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I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.

As bad as Windows is, and it is it getting worse by the minute, it honestly does just work. I dual boot my computer, mostly into Linux everyday and even now I occasionally come across problems that don’t exist on the Windows side. The community need give up with this idea that Linux doesn’t have major usability issues.

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Redredme@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Yeah it’s funny. Post about stuff just working out of the box.

First reply: Open source. Downgrade. So… Do exactly what the post is raging about.

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- echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  There are many advantages to open source software and a lot of it does actually just work. Linux isn’t one of them though.
  
  To be fair that’s because an operating system is far more complicated than most open source projects which tend to be applications.
  
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basxto@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.

The point is that you can, not that you have to. My system is very customized. A few years ago when I had to work with Windows I used it with ConsoleZ (middle click paste!!!11), Kate (KDE4Win) & Dolphin (KDE4Win; explorer didn’t support tabs), that also wasn’t the most stable experience one could wish for. I would’ve used a tiling manager if such a thing would’ve existed, but there are some things you just can’t have on Windows. Everything works fine and stable when you use the standard stuff (for Windows that would be Explorer, MS Office, Outlook, Edge, Visual Studio, etc), but I’d expect the same from stuff like Ubuntu without third-party repos and no manually installed stuff. And even more if you just use GNOME/KDE with their standard software.

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Mim@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The fuck are you doing, that you need to mess with the OS?

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- echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  So Linux is just going to magically appear on your computer is it?
  
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  - PrincessTardigrade@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Not to mention all the dependencies for everything, I’ve gone multiple layers deep trying to install dependencies for the dependencies just to use a single module. Tbf I’ve mostly used Linux for bioinformatics so perhaps the problem for me is biologists creating software for other biologists and none are truly computer scientists (including myself)
    
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    echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    It very much depends on the build of Linux you’re getting but there’s definitely quite a lot of builds out there that were designed for enthusiasts, where after you’ve installed it you have to spend the next several hours configuring everything. Your average computer user has very limited patience for this assuming they’re prepared to even do it at all.
    
    I bet that 99% of people don’t even really know how you would go about installing a new operating system. It’s not exactly intuitive.
    
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lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
My experience is pretty limited and I might just be lucky in that everything worked for me, but installing linux was exactly as hard as installing windows. If anything, I found it less annoying because with Windows I tend to decline a lot of their services (no cloud, no office, etc) and I profoundly resent being nagged by MS to use services that don’t interest me.

If I bought my laptop with linux preinstalled, I wouldn’t say that it has been less usable than a windows machine. there is some missing support, but I had similar issues with switching from mac to windows and back.

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Olhonestjim@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I am not a power user, but I’m ok. I got sick of Windows BS, so when I got my Framework 13, I installed PopOS. I haven’t had to do anything to get things to work. It’s been fantastic.

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dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I may be in the minority here, but I absolutely know how to rock every corner of a modern Linux setup and I avoid OS-tinkering at home like the plague. I have better things to spend my time on, so the bar for user-friendly computerized things in my home is incredibly high. In fact, to circle back to OP’s point, such things have to “just work”, be secure by default, and require minimal hacking and tinkering to function reliably.

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