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What are the benefits of using Linux for the less computer competent?
I've been experimenting with Ubuntu and Mint on VirtualBox for a few days, and I fail to see the utility for less tech savvy people such as myself. I have experience in HTML and CSS as well as dabbling in Codecademy for recreation, but higher level computing is new to me. I don't know how to navigate a terminal nor how to stop Windows from crashing, but I'm open to learn.
I have a selfish answer to this.
As the only person in my family who works in any computer adjacent field, I'm the one who gets the calls when somebody's computer has a problem. Nevermind that my work has nothing to do with personal computers and there is no reason for me to be an expert in them.
Even so, I used windows in some capacity up until win7, so I did used to know how to troubleshoot pretty deeply.
During this time, it wasn't uncommon for me to end up somewhere a couple Saturdays a month unborking somebody's computer. Often enough, this meant reinstalling windows, which for some reason takes half a day (or used to, I don't even know now).
When win8 came out, it caused me more problems than I was interested in spending time on, so I got rid of all my dual boot setups and went Linux only for all my machines.
The calls kept coming, though.
I decided that as much as I would like to help everybody, I would not be keeping up with windows developments in order to do so.
So I gave folks ultimatums. I told all my tech support beneficiaries that I don't do windows anymore, but I would be happy to set them up with what a version of what I am using.
Four family members took me up on it eventually, and have been running Linux Mint Cinnamon ever since.
In the entirety of those ~10 years, I can honestly say I have spent less hours screwing around with other people's jacked up computers than I have in any other six month period before.
I have done a few reinstalls to bump folks up a couple version numbers, but that's a handful of times and it takes like twenty minutes.
For non technical users, everything just works. Most of "everything" for half these people happens entirely in the browser anyway.
I think there are three main groups of people who I would not recommend the switch:
Particularly with the advent of Valve's "Steam Deck" i only see this getting better. Steam has much better support for Linux than it did in the past and there's even more apps such as Lutris, Bottles etc. that can assist with PC Gaming.
It still is very much an active choice with caveats, I wouldn't recommend it to every PC gamer. But if someone wishes to detach themselves from Microsoft Windows for whatever reason it can be a really great option!
If you only play Steam games without anti-cheat (or Minecraft :D) then the Linux compatibility software will probably work on all of your games.
why games with anti-cheats aren't on linux? is it because it could be easy to circumvent them?
I think most games with anticheat don’t work yet. I tried loading up DayZ the other day and it crashed as soon as it got into the game. I read that the anticheat for it should work, but that was reported years ago so maybe not anymore.
Anticheat wants to sit at very top level of the operating system so it can see everything, otherwise it would have no ability to see cheats running on the computer. But when you’re running a game in Proton (the name for the compatibility layer) it’s simulating a number of aspects of the Windows operating system. Anticheat is specifically designed to detect that kind of simulation, as it’s one of the most straightforward ways to fool anticheat software. It’s like putting horse blinders on the anticheat. No hacks here! Trust me, bro.
Valve has already been working with the anticheat companies to get them to support Proton. As long as they can build a mode for Proton under Linux then they should be able to do their job. The anticheat just needs to understand that the suspicious aspects of Proton can be augmented with the legitimate integrity signals from Linux itself.
Even this is changing, thanks to the Steam Deck. Most games that rely on EAC run fine on Linux, now.
Not just Photoshop and CAD. Most pro audio and video people make their living with Windows/Mac-only software. I imagine many other fields are still similar
I've accepted the fact that I'll always need a Mac and an adobe subscription for my photography, but that doesn't stop me from using a Linux server for other self hosting purposes!
I've been thinking of trying Linux for a while now and was so sold on finally going for it while reading your post until I got to that part.
I use the Adobe suite professionally. So I have no choice now. That's sad. I'm really tired of Windows and all the new features that's just meant to throw more ads and bloatware at you.
I feel unsafe on Windows.
There are enterprise editions of windows that come without all that bloatware. You can either buy a key on eBay or sail the high seas. I'm on mobile ATM but I believe it's the LTSC version. It's the edition that gets sold to government or corporations.
Indeed, although it's a pain to update them later on which you might need to do for various reasons. For me, I game on my PC so new DirectX features come out which I'd want to utilize.
