First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
> getting Japanese IME working
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
You should revel in the fact that you now have choice and not a single option. That does mean you will have to pick one.
All of the options you have been presented with will work fine - there is literally no wrong answer here!
All of them are very well documented and you will not get a "SFC /SCANNOW" type answer if you have a problem.
However, for folks who don't want to install some random packages, maybe Atomic version of the distro is better: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
As someone that is 100% on Linux and is occasionally forced to use Teams (where a fat client is no longer possible and was worse than the browser version when it was), I'm curious what that 5% was for you.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
Granted, I think Apple has slightly better execution, but that's pretty subjective, I suppose.
There's a good joke in there somewhere
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
It dates back to the 1990s and has used in Hollywood movies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks
There is a free version to try out with limited features, then subscriptions and also options to pay just once ($200 or $420).
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
[0] https://www.quantable.com/analytics/whats-blocking-google-an...
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.
And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.
They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
All modern Chromebooks can be put into developer mode without opening the case, which gives you root access.
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
See! Even a terrible analogy can get the point across.
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
Which is why I'm strongly considering a Steam Cube.
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
The terrible thing is that you are probably unqualified to do driver surgery without taking on more work than the problem is worth to you to fix.
Being able to do it yourself is truly the only liberating thing out there, since paying someone else to do it does not seem to actually work these days (or ever).
Closed source OSes like MS Windows and OSX dont permit you to see, let alone fix things internally.
I haven't found anything in my steam library that Crossover (wine with a nice GUI) hasn't handled on my Mac yet. I'm sure a bad game exists, but for most games it is seamless.
I tend not to have unrealistic expectations like running AAA titles at high framerates on a mid-tier laptop, and tend to go for indy games, but the games I have run work great.
Native game selection is - in fact - pretty limited, but who cares if it is being run with a compatibility layer if it plays well.
Yes, things breaking adds to this experience but when you are young, there is a lot of time for things you enjoy.
It’s more a case of Windows getting significantly worse and feeling like malware than Linux desktop being THAT much better than the last time I tried it, but between proton and maybe 95%+ of my work being in a browser window or browser window (Electron) these days, I basically never run in to compatibility issues and never have Candy Crush advertised to me.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/millions-to-receive-free-e...
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/11/04/electricity...
Unknown could just as easily be windows, chromeOS or macOS or just automation for that matter. Why would only Linux report as unknown for only a portion of users?
Given that the Unknown line is directly mirroring the ChromeOS line, it’s much more likely that it’s misattribution from ChromeOS. (And yes ChromeOS is Linux under the hood but the distinction matters because of the implication of the article)
What is the methodology of the statistics collection? Is it just user agent strings?
To this day I only ever use windows for gaming. Wonder if it’s time to try gaming on Linux again.
What may make this happen is political risk. The rest of the world outside the US doesn't like the excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US, especially when that may mean snooping or disconnection. This used to be just a theoretical objection, but under the Trump administration it's a practical one.
Which is, as you say, an issue of digital (data) sovereignty.
When the US government acts in an erratic, unreliable, and untrustworthy manner, large organisations naturally look to de-risk their infrastructure and supply chains by removing American products and services from them:
https://dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dutch-universities-do-without-...
It's the same reason many countries don't want Chinese products in their telecommunications infrastructure. They don't trust what the Chinese government will do, or rather they do trust that the Chinese government will do things that aren't in their best interests:
This failure mode of capitalism should've been easy to anticipate: owners of capital eventually become the customers.
Capitalism is great for technology development. But stable markets don't generate the returns VCs and public company shareholders demand.
I predict a return to simple commerce: pay money for a good or service without third parties. It doesn't need to grow or generate returns.
Of this demographic I found they were mostly conservative/right wing. It makes me wonder if there are a bunch of influencers like Luke Smith out there telling them how to use this stuff, or if they're just figuring it out on their own through forums. I think the word "flocking" is too strong, but there is definitely a large and growing non-technical userbase of people who use linux.
