this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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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)
On the other hand printers always work out of the box on Linux without even installing any drivers, whilst getting them go work on Windows can often be a nightmare
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.
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
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.
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
"Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!!"
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
This is a common meme but essentially is never needed
The deliberate misrepresentation here is that the Windows registry supports importing keys from a text file, so most of the time you have to mess with it you just download a file and double click on it.
Is that super secure? Nope. But hey, anytime you need to do something on a Linux terminal you're also copy/pasting random crap you found online, don't pretend you're not.
The ultimate point still stands. None of these matter to normies, it's how often you need to tinker or troubleshoot to begin with. For most users the acceptable number is zero.
That's because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
As a normie (at least in these circles), I think I agree with your last point. Windows being heavily restricted in its customizability is a feature. A bad feature, but a feature nonetheless.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
Windows 11 doesn't even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn't support first gen Ryzen either!
The difference is that if you're using hardware that's compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that's supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there's load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn't. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you're applying solutions by trusting that people aren't doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there's no issues with the hardware itself.
And the "small subset" of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it's only Windows 11 that doesn't support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
Edit: let's add getting Dolby Atmos to work on Linux, never managed to make it work with VLC, had do download another program instead and create a file in a superuser only folder with text commands because there's no UI options to make it work like it should.
That "small subset" is hundreds of millions of devices made in the last 5 years alone.
The problem with Linux (not their fault), is that most of the problems appear in hardware made in the last 3 years.
Huh, odd. I never had these issues, even though I use an Nvidia card with a VRR monitor. All my peripherals (webcam, printer, bluetooth earbuds) work out of the box, too. But maybe I'm just lucky.
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it's supported by windows).
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn't work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
In my group of friends (all Linux gaming), I'm the only one with an NVIDIA card. I don't have more problems than the other folks, I just have different ones.
The biggest gripe I have, HDR and color management, are getting fixed in Wayland soon. In the meantime I use gamescope to get HDR and apply color correction filters with reshade.
Correct. I've been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
You've been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn't under the impression that I'd have feature parity without doing that.
VRR works as long as you're on a recent Wayland version.
HDR isn't a driver issue.
With X11, it ain't happening.
Wayland current supports HDR, however there isn't a protocol for applications to communicate with Wayland to configure themselves correctly. Some applications, like MPV, you can use an environmental variable to get HDR output (but not dynamic HDR, like HDR+ or Dolby Vision) and you can configure the parameters in the config.
Gamescope, the compositor that Valve uses for the Steamdeck, supports HDR for gaming. It works well for some games and completely fails for others.
Luckily, there's a Wayland color management/HDR protocol that is staging for an upcoming Wayland update so you won't need to depend on Gamescope to use HDR.
DLSS works in the games I've seen.
All of that in fully open source drivers? You sure about that? Is it per card?
Ultimately this is pretty much my point, you wrote a whole paragraph about this and I'm still not sure how accurate it is, which cards have which features supported or whether we're even talking about the same thing.
Considering the competition's implementation is "install this one piece of software day one, never think about it again", that is some ways away from a "pretty smooth experience", even without accounting for the parts that are buggy.
For the record, I'm aware of the state of affairs for Nvidia support overall (unfortunately, wish I didn't have to be). I'm gonna say you're wrong about HDR being a driver issue, though, seeing how it was outright disabled for what, three months? due to a showstopping driver bug. It seems to be back to working now, though.
In any case none of this is normie-friendly and an absolute dealbreaker for anybody on modern Nvidia hardware.
Someone coming from Windows would just use the proprietary drivers. It isn't like they're not used to using proprietary software.
The open source drivers (Arch: 'nvidia-open', not 'nvidia') have different problems but installing a completely open source system is an advanced task. If a user just wants to install a driver with the least effort then they'd just install the nvidia package and not the open source drivers.
It isn't a dealbreaker it's just a thing to know. Anybody who's at the point of trying Linux will have had to wade through a sea of people informing them of Nvidia issues, anti-cheat issues, etc.