It depends on how thorough you want to be. On a modern computer (especially if it's one with an SSD), reinstalling Windows can be done in about an hour. Copying backed up data back to the machine if needed takes a very variable amount of time, once again very dependent on whether the machine has an SSD, and reinstalling software the user needs is the same (though Ninite helps speeding up the process).
If you want to leave the user with an up to date computer however, THAT invariably takes 2 to 4 additional hours and multiple reboots for some reason. I do not know how Windows Update works exactly, but it's incredibly inefficient especially when starting from a newly installed OS.
It is a modern improvement though. Even up to early versions of Windows 10, installation was awful. Maybe only the latter half of Windows 10’s lifecycle had a reasonable install process, including toggles to turn off the stupid stuff. It’s kinda amazing it took Microsoft this long, and I’m sure Windows 11 took some steps backwards.
There has to be a fourth group here since I'm very technical (SRE/SWE) but choose to use MacOS instead Linux desktop.
Up until my mid 20s I was using Linux desktop as a daily driver but now in my mid 30s I just want something that works without having to fight nonsense issues like (but not limited to):
I know someone is going to comment on this and say "you should try out XYZ distro instead it will solve all you problems" and I want to believe you but my experiences says otherwise, I've been down this path before and it's pretty much a meme at this point 🤣
Maybe I've just given up on the quest to make Linux desktop work for me because there was a time in my life where I absolutely loved it but other priorities in my life have me doing other things instead of (e.g.) trying to get Bluetooth switching working flawlessly.
With that said I'm not fully done with Linux desktop and will keep an open mind to it, maybe I'll give it a shot again in a few years after applications and Wayland get more polished.
I can't say I've had your specific problems, other than font scaling. But font scaling never worked well on Windows either.
Audio on Linux is so much nicer now with pipewire over alsa/pulse. Seamlessly being able to switch audio devices is a killer feature that is now immensely annoying when I use my phone and can't use the phone's really good built-in mic and my bluetooth headphones.
But that said, yea it can be really finicky. I always say Linux is best for the edge cases outside the standard deviation. For super casual or super poweruser.
What's the deal with this little square I'm seeing everywhere? 🫣
What does it mean, why are people using it and how?
Unicode Emoji. Newcomers don't use ASCII the way god intended. ;-)
I think it's facepalm.
Get off my lawn with your pooprockets and sweaty eggplants. 20 line ASCII art is the best emoji.
I can see other emoji images I assume my smartphone can understand, but a lot of times I just get the tiny rectangle.
I know this is an old thread, but I just wanted to say that I believe on Android, emoji updates are tied to system updates. So, if you're on an older version of Android, you may not have support for all current emoji.
The emoji in question, 🫣, was ratified in 2021, which is relatively recently. Apps can load custom fonts to provide recent emoji on old Android systems, but I don't know how common that is, and it sounds like it's not happening in your case.
More info on the emoji in question here.
Nooooooo as a Linux and mac user for more years than I’m willing to admit to, macOS is headed in the wrong direction (for me) with this seemingly irreversible shift to a consistent UX across apple platforms.
I don’t want my computer to act like an iPad. If I did, I’d use my bloody iPad.
I've had more problems and been left more frustrated by my work-provided M1 than at any point in the last few years on Linux.
As a PC gamer, switching to Linux as my daily driver (i have no windows devices anymore) ive been super happy. I fight with my pc way less than i ever did on windows
I do all of my gaming on linux and macos. For everything I am interested in playing, linux is on par with windows and far ahead of macos. That said, I don't play much online multiplayer so anti-cheat doesn't affect me at all.
I'm just a casual user, but I'm really liking OpenSCAD for programatically designing stuff.
I would actually push back on that. In my experience, most people "want" to use either Windows or OS X in a passive sense of the word. It's moreso that they end up with whatever operating system they use because it's either imposed on them (by their employer, school, etc) or else because it's what they already know and they don't want to bother learning something else. By and large, the OS they're using is incidental to other factors. It's the default option to some other choice.
