MudMan

For reference on how this is different (and how it’s not) to previous instances, here’s mainstream-AF PC World magazine in February 2020:

Windows 7 was understandable before; now it’s a liability. With no security updates and a still-vast market share, Microsoft’s operating system will be a big, juicy target for hackers.

We recommend migrating to Windows 10 if you’re able to, and have a guide explaining your Windows 10 upgrade options (go.pcworld.com/10up) . If you perform only basic tasks on your PC—email, web surfing, and documents—then Linux is a viable, user-friendly option these days. We’ve got a Linux beginner’s guide (go. pcworld.com/lnxg), too, and better yet you can try it for free with no risk to your main Windows 7 installation.

You can probably still upgrade to Windows 10 for free (see page 103), too.

I don’t have APC’s issue on hand, but if anybody wants to share how that compares, do go ahead.

For some additional reference: https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/14/windows-7-support-ends-today-here-are-your-options/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-and-how-to-replace-windows-7-with-linux-mint/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHBBN0CqXk

Short term history is so fun and so weird.

The time I point people at is the early Ubuntu drops when Linux was getting easy to intall, computers were simple to build and magazines would sometimes just pop up in stores with a Linux install CD in the cover. That’s the time I remember more normies suddenly gaining awareness of Linux as an option.

But yeah, I don’t have a problem with any of the stuff you said.

It’s just all unrelated to Windows 10 end of support.

Steam OS and Bazzite are way more relevant than it. Because they fix problems for a subset of users who are mainly focused on gaming.

They don’t do it fully, and not for all users, but yeah, that stuff will move Linux from 1.5% of the Steam survey to 3-5% eventually. That WILL move the needle to some extent.

Now if you did that for Adobe users, video editors, graphic designers, people who HAVE to use Microsoft Office, people who only play Fortnite, people with zero capacity to troubleshoot, people who rely on commercial software with no Linux ports in general, people who have Nvidia cards and want to use Game Mode, people who use other specialized hardware that isn’t currently well supported…

…those things will move the needle.

“My ancient copy of Windows 10 I use as a Chromebook is no longer getting security patches” is, by itself, less of an event than any of those. That’s my entire point.

I don’t need to wonder. I get “so upset” because I hang out here a bunch and it’s boring and repetitive to see the same posts every single day. Especially when they’re kinda weird, wrong and self-defeating.

I’m also not super inclined to letting the Linux/OSS community play the “you’re mad at people being wrong on the Internet” card. Holy crap, is this place not the place to do that with any self-righteousness or moral high ground. In a conversation about lack of self-awareness that may be the biggest instance yet.

It doesn’t have a big impact on anybody. Which is the point. The friction IS the impact.

The hype drives attention if you’re targeting the people that don’t already know. That’s not what’s happening, regardless of your impromptu Instagram IT advice anecdotal experience.

Hype driving attention also doesn’t work if the product you’re hyping doesn’t do the thing it needs to do the way the people you’re marketing it at need it to.

Acknowledging either of those things is not negativity or pessimism. If we’re talking about pushing for open source software as a community then denying or ignoring the practical issues is not helpful. OSS isn’t a religion where you proselitize, facts be damned. It’s meant to be a project for an alternative way of handling software development. That video I linked is not an attack, or a bummer, it’s a hopeful sign that contributors and developers often have more clarity on the situation and the work left to do than the user-level advocates and activist forum posters.

It is fricking not, though, that’s my point.

I have heard exactly zero normies talk about this. Nobody cares. Just like nobody cared when Windows 7 ended support. People just… kept using it. Today Windows 7 is as high up the Steam hardware survey as Linux Mint.

Windows 10 doesn’t shut down in October, it just… stops receiving security patches for free. Anybody clueless enough to not have migrated or stuck there for hardware reasons either already mitigated the issue or does not care. This is Linux’s Y2K moment. Everybody is expecting this big shift to be a moment and it’s really not going to be.

So I’m getting exhausted for nothing, which just makes it more annoying. Not a single normie space is even thinking about this. This is 100% Linux users talking to other Linux users about this big game-changing moment that’s never gonna happen. The EoL day will come, a couple of tech outlets will run a piece saying “hey, MS ends Windows 10 official support” and maybe a listicle of things to do (“1. Move to Win11, 2. Pay Windows for patches 3. Move to another OS”)…

…and nothing will happen.

We’ll all be here and we’ll all quietly stop talking about it and all this friction generated by this delusional hype will just fizzle out.

At the start of the process I was mildly excited, not about the influx of Windows 10 users, which was obviously not going to be a thing, but about maybe the hype leading to Linux development spaces focusing on long overdue work to ease that transition in time for the deadline. That didn’t really happen, so now we’re all just advertising this weird narrative to each other multiple times a day.

