Anyone seriously considering the switch from Windows to Linux?

In My Humble Opinion
41

This is one of those things where I think people really overthink it. Sometimes there is a particular reason to use one distro over another, such as a focus on gaming or vendor support, but otherwise, just pick one. In most cases it isn’t going to matter much.

It’s not 1998, most things are distributed as binaries. I use many out-of-distro applications like Zoom, Microsoft Edge, VMware Workstation, Google Chrome, Microsoft Defender, Crowdstrike Falcon EDR, RStudio, VS Code, and various random things downloaded from github or dockerhub that are all ready to install or use binaries.

And for me, in scientific computing, stuff coming as source code makes Linux by far the easiest option. Often it is as easy as git pull ; make. Sometimes I might need to do apt install to fulfill a dependency.

That gets back to the exact same hangup people have. Do you need a word processor or do you need MS Word? Do you need an image editor or do you need Photoshop?

If you absolutely need a particular piece of software, then you are locked into whatever operating system that software runs on.

The debate is always about whether someone needs Excel, or if they just need a spreadsheet, and only think they need Excel. Most of this is rigidity and fear. When I need help with writing some formula in Libreoffice, an answer aimed at Excel is almost always going to work to solve my problem, I just need to realize the button I click on looks a bit different.

42

I’d give it a shot once the anti-cheat problem is solved. I tried installing a version of Arch Linux on an extra PC, but I hosed it by doing the update order wrong or something. Linux Mint is going better, but I don’t do much with the computer. I guess I’d try Bazzite on my desktop if that time comes.

43

If i am doing something that i can do in a browser, I’ll use Google docs, which are more stable, and generally better than MS office online. And also, the only reason I’d like to get off Windows is to get away from OneDrive. If i have to use OneDrive, i may add well do it from Windows. I honestly can’t think why you’d want to get off Windows and then use MS office online.

But even more important, as you might have guessed from my comments about downloading movies, i often use my travel laptop when i don’t have reliable (or any) Internet service. In airplanes. At a friend’s house in Italy, where the wifi only reaches a handful of rooms and my cell signal is dicey. At random hotels where the wifi is slow and unreliable…

I need a real copy of real M$ Office. I even need the Windows version, because the Mac version is different in a bunch of minor-but-annoying ways. But having that on my gaming laptop is adequate, and any decent spreadsheet and word processor is good enough when I’m traveling.

44

Lol, while i have pulled a few items from GitHub, i really don’t know how to, and have needed help every time I’ve done it. If using Linux means i need to get all my software from GitHub, it’s not a good option for me.

45

I agree, but because Google did a rug pull on higher ed, where I work is now a Microsoft shop. Supposedly there are ways to make some web apps work offline, but that just seems like asking for pain. So yeah, not a good option for offline use. Again, it comes back to, do you (the general you, not the specific you) need Word or a word processor?

It’s the opposite. Not that you need to get stuff from GitHub, but that on Linux it is an option, while for other operating systems it is not. I’m coming at this from a scientific computing perspective, though. Someone comes to me wanting to run the software they saw in a journal article, and if it isn’t pure python or R, then there is a good chance it will only easily be made to work on Linux.

If it only runs on one system, it’s going to be Linux. If it runs on two systems it’s Linux and Mac. This is the opposite side of “I need MS Word,” “I need this software that does a particular analysis with a certain data, and it’s only distributed as source.”

As for getting software, I think people who don’t use Linux aren’t aware of the vast amount of software available in distribution repositories. Debian Trixie, the newest release, has nearly 70,000 packages available.

In many ways, it is choice overload. The point is that all of that software is extremely easy to install, and is free. I can’t say if it does exactly what someone wants, or does it well, but it is there to try with minimal effort.

46

You say that as if it’s a binary choice. But it really isn’t. “Needs to work offline” is a fairly common requirement. So is “needs to open Word docs moderately cleanly”. Libreoffice satisfies both of those quite nicely.

If you just need an extremely basic word processor, you might actually be happier with a simple text editor.

