The “windows just works” claim is stupid. Especially the statement the author makes on how you just double click an icon and it just works everytime and if ever there is an issue, someone else will eventually fix it.
on windows id just give up if I couldnt solve an issue, on linux I actually find a solution, the solution for windows is click 50 obscure things if it exists, linux is usually modifying something with the terminal which can be scary if you arent used to it and don’t know what commands do, eventually youll realize its mostly heading to a director and editing a file, technically you can click around and do that without opening a terminal, using a file editor and manager instead.
I’mma just going to sit over here in the corner with my AbbiWord and Gnumeric…
I don’t buy the argument that windows just works or that it’s somehow better or more stable. The reality is we all have grown to learn about computers specifically using windows and it’s been a steep learning curve. We have gotten familiar with its specificities and its sporadic misbehavior and accepted that as the norm. And people prefer what they are used to even if it’s suboptimal because they would rather not learn something else from scratch, even if in the long run it could be better.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
In my experience, usually with Linux they have less problems and it’s easier to use. Until they need an application that only works on Windows.
In my experience, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. There are some things that work in Linux, and some things that don’t, even after a bit of fiddling. My desktop’s front panel is completely unusable on Linux, for example.
Windows is at least widespread enough that it’s far more likely that parts will work on it at least to some degree. And sure enough, the front panel works fine there.
I think this is an issue where you are talking about people coming from windows trying to do windows things on linux like run windows software. Of course you can in some cases run windows software on Linux but it is not a fair comparison to blame Linux for not being able to run windows software. Linux has it’s own suite of software and that is often better suited.
Every single time I try out Linux it’s been a shitshow. Stuff doesn’t work, drive encryption requires multiple passwords to boot up. Updates that fail.
Windows just works. Only apple is more consistent.
I have never seen an encryption implementation that required two passwords to decrypt the disk.
Is it possible the first one decrypted the disk and the second password was for your user account?
Could be. I just remember being perturbed that there wasn’t an easy way to undo that situation.
Most desktop environments have an option for auto login under the user settings. That way you only need to decrypt the disk.
I still end up with other issues.
Right now I have one that attempted an update and ate the storage device. I later find out that the update command is deprecated and shouldn’t be used. Why is it still there then?
Another that installed a DE but the display is sideways and it’s not responding to the config.txt edits to rotate the display. In windows i didn’t need to look anything up, just right click and edit my display settings.
What distribution are you using? The common desktop environments (KDE & Gnome) have simple graphical display configurations similar to what you find in Windows.
the windows just works argument actually refers to the fact that it’s consistent.
If you have a problem with the desktop, nobody needs to ask you which de you use, or which parts you have substituted out. You have a graphics problem, nobody asks if wayland or x11. You have a problem with audio, nobody asks you whether you have pipewire-pulse installed and to use pipewire. Shit’s the same everywhere.
I say this as an arch linux user. The choice we all love, is actually a detriment to the average non-power user.
Apple has even fewer choices and therefore greater consistency.
Anecdotally my parents use linux because of me using it on my computers too and one nice thing about it is that they can have a consistent UI. The kind of changes that happen with at least some well established desktop environments and window managers are not nearly as radical as when Windows changes where things are at in their UI. There might be some UI tweaks here and there depending on your choice of desktop environments but I don’t use rapidly changing DEs on their PC. With some of the simpler well established DEs it isn’t typical that there will be a change so dramatic that you have to relearn how to use it like with Windows 8 or something. There are some such as GNOME that have undergone some heavy changes in the past but you can choose to use simpler ones like say LXDE or Cinnamon.
They mostly use the web browser anyway so it isn’t like it was a really steep learning curve. Since they switched to linux the amount of help I have had to give them has decreased. If my parents did more advanced tasks they would need to learn some new ways of managing their computer yeah but for them they just browse the web, use Libreoffice and use the printer mostly. Even before they switched to linux I had them using a bunch of open source cross platform software for years before that which did help the process go smoother but Libreoffice for example has a similar UI to the classic Microsoft Word so it was not like it was a huge learning curve.
