- cross-posted to:
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
- cross-posted to:
- linuxfurs@pawb.social
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Windows 11 takes your money, gives you ads, sells your information and ignores your bug reports and feature requests
KDE is free, ad-free and open to contribution
I think we have a clear winner here
But can it run proprietary software used in the industry? From Excel to Photoshop, if you are in a collaborative professional environment, you can’t run away from those, and don’t tell me you can use the alternatives in Linux, because no, you can’t. This is not linux fault, but it’s still an issue you can’t handwave.
I love linux, but you can’t expect people to adopt it just because it’s objectively better than windows.
Wine can run most of those, not all. You can still dual boot Windows if you need to (VMs are an option, but they aren’t always the best).
I mean, that’s what I do. Will I be able to convince my 60 yo colleague that had been using the same workflow for decades? No, not a chance.
Are you talking about for work or home usage? And do they have any specific proprietary application/hardware requirements?
Work use. The are hardware requirements (XRD machines, potentiostats, CNC machining) and software requirements (3D design). My workshop asks for files in Autodesk Inventor, if I send it in any other format, they just won’t fabricate my pieces, and I completely understand, who am I to change the workflow of a complete department just because I refuse to use Inventor (which is provided at work).
But you understand that’s a massive Ballache to deal with on top of your normal workload?
I haven’t tried running anything new, but the stuff I have run in wine has worked easily, without any tweaking
You just gotta make an effort. The one who are too lazy will never be free of Microsoft’s clutches. Which probably just means pretty much everyone will stick to windows.
That’s my point, I use linux as much as I can, but if 80% of your colleagues use Windows… You don’t have much choice.
It depends on your industry. I’m in an agile development team, working in AWS in Java. I’m not a dev, so my work is in spreadsheets, word processor documents, web utilities like Azure Dev Ops
All that is platform independent, though we have to work on the organisation’s computers, so we work in the office on windows PCs or from home on whatever, remoted into a windows machine or VM
The devs work in VMs which are variously windows or GNU/Linux depending on what the person’s previous project was.
Sounds like you need better colleagues.
I use linux 50% of my time, I’m not going to ditch my job so I can use it 100%, lol. What kind of advice is that for someone who wants to use linux.
@desconectado @glibg10b Wine exists… And that’s all I have to say. There is a good installer in lutris for creative cloud that works pretty good if you own it. And if you have a NVIDIA graphics card, it works even better, almost like on windows. It’s not 1:1 but we’re getting close. For excel you have wine again or a great free alternative is WPS or softmaker if you want to buy it.
I wish Wine worked well enough to use Excel. We are not talking about adding up numbers in a cell. Once you include macros, or a reference manager in Word, Wine is not good enough. The same can be said about propietary software, like autocad, or software used to control equipment. Also, good luck convincing a regular user to get familiar with wine.
WPS is great for simple files. Again, not good enough for complex files, especially if it is a corporate collaboration environment. I have lost count on the amount of ppt files that didn’t display well when it used WPS.
Every other year I try all the alternatives you mention, hoping they got better, and I always come back to use a dual boot or a virtual machine, which is not a thing your regular user wants to do.
If you want real change you have to change for real.
List of things to consider
- There are alternatives
- You can use wine
- You can run a windows VM and install it there
- Dual boot windows
- Microsoft has built a proprietary moat around their operating system. The reason why it’s hard to switch from Windows is by corporate design. A mix of early adoption, network effects, and just plain cold hard cash makes them dominate the operating system market. Of course it’s infeasible for your 60yo coworker to switch; but KDE presents an alternate reality, an opportunity, for people fed up with big tech’s bullshit. Yes, figure out how to run and use alternatives you fucking nut. Way to go disparaging countless volunteer hours spent on open source projects so that people like me can switch to linux.
Comments like these make me irrationally angry. Why complain about open source software and give bad PR? It’s open source; contribute.
Read my other replies. 1 and 2 don’t really work, the performance of using wine, or the alternatives, is just not there, if you do amateur work, maybe that’s fine, but for professional collaborative work, good luck using freecad instead of autocad.
Personally, I use 3 and 4, but you have to understand that the regular user is not going to go through that much hassle to set up a virtual machine.
