Anyone seriously considering the switch from Windows to Linux?

In My Humble Opinion
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I have had to type equally obvious strings into the windows command line. Or rather, corporate IT support has typed stuff like that while i watched. If i had this kind of problem with a windows machine of my own, I’d contact warranty support or throw it away and buy a new one, depending on the age of the device. And i have had problems like this on corporate windows machines. Just last week i spent an hour trying to get Teams to work on my employer’s laptop, finally gave up and called the help desk, and it took the help desk guy 40 minutes, which included typing a bunch of stuff into the command line.

I’ve also had several instances of not being able to get the sound to work on Windows devices. Like, it will work fine for system sounds, but not for a zoom call. And i have to go digging because there are three separate utilities to control the sound and i can’t find the right one.

I want to say that so far, EVERYTHING EXCEPT AUDACITY JUST WORKED. The screen worked, the touchscreen worked, the touchpad worked, the keyboard worked, the screen even flipped upside down when i turned the laptop into “tent” mode. And my headphones connected over Bluetooth without any issues, and i happily watched YouTube and Netflix on the thing, all without touching the command line.

Audacity is weird and fussy about its audio feeds, both in and out. I’ve had to fiddle with it on both my Mac and my Windows computers, too. I assumed that I’d need to find someone who uses Audacity in Ubuntu to help me, and I’m delighted that Linux users here have suggestions.

That’s actually not been my experience, despite my looking for help here. My experience is that modern computers just work until they don’t. And then you are kinda screwed. And if you are lucky, you can find other people who use the same software and have had the same issues who can help you. That’s why, when my husband asked if i believed in the wisdom of crowds, i said “yes”, and installed a popular package. Because the more popular the package, the less screwed you are. But at least there are techie people in the Linux community who might help, and i know a lot who might help just to be helpful. You generally need to pay someone for help with Windows. And it still might not work.

By the way, because i was having this issue, and i wanted to use Audacity on my flight, i updated the Windows partition’s copy of audacity and copied all my source files there. And i booted into Windows on the airplane, and failed to connect my headphones at all. I was able to debug that and get them to work again on the ground, but i wasn’t going to debug a Bluetooth problem when there were 15+ Bluetooth devices within range of my laptop all saying, “I’m here, pick me!”.

So i gave up and watched YouTube on the Ubuntu partition, with my wireless headphones.

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It actually is hidden in Ubuntu, in the default setup. I needed help from my husband to find it. Google would probably have worked, too, but my husband was right there.

Thank you. I appreciate the help.

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It is not supposed to be obvious in any way, shape, or form. I have recommended a couple of packages that I, personally, find somewhat useful, because I have some experience tinkering with audio stuff under Linux (though I claim no super professional expertise). This has not much to do with the essence of the operating system, if you are under that misapprehension— think of it the same way as if I recommended some utility to list USB devices under Windows, or similar technical information.

Back to Audacity, here is some crucial information: if you install the “snap” package, it does not seem to work. Install the regular package (via command-line apt or the GUI or whatever you prefer). Then “pipewire” should appear in your menu of output devices and you will be able to hear something.

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I need to give Linux another try. If it will install cleanly and run without fixes.

I remember at work that Linux had security concerns. There was one guy in IT that supported Linux and stayed busy keeping them secure.

I think there was a concern Linux servers could be a risk to penetrate the company firewall. The ports have to be secured?

That’s less of a concern at home. Your not protecting 1400 computers and SQL servers in a business network. A home is not a hacker’s target like a university or business.

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You can firewall ports under Linux, though; that capability is built into the kernel. Not that I claim it is better or worse than let’s say OpenBSD, but note that a lot of routers run OpenWRT and that is Linux and works OK for casual users. A corporate environment might be held to more strictly certified standards, which I have no idea off the top of my head what they are.

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I apologize for what may appear to be my incessant gripes about my experiences with Linux. But since our time on this earth is limited we each have to learn from experience and do what’s best for us in the best way we can. I freely admit that since around Windows 10 (which I never had) and now Windows 11 (which I have, and mostly don’t like) Windows is problematic, too, and this time it’s by design, which makes it all the more frustrating.

Currently the best I can do is running Windows 11 with all the “helpful” security features disabled.

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I’m not ignoring the advice, I’m just busy. I might have time to look into this on my train ride this weekend, or maybe during sunday’s storm.