The trade-off is that you can use an operating system that isn't shoving ads in your face, spying on you and forcing you to get a new PC with a TPM.
For some people that is the dealbreaker. They often find that giving up HDR for a few months, not playing Apex Legends and typing into a terminal is a small price to pay for being able to trust your operating system to be working for you and not for shareholders.
What do you mean, often? What's "often"? Linux's install base is what? 2-5% on desktop PCs, tops? And much of that has been fairly stable for a long time.
So who are these aggravated masses that are evening out the 90% of dedicated GPU users and the mass of people who just don't seem to have much of a problem and definitely not a motivation to move to Linux specifically?
There's a bit of size blindness in the community, where any movement is seen to be momentous and every inconvenience a turn of the tide and it comes off a bit delusional.
Also, "a thing to know" is one thing too many for people who bought a prebuilt PC and never touched anything about it until they bought the next one. And if they do buy a new GPU or whatever they expect to just jam it in there, turn the thing on and expect everything to work right away. Having to wade through all those warnings about Nvidia and anticheat is itself an aggressive way of disincentivizing moving for many people. Honestly, I have a running Linux install and if I have to hear one more time that Mint is the best distro for Windows users and works just fine out of the box I may scream and take a sledgehammer to my boot drive.
The proprietary driver? I went distro hopping, ended up trying four or five different ones. Some had the proprietary driver baked in, there were a couple of different processes for the installation for the others. The GPU wasn't the only hardware compatibility issue I was juggling, so by the time I also had audio going and the right DE setup to support my display features I ended up manually installing them in Manjaro by just finding a guide and blindly following whatever they told me to do.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
I've defaulted to enabling the X reset on mine, just because waking from sleep is such shite.
In the last twenty years, I've pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn't in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
"Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users" is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That's a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That's not an opinion, it's data that's widely available.
It's also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn't mean it's the only one.
In any case, that's not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is "get an AMD GPU", not "we are assuming you're on integrated graphics".
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn't and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
I don't pretend anything, I commented my personal experiences. So I guess we both shouldn't expect our experience to be the norm...
And tbh, statistically you have the upper hand, most people do use windows after all. (76% or something like that?)
Shit, I canβt get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then itβll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows wonβt even throw an error, itβll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. Itβs gotten to the point where I donβt even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It'll also affect SMB shares
I wish I could do that, but CGNAT makes ipv6 the much preferred option for a lot of things.
But it's good to know that this might be the cause...
Sure AMD's drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
Frankly you are comically biased.
Yeah, I run Linux as my main OS and am able to say that it's not ready to go mainstream, biased as fuck
It's telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn't, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It's because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won't face those problems in the first place on Windows while they'll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn't a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can't tell what OS they're using in the first place) and the solution doesn't come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with "don't just trust random people".
The "What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!" argument falls apart when you realize that it's not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you're trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don't even need to know that it has a terminal.
There, happy?
You can't bullshit me man. I 've been using solving peoples' issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won't see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends' pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Sounds like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair because I've never had issues installing AMD drivers on Windows 10, never had Windows update issues and so on.
Maybe you would be better off getting a iPad.
Kiddo fuck off. I 've installed them plenty of time as well, still it's a common issue mainly due to windows update. I obviously fixed that as well as plenty of shit you probably either never seen or pretend you didn't.
Funny how it's never been an issue on all my AMD setups even the ones where I fucked around with the Windows install to make it lighter.
I've been using Windows since 3.0, so you're the one who can fuck off calling me a kiddo.
I never said I had a problem in my AMD rigs either, but you obviously can't read. I 've encountered those issues on others peoples' PCs that they asked me to fix.
You obviously have less experience in fixing windows' issues since you think they do not exist. If you knew how to Google you could find many many people having issues in Windows, many of those remaining unresolved in some case even after applying either a manufacturer or MS provided fix.
I called you a kiddo because you use childish insults like PEBKAC, if you want to insult somebody do it in the open.