There are enough web based office instances running for Linux to be functional in that regard.
Photoshop on the other hand…
Photopea is a solid replacement.
GIMP will be great once it no longer needs to dodge patents
Audio players work great now MP3 is out of patent (before that MP3 was really only available if you were willing to ignore the patent)
I love linux, but you can’t expect people to adopt it just because it’s objectively better than windows.
Excel o,O
Meh I had a dual boot machine ages ago. Still here collecting dust. Basically I only switched to use the Linux for down time, movies, and study, most day to day tasks from engineering software to anything I considered important enough that you do not want the results hacked or broken I would use Windows.
I think of modern machines kind of like a hammer. These days almost nobody actually remembers the guy who made the first hammer, or who discovered fire, but there’s a price tag for the bow, the paper and the hammer, not so much the making of the hammer, because the actual skill involved or required to learn about it has become challenged if not cheapened to the degree that there are now multiple paths to obtain or create a hammer, yet the benchmark quality of the hammer as well as the process for creation itself as a whole is now more of an authority than the actual original statue or monolith of “hammer man” himself.
This is why I think the many flavours of Ubuntu including the many esoteric Linux distros are still interesting but still lack the diversity of use and specialization. The fact that whole blockchains are built for XYZ while sitting around pumped then dumped to trading at cents with no use goes to show how cloud computing systems and lower level computing is still very disconnected and becoming further thrown aside to uphold ponzi schemes.
I’ll give you an example, more money is wasted on onlyfans per year than for people trying to use system XYZ for solving problem A, or curing cancer. Consider that to be one of the “good” reasons many men and women are so misogynistic, even without looking down on sex workers.
I… what? What does Ubuntu have to do with misogyny?
This post reminded me to take my meds.
Get a life and stop trying to diagnose people via any observable behaviour. One day you’ll understand child lol
Look. Everything is like a hammer, in terms of specialization. From Linux distros to gender roles, if you want to understand the world, just look at the hammer. We live in the Hammer Age. It is hammer time.
No but yes it’s a useful analogy
Because plot twists and funny 🤣 nobody cares
Not to mention free as in freedom.
Also free as in beer.
Sadly there’s no beer in it however
You can look up beer recipes and buy equipment and ingredients from it though. And use web based or spreadsheet calculators on it to do beer related calculations
That beer is also not free, but assuming you make beer for a long time the price per pint (half litre to split the difference between UK and US pints) tends toward about 20c (though highly hopped beers like hazy pale ale can get towards a dollar a pint) which is pretty cheap
But not free as in Murica.
You could get Ubuntu in a free like America style
But in America, Freedom isn’t free.
Buck’o’five.
Canonical will sell you an Ubuntu
And anytime you mention that anywhere when somebody is being fucked again by windows, people find you annoying
But can it play Starfield with an Nvidia GPU? I originally had popos on my PC until Starfield came out, I had to switch to Windows to play.
In a nutshell; it works with a lot of tweaks.
I mean Starfield was just terrible optimized for Nvidia at launch and still isn’t ideal no matter what OS you use.
I play it on max settings with no problems on windows
Linux is the modern OS and windows is just a bunch of old shitty technology in a trench suit.
This is kinda how I feel about Windows these days. It’s interface, directory structure, shudder the registry, user specific apps (from MS Store or Winget), buttons being inserted into the menu bars on some apps, but not others, button sizes being different sizes, some parts still using the Metro interface. The whole thing either needs a re-write, or should be dropped and something new to replace it. Don’t even get me started on things like the eventvwr hanging for 20 seconds after it opens, event tracer API, their in-house abandonment of powershell modules once powershell was open sourced, Windows containers being a disaster, etc.
The problem is that so much critical infrastructure around the world relies on ancient Windows software. I’m pretty sure their backwards compatibility is one of the reasons there’s so much inconsistency in Windows, and every iteration seems to just add more bloat on top.
They hired the man behind systemd (controversial, I know, but he does have a vision). I hope they listen to him and/or he starts directing how they should do things from the ground-up.
I hope they listen to him and/or he starts directing how they should do things from the ground-up.