By contrast, almost no one is buying hardware with a Linux distro pre-installed. It is not the default option for consumers the way other OS are. If you are using Linux, you need to make an active effort to seek it out and put it on your system. You need to research which distro you want, download it, install it, configure it, and will probably spend quite a bit of time tinkering with it. People who use Linux want to use Linux in an active sense of the word. There is a drive to change the status quo and an openness to trying/learning something new.
I think about this when people start saying things like "nobody will use that" when the new cloud implementation of Windows that Microsoft is moving towards is brought up. Like, what you want doesn't matter, they'll sell it to employers and schools. People will get used to using it at work and school. Then, when a small percentage of them buy their own computers, they'll buy what they're already used to using. Power users and tech enthusiasts just don't matter too terribly much when it comes to the over all market. Think about the generations of Mac users who love them, and swear by them, and only ever used them because they wanted to be artists/graphic designers and that's what school taught them to use.
I kind of find it similar to driving a manual transmission vehicle. There's no outright reason to drive a manual, you can still drive an automatic as much as you want, and they are easy to work with. But, you can drive a manual and you'll have some issues upfront but for the most part once you get the hang of it, you'll be good to go. It's just sometimes, maybe, you'll have a time or two where you wish you still had an automatic.
You don't need to be tech savvy. As a full distribution it's a full blown operating system. Gone are the days to need to open terminal or a shell and run a bunch of commands to fix things.
If you want to use it then it's driven as a freedom choice. There's no telemetry reporting you to Apple, Microsoft or Google unlike MacOS, Windows or Chrome OS.
There's no vendor lock in. There's no single choice of software, set up or layout that you are required to use.
That's what you get from Linux, unshackled. However, it's not for everyone.
To balance this out with a couple pros that are more user-centric:
I hate this talking point, for two reasons:
Sure, Linux will have some volunteers, and it'll get some patches from Intel/Red Hat/other corporations who benefit, but corporations will have their own incentives that won't always align, and the volunteers will need to take day jobs working on e.g. Windows and we'll only get their "spare time" work.
In the long run, the only sustainable solution is for Linux to be funded by users, directly with money.
At this point most people don't even need that. Upgrades to Windows 10 and Windows 11 have been free, and it looks like that trend will continue. If anything, the average person just needs to "pay" for the Windows license that comes with their off-the-shelf PC.
I think the licensing on Linux OSes could require that commercial use requires a fee. Charging businesses and allowing home use for free will probably work.
Maybe, but that's the exact opposite of what I want.
Commercial users are of secondary priority - if you work for the a business and you're not the owner, then (in broad strokes) you ultimately don't have control over your computer - it's literally not your computer and it's controlled by IT dept policy. What's more, you are not paying the fees, your boss/CFO is. This means that you not only gain less freedom from FOSS at work compared to at home, but you don't actually have a say in the software's direction except through your boss. Your CFO might demand the software have more features when you only want it to be speedier and less buggy.
As I said above: in the long run, the only sustainable solution is for Linux to be funded by users, directly with money. That means don't route the money through corporations representing their employer, don't route the money through advertisers or sponsors - have the user send money to either the devs or a 501c-4 whose sole job is to pay the devs.
Corporate funding, even with the best of the intentions, means that server software is designed to scale well across three continents, instead of being designed for simplicity and to be run on a home server by people with minimal IT experience or maintenance. Relying on corporate funding is a bad idea IMO.
Depends on the distro, and also how old the hardware. Most distros don't support 32-bit x86 anymore (though those systems are very old at this point*).
Either way, hardware tends to get better support by Linux systems in most cases, as long as you're not looking at specialized hardware.
It's definitely retro computing at this point, but it's still alive as long as Debian supports it. Once there are no major distros with corporate backing releasing for it, it will really be over.
Caveats-
Most operating systems still require you to be "tech savvy" if you compare across society. The number of people who can install an app from the app store is high. The number of people who can download the same app to their windows machine and install it is lower.
Piggybacking off this, Linux, for a variety of reasons, is still by far the OS that requires the most skill to use. Even if you're not stuck digging around in the terminal usually, just being aware that common things you use might not work correctly or out of the box is already a BIG step, and that there's going to be extra information to filter (oh look a .deb file....). Further sometimes things break more because they're not getting mainline support.
Knowing HOW to research your problems is a vastly more important skill in linux. The kind of person who already struggles to troubleshoot getting itunes on their mac is probably not going to handle linux very well.
