I’m so tempted to do a charity program on my own and just receive 50k of these and put Ubuntu 24.04 or another user friendly Linux and drive around with my car trunk open and with a sign that says “free computers” while driving through New York
wouldnt it save you a lot of time and gas if you just left the car unlocked or even locked somewhere in NY?
Is it a Tesla?
Any organization that promotes Linux should find some of these charities nearby and offer to assist them in installing Linux distros that feel like Windows. We need not divert this into an argument over which ones are best. The point is that besides keeping a lot of hardware out of landfills it would help spread awareness of how user friendly Linux has become. I’ve been using Mint Cinnamon for over a month and barely notice the difference from Win10.
I really hope people decide to leave windows finally.
The article mentions how basic programs are missing. They acknowledge the existence of FOSS alternatives, e.g. GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements, but complain about it being too difficult or that some alternatives are simply not to be found via Mint’s “Software Manager”.
Which is not news and probably one of the reasons why desktop Linux-based distros have still not become mainstream. There’s just a lack of all that “user-friendlyness” less tech-oriented people need.
These things can be changed, although there is an economic barrier. FOSS projects are great and we see how many of them took off. However, if the main portion of users are not on Linux, but on Windoofs, then it doesn’t make much sense to invest time and money into developing and maintaining software for Linux while having commercial interests.
The sad reality is that Microsoft has gained that market dominance. You won’t get end-user oriented software companies on board with Linux as long as the user-share is so comparably low. This is a self-reinforcing cycle.Windoofs meets UX needs and there is a lot of software people need -> most people use Windoofs -> companies develop and distribute for Windoofs -> people keep using Windoofs, etc…
To break out of that, people need convincing alternatives. Not just for Linux alone, but especially for the software running on it.
Which is hard to achieve, given how a plethora of Linux projects have to survive on donations alone and too few companies take the leap.
There is a silver lining though. With the Steam Deck and Proton, Valve really got a lot more people on board with Linux. I can only hope, that this trend continues.
But at the moment I fear that this will be short lived, especially with Microsofts “handheld Xbox” on the horizon.
So let’s see, how this unfolds. The EOL of Windows 10 is really a strong incentive to switch to Linux. For my part, I will go for the full switch, since I’ve used Windoofs mainly for gaming anyway and am using Linux systems daily for my job. But then again, I am an engineering scientist and I can’t picture, e.g., my parents being satisfied with a Linux distro.
Getting radical, but software is another example of why capitalism sucks and how a socialist system could improve things.
In the domain of software design and distribution, when these things are run by companies that need to compete for market share and profit, then it just creates so much waste with needing everything to. be subscription based and filled with ads etc.
If we didn’t have this ultra competitive market system, then people who are passionate about software could be paid to self organise around various projects and design things for long term use value and not enshittification.
Because people with the free time to do so have already come together and organized themselves around a single Linux distribution for this purpose?
Lack of user-friendlylinesss ? What ? How much more user-friendly can we get ?
Most things are point & click
Most isn’t good enough, it has to be better than Windows. People will pay money to deal with the devil they know rather than learning something new.
People use chromebooks
This is the reason I have my family on the Apple ecosystem as much as I hate it and wish I could throw open the doors of Linux and just live in that open source utopia. The number of devices needed and the purposes of those devices grows every year. Apple is mostly idiot proof, it’s the same experience across all devices, and I just do not have to worry as much about “can you help me with…”. I can’t imagine even attempting this with Linux. It would be a nearly full time IT job explaining things and putting out fires.
Apple is mostly idiot proof
It sure as hell is not. Not even close. That’s just the marketing that Apple has spent countless millions on propagating. You have no idea how many people over the years have asked me to help them with “simple” things on their Apple devices.
One example is my mother for whom I bought an iPad when she was moving across the country away from me. I thought it would simplify things for her since I couldn’t do visits to fix things when she needed help. After a couple weeks she finally called me to tell she doesn’t like it and can’t figure out anything on it. Swapped it out for an Android tablet and I haven’t helped her once since then (like 5 years ago).
Edit: I haven’t needed to help her, it’s not like I just ignored her from then on /Edit
I’ve also setup multiple people with Linux (including my parents) and I never get tech help calls about it. At most it’s my dad saying he can’t find his bookmarks or he forgot his email password.