The quiet acknowledgement that… well, yeah, it won’t happen, but don’t break kayfabe just in case there’s a Windows guy looking, just reinforces that point. I would much rather have spent all this energy addressing WHY it won’t happen, or how to address the work that is needed to make it happen. I’d argue THAT is what a “fan and user of FOSS” should be pushing the community to do. In that, you know, it may actually work.

Hah. I fear you and I are not the same, but you and the trumpeters may be equally disappointed.

I’ve said it before, but MAN am I excited to get to Windows 10 end of support so the old people and professionals stuck with highly specific hardware can just keep using their Windows 10 and the Linux community finally moves on from this stuff.

I am exhausted of these threads. Maybe we do a two week nostalgia revival when their paid commercial support ends again, but for now, can we make a deal right here to absolutely stop this crap by the end of the year when the needle moves exactly zero percent? Pretty please?

The fact that they felt they needed to lead with 32GB of memory in a phone at such huge cost maybe tells you what some of the challenges are, considering even top of the line Android with similar price points cap at 12GB.

I don’t know that you’re going to feature creep your way into mobile OS viability. You’re going to need a legitimate shot at Android out of the gate. Especially at flagship price points. If your pitch is “pay high end prices to give us a shot at succeeding where Windows/MS crashed and burned” you’re going to have to pitch wealthier people than me.

Which part?

For closed source repositories of software that is currently available it’s just a matter of having them included by default and actively prompting them on app managers as opposed to defaulting to hiding anything that isn’t open source by default. Different distros come closer or further from this in the first place.

I imagine if you were going to go out of your way a bit further you’d restructure some of your splash pages and manager layouts to promote those based on popularity out of the gate.

There’s an argument for a next step to be pre-packaging windows apps that can work under Wine directly in a package manager, but that’s a bigger project and I genuinely don’t think Wine is ready for that yet. Linux probably needs a better translation layer that works more reliably and comprehensively before that’s an option. But hey, somebody should get on all of that, too.

True story, OneDrive is the one piece of Microsoft software where I always accept any prompts to give feedback or fill surveys.

My feedback is always the same: “This is the piece of software that has cost me the most money and work hours over the years”

This is an accurate assessment.

Oh, I didn’t mean to come across like that, I’m just saying you don’t sound like the archetypal Windows user and even if you were you’d be in a tiny minority.

Which, yeah, tracks with what you’re saying about both your use case and your profile. You sure don’t sound like you’re using your PC as the average end user does. The average user has not tried Linux, doesn’t have those applications in mind, certainly has no set opinion on dual booting or UEFI. You ARE a bit of a unicorn there. As am I, I suppose, although I’m bouncing back and forth, not maining Linux, and not because I’m particularly dissatisfied with Win 11 specifically.

You are pretty archetypal on the OneDrive thing. Everybody has had an annoying experience with One Drive recently. I don’t know that there are any other experiences to be had with OneDrive at all, to be honest.

Cool, mr. Unicorn. You are a small minority of a small minority, though. I do have lots of questions about whether you would have upgraded to 11 given the chance, or about when you intend to get a new PC, and whether you’d switch to Win 11 then, or about why you didn’t try the workarounds for the compatibility issues, or why you aren’t trying the options to extend the support on Windows 10, or whether the spyware thing would have been enough and so whether you’d have switched regardless. Because you sure sound like a guy who would have tried Linux before. “Why I am on Linux on my primary desktop computer” is… very specific wording.

But taking you at your word you’re still 2% of 2%. Of 2%, given that you’re on Lemmy. Except you seem to be on programming.dev, so… of 2%?

I’m gonna guess from the scratched and replaced line that this was an edit. The original response was about federal systems in general, the guy generalized from the US, I noted this was not the case in general. I guess I wouldn’t have been confused if you had responded to him, but I was specifically not talking about the US. Muddled online chats with strangers are muddled, I suppose.

Which states and which federal government?

Yeah, it’s absolutely a catch-22. That said, most Linux distros come with closed source repos deactivated out of the box. The nicer ones will at least ask you during the install process, but some don’t bother. It’s less about convincing the devs to port and more about exposing the stuff that already exists.

And Proton shows that a translation layer that works reliably on Linux isn’t impossible, it just needs the right amount of focus and investment. I don’t know how far the current tools are from that, though. Which is interesting, because I do use Linux on the daily and I haven’t even bothered to check in ages, instead moving to Windows for that, which tells you something.