I find that people who have a hard time understanding an app store will probably won't be able to use the software they're trying to install anyways.
But with appimage and flatpak being more common these days, you don't necessarily need to explain package management to the end-user.
Power-users forget how much of a pain in the ass Linux can be, because they resolve problems unconsciously.
Like, if I update through Discover then it constantly nags me for a password during the "automated" updates (once would be acceptable maybe). So when I click "update" then AFK, then sometimes I come back to an error. I suspect it breaks because the password prompt times out, so I update it through the console which I know handles updates more reliably. Such a basic solution that you'll forget you did it, but non-power users won't even think to try commandline. Nor should they.
I guess it had to be pretty deep in my subconscious because this isn’t something I have encountered before.
Weather this is a bug or not, I agree this isn’t something that a user should have to deal with.
I feel like there is still some amount of understanding needed. Even if a user only uses KDE's Discover / GNOME's Software Centre there is still an option on many apps for switching between different sources for the same package. At least on Fedora (I use Kinoite, the immutable KDE variant) some packages like Firefox have 5 different options listed, three flatpak and two RPM. Of course if an OS comes with sensible defaults this isn't the biggest issue, but not understanding that the applications could be coming from a different source e.g Flathub instead of Fedora could be problematic.
I don't think that's relevant. I was talking about going to the application's website and downloading a flatpak, not going to a repository of any sort.
Though if a distro's app store analogue lists multiple different packages from different sources I would agree that's a major usability issue.
• Price (the most popular distros are free).
• Privacy. To my knowledge, most distros do not "phone home" with data about your app usage/installation, browsing habits, files, etc.
• Ad-free.
Ubuntu definitely does, I was watching my firewall yesterday and all of my Ubuntu computers are maintaining a constant connection to canonical
I'm constantly amazed that so much of the Linux community is still okay with Ubuntu. I feel like Canonical has made it abundantly clear who they are, and the only sensible decision is to have nothing to do with them in any capacity. The fact that people still recommend, much less use, Ubuntu or anything derived from it constantly amazes me. It's far past time for any Ubuntu based distros to rebase off Debian and everyone else to throw Ubuntu itself on the trash heap of history where it belongs.
What's the benefit of using Windows for a standard person? All your interactions are now done through the web browser (social networks, banking, streaming, office softwares, ...), so you don't really care about your OS. Unless you have a need for a specific software, or gaming (even that is being change by Steam) there is no real reason to use Windows except habit.
I think an interesting point of people originally wanting everyone to use Linux is that everyone is basically using Linux right now. Linux is very good at being reconfigured to run on things other than a traditional desktop PC and so Linux is at the heart of all Androids and iPhones. Chromebooks are made possible because their heart is Linux as well. Different companies put their own layers on top (Google and Apple in this case) and so they call those operating systems their own things because of those "special recipe" ingredients being put on top.
Linux tends to come into play, for me, on devices that the original vendors no longer support (such as expired Chromebooks, "incompatible with the current version of Windows" PCs, etc). Linux allows me to keep using those devices which still function perfectly fine. Most people don't mind occasionally replacing their things but I would prefer to find utility in something if that thing still has utility to give.
The average person is familiar with Windows in at least some way, though: for most people it is probably the only operating system they have ever used. I don't think it's fair to cast aside that tech literacy as if it were a habit that needs to be broken. Switching to a whole new family of operating systems is a hurdle that many people cannot (and don't have to) tolerate.
Linux is a different environment, a different culture. I love Linux, but the terminal is a non-starter for many people. Sure, a lot of beginner friendly DEs try to abstract away the terminal from the user, but it is still the best way to install programs and something that every user will come into contact with eventually.
I have a theory that the average "terminal" experience could be made 10x better with a few very simple (albeit hard) changes.
Namely:
In other words, take the terminal emulator out of the commandline.
The best QOL decision I've seen for a DE is Linux Mint having a 'Show in Terminal' option when you right click in a folder. That saved me so many headaches when I was just wrapping my head around terminal business.
