I think most of the complaints are that Microsoft Office doesn’t work. Which is true. The web version of Microsoft Office is honestly kinda terrible.
And no, people don’t want to use a product that does the same thing as Microsoft Office, they want to use a product called “Microsoft Office”. No, it’s not logical, and doesn’t make any sense at all but it’s how people are.
The only sense it makes is that M$ hasn’t followed the spec, and so things done in office display fine in say libreOffice, but not the other way around. So if your company is willing to transition, but everyone you deal with outside the company is still on Office, there’s a bit of a communication issue. That’s M$'s biggest strength, homogenous work environments.
That’s why my business only uses pure, crisp .txt files. If I can’t open it in notepad, I don’t want it!
I have unironically been preaching the powers of text and JSON, and have some converts. Universal compatibility is great.
Json is a garbage format for anything that’s meant to ever be touched by a human. At least use yaml or json5.
In the first paragraph of JSON5’s site:
It is not intended to be used for machine-to-machine communication.
YAML is not supported by a lot of enterprise software (example: Azure pipelines supports it but Power Automate does not). JSON, XML, CSV, or failing that Text are the safe bets. We use a few options for reading or building presentation layers quickly. Ultimately the idea is to move data around in a way that is friendly to our current and future applications.
It’s absolutely trivial to convert either format to json if necessary. The real killer for me with json is the lack of comments. Human-maintained files absolutely need comments.
Fuck it! I’m in!
There shouldn’t even be word processor documents between companies. PDF is the file type for maintaining consistency of page formatting!
Should be and is in fact? Two veeeerrrry different things
Microsoft’s biggest strength is the Active Directory. Linux user and computer management is a huge PITA.
For Linux user management you can just use an LDAP solution like FreeIPA. You can even tailor sudoer rules based on security groups, so like you can allow someone to reboot the server but not actually make configuration changes to system config files and what-not. It’ll also handle CA and PKI with smart card support and of course DNS. It has a web interface as well.
I’ve done workstation maintenance in a previous job. Every part of the Linux centralized management was worse than Windows. We did it to support our coworker’s wishes, but SSSD constantly shits the bed, and having to code (config management) to write some pretty simple rules like default printers is super annoying compared to the Active Directory built ins.
I don’t know, I like using Fleet Commander with FreeIPA (where it stores the profile). You just spin up the template VM for whatever like-clients on the network you want to make default profiles for and make the changes, shut it down, checkbox the changes (the configurations and stuff) that you approve and let it apply the profiles across the network. Easier than depending on Puppet or Ansible playbooks IMO.
I have had issues with SSSD as well though and it had to do with Kerberos tickets but I can’t remember what I did to fix it. We’d have to manually use kinit on each machine when it’d basically fall off the realm. I want to say it was a DNS issue but it was so long ago, I just don’t remember.
We used to use Centrify for Linux and Solaris and it was easy using Access Manager to basically handle AD users and computers with Active Directory and had some GPO support (you could push config writes with GPOs for example and organize it all via OUs for example) but it would get a little wonky between trusts in the forest sometimes (in regards to zone management in Centrify) and they kept getting more expensive. Maybe they’ve fixed that stuff now but it was really simple to use and you could basically manage a lot through the AD and create group profiles in the Access Manager. I think the last straw was wanting to force us to license the entire suite regardless of whether we were using it or not. Personally, I never liked it because it wouldn’t use SSSD or kclient/nsswitch and if some service tried to join the realm/domain, it’d join using the same computer accounts and basically break the account since Centrify used its own client, so you’d specifically need to join the computer accounts via Centrify as a different name. It wasn’t detrimental or anything – just annoying that it was a problem at all. Also, sometimes the user cache database saved in specific users’ appdata that use Access Manager would corrupt from time to time and you’d need to manually delete it to use Access Manager. I’d hope they fixed that by now too though.
All and all, I’m not saying Active Directory isn’t an excellent product because it is and I’m not saying that there is a 1:1 solution for Linux but I’m saying it that in my experience it isn’t terrible either with FreeIPA and products you can use with it. I definitely hated other 389 solutions prior to FreeIPA though.
