That's LTT in the bottom

Reserved bandwidth??

Some sort of hidden, concealed, clandestine internal QoS implementation in Windows. Reserving a portion of network bandwidth for high priority traffic sounds like a good concept, but I don't like the fact that this is so hidden (I've been working with computers for many years and I've never heard of it until now), and that the mechanism to determine the priority of a packet is unknown.
- We know windows spyware traffic have the top priority.
https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-limit-reservable-bandwidth/

It's not as scary as it sounds.
- It's not, and in a vacuum I don't think anyone would mind. It is the fact that it is concealed that is really shitty.
  
  "It reserves bandwidth for high-priority tasks such as Windows Update over other tasks that compete for internet bandwidth, like streaming a movie"
  
  As much as I'd like to keep my system up to date (and I really do), if I'm watching a movie then that is my priority. Any task I'm currently using the bandwidth on, should be considered my system's priority. This is akin to rebooting the computer when it determines it is necessary, with the user having little control to stop it; it's intend isn't malicious, and it is meant to protect the user, but all it achieves is upsetting the user and make us find ways around it or turn it off completely.
It's used for updates. I'm not sure if it works all the time.

I think that it used to be called superfetch in the old days. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/superfetch-service-disable-helps-to-increase-speed/3c4d5b4b-edef-4eb7-9456-52fd304e606c

If you're using an "unofficial" license, it's probably normal to disable updates and afferent services.

I remember from years ago when I was modding Windows XP installations with nLite to try to purge all the unnecessary bits and install some useful stuff. Superfetch was this annoying service that supposedly ruined online gaming due to lag. :)
- Prefetch and superfecth are just obnoxious services that waste disk space. You can safely disable them, there is no downside to not using prefetch or superfect on modern SSDs. On regular spinning drives, yes, they did make loading programs a bit faster.
- Superfetch was keeping an index of file relationships in RAM and pre-loading files you were probably going to use next. It didn't ping your network at all, but it could easily eat up a ton of disk resources and RAM. It was really only an issue on old 5400rpm laptop HDDs from what I remember.
  
  Might be thinking of windows search indexing.

I mean that only matters for people like us.

99.99% of the Windows user base doesn't give the tiniest semblance of a shit about any of that. Hell I run Windows on my gaming pc still and have never had cause to do any of that.

what if you wanted to show a presentation

but windows said
- I'm going to be honest with you, as often as this has been memed and for as long as I have been using Windows on my work computer, I have never once been forced to restart on the spot by an automatic update.
  
  I'm sure those who have will be quick to reply but at this point I'm 90% confident it's a loud minority.
- That is on you for using a Home license and not a pro license.

what if you	wanted to show a presentation
but windows said

20 years ago, a friend said "Windows does whatever you don't tell it not to do". It is as true now as it was then.

90% of configuring Windows is disabling shit.

To the reader that needs it and is too afraid to ask: https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
- Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope CurrentUser -Force; ls -Recurse .ps1 | Unblock-File; ."WinDebloatTools.ps1"
  
  Ugh, you need to use the terminal for the simplest tasks in Windows, it's so hard, nobody will ever use it, cope Windows users!
  
  That's what most people in this thread sound like. But for Linux.

I am currently dual booting and trying to get feature parity in my Linux install as a reletave newbie.

So far the largest hurdle I've been able to solve was getting my RAID array recognized. That sent me down a rabbit hole.

To get it working in Linux I needed to:

switch from LMDE to Mint proper
add a PPA repository
install the RAID driver
manually edit my grub config file to ignore AHCI
run a command to apply the change
reboot
format the volume

To get it working in Windows I needed to:

format the volume(Windows gave me a popup with a single button to do this on login)

You'd normally use a software raid implementation these days, and Linux has a number of those. But yeah, dual booting can expose some quirks and filesystems and disk setup in general is one of the most prominent.
- This. How an advanced use case is accomplished is not a point against a system's usability.
- 20 years ago it was PCMCIA wifi drivers.
  
  Now it seems like it’s always some kind of disk boot filesystem issue.
Are you using hardware RAID? yeah, that doesn't go too well with Linux... works perfectly in Windows though, cuz their softraid solutions are shit.
- Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn't. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.
  
  Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux, but it's also hot garbage that's software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.
Why have I never thought about this? Dual boot and bit by bit work on feature parity while still having an OS that's my daily driver.
- Beware of the W̷̞̬̍̌͘͜ĭ̴̬̹̟͕̒̆̈́n̸̢̧̙̈́̅̂̆̕͜ͅd̵̟̟̪͎̀̀ő̴̼̺̺́̐̂͘w̵̨͊̀s̵̡͎̭̊ ̸͔̬͔̜̊́̈́̌̈́ͅŬ̴͉͚̳̌̉͘͝p̸̼̅̆͐̃̑d̸̜͂ǎ̵̛̯̏͝ť̷̰é̸͇͝ as it can screw up/overwrite your other bootloader completely.
  
  Kinda sucks, when you've got a meeting/work and you find out that forced update made your system unbootable/partially unbootable and you now get to live boot in and go fixing the EFI partition manually, in the CLI.
  
  That happened to me once and that's when I decided feature parity was less important than a reliable system that "just works" for getting things done on a schedule. (I removed windows completely, in case that wasn't clear)
  
  Anyhow, make sure you install windows to a separate drive that can't see any others during the windows install, then will keep the bootloader separate.
Proprietary RAID in linux is a shit show. That's why everyone uses software RAID.
After a while, you'll hit a point where parity is impossible going the other way.

I'm running a striped partition and a mirrored partition with only two drives, and using an SSD to bcache the whole thing. I've even got snapshotting set up so I can take live backups.

I have no idea where to start with that setup on Windows.
I had a hell of a time just trying to get Mint to write to an external drive, including unmounting and remounting the drive countless times trying to get it to mount as rewritable (adding it as a mount option wouldn't work in terminal or in "Disks"), it would just refuse to let me write to it, I could still read everything fine. I finally quit, got a second drive, backed all my stuff up and reformatted the first one, which Mint now sees and writes to just fine despite being configured exactly the same way it was before.

That is a massively condensed story, and if I ever have to look at fstab again I might just have an aneurysm. Y'know how hard it is to write things to an external drive in Windows? You plug it the fuck in.

Anyone who says Linux is ready for the masses is deluding themselves. It's fine for nerds, people who like to work on their computer, but it is absolutely not ready for people who like to do work on their computer. Not when something as simple as "yes I'd like to save this to an external drive please" turns into a days-long rabbithole of bullshit that culminates in me buying an extra 8TB drive off Amazon.
I've been using Linux for too long because that list of steps sounded completely reasonable to me.

I mean, you don't HAVE to do any of that stuff in Windows, it's just helps a bit.

I'm sure there are plenty of windows horror stories. But almost every Windows computer I've had in the last decade, both custom and OEM, has worked pretty well out of the box. And almost every Ubuntu computer I've had over the last decade has had problems that weren't trivial to fix.

I like Linux, but when people compare these problems like they're the same just are missing the point.

Yep exactly this. The user friendliness and likeliness it just works is much higher for Windows.

If it doesn't work for Linux I've found it also will generally take much longer to figure out and fix.
- Sure because Error Code 0x8007057 tells you immediately how to solve the problem.
  
  Linux error messages like error: kex_exchange_identification: client sent invalid protocol identifier "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" are completely arcane tough.
  
  I support both systems. And Linux support is so much easier. Mostly in runs out of the box. If it runs I continues to do so and If you have an error you get a specific message like above.
  
  With such a message you either:
  
  See right away how to solve the problem
  
  Search it online and get a specific solution for exactly you problem
  
  Or you can ask Experts for a solution for your specific problem.
  
  With Windows: No systems runs out of the box, I always have to install additional software (7zip, sane browser, ...) and also for anybody remotely privacy concerned have to adjust many settings (for which tools exist thankfully)
  
  If an error occurs under Windows and I get a code like above:
  
  I can sometimes guess by my experience what the reason is and solve it.
  
  If not I search the error code and circumstances which lead to it online, then apply the 20 solutions presented one by one in hope one works
  
  Ask experts which ask me to run a bunch of diagnostic utilities because the error message does not tell you anything. (Yes by now I can also guess which utility could provide relevant information, but not because Windows told me)
  
  In a noticeable amount of cases the solution is: We can not determine the reason for the error, please reset everything (First a restart, then run this cleanup tool and if this doesn't help just reinstall!)
The true test is, would you install it for your mom. Have fun figuring out her public library and ereader shit on Linux.
- I've installed it for my mom. She mostly just checks mail, writes some documents and browses the web. She said she didn't notice a difference, everything worked as it should.
Sure, but then I upgraded my working out of the box Windows 8 machine to Windows 10 and it became unusable because it has a hard drive, not an SSD. Select between running an unsupported system and being able to use your computer without it stuttering every 2 seconds...
- I do admit I don't really trust the windows upgrade process. Not for any specific reason, just vibes.
  
