Canonical should be able to see the warning sign in there
Ubuntu has dropped off a cliff in Linux market share. Fedora serves as a near-replacement in UX, and there are some distros that are so optimized as “pre-configured”, they left it in the dust, to say nothing of how Canonical keeps trying to make Ubuntu worse. It used to be famously “Debian but easy”, but now just using Debian sounds like way less of a hassle.
A lot of negativity on using Ubuntu. I agree with the hate for Ubuntu but if i was trying ease my mom into Linux I would put her on something like this to begin with.
Ubuntu is a good starting point for people who aren’t comfortable on computers.
I installed Fedora on my mother’s laptop because she was complaining about it being slow and loud, on top of windows occasionally breaking after updates. She’s had no problem so far and seems to be happy with it. I just set it to auto update everything every week and that’s it.
That was true 15 years ago. There are now plenty distributions focused towards new users. And to be fair standard distributions have become very user friendly.
I’m a Fedora user myself. It’s pretty well built but I’ve had a lot of issues especially with the Wayland stuff. That’s getting better for sure but Ubuntu has the type of tech support that older people are used to.
It’s probably still the most popular distro, still today, which means there are going to be more resources for them.
If my mom has to open the terminal, she’s going to give up and go back to windows.
That’s because Ubuntu is the standard devops platform for intellectually challenged software engineers who don’t like choosing a quality development platform because they fear lack of documentation since Ubuntu was the distro standard for 15+ years.
Hence why its also highly used as a podman/docker image base.
And why actual linux users tend to switch or pick a superior distro.
I am a Ubuntu to user now. However, I find myself reading Arch wiki far more and a bit Debian’s but barely Ubuntu’s. But I agree that Ubuntu is the industry standard and it’s acceptable to distribute a deb and test it on Ubuntu LTS and call it a day. Other distros can simply dig into it and make it work. Containers and sandboxes are great, but I hate the concept to only distribute things that way. Snap Flatpak LXC Incus Docker Podman etc. stuff don’t work on some restricted/weird environment.
Its just shittier Debian.
I like mint for easier access to newer packages/drovers for my gaming VM but that’s about it.
I don’t know what a native Linux PC is. Does that mean is runs the OS without a noticeable accent?
Native Linux PCs speak in penguinese and celebrate their mesiah the great Torvaldius giver of kernels.
I’ve heard rumors he turned to the dark side.
Real answer: this is talking about computers with windows 11 installed that also run Ubuntu through a service called WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux; basically you have a windows 11 pc that can do linux stuff too.
A native Ubuntu machine would be installed directly to the hard drive and booted that way.
Makes sense, thanks. Also seemingly an odd brag. Seems like putting out an article that you’re commonly the side piece.
Yeah. I highly suspect its mostly people who need Ubuntu for job purposes and have security policies or just the C-suite refusing to follow the times
Funnily enough, Microsoft built WSL so developers could use Linux without leaving Windows. Instead, it turned a growing number of Windows PCs into functional Linux development machines, with Windows serving as little more than the launcher.
I mean, I get using Windows if you’re actually doing Windows development work, but if not, I’d just put Linux proper on the thing.
The appeal for developers is that even if their employer issues a Windows laptop, and even when their development stack expects Linux, WSL removes the need to dual-boot.
With WSL, they don’t have to fight their employer’s hardware policy to get it.
Any employer that is employing someone to do Linux development work and takes issue with them having a Linux box to do dev work isn’t a place that I’d want to bother to work.
Functionally all new apps are “Linux development work”, as modern C# solutions are containerised and hosted on Linux servers.
Microsoft gave up on Windows servers a decade ago when they released .net Core, as it was the sound solution to ensure continual growth of Azure and fighting off Java adoption hosted through AWS/GCP
.net framework is a niche framework now, which just a few legacy platforms run today.
However the reason IT requires Mac and Windows for everyone, is because they can lock those machines down. Like mad down, they don’t want to build software to lock Linux machines down from a central place.
I wouldn’t work there either but those places exist and we must mourn the souls who toil there.
