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.
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?
Spy on users
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.
Selling copies for 200$
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."
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
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.
Run Microsoft Excel
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.
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
Play all my laptop's speakers
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.
Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.
Restore the screen resolution when an old game crashes
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.
Blue screen. Embed advertising and spyware in everything.
Change your audio device seemingly at random.
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.
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.
top 50 comments