Linux Linux for a noob

[soulweaver]

I couldn't have put it more eloquently and as concisely as you did. I fully agree with what you said. I have long been a poweruser of windows and simply love the number of tweaks windows lends itself to.

For most past, I find it more customisable than most OSes. From the the features enabled in powertoys to the tons of freeware programs that allow you to tweak almost anything, it is unparalleled.

Like you, I have been wanting to switch to MacOS, and have been running a hackintosh for three years now, and I am still not used to the OS.

Getting a network printer to be recognised on a Mac in itself is worth writing a book about. As for games and controllers, the less said the better.

And if you want to connect an Android phone to access its file system or want to do something over adb, or a combination of these things, which OS works best?

I definitely know how you feel mate! @gourav I feel exactly that way too!

 

[gourav]

For most past, I find it more customisable than most OSes. From the the features enabled in powertoys to the tons of freeware programs that allow you to tweak almost anything, it is unparalleled.

Absolutely, the freewares available for Windows are so diverse and so many. Just a few days ago, I wanted to organise my music collection. I found this app https://www.mp3tag.de/en/ and it was so intuitive, I was using its advanced features within the hour. Later I tried doing the same on Linux and the closest app I found was so unintuitive, I didn't want to waste my time figuring it out. Just rebooted into Windows.

Everything Search and Hornil Style Pix are two apps I dearly miss whenever I need them and am not on Windows.

 

[lockhrt999]

I too am a windows power user but I need to use linux on the daily basis. I'd suggest you to stick to windows. Windows has problems but the problems you see with linux are on the next level. Linux community is toxic and most of problem solving tutorials don't work.

Windows is tons more customizable than linux thanks to its big community. Latest gnome and kde do look beautiful but that beauty is only skin deep. The UI starts falling apart as you start using complex applications. Windows is ugly but at least it's consistent.

 

[enthusiast29]

Linux community is toxic and most of problem solving tutorials don't work.

I agree, people are pretentious and a bit with ego. As if they are a know it all and expect others to follow the same. Anyways, I do my own research and do find solutions that work out for me if needed. I can safely say I am a above average user of linux since I've used many systems at work and even before that I was using linux for development personally for a few years.

Windows is ugly but at least it's consistent.

Can't agree with this not even one bit. Since Windows Vista, with every version of Windows M$ has made major changes to the UI and reintroduced a learning curve with the UI. That's why people avoided the upgrade to Win7 and Win10 for years. Let's not talk about Win 8.x at all... It had come down to M$ forcing the free update of Win10 to existing Win7/8 users by advertising/spamming, full screen nags. People lost their data and M$ lost lawsuits and paid compensation to customers.
Now even after making Win10 a servicing model in 2015 and announcing publicly that it would be the last version of Windows with only servicing and feature updates going forward, they've come up with Win11 yet again with major UI overhaul breaking essential yet the most basic functions like taskbar on secondary screen, no date/time, dragging and dropping items across taskbar and into file explorer etc.

Though they're consistent with breaking something or the other every alternate Cumulative Update even with Win10.

 

[gourav]

I too am a windows power user but I need to use linux on the daily basis. I'd suggest you to stick to windows. Windows has problems but the problems you see with linux are on the next level. Linux community is toxic and most of problem solving tutorials don't work.

Windows is tons more customizable than linux thanks to its big community. Latest gnome and kde do look beautiful but that beauty is only skin deep. The UI starts falling apart as you start using complex applications. Windows is ugly but at least it's consistent.

Totally agree. Sometimes I find it very difficult to find answers for basic questions. There are tons of good tutorials which when work, they work like charm, but if something doesn't work, then it is nigh impossible to find the answer. I remember my initial days of navigating around my Raspberry Pi. The tutorials would leave out important bits assuming that the user would know basic stuff, even if the tutorial was specifically labelled as being for beginners. The first three months were extremely frustrating. Now I too use Linux as a server OS on my VPS, Raspberry Pi, and Synology (though I mostly use the GUI, sometimes I use the shell as well).

And same for customization, though the possibilities have come down since Windows XP days, Windows is still fairly customizable.

