you could do that earlier, I would have done so when I was starting out.
Creating good options APIs is an art to be mastered but you don’t need to do that to get something going.
good luck cross-compiling
Have you ever tried cross-compiling on a traditional distro? Cross-compiling using Nixpkgs is quite easy in comparison.
actually good luck understanding how to configure existing packages
Yeah, no way to do so other than to read the source.
It’s usually quite understandable without knowing the exact details though; just look at the function arguments.
Also beats having no option to configure packages at all. Good luck slightly modifying an Arch package. It has no abstractions for this whatsoever; you have to copy and edit the source. Oh and you need to keep it up to date yourself too.
Gentoo-like standardised flags would be great and are being worked on.
good luck getting any kind of PR merged without the say-so of a chosen few
Hi, one of the “chosen few” here: That’s a security feature.
Not a particularly good one, mind you, but a security feature nonetheless.
There’s also now a merge bot now running in the wild allowing maintainers of packages to merge automatic updates on their maintained packages though which alleviates this a bit.
have fun understanding why some random package is being installed and/or compiled when you switch to a new configuration.
It can be mysterious sometimes but once you know the tools, you can directly introspect the dependency tree that is core to the concept of Nix and figure out exactly what’s happening.
I’m not aware of the existence of any such tools in traditional distros though. What do you do on i.e. Arch if your hourly shot of
-Syugoes off and fetches some package you’ve never seen before due to an update to some other package? Manually look at PKGBUILDs?
Me delaying the fix to my Linux problems by never switching back to Windows
Arch is cool and all but fixing all the issues every other time you update is a full time job. I can never rely on my system for shit. Sometimes there’s actually a wiki page for the issue but in my experience it’s usually bugs almost no one else has which means I’m on my own. If you’re smart enough for that cool but I’ve dedicated most of my life to only using Linux and I’m still nowhere close to being able to use Arch without spending too much time troubleshooting issues. I think I’d rather deal with Debian repositories being so out of date half my shit is broken because that way at least I only have to fix it once every year or two instead of every goddamn week.
Arch is not meant to be a daily driver if you’re expecting “shit just works” stability long term when you just blindly run updates. You have to understand what you’re updating and sometimes why.
It is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems.
If you want to use Arch, you need to invest in snapshots using
rsyncordd. Given how it’s a rolling release, you should do this weekly. If something fucks up, grab all your logs and put them somewhere safe. Roll back and look at your logs to see what broke. Then apply updates as needed. You can ignore packages for quite a while. If you’re not smart enough to understand it now, you may in the future. It takes time and practice.Debian based is only “out of date” feature wise because they do a package freeze. They ensure stability before release. Updates are largely security related.
To be fair if you set it up properly, you don’t install a ton of stuff from the aur, and you stick to a major desktop like kde or gnome it’s stable to the point of being boring.
I’ve recently switched to hyprland from kde just to have something to mess with or tweak when I feel like it. Sometimes they change the config file for hyprland and I have to fix it but I like it none the less. I used kde for a couple years with zero issues and only just switched desktops using the zx backdoor as an excuse to while my system.
This is coming from an individual that hasn’t had an opportunity to switch from an Nvidia card yet.
I generally seem to have had a good experience with Linux Mint. I use the cinnamon version.
Even dist upgrades don’t seem to be too much trouble.
I used to main Gentoo but that was a lot of work. I still miss it though, but that was almost 20 years ago, when I was unemployed, and had more free time than money.
I run Windows 10 on my personal laptop and I look at these changes for the sake of change and I am seriously considering wiping it and not just use Linux in a VM.
I’ve been using nothing but Linux for 5 years and I still have problems every now and then.
But the same can be said with windows. My life long windows user friend occasionally (a few times a year) reaches out about some significant issues they are experiencing with windows on their modern desktop.
I truly wouldn’t recommend Linux for a fairly tech illiterate person like him, but really Linux is better in every category that matters to me.
I truly wouldn’t recommend Linux for a fairly tech illiterate person like him
I would actually argue the opposite, linux is way more intuitive for new people who hasn’t used a pc before or hasn’t used windows long enough to fill their brain with their unconsistent mess. I’ve seen 3 variants of this already with people close to me ( last one of them encouraged by me). Kinda mind boggling.
The moment a new user needs to use command line, they are out.
It isn’t mind boggling at all.
Untrue statement plus in some distros you don’t need the terminal at all. Fear to the terminal is included in windows’ inconsistent mess, as i said, to real first time users it’s not that horrible to “talk to the pc so it does what you told it to do”.
Also you don’t get to decide if an experience i had felt mind boggling or not (?
I mean he’s tech illiterate when it comes to anything semi complicated but with the way he uses his pc and the software he uses it would just not be possible for him to switch at all, would be unable to do 70% of the stuff he wants to do.
Linux is only good for the truly tech illiterate/pretty noice users in my opinion. After that you hit a point where they are literate just enough that they would need to solve problems on linux they wouldn’t have to on windows and their inability to solve problems on Linux make their experience bad.
One level above that Linux is the better option again though.
You can usually find the solution to Linux problems on the forum for your distro.
With windows problems, the answer is usually “nothing can be done unless microsoft actually decides to fix it”. That’s after digging through 10 or more pages of search results filled with AI generated crap.
Yes, and I would like to add that if you really know what you’re doing, you can even fix complicated, deep-rooted problems by yourself.
“nothing can be done unless microsoft actually decides to fix it”
That is just a straight up lie
I haven’t encountered a SINGLE issue like that in all my years of IT in heavy Microsoft environments. You can always find a solution, albeit having some small caveats like you have in every open source software. Every single issue is documented somewhere since 80% of desktops run it. The community is just so much bigger. You can even straight up contact Microsoft directly if you encounter anything that hasn’t been encountered before.
Don’t blame your lack of Google fu on Microsoft just because you don’t like their design philosophy.
I would say so far, I can find the solutions just like i can with Microsoft, i can even leverage it with AI to get my problems solved. and actually, in linux mint, they have a irc and forum i can contact from my desktop.
shut the fuck up capitalist pig.
Found the Microsoft agent.
I actually switched back to Windows a few weeks ago because I was so tired of all the NVIDIA problems I had on Wayland. A few days later I read that explicit sync finally got merged, lol.
I’m definitely planning on switching back to Linux, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it before getting a new AMD GPU.
D I S T R O H O P P I N G
To
T E M P L E
“Fact: 95% of Linux users switched back to Windows95 right before all their problems are about to be fixed” A.D. 1999
- Seriously though a few years ago Microsoft launched their own Linux distributions. You’d think it would be smooth sailing now, no ?
That is why dual boot is based.
Only dual boot two Linux partitions. Dual booting windows is a waste of disk space, and liable to fuck with your bootloader every update.
Dual bootingwindows is a waste of disk spaceThere, fixed that for you.
