@nyanide I keep saying it, the Linux community is bad. And he's right, most of the good software you associate with Linux is available on Windows too. So there's little incentive in switching to Linux in the first place.
Until user friendliness becomes a priority, Linux is not a good choice for a desktop OS for the average user.
It's a good choice for some programmers, people who like to tinker, and maybe some other niche users. But not for... pretty much everyone else on Earth.
@nyanide Honestly... I can live without package managers. It's definitely an useful feature Linux has, but at times, especially when I was in the Ubuntu ecosystem, I just wanted the ability to download a .exe equivalent setup file from a webpage, and know it will "just work".
Ubuntu had .deb at the time, but those could be hit or miss if the dev didn't package for the latest Ubuntu version. These days, AppImage is a good equivalent, but not everyone uses them. And I have trust issues with Snap and Flatpaks that devs seem to prefer.
These days, arch repositories & AUR really do seem to have everything, so haven't felt that "just give me a damn .exe!" need in many years.
But software packaging is still a mess in Linux overall. Too many package managers, too many standards. Windows keeping it somewhat simple is a big benefit for the average users I talk about.
@nyanide The schizoid thing got me moving away from Ubuntu too, so I get it. For me it wasn't necesarily an issue of getting all software up to date, but I'd hear "Gimp has this new feature!", and then I'd discover Ubuntu wouldn't put it in for several months. And I've had issues with PPAs too... so I wanted out. Solution for me was Manjaro and currently Endeavour. Together with KDE, I'm actually happy right now.
I have days when I think about going Windows again, but not strong enough to actually do it. But I also don't want to change my distro unless someone pays me a lot.
>Windows keeping it somewhat simple is a big benefit for the average users I talk about.
That's mostly a end-user abstraction. Creating a Windows installer package is one of the worst experiences someone can have in developing software. Much much worse than what Linux has to offer in terms of rpm or even dpkg. Pure horror.
>the rest...
I agree with most. Packaging software for multiple distros is insane especially since you have to support like 4 version of Ubuntu, 3 Fedora versions, 2 openSUSE versions. Most of those issues could be eliminated by throwing away point release distros for desktops though. They serve little to no purpose anyway.
@phnt @nyanide
>Creating a Windows installer package is one of the worst experiences
I'm sure it is. But I'm not talking about developers. I'm talking about users. From the user pov, "it just works". Of course, it's not always perfect. I'm sure I've had issues every now and then, and at some point, really old .exe installers don't play nice with anything after Win7. But there's also cases where I got software made for Win9x working on modern Windows. Dependencies usually prevent that from happening on Linux completely. There was a few days ago a similar thread where someone was saying that they found reports of games that had had a release for Linux, where people recommended playing the Windows version through Proton instead, because "it just works". When you can get these kinds of situations, something ain't right imo.
>But software packaging is still a mess in Linux overall. Too many package managers, too many standards.
Actually true, christ almighty some aspects of Linux are legitimately cucked because of weird distro maintainers.