You spelt monopoly wrong.
I installed a Windows 11 update. Office no longer worked. Office refused to re-install despite trying a huge number of things. It literally refuses to install. Tried their help tool which even does removal of old references in the system. Failed 5 times.
Tried using the web version for a simple thing. First localization struggle which doesn’t carry across sessions. Excel column formatted to number. Then to currency. Then to general. Autosum shows #Div!0 still. Tried seeing if the AI could help. Have to re-login. (Using Mozilla this whole time btw). After re-login, ai tool says stop using private mode. I’m not…
Literally trying to do the simplest autosum on about 25 lines and it can’t function.
Installed LibreOffice. No problem with ‘Excel’.
I’m really not exaggerating. I saw online a similar issue and the guy had to reinstall the entire OS to get office to work again 🤨
I’m really not exaggerating. I saw online a similar issue and the guy had to reinstall the entire OS to get office to work again
That’s windows for you, have a major issue? Reinstall the OS. Been using the computer for to long? Reinstall the OS
Our company has bought into the whole onedrive/teams/ Microsoft family.
They’ll do what the IT guy says but that first time copilot popped up grrr
If only libreoffice had an app for mobile platforms…
Being unable to open the documents I wrote on my computer without using some kind of crappy ad filled third-party app is annoying.
Libre Office has a mobile app. The one called LibreOffice viewer is only a file viewer but works perfectly if you only look at documents, it is developed by the same foundation that develops LibreOffice. If you want to edit, Collabora is the name of the app, it is based on LibreOffice and is officially approved by The Document Foundation. It is developed by one of their certified collaborators. Both are available on Android and iOS.
Thank you!
Try Collabora Office!
Thanks!
Office 2016 works, there is office online and LibreOffice. What now?
At least one good thing that Google has done is that Docs/Slides work on browsers and (where I live) most people use that now.
Not great if you are also trying to de-Google, though.
If the alternative is Microsoft, you’re between a rock and another rock that used to claim not being evil.
Libreoffice all the way. Most users don’t need more than that.
Google is not really much better than MS. It still leaves you under the yoke of big tech. “Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”.
Ironically, Microsoft has retired the “Microsoft Office” name.
Micro$oft office is being teached in college for my friend and I, having libreoffice, tried doing the exact same thing in it. Not only everything was possible, but also its more convenient in LibreOffice. There are many annoyances in m$ office like auto formatting which cannot be disabled and auto prediction which fills in the details of next cited person from previous (like hell what, how should two people must have same bio?) and now you have to edit all that out by replacing the autofilled ones. LibreOffice on the other hand has much better UX
(Talking about Excel vs Calc and also Word vs Writer)
I mean maybe that specific advanced feature is not in libreoffice, but there are much more good things in it that is worth considering using it.
Have you tried excel ? Its WAY AHEAD of any excel like thing available as office in wild. Just example vlookup , Power tables , vba are no whwre near in any of the products.
HDR works. On KDE Wayland and in games only with Gamescope, but we are getting there. And there is the Steam Deck of course.
I never managed to get gamescope working on my Nobara. Any docs I should look into?
Depends on what you mean with not working. Get any errors? e.g. i like to test with vkcube (vulkan-tools need to be installed. don’t know the package name on Nobara / Fedora). if
gamescope vkcuberuns, then its likely not a gamescope problem but one with the e.g. game you try to run or wine / proton.But the latest versions seem to be indeed a bit problematic. The last that works (mostly) flawless on my Arch is 3.14.2. So maybe worth a shot to downgrade to that if your current one fails with vkcube.
Otherwise, it is probably a good idea to get in contact with the Nobara community or the developer. I hate to recommend Discord, but as far i know that is unfortunately the only place where they are active.
And there is of course always the excellent Arch Wiki which is usuable for other distros as well: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope
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The funniest thing is, people say Linux is not ready, cause [insert feature] doesn’t work. The problem is said feature doesn’t work on Windows either.
