"popularity contest" is an opt-in on Debian. It's not malicious, and it's not for financial gain, but it is in a loose sense spying.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
... No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
I think it recovered my PC for me twice, and it took about ~10 minutes each time at most. Good luck reinstalling everything in that time lol.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it's not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that's not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Of course not, but it works 9/10 times for most people. Enough so that most people never have to deal with a faulty Windows update.
sfc /scannow didn't work? Well too bad, cuz now you gotta reinstall your OS
I had to literally give up on a windows install that worked itself into an update hole, run the update, cant log in, undo the update, it tries to update at night. Endless cycle, no possible fix.
I don't want to berate you, but just know with enough practice, you'll be able to fix that linux install. Windows wont let you fix it.
That's why I make a btrfs snapshot of my system before every upgrade. Rolling back from a rescue image takes only a minute.
Edit: automatically via the upgrade script
What a great idea! They should automate something like that! Maybe they could call it System Restore?
I’ve actually had more issues with Windows doing that. My wifi drivers have stopped working on more than one occasion, and once it just decided to stop recognizing my wife’s hard drive.
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
That's not so much a Linux problem as a Corporate greed problem.
Remember a big part in Windows mobile dying was its lack of Google support and not it itself lacking in any way
"I used Windows all my life and am unwilling to learn anything new"
It's like the difference between learning how to read a book and learning how to assemble it in a foreign language and then read it, with many of the pages mangled and eaten away.
Oh please, I use Ubuntu and Kali at work. Just because I don’t suck the Linux penguins dick doesn’t mean my statement is any less true. Using Linux is a pain. Even some of the most mundane tasks with application installation, setup, or maintenance take 20x as long and require non stop troubleshooting at every turn when nothing works as expected or you encounter new things you don’t know how to get around. Down vote me to hell i don’t care, I don’t hate Linux but I stand by my statement and everything is more difficult.
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
Erm I'll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language -- that doesn't make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you're already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you're dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.
You're only partially correct. I did grow up using Windows, but I also dual-booted Ubuntu on every machine that I could. I also used a Macbook exclusively for a few years, and MacOS was way closer to Linux than Windows was back then.
Nowadays, I also use a mix of Powershell and Ubuntu via WSL, depending on what I need. Linux commands usually do less than what I'd like it to, but they work like simple building blocks. Powershell does exactly what I want, but some of these commands are way too freaking long.
However, I'd argue that path variables aren't for power users. Sure, it's not for your grandmother, but a decent chunk of people who wanted to run a Minecraft server for their friends probably looked into path variables, and almost all of them looked at firewall settings and port forwarding. Those people will be confused and scared of GUIs and editing txt or bat files. Without a friend walking them through the process, opening a terminal is infinitely more intimidating. Even if someone is fine with learning terminal commands, there aren't nearly enough checks with Linux commands when doing something potentially destructive compared to Windows. With Windows, you usually get some minor annoyance with hard to find solutions at worst. With Linux, assuming no backups, you'll end up needing to clean install if you're trying to learn how to do something.
In all fairness, I haven't used Linux GUIs often in about 4 years. The most recent time I used one at all was about a year ago when I was trying to set up a remote desktop solution, but didn't know what a desktop manager was, what a display server was etc. I only really use Linux from a terminal nowadays.
EDIT: To add to the PATH thing, you severely overestimate the number of programmers who are also power users. It is crazy how many CS majors don't know how to fix basic issues.
In what world does Windows have an intuitive, consistent UI/UX?
You just got used to the mess that Microsoft calls a "user experience". Gnome and KDE are consistent platforms for their respective apps with Gnome having one of the most flushed out HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) of any desktop interface to make their DE in the most hands off/out of the way experience for you to focus on your tasks (subjective)
I can agree Linux is not intuitive.
I won't agree Windows is intuitive. Its just not.
My argument? 2 settings panels for more than a decade now.
That's it
Fair. It's still intuitive as an XP/7/8 user, but not for a new user. That being said, Windows 11 has made good improvements in moving stuff to the "Settings" app.
I would've agreed when I used i3 and no desktop environment, but now that I'm running gnome on fedora? I completely disagree. The user experience on gnome is far more coherent, intuitive, and less convoluted than on windows.
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
This is one of the issues that systemd purports to solve, and it gets nothing but flack for it.
Granted, systemd does have its flaws. But the religious war around it is unjustified.
Yes, Linux has steadily improved over the years. It's just always going to have a harder time of it because there isn't one company dictating the base by fiat. Of course, that imparts other advantages. For example, programs developed on Linux tend to be more portable by default than Mac or Windows programs.
The granularity and scale of active directory is a major thing that is keeping linux out of offices, etc...I know you can do a lot with certain tools but nothing comes close as far as I have seen.
The granularity of AD doesn't scale though. I work for a huge bank and trying to get something changed in Group Policy is basically impossible. Making it even the tiniest bit bigger (e.g. adding a single new rule) will slow down every goddamned PC and VM in the entire organization. It adds up to real money lost real fast.
Not only that but some changes to GPOs can break things that you didn't foresee so the general wisdom is, "don't ever change it." Rendering that whole "granularity" argument moot. What good is granularity if you can't even use it?
Also, getting AD to scale to the size required the help of Microsoft. They had to change AD for us many times because the way it replicated certain things just does not scale past around 20,000 desktops (if memory serves). They gave us custom DLLs that run on our DCs to keep things operating reasonably smoothly but their lack of support on non-Windows platforms is a perpetual problem.
If literally every single computer in your company is Windows you'll be fine. However, as soon as you start trying to connect your Linux servers to AD everything starts getting really fucking complicated and troublesome real fast.
Microsoft made a lot of mistakes when they were designing AD but the biggest one was making it intentionally proprietary in so many ways. It prevents us from adopting it more. If AD actually worked with everything we'd be paying Microsoft a lot more in licenses every year.
Aside: Their second biggest mistake with AD was allowing groups to be placed in other groups. This made it so that "simple" administration of your policies and access controls goes from a single lookup to a lookup to the power of n groups. It doesn't scale at all and exponentially increases network traffic and load on domain controllers.
LDAP + Kerberos running on Linux servers doesn't have this problem because it doesn't allow it (intentionally, because it's stupid).
Oh man, I'm thinking about it now and AD just makes me so upset, haha. It's such a poorly engineered product. Don't give it more credit than it's due. It works fine for small organizations but that does not mean it's a good product.
I can see why you'd choose Active Directory on a Windows server over a general LDAP server running Linux. But why can't Linux Workstations interface with a Windows AD server?
I create Computer accounts for Linux servers at work. It works fine. We only have Windows workstations, though. But, I can't see how we couldn't have Linux workstations.
