this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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    [–] [email protected] 244 points 1 week ago (80 children)

    99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).

    Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they'll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.

    Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won't make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it's forced on them... which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.

    [–] [email protected] 78 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (47 children)

    More user friendly doesn't mean you won't have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that's a real problem...

    (and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can't tell what they do, that's a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don't understand)

    [–] [email protected] 97 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.

    It's not the terminal, it's the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn't customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes "oh, but Windows command line is so annoying" is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you're trying to do something Windows doesn't want you to do.

    The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it's a feature.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

    You can reinstall a driver without ever touching the command line on windows.

    Can you do that with Linux? Idk maybe on some distros but the default would just be to uninstall the package from terminal.

    Pretending these are equivalent is not cool and it just drives new users away for not understanding things the community takes for granted. It takes effort to learn the terminal if even tech-savvy windows users may not even use the command line

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

    Not what I'm saying. I'm saying that a) copy pasting into the terminal isn't the horrifying breakdown of usability Linux advocates seem to believe it is, and b) there are more pressing issues about how often you need to troubleshoot something in the first place.

    On both Linux and Windows it's relatively rare to have to reinstall a driver in the first place because both are able to pick up your hardware, set themselves up and keep themselves updated with minimal user intervention.

    The real problem isn't whether fixing the exceptions to that involves typing. The real problem is how often there are exceptions to that. In Linux it's way more likely that the natural process of setting something up or customizing something will require some fiddling, while Windows is more likely to make you install some bloatware or not give you much choice, but most likely will get things working for you the way it wants them to work.

    That is very much a user-friendly approach, despite its annoyances. The problem isn't that there is a command line interface, the problem is that it's littered in the middle of doing relatively frequent, trivial things. On purpose, even.

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