For example pausing/resuming playback across multiple appliacations using media keys. It’s not perfect on Linux (not every app uses MPRIS), but it’s not great on Winodws either
Hell tbh I never use my pause/resume button, I just hit “p.” I <3 VLC
Yeah, but that works on VLC only and it has to be focused. With MPRIS you can eg. pause a song playing in mpd, while having VLC focused
Good thing I really only use VLC for videos, and Clementine for audio very rarely, and if I’m done with the music and switching to video I can just exit Clementine! I use the volume keys all the time though, since I sadly lack physical buttons.
It works way better on Linux. I especially like the gnome screenshot tool
Try flameshot or spectacle, way better.
Last time I tried HDR on Windows, that sucked too.
My Android TV and consoles are about the only devices where it works properly.
HDR games is fucking baller on the steam deck. I’m legitimately thinking of switching to kde from sway so I can take advantage of it on my new OLED monitor.
My TV and PS4 Pro have HDR. I’m sure it helps make brightness better, but it just makes everything look yellow.
Also, I don’t even think my TV’s HDR works with its apps. I distinctly remember House of the Dragon and trying to see something. I accidentally closed the app and reopened and suddenly it was super clear. It’s like it turned the HDR on (or off) and suddenly everything was visible in an otherwise dark scene.
Quality of HDR is very much dependent on the TV you have I think.
I’m still rocking a 2017 LG OLED which are considered pretty good, but as you go down into LCDs and the cheaper brands, you’ll probably take a hit on image quality. Some TVs used to have a yellow pixel as well as red blue and green, so could even be that.
HDR is less about the brightness (although they are brighter than older TVs) and more about colour and brightness accuracy.
Brightness is very key imo. If your display can’t easily hit 1000nits it won’t be very good.
HDR is awesome if you have the right hardware. I’ve never seen a movie look so good. Someone needs to get HDR working.
It works in KDE + Wayland… mostly… for applications that support it… and there was this update that ruined my color profile for a while but they fixed that now!
It’ll be finished on Wayland before the end of this year
first game I played in HDR was mass effect legendary. I don’t care that the game itself is close to 15 years old, the 4k remaster + HDR blew my mind and set a new standard for how good games could look.
It does work for most games. MPV player supports it as well. It’s still rough around the edges, but it’s definitely there.
You can get both on Linux. KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland supports HDR, and you can even run some Adobe apps through Wine (Photoshop on Linux, Illustrator on Linux).
Using Adobe on Linux is a sacrilege. Screw that company.
photoshop, illustrator, etc are genuinely good programs though. the ‘linux alternatives’ just arent usually as powerful or easy to use.
this is coming from a linux and foss fanatic, btw. i dont use adobe, but i probably would if i was in a creative industry
I agree that they are effective programs for getting work done. There are some drawbacks in a professional setting though, the biggest being the data scraping that has been introduced. It’s hard to explain to clients that any licensing of their images has been violated before it has even been applied. Either Adobe are going to get away with exactly the kind of IP infringements that they are so against when it comes to their own work, or they’re lining up a buggerload of legal problems for themselves further down the line.
Then there’s the price-gouging that they’ve gotten into with their online subscription model and instability on some hardware.
How to trust them?
For people starting a new business in a creative industry I don’t think Adobe is the obvious choice that it once was.
Can I run games in HDR, though?
you can on the steam deck but I’m not sure about normal desktops. proton does support it tho so probably?
I actually do use acrobat for legal document work
It good for adding signatures and making changes to pdf format schtuff
what do you use for illegal documents?
A pirated copy of acrobat
Like this?
Pirate acrobatWe got pirate acrobat at home.
Pirate acrobat at home:
Adobe Acrobat works for me using Bottles/Wine. Pirated and old version of course
If that’s your only use case you can also use Xournal++ on Linux which does the job.
Of course your choice of OS is totally up to you and you don’t have to justify it to anyone, just letting you know the tool exists.
hdr support is coming tho
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steamos already has it iirc (well, specifically gamescope)
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kde 6 has experimental hdr support with wayland session
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cosmic de devs promised hdr support in the first public stable release
what i really miss is passkeys (specifically, using tpm2 to store them like windows hello does)
SteamOS has HDR support indeed, and it works really well with pretty much all HDR-enabled Windows games in Proton I’ve tried.
