Reply to post: Re: Try Linux. - Or DON'T! (My love/hate Linux rant.)

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update downs Chrome, Cortana

Updraft102

Re: Try Linux. - Or DON'T! (My love/hate Linux rant.)

Wow, what are you doing to get these results?

I've only been using Linux a lot since the last part of 2015, and I've found Linux to be easier to work with than Windows. Windows considers any file system that is not its own to be unallocated space... it refuses even to acknowledge that data exists in non-Windows formats. If you try to set up a dual-boot by installing Linux first, then Windows, Windows will stomp all over Linux and refuse to accept it was even there. Linux, by contrast (in all the versions I have tried), will gracefully offer to install itself next to Windows, and I have yet to have the dual-boot setup it creates fail. I've put Linux (mostly Mint) on a bunch of Windows PCs by now in a dual-boot setup, from the single-core ATA laptop that's a dozen years old to Kaby Lake, MBR and GPT setups, and they all work.

Of course, none of those machines had Windows 10 on them after I was finished, so that may have something to do with it. Windows 7 or 8.1, not a problem.

No offense, but it's probably good that you refuse to build Linux PCs for friends and family so that you won't have to work on them. I wouldn't want to have the kind of bad luck you describe to befall my machines either! I've got five Linux PCs that I use for various tasks, four of which dual-boot Windows, and they just keep right on working. Windows has often made me go hunting across the web looking for drivers that will work with various bits of hardware and the version of Windows in question, while (without exception) Linux just works. For the video drivers, I've had to open the Ubuntu/Mint driver manager and click the radio button for the proprietary driver and hit "apply changes," but that's still a lot easier than going to the nVidia web site and downloading the installer for "regular" people.

That's not to say that Linux is always easy, of course, but then neither is Windows. Overall, Linux seems far more robust than Windows... Windows is really quite fragile, and the slightest little thing will break it.

I've never tried to be the go-to "fixit" guy for a novice user on Linux, and I'd always assumed it would be an endless stream of "help!" requests, but people who have done that generally say that the number of requests for assistance drops sharply when Windows is gone, and that's gotten far worse since Windows 10 has been inflicted upon us all. I know that keeping people's Windows machines working is pretty labor intensive... by the time they get to me, they're screwed up beyond all belief. Of course, now all you need to do to bork a Windows machine that badly is to turn it on and allow the broken Windows 10 patches to install.

No way would I want to be the person responsible for people's Win 10 machines. In a professional capacity, if the pay was good enough, it might be a nice source of job security, but for friends and family? The best advice I can give is "avoid Windows." With MS doing their best to sabotage Windows 7, even that's not a safe bet to suggest to people as an alternative to 10.

I agree with you on wanting MacOS to be sold as a standalone for PCs. I'll never buy into Apple's severely limited hardware choices, but I would definitely give it a shot if I could use it on my existing hardware. I don't know if I would end up using it myself, but at the very least, it would give me something to recommend to people... right now, I have no good answer for a non-techie type of user who has a PC and who wants to know where to go now. Linux... it's good for me as a tech-savvy type, but for the regular user? I don't know. Windows isn't any good for anything anymore. There needs to be another choice.

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