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There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers,

There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. That's not to say that those things can't work in Linux, or that some distributions don't work better than others. It is also not to say that windows is without its own problems. However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows. > The operating system we use should not bother us and control us and treat us like idiots. I fully agree, for experienced users. Sadly the majority are still tech illiterate and are (for a lack of experience) "idiots". Windows had a chance to make an extremely easy to use operating system, and blew it by turning it into an ad platform with a slew of unpleasant other sharp edges if you pull the covers back.

Zardoz84 5y ago
the last time that I try on Windows , I find the multi monitor experience subpar compared against Linux with KDE.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> printers Printers are a nightmare. They suck on windows and they suck on Linux. I don't often talk about my job when I meet new people, but when I do people ask me for help with their printer…
- krylon 5y ago
  Hehe, as a former Windows admin, I came to hate printers passionately. My experience with printers on Linux and macOS was a lot better. However, I do not do much printing in my personal life, so that does not necessarily say a lot.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  I use to be of the opinion that business/enterprise grade network printers were the way to go. You'd assign an IP and forget about it, when you set them up you'd plug in the IP and magic. However once you introduce power saving, wifi, and self discovery via Bonjour or whatever voodoo Windows uses, they're not much better. It doesn't help that every printer manufacturer these days wants their driver to be a full blown App with a custom UI and taskbar icon so they can push their consumables on you.
- neogodless 5y ago
  I used to think that. But I bought a wireless Canon Pixma nearly a decade ago, and haven't had any issues with it yet on any of my Windows machines. Just get on my network and print to your heart's content. No fuss. Now... previously, I've had printers with multiple hundred megabyte driver downloads... that stopped working when a new version of Windows came out, and they ended up in a landfill. Ugh. But over the past decade, printing doesn't seem to require drivers. It just works.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > and they suck on Linux. I have to say I can't remember the last time I worried about a printer on Linux. My current one, a network-attached HP, just popped up when I wanted to print something. I never installed it - it was just there. Not sure how that would qualify as sucking.
  - hiram112 5y ago
    Like most of us on HN, our use cases are not even remotely similar to the majority of users out there who end up using junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets like BestBuy or Walmart, which use proprietary bloatware to up-sell them subscriptions to ink replacement and photo printing services. At best, you might be able to find a very basic driver on Linux that speaks compatible Postscript in order to print b&w PDFs. Or they're in a corporate environment with a much more "enterprise" printer. And again, the IT staff will want to image the same proprietary printer software that hooks into Active Directory on all the clients. Maybe a small percentage of Linux-savvy admins out there would be able to figure out the correct set of drivers and packages to install that would allow a standard RHEL or Ubuntu laptop to print and scan basic PDFs, but unless the company has a lot of users all using the same Linux distro and version, good luck as it will be a game of whack-a-mole to keep separate distros working every time there's a Kernel upgrade. I'm a single user on a Mac using a well-researched and highly rated Dell Laser printer. It does work on Linux (and Mac) and has great Postscript support, even over the network. But 50% of my use is to scan PDFs with optical recognition (I believe that allows the PDFs to be text-searchable instead of just scanning a pixel-image of the documents). And I doubt that function works on Linux, as it requires proprietary Dell software to do the enhanced OCR scanning vs just image scan.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets So the problem is not in Linux, is it?
      - littlestymaar 5y ago
        The problem is the printer. Q.E.D.
pradn 5y ago
Heck, I can be technically-savvy and I prefer the "just works" experience of Windows. It rarely gets in the way. All major software and games work on Windows. I don't even think about hardware compatibility. It just disappears, which is nice.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > I don't even think about hardware compatibility This is somewhat dated, by I've shopped for hardware for Windows by chipset because some worked great out of the box, while some was finicky.
- atoav 5y ago
