@beardalaxy
Sorry, but I still have no idea, if my laptop has the correct GPU drivers.

And trying to figure it out was seriously awful.

No, linux in general is still FAR from normie friendly.

@beardalaxy
Oh... his immage is "steam UI by default"

bad choice... -_-

@LukeAlmighty i could install a linux distro on any of my roommate's computers or maybe even my mom's or grandparents' computer and they'd be able to use it at the same relative ease they already use windows.

there is still going to be pretty much the same amount of tinkering as there is on windows at this point. two of my roommates i have to help with gaming related stuff every time we play anything and they're on windows 10 and 11 so it's not like linux is going to be any harder for them at that point. fuck, a little while ago everyone was playing a game together while i was at work, and one of them was complaining that his game was running like shit. turns out he had wallpaper engine running on the background and he's on a laptop so it was sucking pretty much all his GPU power. and nobody else at my house could figure that out for some reason???

there are some use cases that linux definitely isn't as good for (or requires a bit more learning for different software) and there are still some drivers around that don't work super well, but that's going to happen in steam os too so it doesn't even support NVIDIA GPUs so like, why recommend it?

most normies though who are just playing games on steam or whatever will notice barely any difference from windows, troubleshooting and all.

the biggest hurdle is probably just needing to learn different software, and that software sometimes being a little bit unwieldy when compared to the stuff on windows or, for things like photography/video editing/music, mac. but for someone who does business/casual stuff on their PC or even gaming i really don't think there's much of a difference and the gap continues to close.

@beardalaxy
I said this many times before, but in my opinion, the main issues are:
That fucking file system
User rights management
That entire "package manager" shit
And now, I discovered, that even commmon drivers are one big hell.

When it comes to "using different programs", I would call that barely an inconvenience, unless it's related to your job directly.

@LukeAlmighty @beardalaxy Whatðs wrong with the FS? Every graphical FM has simple ways to manage permissions. Package managers are one of the best features, wdym? "apt install firefox" "pacman -S firefox", if a normie can use notepad they can use this, otherwise get the GUI for that PM

@applejack @beardalaxy
I know how package managers work, but thank you.

@LukeAlmighty @beardalaxy I know, so I'm having trouble with what you think is wrong with them

Any of theses. These three are direct features that are a very uppfront improvement over windows

@applejack @LukeAlmighty i think he's saying that even though he knows how it all works, some random normie that doesn't even want to learn won't.

my argument though is that a lot of distros don't even require you to use apt install or anything like that, you can either download packages from the internet like you normally would or use software shop GUI kind of things. i know for a fact Mint has a GUI where you can search and download apps, and it's much more reliable and easy to use than microsoft's app store.

and yeah since most stuff gets done in the web browser by normies, idk there's just very little difference in terms of how difficult it actually is to use.

i actually had some serious issues on my laptop running windows funny enough. windows update stopped working (it would actually crash my system) and then wi-fi stopped working altogether. it had a lot of SD card problems too where it would like corrupt SD cards (which has happened on several friends' laptops as well) and i'd update the driver with something not actually meant for it to get it to work again, then windows update (when it worked) would just replace the driver again so it would be shit. switched it over to linux and it's been totally fine, never had to do anything wacky on it except for when i tried to play a game through proton and had to manually tell it to use my GPU instead of onboard CPU graphics. but it was just one argument for launching steam and that was it.

@applejack @LukeAlmighty it's also a little less prone to getting viruses, partly due to user permission stuff which i actually like. having to type in my password to install something is good because i know that if something sneaks its way in the system will ask me for a password regardless. forcing normies to do that is probably for the best too even if it does sometimes get a little bit tedious.

the file system is different. i don't think it's necessarily bad, just different. you've got different folders in different places. it'll take some adjusting to. the file manager having tabs by default though is already a huge improvement over windows, i'll say that for sure. if you want tabs in windows you have to fiddle around with third party software and third party themes for that third party software if you want it to actually look good.

i've also had better luck printing with linux than i have windows lol.

still, the only thing keeping me on windows on my pc is the fucking colorblind mode. i mean proton has DLSS now even and my capture card that doesn't have linux drivers now doesn't work in windows either so....

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty 90% of the lack of viruses is because people use package managers or install from source

*a little less* is also *an little* understatement, especially if you include software like bloatware, adware, or spyware as viruses

The filemanager in windows is weird. There's no easy way to fork it like using tabs, it doesn't update when files change automatically, I can't drag and drop from an open instance to a "pick a file" prompt, I can't customise the thumbnailers or really any part of it, it stalls the computer turning off and every time I restart it insists on opening the windows I had open

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty But it's not harder, it's just different and better

There is *no* solution to that other than to just be windows again, what's the point?

~ is not harder than %userprofile%, / is not harder than \\, / for root is not harder than C:\\, and then there are straight up improvements, any char except for / and \0 is allowed, no magic chars or filenames you can't have, there's also virtually no magic junk files like Thumbs.db, its universally UTF-8, I get sent zip files from my uncle and the names are corrupted and that happens between windows users, we have every FS that windows supports plus almost every single one it doesnt, we can mount anything anywhere so my ~/Niðurhal is actually a seperate drive, no D:\\ shenanigans, it just works, formatted USB drives don't have a 4gb filelimit and FILES ARE ACTUALLY CASE SENSITIVE

Last time I had windows legitimatly installed it borked itself during an update too. I've since installed a pirated Russian version that gets no updates with bloatware removed and classic shell preinstalled and it's fine

@applejack @LukeAlmighty minor nitpick but the 4gb file limit thing is just with fat32, windows supports exfat. i remember the good ol' days when you had to split dual-layer wii games though in order to have them on a usb drive. good times. there was even a version of brawl that had everything but multiplayer scrubbed out so it would fit on one disc and thus let you copy it onto a usb drive xD

such a weird arbitrary limit. apparently it was only 4gb because they thought that people wouldn't ever need to copy files bigger than that. a lot of computer design stuff was really not very forward thinking. like ipv4 or the whole y2k thing. like why the fuck wouldn't you program your computer to be okay turning to the number 2000 after 1999? people deadass had to work around the clock at the 11th hour to fix that xD

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty I know but that's the default for USB drives most of the times. It works with basically everything, it's even reccomended for EUFI installs on Linux for /boot because BIOSes universally know it

I wouldn't doubt exFAT has become more popular now since people buy USBs to put movies and such on but it's still always worth formatting it with something better anyway

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty with how normies do 90% of shit in their web browser, I'm sure some will complain less when it's not slow for some reason.

If I had more pull over this one job I'd install Linux on these laptops that they wanted to "toss" for being too low specced for windows 10/zoom calls (amd A8 lol) but since I was told to keep them I think you know what I'm going to do with them.

@PhenomX6 @LukeAlmighty fair point actually. fwiw chrome os is actually pretty good if you know what you're getting out of it. it's super light and the devices it runs on are cheap as hell because of that.

of course, >google but