I think the problem really is that the societal knowledge of working in a terminal has long since gone. The average person had not had to use or even seen an operating system without a GUI in four decades. It's like reports of Zoomers struggling with the concept of file directories because they've grown up using smartphones. This knowledge has to be relearned, and for non-techies that is too big of an ask.
Honestly, that's nonsense. As long as we still have e.g.
IRCDiscord bots, input via typing will be a thing. I remember everyone in Maplestory used the "/find <player-name>" command on a regular basis to meet up with their friends.Commandline isn't hard, it's just clunky because of it's historical baggage from emulating a 1970s hardware terminal.
I really don't think those are comparable. There is a world of difference between Minecraft commands and the Linux terminal. You're not going to learn how to navigate directories in the terminal through a Discord bot, for example. The command line as a concept might be familiar to the average person, but using it to install programs, copy and delete files, etc. is well beyond what they know.
The official Maplestory no longer supports Linux last I checked (not even in a VM), but there are private servers that do. Or did.
Ctrl+v works though.
Like I said - simple, just hard.
It's a backwards-compatibility problem , so of course Microsoft won't touch it. Backwards-compatibility has been a major selling point for Windows, and most Microsoft stuff doesn't require copying/pasting terminal stuff anyway.
Fixing ctrl-C and ctrl-V would basically require to terminal emulators what Wayland is to X11, I understand why that hasn't happened - that would take a ton of resources, and improving the terminal experience for newbie Linux desktop users is simply not a priority.
That doesn't mean it would be any less of an improvement, though.
Oooh, spicy. I usually go into these discussions with the (sadly reliable) assumption that everyone else believes that the commandline is something every Linux-user should learn.
Yes, I agree with you, but let me write a couple of paragraphs on why that won't happen too soon.
The reason why the terminal is such a common crutch is because it's basically universal across distros and doesn't change like GUIs change, and thus is trivial to lazily support in tutorials (or in text chat) - they say "copy this magic into your terminal and hit enter", and works in Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. Also, typing text is easier then taking screenshots.
This has a second-order effect in that if a GUI is implemented, everyone knows that it's an addition to the commandline equivalent, so if the GUI errors out it usually gives a shitty error message (because it at best bubbles up the commandline error-text verbatim), and everyone just quietly knows the solution is to "drop down to the terminal".
I also suspect that historically, X11's shittiness encouraged power-users to use exclusively commandline because then they didn't have to touch their xorg.conf. Thus, the main dev for Gnome's file manager has the philosophy of "if you want to do anything complex with files then use the commandline", and doesn't add in-depth file-wrangling features to the file manager as a result, thus contributing to the "everyone should commandline" cycle.
IIRC, I heard that Windows Server put some serious effort into making the GUI for remote-handling servers a first-class citizen, whereas (obviously) on Linux everyone has just accepted servers must be commandline. I don't know how true that Windows part is, but accepting the premise, I wonder whether it succeeded for somewhat similar reasons to why Framework Laptops succeeded (where Dell/etc's modular laptops didn't) and in The Dark Knight Rises with "climb without the rope" - if you've got a safe fallback then you're more likely to have halfhearted and fickle support within the company, whereas if Framework's modular-laptop failed then the whole company failed no ifs and buts about it, so when they came across hard problems then they either tackled the problems wholesale or died trying.
Fork bombs are bad but honestly not a big priority - if someone is blindly following untrustworthy instructions they don't understand then you're kind of screwed already, because the GUI instructions can just say something like "and then the computer will prompt you to type in your password, so do so and hit confirm". Hell, even if you could successfully give a warning then some people will ignore it, like Linus of Linus Tech Tips and his "yes, do as I say" moment (or the "delete system32" meme).
So all that aside, how does keeping the commandline clunky actually help protect newbies from themselves? I personally want ctrl-C/ctrl-V because otherwise whenever I use terminal I sometimes forget to hit the shift key, due to it being inconsistent with copy/paste in the rest of my operating system.
While Linux users are not immune to viruses and malware, they are currently not as targeted or generally as susceptible as other platforms. Linux also has a nice array of built-in security features.
No, it absolutely has no sane security, and the only reason it is not ripe with malware is that <3% of people use it on the desktop, and the kindness of most open-source contributors.
