why people use windows despite it being inferior to linux?

Darkbug, 10 months ago

I’m using windows 10 because I need it for school. I plan to ditch windows on my main pc once I’m done in the spring.

t0m5k1, 10 months ago

Sorry but it just can’t be boiled down to that sentence. I daily drive Linux and still disagree even though windows has obvious flaws.

Kristof12, 10 months ago

Hardware manufacturers they see M$ and go crazy

kyub, 10 months ago

Windows on its own is inferior and MS preys on its users by extracting more data and pushing them more into price-increasing cloud-based subscription models where privacy, ownership and the term “Personal Computing” means nothing anymore, and where its cloud infrastructure (where all your stuff lives) also is a big juicy target for hackers all over the globe, so you should absolutely, if you can, move away from Windows to a neutral OS like Linux, where you remain in control over what you use and the security of your infrastructure (if it’s too hard for you, pay someone to take care of it, instead of shoving your whole life and all of your company’s business secrets into MS’ cloud).

The couple of areas where Windows can be seen as “superior” on the desktop are also mostly not due to Microsoft, but due to other developers (only) developing their stuff for Windows due to its popularity. So if you use some proprietary applications or special hardware which only work on Windows, you’ve made yourself dependent upon that OS. And by staying on that OS, you’re not changing anything. You should move to Linux and insist on developers to make their stuff work on Linux as well. Or else nothing changes and MS will continue to do what they want with their users. It’s a downhill spiral and it started with Win8 or Win10. At some point, Windows will be so bad and Linux desktop will be so good that a change will happen automatically. But still, you should switch now to accelerate the inevitable process, and not support MS for much longer. The monarchy is dead, we live in a democracy now. (Well, most of us)

Yes, the change can be hard, especially if you’ve used a lot of proprietary Windows-only stuff. But it’s necessary. The operating system is too important for it to be 100% controlled by a privacy-disrespecting, US intelligence service obedient company. Sure, Windows might still offer you a better experience for your specific workflows in some cases. But it’s a poisoned apple, and more and more poison gets added over time. Just move away and stay away. Adjust your workflows. Make a statement. Every new Linux user is another argument in favor of the open operating system, and another reason for developers to start building for Linux as well. If you stay on Windows because, say, your career depends on you using some proprietary Windows-only stuff, then OK, use it as long as you have to. I’m not telling you to stop using what you HAVE to use. But if you stay on Windows even though you could just as well move to Linux (which most people can), you’re not doing anyone any favors except that you’re supporting the status quo and slowing down important progress.

And about the games using anti-cheat … just skip those. You don’t even want them on Windows. That’s literal malware you’re installing onto your system, just to play a video game. Sure, Windows itself also contains malware, so maybe users just don’t care. Fair point. But I still can’t recommend people harming the security and privacy of their systems so blatantly. Some of the anti-cheat stuff is actually compatible on Linux if the developers allowed it to be (technically it is compatible in most cases, but devs have to allow it specifically), but please just don’t support such things. There are many great games out there to play besides games using anti-cheats. Just like there are many great Linux-friendly applications you probably don’t know about yet besides those Windows-only proprietary apps. It is some initial work to adjust and make the new discoveries, but it’s worth it. Even necessary, considering how user-hostile Microsoft/Windows has become.

TropicalMustafa, 10 months ago

How does your superior system handle games with online anticheat?

ReakDuck, 10 months ago

Pretty good actually. I play Battlebit remastered and Apex legemds and love these games.

I have the advantage to not sign-in evertime I need to update Nvidia drivers. Don’t need an account to just use Windows 11. Don’t need to heavily search for the non-suspicious.exe because most things are in the repo or AUR.

t0m5k1, 10 months ago

I use arch too and dualboot with windows.

How are you updating drivers without sign in?

I have a local account in windows.

I see the AUR as suspicious until I establish a basic form of trust for what I want just like most .exe files and installers, I’d recommend you take this approach to the AUR too as it fundamentally is an obvious untrusted source.