Maybe get a Macbook?
Do you even know how bad Linux is? The video drivers don't work, bluetooth doesn't work, your laptop won't wake up from sleep, it's horrible. Go the fuck away. Linux is horrible.
Windows is fucking awesome. Mac is OK. Linux sucks. Don't waste your time.
Then I had to plug in the LAN cable and the whole system just... froze and needed a hard reboot. I don't know Linux systems deteriorated so much because everything "just worked" ~10 years ago and it got way worse since that.
Windows is a well documented hellscape of advertising, tracking, poor performance, and disregarding user will. Some people may pay to upgrade to a guilded cage from Apple, but trying Linux on the hardware you already have doesn't cost a dime. I've given Linux to multiple mostly tech illeterate friends now, and they are all happier and asking for less help on those systems. Amusingly, the help they've asked for wasn't even Linux specific and they would've asked the same things on Windows.
But I still think it's better to have the unwashed masses move to Linux just to give Microsoft the middle finger of realisation that they're, well, making horrible decisions.
Maybe we can compromise by keeping all the n00bs shepherded into the Ubuntu pen?
I just don't have the time anymore to waste hours of my day to get apps working, when it just works on windows or mac.
> Win11 file picker is years ahead of some random file picker option available on linux
First it would be nice to know why you would think this and maybe provide an example, second there are other file pickers. It should also be noted that you don't need one at all, but if you want one, there are so many options, try nemo
> HiDPI
Wayland
> Multi monitor scaling polish
What did he mean by that? Wayland supports different scaling factors between displays.
> rdp
VNC, ssh + pf
> vastly superior accessibility
Hahahahaha
Some examples of what you mean please, otherwise this is just a lazy shill answer
File picker has been a strength of Windows for quite a few versions. And the consensus seems to be that it is better than Mac's (based on my YouTube watch history). I have used various Linux desktops, and none of the file pickers are nearly as good as the Windows native one, in yet of being able to navigate/filter/order things and occasionally getting more information about the selection.
neither nautilus nor nemo provides you convenient way to navigate, to check free disks space, to check photos in an album view, to see all the file properties and customize table views.
if you don't have this usage scenarios, it doesn't mean its a ragebait.
and btw, your attitude is one of the reasons people don't want to move to linux. One more toxic community? Naah, I'm good.
cd where/you/want/to/navigate
ranger (if you want interactive)
>check free disk space
df -h
> check photos in an album view
nsxiv -t *.{jpeg|png}
> see all the file properties
ls -l
But I guess you are right. If one wants to use a computer like you use it on windows, then linux is a bad choice. The best choice in that case is windows.
Your file manager is not your operating system, use something else to view images.
I have all those "usage scenarios", which are in fact absolute basics and thus it's worth remembering 3 commands. The problem arises when one uses a Desktop environment with a dock and all other bloated nonsense. Maybe computing is solved once people reverse the brain damage inflicted by Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sorry for my attitude, because OP is the reason computing sucks and becomes more bloated and telemetry ridden every year. It's pure laziness to learn something new. Linux should be there for everyone, but shouldn't be called "immature" just because someone needs a perfect clone of the windows file picker, or wants his proprietary windows programs to run. Thats all good and fair, but not linux' problem.
VNC is highly dependent on implementation. Sunshine/Moonlight runs circles around RDP in terms of performance and includes audio. For situations where you need the extra functionality is RDP... You can just use RDP. It works just fine on Linux, especially if you're on recent KDE.
On-screen keyboards are admittedly a pain point, but I've usually seen people say nicer things about the screen readers than Windows. Probably lots of different experiences depending on implementation.
I remember KDE copying that a few years after Microsoft introduced Active Desktop. That was, what, 25 years ago now?
Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
That's not interesting, the most common os is Windows, ergo most downloads are going to come from windows.