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What would it take for you to switch to Linux? (piefed.social)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Having the time to dick around and get a linux distro up to my current speed with windows. Or someone else making a distro that mirrors windows 10 capabilities, and utilities (even mundane things like control panel and it's branches to other settings) and verbose explanations of functionality in the onboard help docs or subtext of options. Or an onboard llm asshole like clippy that can be conversed with om how to accomplish something the linux way.

I think what the linux community misses or forgets is that windows became popular partly because it held people's hands so much. If linux users want to see the year of linux come to fruition they need to make the distros walk people through a task instead of pointing at the wall and saying "up".

Conversely I think the linux world says they want everyone to use it but I wonder if they actually want that: everyone using linux means the computing and advertising world pivots and makes linux equivalents of everything, including all the gate keeping, scummy business, malware/adware/tracking...

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    And how would the advertising world even get their shitty software onto your computer? Unlike windows, there isn't some monolithic corporate entity making decisions about your computer for you.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    The same way they got their shitty software into everything: deals with producers. Your mom/aunt isn't going to build her own pc/phone, theyre going to buy what they can at the store, which would be something sold by dell or HP or whomever, who cut a deal to discount some price by including McAfee or printer-easy-setup-utilities that advertise new ink or printers.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    So worst case, your mom/aunt deal with the same amount of advertising crap that they always have, but anyone who wants to can remove this stuff and use the same Linux as they do today.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Yes, until they lock down the software by pushing out the smaller people via certification requirements, specific signing methods, and branded closed-source apps while gating the open source repositories however they can try.

    I'm not saying all this to deter adoption btw, this is just how it seems to go: the public puts work into something to make it good it gets co-opted by corps and they enshittify whilst marketing it to the world, so everyone gets in with 1 idea and it changes to the same old mess.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Your last paragraph nails it. I'm not trying to get the whole world to switch, but I'd be happy to get the like minded peopleout who haven't switched.

    When it stops being a tool that works for me and starts working for corpos, well, then I will be in the minority again.

    This topic used to come up all the time on Reddit subs, but this is the first time I can remember seeing it on Lemmy.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Some distros’ discord servers and sites have actually set up AI assistants to handle that clippy concept of being able to ask questions without judgmental users responding.

    I stayed with Windows largely because their guidance to those actions was generally good, and left when it started sucking - when a Start search for some normal desktop action instead gave a website article that got an automated “Try restarting” answer from an MS volunteer.

    I still don’t think Linux guides people all that well (better or worse depending on the distro). These days, I think it does get better than Windows if only because Microsoft got so lazy with their own product.

    The “suckyness carryover” isn’t as natural as you think when people can fork distros so easily.

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