I do their software updates but me doing software updates has just been me typing “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade” and restarting. If there ever was a problem I would have to fix it but I would have to fix it if there was a problem with Windows too. I find linux to be easier to fix than Windows and the error messages to be easier to figure out. Overall the switch has gone well and there is less I have to worry about.
Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.
I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.
There’s also some indoctrination involved.
But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.
Not so much the user experience, but I’m not aware of any software that doesn’t work with Microsoft, except for ones developed by Apple.
With the latest version of Windows, it’s not even a question as to whether a given piece of software will run.
Networking your home computers still does not work smoothly in Windows. It often stops for no good reason until you reboot everything.
Then i don’t know what you’re doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are “awesome and just work on linux” somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.
I’ve got some nice linux servers running that i’m really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it’s just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I’m more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux “just works” is delusional…
Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that’ll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things “that just work”, just don’t. For example, i’ve got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it’s amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton “running windows games on linux just works”. If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that’s a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn’t. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it’ll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you’re on your own.
And that’s its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like “it’s free, so accept it the way it is” when someone dares to ask questions or … even… (do i dare say it?)… complain… Doesn’t make for the most constructive environment…
Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you’re willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it’s a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There’s no other way to put it.
I didn’t say Linux just works. I’m just fighting back against the preconceived idea that it’s just a total mess and windows isn’t. I have myself ran into issues with linux. But also, I’ve run into many issues with windows too.
The difference is that when people encounter issues with windows, it’s like well too bad, need to find someone who can fix it. But when they encounter an issue with Linux, it’s like linux sucks, let me get back to Windows as if it didn’t suck at least as much.
The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…
And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…
I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…
Linux works better than windows for most apps/system stuff.
But there are certain classes of apps which are not up to par with whatever is available on windows. An office suite is one of them, I just use the Google suite (mostly sheets) in a browser, it works better for me.
I agree with the developers point about lock-in but sadly I don’t have enough time at work to work with libre calc over proprietary alternatives (I have tried it truly but the performance and user experience is just not good enough for someone already past deadlines)
There’s a phrase that gets passed around the tech scene: “Linux is only free if your time has no value.” Because, yes, Linux and other open-source apps are free to download and use. In a world driven by money, you’d expect the free version to overtake the paid one. The problem is, the paid option…just works.
Sure, until the paid option does something anti-competitive or gets too expensive or shuts down entirely, and you have to switch to a different paid option, sometimes burning dozens of hours in switching time (and/or hundreds of hours of work through lost or corrupted data) in the process. Not to mention the transition costs of just figuring out the new thing. Why not just switch to something that won’t go away, or be changed under your feet?
The problem is that it needs that initial time investment to get it working the way you want it.
Maybe I’m just enough of a tinkerer in any situation that I’ve put pretty much the same amount of time into fiddling with my Linux settings as I did with my last Windows computer.
If your hardware isn’t working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.
People have been talking about this for my entire life, but in the past year of my switch to Linux, it has literally never happened once. I downloaded a new, open-source driver for my drawing tablet because it had some extra features that I wanted, but even it worked out of the box. I’ve never experienced this incompatibility. Honestly I’ve never even had trouble with software I wanted not being available for my distro.
Am I doing Linux wrong?
Windows doesn’t have this problem.
LOL.
Installers made for Windows don’t need any special TLC;
ROFL!
you double-click them and they work.
OH wait they’re serious?!
Once they’re installed, they work. If you need to install a driver, it works. You open a document in Office, it works.
Sure, if you don’t run into a permissions issue. And if the system registry doesn’t get corrupted. And if you’re not on an ARM machine. And if your TPM is the right version. And if you’re on the right subversion of Windows. And if a previous install didn’t leave some remnant of itself behind. And if you don’t want to do anything with an Apple device at all. And if sometimes you have the right fonts installed?
Honestly, I think I’ve had fewer problems installing Linux applications than Windows applications, but I can’t attest to that. I think I can be pretty confident in saying that they’re mostly equivalent. Both of them are pretty mature platforms with fairly minimal hiccups, in my experience.
And if something doesn’t work, we can yell at Microsoft until they publish a fix that makes it work again.
That’s a weird way of spelling “until they ignore it for six months and then lock the support thread for inactivity.”