You’ve made an excellent case for you to use Linux. It even explains why you think that running Linux with MS Office Online might make sense for you. But if you step back for a moment, I think you will see that none of your issues is a reason for a person currently running Windows to consider a switch to Linux. If I needed Linux to run the software I know I want to use, I would already be running Linux, I wouldn’t be contemplating it.

47

This is a hugely significant point. While I share the common disdain for Windows and Microsoft’s lack of meaningful quality control, MS does put a huge effort into the principle of “it just works”, and the typical ordinary user can go about their business with the typical ordinary GUI and not have to worry about obscure techie stuff. In addition to that, some of us after decades of experience with different versions of Windows have learned a lot about the internals and are comfortable with things like poking around the registry or using command-mode tools. Linux is not only a whole different environment, but in my experience it demands technical knowledge right from the start. For well-acclimated Windows users, it can be a nightmare.

48

I think LibreOffice is amazing and I know a lot of people don’t like what MS Office and/or MS365 has become, but for me, it hit a sweet spot in terms of utility. I could start writing a document on my desktop PC and not even bother explicitly saving it, then later open it up from my phone or some other device and just pick up where I left off.

It’s only synchronising data but the way that it happened completely seamlessly and transparently was incredibly useful and I do miss it - people have suggested all sorts of smart (and some very stupid) ways to try to replicate that sort of thing on Linux, but none of them was nearly so slick and seamless.
Also I know a lot of people love to hate on OneDrive, but I found it genuinely useful and I even paid an extra sub for another couple of terabytes of cloud storage, which was pretty competitively priced for what it was.

That said, I was deeply unimpressed with the way they tried to stealthily force me to upgrade my subscription to a higher priced tier and that, on top of the frustration I was experiencing with Windows 11, was enough to tip the balance and that’s when I migrated away.

49

Wait, what happened there?

Not at all. You never need to use Github or Git. Some distros have their own app stores where you just point and click and download what you want, like any other app store.

I don’t know if that has been true for a decade or two now. Every software has its “happy path”, and straying from it is just as painful in Windows as it is on the Linuxes and Macs. They all have their quirks, often significant, and there isn’t always a solution or even a community willing to help you figure out a solution. Microsoft’s community support is especially terrible in this regard (their forums as absolute trash).

That said, the sheer familiarity of having used Windows for decades gives it a huge leg up in many households and organizations.

50

They offered Google Workspace (or whatever it was called at the time) to universities for free, or incredibly cheap. At the time, we could have our email go to university branded Gmail, use Google Docs, and unlimited Google Drive storage.

Yes, unlimited.

People used things like rclone to dump terabytes of data into Google Drive. Also departments used it for its intended purpose of saving and sharing stuff with a group.

After 5-10 years of this, Google decided that the new storage size was going to be limited to 5GB per account, including Gmail and Drive. So not only are the exploiters who’d been backing up 10s of terabytes of encrypted data to Drive screwed, but also the “normal” users who had 20GB of accumulated email and files.

Then Google comes back and says we can continue at the previous storage levels for $30 million per year, or something like that. Even getting rid of the data from the top 2% of users that accounted for 75% of the space would still have left a bill of millions per year.

In the end, university Gmail is gone, and Google Docs still remains with a 5GB limit. Oddly, our official mailing list software is Google Groups (probably because it such a bad choice for mailing lists).

We’re all in on Microsoft now, with Exchange for email, MS365 for Office, 4TB of OneDrive per person, Teams for our desk phones, Sharepoint for whatever it does, AD for authentication, MS Defender for EDR on Macs, and various enterprise management to tie it all together.

Yes, exactly. I do not want anyone who is happy on Windows to switch, because I’m the one they’re going to come and ask for help with Linux. At least when the have a problem with Windows, I can just shrug and say, “you made your bed.”

Usually the “should I switch to Linux” really means, “can I have everything exactly like Windows, but for free and without ads and dark patterns for Microsoft? And also it should make this 9 year old laptop run like it’s new.”

The answer is of course, no. Linux has benefits over Windows. MacOS has benefits over Windows. All of that comes with trade-offs. Some of the trade-offs are imagined, or decades out of date (I’m going to have to hand tune an XF86Config file!).