You run everything as the same user, so there is zero security boundary between, say, your documents/family images/browser data, and any random application you happen to run. In general, desktop OSs are quite bad at security, but linux is far the worst - mind you, it’s not due to any inherent technical limitations, android uses the same basis and is very secure. It just didn’t have much focus. The general order of OSs in terms of security is Linux < Windows < osx < ios, android. (there are of course more security oriented OSs, many built on Linux itself)
Sorry for my sterner voice here, but one should absolutely not spread a false sense of security! Oh and I say that as someone who has been using linux on all my desktops for decades.
i disagree, exactly the same statement is valid for windows, if anything its significantly worse. On linux, many solutions exist to limit the range of permissions an application has, and what its able to do. SElinux, apparmor, bubblewrap, flatpak, firejail, etc.
On windows, sandboxing only applies for apps installed via the MS store, which most don't even use, and even then not all apps are guaranteed to be sandboxed. If you take the whatsapp desktop app for example, it has the following permissions:
Does whatsapp need those permissions to function? Absolutely not.
The way most people are used to installing apps on windows is not by using the ms store either, or by using a package manager (even though options exist on windows for one), but rather opening their browser, searching for the app they want, and clicking on the top download link returned by their search engine. If they get a UAC prompt, they just click "Yes". I hope you can see how flawed that is.
This is also why the surge of malicious google ads was such a large issue to the extent that the fbi starting recommending adblocks as part of internet safety procedures..
The topic was explicitly about less computer-savvy people, and not even highly skilled professionals use any of those linux security tools in the general case, or only when they feel it is needed — and people absolutely do make mistakes. If it’s not on by default it basically doesn’t worth anything.
Windows is indeed not far better, but they do at least have windows defender enabled which supposedly finds at least some known malware (in my experience it only ever found KMSpico, though).
Not necessarily - Microsoft gave up on forcing microsoft store apps to be sandboxed as UWP apps, though it seems they're having another go at it with win32 app isolation. Your example of whatsapp isn't the best, because if I remember correctly, it's one of the few apps that does work with the native windows sandbox, and for which permissions can be controlled in the privacy settings. I don't know where you're reading that from, but a look at the MS Store doesn't seem to show it as having the "use all system resources" permission or that access all files permission you quoted.
I find this interesting because i'll watch the occasional CTF video, and i've always wondered with all these privesc's they abuse if that's just because the example box is running some ancient version, or just that most versions are that insecure?
A bit of both. There are always security vulnerabilities in software (with a few caveats). We are just waiting to discover them, but when it comes to CTFs they are made by people who want them to be solvable if you know how to find the known vulnerabilities, so in a CTF they are often older versions with known vulns to exploit. That doesn't mean there aren't other unknown vulnerabilities and zero-days to find in that version, but the creators of that task chose it for the specific known vuln.
For IRL security it mostly boils down to preventing remote code execution so an attacker doesn't have a gateway in for a privilege escalation. That means guarding the interface between users and your service, and making sure any code you run on your side is vetted, or at least properly sandboxed. Preferably both.
One practical advantage is that you can sometimes reuse old hardware when the OS vendor stops supporting it. It's a way of getting a very cheap computer. (I will be trying this eventually on an ancient iMac I have that still works fine and has a nice built-in monitor.)
Honestly, even something totally vanilla like Ubuntu will scare you with weird Snap errors when using Firefox. So the primary benefit is the opportunity to learn an OS that gives you a lot more control over your computer. And with that control comes much more responsibility. All operating systems suck, but in the case of Linux, that's somehow your fault :)
On a more philosofical level, if you manage to push through it, Linux gives you the tranquility of having no planned obsolescence inevitably taking your computer from you. You're not being used to QA the next version for windows that will eventually only work on the cloud or whatever.
This is, by far, my favorite answer.
Honestly, I don't think there is. I see people have mentioned stuff like telemetry and cost. But if you're not tech-savvy, I don't think you'd care about telemetry (in fact, I'd wager you don't know even what that is or how your data is collected). And you'd also be buying a laptop or prebuilt that has Windows included, so cost is priced-in (and you don't have a choice).
I think this is a "if you have to ask" type of question. Until you have a genuine reason where you yourself discover a reason you need Linux or some problem with Windows, there's no need to switch. For me that was handling Python packages and different versions, where managing the PATH and virtual environments got too much of a hassle. But with WSL now, I'm not even sure if I'd make that switch again.