  On Linux you think about hardware compatibility when you buy the hardware, and then in many cases it just works. I use both systems so I have good comparison, and it is nowhere nearly as clear cut as "On Windows it just works" vs "On Linux you have to invoke unholy incantations to make it work". In some cases it is surprisingly the other way around, where Linux has some standard driver that just works and on Windows you have to install some damned bloatware just to get a fraction of the usability.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    This is my experience too. You have to care if hardware works, but when it works - and that is very frequent nowadays - it usually works much better than on windows. My best example case is a Asus C120 mini projector whose linux driver development I personally helped. When plugged, it shows itself as a mass storage device with a .exe file with the driver for windows 7. The driver doesn't work on recent windows versions, I don't know if you can download a new version. On linux, just plug it and it turns into a monitor. Nothing to do, no command to type. And the best part: I discovered it when I accidently plugged it on an ARM machine. It is very unlikely you could have such a good experience even with supported hardware on windows.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Razer Synapse comes to mind which requires a cloud account to make you use the hardware such as mouse. On Linux, a FOSS GUI takes care of it. Not only that, same for software used to update SSD firmware (bundling Chromium, and an old version, too!). On Linux, topgrade takes care of it for me.
onemoresoop 5y ago
Hibernate is my linux pet peeve.
- wazoox 5y ago
  I had some trouble for a few weeks this year with some AMD graphics firmware (crashing graphics under load after an suspend period), but an update corrected it the day after I began being annoyed enough to begin looking seriously for a solution. It just works. It just worked (but for these few weeks) since I've been using a Linux laptop daily, which is since 2007 or 2008.
- zrm 5y ago
  Can somebody explain what the purpose of hibernate is in modern day? I get how it was useful in 1995 when ACPI didn't exist. But now it's significantly slower to resume from than S3 suspend, which uses <1 watt, and it wears out your SSD. What is it good for?
  - treis 5y ago
    Dual booting is my usecase.
  - onemoresoop 5y ago
    The purpose for me is to pause my system and resume without draining any battery juice. I have a portable small dev laptop and when I close the lid it suspends nicely. However, a day or two later when I want to do some work the battery is 80% drained. A few times it even drained completely so when I booted my wifi drivers were corrupted. Had to spend nearly an hour fixing it up. Still loving linux though, it still feels like I'm in control of my machine but as I get older I tend to not want to keep on fixing things all the time, just want it to work.
- dyingkneepad 5y ago
  Linux dev here, I worked on and fixed lots of Hibernate-related bugs. Abandon all hope: Hibernation (S4 suspend) is absolutely horrible to debug and test, you can't easily put this in a CI system without delaying your testing by 100000%, and hibernating is generally a bad idea since booting is so fast and S3 suspend is also so good these days. Just change your workflow, avoid the pain.
hef19898 5y ago
The only issue I ran into woth Ubuntu so far is WiFi printing. Everything else works at least as good as Windows. And Linux is so mich cleaner. For professional use, read commercial usw of Office programs, I think Windows is easier, so. I never tried Linux in such an environment so.
orwin 5y ago
> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. But this is not true on laptops though. Right now, my sister is restarting her studies (or rather starting, after working 5 years as a chef), and had to pick up a laptop. I lent my old one, with windows by default, and dual boot to linux. She was only using it for internet, matlab (or scilab, i'm not sure) and dropbox. My brother advised hare to take Joplin for notetaking, tried it on both limux and windows and now, two month after my initial loan, she bought a computer with linux. Because while on desktop, you might have compatibility issues, on a good laptop you won't.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Edit preamble: I am referring to the last 4 laptops I have owned; havent had a desktop in a decade. This hasn't been my experience. Multi-monitor and hidpi only worked out of the box on one distro (pop_os!) and printing to an old brother laser printer only ever worked from Windows. That said, if I was doing scientific computing via matlab or what not, I would probably grab pop_os over windows too. I still do most of my development work on linux, and video / gaming / home office from the windows partition.
  - orwin 5y ago
    Yeah, matlab might be the reason, i did not really use Linux when i was a math student so i did not really feel the pain at the time.
  - krylon 5y ago
    I have never touched a hidpi display, but using multiple monitors has worked quite well for me, both on desktop machines and laptops. Including attaching a display on a running desktop session.