Can't agree with this not even one bit. Since Windows Vista, with every version of Windows M$ has made major changes to the UI and reintroduced a learning curve with the UI. That's why people avoided the upgrade to Win7 and Win10 for years. Let's not talk about Win 8.x at all... It had come down to M$ forcing the free update of Win10 to existing Win7/8 users by advertising/spamming, full screen nags. People lost their data and M$ lost lawsuits and paid compensation to customers.
Now even after making Win10 a servicing model in 2015 and announcing publicly that it would be the last version of Windows with only servicing and feature updates going forward, they've come up with Win11 yet again with major UI overhaul breaking essential yet the most basic functions like taskbar on secondary screen, no date/time, dragging and dropping items across taskbar and into file explorer etc.

Though they're consistent with breaking something or the other every alternate Cumulative Update even with Win10.

Somewhat agree but there's a flipside. While they make ridiculous choices, especially with regards to the Start Menu (they probably find it hard to accept that they designed something which works well and keep trying to break it), they maintain the under the hood system. So customization apps designed for previous Windows versions continue to work. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker and Open Shell have continued to work since Windows 7 days (not to take credit away from the developers who keep making regular updates). Apps and Games largely continue to work across versions, unlike Mac, where a major update can break many apps and create compatibility issues with hardware. Speaking of which, hardware compatibility issues are largely non-existent on Windows, due to how drivers work on it. Can't say the same for Linux and Mac.

 

[icysmoke]

I know I'm replying late, but wanted to know @icysmoke 's experience so far.

I have a slightly different opinion to other users. I know lots of people have switched from Windows to Linux, but for some, it may be incredibly difficult. My experience has been similar to @soulweaver in that I have tried to make the switch many times only to go running back to Windows after a month or so. I am a power user of windows and do little customizations here and there to make it easier to use. No matter how much I try, I am not able to replicate all those customizations on Linux. While many people like to disagree, out of the box, Windows Ux is miles ahead of both Linux and Mac OS. They are not even in the same league as Windows.

In my latest attempt (3 months ago), I installed KDE and spent hours customizing it to my liking. I almost got everything running as well with the only exception that I could not replicate the middle click features of https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker. However, this time I was determined to make the switch, so I decided to get used to the new shortcuts which KDE did have, some which were better than Windows as well. I thought over time I'll learn to do things the new way.

Then came a monitor change. I got a 4k monitor. This monitor worked fine with my work laptop but kept blanking out with my NUC (on which I was using Linux). I thought it was a hardware issue, then I noticed the screen would blank out when a movie was running but not when it was paused. At which point I realised it was a software issue. Booted into Windows and it worked perfectly fine. Spent hours searching for a solution to no avail and had to finally switch back to Windows.

My latest endeavour is to switch to Mac. I have been using my new Mac Mini for over a month now. And while the performance is incredible, especially for the price, the Ux is absolute shit compared to Windows. I am in the Finder app and enter button doesn't enter into a folder, delete button doesn't delete a folder. Ctrl+Tab refuses to work half the time for no apparent reason, there's no shortcut to put the computer to sleep, there's no software volume control, monitor brightness control works on my Windows PC but not on the Mac, the menu bar being on top is incredibly inconvenient when you're trying to work with multiple windows in the bottom half of your screen, the default photo preview app doesn't have something as basic as next/previous, my game controller simply refuses to work, and so on. I can go on listing things which just work on Windows and are an absolute nightmare on the Mac.

Windows has its problems, but it just works out of the box. Linux doesn't. It needs a lot of customization. And don't even get me started on Mac. There are a plethora of apps which simply replicate the built-in functionality of Windows and cost anywhere between ₹1,000 to ₹10,000. It's unusable for a power user of Windows.

My experience hasnt been very dissimilar to yours. I have dual boot but inevitable end up spending time om windows. There is always some small things that needs debugging and I take the easy route of switching to windows.

I finally used macos when it was forced upon me by my employer. I think it will need something similar to move to Linux fully. It is always easier to stick with whats familiar. When my workload is lighter in the next few months, I will give this another shot though

 

[calvin1719]

Since this has devolved into a more general discussion, let me ask here: Has Linux fixed the mouse tracking yet? Every distro i've tried in the past, from Mint to Ubuntu to a couple of others, all had the same issue of mouse tracking being too sensitive and not feeling normalized. No matter what the settings, it felt like it had smoothing and acceleration. If there were settings to disable these, I was not able to locate them.

Is it better these days? I play mostly FPS so that was a dealbreaker for me at the time, and still is.

 

[devagya]

Unlike others here, I completely switched to linux about 2 months ago. I mainly use vim/ vscode/ide for development stuff, commandline for compiling/ commandline stuff, and browser for everything else - excel, ms office stuff, minor image editing etc. all work fine on web for me. I keep Windows on my other partition incase things go south or I need to use adobe apps, which I didn't have to use even once in these 2 months. I don't play much games. However, I do play CS and Apex occasionally which work on par if not better than Windows.