Privacy may not be a thing that a person values, but that doesn't mean that it's not important, and certainly doesn't mean that it's irrelevant to them. I would argue that it's more important for those who are not aware / doesn't understand the severity of the issues because they are more likely to be taken advantage of.
This is a good point. I feel like mobile OSs have done a good job with this (like Android notifying you when apps are requesting permissions), but this is lacking on desktop OSs, so people are much less aware.
People who aren't tech savvy don't know the specifics, but they generally still care - they just don't see much they can do about it. Like, "don't use Windows or Mac or Android" doesn't leave them with any actual options.
Matter of fact, I did not until I posted this thread. I'm a novice when it comes to computers but I'm always eager to learn. That's why I'm considering Linux.
IMO the biggest thing about Linux and FOSS operating systems is basically tech-veganism. Taking an ideological stance on the operating system you use, using software that supports/conforms to your ideology. You can choose your distro to comply with your ideology depending on how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go. Distros like Ubuntu and Arch are sort of like Meatless Mondays or vegetarianism that allows milk, cheese, and eggs: You're doing something better, but it's not as far as it goes. Others like GUIX or Trisquel are like cutting all animal products out. You may see benefits, but there'll also be inconveniences or even hard blockers occasionally. What will matter is your response.
A thing that doesn't get discussed is the practical benefit: Being a non-technical user you actually don't benefit practically from FOSS software because you likely don't currently have the skill to take full advantage of the benefits. The great thing is FOSS platforms (Linux/BSD/etc) make this process easier and more straightforward, as well as well-documented in centralized repositories, so, in a way, it's easier to become a poweruser. You'll likely use Ubuntu in the same ways Windows wants to be used: Using their repos/app stores (Ubuntu repos + Snap Store vs Windows Store which is being pushed as the central Windows software repo).
I don't mean the second paragraph to say you shouldn't do it. In all honesty the worst thing that will happen is you learn something and become more knowledgeable before going back to Windows. If you're looking to take the plunge I have a suggestion, and it's what I do as a primarily Windows user these days: Focus on Linux-compatible workflows using free/open source software, or even just software that works on Linux, which is quite easy for Ubuntu. If you can't find something that'll work on Linux, you get to learn how to get that functionality.
It's definitely more messing around. Distros like PopOS or Linux Mint make it easier but Windows/MacOS have legions of UX/UI people working to make using it as frictionless as possible.
At the same time, I've never had a Linux distro just up and reset half my settings on me though unlike Windows.
Windows is known for randomly corrupting a profile or changing everything when it installed a Service Pack or CU.
If you've not had Windows reset something on you, you've just been very lucky.
Oh no I mean I've had Windows randomly change things on me numerous times, whereas under Linux it's always been rock solid!
Just learning to do the tasks you do on Windows and troubleshooting should give you some pretty good experience over weeks/months. I never really did any 'learning', just gradual terminal commands and software discovery over a few years.
As for the benefits, I suppose there really aren't many unless you want to get into coding or software development or something. For me it was for running a server.
Less bloated(runs better on less RAM), and having your file explorer crashing doesn’t crash the entire Desktop Environment.
Less telemetry and tracking(if you care).
Different desktop environments if you want to try different desktops.
But you need to keep in mind:
Linux is a different OS, not a “Windows substitute”, you’ll need to relearn and adapt to it, think of moving to MacOS from Windows or vice versa.
Terminal is something you’ll have to use sooner or later.
Not exhaustive, but this is what I came up with.
I switched to GNU/Linux back in 2016. I'm not a power user, nor am I a hardcore gamer, and basically use the operating system to browse the web and do stupid stuff.
I find there are better FOSS options for software with GNU/Linux.
I run sudo apt-get update/upgrade/autoremove/autoclean once a week taking me minutes while Windows demands an hour or more of time with their updates known to break more things than they fix.
I find GNU/Linux easier to maintain, especially with the advent of smartphones where I can look shit up if my computer breaks, and it's more secure than any Microsoft product out of the box. I no longer have the werewithal to calibrate Windows to have similar security.