  - kenniskrag 5y ago
    Brother printer usually supports linux. Sometimed you have to run their installer or copy their printer files in a cups folder.
- black3r 5y ago
newacct583 5y ago
> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows. Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac, and a better time still with a tablet or phone. The days of "windows is easier for end users" are largely at an end. In the modern world, these are *both* enthusiast/professional systems intended for special purpose deployment.
- deeviant 5y ago
  > Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac Not if they wanted to game or interact with the windows app ecosystem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Than Mac? I don’t know if that’s true. The average user knows almost nothing about how to use their Mac from my anecdotes of running a virtual coworking community and trouble shooting people’s stuff.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I have found this to be true for my parents, only because they have an iPhone and iPad. If they weren't already in the apple ecosystem, it'd be a bit of a wash I think.
christophilus 5y ago
> Multiple monitors, high res monitors My experience with vanilla Gnome and Fedora has been excellent regarding these two points. Haven’t had printer issues, either, but I rarely use a printer. Gaming with Steam and Proton is good enough for me, but still a little more friction than on Windows.
- ActorNightly 5y ago
  I switched to Windows on my desktop primarily because of the support of the modern games (like upcoming Battlefield 2042) and generally higher performance. To gain back the linux dev environment, I got a decent laptop (used), and installed linux, but I use the VSCode remoteSSH capability on windows, which works super well. I dabbled in trying to set up passthrough to a VM, however from research, the chance of getting banned by anti cheat on some games was not worth the risk.
ageofwant 5y ago
This has not been true for at least a decade - time to update your ken on Linux.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I've been using linux daily for over a decade. Pop_os! is the only distro that almost entirely works 100% straight out of the box for most things. This has been the case across 4 high end laptops (dell xps, surface book 2, and something something lenovo, I forget which). Manjaro, vanilla arch, deviant and Ubuntu all had some difficulty or other, though my objections to Ubuntu are more related to software decisions rather than hardware support. In that case, it was roughly on par, perhaps slightly behind pop_os in terms of out of the box experience.
bachmeier 5y ago
> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. With respect to gaming, the parent was referring to work done in the browser, so probably not including gaming. We use consoles for all the gaming in our house, so at least for us that's a non-issue. I have to disagree on printers. My experience with getting printers to work on Ubuntu is that you have to follow these steps: Plug it in Start printing That's never really been the case for Windows. We used to have to mess with driver installation and then reboot. Sometimes we'd have to do more than that based on visiting a website. When Vista was first released, a lot of older printers were not supported, and that included one of ours. The only solution was to use Linux. Just a few days ago, my (Windows-using) aunt was visiting and told me her printer stopped working. She has no idea how to get it to work and now she'll have to pay someone to figure it out for her. My mother has had similar issues. I don't much care about Linux vs Windows but I don't think printer support is a highlight of Windows.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I have personally had the opposite experience, but printers are a minefield, so it isn't a huge surprise.
zrm 5y ago
> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows. Here's what I've observed on this one. If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out. If you put one in front of an adult who has been using Windows for 30 years, they get mad at you. Because they already know how to do Z thing in Windows and for Linux they have to figure it out or look it up. Which as a general rule isn't any harder to do on Linux than it is on Windows -- it's often easier -- but they already did it on Windows 30 years ago and don't want to do it again. That lasts for all of a few hours of use before they've figured out how to do the things they commonly do, if they don't give up.
- benbristow 5y ago
  > If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out. Until they need to do anything off the beaten track, which can be something as simple as changing the mouse speed (I'm not making this up) and you google it and it's telling you to run terminal commands and update your Xorg.conf file.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    On my Ubuntu 20.04 machine: pressed super (windows key), typed "mouse"; it showed me mouse setting which I clicked; there was a slider named "touchpad speed". It is nowhere near complicated and you don't have to run terminal commands or update your Xorg.conf file.