  I haven't used an HDD in a long time, so idk the current state of affairs, but when win10 first came out, HDDs were fine. That's a bummer though, and win10 is more expensive both in the cost of the OS itself and in the hardware you need to buy for it. You can run Linux on a potato. But that's not really the kind of issue that this post is talking about, afaict.
exactly

The reality is, for 98% plus of windows users, NONE of that matters. MS could give a shit about tech. nerds that want to de-bloat, reduce resources, install crazy niche thingyawidget....

Pretty much everyone in this community is not their target.

Car analogy! You are car guys running custom block modified street racers shitting on electric cars...

Good old transportation analogies, we can make up anything with them.

Fedora/Mint is a free (electric) bike. Arch is free system to order bike parts and instruction how to assembly whole one yourself for free. Gentoo is an automatic parts molding machine. Linux From Scratch is a book about bikes. Windows is a Segway.

"Bikes are only free if you don't value you time" "Segway 10 is much easier to use, buttons are more intuitive than manual steering and if you know this Konami code you can ride without an account too!"
Considering many electric cars also spy on their users and have anti-features, it's probably a good analogy :)
I think a Corolla is a more appropriate analogy. You should see some of the Tesla swapped modded cars

Reminder that Group Policy settings are disabled in home versions, and even some of the registry entries for updates are missing. To get a full package of windows with all the options you have to pay like $400 to $600 for their LTSC or maybe some of their Enterprise versions. Honestly, if anybody pirates Windows, then definitely pirate the LTSC.

I don't think many dual booters actually pay for Windows licenses.
- Yarrrrr that be true
- I don’t think many dual booters actually pay for Windows licenses.
  
  You probably got a license when you bought that laptop you got in 2010. And carried it forward. Just because Microsoft didn't charge for the upgrade path to get to windows 11 doesn't mean you didn't pay something for the license.
Isn't gpedit not even in pro anymore?
- It definitely is in pro.
Windows 11 Pro is 199$
Huh? You only need the Pro version for Group Policy and all the registry settings, and you can get licenses for ~$20 if you buy an OEM license through an authorized reseller.

There's some limitations to the OEM licenses, but I've never run into them.

As far as I'm aware, LTSC just effects the update channel that Windows Update pulls from, with LTSC getting non-critical updates later and for longer after support "ends". Usually you can switch that in the registry.
- Huh? Huuuuuhhhh?
  
  I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of every windows version, but OEM versions are made to order by manufacturers and that comes with it's own special place in hell that I'm not even going to go into. LTSC has everything with no downsides, Home has Group Policy disabled, that was my comment. Despite your standoffish comment you didn't argue against any of that.
Or just get it for like $4 from a reseller

https://www.allkeyshop.com/blog/buy-windows-11-enterprise-cd-key-compare-prices/
- It's not a legal license anyway.

"Windows Reserved Bandwidth" is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time. You can turn it off I guess, if quality of service isn't your vibe.

It's always funny seeing users doing their cargo cult dances when troubleshooting stuff

Shocked Pikachu face when other stuff starts breaking because you 'optimised' 500 settings
Windows Reserved Bandwidth” is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time.

Do we know for a fact that the Windows marketing telemetry does not use any of this reserved bandwidth? Or are we just taking the vendor's word for that?

I asked because 'reserving' is different than 'prioritizing'. Generally speaking, a QoS prioritizes, where what's being described by the title is reserving.
- Microsoft: [implements a common OS feature]
  
  You: But can you prove it's not malware?
  
  That's just tinfoil hat paranoia.
because it's* assumed

Windows: Cannot print because error.

User: What error?

Windows: What error?

You know that guy from Zelda II? He's stopping you from printing.
- Did you get all that?
  
  No
  
  Yes
  
  Can't wait for this service patch for windows users.
Seriously, what's up with Windows software always never showing an error logs?
- Depending on what you need logging for, you may need to enable it in Event Viewer or manager. It's really stupid sometimes.

Learning Linux is learning how to use a computer.
Learning Windows is learning how to avoid big companies will when you want to use your computer.

Learning Linux is learning how to use your computer

Learning Windows is learning how to use their computer
Lol

Windows and Linux are both easy to use... Provided that everything works out of the box.

Once you have to actually start solving problems, Windows really starts to fall down because you have to spend ages looking through settings and perhaps installing tools like bcd editors. Like seriously, the number of places you can manage your microphone settings are insane.

At this point, I think the only people that say Windows is easier are those that have never had to reinstall it or who have been using it since the XP days and haven't realised that it is all learned knowledge.

I certainly think Linux tooling could be improved (a graphical fstab editor would be nice), but I struggle to see how troubleshooting in Windows is any easier than Linux.

Linux applications often give you some descriptive error that you can paste into an internet search and usually find someone who had the same problem.

Windows applications just stop working and say "UNEXPECTED ERROR" or smth. Like thanks you literally didn't help at all.
- That's potentially my biggest issue woth Windows. You aren't actually made to understand what went wrong. Linux will give you lots of information. It can be overwhelming if you're just used to seeing "This app stopped working, wait or close it?", but once you're used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
- My cousin had an old Dell that had an HDD with that "optane" crap, you know a 16GB NVMe "cache" that allegedly did anything. I was going to pull that out, put in a proper NVMe drive, leave the old hard drive in there as additional space, and install Windows 10.
  
  There are apparently BIOS settings that need to be altered for this to work, and Windows would throw "UNEXPECTED ERROR 0x1C4B332AFE943CE2C4 or something to that effect and wouldn't finish installing. Mind you, you don't get a usable Windows environment, so you have to copy that long string of text by hand into another device to find...nothing. Nearly no results out there.
  
  After awhile of trying to get a functioning Windows install media (which is difficult to do from a Linux machine. Way to go burning that bridge, Microsoft) I eventually decided to put Mint on this thing, which also gave an error. This error read something like "Unable to install, probably because there's a problem with the NVMe storage settings, you may need to disable TLVRQ (or whatever the generic term for Optane was) and try again. See this page in the Wiki for more information." And it gave a link to that page, because of course we're booted into a fully functioning live environment with internet access and a web browser, and it also gave a QR code link to that same wiki page so you could view it on mobile.
  
  Microsoft isn't even trying anymore.
- Unexpected error, let's hope that the application writes into eventmgr or has some other logging system.
Windows 7 was usable. The ten different places to hide settings started with 8 iirc. But I haven't used Windows in almost a decade, so I might be wrong.
- No, you're on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn't super pretty if we're all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE's settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
  
  The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn't seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it's still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
- They were transitioning to the new Metro look, that's why the 10 different places for the same setting.
  
  And seeing how slowly Control Panel is being transitioned to the new Metro Settings app, I'd have to guess that that thing is so deeply intertwined in the OS and so many things rely on it, that moving to something new is painfully slow.
Agreed. Linux troubleshooting is easier for sure, assuming you know your way around a terminal. Many beginners tremble in fear when they see it. In windows nearly everything is labeled and clickable... removing the need to memorize commands.
- And that is why I use fish. Well, one of the many reasons, lol 😂.

Me: Can you please just not change the UI?
Microsoft: now you need to expand the right click menu to access your most used actions.
Me: what?
Microsoft: and we replaced all the cpl and msc files, so now you can't use the old settings interfaces.
Me: wait!
Microsoft: and ALL the new settings uses edge webviewer, so if you manage to remove edge you've fucked your install up
Me: sounds terrible, surely I can just reinstall edge
Microsoft: you can try but all links to edge on our website are just links that launches edge, because you can't remove it - so why provide an installer?
Me: do you expect me to die?
Microsoft: no Mr User, we expect you to cry! Muwhahahaha

Microsoft in 1995: Let's put the start button at the lower left. So people can always find it.

Microsoft in 2012: Start button is gone, but you can still click the lower left, like you have been for 17 years.

Microsoft in 2013: Fine have your button back since everyone is so used to clicking on it.

Microsoft in 2021: Let's make the start button move around every time you open and close anything.
- Meanwhile on KDE
  
  Me: I wanna edit my taskbar and desktop
  
  KDE: ok bro just right click and enter edit mode
- I'm not sure what you mean, the start button on the taskbar? I'm pretty sure it's always been in exactly the same place and all that has changed is whether it literally says start or not, and what glyph it uses to represent it?

Meme's not wrong and I daily Linux, but how we got here is all that crap on the bottom has a pretty low chance of leaving you bricked and getting back from bricking windows is usually marginally trivial. The same people get lost in Linux, don't read warnings, do stupid shit without thinking then spend forever trying to muddle through how to fix it. Mr. LTT did it himself.

