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Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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If anything will finally result in the "year of the Linux desktop," it's shit like this. No one wants their operating system actively working to make it harder and more annoying to use their choice of applications.
The OS isn't the reason anyone uses a computer, it's the applications it can run.
(my personal experience)
A couple of months ago, I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 11. I turned off the safe boot stuff, plugged in a Linux USB drive, wiped out Windows, and went to it.
The next 6 weeks or so, i spent about 75% of my time reading articles that included things like, "In order to get this non-Microsoft program/service/etc. to mostly work ('will still randomly crash, we don't know why'), you have to get Linux to pretend to be Windows, here is a lengthy process, different than how you made Linux pretend to be Windows for that other program." The other 25% of the time, I was reading articles about why I chose the "wrong" Linux flavor, and that was the cause of the rest of my problems. "We know you have this wide choice of Linux options, but if you don't pick this one variety of Linux (that has a fair amount of controversy), no one wants to support you, sorry." (this just sounds like Windows, with extra steps)
Some of these things to me were basic, like, running Windows I have a good amount of control over the CPU speed, which indirectly helps me manage how much noise the fan makes. The Linux options were "Do you want the worst CPU speed or best? That is all we can do." Or, i wanted to connect to a hosted file sync service, which it could only do through it's own graphical file manager, that not all installed applications supported, and that WAS NOT SUPPORTED ON THE COMMAND LINE. An app, built natively for Linux, didn't support the command line. (meaning, i couldn't open the command line and see the mounted remote source in the folder structure and correct file names, it was mounted there, but all the file names were IDs in one giant folder) My brain broke a little that day as someone that has dabbled with Linux for Server for 3 decades.
I feel like anyone that has tight enough app expectations where Linux/Windows doesn't really matter, is probably someone who would be well served by a Tablet and could stay entirely out of the whole conversation. I really wanted Linux as my primary OS, and I worked hard at it, but I have a family and 1-2 jobs, and just couldn't spend any more time fighting the OS to run basic apps/have basic control. Went back to Windows, installed WSL and a Linux on VM, and spend less time fighting to get non-MS things to work.
edit: For the people down voting, I would love to hear how my personal experience was wrong. I had what I considered basic needs that were not being met, and so I altered what I was doing until I could gain enough information to try again, rather than staring at an expensive doorstop. :)
Driver/System support can also be a bit spotty. I had problems with a Live Linux instance blow up the speakers on my old laptop, and the line-out left channel on my current desktop, because the default volume was maxed out, and that was way too loud for them to handle.
It's a bit better now, since a lot of distros come with a relatively simple graphical installer and defaults that cover most use cases, but even as a relatively technical person, it was a massive pain sometimes.
We do get some Linux systems, like Chrome OS, or Steam OS, but I doubt that it will go mainstream as a fully functional desktop. Not only is it not monolithic, where you have the Lemmy problem of there being a hundred different distros, but there's an expectation of someone being technical to both install and use it. Never mind that each distro has its own package manager and package versions.
Just look at LTT's Linus Sebastian's attempts at using Linux. He's more used to Windows, so inevitably ends up breaking things because he has no idea what he's doing, being in the gap of having a little technical knowledge, but not that much at all.
I'm glad to hear this... I've been writing code and using Linux on servers since Red Hat (pre-fedora) had "Redneck" as a language option... But so often I get told, "Oh, you must be a technical newbie, because real techies can handle recompiling the kernel in order to get everything to work..." ( rolling eyes ) There is a world of difference between a headless server, and wanting to use an OS for your primary direct interaction. :)