Microsoft has gotten us into a state where we don’t need to think, tinker, or troubleshoot our software. We just double-click the icon and wait for it to “just work.” If it doesn’t, it’s someone else’s issue to solve, and we flood social media and support emails until the issue is resolved.
Here I have to agree with the article, because whatever the reality of installing applications on Windows, this is the fiction they’ve sold us. Apple, too. All operating systems have troubles, and all vendors try to downplay them and fix the stuff that causes problems for most of their users. Linux is just honest about the fact that they can’t make everything a perfectly smooth experience for everyone.
I work on a day to day basis with Microsoft products and services, including cloud environments, SQL databases, Azure lakes, etc.
I do it ALL from Linux, and if I have to I will remote into windows machines. I do it because I don’t have time for Windows nonsense. I need my machine to work, so I can work and get paid. Linux is easy to set up and has very few surprises. It just works.
There are people for whom this is news? Cheesus chroist
If the XML standard is overly complex, does that mean it’ll be a bigger pain for MS employees to maintain? Sounds like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
Iirc the openXML standard was open sourced due to some anti trust stuff brewing. They then expanded on the standard with proprietary addons that give LibreOffice/Google Docs trouble.
Shit, I’ve been right about microsoft for thirty-plus years and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.
They are. A. MONOPOLY. They have never “fought fair”, and it wouldn’t ever occur to them to do so. Their heart is all BOGU.
The only reason Apple still exists is because Microsoft didn’t want to get broken up, so they invested in Apple to stay competitive for 150 million in 1997.
I dunno. I mean that’s true, but it’s also the case that Gates stole a lot from Jobs and they knew each other pretty well so it was also like a friendly loan.
Tbf Gates took the boos he got at AppleWorld or whatever it was then pretty well.
That’s not entirely true. It’s true that Microsoft invested in Apple, but it’s not true that they were about to get broken up and that Microsoft money saved them.
Wasn’t there even a Simpsons episode about it?
“Buy him out, boys.”
Das Bus
Season 9 / Episode 14 (19:10)
“You don’t think we got rich by writing checks?!? Ahahahaha”
“Buy him out, boys!”
microsoft is a dirty bastard
Disappointing Fox news version of Windows’ take of something somebody at Libre once said about Windows’ domination of markets.
This read like basics. Was hoping for more info on how unusable XML was fot LibreOffice or if it wasn’t (unusable to OSS versions). Obviously, OSS is better for enough reasons that a few in the EU are switching government computers from Windows to Linux.
Yes, corporate & proprietary schtick is lame & crippling. Old news. Guess it needs to be yelled until we research start taking about (marketing) FOSS Solutions.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working. I already have terrible excel bugs all the time on my work computer. Left clicking a cell sometimes just selects half a dozen adjancent cells. You vlick something and all of a sudden the rendering just goes completely haywire… You have two larger tables open and it just crashes…
Things will only get worse from this, until the global economy will loose trillions to being stuck with Microsoft.
The thing with “just works” in monopolies is that it eventually stops working
This gets accelerated when the company starts changing the product just for the sake of having to change something to meet some OKR, or because they need to find a way to incorporate the newest marketing buzz (cloud, AI, etc).
The Office suite was simple to use and performant. Nowadays I watched a college professor struggle for 8 minutes trying to figure out how to save a file locally rather than saving it to OneDrive, because they redesigned everything around that. It also takes an obnoxiously long time to launch, it keeps popping up some Copilot button in inconvenient places too.
16 digit numbers
Still
You’re right but at the end of the day, the average person is content with having their stuff just work for now and that’s a reasonable expectation isn’t it? If it ain’t broke, people aren’t going to go out of their way to protect themselves from a what-if that they may feel is going to maybe mildly inconvenience them when it happens regardless of what it actually is, since they may be ignorant of the true state of how things might be.
And in the end, some are just gonna accept that inconvenience from stuff not working completely rather than switch. People have been saying to switch away from Chrome for years and now even with ad-blocking being nerfed, people are still on it.
Also they already start shortening the live cycle of the non subscription office licenses, calling it „Modern-Lifecycle-Policy“. Up to now you hat 7-10 years of update support. But this year Office 2016 and 2019 phase out, next year already Office 2021! And Office 2024 only has support til 2029. Thats from today only 4 years (at the same price!)