If Linus is good for anything, it's being a perfect example of the average moron who thinks they know everything so they actively refuse new information.
- verage moron who thinks they know everything so they
  
  I had such high hopes when he and Luke started that challenge. If they would have made it, we'd probably have twice the uptake we have now. But because he has to drop out to cli and do stupid crap. He could have run Ubuntu with Unfree and used straight GUI installs and have been in steam in 15 minutes.
Honestly I've had way more completely bricked Windows installs than Linux. Don't think I've ever managed to completely Bork a Linux install except when doing something extremely stupid. I've had Windows get to the point where no amount of SFC of dsim could get to go boot again just by having the power go out during an update or other fairly mundane issues.
- Like accidentally mounting your root subvolume in your home directory while it's still mounted as root. I mounted root to a directory called games in my home folder. I noticed some crap in it after accidently copying the contents of the wrong directory into it and without a second though rm -rf games/* Before I knew it, I saw my desktop unload before my eyes until I was left with nothing but a solid white _ in the top corner.
  
  My home folder was on a slow hard drive and I was trying to make a subvolume on the small but fast SSD. I ended up just making a symbolic link to a folder on root after reinstalling.
- ore completely bricked Windows installs than Linux. Don’t think I’ve ever managed to completely Bork a Linux install ex Everybody has different experiences.
  
  I completely shattered my NixOS install by trying to activate Nvidia Prime on my laptop. Of course it was NixOS, so i could roll back from the boot loader. There was the time I used vim to edit /etc/sudoers on a remote VM. that was a joy.
  
  If you screw up most of your core windows install DISM online cleanup will put most of it back.
  
  Windows has more guard rails than say Debian or Ubuntu. But to each their own.

Windows is easy to use if you don't care about privacy.

Can’t even move the taskbar to the top of the screen
- The worst part is their excuse for not doing it. They're under the impression that not enough people care about it, so it's not worth implementing, and in explaining that they make it sound like it's some great effort to make taskbar-related context menus pop up from the top instead of the bottom. Literally just having the volume or whatever menu pop up in relation to the top instead of the bottom. It's the craziest fucking thing I've ever seen, especially since like five different free apps and a couple paid ones already have done it. A few hours worth of coding and testing is apparently too expensive time and money-wise for literally Microsoft to bother spending.
  
  Tali Roth then explains that "when it comes to actually being able to move the taskbar to different locations on the screen, there are a number of challenges with that. When you think about having the taskbar on the right, or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work all of the apps have to do to have a wonderful experience is just huge."
  https://www.howtogeek.com/114501/microsoft-explains-why-you-cant-move-the-windows-11-taskbar/
  
  A wonderful experience they say. Jesus fucking christ. I haven't had a "wonderful experience" since Windows 98 and that was largely because I was 12 and didn't know any better.
- I liked it on the side in Windows 10. With widescreen monitors, horizontal space is cheaper than vertical space. Doubly so when you go ultrawide.
- You can with Windows 10.
It also needs to be said how god awful the ui is. It's not necessarily the worst layout in the world but it's also clunky and slow as balls. It's almost as if it's designed to slow the user down so people are focused on how slow it is instead of its other problems or soemthing. The ui buttons in a fucking 3d game on the same pc respond quicker than windows 11 ui does.

KDE on the other hand is so goddamn fast that stuff loads faster than I can click. I literally don't have time to use Windows.
For me, it is just too ugly
- The windows ui is very ugly. Uglier than the windows 9x one even. Their ui design peaked with Vista and 7.

To be real with you, I find windows more complicated, the syntax..

Ah, a man of culture I see 😌.

As a linux user and developer and someone who works with linux servers all day for 20 years.

Yes linux is complicated.

Linux is just as complicated as windows. Windows just has layers of abstraction that give the illusion of simplicity. The problem is the process of abstraction adds complexity and removes control.

If you need the change any of the lower levels you half to think about how it effects the abstractions and the software built on top of that.
- The fact that you can connect literally any device in the world to a windows machine and it just automagically works in a few seconds is something people don’t appreciate enough. Im sure microsoft put a lot of effort into that, and constantly is.
  
  Let me plug this web cam to my linux daily driver. Oh wait, I need to check exactly what chip its running and if that specific version is supported on my specific distro and specific version. And then I find out yes it is supported but its still missing auto exposure compensation for some reason. And of course I have to install it first and all its dependencies from that specific repo im using.
  
  Easy.
Linux hasn't been a daily driver for me in a long time, but there have definitely been times where, after researching a question about how to do a thing in Linux, I ended up saying "you know what I'm just not gonna do that thing."
Try to work with Windows servers 😰. I still have nightmares.
- I've found them pretty easy tbh. I've admined everything between 2003-2019 professionally and I have a handful of 2022 machines in my home lab. Stick with R2 releases and it's p stable. Usually when something goes wrong it just needs a good kick, not major surgery.

I know instantly how to get the packages I need in Linux but I had to do some research to enable the webcam in Windows 10.

The idea that one OS is easier than the other is misattributed familiarity.

I discovered yesterday that Windows has a command line package manager in Powershell that can install, uninstall and update basically every software you might ever want to install on a Windows PC.
winget search ""
winget list
winget upgrade
- They pulled a corporate and rewrote an opensource project to embed it into windows
  
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- They copied the open source project AppGet and screwed the developer. It's an interesting read.
To enable the webcam on windows you just...open teams and start a call or use one of the apps that use the camera...
- Unless the vendor decided to lock it down until you manually unlock it with the administrator account. Then even Teams can't see it.
- It is almost like those Linux users are not really as technologically capable as they claim to be.
  
  Or they are just lying and haven't used Windows in over a decade.
The idea that one OS is easier than the other is misattributed familiarity.

Exactly. OP's meme makes no sense to me. My experience has been that using Linux is a never ending series of file not found and access denied errors.
- And you never dug any further to see WHY you're being denied access or WHY that file is not found.
  
  Simple example, some distros will block regular user access to /root. That doesn't mean that you can't access those files, it just means that YOUR user can't see them WHILE you're logged in with that user... which is why bash file/dir completion will not work if you cd to /root/path/to/dir. Log in as root in the terminal and it works just fine. Some even might out right not see the files if you're logged in as a user, instead of root, regardless if that user in the sudoers file or not (you type in the exact path to a dir/file in the terminal and it won't open/cd to it). In those cases, even sudo won't work for some things, you just HAVE TO work with root.
  
  To be honest, this is very rare and has happened to me like once or twice (on some distros). In most situations/distros, sudo will work just fine.
How do you know if you don't already know the package name?

I have to always Google for the package name, which similarly is what I do to find a Windows installer but instead of the name it's download link.
- apt search KEYWORD
  
  Or
  
  dnf search KEYWORD
  
  Or
  
  pacman -Ss KEYWORD

Unpopular opinion: The Windows Registry, a centralized, strongly typed key:value database for application settings, is actually superior to hundreds of individual dotfiles, each one written in its own janky customized DSL, with its own idea of where it should live in the file system, etc.

Which is why I prefer NixOS (I use NixOS btw)
btw i use Nixos
- The language itself has no type enforcement, the type checking is implemented within nixpkgs. This might seem like pedantry, but it really matters for things like LSPs (text editor autocomplete). I think that's what scares some people off: it's like OG Minecraft, you need to have the wiki/search.nixos.org open while you are doing your editing.
  
  That being said, the type checking goes much deeper than what the windows registry does - e.g. it won't allow you to enable conflicting services - like grub and systemd-boot - at the same time.
- claps
I agreee with you on the side of the concept, but the way it is organised and the potential values seem to make no intuitive sense (if they make any)
In gnome there's dconf
That is true.

But, due to the nature of how it works, it can be also used to hide data that the user "should not be aware of".
- So can a dotfile, or any other kind of storage. There's really nothing inherently bad about the registry. Its reputation as a place to hide things in is equal parts selection bias, users' lack of technical understanding, and the marketing of "registry cleaner" apps.

OP never watched the LTT Linux video

Edit: for people that also haven't watched it: Linus tried to use Pop-OS for gaming. When he tried to install Steam it uninstalled his desktop-environment leaving him with only a terminal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M

it did warn him to be fair. he had to type out "yes, do as i say", which is a HUGE red flag. even to me, a farely casual windows user.
- Just watched that portion. When he scrolls down to "yes do as I say" you can literally see two lines above it stating it will remove desktop environment.
  
  Outputs exist for a reason, folks.
- To play devils advocate, I'd say that the bigger issue is that Linus ended up in the terminal to start with, when he had no idea what he was doing in there.
  
  If Linux is to hit the masses, then a beginner friendly distro should have the convention to install apps be by GUI instead of TUI, and guides should be updated to reflect this. That GUI-based installer should see that the "Yes, do as I say" prompt was triggered and in a clear and concise way, inform the user that important packages will be removed if they continue and they should not.
  
