3 ms·

This parody brought to you by the people for common sense. I have a system76 machine that I've used for years without any difficulty until my kids school said

This parody brought to you by the people for common sense. I have a system76 machine that I've used for years without any difficulty until my kids school said she needed access to this weird OS called Microsoft Windows that I don't know much about so I got a second drive and resolved to try this Windows thing on a secondary drive. Installing the physical drive was the easy part. Everything after that went south. First instead of just going to windows.com or something I got shunted to stores where they were selling entire computers. I didn't NEED a new computer just an OS. Then I found people selling things called cd keys. What are those? Who even buys an OS anymore? Eventually I figured out you can download something called an ISO file (what is that?) from microsoft and pay for it later? It looks like I'll be paying hundreds of dollars for what comes standard with Linux isn't that crazy? Then I tried to "burn" the iso to a usb drive and THAT didn't work so I borrowed a portable usb optical disk and bought some writable disks at Walmart like it was 1999 and finally got it installed whereupon it took a giant shit on my computers ability to boot anything except Windows. At first I thought it destroyed all my data on Linux and I about had a heart attack but after hours of troubleshooting I realized I just had to restore the ability to choose my OS at boot time and all my data was still there and I calmed down a bit. Then I booted up this "Windows". At first nothing worked including the internet so I had to do research on my phone. I discovered that unlike Linux windows doesn't actually come with the drivers needed for your machine you have to go to each manufacturers website and navigate their confusing site (and avoid malware sites offering drivers) and find each individual driver. If you ever need an update you will have to do this all over again unless the driver includes an auto update feature. For the stuff that does auto update if it ever causes a problem with your hardware it will probably be impossible to fix and you will just end up reinstalling windows all over again and hopefully realizing what tanked your install in the first place and people actually do this over and over again! It had a mediocre but acceptable set of default applications. Not nearly as good as my computer came with but its ok. Then I went to install some software I'm used to and I discovered the windows app store unlike Linux has almost nothing of value and one is expected to do the same dance as above for applications just like drivers. While downloading from a seemingly legit site I acquired several weird pieces of adware and an actual computer virus. Something I had previously just read about on the internet. Good thing this insecure OS didn't have any of my actual data! It's not surprising that few people use this "windows" thing. It's a total mess and not nearly ready for prime time. Maybe 2030 will be the year of the Windows Desktop.

ComradePhil 5y ago
One thing that has changed is the fact that most of the third party drivers is installed automatically when you install Windows and can also be updated as "optional updates" using Windows update itself... also with WSL, you can run a Linux instance which seamlessly integrates with Windows. So, I think the time of the Windows desktop is already here.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  A huge portion of the job for non technical people is ensuring hardware and software compatibility, installing, configuring the OS. With Windows people outsource this job to their OEM in general because that is what non technical people do with any OS they buy it as a package with their hardware and use it. Using Linux isn't particularly harder than using Windows.
hedora 5y ago
Have you considered running Windows 3.1 in dosbox? It's the complete windows experience, and the terminal integrates in seamlessly with your desktop linux account. Office, etc run well, but you can use the Linux side for things like Steam, browsing the internet, development, media creation, etc. Sadly, due to the hardware compatiblity issues you described, and the fragmentation of the UI in modern windows distributions, this really is the best out-of-the-box microsoft experience these days. I really hate indirectly supporting commie zealots by paying hardware developers, knowing that some of the purchase price goes to making sure their hardware works well with open source software. Once, I tried to organize a sit in at the FSF to get them to refund us, but it didn't work out. The lamestream media wouldn't cover it. Sadly, as you have found, there just aren't any principled capitalists producing products with an acceptable out of the box experience. So, I have to recommend things like the raspberry pi to my less tech-savvy friends, as much as a I find it to be a moral and ethical compromise.
skazazes 5y ago
I have not had to install a driver manually on Windows in a long time, probably approaching a decade. I will concede that Window's boot partition defaults are comically malicious to other boot managers on a system and personally temporarily unplug all drive besides the installation target. All that being said this feels like a bit of a straw man seeing as your average user (which this entire sub-thread is discussing) does not even know their hardware can support multiple OSs at all, let alone simultaneously. They buy a computer and assume the OS it has at that time is all they can use, and if it somehow ends up in an un-bootable state that they need to bring it to GeekSquad... Also to imply that the Linux app stores are at all better than the Windows one is a bit disingenuous. About 50% of the time that I have attempted to use them, I ended up with a broken and completely unusable installation of the program. There is some hilariously ambiguous error prompt that shows up and the real error is written out to some log file mentioning that the installation failed to do the system not using init.d or something about systemd. Oh and the log file is intended to be interacted with through terminal commands and is a pain to even find on disk.

ComradePhil 5y ago

One thing that has changed is the fact that most of the third party drivers is installed automatically when you install Windows and can also be updated as "optional updates" using Windows update itself... also with WSL, you can run a Linux instance which seamlessly integrates with Windows. So, I think the time of the Windows desktop is already here.

michaelmrose 5y ago
A huge portion of the job for non technical people is ensuring hardware and software compatibility, installing, configuring the OS. With Windows people outsource this job to their OEM in general because that is what non technical people do with any OS they buy it as a package with their hardware and use it. Using Linux isn't particularly harder than using Windows.

hedora 5y ago

Have you considered running Windows 3.1 in dosbox? It's the complete windows experience, and the terminal integrates in seamlessly with your desktop linux account. Office, etc run well, but you can use the Linux side for things like Steam, browsing the internet, development, media creation, etc. Sadly, due to the hardware compatiblity issues you described, and the fragmentation of the UI in modern windows distributions, this really is the best out-of-the-box microsoft experience these days. I really hate indirectly supporting commie zealots by paying hardware developers, knowing that some of the purchase price goes to making sure their hardware works well with open source software. Once, I tried to organize a sit in at the FSF to get them to refund us, but it didn't work out. The lamestream media wouldn't cover it. Sadly, as you have found, there just aren't any principled capitalists producing products with an acceptable out of the box experience. So, I have to recommend things like the raspberry pi to my less tech-savvy friends, as much as a I find it to be a moral and ethical compromise.

skazazes 5y ago

I have not had to install a driver manually on Windows in a long time, probably approaching a decade. I will concede that Window's boot partition defaults are comically malicious to other boot managers on a system and personally temporarily unplug all drive besides the installation target. All that being said this feels like a bit of a straw man seeing as your average user (which this entire sub-thread is discussing) does not even know their hardware can support multiple OSs at all, let alone simultaneously. They buy a computer and assume the OS it has at that time is all they can use, and if it somehow ends up in an un-bootable state that they need to bring it to GeekSquad... Also to imply that the Linux app stores are at all better than the Windows one is a bit disingenuous. About 50% of the time that I have attempted to use them, I ended up with a broken and completely unusable installation of the program. There is some hilariously ambiguous error prompt that shows up and the real error is written out to some log file mentioning that the installation failed to do the system not using init.d or something about systemd. Oh and the log file is intended to be interacted with through terminal commands and is a pain to even find on disk.