So no, the idea that Apple is easier is just a lie everyone was tricked into believing. Most people have used Apple devices for a long time or know someone who has, so the support network is generally there for the small everyday things.
I didn’t have to show my aging parents a single thing on their Linux systems. I just setup their shortcuts for Chrome/Firefox and their documents to the same spot on the desktop as their old Windows install and they just use it.
I respectfully disagree. We have had different lived experiences but that does not make it a lie or that I was tricked.
Is this a joke? The main way most Linux users install software is still via the command line.
On Windows the command line is an exceptional thing you sometimes have to use for troubleshooting. On Linux it’s the default way everything is done.
For example how do you stop a service on Linux? The top answer just assumes command line.
If I search for how to do it with a GUI I get a 5 year old post explaining that all the GUI attempts are dead.
Now if I search for Windows, I get these instructions (from the AI but they sound like I remember it):
open the Services console (search for “services” in the Start menu), right-click the service you want to stop, and select “Stop”.
And the top SO question is someone asking specifically how to do it with the command line because the GUI way is so easy and obvious.
That’s just one random example. Not even getting to hardware support, ease of installation, etc.
Is this a joke? The main way most Linux users install software is still via the command line.
I reject the premise that the command line is not user friendly.
With either a GUI or a command line, the first step is going to be “Search the internet for the instructions.”
The second step for the command line option is “ctrl-c, ctrl-v”. The task is now complete.
The GUI option is only superior if it allows the user to skip the “Search for it” step. If it does not, now you are manually searching some arcane hierarchy for the specific location the developer decided to place that option.
The whole point of the GUI is to be more intuitive. If you need to go to the internet to realize how to do the basic stuff, that means your GUI “failed” in its purpose.
That’s still unavoidable for very complex UIs though, but still you measure how good a UI is at helping people accomplish their tasks.
Agreed. And I certainly use a GUI more than a command line.
My point is only that the command line should not be considered “unfriendly” to the user.
I don’t think “intuitive” is the proper metric for determining user friendliness. I think “ease of accomplishing a given task” is much more important. There are many tasks for which the command line is faster and simpler than using a GUI. Windows tends to hide these simpler, faster methods from the user. By regularly exposing the user to the CLI, Linux pushes the user to learn them.
Every button click is a dialog with the computer. It presents you with options and context, and waits for you to make a decision. Using a GUI, even simple tasks are going to take several dialogs to accomplish.
Most of the time, though, the user knows the exact task that needs to be accomplished, and is just appeasing the computer by going through each dialog to get to the point.
In these cases, the command line can enable the user to skip all that uneccessary dialog and go straight to execution of the intended task. I would say that this is not “unfriendly”.
The GUI option is only superior if it allows the user to skip the “Search for it” step.
Well yeah, and it usually does so it is usually superior. Did you have to Google how to connect to a WiFi network with a GUI? Of course not.
True.
Of course, I normally use a GUI on Linux to control WiFi, so that’s not a particularly good example.
I regularly use shell scripts. I do know how to use the GUI to change file permissions to make them executable. But why would I open a file manager, browse to the file location, right click, select properties, select permissions, and save, instead of just firing off “chmod a+x *.sh”?
The last shell script I made for work automatically concatenated a bunch of PDF documents, applied a watermark, and printed two copies, all using command line utilities. A simple task that would take several minutes for the user to perform with GUI tools.
This was a simple task that was regularly performed by several users. The command line gave the user a simple, consistent method to automate this task. To my way of thinking, that makes the command line more user-friendly: it does not limit the user to the pre-configured operations allowed by the GUI.
Most things I do in command line I am not aware of or would want to do in a GUI on windows tbh. Recursive search for any files that contain a specific string? How do you do that on windows without.
Most people just want Facebook and pornhub, Linux has everything you need.
How do you do that on windows
Open explorer. Type string in the search box.
(Ok it’s kind of a shitty search feature but that’s besides the point.)
Most people just want Facebook and pornhub, Linux has everything you need.
Sure, but don’t confuse covering 90% of what people do with covering 90% of people. It’s like electric car range or browser website compatibility. It might have enough range for 99% of my journeys of work on 99% of websites but that final 1% matters! You can’t just ignore it.
My bike is fine for 99% of trips. For the other 1% I can get a train
As long as you’re going somewhere that has trains…
I mean you could say the same thing for ICE/EVs, neither are taking you somewhere that doesn’t have roads.