I remember when Microsoft first attempted to prevent the standardisation of Open Document Format (used by LibreOffice and others) and then bullied its way into getting approval for own OOXML standard. Already back then, supporters of FOSS warned that Microsoft would use the overly complicated OOXML to maintain its stranglehold on users of Office-like software.:
Whenever applicable and possible, standards should build upon previous standardisation efforts and not depend on proprietary, vendor-specific technologies. Albeit, MS-OOXML neglects various standards and uses its own vendor-specific formats instead. This puts a substantial burden on all vendors to fully implement MS-OOXML. It seems questionable how any third party could ever implement them equally well, especially when a standard comes with 6000 pages of specifications without serving its minimalistic purpose.
Yeah, the issue is not “Microsoft’s usage of the XML format”. The issue is that they blatantly bought their format’s standardization, and then intentionally released an implementation that substantially deviated from the specs, making sure that MSO was the only “compatible” implementation.
hey LibreOffice when are you gonna make the keyboard shortcuts in LibreOffice Calc match the keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Excel?
Probably never
Wait, isn’t this just a matter of generating a config text file that you could set keybindings with that would specify all the custom keybindings necessary to give a basic degree of commonality in keybindings for a newbie?
Coming from emacs the idea that a program as complex as the Libreoffice suite wouldn’t have a generalized modular way to shift between different keybindings styles is a bit odd to me. Isn’t it just a matter of exposing the keybindings in a text file config format that could easily be imported/loaded into your Libreoffice program?
I don’t have any skin in this game, but I do think that it is worth emphasizing how useful it is to accomodate people who want radically different keyboard shortcut styles, or rather how obviously common sense it is to prioritize this in development. Keep a main keybinding style, specify a config format and then let the weirdos fiddle with alternate keybindings on the side.
Keyboard shortcuts can be dealbreakers especially for someone stressed out and overwhelmed who is having trouble getting momentum in a new software, thus for an open source project this is a natural target for software development focus because it is possibly one of the simplest, most effective and broadly applicable ways to expand the usefulness of a software tool to a bigger audience (who will hopefully eventually become contributors or support the community in some way themselves).
There’s the rub. The last time I checked, there was no way to package keybindings in a modular way, which is a massive oversight in my opinion for a project meant to replace that which millions of office workers have years of muscle memory engrained
It feels like making a car for an international market that is meant for anybody but is locked into one language in the user interface for no good reason and either can’t be changed without overhauling a big part of the car construction process involving somehow parts of the actual powertrain needing to be changed or it is only a moderately difficult process to begin and they haven’t prioritized it which makes me wonder how they establish priorities for creating a car that is useful to as much of the world as possible in the first place…
I mean I am thankful for useful FOSS software, and having ANY alternative to microsoft office, especially a functional free option is amazing… it is just… come on LibreOffice!!!
Let a cottage community of weird LibreOffice keybinding schemes flourish!!!
I mean, they could just really suck at writing good software. Isn’t some sort of rule of thumb law to never attribute to malicious intent what can just as easily be explained by stupidity?
There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.
I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.
It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.
In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.
But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?
Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …
It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”
The one thing you have to give Microsoft is backwards compatibility. They make hot garbage, but God damn if you can’t run that garbage from 10 years ago.
Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.
Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.
That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.
Although 10 years ago isn’t that long in computer terms any more. Those are machines that can still run Windows 10 without issue. It’s an older computer, but still perfectly usable these days.
I haven’t done the experiment, I’m curious to know if you can take a random binary compiled for Linux 10 years ago run on the latest version of popular distros. See in which ones it runs.
Depends on it and its dependencies, probably. A lot of the core utilities are generally unchanged enough that they should still work despite being a decade old.
I would agree, except that every piece of it is significantly more complex than it needs to be. ODF is considerably simpler in part because it makes use of other pre-existing standards for things like dates and times. OOXML redefines so many of those things, and in many cases Microsoft Office’s implementation isn’t actually compatible with their own standard.
Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…
Integer storage in spreadsheets… There are a ridiculous number of ways to store any integer, and I don’t just mean because you could theoretically store
1and00000001and they’d be interpreted as the same thing.
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.
