Games on Linux are great now this is why I fully moved to Linux. Is the the work place Pc’s market improving.
Why would “Linux” want to get more users, whatever “Linux” is.
Personally for me its compatibility and support. Too many of programs and hardware I use daily aren’t compatible or even have a Linux version or have little to no support officially or not.
For an example I tried to use Mint on my main rig but i was having trouble with my two monitor. I wanted my right monitor to be the main display but i kept wanting to use the left one, issue with how i wanted them to be arranged virtually and a ghost third monitor showing up and it all reverting settings or just breaking when a program open in full screen
OR when i messed with how drop down menus in settings and though steam was busted or something cuz i couldn’t right click on my games in my library
Native Adobe apps ports :(
CAD software.
FreecCAD just released it’s first full version and it’s a pain to use. Back in 2018 somebody said FOSS CAD software was at least ten years behind the big windows commercial software. I think now it’s about fifteen behind.
I disagree. Majority of average office workers do not use CAD software. It’s not a hurdle to widespread adoption.
Majority of average office workers do not use CAD software.
That really depends on the office, doesn’t it? Project Managers, Detailers and Engineers should be familiar with CAD software.
Even if for a moment we assume u r right, what about electricians? cnc ? 3D printing? etc.
Not a problem for u doesnt mean it isnt for someone else, and we aint even talkin about compatibility issues between cad software.
Try bricsCAD closed source but native for linux https://www.bricsys.com/
The software looks nice, but it seems there’s no 3D capable hobby-tier. 3D modelling starts at Pro-tier, which is >$700 per year. That’s a low price for commercial software, but not a good option for hobbyists
Question was not about price but about existing of such software,yes cad software will alwasy cost a lot
Some small but important taken-for-granted things functioning like screen and audio sharing/recording in wayland. Yes, I know sometimes with some apps/distros it works. But it needs to work all the time on all reasonably current hardware everywhere. Wayland is getting there, but we’re still a ways off and X11 has its own issues. It feels like we’re 80% of the way there for feature parity and stability vs Windows and MacOS, but this last 20% stretch is feeling like an eternity. The bugginess and lack of features stretches to multi-monitor support as well. Plus we’ve got a bunch of distros threatening off and on to remove 32bit libraries, which would really hamper software support that’s already anemic to begin with… There’s no one single blockbuster issue. It’s just little everyday things that produce just enough friction to keep the unwashed masses away.
I think part of the problem is that while Linux software is constantly getting more user friendly, the average user is getting less knowledgeable about computers at just as fast of a rate. People even understanding the concept of files and folders doesn’t seem to be a given anymore.
Yes, exactly. Phones and tablets have resulted in intro to comp sci instructors having to teach young people how a filesystem works.
Everything mainstream is a black box corporate ecosystem these days. Kids learn how to use specific programs and mobile apps, but don’t learn anything about the OS or machine itself because everything is isolated and “just works”.
It’s a really weird spot to be in. We’re used to the older generations being bad with tech, but now it’s also the younger ones too.
Part of the problem there is that we don’t teach people how to actually use computers, we teach how to use specific programs instead usually.
A few months back I saw a post somewhere about how “kids these days don’t know how to read an analog clock”. And it’s the exact same thing, you have to teach people how to use them. You don’t just innately know how to use these things we created.
I grew up in the 2000s and got taught how to read an analog clock in like the first year of school.
I remember me teacher made a clock face on paper with the two arms pinned on. I brought up my parents had a clock with ‘lines instead of numbers’ and she taught everyone roman numerals on the spot.
What are teachers doing nowadays?
A lot of teachers are really underpaid and have a lot of students to worry about. And that’s on top of parents wanting to meddle in their kids education and schools trying to cram more into the same amount of time. So it’s not always possible for teachers to be able to teach everything they need to, let alone other useful things to know.
And well what I said in my original comment about people just expecting others to know things without bothering to teach them. Years ago I was expected to know how to sign my name in cursive when the school district that I was in cut cursive when I was in kindergarten. Thankfully I had a teacher who actually taught me how to later on but otherwise I wouldn’t have known.
When i sign my name i just write the first letter and do a fancy squiggle. Works everytime. lol
That’s more depressing than I can handle
This is an unfortunate truth. I occasionally teach a short course on basic computer networking with a short segment on Unix/Linux to students ranging from ages 18-25 and only about 1 or 2 out of every class of 20 even knows what an “operating system” is.
You use an interesting example- personally, I feel like while files and folders have their place, I prefer they be part of the background and not presented to the user. Take photos, for example. If I’m looking for pictures of my dog, I don’t want to go into the 2022 folder, then the August folder, then look through all those files, back out into 2022 then go into the September folder, etc. I just want to type ‘dog’. Or pick from a dropdown list of common tags, or anything other than digging through files and folders.
Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.
But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.
It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.
I mean hierarchy is how we find any specific item in the real world though, so it seems like the best way to organize things on a computer. If I’m looking for a pair of scissors I know to go into my house, into my kitchen, into the drawer, and take the scissors. You can use tagging and things to search, but having that be the main way of accessing files will never be as reliable or repeatable as just looking where you know the file is.
Precisely- it’s a concept that is ingrained in people to the point where anyone who doesn’t understand it is viewed as lacking. However, it’s needless.
I don’t need to understand IP addressing subnet routing to go to a website. Why should I need to understand a file and folder structure to find an old tax document?
What was that famous saying again? Something about developers making things idiot -proof and the universe producing bigger idiots?
It needs to shed the gamers and get more useful users.
What? It already doesn’t have most of the gamers.
Normies can use it easier than gamers. Linux on the right hardware is stable as fuck and Linux has always been good at running a web browser, which is like 99% of what normies do on computers these days.
Two things:
- Obviously it needs to come pre-installed. This is a really tough hurdle to overcome and I’m not sure how it can be.
- Security needs a lot of work if Linux is going to lose the small-target advantage.
Reliance on terminal
I’m gradually concluding that every decision in computer UI has been wrong. Peak UI happened in the 1990s; it’s been downhill ever since. People think terminals are scary, but come on—asking ChatGPT “how do I do this?” and getting three lines that have worked unchanged since 1989 is not harder than watching some tech-bro explain which menus to click… menus that get rearranged every six months so they can find new ways to wedge ads into your ribbon.
Adding my voice to the hardware compatibility issue. While most hardware just works, Linux usually lacks the ability to configure the device. Audio interfaces are a good example of this. They work but you can’t set the sample rate or enable any custom features on ANY of them.
I believe government regulators should step in and require hardware manufacturers to provide Linux support equal to Windows or Mac. This could be relaxed for low volume or highly specialised devices, but mainstream consumer stuff should be more universal.
It CAN be configured, but you have to go hunting for the tools to do so.
I’ve got an old 5.1 surround sound speaker setup attached to my main rig, and in both Cinnamon and KDE (the only two I’ve tried), you can’t use the normal DE’s audio control panel to put the thing in 5.1 mode without first installing an old, probably unmaintained tool called ALSAJackRetask. Once you’ve retasked the jacks, several options for surround appear in the DE’s audio control panel. It knows but it can’t do.
They work but you can’t set the sample rate or enable any custom features on ANY of them.
Not in my experience. I have a RME card that can be configured via alsamixer (which should work for most cards) and a Focusrite Saphire USB interface that someone wrote a little UI for in which you can even freely route audio to/from different channels and mix busses.
Are either of those accessible from the GUI in a fresh default install? I know exactly where in Windows to find that control panel (granted they make it more convoluted to get to in every successive version), but I don’t know how I would do it with just what the OS provides in either Mint or Kubuntu (the two distros I have the most familiarity with).
I have only been rocking Linux as a daily driver for a year or two now though, so it could just be a gap in my knowledge.
No but now we get closer to the real problem. Meaning there is an accessibility problem, which is different than the (in my opinion wrong) statement that I wanted to correct.
Are you able to enable the Air function or doing any routing on your focusrite? I’ve found a way to handle sample rates on Topping Pro 2x2, and on my old focusrite 2i2. But input delays through the audio layers in linux are slower than windows and mac.
I should clarify my original comment. I’m looking for full feature parity out of the box and not having to devise some sort of work around or relay on a 3rd party and hope they don’t stop maintaining it.
It is a real frustration, I use my linux install as must as I can but somethings are limited by the lack of 1st party support.
The problem with audio interfaces is that they function very different internally and have different kind of settings. Alsamixer does usually a decent job of listing all parameters but it is an old TUI tool and not nicely embedded into the desktop so I guess people just don’t find it. Stuff like latencies just have to do with buffer sizes that are configured in your machines audio system, usually pipewire, pulseaudio or jack, which all work on top of alsa (which is where the drivers run). You can reduce the buffers there (in config files) to get lower latencies. This however means that your system needs to have a very tight scheduling for your audio processes, because if it fails to fill the buffer in time there will be glitches. Professional low latency audio does definetly not work out of the box on linux. It got a little better with pipewire, but I don’t think it works well without a little bit of tinkering. If you decide to tinker I recommend you read this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio
I don’t remember which tool I use for my Scarlett (I’m travelling). But I googled a bit and this looks good:
https://blog.rtrace.io/posts/fedora-support-focusrite-scarlett/
This all would be better if manufacturers would provide Linux config tools like they do on windows or at least information of their protocols. Until they do we have to be greatful for people reverse engineering that stuff (e.g. by analysing USB traffic on windows) and then writing uis for it.
