I think it’s a fair point that immutable distros are still a developing concept and probably not ready for primetime, but I do feel that eventually this must be the answer to make things absolutely bulletproof for people (of which there are many) who have a natural ability of nuking their OS.
Why would it have to be KDE or XFCE? GNOME as it exists today is probably the closest to macOS’ design language, and whatever you do designing any kind of operating system UI, macOS needs to be the benchmark. GNOME 2 in the olden days was my favorite DE so today I have to go for things like KDE or MATE but I’m not a novice and I can fully acknowledge that what works for me isn’t what works for everyone. GNOME probably made the right decisions to lower the entry barrier towards Linux.
XFCE to me is purely a choice for outdated hardware so unless your extreme beginner has an extremely old PC XFCE is a non-starter. Whether KDE can be made more accessible to the non-initiated I can’t say. Anything that has a Windows-esque taskbar is probably ill-equipped from the start as well. Again, macOS is as easy to use in a keyboard and mouse sense as tablets and smartphones are with our fingers. This is the way.
This is the only take based in reality. Nobody (except us) cares about openness, federation or business models. What matters are ease of use and adoption.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the other takes are missing the mark in terms of history possibly repeating itself in the future. But if it does, that just means that (as is to be expected) the people don’t make momentary decisions with a bigger (collective) picture in mind. Design needs to address individual needs first and foremost especially when it comes to social media.
Nobody joins a platform to beat corporate ownership of people’s digital lives. BlueSky manufactured adoption by starting out as an invite-only cool kids club. Having to pick a fediverse instance is an entry barrier. There will always be a lot less money to throw around when you’re trying to create something under the umbrella of freedom and openness. I don’t see how these movements could ever win, even if they provide an arguably better product.
World hunger can’t be cured for profit. The hunger of the many is directly caused by the greed of the few.
But I’d love to see them try of course. The billions Musk has evaporated with his purchase could’ve also been spent less egotistically.
Windows can definitely be a nuisance these days especially during the setup. But you mention a key aspect at the end. Touch-based devices these days are super intuitive compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to on our desktops for decades. And they aren’t just miniature PCs anymore, they can do all the same stuff, regardless of whether they’re actually being used for the same things we associate with desktop-work.
Linux has a huge userbase in the form of Android and therein virtually no entry-barrier or learning-curve to speak of. I feel that that’s where we need to go. Mac OS is already there. Windows is just living and breathing off the fact that its market share was once virtually 100%. I think a good example of what I mean is how Valve are leveraging Linux on their Steam Deck. It’s still intimidating when you switch over to the KDE desktop, but as a regular user gamer you won’t ever need to. Everything this device has been built to do can be done in a tailor-made UI for its purpose. Or think ChromeOS. I can install a virtual Debian beneath ChromeOS if I want more control over what I can install but other than that the OS is dead simple to use.
Linux deserves mass adoption but it needs to think user experience first just like the big corporations do. I firmly believe that that’s possible even when the big bucks aren’t being thrown around.
I have a middle aged customer who is legitimately using Mint on one of those old Athlons today in 2024 for her day to day. There literally is no reason for her to upgrade hardware unless her usecases evolve into something more demanding.
I agree Linux is a lot more accessible than it used to be, but if I understand you correctly the people you helped transition still needed at least some initial holding of their hands. If for example you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled that initial hurdle could be cleared but I still believe there’s a learning curve at least as steep as it would be for someone learning Windows for the first time. The difference being that everything out there takes Windows into account.
If you just wana surf the web Linux can probably be as easy as ChromeOS these days but that isn’t really a usecase where operating systems can make a difference one way or the other.
Is that an Enterprise version at work? I mean even if you pause updates for as long as they allow you to on consumer versions, at some point you do have to do it. I do get nagged on one of my installations but not on my main one. Both Windows 10.
I was planning to transition to Linux completely by this autumn but laziness strikes as per. I guess autumn 2025 is the new deadline now.
I didn’t understand the “forced upgrade” argument until now. Yea I guess you’re right, at some point you have to do updates (they nag about upgrading to 11 but you can skip that indefinitely). But with how popular Windows is you have options for a lot of problems (including forced updates which to be fair shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to security patches).
If you open up Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility (https://christitus.com/windows-tool/) you basically have a comprehensive list of all the ameliorations one could ever want at their disposal. That’s really the main thing Windows still has going for it, it’s a decades-long mainstay which means there are plenty of knowledgable people out there who know how it can be made to heel even if Microsoft decide to force a Microsoft account on you, telemetry, whatever it may be, there will probably always be a way around it.
For example one of my main gripes with Windows 11 is how you can’t make the taskbar show all tray icons anymore by default. They removed window titles in the taskbar so now everything is basically a square down there meaning there’s all this empty space between my open windows and the tray. But of course someone out there has written a program to automatically unhide all tray icons and thrown it on GitHub.
