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Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, itβs a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. Itβs just that there arenβt a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Only if you compare computers that come preinstalled with Windows, operated by users that are already familiar with Windows.
A non-technical user is completely out of their element trying to install Windows, and a computer that comes preinstalled with Linux is easier to use than a Windows PC (no driver installation necessary, no hunting for software on the internet among spam links and ads, preinstalled software for most every-day tasks).
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Generally people are worse with computers than you think.
A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Natively run Windows software. Do I win?
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.
I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.
so, due to those gaps, it currently can't do those things.
This argument boils down to "yes it could, if someone bothered to implement it". Well... nobody has, so it can't
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
Spoken like someone who doesnβt do stable releases
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
Play lots of AAA games
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:
You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly
Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
I'm going to go with "be normal".
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.
But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not.
Thatβs funny because IMO itβs the exact opposite. Every mainstream operating system is a Unix or Unix-like. MacOS, iOS, Android, the BSDβs, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Windows is the only non-Unix OS that has any significant marketshare.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it's an adventure each time.
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).
Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a 'hope it works' but are most definitely unsupported.
Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.
Wine is 'fun'(?), but it's a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows' tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it's not 'supported.
Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn't have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).
I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work "well enough" to move on from windows but it's just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it'll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it'll be easier to switch.
For now, I'm stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows' direction).
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.
Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.
Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
Ads in my notifications and my lock screen.
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language -- that doesn't make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you're already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you're dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.