My Aunt bought a new laptop to run her eBay/Facebook selling business on. She’s not particularly techy but has used Windows machines for admin work for prob 20 years or so.
Laptop had no office apps installed and she tracks everything in a spreadsheet. Original plan was to install Libreoffice but it was running some budget version of Windows 10 you can’t install anything on, can’t remember what it’s called. So I installed Fedora.
Chromium and Libreoffice Calc open on login, her ancient HP printer works, she’s able to access her camera as USB mass storage when she lists items and unattended upgrades are enabled.
That was 2 years ago, no problems since.
Cool story, bro. And for every such cool story you can bring up I can bring you a hundred, probably, of people who got set up on Linux and returned to Windows because it was a horror show from their perspective.
Let me give you the clue: “The Year of the Linux Desktop” has been declared with monotonous regularity since the 1990s. It still hasn’t arrived. There’s a reason for this, and the quicker Linux (and other F/OSS) advocates grasp why this is, the quicker will the year actually arrive.
Until then, Linux is a fringe OS for techies. (And there it excels. As I said, I’ve been a non-stop user of it for ages.)
I totally agree that can happen. My first experience with Linux was installing Slackware from a CD I got with a magazine at 16. Install worked but I couldn’t really do much with it with no internet connection so abandoned it. Also I hosed the Windows partition when trying to set up dual boot so got banned from the family PC for a while.
Huh. My first Linux experience was an early Slackware too! And yeah, I tinkered with it (thankfully I had a second computer so I didn’t trash my valuable computer) and just stopped using it because it didn’t bring anything useful to the table at the time. (I switched to QNX on that computer instead.)
Years later I was a lot more impressed by Linux and made the switch to dual-boot, then finally ditched the Windows side entirely.
Clarifying what? That Linux is not the choice of non-techies as their primary desktop operating system? I think a quick observation of, you know, desktop computers would settle that in seconds.
I don’t know how this solution should be hard. I always have a live boot usb(O.K. not Fedora) with me and installing these apps is about 1-2 commands and I really don’t like scrolling through legacy Gui apps.
It sounds like they’re talking about the N versions of Windows, which can only install apps through the Microsoft Store. That can be disabled, but my understanding is it’s a pain to get it done. It’s meant to be locked down kind of like Apple products.
I couldn’t find any way to do it. I also carry a Ventoy USB drive with me everywhere I go with Fedora on it as it’s the distro I use so it was the quickest way I could think of to get everything working at the time.
My Aunt bought a new laptop to run her eBay/Facebook selling business on. She’s not particularly techy but has used Windows machines for admin work for prob 20 years or so. Laptop had no office apps installed and she tracks everything in a spreadsheet. Original plan was to install Libreoffice but it was running some budget version of Windows 10 you can’t install anything on, can’t remember what it’s called. So I installed Fedora. Chromium and Libreoffice Calc open on login, her ancient HP printer works, she’s able to access her camera as USB mass storage when she lists items and unattended upgrades are enabled. That was 2 years ago, no problems since.
Cool story, bro. And for every such cool story you can bring up I can bring you a hundred, probably, of people who got set up on Linux and returned to Windows because it was a horror show from their perspective.
Let me give you the clue: “The Year of the Linux Desktop” has been declared with monotonous regularity since the 1990s. It still hasn’t arrived. There’s a reason for this, and the quicker Linux (and other F/OSS) advocates grasp why this is, the quicker will the year actually arrive.
Until then, Linux is a fringe OS for techies. (And there it excels. As I said, I’ve been a non-stop user of it for ages.)
I totally agree that can happen. My first experience with Linux was installing Slackware from a CD I got with a magazine at 16. Install worked but I couldn’t really do much with it with no internet connection so abandoned it. Also I hosed the Windows partition when trying to set up dual boot so got banned from the family PC for a while.
Huh. My first Linux experience was an early Slackware too! And yeah, I tinkered with it (thankfully I had a second computer so I didn’t trash my valuable computer) and just stopped using it because it didn’t bring anything useful to the table at the time. (I switched to QNX on that computer instead.)
Years later I was a lot more impressed by Linux and made the switch to dual-boot, then finally ditched the Windows side entirely.
Mind clarifying?
Clarifying what? That Linux is not the choice of non-techies as their primary desktop operating system? I think a quick observation of, you know, desktop computers would settle that in seconds.
All you have to do is turn that off and you can install anything you want. You took a simple problem and made it hard.
I don’t know how this solution should be hard. I always have a live boot usb(O.K. not Fedora) with me and installing these apps is about 1-2 commands and I really don’t like scrolling through legacy Gui apps.
It sounds like they’re talking about the N versions of Windows, which can only install apps through the Microsoft Store. That can be disabled, but my understanding is it’s a pain to get it done. It’s meant to be locked down kind of like Apple products.
It’s S mode and it’s just a couple buttons.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of-s-mode-in-windows-4f56d9be-99ec-6983-119f-031bfb28a307
I couldn’t find any way to do it. I also carry a Ventoy USB drive with me everywhere I go with Fedora on it as it’s the distro I use so it was the quickest way I could think of to get everything working at the time.
Windows S can be turned off, but it does require an internet connection.