To quote myself just one post above:

I agree with the idea that selling that everything can be the same on Linux is not a great plan, but Linux advocates often focus on the wrong things to keep and change. They are often very focused on having a similar looking desktop, which nobody cares too much about, and really dismissive about software not having Linux ports, which is a catastrophic issue.

I do see what you see on principle, but I’d argue that the reasons KDE and Linux overall can come up short on “being good in its own right” are significant and often self-inflicted. No user should have to manually add a repository to their software manager, let alone a Windows “exile”. Being the only major OS without native or emulated compatibility with major software suites is a dealbreaker for many people and so on.

Whether KDE or Wine or the kernel teams are able to fix the issues remains irrelevant to the end users. I agree they should find their own optimal ways to fix things, I’m saying they haven’t found them in many of these areas.

Windows 8 to Windows 10 didn’t. Which is why Windows 8 was quickly swept under the rug and Windows 9 was named Windows 8.1 to try to make people forget that ever happened.

10 to 11 are reskins of each other as far as the UX is concerned. Behind the scenes there are some hardware and software compatibility quirks, but at the user level it’s perhaps the least eventful Windows transition ever.

I know people complain about the enshittification in 11, but a lot of people leave out that many of the controversial features got patched into 10 as well.

I agree with the idea that selling that everything can be the same on Linux is not a great plan, but Linux advocates often focus on the wrong things to keep and change. They are often very focused on having a similar looking desktop, which nobody cares too much about, and really dismissive about software not having Linux ports, which is a catastrophic issue.

Ah.

I mean, still, point stands. But… ah.

Agreed. It serves as a bit of a backlog for that reason, and that’s a more honest approach than pretending everything is sorted already.

People that do these sorts of remote work via GUIs exist. But yes, the switch is likely pretty obvious to them. I for one used to do it with Minecraft server stuff, I had FileZilla; Dolphin pretty much replaced that instantly for me. MUCH later, scripts replaced Dolphin.

They exist, but they already know that Linux is an option. It’s not a selling point, it’s a bit of an echo chamber about how it’s possible to do the things you already know every OS can do. If you’re messing with those things you’ve been in a million tutorials with segments on how to do stuff in Win/MacOS/Linux over the years.

Is it though? They’d face the same issues switching to MacOS. There’s no point in lying that some of their favorite programs may not work. I still miss Paint.net though GIMP has grown on me a lot.

If GIMP has grown on you a lot you probably should check with a doctor about that. Because ew.

I think it is. The scale to which you’ll have to swap software solutions is way larger in Linux, which is why nobody is writing the same advice for Windows or Mac marketing. I’d argue Mac-to-Windows will lose you more options, but either way the expectation is that the software will be there for you or that you’ll have a better alternative that is an actual selling point. “Come over and see if you can find a viable alternative to all your work software” is a huge dealbreaker.

Nobody is going to leave their old Windows files on their OS drive AND install Linux unless their goal is to dual boot (and that’s clearly not who this is for).

Isn’t it, though? I mean, I get why you wouldn’t float that option when you’re trying to push people to move over entirely, but… that’s definitely an option.

The entire file system needs to be replaced in the process of installing Linux, so there’s no “somebody should find a better solution to this.” The only way to do it would be to relocate and resize partitions as files are copied … and that’s incredibly dangerous. Not to mention attempting to guess what files are important to the Windows user has a high probability to fail.

Well, yeah, but you’re describing the problem, not a solution. Let’s say that there is no technical solution to preserve a data drive across OSs (there is, but hey). That’s an inconvenience, at best, a major problem at worst. In a world where Windows will update you without messing with your partitions and even a clean install will preserve your separate data drives (which Windows has encouraged splitting from the boot drives for a while), this is a reason why you’d be discouraged to take on the more finicky, annoying process of moving everything over to Linux. Especially if you don’t know if you’re going to like it and may have to move everything back.

People should update software (at least when there’s a security related issue) … for the exact same reason they should ditch Windows 10. However, as you said “Having to explain to people that their perfectly working computer is actually not working despite all available evidence is a bit of an issue.”

Yeah, I’ve always been torn about Windows’ approach to updates because of this. I do want automatic updates. I don’t want to have to remember to manually check for and fire off updates. Especially when the longer you wait the more of a gamble it becomes that something will have broken after you’re done.

This became a meme on Windows because their early implementations of Windows update were insanely blunt and annoying. Nobody wants their computer to reset in the middle of a presentation or a game. I’d say that an automated reminder to update or an update scheduler are not inherently a bad thing, though. For big sysadmins that will only update what’s strictly necessary you want the option of manual updates, but for desktop users who typically will want to be on latest for everything? Just letting their computers update overnight or on every reboot isn’t the worst idea ever.