ReakDuck, 10 months ago

Nvidia disallows driver or any GPU update till you finally logged in

t0m5k1, 10 months ago

Sorry, I’ve never had to sign in to anything to be able to download and install an nVidia driver. I’ve been using their cards for decades. No idea where/how you’re getting them. Geforce experience is an optional add on if that is what you talk about.

ReakDuck, 10 months ago

I think you are right. Still I and many friends think this way because the game ready driver is the only convinient way to update it without revisiting the nvidia webpage for the newest driver.

t0m5k1, 10 months ago

For convenience online there is always a trade off, When I do my update runs on windows each month this is one of my bookmarks. If I can’t be arsed I used SDI origins.

TropicalMustafa, 10 months ago

None of games that I play work correctly on my machine. These are:

Hell let loose

Squad

FaceIt CSGO

Insurgency: Sandstorm

Squad kinda works, but is unplayable due to performance reasons. Insurgency is a hit or miss, others just don’t work at all. Sorry mate, but Linus is not good at all for online gaming.

RassilonianLegate, 10 months ago

@TropicalMustafa
@ReakDuck
That very much depends on what you want to play, here's a convenient link to help determine if the game at least has linux compatible anti cheat (gets updated regularly)

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

vulnerability, 10 months ago

This type of questions seems too obvious and really childish, there’s no way you don’t know why people use windows despite it being trash. Either you’re dumb or you’re asking this questions for attention.

NightOwl, 10 months ago

Yeah, I think there needs to be a push for less of these circle jerk posts. It seem more appropriate for a meme community than something that I at least assume is meant to be about more focused discussion about Linux than a Windows fixation.

Drhype, 10 months ago

other than pre-installed i don’t know and the reason i asked because my friend asked me to install linux on his laptop but after i installed linux few days after he reinstalled windows and now his mic and web cam not working and some other stuff, so he’s asking me again to reinstall linux

MangoPenguin, 10 months ago

It’s a personal opinion, I find linux desktop ‘inferior’ in that it’s much harder for me to use, less hardware and software is compatible, and things break more often.

On windows I don’t deal with drivers, software installs with 1 or 2 clicks and works right away, and games all work great without any tweaking or setup.

neo, 10 months ago

It’s preinstalled.

DSX, 10 months ago

Posts like this are why Linux users have a bad rep. I like Linux but a lot of tools I use are developed for windows, not Linux. I use Nvidia gpus (because I have to for CUDA) which are known to bug out on Linux.

Coolkicks, 10 months ago

One word. Distros. If I want windows on a home computer, it’s windows. Maybe it’s Home or Professional, but it’s just fucking windows.

If I want linux at home, it’s Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or Slack or Cent or Mint or some other shit. Then I choose one and I want office and it’s not an option, so I google “office on linux” and it’s libreoffice or wayland or x.org or god forbid open office. Guess what I don’t want to do, explain that shit to my kids.

At work we have red hat and cent. If I’m spinning up private cloud computer it’s cent, if it’s public facing its red hat. No decisions to make. But then I have to research some arbitrary package and all the user guides are Debian based and like clockwork apt-get and rpm are inevitably different versions and installs to opt instead of /usr/local and just fuck.

Yea it’s come a long way, but home pcs need to operate brain dead simple point and click. Windows as successfully abstracted away every component of the concept of an operating system from 80% of end users, and 99% of the last 20% don’t want to deal with it off the clock.

skullgiver, 10 months ago

Word works. Photoshop works. COD/BF/Fortnite work. Most people don’t want to bother with Lutris install scrips to run the programs they’ve been running for years. You never need to use the command line, even if you need to dig deep into system settings for some reason. You don’t need to look up what a cinnamon gnome is supposed to be before you can use your computer. You can even overclock your computer with the tools your GPU manufacturer provides! And you can use the Stream Deck! And your RGB works!

“But there are open source alternatives” no, there really aren’t. The best Photoshop alternative is Photopea and that comes with the browser penalty. Comparing Illustrator to Inkscape is just silly. No Linux office suite comes close in compatibility with what Microsoft’s tools (and therefore the rest of the world) produce. Cross platform tools like Discord are sometimes just… broken for a while because the AUR and the Discord server are out of sync. Why would you use the AUR? Well, because if a company has a Linux version of their program, it’s written for Ubuntu, specifically 18.04 or 20.04 on amd64.