    - benbristow 5y ago
      That's touchpad speed though, not mouse speed. And this was on Linux Mint, which is meant to be a beginner's Linux distro.
      - marcodiego 5y ago
        Sorry, I bit it. Plugged a mouse just to test it: the procedure is EXACTLY the same. And Ubuntu is not a hard for beginners distro. You're parroting outdated false comments.
kaba0 5y ago
> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind Multiple monitors: nope, wayland does it better. The amount of flickering, determining dpi etc is objectively worse than what you get with modern Wayland. The rest may be true, but other than printers, they are quite similar nowadays. Pipewire does close the gap with regards to bluetooth. And then the other side: for development, windows is strictly inferior. Debugs are exceptionally slow for c++, git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator, and for java it is seriously slower for some reason.
- benbristow 5y ago
  > git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator Does anyone even use git bash? Powershell Core + standard Git SCM for Windows works perfectly fine for me.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Unfortunately the project at work depends on a minor posix shell script (for whatever reason), that has to run inside git bash..
    - benbristow 5y ago
      Sounds odd. What does it do? No way to convert it to run inside Powershell instead perhaps (Powershell Core is now open-source and cross-platform and can run on Linux too!)?
marcosdumay 5y ago
To take another of your points, printers suck on Windows, and are perfectly ok on Linux. On Windows you will get the manufacturer driver with all the crapware that comes with it. Linux certainly has an inbuilt driver that supports all of it. About Bluetooth, I never managed to get it working on any Windows computer. Granted that I didn't try very hard before formating them, but the largest difficulty on Linux is discovering that it's already working with everything installed, you just have to stop searching the web on how to set and use it.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I've got a brother laser printer that has yet to successfully print from linux, and a Bluetooth headset that would only half work on a modern linux distro. Both work perfectly fine on Windows. YMMV.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    When I finally gave up and brought a Bluetooth headset I simply couldn't find any Linux instructions because they were lost at the sea of "no, the Windows driver won't allow you to use this headset on that application" issues. But yeah, I imagine headsets that simply work on Windows exist, you probably just have to avoid the famous brands. (Anyway, I got it to work by searching "bluetooth" on the desktop menu and launching the bluetooth management application.)
  - dmatech 5y ago
    Which model? I'm not above reverse-engineering a driver and building my own. I have an HL-2270DW, but I've never needed to print from Linux.
uep 5y ago
> There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. This hasn't been my experience. Printers and gaming are the only two on this list that I think Windows does better out-of-the-box. There is one thing missing from this list that I think Windows does better, and that's power management (suspend/resume) for laptops. Other than printers, I would say Linux generally performs worse on these things because the companies making the printers, games, and laptops don't support Linux. Printer manufacturers don't support Linux that well, but I also think printer handling on Linux is not as good even when it is supported.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ubercow13 5y ago
  Since connected standby, Windows certainly does not do suspend better than Linux. I’m not sure it’s even capable of suspending any more. See for example this recent report of Dell advising that customers should not expect their laptops to suspend [1]. I’ve owned a laptop with this feature and replacing Windows with Linux allowed me to actually use S3 sleep again, safely put the laptop in a bag without worrying about it turning itself on, and it improved the battery life when sleeping by a factor of like 5-10. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
greydius 5y ago
> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. I'm running Ubuntu with two 4k monitors, an HP printer, and a bluetooth mouse. All of this works perfectly without any fiddling. I've also played quite a few games on this machine thanks to Steam and Proton.
formerly_proven 5y ago
The multiple monitor experience on Windows depends hugely on the exact hardware used and can range from "ok" to "absolute shitcan trashfire", but with modern stuff it's mostly tending towards the latter.
sudosysgen 5y ago
I've personally had a much easier time getting Bluetooth and printers to work on Linux. It's been 100% plug and play on Linux but on Windows I have to use a mess of driver installs, configurations, changing the Bluetooth stack, messing in device manager to reset stuff