I have only 1 monitor and no printer so no issues with that yet. however I'm planning to get both soon so linux compatibility will also be a thing to look for.

Since this has devolved into a more general discussion, let me ask here: Has Linux fixed the mouse tracking yet? Every distro i've tried in the past, from Mint to Ubuntu to a couple of others, all had the same issue of mouse tracking being too sensitive and not feeling normalized. No matter what the settings, it felt like it had smoothing and acceleration. If there were settings to disable these, I was not able to locate them.

Is it better these days? I play mostly FPS so that was a dealbreaker for me at the time, and still is.

Since I use Arch btw, here is how you do it on Arch(should also work on other distros). I play CS and Apex and it works fine in my case

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration#Disabling_mouse_acceleration

 

[vishalrao]

OP @icysmoke ignore the toxic windows power users here heh.

Any update on how your foray into linux is panning out?

If you've settled on a distro and desktop environment to your liking then don't be discouraged too soon if you face hurdles in your workflow. Keep looking online for solutions, either in forums or guides etc and you will soon be on your way to becoming a toxic linux power user.

 

[gourav]

I know this happens everywhere but my intention was not to make this a Linux Vs. Windows thread. I don't like people calling other people toxic just because they are offering differing opinions. I personally was only recounting my own experiences (so were the others, I feel). And despite what I said, I use Linux where I need it and Windows where I need it.

I love both Windows and Linux. For me, Windows works well for day to day use while Linux works well for server like usage. There's no way Windows would run smoothly on something like Raspberry Pi Zero, even if they had a version for ARM. Linux's strength lies in its ability to run on any hardware, no matter how low powered. It's also extremely stable. At times my Raspberry Pi ran for weeks without a single restart and there were no issues. Windows, on the other hand, starts to lag and stutter if I don't restart my laptop at least once every 3 days.

I use a Linux VPS and a Synology NAS running on Linux and I wouldn't want to use Windows on those machines even if I did have the option. Setting up stuff like Apache, Nginx, etc. was a breeze on my VPS and I have a few sites running. I also have a few docker containers running on my Synology and setting those things up was a breeze. Here I also need to note though that Synology's UI for docker is really intuitive and I have struggled to find any application which makes managing docker containers that easy (though, some advanced features may be missing).

All in all, if you're comfortable with Linux, great, more power to you. If you are trying to switch, do give it a try. Depending on your usecases and workflow, the switch might not be too difficult. If it works out for you, definitely better for the world, less power to large corporations.

 

[lockhrt999]

Anyway, today, one doesn't have to choose between Windows or Linux. Today, you can choose both. Now, you can install Ubuntu from microsoft app store. That's like google play store letting you install iOS as an app. How awesome is that!

WSL2 is making windows as better programming platform than MacOS. And, if you want to run Linux GUI apps on windows, the WSLg is almost here.

Talking about windows hardware compatibility, I faced a hibernate/sleep problem with TP link adaptor. I told about it to the TP link and its engineers from china baked me new beta drivers that solved the issue. They wouldn't treat linux user like that. Take any computer parts maker in consumer space like nVidia, Logitech, Corsair, etc they treat Windows users as first class citizens.

 

[icysmoke]

An update - I have almost completely shifted to Zorin now and am loving linux. The command line is awesome. In fact have begun to prefer the command line over the gui. All ubuntu support works for Zorin as well. Still have dual boot since things like Onenote just work better on Windows.

Keep my android connected to the laptop through Zorin connect without worrying about viruses ( since this aint windows). Works as well as Airdrop.

There is some googling required everytime i need to do something new, but it isnt hard at all. For windows or max users, Linux is different but easy. In fact I found adapting to Linux slightly easier than i found adapting to macos. Thats probably because Zorin core UI resembles windows. Overall, highly recommend Zorin and Linux to noobs like me.

 

[eTernity2021]

Windows is a great OS, LINUX is also a Great OS imho, where i get Softwares for Free for which i have to pay in Windows OS...
Nevertheless i enjoy both the OS, comparatively, Linux is faster than Windows!! Yes there are some misunderstandings in terms of customization and getting the response from Linux Community, But i evolved myself, i have changed myself by using right vocabulary in Linux Universe, and i am seeing improvement in the response and performance in Linux, on a whole, No blames, Both OS is full of fun!!