But what people use at work or school influences what they want to use at home. Especially less confident users, who are investing time in learning, don't want to learn something else - even if this learning requirement is just a perception and there isn't actually much to learn. .Maybe in the workplace, whatever app or software the company is using, you may end up "having to" use it. But at home, unless you are a PC gamer (another species destined to become extinct i reckon), you don't even need it anymore, and let's be honest, since Windows 7, Windows is absolute garbage and a system hog.
A person who operates the various Office app and gets their head round a few spreadsheet formulas and Word shortcuts, feels comfortable in their familiar environment.
And Windows is in Enterprise because of its infrastructure integration, the AD and central management capability is more precisely what large organisations need. Then once that's in place, the enterprise application are designed to work nicely with windows and so it becomes the square peg. The round peg linux its searching for the hole here and it fits in here and there.
And whilst Windows is less memory efficient, it does what people need more than adequately. "Absolute garbage" is an unhelpful and not objective exaggeration.
The unfamiliar user being exposed to linux is confronted with one of the real benefits of linux, that is the choice. So many different distros, package managers, desktop environment. So many web based instructions and tutorials for linux don't apply to many setups. Imagine a new user facing up to adding an obscure line to a file in order that their linux can find a different repository - or in one case I saw, the instruction was to get this source from gihub and build it.....they just ask why?
That choice which means fragmentation is very daunting to many new users. And whilst windows has altered its look in 10 and 11, it still looks like the one at work, or the friends desktop.
People are suffering the curse of knowledge and not seeing things through the eyes of unfamiliar users - often to an insulting degree.
And you can't tell many linux zealots to see this objectively, they don't want to know. You cannot critcise their sacred beast, if you mention anything like this then the response is "ah be ******* windows is ****, windows garbage, windows ****" (despite Windows not being mentioned before). It's actually not, this is just ridiculous bigotry. I know linux is better in many ways, and it is so if you are an accomplished user.
I've heard all the ridiculous anecdotes too, "my 97 year old grandmother was struggling with Windows, about to throw her PC out the window so I installed Linux Mint Chocolate Chip for her and now she works for NASA programming flight control software in assembler for moon landers". Occasionally you get a success, more often than not they want their Windows back because they can't reliably print or some software isn't available (and they are annoyed because some linux zealot has been telling them what they need in a very condescending and Jeff Albertson way.
I'd love to see linux succeed more (although I am disillusioned with how linux is developing and increasingly drawn to BSD).
But more introspection and honesty is needed.
Statistics: Posted by AndrewPiEater — Thu Feb 01, 2024 9:21 am