Zardoz84 5y ago

the last time that I try on Windows , I find the multi monitor experience subpar compared against Linux with KDE.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> printers Printers are a nightmare. They suck on windows and they suck on Linux. I don't often talk about my job when I meet new people, but when I do people ask me for help with their printer…

krylon 5y ago
Hehe, as a former Windows admin, I came to hate printers passionately. My experience with printers on Linux and macOS was a lot better. However, I do not do much printing in my personal life, so that does not necessarily say a lot.
cptskippy 5y ago
I use to be of the opinion that business/enterprise grade network printers were the way to go. You'd assign an IP and forget about it, when you set them up you'd plug in the IP and magic. However once you introduce power saving, wifi, and self discovery via Bonjour or whatever voodoo Windows uses, they're not much better. It doesn't help that every printer manufacturer these days wants their driver to be a full blown App with a custom UI and taskbar icon so they can push their consumables on you.
neogodless 5y ago
I used to think that. But I bought a wireless Canon Pixma nearly a decade ago, and haven't had any issues with it yet on any of my Windows machines. Just get on my network and print to your heart's content. No fuss. Now... previously, I've had printers with multiple hundred megabyte driver downloads... that stopped working when a new version of Windows came out, and they ended up in a landfill. Ugh. But over the past decade, printing doesn't seem to require drivers. It just works.
rbanffy 5y ago
> and they suck on Linux. I have to say I can't remember the last time I worried about a printer on Linux. My current one, a network-attached HP, just popped up when I wanted to print something. I never installed it - it was just there. Not sure how that would qualify as sucking.
- hiram112 5y ago
  Like most of us on HN, our use cases are not even remotely similar to the majority of users out there who end up using junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets like BestBuy or Walmart, which use proprietary bloatware to up-sell them subscriptions to ink replacement and photo printing services. At best, you might be able to find a very basic driver on Linux that speaks compatible Postscript in order to print b&w PDFs. Or they're in a corporate environment with a much more "enterprise" printer. And again, the IT staff will want to image the same proprietary printer software that hooks into Active Directory on all the clients. Maybe a small percentage of Linux-savvy admins out there would be able to figure out the correct set of drivers and packages to install that would allow a standard RHEL or Ubuntu laptop to print and scan basic PDFs, but unless the company has a lot of users all using the same Linux distro and version, good luck as it will be a game of whack-a-mole to keep separate distros working every time there's a Kernel upgrade. I'm a single user on a Mac using a well-researched and highly rated Dell Laser printer. It does work on Linux (and Mac) and has great Postscript support, even over the network. But 50% of my use is to scan PDFs with optical recognition (I believe that allows the PDFs to be text-searchable instead of just scanning a pixel-image of the documents). And I doubt that function works on Linux, as it requires proprietary Dell software to do the enhanced OCR scanning vs just image scan.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets So the problem is not in Linux, is it?
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      The problem is the printer. Q.E.D.

pradn 5y ago

Heck, I can be technically-savvy and I prefer the "just works" experience of Windows. It rarely gets in the way. All major software and games work on Windows. I don't even think about hardware compatibility. It just disappears, which is nice.

