Well one is trying to crack down on people using adblockers and the other is lobbying governments they don’t pay taxes to so that they are allowed to continue using forced ethnic slavery to make their products.
If you need more ammunition they recently also changed it so all links in Outlook opens in Edge even if it’s not the default browser. You have to go to settings and find an entirely separate default browser setting to stop it.
True for Windows as well. Ever upgraded to a new version before the first SP? Linux just gets upgrades a lot faster than Windows (and I mean the conservative distros like Debian. Bleeding-edge distros are on a completely other level).
Microsoft have been known to ship a product with thousands of known bugs on its release date. In the networking space (Windows NT), there were Technet CDs that were released to fix all manner of known bugs just so the corporates wouldn’t have to wait for a Service Pack
Perhaps a better statement would be, if a for profit service is free, you are the product. Obviously it’s possible for someone to make free stuff if they want to, but if someone is making money from you using something, but you aren’t paying them, then they’re making that money by selling someone else access to you.
Calibre performance is worst then the old Edge in term of loading time. The old Edge loads almost instantly. Plus the interface is more user friendly then Calibre.
And I feel like that happened really quickly. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Edge was a nice, nimble browser. Not this bloated naggy beast it is now.
I find Edge better than Chrome at the very least. Granted, I don't use either as my main options, but between the two Edge seems more responsive and lighter than Chrome (and before anyone misunderstands, I know they both use the same engine, I'm referring to ... well, prior to Google, I would have referred to it as the chrome, but can't really do that now... the application around the engine).
I daily edge at work because I just wanted to and I like how it integrates with our domain. It’s fine, but I did have to spend some time turning off weird things like price trackers or whatever it was.
This “solution” completely ignores the volumes of software that is still only compatible with Windows. This is exactly the belief that Microsoft wants you to have: the illusion that you have a choice between Windows and other, equal alternatives. And before someone starts spouting off about WINE: it truly is a wonderful piece of software, and I don’t mean to disparage any of its talented contributors, but it will likely never even approach feature parity with Windows. I mean, it still can’t run the industry standard 3D modeling program.
I think that compared to video games, productive softwares, especially “industry standard” ones, rely more on Windows APIs at much more accuracy (and since Wine and its forks such as Proton have to rely on black-box reverse engineering to avoid copyright infringement), the API calls may not have the exact values 100% of the time which is more tolerable to videos games but much less on productive softwares.
Another reason is that most of these softwares unlike most video games are likely using many Windows’ quirks or bugs and are likely less using standard (such as WinUI, DirectX,…) or cross platform toolkit (Qt, GTK,…), making reimplementing the environments and libraries to run the softwares much harder.
Oh, and not even counting that many of those softwares may also use kernel-level DRMs which Wine/Proton/Crossover/… are only userspace level to prevent pirates. This was actually a problem in video games too when many video games, mostly multiplayer ones implement kernel level anticheats or DRMs, until Valve contacted the anticheat/DRM developer as well as the release and popular of the Steam Deck make developers care more about Wine/Proton compatibility, but even then there are some developers still don’t implement Wine/Proton compatibility or even worse ban Linux users for circumvent the artificial incompatibility.
Meh gamepass is cool for now. It will probably go up in price and become shitty when they get enough market share but until then it is super cool. And honestly I think bing/edge is now the better choice as a search engine/browser compared to Google/chrome. But no way I will give up my Firefox.
What part of the $1299 MacBook Pro and iMac, the $999 MacBook Air, or the $599 Mac Mini is over priced?
You would struggle to find the power of those for lower prices, especially with the quality and support Apple provides. And it’s nearly impossible to find hardware like that with full Linux support.
I’m holding onto hope actually. I recently started dual-bootung into Mint and the installation process was a breeze. The only thing I could imagine a “typical” user finding difficult is setting up the flash drive for booting/installation. The UI is nice and familiar too. As a Linux newbie I hear that Mint is basically Ubuntu, and that (modern) Ubuntu is hot garbage, but even if it caused my computer to take an actual shit on the floor, it still beats Windows by a country mile.
I think (perhaps too optimistically) that with some more awareness we could see a fairly sizeable migration.
I didn’t mean to make it seem like I had any opinion either way, just that it has received some hate over the years. I did some research - admittedly it was cursory - and it looks like the issues are somewhat exaggerated.
Canonical, it seems, has made a number of poor decisions but apparently they pay attention to user complaints and revert / make adjustments accordingly. Some of the controversial things I saw were related to the Snap package manager, possible telemetry, bloatware, and some partnership with Amazon.
Some of those things were either nothingburgers or simply overblown (one person said the only thing they could see as bloatware was… a few board games), so I would take their anecdotes with a grain of salt.
Again, I’m a relative idiot when it comes to Linux, but my takeaway is that Ubuntu suffers from the typical growing pains / compromises that a relatively popular OS will inevitably encounter. Especially when most of the Linux userbase consists of power users who prefer having complete control (which is perfectly fair too!)