  Effectively just having a much better interface for the user is what I'm saying.
- It was hidden in a massive wall of text. Ain't nobody got time for that
  
  Man was installing Steam why does it even want to remove his desktop environment to begin with.
- Counterpoint: Installing widely used software and following common instructions to do so should not ever put you one confirmation away from destroying your desktop environment, no matter how explicit that confirmation is.
- They should have made the confirmation be "unless I know what I am doing, this will break my system"
  
  And Linus should have read more than one sentence of the scary warning.
Yeah lil bro is shadowboxing against a fictional, perceived "LTT".
I did a similar thing on linux mint while trying to get my audio system working how I wanted. Luckily it comes with terminal-accessible rollback by default via timeshift and I was able to revert the mistake.

Linux's modularity and customizability vectors for complications which Windows lacks, which is both an advantage and an issue. I prefer having it over not, though.
Linus is dunning-kruger crystallized and refined. He routinely talks authoritatively about subjects he knows little about. His qubit analogy is particularly wrong and annoying, and he doesn't stop bringing it up.

Either way, more idiot filters have been installed in front of that and you'll have to do way more work (likely learning something in the process) to fuck your system up like that.
- Least condescending Linux user
The problem was using some esoteric loonix distro that's not Ubuntu or mint. Smh
- Pop-OS is esoteric now?
- I suspect the actual problem was that Steam's Linux implementation is, uh... A little rough around the edges.
  
  As in, there was at one point an error where the launcher could delete your entire hard drive.
- The fact there are so many distros and only a handful are "the good ones" (which changes with every user you ask) is one of the major reasons Linux is is not user friendly at all.
- It's a problem with APT not updating it's packages/programs/version list before installing a software.
  
  He should do "sudo apt update", before "sudo apt install steam", but of course it's apt problem for not doing it automatically. Someone who uses Linux for longer would install it from Flatpak app store or something, but it's clearly not simple "wrong distro, bro".

This is the exact reason I'm finally done with Windows. Customization and troubleshooting have become a nightmare since they started gi try and become more like Apple

Microsoft has always copied a lot from Apple, it's been a running joke since the early 1990s.

What I really hate is that pretty much every tech company sees Apple as "the cool kid" and desperately tries to emulate it, failing to understand what makes Apple Apple (snob attitude towards everyone, overpriced shit, tyrannical grip on its ecosystem, marketing everything as luxury) and how it achieved success (by stealing and copying ideas from others, focusing on UX (mostly, but not always))
- "Yeah fuck xerox." (Apple probably)

I recently discovered, after a while of wondering why the audio quality in windows was worse than fedora that the automatic windows audio enhancements actually made the audio significantly worse 😅 meanwhile I still haven't figured out how to stop windows from randomly switching the audio source from my headphones to my nonexistent display monitor audio.

Don't forget that windows updates can completely screw up all of your audio settings, specifically the microphone.
Open device manager, goto audio devices,then disable the audio driver for your monitor. Simple
- Simple
  
  it would be "simple", if start->settings wouldn't point me in an completely wrong direction. As it is, you need to know the secret phrase "device manager" (or "control panel" or "management console") to find the hidden settings-dialogs that will actually solve the problem.
- Thanks!
Right-click on the Sound icon, then Sound Settings.

You get to: System > Sound

You can do stuff directly in the first panel, but scroll down:

System > Sound > All Sound Devices

Find your Display there, it could look like:

Click on it.

The first option in the detail view is to toggle it as a sound "output" device:

The options are "Allow" or "Don't allow". Once it's blocked, it's no longer in the list of options for switching easily between sound output devices (automatically or manually).
You should be able to disable your monitor's non-existant audio device in one of the settings menus. On Windows 10 it's in the old style control panel's audio device settings.

Linux: You can mostly stick to the GUI to install software, touch the terminal for obscure/command line applications and install GPU drivers and you have a functioning system

Windows: Forced to go into regedit and services.msc to fix high resource usage on a fresh install, debloat scripts to remove bloat on Windows and need to update system, scower the internet for drivers and all the software you need

I can see why I got fed up very fast trying to use Windows 11 in QEMU tbh...never trying that shitshow again...

Edit the only packages I had to install through Bash are: Neofetch, Htop, OpenSeeFace, Brave Browser, Wine, Nvidia drivers and ProtonVPN. Linux is very user friendly imo

7 packages from the command line isn't that many, but you're failing to account for the fact that to most Windows users, the amount they'll realistically install is 0, both because they don't know how to use the command line and because they don't know what to install. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/
And keeping your software up to date is a giant pain.
- Use Winget or Chocolatey. If you use an app that's not packaged yet, it's easy to package it yourself.
Scour

A big hurdle in any technological change is the "power users". People that have learned a lot about the old tech and have to face that knowledge becoming obsolete. And then having to learn a bunch of new things.

The same goes for Windows power users as people who know a lot about fossil fuel powered cars.

I was a Windows power user, but in Windows 10 I can't do anything. People be like "yeah just use group policy..." but I have home edition which worked perfectly in Windows 7/8. I could disable the anti-virus, I could disable the firewall, etc.

Now I borked my Windows 10 because I downloaded some debloat scripts and now it won't update because update service requires the firewall service which I disabled. Fuck it, not booting into it anymore, Linux 5ever.
- What did you use in place of the built in firewall?
I use both linux and windows. I am power user. Linux cannot do all the things i need it to, neither can windows, but at least we have WSL and VMs. Try setting up a passthrough GPU just to play a game on linux. Then try setting up an AI application using docker for windows.

I get it, we all wanna root for the underdog, and linux certainly has it's place, but i am so done seeing this "windows bad linux good" bs
- Ngl, you're kind of proving their point.
  
  Setting up a pass through GPU for Linux gaming is obsolete knowledge. Between Proton, Lutris, and Heroic Launcher I can play my entire game library directly in Linux. I haven't booted Windows in months.

The longer i spend on lemmy the more curious i become about running linux.

Dive in!
- I don't like the idea of such charts, they take stereotypes about distros and squash together. Distro is just a package manager, software repository, preinstalled software and community doing additional patches. Better idea is just case by case basic.
- I'm a cool grandpa with old hardware.
- Where can I read about dual booting with EFI? My motherboard is ancient and my next build will be EFI. With BIOS you install Windows then Linux because Windows will fuck the MBR. What's the process for EFI?
Mint it
And please ask us questions! We are always here to help!
Just try it. Resize your Windows partition with the live USB you are going to use to install Linux and install it to there. Make it your default in your boot manager for a while and see how it goes. You can always have Windows as backup. If you decide to try it, don't forget that you are going to learn a new OS, not something tries to replace Windows as it is. Just an alternative tool.
- Just make sure your windows drive is not bitlocker encrypted, in which case, you want to resize it using windows.
Are you old enough to remember how Windows was? In the good old days of 95, 98, or XP?

Linux is kinda like that. Except way more capable.
If you actually will be going to, i could personally recommend EndeavourOS. Don't fall for "Ubuntu is best for noobs", it isn't, and in my experience it lacks stability.

Also, if you're not quite a mouse person, you could try tiling wms on your journey, like i3 or awesomewm. For me i3 is one of the major reasons to never return back. The ability to actually be able to do all you need with just a keyboard is huge for me, and something I was looking for even before switching to linux. Now floating wms and especially Windows itself seem so unhandy and irritating
- Maybe Linux mint, I love archlinux as much as the next guy but jumping head first into a glass of water takes practice. Unless you revel in the challenge of jumping in the deep end just so you can learn how to swim like I do!
  
  I'm just glad I chose arch instead of Gentoo. I got plenty of will power to learn something new but waiting hours or even days for a bunch of software to compile was too much for me.
It’s always a pain in the ass for me but I enjoy it. Prefer the ease of use with windows and macOS for my daily driving though. I only use Linux for my home assistant and Plex servers
For me it is the other way around.

I love open source stuff, but the rabid fanbase full of elite snobs worshipping a piece of software while claiming any other popular OS is the devil makes me want to stay far away from it.

It has become a cult at this point. And one of the major reason for the low adoption rate of their favourite OS.

You right click the candy crush icon and press remove.

Whotf does the other two things?

Linux soy boys pushin lies
- I don't know about the windows stuff, haven't used it in years. But back in the day installing Ubuntu was super easy (just boot from USB stick and install and mostly everything works). But a fresh windows install was a real pain like downloading drivers for all your hardware etc.
  
  Nowadays it's pretty easy in both cases I guess.

It's not exactly a fair comparison, the tweaks in the bottom panel aren't necessary for most users to do, yet a new user to Linux will need to get over a learning curve to do fairly basic tasks.

My litmus test for when Linux will be "ready" is can you do everything you need to do without using the terminal. So far I've yet to see a distribution that has achieved this.

The closest thing I've seen is SteamOS.

I set up Linux Mint for my parents a few months ago. Never touched the terminal, everything was done in Mint's UI; the initial installation, Timeshift setup, theme customizing, app installations for Spotify, OnlyOffice, VLC, and Chrome, automatic updates, printer and scanner setup.

Butter smooth so far.
- Yeah I honestly rarely use the terminal on my mint install. And that's even as a developer.
  
