It's a vision that I'd like to see with a significant shift to Linux, however MS still remains extremely dominant in business/office environments though - and commonly now using Office365 and Teams of course (more vendor lock-in). Lets see if today's college students, IT people, developers etc become tomorrow's driver away from Windows.

Not really:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/wi...f-death-issues

The more serious problem with Windows 10 is updating. A quick Google search for “Windows 10 update problem” brings up a mere 588 million hits.

The real killers are what Microsoft laughingly describes as updates, when in fact they are completely fresh installations (e.g. W10 v.1809 to W10 v.1903).
This happens twice a year.

Most W10 users are completely unaware of this and assume that one update is pretty much like another.
If anything goes wrong during these major transitions, well tough luck on the users because Microsoft will take no responsibility for the borked system or personal data loss. (I had to wipe one W10 drive after it became corrupted going from v.1809 to v.1903. Fortunately I had backed up my data).

Question: Would anybody in their right mind consider moving from W7 to W8.1 without a backup or other safety net?
Answer: No.

So why are W10 users left completely exposed in this fashion with updating?

PS To answer Pen guin’s original question; Linux all day, every day.

Think it's always been stable enough to use. The real problem is the licensing. You can't really make money from your software. Other issues with licensing make it less useful and illegal in some ways. Think most would agree to mix Microsoft Windows with Linux (mingw) or use macports.

Linux works great with payware and other expensive software. Rar works really well as long as it supports the architecture and rar2fs makes it much better (it's faster than archivemount, multithreaded and only lacks U.I.).

Some older software used to cost more than $10000.00 with Linux variants available (some older versions of Lightwave and Softimage 3D). Some of the more expensive software only supports OpenGL properly and I think that is why NVIDIA and ATI/AMD have linux Modules and software to use those programs. This's also why Quantum 3D Aalchemy and Wildcat 3D accelerators don't support DirectX under pre y2k Windows N.T. O.S. I think (or at least it's related), and most every other O.S. doesn't support more than OpenGL.

i think it is better to use linux than windows. there are certain problems with linux, like network manager on xfce4 and realtek ethernet drivers.

but when i got em to work windows cant compete with linux / *bsd.

It is for me - and has been for almost 8 years.

I made my choice, I wouldn't even go back if someone could somehow prove to me that Windows or MacOS are objectively better. Which of course nobody can.

It's like certified organic food - it not only tastes better, but it's also healthier and more ethical.
That's what GNU/Linux is for me.

Just the other day I nuked Windows 10 from a thinkpad - not even considering that I might've been able to sell it...

OP, the answer is not cut and dried: it depends on the user's requirements and their ability to manage and understand Linux systems. In 2003 a colleague of mine ran Slackware, but it was off a VM in a Macbook because the Macbook had better hardware detection and he liked using the latest and greatest gadgets. In 2008/9 I attempted to run Ubuntu as my main OS but couldn't because I was a gamer.

It's 2019 [just] but Linux is still not great for gaming - yes, there are 1000s of games on Steam for Linux - but many new ones [*cough* Trine 4 *cough*] are still not seeing Linux ports [I think Frozenbyte gave the reason as "the Linux guy left"]. One of the main reasons I was able to move from Windows to Linux in 2017 was that I was gaming a lot less but I still get annoyed nowadays if I can't play things like Trine 4, and I'm not going to buy Cuphead just to find out it doesn't work on Steam Play.

You'll want a Windows machine if you're a serious gamer. That's still the case. However, if the majority - or the entirety - of your time online is spent web browsing and with office applications, you'll be fine. Mostly. But that's still not the whole story.

I do a lot of work for uni and, unfortunately, I have to sometimes use MS Office at their Windows 7 machines [like I am now]. The reason for this is compatibility. Now some will say that MS Word is 100% compatible with Libre Office Writer but it's not - or more specifically - it depends [again] on what you're doing. If you're going to create a simple text document you'll be fine, but if you want to share a document with multiple footnotes, diagrams and tables, you'll find that the formatting will be way off on someone else's Windows machine. For instance, tomorrow I'm presenting at a conference, will I prepare the presentation on Libre Office Impress and risk it being skew-whiff when it goes on the Window machine tomorrow? Absolutely not, so here I am working on Powerpoint on a Windows 7 machine. And this will likely always be the way because MS cannot risk total compatibility between office suites. If such a thing existed, they would lose a chunk of their market share. They already lost Windows Phone, that's dead. If they lose their market lead in MS Office it would be like a firm losing a major client. For that reason they always have to keep changing things in MS Office. Another example is my wife, who cannot and will not move to Linux because she needs a piece of software for her work which does not work on Linux natively. So Linux fails out of the box for her.

So the answer is, yes, it depends. For some people, 100% of their work can be done on Linux. For me, it's 90-95%. For others, it's just not worth it at all. It's down to your use-case.