dehrmann 5y ago
> I don't even think about hardware compatibility This is somewhat dated, by I've shopped for hardware for Windows by chipset because some worked great out of the box, while some was finicky.
atoav 5y ago
On Linux you think about hardware compatibility when you buy the hardware, and then in many cases it just works. I use both systems so I have good comparison, and it is nowhere nearly as clear cut as "On Windows it just works" vs "On Linux you have to invoke unholy incantations to make it work". In some cases it is surprisingly the other way around, where Linux has some standard driver that just works and on Windows you have to install some damned bloatware just to get a fraction of the usability.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  This is my experience too. You have to care if hardware works, but when it works - and that is very frequent nowadays - it usually works much better than on windows. My best example case is a Asus C120 mini projector whose linux driver development I personally helped. When plugged, it shows itself as a mass storage device with a .exe file with the driver for windows 7. The driver doesn't work on recent windows versions, I don't know if you can download a new version. On linux, just plug it and it turns into a monitor. Nothing to do, no command to type. And the best part: I discovered it when I accidently plugged it on an ARM machine. It is very unlikely you could have such a good experience even with supported hardware on windows.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Razer Synapse comes to mind which requires a cloud account to make you use the hardware such as mouse. On Linux, a FOSS GUI takes care of it. Not only that, same for software used to update SSD firmware (bundling Chromium, and an old version, too!). On Linux, topgrade takes care of it for me.

onemoresoop 5y ago

Hibernate is my linux pet peeve.

wazoox 5y ago
I had some trouble for a few weeks this year with some AMD graphics firmware (crashing graphics under load after an suspend period), but an update corrected it the day after I began being annoyed enough to begin looking seriously for a solution. It just works. It just worked (but for these few weeks) since I've been using a Linux laptop daily, which is since 2007 or 2008.
zrm 5y ago
Can somebody explain what the purpose of hibernate is in modern day? I get how it was useful in 1995 when ACPI didn't exist. But now it's significantly slower to resume from than S3 suspend, which uses <1 watt, and it wears out your SSD. What is it good for?
- treis 5y ago
  Dual booting is my usecase.
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  The purpose for me is to pause my system and resume without draining any battery juice. I have a portable small dev laptop and when I close the lid it suspends nicely. However, a day or two later when I want to do some work the battery is 80% drained. A few times it even drained completely so when I booted my wifi drivers were corrupted. Had to spend nearly an hour fixing it up. Still loving linux though, it still feels like I'm in control of my machine but as I get older I tend to not want to keep on fixing things all the time, just want it to work.
dyingkneepad 5y ago
Linux dev here, I worked on and fixed lots of Hibernate-related bugs. Abandon all hope: Hibernation (S4 suspend) is absolutely horrible to debug and test, you can't easily put this in a CI system without delaying your testing by 100000%, and hibernating is generally a bad idea since booting is so fast and S3 suspend is also so good these days. Just change your workflow, avoid the pain.

hef19898 5y ago

The only issue I ran into woth Ubuntu so far is WiFi printing. Everything else works at least as good as Windows. And Linux is so mich cleaner. For professional use, read commercial usw of Office programs, I think Windows is easier, so. I never tried Linux in such an environment so.

orwin 5y ago

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. But this is not true on laptops though. Right now, my sister is restarting her studies (or rather starting, after working 5 years as a chef), and had to pick up a laptop. I lent my old one, with windows by default, and dual boot to linux. She was only using it for internet, matlab (or scilab, i'm not sure) and dropbox. My brother advised hare to take Joplin for notetaking, tried it on both limux and windows and now, two month after my initial loan, she bought a computer with linux. Because while on desktop, you might have compatibility issues, on a good laptop you won't.

zdragnar 5y ago
Edit preamble: I am referring to the last 4 laptops I have owned; havent had a desktop in a decade. This hasn't been my experience. Multi-monitor and hidpi only worked out of the box on one distro (pop_os!) and printing to an old brother laser printer only ever worked from Windows. That said, if I was doing scientific computing via matlab or what not, I would probably grab pop_os over windows too. I still do most of my development work on linux, and video / gaming / home office from the windows partition.
- orwin 5y ago
  Yeah, matlab might be the reason, i did not really use Linux when i was a math student so i did not really feel the pain at the time.
- krylon 5y ago
  I have never touched a hidpi display, but using multiple monitors has worked quite well for me, both on desktop machines and laptops. Including attaching a display on a running desktop session.
- kenniskrag 5y ago
  Brother printer usually supports linux. Sometimed you have to run their installer or copy their printer files in a cups folder.
black3r 5y ago

newacct583 5y ago

> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows. Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac, and a better time still with a tablet or phone. The days of "windows is easier for end users" are largely at an end. In the modern world, these are *both* enthusiast/professional systems intended for special purpose deployment.