I hate Windows and would love to see ruined too.
There was a TCP/IP bug that shared it’s exploit on versions of windows from windows for workgroups 3.11 (which you ran from the DOS prompt by typing ‘win’) through to windows 7 (which was the new hotness at the time)
That’s a bug conserved from the very first Microsoft implementation of TCP/IP through to the state of the art at the time
People were surprised at the time that it wasn’t a windows NT bug
That’s surprising, as I think the first Windows TCP/IP stack was ported over from BSD by Spider Systems (pretty sure that’s why it still has things like “/etc/hosts” - albeit under System32). Wonder if the bug was in BSD and never backported (cross ported?).
Yeah, but that old technology is what still lets me run a 13 year old version of Adobe creative suite. If that ever changes I will have to learn something new!
We will perhaps never beat adobe but nowadays there are some amazing tools!
… Which are developed for windows as well. Haha.
Kinda weird that they’re calling it an OS, but ig they’re just trying to cater to the windows audience
I feel like they intended to mention KDE neon (which is the official KDE distro).
KDE neon is what they’re selling
Selling as in advertising, I might add. Neon is free
Neon is more of a testbed than a proper distro (they don’t actually even use that word).
Is this “the KDE distro”?
Nope. KDE believes it is important to work with many distributions, as each brings unique value and expertise for their respective users. This is one project out of hundreds from KDE.
It’s a proper distro, that’s just saying it’s not THE official one
Plasma is not a system, but I see how they didnt want to confuse people here
It is a desktop environment system.
But no operating system
To be fair, forcing a bunch of software on the machine users own was never a good move, and in my opinion, not a new normal.
It was a good move when people had no idea what they were doing and needed defaults to get started.
You mean the defaults that were against anti trust laws?
So basically ever since I first tried Windows 7 I held it as the “Gold standard” for desktop OS’s. Half my tweaks to Windows 10 were trying to get it as close to Win7 as I possibly could.
When I finally start experimenting with Linux early this year KDE quickly got me to reconsider my “Gold standard” and finally switch my main machine fully to Linux.
No regrets and certainly ain’t switching back even if Microsoft gave me updated Windows 7 with every extra feature I wanted back then.
I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.
Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.
When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.
To me it’s absurd how Microsoft gets beaten by a free desktop environment when windows is like their main product. They have billions of dollars. How do they manage to not do better?
windows is like their main product
TBF it isn’t really - only about 12% of their revenue. It’s more of a means to lock people into their other products.
Well, that’s the thing, it’s the core part of their entire business. The glue that sticks everything together. Or at least used to be until Azure.
Because they dont have to.
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It seems like a big company’s problem. They have a well-paid design\marketing department that can do whatever they want to create the best-selling interface for the new version of Windows, but before it’s released, no one tested it yet for anything but bugs, and who’d argue with a flock of top designers anyway? Add here the board of directors who are here to sell them ideas and who won’t use it either – I’m sure they applauded to the idea of unifying mobile and desktop experience with WinPhone&Win8, but especially Tablet-Laptop transformers they saw as the future. It sounds great on the paper, right? At that time it could’ve even sounded obvious for their business. And so it happened like it did.
Linux counters it by constant feedback and competition between easily switchable DEs, users being prepared even to jump distros; Apple has a fetish for style and experience (that’s a half of their pricetag), they build their business model about looking and feel nice, so you’d build an ecosystem of their products, you can’t even see error windows here and their garden is gated af; and ChromeOS\Android aren’t shy of looking what others do (like iPhone’s design findings) and conservatively taking what works, also having tons of vendor-created restyles\forks on their own platform as a testing ground for new ideas to make them then a standard. MS lack all of it, and their creative process is guided by external interests and ideals, it’s just an afterthought. And as they have their stable market share, they probably won’t even care. It took whole internet’s screams to return their traditional start menu in win8.1, then w10.
That’d probably stay the same until their new CEO would happen to be an art college graduate - like the current one pushed for accessebility and building special controllers because she has a child with a disability. A top-down signal. I won’t bet on it anytime soon.
The fact that Windows 11 has removed the ability to move the taskbar and has no intention of adding it back is just baffling to me. It’s a small thing but so jarring every time I try to use it that I’ve barely used my desktop in the last few months.