OK then, is the percentage of Linux-only users higher in 2019 in comparison to 2011? Not by much, no - in 2011 it was about 0.7% of desktop use and in 2019 it's only slightly more. But look at Windows by comparison - it had a massive 90%+ of the desktop market in 2011 compared to 70-80% in 2019. Linux has barely moved up by 1% on the desktop by comparison. So while total Linux migration has worked for some people, it may also only be semi-permanent in many cases as hardware becomes cheaper and people increasingly use multiple devices.

EDIT: corollary - the above figures are only representative since the 'unknown' quotient still has an effect on those results. Notice the latter half of 2018 where the 'unknown' segment rockets from 2% to nearly 15% [while Windows simultaneously dips] before the 'unknown' percentages decrease right at the end of the year. There could be many reasons for this, but I'll bet one of them was the release of Steam Proton in August 2018 whereby many users thought, "this is it" and tried to migrate to Linux for all their use-cases before realising that it was still impractical to do so.


This is a very interesting post. I can't remember which version it was but there was a W10 update whereby many users reported all of their data being wiped.

4 members found this post helpful.

An excellent review of the current position. To summarise, there seem to be two fields in which Windows wins:

1) Gaming. Nothing to be said about that. If you are an ardent gamer, you will need to have Windows available even if you don't use it for anything else.

2) Office and professional packages. Here the situation is murkier. As long as business uses MS Office and other proprietary professional packages like photoshop and various CAD programs, Windows will be necessary at home for some people for compatibility reasons. But the same offices mostly use Linux on their servers. So if they decided to migrate their desktops to Linux too in order to simplify their systems, the situation would change. It would then be Windows that would become the "incompatible" option.

There is also a large population of people who run Windows at home but don't do anything on it that can't be equally well done using Linux. If they use Word, they use it for writing recipes and the occasional business letter. If they use Powerpoint, it's for a presentation to the Mothers Union. And if Windows 10 keeps crashing due to bad updates, they may very well decide that's the final straw and come over.

You’ve gotten many great answers which I won’t duplicate, but maybe a different perspective from many others here.

In contrast to everyone else (or most everyone), I’m a relative newbie. I’ve only been using Linux for desktop for 2-3 years. I’d heard of it before, but had been using only DOS and Windows since the (early?) 90’s.

Windows’ frustrations weren’t enough to drive me to use anything else until a major Win 8 update screwup that I had to spend a lot of time fixing on my kid’s computer. I started by reading enough about Linux to get comfortable trying it, then I went through a time of trying lots of live Linuxes, then (after backing up my Windows data) installing Xubuntu 16.04 dual boot with Windows.

Today I use Linux by choice at home. Mostly it’s for the everyday stuff like email and web browsing, but I also tinker a bit - because I like to, not because I have to - and I’ve started using it to play with Arduino. Family uses Windows, so I’m still the acting Windows help for them. I still have the Win 10 installed that came with my computer. I use it mostly to update itself every few months (I don’t want it to get too far out of date - worried that it could lead to a catastrophically failed update) and have used it for tax software.

I started with a Linux that is “easy” for noobs (decide for yourself, but you can do a web search to find those), and still use the Xubuntu flavour of Ubuntu, but alongside that and Win 10, I use elementaryOS, and Slackware (and OpenBSD on another computer, and sometimes Puppy, and occasionally TinyCore.)

Work is all Win 10, and there will be no convincing them to switch to anything else in the near future. IT is someone else’s job, so Win 10 gets the job done and is mostly harmless in that arena.

TKS

see post below

I am using lubuntu linux for more than 4 years and its running stable. And there are lots of good forums to help you out in times of trouble.
But the choice of an OS depends to my mind on the fact for what you want to use it. If you are a hardcore gamer or you need special progs like adobe acrobat or dragon, than windows 10 will be your choice, because there is nothing similar in the linux world. But if you are a normal user, you don t need ms windows at all. Windows 10 is blown up with apps that nobody needs, and apart from that very hungry on recourses, so you have to check your hardware as well.
I prefer spending my money on traveling throug the world instead of buying every 4 years a new computer, and thats one reason why I am using linux.

1 members found this post helpful.

Update update:

To use a football analogy, Windows 7 manages to score an own goal deep into stoppage time:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...rt-update.html

I read this priceless quote in the computer help section of The Pensioner, the magazine of the Civil Service Pensioners Association.
Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas! Incidentally, the unnamed person whose enquiry triggered this fatuous advice stated clearly that he/she has an old computer which is used only for email and browsing. Not surprisingly there was a reluctance to fork out money on a new OS which might not even run on that machine. The response?

hazel,

I have asked a Linux-using friend who is a CSPA member to send an email to the Pensioner.

That won't work! I once sent them an email pointing out that most of the help page was concerned with solving problems that were actually caused by weaknesses in Windows, and suggesting that it would be more helpful to teach people how to use Linux instead so that such problems wouldn't arise. They published the letter with a boilerplate answer pointing out that most computers "come with" Windows and very few "come with" Linux, so there wasn't much point in telling people about a system they wouldn't be using. Clearly this would-be computer expert wasn't aware that it is possible to install a different OS on any computer.

At least you tried.