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[–]enefi 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Can't say I agree with majority of points.

Lack of video game support

Not really true anymore. Yes, Windows is better in this regard, but Valve improved the situation in a few years by leaps. ProtonDB reports 75% of top 1000 games to be playable on Linux. IIRC only games with rootkit anti-cheats (EAC and BE) are a problem and I don't think many Linux users want rootkits to be supported by Wine anyway.

fucking Wine - it had problems running even 20 year old games

Funny, because I read quite a lot of people praising Wine for being able to run these ancient games when current Windows no longer supports them. Yes, you read that right - for old Dos/Windows games Linux might be a better choice than current Windows.

Bad documentation In Linux, "help" means reading barely intelligible man pages - and even then, you have to know what you're looking for. Though some distros do have real help, it's online and usually low quality anyway. What remains for a newbie user are elitist internet forums that will tell him to RTFM (which doesn't exist). On the other hand - Windows, since at least 98, has included a great, interactive help tool that can diagnose and fix problems with audio, graphics, internet, everything.

Seriously? You have Arch wiki which is really good. And if you use distro appropriate to you level (e.g. Ubuntu), then you have plenty of places to get advice - for example Ubuntu has that QA site. If you are using distro which is out of your league (e.g. Arch, Gentoo), then it's your fault (you can still find people willing to help, but you will most likely suffer). Another thing is, you have to know how to ask questions. If you don't show any signs of trying to solve your problem, or omit all details, or are blaming Linux, then you can't expect community members to be friendly.

No system restore

Just use timeshift or stable distro.

Software installation

Well, yes, Linux landscape is a bit fragmented, but as a normal user you should be totally fine with Ubuntu or PopOS!. If you are dev/tinkerer/impatient gamer, then Manjaro is a sweet spot for me. You have available vast majority of software through AUR, one command away. And you even mentioned it - a lot of software (especially the gui clicky one) started offering appimages, snaps or flatpaks.

Lack of certain software ... commonly mentioned ones are AutoCAD, Photoshop, as well as video editing software.

We have FreeCAD and for video editing kdenlive or Blender (pretty sure I am forgetting another one well known). Photoshop is partly true (only for professionals), most users who use pirated version are newbies, so Gimp or Krita would be enough. That said, I heard Blender with grease pencil is starting seriously endangering Illustrator. Inkscape is fine for smaller stuff, possibly even professional (I would guess it depends on what exactly you are doing).

No focus on security ... By default, Linux doesn't really care about your security or anonymity (unless it's a niche distro like Qubes or Heads) - any application can do whatever it wants within the permissions it's been given

Looks false. There is AppArmor and SELinux, from arch wiki:

Ubuntu, SUSE and a number of other distributions use it [AppArmor] by default. RHEL (and its variants) use SELinux which requires good userspace integration to work properly.

No actual firewall

No user friendly per-application firewall, yeah, I agree with this one. There were attempts and it should be possible to implement (IIRC kernel supports marking packets with processes via some option), but I haven't seen a usable project yet (only few dead experiments).

Hard to "rice" ... while Windows has an easy to use color editor

I am pretty sure there was only one color to customize few years back and I think currently there is only light and dark theme (I don't use Windows, so I might be wrong on this one). Linux has the most customizable DEs. Yes, it may not be as user friendly as picking a color from GUI, but ricing is the domain of Linux.

No GUIs to configure basic things ... OpenVPN connections or keymappings

OpenVPN is not a basic thing and I remember that in KDE there is a GUI thingy to configure keymappings.

Still controlled by big corpos

Well, yeah, but still better than Windows. At least source is foss and it's more corporations, not just one.

Fragmentation

For all of Windows' faults, it for sure benefits from at least one thing - it is consistent. If you know how to use it here - then you can do the same there, and elsewhere.

Not really. Remember those tiles which they forced to remove from desktop? Or the myriad of configuration dialogs from different eras, often doing similar/same things? Some people are still using XP and 7.

On the other hand, Linux is a bunch (really, hundreds) of distributions which differ in philosophies, target audience, installation, available functionality (e.g FDE) by default, intended usage (server-only, live USB only, gaming...), type of package manager (different ones are incompatible unless your distro is from the same family - many now choose to roll their own), default software.

Only few are commonly used and only couple could be recommended to beginners. Also majority of distros are just building on top of other distros, so in reality you have a few distro families and the rest, those hundreds, are just variations, flavors, usually not differing much from their parents. And again, there are appimages and similar technologies (Valve is working on their own for Steam) which mostly solve the problem.

GTK3, which changed everything from GTK2

GTK2 is still being used? I thought virtually all maintained software has already been updated.

made programs dependent on the two versions look and behave completely different since not all GTK software has good KDE replacements

This issue is present in Windows as well. I would say on Windows it's even worse - there are modern looking configuration dialogs/windows easily accessible, but they often lack a lot of options and you have to cumbersomely navigate to a similarly named dialog from nt/95-era with much more options. And of course consistency in applications on Windows is pretty bad too - a lot of software is multiplatform and/or uses their own UI tech (e.g. Blender, Electron applications and I am pretty sure Photoshop too), so it isn't really that different from Linux.

And of course, choosing a distro is a struggle in itself that Windows users don't have to deal with.

True, but it's not difficult. There are quite noob-tolerant and active communities like r/linuxquestions.


A lot of things are blown out of proportions, half-truths, or a thing of the past. It makes me wonder if the author isn't on MS payroll.