What drives me crazy is how they can’t update all their configuration interface to the same standard, if you go deep enough you still fine things that are unchanged since Windows 98
Needs more system settings, there’s only three.
I’ve noticed a trend in modern design where designers will put out garbage to ‘keep people on their seats’ waiting for it to be fixed.
I set my KDE up to look as much like Windows 7 as possible.
I think that was peak desktop design before designers started changing shit just to stay relevant.
Almost all my desktop gets used for anymore is gaming. The windows only anti cheat shit leaves me not messing with splitting what I boot up for.
Fully based
Konquered
In the newest windows, it is even possible to hover the volume icon and change it with the mouse wheel!!!
Does clicking on it open the mixer, or still the useless menu which should be accessible with a right click instead?
KDE had that pretty much since the invention of the mouse wheel.
Still not going back to Windows!
LOL!
Wait, they didn’t have that before? Heck, even my sway install with Waybar has this.
But you still need to get at the audio settings to tell it that it should use your microphone for a microphone, not the USB camera
I have the same functionality on my waybar
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What’s plasma ? Is it a browser? Sorry, I dont understand computers
Unlike Windows and MacOS, the Linux ecosystem is a lot more modular. For example, graphical user interfaces. There are a few types, ranging from ruthlessly simple tiling window managers to more complex desktop environments that more closely resemble the Windows or MacOS experience.
Linux users may take their pick between about a dozen desktop environments (DEs), including Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, xfce and LXQT.
KDE (once standing for Kool Desktop Environment, now merely KDE) is a community/organization that produces open source software. They made Krita, a raster art program, KDENLIVE, a video editor, and many other such utilities. They also make the Plasma desktop environment, which is often referred to simply as “KDE” by distro maintainers. For example, you might download Fedora GNOME or Fedora KDE.
KDE Neon is an operating system maintained by KDE which features the Plasma desktop.
Thanks for the explanation. Really appreciate it.
It’s a desktop environment for linux operating systems. Desktop environments pretty much dictate how a pc looks. KDE Plasma,Mate, Gnome, Cinnamon etc are some famous desktop environments
KDE Plasma is an desktop environment.
The kind of thing you interact outside of installed app/programs. Like the panels, window decorations (titles, close buttom, maximalize button), the way windows float and behave, system settings, etc.
Unix systems (like Linux) are very modular and you can install different desktop environments if you want. And even within those desktops are modules, like you can install different “start menu” or file manager on KDE Plasma.
an linux operating system made by the KDE team
raises pendantic finger Ah-hem, sorry, but KDE Plasma isn’t an OS. It’s a desktop environment. For an OS bundled/built-around Plasma then Kubuntu or KDE Neon are both Linux distributions that would better fit that description.
We could call it Plasma/Linux or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Plasma plus Linux.
Thank you for interjecting.
KDE’s plasma centered Linux Operating system. So to not be overly pedantic, I stuck with what this lemmy post was about. I didn’t say the plasma desktop environment was an OS.
I said “a linux operating system made by the KDE team” in which the KDE team referenced their OS as Plasma in the Mastodon post, or “toot,” shown in this lemmy post.
Or a GNU operating system with a Linux kernel and KDE desktop environment
But that’s a mouthful
Since when has KDE been an OS?
Plasma isn’t a KDE OS, but Neon is.
Literally according to KDE’s own tweet (whatever they call tweets on mastodon) which is the subject of this thread.
I think the Mastodon people toot.
Things are more interesting in the Linux world. Plasma is just a user interface, a desktop environment. The actual operating system is Linux. And we have so many choices for how we want our desktop environment on Linux, but Plasma is the most advanced one.
I said its a linux operating system, and the whole installation from Desktop environment to the compiled kernel and preinstalled executables was carefully made by the KDE team. They literally said Operating system on their mastodon post, “toot,” this lemmy post shows. So its correct what I said
Well, if you bothered to read the text on the image, you would have found your answer.
Whoosh
woof woof
No wonder lemmy user base Is dropping with holier than comments like this. Let me guess, you use arch too?