deeviant 5y ago
> Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac Not if they wanted to game or interact with the windows app ecosystem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
skinnymuch 5y ago
Than Mac? I don’t know if that’s true. The average user knows almost nothing about how to use their Mac from my anecdotes of running a virtual coworking community and trouble shooting people’s stuff.
zdragnar 5y ago
I have found this to be true for my parents, only because they have an iPhone and iPad. If they weren't already in the apple ecosystem, it'd be a bit of a wash I think.

christophilus 5y ago

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors My experience with vanilla Gnome and Fedora has been excellent regarding these two points. Haven’t had printer issues, either, but I rarely use a printer. Gaming with Steam and Proton is good enough for me, but still a little more friction than on Windows.

ActorNightly 5y ago
I switched to Windows on my desktop primarily because of the support of the modern games (like upcoming Battlefield 2042) and generally higher performance. To gain back the linux dev environment, I got a decent laptop (used), and installed linux, but I use the VSCode remoteSSH capability on windows, which works super well. I dabbled in trying to set up passthrough to a VM, however from research, the chance of getting banned by anti cheat on some games was not worth the risk.

ageofwant 5y ago

This has not been true for at least a decade - time to update your ken on Linux.

zdragnar 5y ago
I've been using linux daily for over a decade. Pop_os! is the only distro that almost entirely works 100% straight out of the box for most things. This has been the case across 4 high end laptops (dell xps, surface book 2, and something something lenovo, I forget which). Manjaro, vanilla arch, deviant and Ubuntu all had some difficulty or other, though my objections to Ubuntu are more related to software decisions rather than hardware support. In that case, it was roughly on par, perhaps slightly behind pop_os in terms of out of the box experience.

bachmeier 5y ago

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. With respect to gaming, the parent was referring to work done in the browser, so probably not including gaming. We use consoles for all the gaming in our house, so at least for us that's a non-issue. I have to disagree on printers. My experience with getting printers to work on Ubuntu is that you have to follow these steps: Plug it in Start printing That's never really been the case for Windows. We used to have to mess with driver installation and then reboot. Sometimes we'd have to do more than that based on visiting a website. When Vista was first released, a lot of older printers were not supported, and that included one of ours. The only solution was to use Linux. Just a few days ago, my (Windows-using) aunt was visiting and told me her printer stopped working. She has no idea how to get it to work and now she'll have to pay someone to figure it out for her. My mother has had similar issues. I don't much care about Linux vs Windows but I don't think printer support is a highlight of Windows.

zdragnar 5y ago
I have personally had the opposite experience, but printers are a minefield, so it isn't a huge surprise.

zrm 5y ago

> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows. Here's what I've observed on this one. If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out. If you put one in front of an adult who has been using Windows for 30 years, they get mad at you. Because they already know how to do Z thing in Windows and for Linux they have to figure it out or look it up. Which as a general rule isn't any harder to do on Linux than it is on Windows -- it's often easier -- but they already did it on Windows 30 years ago and don't want to do it again. That lasts for all of a few hours of use before they've figured out how to do the things they commonly do, if they don't give up.

benbristow 5y ago
> If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out. Until they need to do anything off the beaten track, which can be something as simple as changing the mouse speed (I'm not making this up) and you google it and it's telling you to run terminal commands and update your Xorg.conf file.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  On my Ubuntu 20.04 machine: pressed super (windows key), typed "mouse"; it showed me mouse setting which I clicked; there was a slider named "touchpad speed". It is nowhere near complicated and you don't have to run terminal commands or update your Xorg.conf file.
  - benbristow 5y ago
    That's touchpad speed though, not mouse speed. And this was on Linux Mint, which is meant to be a beginner's Linux distro.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Sorry, I bit it. Plugged a mouse just to test it: the procedure is EXACTLY the same. And Ubuntu is not a hard for beginners distro. You're parroting outdated false comments.