  To be fair I initially had to do some odd tweaks at first, namely getting my keyboard function key working how I wanted. But even that was just editing some config files, and a non-power user probably wouldn't have the kind of mechanical keyboard I have anyway.
What about Mint or PopOS? Also I don't agree with your definition of "ready". The stigma around the terminal must go! the current state of linux on ANY popular distro is: everyting can be done via GUI but some things are just easier to do in the terminal and it's not linux's faulth that terminal is just so good
- There's no stigma with the terminal, the terminal isn't bad, I love the terminal.
  
  However, it's not grandma friendly. It never will be. You need to think less about your preferences and more about a truly novice user. Most people don't want to tinker with their machines, they just want it to work.
SteamOS is the only good linux experience I have had, that's mostly due to the fact it's made specifically for the hardware that is running it.
- Do you mind mentioning the others you've tried and what snags you hit?
  
  I've worked with Arch, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and SteamOS, and I would say that while arch and Ubuntu can have a learning curve, Linux Mint is on par with SteamOS in usability.
Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).

I use the terminal out of preference, and because it's where I'm comfortable, but I can't think of any situation it's actually needed for general desktop use.
That is impossible. It's like saying for Windows "can you do everything that you can do in a GUI, in PS or cmd". That can never come true because the OS was just never designed that way.

Likewise, in Linux or any other POSIX compatible OS, you can't expect that. Everything UI related is designed to just be a wrapper around the shell. You can't expect everything to be configurable through a UI when everything in that OS is designed to run in the terminal (a few exceptions, but generally, yes, this is true).
Meanwhile on Windows 11 you need a terminal even for the basic installation and local user setup.

windows sucks ass for this exact reason but linux is definitely complicated and filled with weird bugs as well lol. i guess those bugs are better than spyware though

At least with linux you know it's because it is maintained by the community which doesn't have the backing of a billion dollar multinational corporation to throw money at programmers. Microsoft on the other hand, has much less of an excuse, and most of their problems aren't glitches, they're "features."

The problem with RTFM is that TFM often does not cover the problem, and broader knowledge of the OS is required. You can't expect every app to come with a manual that covers how the entire OS works, but that knowledge is often required to get work done in Linux.

People familiar with the guts of Linux or Windows will encounter these kinds of outside-the-instructions problems and know from experience what arcane setting to change or what 3rd party software needs to be installed before the procedures written in the manual will work as expected.

IMO, the Windows GUI lowers the bar to begin trial-and-error learning and makes the learning process faster.

Every Linux question I've ever had have been answered by the Arch Wiki
- I'd say out of all my linux issues (and there have been a lot) that maybe 20% are not answered by RTFM. Less than 5% of those were not answered by the Arch Wiki. The remaining 15% is because I'm doing sysadmin stuff and enterprise docs can be either hard to come by, or just not complete enough (looking at your FreeIPA). I will say that certain Arch Wiki sections are worse than others and take either a bit of trial and error or are just incomplete, but that's also an opportunity to update it for the next person!
IMO, the Windows GUI lowers the bar

You can say that again. If a windows "admin" can't find their C:\ drive or their next > next > next > finish wizard, they're completely lost
- like Python users forced to code in assembly

Somethings are more complicated, others less and some others more entertaining if you like tinkering.

That's Linus of LTT in the top

"WhY iS pAcKaGe MaNaGeMeNt So HaRd" my brother in Christ you got one broken Deb that was packaged and provided for free by someone other than the vendor, the vendor provides their own installer you could have used that wouldn't have had the issue. You could have also used a flatpak. You were literally offered three ways to install the software on any operating system you could choose, and you gave up after the marginally simplest one failed and you were too lazy to troubleshoot it.

The donkey doesn't even know the first thing about package management or any part of the build process, and has no right whatsoever to talk about it as if the maintainers of the stack are to blame.

/rant fuck that self-absorbed short stack sponge

Your rant is justified.

But if you compare that to a user who is used to only one way of installing a system and only one way of installing new Software. Then it can be overwhelming at first glance when you are in the middle of a problem with what seems to be the only way to install packages and not in the overview of multiple package managers.
I'm 110% with you here. Debian have make it much more difficult to break your system, so it should be stack sponge proof going forward. I still wouldn't put it past Linus to fuck it up some other way (you know, maybe he'll curl HTML into bash instead of a script), and he'll still stand his ground and blame the world. And then later give one of his non-apology apologies.

I used to be a huge fan.
- Same, I was a fan for a while despite them not being great about accuracy, it was entertaining tech-themed content that I knew not to trust for anything serious. Them recommending a custom windows rom that disabled any anti-virus and blocked security updates was when I completely wrote them off. And their excuse was "we showed some of the issues on screen for like 1/2 a second, that's enough" and refused to acknowledge anyone's concerns were valid.
  
  Then later it got way worse when it turned out they had issues with serial harassment and stole and auctioned off prototype hardware.
Here's probably the worst part of that situation: He got that error, because the Pop!_Shop caught the unreasonable prerequisites and said "Nope, not doing that" and threw that "failed to install Steam" message. Someone who deserves to be the CEO of a tech broadcaster would have the troubleshooting skills to, I dunno, google "popos failed to install steam" and follow instructions on how to fix it. No, what happened was he threw a temper tantrum about how Linux GUIs never work and you have to use the terminal.

The Pop!_Shop's flawed design (in that it doesn't update the apt cache on launch for some reason), that bugged .deb, and a whiny little fuckboy lined up just right to take the system down.

The great thing about Linux is if something has weird behavior and you're already exhausted all possible options to solve it, it is still possible to figure it out on your own because the source code is available.

I still don't know how windows people figure out how to fix such and such problems on windows with some registry entries. Did they ask a Microsoft employee, or did they mess around with the registry blindly until it's magically fixed?

Not everyone is a developer, but the vast majority of people use Windows. When an issue arises, it's easier for a non-programmer to search for help than look at code.
- Sure, you also have that option on Linux, which would be the first thing you do anyway. But after you searched everywhere and found nothing, on Linux you still have an option to dig into the source code yourself, while on windows you're pretty much done unless you have a support contract with ms.
- When an issue arises, it's easier for a non-programmer to search for help than look at code.
  
  Ahh, look! Its my nearly decade long experience with Linux in one sentence! So that whole non-user-friendliness thing about Linux being uncomprehensible to amateurs, that's surely just around the corner for me now, right? Right?!
  
  Not trying to argue any point here, ur comment in this context just made me chuckle.
I’m not a super casual user, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to try to dive into source to try to understand a bug in my OS. I’m just going to work around it and never think of it again.
- You may feel that way, but not every power user is like you. Linux distro is not a monolith, it's made up of thousands of small components made by different people and organizations. If you look at some of those components source control (e.g. on GitHub or GitLab), you'll see a large portion of pull requests are done by their users who found bugs and decided to submit a fix themselves. For example, just look at how many pull requests libgweather got, and they're mostly submitted by gnome users who were mildly annoyed with the weather app.
- It is actually easier than you think. With the help of the devs, you could easily solve your problem, plus make them aware of the bug and fix it in upcoming releases. It might take a few days of messages on git back and forth with them, but in the end, yes, you will most probably solve your problem.
No, you Google the shit out of that particular problem, visiting reddit, forums, blogs and god knows what else, find a few bunch of registry files or reg snippets, copy/paste that, do a sanity check on each and every one of them, backup the registry (or a part of it at least), import them one by one in the hope that one of them fixes the problem... and then you discover that these were meant for Windows 7 and not 10 and that 10/11 had that shit removed or doesn't actually obey that registry entry (a bug, they will fix it... some day...) and then just give up and learn to live with the problem.
They pay for books any expensive classes. I Boomer IT culture talent comes with money and age.

Source: Rejected several tiles for being too young to reasonably know Linux.

Windows is the much more difficult OS AFAIK. Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn't work well (pop up dialogs can be painful). I hate windows and managed to mostly avoid it until I switched jobs in 2017.

Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn't work well

Ah, I see you have seen the UAC prompt as well.
- Plenty of modal dialogs flat out don't work with keyboard follows mouse. But now that you mention it, its windows dialogs (not from 3rd party apps) that seem to be the most problematic.

ltt is so cringe for all things linux and on reddit they are seen as the messia of linux WTF is even happening

~~You're on a Linux Memes channel. If you don't want to see linux memes, just block those channels.~~

For fucks sake, I thought you spelled In This Threat. Not Linus Tech Tips.

I think both Windows and Linux are scary when you want to exactly fits you need.

In using linux I started to know what is a DE, kernel, kernel argument, GRUB, systemd, selinux, etc. and I am the person that want to learn NOTHING about my OS, they just unfortunately pops up during troubleshooting.