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All systems have security concerns, and any system administrator is going to spend much of their time on security related issues. Any place with a large enough fleet of servers should have system administrators who specialize in security. There is nothing Linux specific about this, and no matter what some some slick salesman manages to convince the C-suite, there is also no way to avoid the security work by using some new operating system or software.

Point is, anyone who says (Windows|Linux|*BSD|Mac) (does|does not) require paying attention to security is either lying or naive.

The open port thing I also find funny, especially when it comes from people who should know better. If there is no process listening on port 25, then some other computer can bang on port 25 all day, and nothing is going to happen (unless there is some big security hole in the receiving computer’s networks stack).

Of course, security in depth, and having a border firewall block all port 25 connections (except to your mail server), and have the local computer’s firewall drop all packets bound for port 25 is great. You’re still in the same situation of banging on that computer’s port 25 not making a bit of difference, but removing the border or local firewall does not leave you vulnerable, when nothing is listening on 25.

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Years ago, people at work would convert an older, obsolete Win PC to a Linux print server or personal email server.

A new IT Network manager was hired from the corporate world and shut all that down.

Is Thunderbird still the preferred Linux email?

Creating your own personalized email accounts is a luxury. A throw away email helps with Spam. But, it’s legit and will pass the web site account validation check.

Delete the throw aways off the server later.

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I have it, mostly for the built-in newsreader, but if you’re using GNOME, their own client should do just fine.

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I’m actually using Thunderbird on Windows because my old version of Microsoft Office Outlook doesn’t support Oauth 2.0. It took a bunch of tweaking to get it to work the way I prefer (with the kind help of fellow Dopers) but now I’m fine with it. I’m not generally a believer in open source software, but Thunderbird is one of the few free open source applications that I use regularly.

272

I’m using Thunderbird both on desktop Linux and on my Android phone - I used Outlook on the phone until recently, but it kept shoving Copilot in my face - there is a switch in the settings to turn it off, but it just turns itself back on after a short while (not even just when the app gets an update - Copilot kept coming back on a daily basis)

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Despite its many, many faults, Microsoft is actually capable of producing fairly decent software, even if they habitually rely on their customers to be their field testers. But someone should definitely send their leadership a message that they’d be much better off and enjoy a bigger market share if they stopped enshittifying everything they produce. It’s gotten really bad with Windows 11 and is just getting worse.

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By the way, if you want to double-check whether something was installed as a “snap”, as opposed to a “package”, the Terminal way is snap list . I definitely recommend trying to install the Audacity package and not the snap or flatpak (sudo snap remove audacity if you have to)

If something is FUBAR out of the box on your computer, that is a legitimate experience (often applying to Microsoft Windows), but people are trying to explain that it probably does not have to do with “Linux” any more than Windows enshittification can be traced to the Windows NT kernel.

If you want to compare apples to apples, I would quasi-reasonably say Ubuntu (/Mint, Debian, …) is the Microsoft Windows of Linux, though that kind of thing changes as different flavours-of-the-day become popular and/or corporate-backed, and explain that, e.g., you bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu on it and after two days of struggling the soundcard still did not work and it crashes half the time when coming out of sleep mode, some specific information like that.

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They (and a lot of other big companies) have poured massive investment capital into their AI stuff and they are now desperate to try to get a return on that investment; they are at this point pretty much obliged to try to force-feed it to their customers in the hope that something catches on.

I actually think Apple’s strategy of “we’ll just use someone else’s” might be the most sane and potentially bubble-burst proof.

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That’s an interesting suggestion. Can you explain what the difference is?

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The difference is, Snap and Flatpak applications are (in theory) sandboxed or isolated, while a normal system application is going to access resources through the normal system libraries. So a weird graphics or audio problem with an isolated application may be due to the way its sandbox is configured, a problem that I have noticed a few times, including with Audacity.

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Snap is the sneaky package manager that Ubuntu has replaced apt with. Everytime you use apt, or try to install software Ubuntu uses snaps behind the scenes. It has its own quirks.

However this sneaky replacement with snap is one of the biggest reason why most people recommend Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. The Mint team constructs their distro from Ubuntu, and one of the things they do is remove Ubuntu’s snap to put back Debian’s apt.

They do other changes, but Ubuntu has lost a lot of faith in the Linux world for their trojan horsing snap into their distro. (It’s fine to use and rely on snap, but when I type “sudo apt …” I do not want snap to be activated)

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Enshittification in action! :slight_smile:

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The whole Snap debacle is pretty ridiculous really - it’s like

They’re nearly the same damn thing