I managed to get someone online to try out Linux because their Windows 7 install was dying. Turns out the problem was hardware, but he used Linux for a while and stuck to it for his new PC.

A whole bunch of utilities he got used to had no Linux equivalent (people online claiming the average user can replace GUIs with awk and sed are fools) but I have quite some experience with Wine, so that wasn’t too bad.

HDR is an issue. It just doesn’t seem to work right. Media players do all kinds of weird stuff. I’ve seen six screencaps from six media players taking snapshots of the same file, and they all had their colours wrong in different ways on Linux. VLC managed to get the colours right, but then lacked some other features. The Linux version of his previous media player uses different codecs on Linux so it suffers from the same problem.

Thank to Valve, many games work out of the box, but even Valve’s settings need patching every now and then. Elzen Ring didn’t work right because the version of Proton Steam decided to ship was broken, and needed to be changed in the config settings.

While debugging something else, we also ran into an issue with Teamviewer, which still doesn’t seem to support Wayland. That was a quick workaround, but it still sucks. I hope Teamviewer fixes their stuff soon.

I can troubleshoot, debug, and work around these issues, but normal people can’t. The big things all work. Browsers, settings pages, email, you name it, your average office worker can get through their day out of the box. For the technically skilled, Linux is amazing, with tweaks, source code, and tools available for every purpose under the sun if you’re willing to read some documentation and maybe a little source code.

However, if you fall anywhere inbetween “I just need a browser and basic word processing” and “I know how to program in C”, Linux requires a lot of reading, Googling, and replacing with slightly inferior versions.

Linux may be full of great freeware, but Windows has decades of history of free shareware that seems to just work better. I think the difference is that a lot of Linux tools were written by developers for developers, whereas Windows tools were often written by developers for users.

With Flatpak maturing, things are becoming better and better, but there are still times where I need to tell the guy I helping to open a terminal, and that’s the point where Linux as an OS for normal people fails.

I’m happily using Linux on practically any computer I own, but there’s no denying that Windows was better in a lot of ways for the general public, even back in the XP days.