So is Windows, device manager, ipconfig, registry table, chocolatey, cmd vs powershell, WSL, and many more. But I would say, if you don't care about bloat and ads, and are willing to make stupid compromises, like copy a email to a notepad, so you can see it while drafting a new email. Windows might breaks slightly less often than linux depending on your hardware. But that doesn't mean Windows don't break, in fact Windows broke just in the first linux challenge video.

For Linus's experiment, I don't really think it is a fair comparison between Linux and Windows. No one is going to learn a OS in a month, and expect to have the ability to not harm themselves, not on Windows not on Linux not on macOS.

But it does serve as a good simulation of a busy Windows enthusiast moving to linux. Personally, I don't think this should be the only criteria to judge the linux eco system, but it is a important criteria, and linux has many things they can improve in this regard (and they are indeed improving).

However, popOS installer for steam breaking DE is a legitimately rare event, and it happens to the most popular tech youtuber is even more rare...

Shit happens 🤷. It happens to milti-billion dollar companies as well, like MS. In fact, it happens a lot more frequently (and it's more destructive) than it does with Linux or any other POSIX based OS. I have yet to see an update deleting all my personal files in /home.

Troubleshooting problems is about the same IMO, if you're familiar with the OS and how things work (in general). You just use the terminal more in Linux, since you'd have to open the file manager as root in order to troubleshoot, and that brings a whole other set of issues, like file permissions if you happen to copy a file to, let's say /home/<username>/Desktop temporarily, for troubleshooting. Ah, but now the file has root permissions, not the permissions your user has, and root is the owner of the file, so basically, your user only has read permissions, that's it. You can't move or delete the file. In order to move it or delete it, with a GUI, you'd have to open up the file manager as root again and do it from there. And that is why using the terminal to accomplish these things is so much simpler. You just add sudo in front and that's it, the command will do whatever root could do. And then you realize that just copying and renaming the file to filename.bak in the same location where the file originally resides is so much quicker and better. You can delete or move the file just by adding sudo in front of the command, no file manager needed.

So yeah, troubleshooting is more or less the same IMO.

I haven't watched LTT for quite a while. A lot of his videos entertained me, but the guy himself...

His recent video on the Fairphone is what did it for me.

His "deal breaker" is that the notification sound is too loud? Replacing a battery by heating up your phone, prying it open, disconnecting the flimsy battery cable and prying out the glued in battery is apparently just as easy as using your hands. Seriously?
- Personal preferences exist you know. Also not being able to turn down the notification volume would annoy me personally to no end. But if it doesn't annoy you, is it still unimportant to be informed about this? So you know before you buy?
- His fairphone review was super based. Refusing to pander to deluded fanboys that are willing to pay $500 for a buggy pile of junk where the touchscreen software is broken.

Interestingly, I like to keep my network connected devices up to date. Why would I disable that on any OS?

For me, candy crush et al was never installed on my Windows computers by default, both on home and pro versions. There were install shortcuts, but never the actual programs themselves.

I expect a modern computer to be able to do whatever updates it wants in the background, and apply any kernel changes when I restart it. Ubuntu has been able to do both for years.
- Actually, Linux in general, not just Ubuntu. You could even update the app while running said app (like your browser). It won't crash, you just have to restart it in order to use the new version. You could literally be running every single app that the update updates and it won't crash. Once loaded in RAM, there is nothing tying it to the place where it resides on disk. You could even delete the binary if you'd like, it would still keep running... unless you close it, then you won't be able to run it again, lol 😂. There are a few exceptions though, like services (daemons), but that is only in systemd land, other init/service managers will allow you to just restart the service and load the new updated version of it.
Keeping a Pro or a Home install up to date is not always a good thing. From a security standpoint, yes, I do agree, but when half your personal files go missing after an update... you kinda start wondering why you let this thing update automatically in the first place.

LTSC editions though, yes. I leave them to autoupdate. They do it like once a month anyway, so it's not that big of a deal anyway, it's not really such a big problem. And the updates don't take that long, no new features are added, just security updates and that's it.

So, if you're worried about security and being up to date, I'd recommend the Windows LTSC editions. That is the only thing I ever install if I have to install Windows.
- I haven't experienced the missing files issue on any of the machines I use, nor have the people I know. I guess the missing files thing is when some people set up their directories in a specific unusual way.
  
  On a couple of machines my personal directories are in the default locations and on one machine there on a separate drive.

One time I used the store UI thing in Ubuntu to install a package and it made it so that every subsequent time I opened it it would just freeze. I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it via the command line because it had some kind of lock on it. After awhile I gave up and reinstalled windows.

I gave up on Linux when the repository for my Logitech mouse dongle stopped working 3y ago. Why couldn't I get something as simple as a fucking mouse dongle work instantly blew my mind. Never bothered trying Linux again since.

Too much Linux evangelism here on Lemmy. Linux is absolutely not as user-friendly as Windows is for non techy ppl.
Yeah that's another difference. When something breaks on Windows people will do anything to fix it, including reinstalling Windows or buying another machine.

When something goes wrong on Linux they decide Linux doesn't work and reinstall Windows.

I've had Windows installs slow down till they take 15 minutes to start. I once clicked the wrong button in Visual Studio and the computer became some kind of remote driver debugging target, permanently. Half the settings broke and every startup it would autologin as a debug user.

If anything like that happens on Linux it's proof Linux is too complicated, but on Windows it's just one of those things.
- The difference is that, for Windows, a million other people have seen your problem most of the time, so there's usually some kind of support article that can point you in the right direction on how to fix your problem without having to dive into the docs.
  
  Linux just doesn't have that luxury. If I were getting paid to solve the problem, sure, I'd probably have figured it out in a day or so as a Linux noob. But I'm not. My free time is limited. I don't need to know much about Windows because it works pretty much all the time (ymmv).
Ubuntu snap is broken therefore Ubuntu is broken..

Hostile != user-unfriendly

I believe that, in life, among the worst qualities is the obtuseness of those who do not make an effort to understand the reasons for things and settle on a reality of simplifications and superficiality. Linux has the educational merit of forcing us to dig beyond that superficial layer.

(Sorry for my poor english)

This is rage bait

Actually, no need for de-bloat scripts, a lot of those break more than they fix.

O&O shutup 10, simplewall, And I think O&O makes something like "AppBuster" or something for getting rid of stubborn metro apps.

Also...don't disable windows updates, delay feature updates by 365 days, delay quality updates by 30 days and install security updates right away. If you don't have windows 10 or 11 pro, there's a program called "policy plus" Britec09 also has a guide for "how to only install security updates in windows 10" the guide also applies to windows 11

I love it when Windows decides to restart my computer for me while I'm working on something
- You don't even need anything special to put a stop to that, it's right there in the settings for windows update.
  
  Look, read and think. That's it. I don't understand how or why so many people have so many problems using windows. Then I look at how they install things, how they don't de-select anything and they install a fuck load of bloatware in addition to what they wanted, or how they don't use any adblocking software and then they wonder why their systems run like shit and never work right.
  
  They allowed their system to get flooded with garbage. That's why the average person doesn't like windows, because the average person knows what the buttons do, but doesn't actually know how to use a computer.
  
  any computer, windows, linux or mac can be shitty once it's full of garbage. Those kinds of issues I described above this happen on every OS without proper protection, not just any antivirus, but a good antivirus that actually works, and an adblocker that works system wide with adblocking DNS.
  
  There's people all over the world who can be paid to do that for you, there's guides online to do that kind of stuff on every OS that isn't made by apple.
  
  Idiots don't know anything, and there's a lot of idiots out there that think they know everything about an issue even though they haven't actually seen what needs to be examined to find out what the problem is.
Why use debloat anything... scripts or apps, regardless. Why not just use LTSC? It's debloated by default. No MS Store, no Metro Apps, just the Settings one (it has to have that), everything else is pretty much standard for Windows.
- You mean windows 11 lite? I don't know if you've heard, but the publisher that makes that might be doing something nefarious with that OS. Even more insidious than what can easily be disabled in the official windows 11 and 10

Also with LLMs getting good the less informed user can make changes they want and learn as they do with less effort so lower barrier to entry. The Arch wiki isn't even that hard if you have a level headed 24/7 assistant that knows enough and can reason well enough to teach you something. Only if you make sure that you never expect perfection. I don't trust people's work blindly so why would I blindly trust an LLM? That's the lessen we gotta learn. Use the brain lol

Yup... I have made so many little bash scripts to do tweaks or customize new Linux installs for me using ChatGPT. I mean, I have coding experience (.NET, not much with bash) and could muddle through learning bash better and making those, but this is quicker and allows me to learn in the process by asking follow up questions about syntax and core Linux concepts.

I just spent the last 6 hours trying to get my home assistant VM to run on boot up because I’ve spent the last 6 months unable to get Linux to stop automatically rebooting for unattended upgrades.

I’m far from a power user but it shouldn’t be so fucking hard. It’s like 3 clicks to disable automatic upgrades/reboots in Windows.

It’s like 3 clicks to disable automatic upgrades/reboots in Windows.

