If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
Sounds very similar to my situation. I switched to Linux around the same time and for basically the same reasons. I had looked at Linux at various times in the past, and attempted to switch around 10 years ago, but wound up going back to Windows. The horrors of Windows 10/11 made me more determined this time, and also the Linux desktop experience has improved slowly but steadily.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
I always seem to end up dual booting Windows to play games. I’ve made it quite a while without installing Windows now. Mostly because I haven’t had the desire to game much, but also because of how good gaming on Linux is now. I will hold out until there is some big multiplayer game with anticheat that my friends get me into.
That’s one way to frame it: Encroaching corporations are a front, trying to subdue the public, and we need to unite and fight back for ourselves.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
An option if you don't want to deal with dual boot: buy something like a Bee-link SER8 for $499 and use that for Linux. It's tiny and performs well. Use a KVM or swap cables between computers.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
I made the switch a few years ago mostly because the only thing I do on computers is write software for the companies I work for; I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
The last time my wife's laptop died, I convinced her to give a Linux laptop from System76 a try. Then, when her store's Windows box died, I convinced her (and her business partner) to give Linux a try there. My daughter, 20, has a Linux laptop as well (although in order to get Adobe Creative Suite for school she still has to own a Windows desktop, thanks Adobe). None of these people were interested in software freedom, so their patience for problems during the switch was pretty minimal, and they all switched, and stayed switched. If you buy something like System76 that has Linux pre-installed, and help out with something like Spotify that is possible to install on Linux but not completely trivial, it is not so difficult to convince people anymore.
Windows will keep dominating the desktop PC market as long as manufacturers ship it by default. Convincing someone to install an operating system from scratch is a fantastically large ask.
At my last two workplaces Linux has been an alternative for those who wanted it, along with Mac (unlike Linux you have to ask for Mac, but you usually get it if you have a good reason or a couple of years experience it seems) and Windows (the standard).
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
I dual boot windows with linux, but I haven't used windows in over a year.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
> It’s been two years now. I finally weaned myself off of Big Daddy.
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
I did this a few months back and never looked back. Linux failed me in music production and gaming, while the latter isn't important, I have invested heavily in audio VSTs and it's unacceptable that even with Wine, they do not work and no virtual machines are not enough. I hope MacOS treats you well.
One of the companies I'm working for has a b2c retail division.
We're still buying the Lenovo all-in-one destkops that are used as POS systems with Windows licenses even though we wipe the machine and auto-install our Linux-based POS system as soon as we deploy the machine. Trying to buy a machine w/o Windows is just too much friction. I call it the Microsoft tax. I really wish that not to be a thing any more.
The two last issues facing users switching are (imo) battery management and track pads. I know there are solutions but they're very complicated to setup properly for the average user.
it's funny that a lot of us Linux nuts on comp.os.linux.advocacy back in the 90s predicted this was Microsoft's planned endgame. I personally thought it would take less than 30 years for them to get around to it though.
It's impressive how these Microsoft-owned products became fundamental to my daily software needs. I know I have to find better alternatives, move to using Codeberg/Forgejo, Spacemacs/Neovim..
And programming languages? I like TypeScript, and Microsoft has been a good steward of the project. Similarly with Go and Google. I also rely on VC-funded language runtimes, frameworks, libraries. That's a risk I sometimes question. Ideally I would shift to using FOSS altogether, the whole stack top to bottom.
Even the hardware I'd prefer "open source" if possible.
Unfortunately there's just no solution for an important part of my life - gaming. If it was completely up to me I would completely ignore games that didn't work on Linux. But I maintain an important friendship group through gaming, and those guys are not going to forgo Battlefield 6 or Dawn of War 4 or any of the many games that straight up won't work. Not to mention the additional effort on my side getting a game to work when it's not officially supported - something I am not willing to put a ton of persona time into.
> One day their data was on the local drive and the next it became online-only files that had to be downloaded from Microsoft’s servers.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadIf I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
I thought it was very poor, myself.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
Not going back anytime soon either way.
But with the end of life for windows 10 in October, I switched back to Linux and I'm quite happy.
I'm running Manjaro with Xfce on my 4 year old LG Gram and it's really snappy while only using 900MB idle memory.
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
If you think Windows is bad for the world, stop driving eyeballs to their same strategies in the f/oss world as well.
It's impressive how these Microsoft-owned products became fundamental to my daily software needs. I know I have to find better alternatives, move to using Codeberg/Forgejo, Spacemacs/Neovim..
And programming languages? I like TypeScript, and Microsoft has been a good steward of the project. Similarly with Go and Google. I also rely on VC-funded language runtimes, frameworks, libraries. That's a risk I sometimes question. Ideally I would shift to using FOSS altogether, the whole stack top to bottom.
Even the hardware I'd prefer "open source" if possible.
There is a good progress with the likes of Lenovo (who for decades refused to refund Windows tax) selling computers with Linux pre-installed.
If you want gaming on Linux, get an AMD GPU.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)