I absolutely loathe WSL at work. Users with local non-AD connected systems (which bypass GPOs) install it, then start making highly insecure configurations that result in PII nightmares.
It’s a goddamned cancer riddled bastard child of Linux and Windows that needs the Ol’ Yeller treatment.
I’m guilty of using WSL to bypass what the IT department has done, but that’s partly due to our IT department being borderline useless. To prove my point to them one time, I took a project and compiled it in Windows normally, in a fresh Windows VM, and in WSL. A 20 second compile in WSL took 2 minutes on the Windows host.
I don’t have admin rights at work so can’t install WSL.
But for whatever reason, Virtualbox is something I’m allowed to install. So I did. Now I just use Debian for everything via Virtualbox, IT dept be damned
Windows is only 6x slower in your environment?
Consider yourself lucky.
There are times when my computer just stops, entirely, for like 15 seconds at a time. Didn’t ask it to do much…just open Teams.
And I know it’s 15 seconds because I have seconds enabled in my clock and it actually stops ticking.
But I’m dailying an Ubuntu laptop at work now, and legit everything is faster. I mean like every day stuff like launching apps and switching windows and browsing webpages. Just an overall far more productive system.
All those delays add up. Especially when mated with an ADHD-riddled admin like me who gets distracted and either moves into another task because Word is taking too long to open (excess context switching makes me anxious…but so does waiting for shit like word to open)…or start investigating it.
Which is a whole other pain point in itself because shit like launching Event Viewer takes a solid 2 minutes. RSOP takes like 10 minutes to compile.
It used to take ADUC 5 minutes to load before I found out that was DNS. Yeah, that was actually DNS.
The cognitive friction of a slow PC is like sandpaper to my brain
Didn’t ask it to do much…just open Teams.
You asked Cancer to give you Herpes…
similar but lesser case at work… I was given some 50 K records to analyze, I needed to perform some matches and the records came in flat csv files
I was told by IT that excel was my only option… after 4 hours of it crashing I gave up and did it all on WSL CLI commads, it took less than 45 seconds to execute
I installed WSL out of spite to show that my program compiled way faster when the AV didn’t know about it. It went from 18 minutes to about 6.
“If you didn’t want me running nmap scans on the corporate network, you shouldn’t have let my account use the network interface”
I’m sure you can find better examples… Not only is a small time window, it also seems to me is more to do with tooling on each environment than your actual IT.
Oh I can think of many examples. That was just the latest one.
There was also the time that IT decided that industrial controls technicians didn’t need the ability to manually set IP addresses, or the time where they managed to have %Documents% point to a network share, while they were simultaneously trying to sort out wifi coverage issues.
Dang. WSL is literally the only thing that maintains my sanity when I am forced to do anything on Windows. I don’t work in an enterprise environment, mind you.
only thing
Cygwin?
That was the shit for a long time, but it doesn’t give you Linux containers.
Huh. That’s still around?
My work would be impossible without WSL, and yes I am guilty of hiding from the security systems… Because the security systems are so invasive they keep locking files I’m trying to open so IDEs don’t even work properly under Windows.
Ok so you can provide your users with an option to use a sane OS then.
This is backwards. Running Linux within Windows is such a waste of resources and mitigates a lot of the great things about Linux. Each to their own.
Yeah, go tell that to your company’s IT department.
That’s what WSL is used for: keeping developers somewhat sane in a company that’s Windows-only.
I know plenty developers who run mostly in WSL just for the ease of having Word and such software on the same machine.
Funnily enough, Microsoft built WSL so developers could use Linux without leaving Windows. Instead, it turned a growing number of Windows PCs into functional Linux development machines, with Windows serving as little more than the launcher.
Does this suggest that more Ubuntu users are developers than typical non-technical people (or that they’re about to be)? We need to pump up those numbers on average peoples’ computers
My guess is not just traditional developers, but anyone doing any amount of coding, like data scientists, business analysts, etc.
Especially if they’re using AI, those tools work better on Linux, or as is the case most places, wsl2 inside Windows.
I believe Windows is kept because of the Office tools. However, Windows needs 12 layers of security tools that constantly get in your way, so the path of least resistance is to just stay in your wsl2 sandbox.