Also, work uses Windows. Why does work use Windows? Because configuring 1000 Windows computers is trivial and gets taught in community college. Configuring 1000 Macs is possible if you buy the right software. Configuring 1000 Linux desktops is just… well it can be done, but you’ll have to build something yourself for every single policy rule or pay for the ENTERPRISE license.

Plus, you need some kind of antivirus for most jobs. “But there are no viruses for Linux!” yes there are. Even if there weren’t, your company won’t get various ISO certifications without some kind of antivirus installed on every machine. You can try to make everyone keep their AV on and up to date all the time (and get screwed over during the audit because people turned it off the moment you walked away) or you need some kind of remote management tool, which is ENTERPRISE software.

You can punch, main, and abuse command line toolchains, force them into shape until they perform something like the Windows equivalent. That’s frustrating and painful and just a waste of most people’s time for basic users. I hate Windows more than I appreciate my free time, that’s my excuse, plus, I’ve already done the deep dive anyway, but I wouldn’t recommend Linux to anyone who doesn’t know what “NTFS” is.

Most proprietary software doesn’t just work on Linux and if it works at all, it needs experts or long guides written by experts.

I use Linux every single day but I can’t call Windows “inferior”. The Windows 11 GUI looks like KDE developers puked all over Windows 10, but there are a LOT of small things Windows does right and no Linux distro has managed. Yes, Windows 11 looks like shit in many places, but no Linux distro comes close.

Windows is a billion dollar operation. I’m sure a Linux distro with that kind of funding would be incredible and a thousand times better, but no such distro exists. It’s superior in almost every way for the people who just want to get shit done and don’t care about things like “open source” and whatever the kernel is doing.

That said, Microsoft is pushing people. Windows 11 dropped support for tons of computers, Windows 10 is being dropped in a year and a half. Windows 11 is getting shitter by the day, bullying their user base into using MS Edge. Sadly, people will just switch to the other usable operating system (macOS) rather than mess with Linux.

atlasraven31, 10 months ago

Most people don’t know about Linux, don’t know how to install it, and don’t know why they should even bother to switch.

cupcakezealot, 10 months ago

I use Windows and I have Debian and Ubuntu right inside of it :)

Plus the majority of the games and applications work for Windows.

Rhabuko, 10 months ago

• It’s preinstalled on their PC.
• All their Hardware is guaranteed to work.
• All their preferred Software is available and supported.
• A small but very loud minority of the FOSS advocates are absolute insufferable and people associate this negative experiences with Linux.
• There are thousands of Distros and it can be confusing.

Things have gotten way better on Desktop Linux but changing public perception takes a lot of time and effort.

arcrust, 10 months ago

Pre-installed is the biggest factor. Go to Walmart or best buy. You’ll find windows and Mac and chromebooks.

I don’t think it’s “laziness” per se, but rather people aren’t that technically inclined. It’s too much of a challenge for the average person especially when they don’t understand the benefits.

JudahBenHur, 10 months ago

For me, someone who’s used both, I’m now using a windows machine because there are two applications that aren’t available for Linux os’s that I need for work. You cannot use a substitute program (one is a less common secure video conference program).

Our media pc in the living room is running a Linux OS, but when we try to watch the local web player for national programming (Ireland) Firefox won’t run the player on Linux like it can on Windows, so we have to use Chrome, which I absolutely hate doing.

I’d love to use Linux full time, but I must use a couple of windows/mac OS applications, so I put up with windows. Win 10 isn’t so bad.

NightOwl, 10 months ago

I’m waiting on Linux to get proper HDR support before being able to use one for TV use. Been waiting for that for years.

JudahBenHur, 10 months ago

fair enough. wife and l arent, I guess, videophiles and don’t really care about the highest resolutions etc

phx, 10 months ago

Also, the reason people eat at the same restaurants regularly, and use the same brand toothpaste etc.

• They feel it meets their needs and are comfortable with it

fluxion, 10 months ago

Most people are literally insane