Linux is getting support for Windows Hello
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint works on Linux too.
But like… Why.i was asking about the passkeys specifically tho, not the biometric auth part of it
linux only supports hardware security keys like yubikey, not on-device passkeys atmI was thinking of EntraID on Linux.
There is a Samba talk about making it work
Right? I wish that had more focus than HDR.
I think a big problem is TPM enforcing initramfs. Hoping ukis get wrapped up and as a result more focus is on trusted compute in general
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From my experience in Linux:
- Many pirated games installer doesn’t work under wine (like from xatab, RG Mechanic, Razor, etc) unless you download pre-installed games like from IGG Games or you just download pirated gog games
- Buggy glitching games work under wine (i don’t know why that happened)
- Many mod organizer & tools (MO, VORTEX, NMM, etc) doesn’t work unless you download old version or download some sketchy dll files from sketchy website to make those programs works well
- Sometimes after running games under wine my system crashes like unable to restart/shutdown or failed to open some programs like dolphin, terminal, etc (maybe bc my system running on wayland)
- No Photoshop, After Effects, or Microsoft Office (yes…i know linux has similar programs but those suck & my workplace has standard)
- Hard to fine tuning some apps unless you wanna do some dirty work in YAML or XML or CONF files
Mod organizer 2 leastest exe work with wine (I used Lutris) I have yet to find a games installers that didn’t work with wine (I download my games from fit girl repacks)
Fitgirl installers just crash on me 🤷♂️
Weird, what distro are you using?
It not working on certain distros is yet an other point of pain for Linux
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Nobara. But I’ve had them work on nobara before
Have you tried running it with Bottles?
My solution to #1 is installing it in a VM and copying the installed game over. It works, but quite annoying
The first one I’ve never encountered, but I also never heard about those (only razor). Fit girl always works (the one with Amelie). I’ve tried others and also worked.
It could be those installers have dependencies that are not in your base bottle?
Can you explain why MS office alternatives like libreoffice suck?
I think it comes down to 2 main reasons, and some members of the libreoffice suite definitely do a better job than others.
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Comparability with MS Office, it’s really difficult to use these programs when you can’t reliably collaborate with people using the de-facto standard office software. Impress is exceptionally bad at this.
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User interface clunkines, the ribbon ui Microsoft uses in modern office versions is really nice, and makes finding the actions you need really easy. This is coming from someone who used office 03 and 07, it’s not just a learning thing, it’s a better design.
These issues are definitely a bigger deal on some parts of the suite than others. I’ve found Calc to be a solid replacement for Excel, but when I’m making spreadsheets I’m not fiddling with complex formatting at all. Impress is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It has horrible comparability with PowerPoint, and I need to get things looking just right when I make a presentation. It’s difficult to find even basic formatting options. I could probably solve the usability issues by reading a few tutorials, but the comparability issues hold me back from putting the time in, since I have no idea how a presentation will look when someone loads it in PowerPoint anyway.
you mean this
look better than this??
I dont know but i like libreoffice better in terms of ui.
But now I think I understood the formatting issue in calc tho. i dont know how excel handles this
playing around with Impress i can get pretty good slides without any issues(yet). I think your problem is only with portability. I guess that will remain unsolved for a long time.
edit :
So yeah now I dont see the formatting problem, can you elaborate on that?(what other formatting issue you faced?)
Yes the PowerPoint ui is much better. It takes more space but it’s much easier to find features you might not use as frequently.
I haven’t done much switching between calc and excel. Formatting issues come up when making or editing a document in libreoffice and opening it in MS office. Especially with impress, the position and sizes of objects will be very different between the two programs. This makes opening a presentation from impress with PowerPoint on a different computer impractical.
I like Libreoffice ui better. There are different ui modes too if you want to experiment. I selected tabbed compact since I like compact UI, there are other modes which takes more space and have more features visible probably. Anyway UI might be about preferences but at least there are different UI modes. If you hate all of them, its okay.
Almost all your problems sounds like problems when mixing MS office. Do you face other problems that is not a compatibility issue with MS?