Do share how to disable updates in 3 clicks... cuz it USED to be that easy... not any more.

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havent used windows or mac in years. feels good.

https://youtu.be/oHRNrgDIJfo
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://piped.video/oHRNrgDIJfo
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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Recently installed windows on a separate drive on my linux machine, anyone got any good scripts and things to improve win 11?

Search for O&O ShutUp10, and WinAero.
This one is pretty good https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Think what you want about 4chan, but I generally start with the links in the OP of the "/g/ - Technology" board's regularly recurring "friendly windows thread". Being 4chan, it is decidedly unfriendly, but the guides in the OP are usually good. Always read up thoroughly, fully, and apply your own common sense before using any tools or running commands.

Wish I could be more specific, but I'm still using 10, so I'm not familiar with the 11 specific stuff.

The only real issue I've had with Linux is trying to get my old Drobo 5C to work. (it's a self-managed dynamically adjustable/resizable raid array that just presents itself as a single 70tb usb hard disk. The company that made them dissolved a few years ago)

It's formatted in ntfs and loaded with 25tb+ of data from when I ran windows primarily.

It'll mount and work temporarily, but quickly stops responding, with anything that tries to access it frozen. Particularly docker containers.

Then it'll drop into some internal data recovery routine (it's a 'black box' with very little user control, definitely wouldn't be my choice again, but here we are), refusing to interact with the attached system for half an hour or so. When it finally comes back, linux refuses to mount it. 'dirty filesystem', but ntfsfix won't touch it either. Off to windows and chkdsk, then rinse and repeat.

I gave up when one of those attempts resulted in corrupt data (a bunch of mkvs that wouldn't play from the beginning, but would play if you skipped past the first second or two). I can't backup this data, (no alternative storage or funds to acquire it) so that was enough tempting fate.

I ended up attaching it to an old windows laptop that's now dedicated to serving it via samba :(

Really looking forward to setting up a proper raid array eventually, but till then I'm stuck with 11mbps. I'd love to rent storage temporarily so I can move the data and try a different fs on the drobo...

You could probably get a Gbit LAN USB card added to that so you could at least get 30MB out of the thing 🤷.
- I'd need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn't upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop...
  
  I've got a second desktop that's got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that'd probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.
  
  Idk, still thinking on it.

Or use ltsc like a chad

LTSC gang
I have also mentioned this on more than a few occasions. I dual boot (very rarely to Windows nowadays) and I always use LTSC installs on all my dual boot setups. 0 problems thus far regarding GRUB and other Windows update related issues.

I still don't know why people use Pro... maybe LTSC is more niche than I thought and MS is not pushing ads for that one out there.
- A lot of misinformation for ltsc, people thinking its only for kiosks and cant be used as a daily.
  
  Given the choice for sketchy script messing with registry or sketchy key I'm going sketchy key, at least I know windows iso is legitimate, crazy so few know of ltsc and choose the latter.

Winaero Tweaker makes it as simple as a checkbox.

You can do all that without ever opening a single commandline.

You can't even do that to install software on the majority of Linux.

Majority by number of distros, or only including desktop Linux distros? Because yeah, if you're including server distros, that's true, and if you count it by the number of distros, that's true, but most people use one of a handful of distros on their desktop. Both gnome and KDE have software centers which you can use to install stuff without the command line.
Yeah! Just use a browser. Make sure to click the right download button (not the 50 ads disguised as download buttons) to download an executable (just the installer). Then, run the installer and click "next" a bunch of times. Why would anyone want anything different?
- And then, experience the joy of that program spreading its files to 6 different directories, all at different levels of your drive. Who cares about having a sensical file system that clearly separates system from user?
- I’d still prefer it to the terminal. I get to choose installation locations and it’s easier to configure.

Meanwhile if you wanna play a game on linux you have to research on forums with neckbeards that act all high horsey and get mad at you for asking questions they deem simple. If they do answer its cryptic like: "oh you just use simplinuxuser-bash-sh bro". Then by the time you get the game to run you better hope its not on a laptop with integrated graphics and a nvidia card because by god making the game only see the nvidia card over the integrated graphics if the game doesnt have the option to swap which card youre using good luck to any new user.

Windows users just go to steams website, install steam, install game, play. Windows 10+ will install basic nvidia drivers without you doing anything at first bootup with internet connection. Look, I use linux, windows, macos in my house..windows is still my primary driver even with my steam deck being a close second these days. Im all for linux getting more use but its not easy stop acting like it is..its a hobby, its fun, thats it.

It is absolutely that easy to use Steam for most games on GNU/Linux now.

In fact, even easier, because you can use the software center to get Steam, skipping the whole going to their website part.
- Not quite, running 75% of games requires turning on Proton, and while it’s incredible they can run at all, many have minor issues and/or require setup to work well. Plus dealing with graphics card drivers that are extremely laggy by default unless you find and install the correct version of the proprietary ones.
- Some distros actually ship Steam pre-installed.
Installing games on steam and playing them sounds like what you do on Linux 99% of the time too
- Nah, you spend more time configuring than actually playing.
  
  You even have to configure and emulate Windows, so you can configure your game on there.
Windows users just go to steams website, install steam, install game, play. Windows 10+ will install basic nvidia drivers without you doing anything at first bootup with internet connection

Linux users just go to steams website, install steam for their system (or use flathub), install game, play. Linux will install basic nvidia drivers (Nouveau) without you doing anything at first bootup.

Linux gaming is super simple. The only suckage comes from intrusive AntiCheat/AntiTemper software some developers deem absolutely necessary.
- I don't think you are playing any game on Nouveau driver at this moment. Fortunately, most nvidia driver is a one click install on popular distro. Except if you are on fedora workstation and secureboot, then you will need to register the secureboot key.
- I had quite the opposite experience. Middle of last year, reinstalled Mint on an HP Elitebook 8570w (everybody online seemed to recommend it over upgrading in-place like a normal operating system), and wanted to play games. Steam installed fine, but Mudrunner had to be configured to use Proton. Fair enough, but it crashed on startup. Okay, I’ll try an older version. Still crashes no matter what version I try (and I was on shitty vacation WiFi so downloading was extra slow mind you). Okay, I’ll try some random USE_WINE3D flag I found on the internet. No longer crashes, but the performance is piss slow. “Oh right”, I remembered, “I have to select the proprietary Nvidia drivers”. Fortunately Mint has a setting to easily select them, unfortunately after installing them the game crashes no matter what I do. Give up and go back to open source with 5fps. Try again later, and realize that apparently Mint installed the wrong Nvidia drivers, and I have to manually download them and install via the command line. Some more tweaking Proton versions and flags, and the game is finally running at a solid 20fps.
  
  Compare that to my brother I was playing with. Identical 8570w laptop, identical Quadro K1000m CPU, identical Mudrunner game. The game worked out of the box and ran faster on his computer than it ever did on mine. I don’t remember the exact FPS but it was at least 30, probably closer to 45.
  
  And before someone comments on “Nvidia”, I thought one of the benefits of Linux was supposed to be the ability to run on anything. Even the cheap laptop I got in 2017 because it was $250 but came with a 1080p screen and a graphics card. Paying more for the “correct” hardware would defeat the entire point of saving money with an open source operating system.
hum, going to the website seems unintuitive, I was wondering why I cannot find steam in the app store. Turns out Windows is just not user-friendly.

User behaviors are formed by experience, most people starts with windows, and of course know to use device manager etc to troubleshoot and think it is intuitive.

When moving to a new OS there will of course be rough times. I was also utterly confused when I moved from Linux to Windows many years ago, but it took me couple months to a year to get used to it.

Now I have moved back to linux with many years on Windows experience, and I also struggle to port all my setup from Windows back to linux.

Just because things happen one way on one OS, doesn't mean other ways are "not user friendly".
Sorry, but you haven't used Linux seriously, then. Things were pretty hard 20 years ago when I switched to Linux desktops only, but today it's really is simpler to install Linux than windows./, talking from own experience. Installing Ubuntu is the usual 15-20 minutes breeze while windows 11 was a very painful 7 hour multi day process. It starts at downloading, the iso is like 4 times bigger. A typical windows issue l, as everything on windows is bloated to death.

Then writing the ISO onto a USB requires a very specific writer because apparently only that one worked for windows 11 (which is a typical Microsoft bullshit problem, let's not use standards, let's ensure it's only workable with tools they want you to use). Figuring that out required going into forums and whatnot

Then the install process crashed in step 2 with a typical error 000000000010000 or something like that, it's been a while, so I don't remember the exact code, but more searches and forums revealed that tadaaah, windows 11 requires some specific bios setting for my hardware (standard MSI AMD board) or it wouldn't work. Obviously no clear error message, just some vague code. Linux worked fine btw, it was already installed before on a separate m.2

Then there was an issue with the license key that I don't recall anymore, it's been a few months ago and I've literally been trying to forget the experience. Coat a few extra hours, still.