Use whatever distro fits your needs; as long as you ditch Microsoft, you’re making a good choice :)
With the way the average person uses a computer, the Linux user experience would probably melt their brains. No offense to the average computer user, but we have seen time and time again that they are not the brightest when it comes to tech literacy or just don’t care and refuse to care since it goes against the grain, so to speak.
Hi, average user here, I’ve been daily driving Linux (primarily Ubuntu) for a decade or more. Most of my life in a computer is spent in a web browser, word document, or maybe a spreadsheet. Even at my office job it’s the same, except for some proprietary time tracking and billing software. I’d imagine 90 percent of consumers spend the vast majority of their time on computers in the web browser. Most people don’t mess around with much beyond that.
I just don’t understand what is lacking in the Linux user experience. It’s not any different from a Windows user learning to use a Mac computer. Figure out how to connect to wifi, figure out how to mess with the volume, open a browser and that’s it.
I’m sorry, but I kind of doubt you are what I consider a “normal user”, seeing as you’re in a technology community on Lemmy. Just the fact that you are here indicates a higher than average tech literacy.
As usual, it’s only Big Tech that’s able to compete with Big Tech. They all love to throw their weight around when they can, and join forces when it’s convenient.
Neither corporation should be defended or trusted with your data.
The only thing that’s kinda funny here is the irony of Microsoft tryna poach Chrome users into their own… wait for it… Chromium-based browser.
Coworkers have been complaining on Teams all day about how the Bing bar is suddenly showing up on their desktops. When did Microsoft stop giving a fuck about businesses? I wish to fucking god we could run Linux on our work machines.
I am so glad it wasn't just me! Like the article said, I legit thought I had some sort of malware on my machine. Which I guess is true, they just call it windows. I really only use my machine for gaming and every time I've tried to switch to linux I had all sorts of compability issues.
Open question to all. Is SteamOS all that it's cracked up to be? I'm still gonna have game by game issues right?
The only machine you wanna be using SteamOS on is the Steam Deck. Use a standard Linux distribution like Ubuntu if you're gonna do it on any other machine. The reason being that the version of SteamOS for generic PCs is horribly outdated, and the one on the Deck is very much built exclusively for the Deck's hardware.
Gaming mostly works out of the box with almost all games on Steam on Linux (SteamOS is not special in this regard) but there is an important caveat; be careful of games that use anticheat software - some work but others do not or may trigger bans. Check ProtonDB for your specific games to see if there are issues.
SteamOS is mainly for the Steam Deck not regular PC or laptop. For a gaming distro I would recommend one of PopOS, Manjaro or Garuda.
I suggest grabbing the live image for each of them, booting it, and seeing how it feels without committing to anything. I usually test to see if everything works out of the box on the live mode — music, video, network shares, wifi, any peripherals you might have like headphones, fancy mouse or keyboard etc.
Thank you for the suggestions! I mean, the SteamOS was really my only touch point for linux gaming, I haven't paid attention much to linux since trying wine out like a.... decade ago? I'll give those distros a look and see what feels right! ♥
Basically a good distro + Steam is similar to Windows + Steam, with all the proton stuff and the same (optional) big picture mode as the Steam Deck. It'll handle setting up most games for you real nicely.
For a DE personally I love Plasma; xfce or Cinnamon would be my next choices. I don't understand why so many power users like the modern gnome (Ubuntu default)
Random other tangent: I really miss the old Big Picture mode. Few things about the new one are good, but most is worse and a few things are relatively broken still. I know I'm in the minority thinking that though
As a recent penguin I don’t get the gnome thing either. To each their own and whatnot but to me it just reminds me of the weird themes from the early 2000s. I clicked into plasma loved it.
But, you know, it’s Linux. So I can try gnome and tweak it anytime I want to see if it grows on me. Love it.
I use a steam deck for about 2/3 of my gaming and I rarely have issues with games. That said, I mostly play indie games, but there is so much of my library that is supported that I’m never going to run out of things to play. Proton has really done wonders for gaming on Linux. Are you wanting to play multiplayer games or brand new releases? Or are you more of the patient gamer type?
I wouldn’t run steamos on a full desktop, but you can still get a lot of the benefits just by using steam on Linux. Definitely recommend trying it out.
Oh I am definitely a very patient gamer, my GF talked me in to baulders gate with her. But it's been years since I bought something new. The majority of my steam library is indie stuff. I poked around on ProtonDB and it looks like 70% of my library is rated highly. So I am thinking this is a serious option for me. Gonna give days or two to think on it before committing to the hassle of a dual boot, but all these tools and comments are giving me a lot of peace of mind to try.
this is an extremely funny admission that--much like meta blowing $14b on the metaverse even though it sucked--microsoft spent $10b on bing AI and it didn't move the needle at all
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