Nothing that isn’t subjective, but the comparability issues are a complete dealbreaker, because interoperability is so necessary. This is definitely something that can be fixed since Google Slides is no where near as bad about this.
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Vortex works quite well for me, the only game that is not working correctly is BG3 because of the third party tool to mod the game requires .NET 8 and even if I install it with ProtonTricks/WineTricks the tool doesn’t recognize it. With the game receiving official mod support I think the issue will be fixed.
Mate you can’t tune apps on windows at all. Most of those things actually work on Linux. You just exposing yourself
For the first one, try Lutris
You’ve just said your 5 biggest problems with Linux are things that Microsoft did.
Microsoft made mod organizers not work?
It does though
Well this is why I’m asking, it does seem to work for my 100% Linux friend.
Vortex is written in .Net, so, yeah.
The biggest problem with Linux (other than the whole “most people give up the second they see a terminal” thing) is software availability, which will hopefully improve as Linux gains market share.
2024 is indeed the year of the linux desktop
I’m still waiting for gimp to actually be a viable alternative program to photoshop before installing dual boot linux
Gimp lacks photoshop features and still isn’t catered towards creatives which is the main demographic of people using the software
I’m aware of krita but it’s suited as a drawing program and also lacks many of the photo editing features I would use in photoshop
Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.
It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.
In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.
I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.
Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).
I mean…that’s the reason Gimp exists?
That’s like saying “The biggest problem with the French Revolution is that it happened. If it hadn’t then the conditions would have been perfect for a popular uprising against the ruling class.”
I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).
You can learn any workflow. Adobe Photoshop was pretty alien to me the first time I used it in school. The thing that made it easier was how good the documentation was on adobes website. I recommend anyone try krita to see if it works better for them.
I’ve heard it’s not as feature rich as gimp but more people coming from Photoshop seem to like it.
Most open source tool have the same thing that it feels like it’s made by engineers. I think that’s because it’s true, most FOSS tools are made by engineers for engineers. Because most project start with someone needing something and then creating it and sharing it.
Chances of a programmer needing something and then making it is a lot higher, than an artist needing it and then making it as then there’d be a need to have the necessary skills to make the software. As someone not from CS field I’ve seen how much of redundant programs are present for CS related tasks while barely some exists for other fields because the overlap of programmer and that field is low specifically FOSS programmers. And a few programmers that field would have don’t have the high level software development skills, so most open source tools made by them are “works on my machine, or works for this specific task” even though with less than 1% more effort they could have made a generalized tool.
but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input.
What do you mean? Window managers’ job is to show windows where they are desired and not show windows where they are not desired. With optional bells and whistles like snapping to edges and autoresizing to screen quadrants.
So, can anyone elaborate on question instead of downvoting? Is it dragging windows that lacks creative input? Is it resizing windows that lacks creative input? Or it is showing window itself what lacks creative input?
It’s like saying clipboard always lacked creative input. There is only so much it does. Copying, pasting and optionally working with history. That’s it.
Well, I guess you might want to rotate the window by 45 degrees, then ok, this is not what most window managers just allow to do. And other major OSes doesn’t allow at all AFAIK.
I’m still waiting for DOS to reach feature parity with MacOS
Have you tried photopea? It doesn’t have everything Photoshop has but it’s been able to fit my needs
Use Krita simply
Krita > Gimp gang
Krita was mentioned
Wait why? Isn’t the whole point of dual booting that you still have your windows install, and you could use photoshop there?
I’m really glad DaVinci Resolve exists to fill the void of a proper video editor too, Kdenlive just ain’t it for me.
Unfortunately the free version on Linux doesn’t support H.264/H.265 and even the paid version doesn’t support AAC so using Resolve requires you to transcode if you’re using any normal consumer camera.
doesn’t support AAC
Use OPUS. Better and free.
I love kden, very logical ui and love that it can do anything. What is it about DaVinci that appeals?
Both work well, but DaVinci is better with color grading, audio post-production, visual effects, collaboration, and format support, just to name a few. It’s a professional product made for professionals.
