you know, I'm begining to think this whole "readiness" idea is completely arbitrary. The same people who today complain about linux's supposed difficulty, were just fine using their home micro-computer in the 80's. If you ask me, the only people who are defining what "ready" means, is Microsoft's marketing department.

Linux is ready, but not the professional software devs. Literally only thing stopping me from fully switching

People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks

Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/

By all standards, a completely understandable outcome

It like the endless and useless fight between Android and iOS fan boys, it's much simpler than that, you use what you like/comfortable with, you don't need to convince anyone how right you are and how wrong they are, never really understood this weird behaviour from supposedly well educated people. You enjoy Linux, good for you , you like windows, kodus, you're mac person have at it .

I don't think Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, whatever is "ready yet" either. operating systems are always in development. There are things I can do on my linux machine that I can't do on my windows machine, and vice versa.

But it's not ready because insert niche use case that only applies to me and no, I will not seek out open source alternatives to insert closed source software

Last year with Ubuntu.

Installed it on an old laptop. Booted once then never again.

Installed windows. Worked like a charm.

This is Ubuntu, the OS that makes all the decisions for you like windows.

The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.

I've been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.

The average 'advanced' window user: CLI is scary!

Also the average 'advanced' windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it'll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it

Let's be real. Most people can't really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.

The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn't there yet, because I can't use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as "no big deal", you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won't work. Well yeah, that's a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?

Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don't game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.

Yesterday a guy was mad about that why everything has to go through his igpu and why not directlg through dgpu then I told bro that hdmi or anyother port on your laptop doesn't use your dgpu then he understood.

99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).

Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they'll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.

Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won't make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it's forced on them... which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.

You don't see how terrible Windows is until you've switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.

The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.

It really feels like your PC isn't yours.

Before I bought a Steam Deck I had never used Linux but now I really like it, honestly I'm tempted to install SteamOS on my PC as it's only ever used for gaming anyway

Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.

I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.

When I'm not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can't substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.

When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.

I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.

Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.

I stopped using Linux on my desktop PC in 2007. Last year I switched back, and wow everything is so much smoother now. Video, sound, webcam, networking, all worked perfectly out-of-the-box. No more messing with fglrx for hours to get ATI/AMD graphics working. No more figuring out ALSA vs OSS vs PulseAudio vs whatever else. I don't know what the sound subsystem is even called now, because I don't need to know. It just works.

KDE is beautiful now, too. I tried a few desktop environments and liked KDE the best.

Great time to switch. I've been using Linux on servers since 1999, but it's totally viable for desktops these days too.

Ok, I'll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn't work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.

The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don't have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.

The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn't usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they'd consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.