Oh sure, defending people who aren’t even willing to read the text of the post while also attacking the one who complains about that circumstance is better, right?
Well, although usually it’s a good idea to read the original post first, in this instance the original post is at best misleading because it refers to Plasma as an “operating system” rather than a desktop environment.
(Or for those who want to use even more precise terminology: its full name is either “Plasma Desktop” or “KDE Plasma Desktop”, because KDE also has some non-desktop environments such as Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen… none of which are as popular as Plasma Desktop, though, so usually Plasma Desktop is colloquially called just “Plasma”.)
I never said anything regarding the truth of the original posts claim; it’s just irritating when people start asking questions without even reading what was initially written.
What’s the current reliable KDE Distro? I’ve been rolling with Kububtu for a while now, but Ubuntu’s Snap mandate has been getting annoying.
I have been enjoying OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling distro unlike the Ubuntu and Debian derivatives, but the updates hardly ever cause problems and it’s very easy to roll them back if they do. It also gives you a choice between X11 and Wayland, and Wayland is working well for me on Intel graphics.
I jumped into Tumbleweed recently and have really been liking it. Last time I used Linux with a desktop environment I was using Gnome and KDE was a lot unglier. Things have definitely changed.
Tumbleweed is pretty much the “official” kde distro
Not KDE Neon?
KDE Neon gets the latest package updates regarding KDE first but it is not official in any sense, as listed on their website. In fact, Neon is just a package archive built on top of Ubuntu that offers more up to date KDE stuff.
I have used the distro as a daily driver in the past. It uses it’s own pkgcon package management system.
Fedora KDE Spin works pretty well
I can confirm. I’ve been running it on my M1 MacBook Pro and it’s quite nice.
Natively or in a VM?
Natively. Only major blocker for me using it more often now is speaker support, which is coming soon enough (the M1 Air already has it).
If you want something Ubuntu-based I’d recommend KDE Neon, last time I tried it, it was great. I don’t think it has snaps since it’s made by KDE.
Debian or MX.
I’m using Kubuntu as my main OS and it has been very stable for me. You can remove snapd and install the deb Firefox repository. You should look up tutorials on how to do it, I did it and nothing broke
Most likely the best distro for KDE is KDE neon, but that doesn’t mean that much.
I use it on Debian testing and am very satisfied with it, KDE has never been so stable.
I would recommend the KDE spin of Fedora.
Second but I use Nobara with KDE.
Second. Up-to-date packages and stable at the same time.
Endeavour switched to KDE as their main DE
I for one hope to move from kubuntu to debian with KDE, I assume that won’t have snap shit or systemd shit, but I might be painfully mistaken right there, I haven’t checked it out yet.
Manjaro is pretty good.
KDE is the best desktop environment.
And you can’t get de-crufted Win11 outside Europe! Another win for Plasma!
You can, but it takes a little effort
Because I need Windows to run old C&C games. Get Generals world builder working on Linux and I’ll delete my dual boot
You can already get it working under Linux, running a Windows VM. I remember doing that for Homeworld, it’s basically the emulator approach. A VM is ok if it isn’t too demanding graphically.
Yeah the issue is the tools. They’re what I have a hard time with in the VMs. I have no idea why
Imagine keeping an entire system set aside for one application. You do you, bud.
I don’t think you understand how zealous C&C fans are. Some of us have entire XP machines with CRT monitors just to play the game in its purest form. We’re about as culty as Linux.
But it’s also not just one program, it’s all the c&c games, their map editors, mod loaders, and any modding tools. World builder is just an example.
Fair enough.
The simple solution here is to just move on and play a game that isn’t old enough to drink, lol.
I have a 286 running DOS 6 for when I’m feeling especially nostalgic
I really need to get a Windows 98 PC for the same reason
Does it not run in a virtual machine very well or at all?
It can but it’s already a headache to get the tools running, and adding in the VM layer can add more headaches.
Usually the compatibility patches make the games work in the VM, but the map editors and modding tools had a lot of issues last time I tried.
The tooling around those games was incredibly barbones so there are probably a lot of hacks going on that the VM wasn’t properly stimulating.
I’d like to introduce you to Qubes OS then :P