Also my gaming needs are minimal and often find good stuff on Steam or GOG that can run on GNU/Linux. As for image editing, GIMP is sufficient. I'm not looking to photoshop Hitler shaking hands with Trump in front of an assembly of gray aliens.
Best of all I'm still using the computer I bought back in 2015 with minimal hassle. I remember Windows becomes progressively bloated, making me consider having to buy a new machine. Not so with GNU/Linux.
I think the biggest benefits are getting away from Microsoft's big software as a service and data collection push, and excellent performance on older, lower powered hardware. You can slap a cheap SSD and a light-weight distro in a laptop that would be unusable on the modern web with Windows and have a machine that's perfectly functional and responsive for most people's daily use. All without giving Microsoft access to all your data or letting them serve up ads on your desktop.
I stick to pretty basic working out of the box Linux setups, so not too savvy myself. The not nerd reason to use it (imo) is that it's so much faster on old hardware than current windows or osx. I have a recent personal desktop and a recent work computer, but I find running Linux on my personal Thinkpad T420s to work just as fast for most (non nerd/gaming) tasks
In my opinion (using Linux Mint as my basis, since that's what I use, and is the most "batteries-included", user friendly flavor I know of), it has a lot of benefits including better privacy, a better app store, more customizable with custom themes, more customizable in general actually, no nagging, more transparent and controllable backups, more reaponsive and less memory usage, large forums that will try to help you if you ask for it, ewhen something breaks you can be certain there is a way for you to fix it, etc.
But the downsides are that even the user friendly distros can't fix everything:
Your wifi adapter may not work out of the box, or even at all. You may have to compile/convert the driver yourself.
You will eventually do something dumb and have to fix it. You have to know how to fix your own problems to an extent.
Grub can hreak sometimes if an update fails, you'll have to repair it using a live CD to get the PC to boot.
Battery performance is lower unless you tune it (I suggest auto-cpufreq).
You will not be able to completely avoid using the terminal
Some time ago, my aunt's Windows laptop randomly encrypted her hard drive and asked for a password she couldn't remember.
At some point the computer "decided" by itself that her hard drive should be encrypted.
And that was it. No amount of support could solve it. All the data she accumulated for years was gone. My aunt is an academic in humanities and not technically inclined. She cried and cried and cried for all she lost, including important documents related to her retirement and work done by others.
Of course she should have backup and she should have stored all her passwords, but that's besides the point. Microsoft decided something for her and quite literally fucked up her life.
She could resolve most things due to paper trail and things she was able to find on hers and other mailboxes. But it was a huge pain, it took a long time and her mental health suffered quite a bit.
That would never happen on Linux.
You say randomly, but imo most likely she enabled it on accident.
I hate windows, but the same thing could happen on linux, it's probably more likely to happen on linux tbh, it's a front-and-center option on most live cds when you install.
Either way there's nothing you can do if you forget the password, windows or linux, that's the point of encryption, isn't it?
it's also more likely for her to obliterate her own computer on accident using linux. "Oh I started removing stuff I didn't need to to make space, like this python thing".
I can't imagine how someone could accidentally encrypt their own hard drive. If that was the case, it would still be a failure of the system for giving a turnkey choice that didn't require full acknowledgement of what was going on.
I truly believe it could have been automatic though. That's the kind of thing Windows do. It wouldn't be the first time. My aunt simply wouldn't be messing with the system, she's the kind of person that don't even know what folders are. Just email and Microsoft Word. That's it.
Aren't the bitlocker recovery keys stored in her Microsoft Account? Unless she was using a local account, in which case I think it has to be manually enabled (not sure tho).
I have no idea but Microsoft support was useless.
That, I can agree with. Microsoft Support Forums are notorious for people writing eulogies to themselves without actually helping with the problem. For what it's worth, I did run into a similar issue when I was dualbooting Windows 11 and Kubuntu, and was able to get past it by pulling the recovery key from my account.
Have you ever been frustrated by the fact that you can download a program with one click, run it with another click, and never have to worry about if it will decide to just randomly not work?
Do you have a desire to spend hours scrolling through forums looking up solutions to technical problems that you could entirely avoid?
Do you like having to regularly switch between different operating systems to run different programs?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then Linux is the operating system for you.