Others are very real. For example, Linux lacks support for the built-in cameras on some newer laptops. Others are not Linux specific. Installing Windows on a computer where the storage driver is not included in the install image is a pain.

If someone just wants to play with Linux there are virtualizing solutions, and live images that offer that opportunity without having to wipe your Windows computer.

51

There are two directly opposed conflicting factors with Windows. One is the principle of “it just works”, also exemplified by the principle of “you get what you pay for”. Windows costs money. Linux is the free product of geeky nerds.

But the other side of it is that Microsoft continues to make changes just for the sake of change and profit – “hey, lookit all these new bells’n’whistles we got that you never knew you needed!”. If they just focused on usability, stability, and incremental improvement, Windows could be a fantastic product. But that’s not how you make money.

52

just like the OP, I made the switch to Linux Mint (a couple of years ago - kids never noticed it!) … and its mostly working fine to great. I also managed to re-surrect old laptops with a light Linux distro (mostly during covid when all my kids needed a dedicated “school” computer out of the blue) …

So, overall I am one happy camper - with one (major) caveat: FUCK the whole software updating and installing thingy under Linux - that shit still thinks we are in 1988 or so. Give me SW update/installing like under Android and we are done … but the whole checking dependencies and whatnot - sorry, but fuck that - not gonna open a terminal window in 2025 and type in some long-ass syntax (which I - honestly - do not understand) to install some programm.

53

Well said.

54

I liked it enough I switched to using it on Windows on my work machine and ditched Office entirely.

55

I use LibreOffice on my Windows machine, so at least I am already used to that.

Brian

56

i mean, you shoudln’t have to do any dependency checking manually. The package manager (preferably teh graphical one) should do all that on its own. I don’t use Mint, but looking it up, you can use either Software Manager or Synaptic Package Manager.

I mean, that’s the entire point of a package manager. It gets all the dependencies for you. Otherise you could just download the installer.

57

If that’s what you want, you just need to tweak Windows 11. Just get rid of the bad stuff. You might want someone who knows what they’re doing to do it (especially for that last part as you’re gonna need to debloat and throw in an SSD and such) but it’s definitely doable.

58

the thing is: more often than not, when DL a linux version of a given software (from their webpage), you often get tarball (.rar or .bz or so …) files, which on my comp do NOT auto-open or extract or install.

When I click on those, the OS asks me what to do with that … then I am pretty often pissed already, b/c it is not that an installation file opens and does its thing, but i have to get into the 1964ish syntax of the terminal, and do the sudo-crap … - by then I am quite often out, as the other option is often find some instructions in some obscure fora and copy/paste those (makes me always uneasy).

Just give me the same functionality that is offered for win or apple: doubleclick on the icon and it starts installing and I am golden … and that only works on some of those competing software portals (flatpack?), which also tend to not have the latest version and wont get updated via the OS.

Give us the same functionality we have on the android cellphone for crying out loud and millions of people will flock towards linux

59

That’s the thing. On Linux you don’t download software from webpages except as a last resort. You get them from your package manager. Just like you get apps from Google Play on Android.

We’re talking Linux Mint here. Between Synaptic and their own built in package manager, it would be very strange for anything but the most esoteric software not to be in the package manager.

Heck, you more often have to do what you are describing on Windows, downloading a ZIP file and having to decompress it. If they don’t bother giving it an installer.

60

I used to have to futz around to open zip files on a Mac. Whenever you interact with multiple systems with multiple standards, you’ll run into issues like that.

And I’m not looking for “exactly like Windows, but without ads”. I don’t like the ads, but i can deal with that. What i really want is “comparable to using Windows or a Mac, but with a file structure i understand”. Windows has taking to hiding things. Especially if you don’t want to use one drive. (And hey, i bought a giant hard drive so i could store a lot of files. Don’t tell me you are going to delete my files because i haven’t purchased enough online space!)

And i do anticipate better user-to-user advise in the Linux world.

It’s probably worth makes a bootable thumb drive and checking it out. Maybe between Christmas and New Year’s. It sounds like if i can get the basic system running, and watch YouTube videos upside down in a browser, that i can get everything else to work.