To me personally it doesn’t matter how crappy the design choices are as long as they can be mitigated. If bad corporate decisionmaking is a dealbreaker (which is also a fair assessment) then you have to ditch the corporation entirely and go Linux or what have you. Not trying to be smart or anything but there really is no reason to stay on Windows left anymore. Maybe if you absolutely need Microsoft Office or something but ever since Proton came out the issue with Windows-only games has pretty much evaporated.
Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it’s an investment worth making many times over.
Do Apple still sell Music in that app?
I wouldn’t even know how to hold a local music library on macOS these days. The app that used to be iTunes is now just called Music right? It’s way confusing for me but I also don’t daily drive the OS anymore. I have my stagnant library in Subsonic which in itself is a stagnant product but you know how it is with Spotify these days.
I didn’t know MOV has a more accessible license than MP4 but yea MP4 in itself is hardly what one ever wanted to hold their content in. All I know about MOV is that back in the XP days obviously Windows couldn’t play them out of the box. Not that WMV (lol) was any more desirable. I guess most of my stuff back then was AVI.
Yea … no, sorry to say but this one’s on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they’re way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that’s open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.
HEIC isn’t Apple’s thing it’s from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn’t part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that’s lame.
I used Nextcloud for both files and my PortableApps for years but it always had a hard time managing all those tens of thousands of small files. Lots of sync overhead. So I found Seafile and couldn’t be happier. I don’t just have my PortableApps in there now, I sync my Windows Documents, Pictures, Videos and Downloads folders. Seafile is very good at tracking partial changes in files so it doesn’t always need to sync an entire file when just part of it changed.
Also: It’s just a file sync service without any auxiliary features.
Basically the only answer that takes the question seriously and brings facts to the table instead of an opinion.
My solution is basically what @mojolobo mentions with Nextcloud behind it and I love the concept. Because Obsidian (via a WebDAV plugin on the phone) just syncs with the “Notes” folder in my Nextcloud root it really is just a bunch of .md (markdown) files. It gives me an added sense of security (on top of the self-hosting aspect) because I can see those files everywhere I have Nextcloud installed, I can edit them manually if I wanted to. On the PC you just point the Obsidian app to the folder, on phones you do it via a WebDAV plugin.
Can’t argue with that flawless logic.
Does that mean you weren’t able to implement those changes or didn’t want to regress back from Wayland?
I get that. SATA can be hot plug these days. I’m not saying it should rival the number of USB ports we get on motherboards, but I remember there were also these USB eSATA hybrid ports. Which would probably only work with USB 2.0 but still, would be nice to have.
Will definitely check to see if I can work OpenSuperClone into my workflows. Haven’t had failing drives drop out like that before so I can’t speak to that scenario. I imagine if it drops out why would that software have a harder time to recover under SATA?
Mark my words. Don’t ever use SATA to USB for anything other than (temporary) access to non critical preexisting data. I swear to god if I had a dollar for every time USB has screwed me over trying to simplify working with customers’ (and my own) drives. Whenever it comes to anything more advanced than data level access USB just doesn’t seem to offer the necessary utilities. Whether this is rooted in software, hardware or both I don’t know.
All I know is that you cannot realistically use USB to for example carbon copy one drive to another. It may end up working, it may throw errors letting you know that it failed, it may only seem to have worked in the end. It’s hard for me to imagine that with all the individual devices I’ve gone through that this is somehow down to the parts and that somewhere out there would be something better that actually makes this work. It really does feel like whoever came up with the controlling circuits used for USB to SATA conversion industry-wide just didn’t do a good enough job to implement everything in a way that makes it wholly transparent from the view of the operating system.
TL;DR If you want to use SATA as intended you need SATA all the way to the motherboard.
tbh I often ask myself why eSATA fell by the wayside. USB just isn’t up to these tasks in my experience.
To me it’s like the old saying from Win9x days “Help, I’ve deleted the internet”. Removing an Internet Explorer shortcut from the desktop might be easier than nuking a Linux installation, but I think if the point is to be of service to absolute tech-illiterates then you need to be ready for anything, any edge case. And like you say, if Flatpaks and all that just work then what would be the downside of immutability?
I mean in theory one can make deep-rooted changes to macOS, but I haven’t once seen it fail to upgrade successfully. And I definitely wouldn’t consider Windows immutable with how many things can go wrong in practice. I’ve had more than a few customers who lost wifi drivers through no fault of their own, in one case the entire device wasn’t visible anymore, so reinstalling a driver wouldn’t have done anything, all I could do was roll back the feature update and ensure it won’t install it again. In that sense, immutable Linux might even be the best offering out there today. The only thing it lacks (besides Android and SteamOS) is a multi-billion dollar company backing it for wider desktop adoption.