The knee jerk reaction to this from enterprise IT is often to restrict access to WSL. This solves the problem, but creates disgruntled users who will continue to try and work around it.
What they should consider, in my opinion, is giving these people real Linux workstations that can be enrolled in group policies, SSO, and all that good stuff. Commercial vendors of Linux will support these use cases.
Some places roll out Macs, which work almost as well, but the hardware is more expensive. Hardware and commercial software support may be better, though, I don’t know.
I think either is a superior alternative to Windows.
Unfortunately most people are intimidated and wary of Linux because “some of my programs might not work”
Average people aren’t going to learn a new system because the whole “devil you know” thing.
Simply, the majority of people would rather stick with MS than install a new OS.
If containers, VMs, and dual-boot are banned in the workspace I kinda feel the fear of things not work is legit. When I’m forced to code on a Windows computer without WSL at university’s Programming course in electrical engineering department. Everything I’m used to, bash, cat, cd, ls, nvim, sed, grep, …, simply don’t exist. And I end up find it easier to code in the small text box of the site they provide than any of the slow, non-Vim mode, IDEs.
Firstly, I use linux for self hosting, and have a love-hate relationship for any other purpose. I’ve been trying to make the full transition since about 2009(?) and always end up back on the spyware-riddled Microswamp ad-delivery system.
I’m going to get downvoted for saying this, but if Linux could make hardware tasks as easy as Microsoft, namely printing, Windows would be a thing of the past.
I could put Mint on my 72 y.o.mom’s computer and she probably wouldn’t notice the difference until she had to do something dealing with hardware (connect a camera, or god forbid, print something). inb4 just use cups - My mom doesn’t gasf about dependencies, chown, and chasing terminal errors for 6 hours to print an agenda for the ladies’ church meeting and then have it break itself the next day. This is why it fails. Linux purists who don’t care that people don’t have time for CLI will disagree, and that is precisely what keeps things in the current state.
Great headline, a failure for both companies. Haha! Yeah, I am a cynic and dislike canonical
As other people in this thread points out, WSL is not ideal but it really saves the ass of anyone forced to use Windows at work.
I have a thinkpad handed to me from work with windows on it and all the usual restrictions. I tried for a while to use it by constantly running a virtual machine with Linux, but Windows is not a stable enough environment to host that. So in the end I just bought myself a framework laptop because nobody actually controls that I use the laptop provided by work.
Not everyone is that lucky. Canonical found a way to make their life easier. I think that’s objectively great, no matter what you think about Canonical as a company.
WSL is not generally something people use because they are afraid of changing to Linux, they use it because they are not allowed by IT to change their OS.
Both companies are failures.
what makes them “failures”?
i hate windows and i don’t use Ubuntu but it’s difficult to consider Microsoft or Canonical as failures.
That just means only idiots install Ubuntu.
Or that it is just the default for WSL.
Ubuntu, not Linux.
This is happening because Linux is the default OS for servers, robots, machines, etc., it just sucks balls for normie personal computing, so they’ll use Winblows for the basic stuff, and WSL for the server-centric tasks.
Ubuntu can make it as toddler-centric as it wants, it won’t change the fact that eventually a person will find a thing their machine won’t do without an on-staff geek.
If they have heart, they’ll try chasing the black screen into the depths of google oblivion or use AI for infinitely recirculating bad advice. It’s ironic that a LLM running on a Linux server can’t fix Linux.
Most people will punt and go back to Microsucks which grows more evil and abusive every day.
I’m just mad I can’t get any of my file-management containers to work properly.
Tell me one thing that is harder to do on Linux than on Windows nowadays. Something coming from OS itself, not from hostile vendor the community managed to patch support for.
Crashing mid-game.
print something on a piece of paper.
Harder with windows
Was the last time you used any Linux distro 30 years ago? Shit is basically plug n play nowadays…
the children in my life were able to connect to our printer with no help on Linux. Was there supposed to be a challenge here? IME, works as simply or simpler than the same setup wizards in Windows.