People use the command line because it’s so much faster and more convenient. But there’s often a gui tool. I use Yast from time to time. It has its uses too. It’s slower though (if you know the syntax).
Most things are point & click & no one uses CLI in windows, it’s objectively inferior to linux
Also “start & stop a service” ? Does that sound like something an average user deals with in windows ?
Linux does need a control panel, I can admit that but let’s not pretend that Linux’s CLI is tough to learn. & the CLI is the most effective way of doing things in a pinch, when push comes to shove.
If someone like Pewdiepie (he’s no tech-savvy guy) can use linux, thrn linux has gotten user-friendly enough, although linux can do better & more needs to be done
- Ease of installation😅 now you’re straight up lying, linux is by far easier to install with a liveUSB
- as for hardware, that’s upto the manufacturers to open up their systems
Thanks for revealing your hatred for linux (I cannot wait for you to call me a linux-cultist, eventhough I admitted that linux can do better)
The bad cli thing is a 2000s view not a 2020s view. PowerShell is better than bash and windows terminal does everything I need both for local PowerShell stuff and remote bash stuff.
PowerShell is better than bash
It factually and objectively is not
There’s a reason why POSIX is still enduring to this day. Microsoft’s penchant for writing short novels for a basic command is not what I would call “better”. And that’s ignoring the fact that PowerShell doesn’t have a fraction of *nix shell capabilities and utilities.
Why is it factually and objectively not?
It has standard bash capabilities and also can run standard dotnet libraries. What can bash do that PowerShell can’t?
I’m skipping by the POSIX part because well…posix lost except insofar as it lives on in the two mainstream highly proprietary OSs.
It has standard bash capabilities
Well, ya. Its terminal interface, I’d expect it to have “basic” capabilities.
also can run standard dotnet libraries.
That’s not exactly a selling point.
What can bash do that PowerShell can’t?
Write succinct and easy to read commands. Interop with all the powerful tools in the Linux ecosystem (which is the point of a shell like bash).
posix lost except insofar as it lives on in the two mainstream highly proprietary OSs.
That’s just simply not true. Three majority of core utils you find on most Linux systems are POSIX compliant or mostly compliant. IIRC all the GNU tools are POSIX.
Who cares about Pewdiepie, the point is how much more “user-friendly” do you want, the excuses never end. If a stupid guy like pootiepie can handle linuxmint, then people are out of excuses
Plus it’s actually the apps that we’ll need to focus on (& games)
??
Clearly you do. You brought him up. And brought him up again.
As a point of argument, I could’ve brought up Luke from LTT as well. You’re something else😅
Most things until anything goes wrong, and then you’re out on your ass on the grub recovery screen
sounds like an easy choice
The right answer is definitely not landfill.
Most people use their computers to run a web browser, maybe a word processor or media player, and… not much else. Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
If the charities are unable/unwilling to provide support for Linux, they could give computers away on Craigslist before dumping more e-waste into our environment.
Biggest issue is teams Id guess. The nonprofit deals MS gives small nonprofits with free 365 licenses and management is a huge one around here
Can’t you use Teams in a browser tho? That’s what the teams client is essentially, Edge?
Some people has had issues with the moderation tools for meetings and connection to shared work files and note books via web, although the people having issues where on Chromebooks so might be different with Edge
I’ve done this for years with people in my family - either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. All most of them use is the browser, word processor, spreadsheets and an image and media viewer.
For Desktop Environment I stick to KDE or something that looks and acts similar to Windows XP.
I get very few complaints.
My wife’s 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.
I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.
PySolBSD :)
Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
You’d think…
Edge is on Linux (bottom of the page). Throw a windoze skin on KDE and it would be like they never left.
Lol, I switched to kde plasma and because the windows logo bottom left was replaced with a K, neither my dad or my sister knew how to shut down the pc 🤦♀️
How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.
Windows 10 was released ten years ago. How long do you think they should provide support? For comparison, Redhat gives 10 years for LTS releases, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint give 5 years. Extended support beyond the LTS period requires a paid subscription, similar to Windows.
It’s more that the hardware requirements for 11 are pretty arbitrary and not based on how powerful it is. My old PC can’t run it, not that I care to in the first place. But it’s much more powerful than my work laptop that can and does run win11, though not by my choice.
They said when they launched windows 10 it would be “last version”
The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren’t upgrading.
Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.
Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.
I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.
Windows 10 can be updated for free to 11. This is only impacting the ewaste laptops that some vendors sell. Like the ones with 64 gb storage or 4-8 gb of ram or no tpm chip… All of which are roughly as shit as each other.
This also affects laptops with anything up to a 7th gen i7 and any amount of RAM and storage. Even if they have the correct TPM version. On a technical level, these devices are absolutely capable of running Windows 11, Microsoft just didn’t wanna.
They don’t need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.
Is it an artifical block or is windows 11 just so bloated that it can’t run correctly on older hardware?
both
It’s not about sales, 11 is a free upgrade.
On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.
The technical requirements for 11 were reasonable when it came out and even more so today. Laptops being ewaste when they were built that way isn’t Microsoft’s fault.
The technical requirements for 11 were reasonable
My 8700k (from 2018) disagrees.
They’re the ones that keep making the requirements more and more unreasonable with every update.
What is unreasonable about 4 gb of ram, a processor made in the last decade, and a tpm chip? Even Linux doesn’t run well under 8, let alone 4, because linux’s memory management and handling of low memory is a catastrophic embarrassment. (Yes it uses less idle, but you get to 80% and the system will lock up)
Linux runs just fine in 4. Or much less. It depends a lot on what you use it for. My 486 had a whooping 32 Megs of memory and ran Linux just fine.
Regarding MS, the main problem is the changing of the goalpost. And I’m not so sure there’s even any point to the whole TPM thing anyway.
The TPM chip is the issue here, and not a requirement under Linux.
That doesn’t sound like a tough choice at all…
seriously i just deleted windows and put mint on my laptop (which is only like from 2020ish) and it runs better than it ever did on windows
Yeah, both my Linux PC’s probably wouldn’t even run Win 10, let alone Win 11. As long as they work, pretty much any PC from the last decade can still run any distro and be sufficient to do any kind of productivity workload.
Can confirm with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs my previous W11 install, it’s astonishing that a company with Microsoft’s resources can’t make an OS that runs as smoothly and efficiently as the open-source alternatives. Is it all just because of telemetry and whatever else Windows is phoning home with?
As a company, Microsoft doesn’t reward anyone for improving the performance of the OS. That should be enough of an explanation 😆.
I think it’s just that they don’t care about performance. It’s been the case for a while that typically games run faster on Linux through WINE/Proton despite using a translation layer.
And there’s a bunch of background services taking up memory and CPU on Windows that are hard to turn off.
Install Linux on them and give them to school children so they can go to school online and not have to worry about being shot. I also see a lot of lithium in that pile.
Linux. Each Linux OS, breathes new life into an old laptop. Least if that laptop is at least 15 ~ 20 years old. Laptops from the late 90s though? May have to go very old school Linux.
It breaks my heart that so much of these will end up in landfills. Resell them. Or send them to device recycling. There’s a shitload of rare earths in modern-ish but obsolete computers. And downcycling is possible too - my router is an old Lenovo thin client with a dual port 10g SFP+ card slapped in it.
… that’s a really compelling reason for linux.
I mean the next few years are going to be rough. Being able to recycle these things for basic use is going to be huge. Windows, mac, people need the internet more than anything else. It’s a sad way to gain adoption but it could be insanely impactful…
Looking at the used market where I live, quite a large number of laptops are already sold with Windows 11 installed even when officially unsuported. Activated with MAS as well, probably.
I think there are a lot of gunky software out there that only works on Windows. I tried getting my mom on Linux but I was unable to find any good open source sewing and graphic alternatives to the expensive lock in hardware that she had already bought.
Although I doubt these are the kind of road blocks charities are facing.
“Companion softwares” for hardware are the only thing that still makes me use my Windows VM. In my case it’s my children’s educative computers which need a real computer to add content.
What do you use for your VM? I tried running a VM with QEMU but its pretty slow
Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn’t worth it.
But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run … well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.
Some modern workloads can take advantage of multiple computers. You can usually compile using things like distcc and spread the load across them.
If you make them into a Kubernetes cluster you can run many copies or many different things.
It’s still an unsolved problem: we still end up with single core bottlenecks to this day, before even involving other machines altogether.
Yes. It’s always the bandwidth that’s the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.
Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something like that. I’ve always got a bunch of computers running virtually idle and it would be nice if they could just help out with whatever your main PC is doing.