Then, hours later already, I cn actually start the install. Effin yay. There are what feels like hundreds of screens and crap to click through, loads about windows wanting to steal my soul with ads and monitoring and please sir, but some more crap you don't want!

I installed Linux on a Saturday, started onwindows 30 minutes later, and finished windows about a week (and about 7 hours total work time) later.

Windows SUCKS because it's been designed to work well for Microsoft, Linux may have issues but it's been actually getting better every time over the past 25 years.

On servers? Don't get me started, windows is a sad sad joke, I don't even take it seriously. Watching windows administrators do their "work" is just one big "whyyyy??"

Should I mention your android phone is Linux too?

Saying Linux is only for a hobby is beyond short sighted. Sorry bout the rant but it irks me when people casually mention it's a hobby because they don't really know it, then happily leap back into the daily grinder that is windows

whenever someone comes to me asking for help on windows, I first tell them straightway that windows is shit, and I know nothing about it. then I spend half an hour searching for answers to resolve the problem, only to curse it again and give up, before telling then again to use a better operating system(i.e., GNU/Linux).

Ah, so it is a skill issue for you?

Windows is a whole lot better documented than any Linux distro ever will be. Because of the fact it is the standard in the majority of businesses. So if you can't find the solution, then that is on you.
- yes, I don't want to be get "skilled" in a proprietary disservice.
  and no, distributions like Debian GNU/Linux, or arch has far better documentation. the quality of documentation also matters. they may not have 100 different "run sfc scannow" websites, but they will have almost any problem you can find on good forums.
- To be fair, I've had some issues on Windows that have left microsoft support staff saying "yeah man Idk good luck hope you figure that out lol". Meanwhile, on Arch, I've never had a problem that didn't have a solution, or at least a clearly documented cause (which is almost always just as important as the solution) right there in plain text on the ArchWiki.
  
  Plus, when a windows error happens, you usually just get a little message saying "It dun broke 🤷‍♂️". Again, on linux, 9 times out of 10, I get a pretty detailed error message at least telling me what broke, and maybe even some hints as to why. I get that Windows has error logs, but I bever have to dig for that info on linux, it's always presented to me because it's important.
- Windows is a whole lot better documented
  
  Windows documentation be like:
- Does windows show logs? What documentation is going to help you when you don't know the error. Most windows troubleshooting guides I've seen include 4-5 solutions and say try all of them maybe something will work if you are lucky. On linux you can find pretty much any bug on GitHub or an online forum.
  
  Edit: ignore this guy lol. Just seen him in other comments in this thread. Dude is saying skill issue when he's literally scared of a terminal.
I work in a Windows environnent but often use Linux at home. I find that the level of difficulty is equivalent once you're familiar with either OS, their general design, and how their management tools are meant to work. It's mostly a familiarity problem. You don't use Windows regularly so you have no idea where to even start troubleshooting, or how to tell at a glance if the instructions you've found pass the sniff test.

Plus, it's always considerably easier to troubleshoot your own shit than to troubleshoot some random person's jacked up configuration where you don't know how they use their machine or how they managed to fuck it up.

The biggest difference I find is that Windows has such a massive user base that any "user based" help (like the microsoft support forums, yuck) is far more likely to be written by some shmuck that doesn't know what they're talking about than you see with Linux. Alternatively, it's just content farm site after content farm site regurgitating shit advice stolen from the users who don't really know what they're talking about. Finding useful information and guides can be more difficult.
- yeah, my machines have been windows-free for almost a decade, and in the development field, I rarely see it. So, it's alien and disorienting to me.
  but even then my experience with windows has been less than optimal. I had to install many good services like henrypp's simplewall just to stop windows from phoning home. not to mention removing other bloat.
  
  with GNU/Linux, I know my machine will do nothing like that without my explicit permission.

Not true , Show me on Linux except may be one or two flavours how to add program in start-up, a windows 98 and windows 11 has same place and is all known. Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux , unlike plug and use in windows

Just stop saying Ng Linux is better , it's not for regular use . I know you dudebros will get hurt and downvote me . Linux is not easy, does not have MANY MANY Utilities which are present for windows and it's just not usable for users .

You're just more familiar with windows. You likely grew up with it and depending on your age were taught it in school. You're biggest gripe seems to be having to touch the terminal to install things, but to me, I think it's weird to use a browser to install things. This is where that esoteric knowledge comes in.. you know which download button is the real one that won't download a virus.
I would agree a few years ago, but saying that it's generally not usable for users is (in my opinion) wrong. If you're only going to use a browser, and watch some videos, Linux is fine. If you're a gamer and only use Steam, Linux is fine. Linux was also fine for me when installing Lutris to run other Windows games like Trackmania. For both those cases, I didn't even have to touch the command line. If you're a programmer, Linux is probably fine, because you have more knowledge on how command lines work anyways.

If you have any kind of advanced use case that doesn't have a well established solution, and you have to research (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), that's probably not fine for a normal user. But more and more tools do have established solutions that work out of the box, so I'd say it's getting more fine.

Whether Windows, Mac or Linux is better is a question of use case and other factors in my opinion. You only used Windows your whole life and don't want to get used to a new thing? Then don't. You love the Apple ecosystem and want to pay the premium? Do so. But I feel like outright saying Linux isn't for regular use has become false in the recent years, as there are quite a few use cases by now that can use Linux without problems.
I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the "IT guy" I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about "being in the same place for 25 years". This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let's not start about systemd now, I don't care), but one new "skill" to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I've learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.

Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux

Hum, all of them I've been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it's been a feature for a long time. I don't like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it's target then name or the other way around).

The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn't use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it's not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.

I've seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I've never used KDE, it's a long story, but I guess the same would apply).

For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).
Ok Linus

100% agreed. Once you disable all the unnecessary stuff Windows comes with you'll be left with a stable system that is compatible with everything from professional to hobbyist software. Meanwhile under Linux you'll spend all your days on getting a basic system to run properly (for some distros) or trying Wine, virtualization and other subpar hacks to get any kind productivity and ability to cooperate with others. :)

a stable system

Until next update, where they may just blacklist your CPU just because
- Or an update where they delete all your files again.
  
  2018: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-october-2018-update-file-deletion-bug-story 2020: https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/
  
  These both happened to me. I was already looking into switching to Linux in 2020, and the last update did it for me. Have been only been using Linux at home ever since.
- Just wait for the next version of insert-non-debian-linux-distro and you won't be able to boot after trying an update. :)
  
  I find it very interesting that I always see a lot of people complaining about those kinds of updates breaking Windows all the time. In my experience I've only seen it happening with old ass , cheap hardware computers. Never had issues myself with mid range and hardware from reputable brands. If you've a computer from Aliexpress or some Chinese brand, oh well, you get what you payed for.
This highly dependent on what you do, do you do graphics or video editing then you are right, do you do non-Windows specific coding? Its the exact opposite.
- do you do graphics or video editing then you are right
  
  Not just that, same for every advanced MS Office product, any other enterprise desktop MS application, architecture, a lot of engineers...
  
  do you do non-Windows specific coding? Its the exact opposite.
  
  Jetbrains is available for all platforms and runs equally good on all of them.
Nah, Wine runs most XP-times software better, Windows 10+ sometimes not at all. Some people do hacks like running wine in WSL because of this.

There goes your compatibility. Not to mention that Windows is probably the most incompatible OS (to the rest) in wide use (filesystem, non-POSIX, drivers, etc.)
- You're full of shit. Wine still fails at basic Win32 API calls available since Windows 95 and most thing that fail under modern Windows versions are usually GPU related tasks like games and the fact that you don't have specific DirectX or DirectPlay features available on your modern OS and/or GPU and those cases there's dgVoodoo2.
  
  Do you really want to talk about compatibility? Just try to install MS Office 2003 and Photoshop 6 under Windows 11 - you'll fine that both will work just fine without hacks.
I won't consider using dozens of random debloating scripts made by reverse engineering Windows binary files a stable experience.

Also the second part is clearly frustration of running Windows-only software on Linux. Like, just look at installing Linux vs Windows experience. On Windows there is no live ISO, super outdated look, terrible user unfriendly partitioning section and after that they don't even show you a nice welcoming overview of the system like Gnome or KDE now have.
- I won’t consider using dozens of random debloating scripts made by reverse engineering Windows binary files a stable experience.
  
  The thing is that this isn't correct.
  
  Windows' bloat/spyware can be disabled via group policy and it works really well because it was designed to allow it. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable the "spyware" otherwise they couldn't use it.
  
  Microsoft provides very detailed documentation into the bloat that you can follow to disable what you don't want. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services. Those "dozens of random debloating scripts" are usually just following that guide, not much else.
  
  I'm not saying Windows is good, I'm just saying it delivers and for the hassle that it takes to run Windows-only software (that most people require) under Linux, most people might be better off by spending a quarter of that time debloating Windows.