kaba0 5y ago

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind Multiple monitors: nope, wayland does it better. The amount of flickering, determining dpi etc is objectively worse than what you get with modern Wayland. The rest may be true, but other than printers, they are quite similar nowadays. Pipewire does close the gap with regards to bluetooth. And then the other side: for development, windows is strictly inferior. Debugs are exceptionally slow for c++, git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator, and for java it is seriously slower for some reason.

benbristow 5y ago
> git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator Does anyone even use git bash? Powershell Core + standard Git SCM for Windows works perfectly fine for me.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Unfortunately the project at work depends on a minor posix shell script (for whatever reason), that has to run inside git bash..
  - benbristow 5y ago
    Sounds odd. What does it do? No way to convert it to run inside Powershell instead perhaps (Powershell Core is now open-source and cross-platform and can run on Linux too!)?

marcosdumay 5y ago

To take another of your points, printers suck on Windows, and are perfectly ok on Linux. On Windows you will get the manufacturer driver with all the crapware that comes with it. Linux certainly has an inbuilt driver that supports all of it. About Bluetooth, I never managed to get it working on any Windows computer. Granted that I didn't try very hard before formating them, but the largest difficulty on Linux is discovering that it's already working with everything installed, you just have to stop searching the web on how to set and use it.

zdragnar 5y ago
I've got a brother laser printer that has yet to successfully print from linux, and a Bluetooth headset that would only half work on a modern linux distro. Both work perfectly fine on Windows. YMMV.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  When I finally gave up and brought a Bluetooth headset I simply couldn't find any Linux instructions because they were lost at the sea of "no, the Windows driver won't allow you to use this headset on that application" issues. But yeah, I imagine headsets that simply work on Windows exist, you probably just have to avoid the famous brands. (Anyway, I got it to work by searching "bluetooth" on the desktop menu and launching the bluetooth management application.)
- dmatech 5y ago
  Which model? I'm not above reverse-engineering a driver and building my own. I have an HL-2270DW, but I've never needed to print from Linux.

uep 5y ago

> There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. This hasn't been my experience. Printers and gaming are the only two on this list that I think Windows does better out-of-the-box. There is one thing missing from this list that I think Windows does better, and that's power management (suspend/resume) for laptops. Other than printers, I would say Linux generally performs worse on these things because the companies making the printers, games, and laptops don't support Linux. Printer manufacturers don't support Linux that well, but I also think printer handling on Linux is not as good even when it is supported.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ubercow13 5y ago
Since connected standby, Windows certainly does not do suspend better than Linux. I’m not sure it’s even capable of suspending any more. See for example this recent report of Dell advising that customers should not expect their laptops to suspend [1]. I’ve owned a laptop with this feature and replacing Windows with Linux allowed me to actually use S3 sleep again, safely put the laptop in a bag without worrying about it turning itself on, and it improved the battery life when sleeping by a factor of like 5-10. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

greydius 5y ago

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind. I'm running Ubuntu with two 4k monitors, an HP printer, and a bluetooth mouse. All of this works perfectly without any fiddling. I've also played quite a few games on this machine thanks to Steam and Proton.

formerly_proven 5y ago

The multiple monitor experience on Windows depends hugely on the exact hardware used and can range from "ok" to "absolute shitcan trashfire", but with modern stuff it's mostly tending towards the latter.

sudosysgen 5y ago

I've personally had a much easier time getting Bluetooth and printers to work on Linux. It's been 100% plug and play on Linux but on Windows I have to use a mess of driver installs, configurations, changing the Bluetooth stack, messing in device manager to reset stuff