Edit: this site seems to make more sense as the arch wiki page (it is linked there):
Ah, fair enough.
Workplace is a huge conveyor of technology, and capitalism loves capitalism. Public sector has a much higher Linux adoption rate
I guess it would be reducing the need of terminal usage as much as possible. That’s still the only thing a common user struggles with, in my opinion. The rest is just difference or has nothing to do with Linux.
With Linux gaming is rising currently, most common problem is kernel anti-cheat games and it’s not Linux problem, for example. What are devs supposed to do? To develop literal Windows kernel compatibility layer or something? But Linux may do stuff on their end to make cheating difficult to keep game studio’s happy but that would also mean to stray away from its philosophy. As a general platform, it would be hard to do this anyway. This would be possible per distro basis. Maybe Linux dev circles are already discussing this, maybe not, I don’t know honestly.
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I’m reminded of a video I saw of a woman talking about her dating prospects using M&Ms. She poured a bunch on the table as a metaphor for her dating pool, and slid away M&Ms as she ruled the people they represent out. “8 million people in the city. But half are women slides half of the M&Ms away of the remaining 4 million men, 20% are under 25, slides more M&Ms away” until she got to a point where she had one candy left, and then she shattered it with a meat tenderizer and continued sliding pieces of it away.
You can do that for potential adoptees of Linux, because there are a bunch of filters in series you have to pass through before successfully adopting Linux.
8 billion people on the planet.
Subtract the Sentinelese and Amish and North Koreans and everyone else who just outright doesn’t have access to computers. Nothing we can really do about them and in some cases it would be unethical to try.
Now subtract out the people who only use a mobile device like a cell phone or tablet, which are locked to their OSes. Android or iOS is as much a part of the hardware as a microwave oven’s firmware is to them. Linux on mobile devices (excluding Android) is in a severely rough state, there’s basically no hardware and software combo that is ready for daily driving.
Now subtract out the people who do use a PC or other device, that won’t ever install an operating system on a computer themselves. You’ll get some of these folks by selling computers with Linux installed in stores and such, though I think you’ll have to address a few other points later. I think SteamOS is demonstrating this.
Now subtract the people who might install Linux themselves, say PC builders who would have to install an OS anyway, but bounce off the process of choosing a distro and then installing. The big distributors like Canonical and Fedora tend toward marketing wankshit instead of human language. You can’t tell their goddamn websites “I just want the normal end-user desktop version with KDE please.” Does “Core” mean our main, central product, or the IoT embedded system version? You kind of have to know Fedora calls their Gnome edition “Workstation” and if you want “normal Fedora but with KDE” that’s a “Spin.” Then you get the Trendy Fork Of The Month, things like Bazzite and Nobara that pretty much are Fedora or Ubuntu with a theme applied, maybe some actual features in the OS, but often just a redone onboarding process, like I think it’s Bazzite that offers a configurator on their website that lets you pick your desktop and such. Defuckulating the onboarding process of major distros might allow us to do away with the Trendy Fork Of The Month.
Now subtract the folks who get a Linux machine up and running and then bounce off of the unfamiliar UI. I’m pretty sure this is Gnome’s fault more often than not, Gnome is deliberately hostile to both distro maintainers and end users to the point there are now four DEs that are “We can’t do this anymore” forks of Gnome: MATE, Cinnamon, Unity and Cosmic. You’d probably see more people stick with Linux if it was less easy to stumble dick first into Gnome.
Now subtract the people who got this far and then said “My CAD/art/music/office/finance/whatever software doesn’t run on this.” and had to switch back. In a lot of cases, software like that exists in the FOSS ecosystem but it’s significantly inferior, like FreeCAD or GIMP. These are often kept in a deliberately shitty state because some opinionated programmer likes how the code they wrote in 2004 looks in their IDE, so open software continues to be unadoptable and people continue to pay subscriptions to the Captain Planet villains in charge of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe.
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does the average Korean citizen have a PC of their own?
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now thats just ignorance.
Explain the permanent state of GIMP’s UI without deliberate sabotage.
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Consumerism.
Unfortunately this is the case for a lot of the worlds problems
*capitalism/colonialism
No, it’s consumerism.
Games are still not perfect. Multiple screens can be really finicky if they have different resolutions and refresh rates.