Idk, I installed fedora 40 some time ago, and many things were broken out of the box. In that regard windows seems a bit more friendly to a new user
But they layer so many unwanted services and bloatware on top that it makes it hard to use. Being forced to be online to log in and forced use of OneDrive confuses new users just as much
It sounds like you’ve read about but not used windows for a while tbh. The going online thing is true, but its not exactly confusing. Not sure what you mean by onedrive, I uninstalled it years ago.
I think you haven’t installed (not used) windows in a while if you don’t understand what he means by the forced onedrive
It’s my daily on 3 of 6 machines, 2 are installs from the last year
I installed Windows on a device yesterday. I had to switch to the command prompt and type in “OOBE\BYPASSNRO” in order to just not connect it to the internet and skip the Microsoft sign in prompt. And that seems to work for the most part. Sending diagnostic data is still required and not optional but ah well.
A few days ago on another friend’s setup, he didn’t know that this option existed (who does really), so he signed up for a Microsoft account, logged in and his Documents and other folders were automatically getting synced to OneDrive. Now, for you and me, we understand that just uninstalling OneDrive should fix that or even just disable that feature itself. But this is opt-out and not opt-in. And he doesn’t really understand it’s getting synced, he simply sees that there’s oddly increased data usage. This is the kind of person who will have recall enabled without ever realising it exists or even using it, but will still have it as a potential security issue waiting to happen on his setup.
It’s all the opt-ins that Microsoft does. Everything defaults to “yes, do that worst thing possible”. And you and me will probably switch it off, but we’re not the average person. The average person doesn’t understand or care.
Being forced to be online to log in and forced use of OneDrive confuses new users just as much
You’re not forced to use either of those, IIRC. Just set it up without connecting to the internet or without signing in.
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No, there are no facilities for installing W11 offline or without a MS account anymore. MS removed those.
Can still use the “Shift + F10 and type OOBE/BYPASSNRO” option. A non-online method is still necessary for corporate environments that use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) or other tools to image computers in bulk. See more details here: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/door-slammed-on-last-remaining-easy-windows-11-local-account-setup-workaround
But god forbid someone ever has to open a Linux terminal.
Not any more
I don’t think you RC
The last time I had to setup a Windows profile (late last year on my then-new laptop), that was the case. Has that changed?
Why would you skip online login? It protects your laptop from being stolen, it syncs settings between devices, etc. Do you skip online logins for Android and iOS phones too? Of course you don’t!
yes, I do
“Online login protects your laptop from being stolen” is the most unhinged broken logic I’ve read in a while ngl
Are you trolling? Or completely ignorant?
Linux Mint and Zorin OS work out of the box for most users. Usually the most complicated part is just the installation process (which can be an absolute pain if the starting system has Intel RST, Secure Boot and Fast Boot all enabled). Of course, more advanced users always can run the risk of breaking something (I accidentally broke my system irreparably at one point when I did a dumb and formatted my Swap for some reason and had to reinstall) but that’s also true of Windows.
Okay, zorin os , not complicated part is not true. On any Linux 1., try to find where is program main executable is 2. Put that at startup, so thatbsoftwre starts at login 3. Connect HDD and ensure that it’s available in ALL programs , without touching terminal. These things are trivial in windows. Linux or the v n zonrin works out of box if you just want to surf Internet.
Most desktops have a graphical startup editor
Isn’t surfing the web the main use case for a large portion of the PC/Laptop user base? Pretty sure for wide swaths of people, “executable”, “startup program” and “HDD” have no meaning. Not saying that’s “right” or “wrong”, just that that’s my observation. You could make the argument that they might as well switch to Chromebook, and in fact, many do.
For intermediate users, there’s a graphical startup program menu for selecting startup apps, at least in Mint Cinnamon. Usually programs for me won’t be able to access my HDD only if I did an even more advanced thing and made a docker instance without permissions - other than that, I’ve been able to connect programs like Steam (Flatpack) to my external HDD without issue. But maybe that’s just Mint, idk.
My personal grievances are using a laptop with ubuntu. No wireless casting of display to tv, no good smart phone as a mouse/keyboard control, the screen is sometimes sideways for no reason.
But Linux and stuff is interesting still. I’m just not ready for it as a daily driver.
