What are some things that Linux can't do, but Windows can?

Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.

I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.

The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
- i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.
  if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.
- I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
- I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
- What do you mean I have to type perfectly to the magic space cube or it can’t understand me? How the fuck is ‘sudo apt-get update’ English?
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
- Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
  Generally people are worse with computers than you think.
  A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine
- That's part of the issue. Unfortunately Linux pre-installed devices are scarce.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
- And most users don't even notice the issues - I feel lime the bar has really become can I click on, enter password and open a web browser, a bar which limux has surpassed for decades
  Though most linux users probably also scare away the layman with the hacky stuff we got going on lol
You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
- Yeah, never had to set a graphics device driver for Android. That always just works.
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
- "The only intuitive interface is the nipple."
  ...but in truth even that isn't very intuitive 🤷
Except you’re wrong because Android is Linux based and Ubuntu basically fits your criteria
- I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
  I'd argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you've made the guy's point. That's already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
- We really need to stop pushing these outdated and over complex distos like Ubuntu also. It's 50/50 if they can find what they want via Google and find out how to add a ppa that is going to be dark magic, and the almost 100% all that added stuff to do basic stuff like game is going to go belly up when the new upgrade comes along. Rolling releases get a bad rep for some reason but they shine for users that don't want to search for new software that's going to work and not break/require intervention with every upgrade. /rant
That's nonsense.
That's manufacturer support. Not Windows or Microsoft. Try installing any discrete graphics card under Windows on arm. It's a nightmare. Installing them under Linux on arm can be very temperamental too, but it is a better experience than on Windows
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary
ppl who know how to use MacOS or Windows should have no issue using those

Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment

Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
- Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
  I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
In KDE and I think GNOME the setup is fine. But there are no usb fingerprint readers that work with Linux, at least that you can buy.
The Windows Hello camera enumerates under Linux as just another webcam that activates the flashing LEDs when it turns on (I've found a number of neat uses for this, including having a ridiculously low gain IR camera that I can just use for whatever and have what would be a surprisingly good emulation of the Wii sensor bar for use with Dolphin if it weren't constantly flashing on and off), and there is software (Howdy) for using it to sign in. Unfortunately, signing in with your face of course precludes using your password for decryption, meaning that after you start some applications you'll be prompted to type your password anyway to unlock your system keyring, and perhaps more importanty SDDM isn't smart enough to interface with fprintd/howdy properly and doesn't even try to activate the biometric sensor until you type something in the password box.
(Also, hilariously, because of how I set it up initially to accept my face instead of a password for sudo, I couldn't configure it to check whether the terminal was remote, so when I ssh'd in and tried to sudo, it turned on the hello camera however far away that was and looked for my face, only prompting me for a password after facial rec timed out.)

Natively run Windows software. Do I win?

that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity
- Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?
- You misspelled “naivety” lol
Wine’s not an emulator…
- That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
You windows
- Windows does what Nintendon't? Wait, that's not it...
Do I lin?

At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.

I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.

so, due to those gaps, it currently can't do those things.
This argument boils down to "yes it could, if someone bothered to implement it". Well... nobody has, so it can't
- I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it's unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.
"linux is more capable but its just not capable of running anything"
yeah im more than capable to run a marathon. i have two legs. i am not able to run a marathon. having the means to run one doesnt put me in the same party as people that have ran a marathon.
aka linux users coping like usual
- The point is, you COULD run a marathon if that's what you decide to do. But you would need to learn something new and frankly most people are too lazy to do so. And I can often fall squarely into that just like most. But I'm under no illusions that it's my lazy choice to not run a marathon.
  aka most people in general
Thank you! Have my upvote

Spy on users

Ubuntu and DNF chuckles
"popularity contest" is an opt-in on Debian. It's not malicious, and it's not for financial gain, but it is in a loose sense spying.
- Spying on people OOTB without them knowing*

Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."

Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
- And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases
Last time that happened to me was 20 years ago. Am I lucky and this is still common?
- Depends on your distro I suppose, I've never ever thought this while using fedora
- Happened to me last year. I never fully found the root cause, but suspect nvidia drivers may have been an issue. I actually re-partitioned the hdd and put another ubuntu on it to try to fix things. That one booted, but I couldn't un-fuck my old install.
- I've had this happen to me at least once on every distro I've tried to use long term (longer than let's say a month or two). Most recently was about this time last year. Luckily it was on my second computer, and I was still maintaining a full Windows install on my primary gaming system, so I didn't really lose anything. Just reinstalled Windows on the second computer and tossed it in the closet until I decide what to do with it, and switched back to using the other system for all tasks instead of just gaming.
  Conversely, all of the non-desktop systems that run some form of Linux(my NAS TrueNAS, my other NAS running unraid, multiple mini file/web servers, similar systems) are all rock solid. The only one that gets borked regularly, is the little system I use for testing out random shit(mostly Docker stuff) before installing on one of the other systems.
  It's about that time of the year where I take a trip around all of the major distros that I've run over the years and see what they look like, and if they have any new features that will compel me to try them out again. Probably start with Garuda, since I really did like their distro list time I tried it out. Maybe I'll intentionally break the system and see how much of a pain in the ass, or not, the default btrfs/snapshot setup they use is.
- Only if you aren’t on a stable branch.
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
- You might be suffering from the opposite of survivorship bias: When you work in IT you end up having to fix the strangest shit that reoccurs on certain categories of hardware.
  I know for a fact that RHEL 7 just did not like certain appliances by vendors that used it (back in the day). They would regularly break themselves until the vendor put out an update that switched it to a Debian-based custom thing.
  Also, all the (thousands of) appliances that use Windows are utter shit so it's not really a high bar. The vendor just needs to hire people that actually know what they're doing and if they do they won't use Windows on an appliance!
Timeshift
- My thoughts exactly
Amen Brother, my experience the last 20+ years
- after 20 years, but usually much sooner, people usually learn to either:
  what is, and how to stick to stable shit
  troubleshoot and fix whatever problem happens, often preempting them
  maybe it's just not your cup of tea?
Moving to ublue/silver blue has really been a treat for avoiding this. Oh update borked my system time to boot to last update and wait on that one. I personally really want to get a CI/CD running next for my updates to make sure my specific build and collection of software just works the way I want it too.
I’ve actually had more issues with Windows doing that. My wifi drivers have stopped working on more than one occasion, and once it just decided to stop recognizing my wife’s hard drive.
I have an uncle who will assume anything that takes over 20 minutes has crashed so managed to break his Windows box by continually hard resetting as it was trying to apply a large upgrade.

Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.

There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.

Selling copies for 200$

Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
- Can they legally do that?
As another commenter noted, I guess you haven't met red hat
- They sell support more than anything
RHEL would like a word ;)

Embed ads on your desktop.

Play games with kernal level anti cheat

Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.

Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux

fusion 360,
Onshape, with extra advantages like seamless collaboration (like that of Google sheets)
Adobe suite
Darktable - Lightroom replacement, Gimp - Photoshop replacement, kdenlive - premiere replacement, but I get that you will have to relearn all these all over again (worth it tho, as no monthlys ever again)
- GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement except for pretty basic stuff. There’s no content aware fill, fewer non-destructive edit options, wonky compatibility with PSD files, etc.
  Darktable also isn’t a real replacement for a lot of use cases. Lightroom (the non-Classic version) has pretty great cloud syncing and multi-platform apps, so you can do some work on a desktop and then move to a tablet/smartphone or vice-versa. Darktable doesn’t have that kind of flexibility.
- None of these are legitimate, professional replacements.
I've put more work into getting wsl to work at work than I have my home linux machines. it's just so unreliable for some reason. I ended up just giving up and running a full vm instead, and it's so much nicer since I can just pretend windows doesn't exist
- Especially when enabling wsl is incompatible with running a VM. I want to run VM not only for Linux! Yeah just installing a full vm is better.
- Same here. It's nice that I can do some of regular Linux flow on my laptop but it's so much to get to consistently just work .
Fusion 360 actually works under Linux with Bottles. Some other Autodesk products also have native Linux versions.
AutoCAD. The reason i wont change my workstation to linux

Play lots of AAA games

Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.

Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux

This is exactly my problem. I really want to do the switch, but I'm using my computer for work also, and I'll never get by without Office nor Adobe suite.
- the browser based office does just work if that helps. I don't have anything for the cc side tho
- libreoffice works just as good though i expect the majority of people are already using something on the web like google docs or something
  adobe, agreed, unfortunately. adobe as a company is terrible but the software is great (thanks to macromedia)
- That's probably wrong. You don't want to use something other than Office or Adobe suite because you're used to that, even though there are programs that work perfectly well for the same things available on Linux. And that's okay. It's okay to want to keep using what you're used to. But it's a lie to say you'll never get by without those programs you're used to.
Add autodesk to that, and 99% of software used in aec or civil engineering or machine stuff (can't remember name, foreigner drunk ugh)
- CNC stuff??
That's not so much a Linux problem as a Corporate greed problem.
Remember a big part in Windows mobile dying was its lack of Google support and not it itself lacking in any way

Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.

Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.

That's a letter U problem. I can administer Linux a bajillion times easier than windows, because I do it for a living, and haven't touched MS since Server 2010. Also Docker in Windows is LOL. You're leveraging Linux to shit on Linux. Lets do that all in IIS and see how you feel.
- Pointing out that you find it easy because you do it for a living isn't a very good counter to their point - most people do other things besides Linux for a living
- This is what’s holding the community back. The “get good” advice isn’t really advice and keeps Linux from hitting the mainstream. I get it you’re amazing at Linux but the rest of us shouldn’t have to go back to school to get a computer degree and become a Linux professional in order to use it. This is the same person that replies to questions about Linux with “why do you need the GUI just use the command line instead or it’s dead simple just type: followed by like 80 lines of code that people can’t make heads or tails of because they’re novices. Man I get that you want to flex but it’s a pretty strange flex.
- What?
- IIS is not the same as Docker. Sounds to me you are shitting on IIS for the sake of trying to prove a point I wasn't trying to make.
  This goes into my next point. Linux users are toxic as hell. They are elitist snobs who shit on newbies because they have years of experience.
- I used Windows from 95 onward. Docker on Windows is second class compared to running on Linux.
  That being said, I don't think it's that people cannot learn to use something like Ubuntu, it's that if they don't need to, they won't.
  Good enough, is fine for the vast majority of folks. And I think Windows 11 proves that.
  Like I had to learn OSX for my work computer, which I ended up loving. But that took me a week or so to get the hang of.
- Yeah, I started working for a company with a lot of Windows servers two years ago and I still can't wrap my brain around them. I've been a Linux sysadmin/sysarchitect for 20+ years and I'm still completely lost how to get Windows to much of anything. I usually don't have to do much on those servers, but when I do its StackOverflow that's really administering them. It's because I lack foundational knowledge about windows and also because I'm fine not having that knowledge.
- Hold on, did you just low-key state that running Linux docker containers on Windows ends up giving you the best of both worlds? Run Linux server software in docker containers, run client software natively on Windows?
That's very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that's no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.
- Yeah.... this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
  Saying running anything out of the box is "impossible by design" on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven't succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I'd agree but at least you'd have leg to stand on.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there's almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it's not always clear what you're supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn't geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn't always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It's a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works "out of the box" better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It's pretty solid.
- Ubuntu is notoriously user unfriendly???
  That's honestly super confusing to me. Not just experientially from using Ubuntu but also just I've never heard it described that way. It's definitely near the top of list of out-of-box friendly distros.
  Graphical installer. Full App Store UI. Desktop versions that come with lots of common software. It's hard to get much simpler than that.
  Truly, if anything, I would consider desktop Ubuntu to be somewhat power user unfriendly.
- In my experience, most package managers should set up dependencies by themselves! Though, I do agree with the lack of explanation of documentation.
  I use arch by the way, but what’s your opinion of other “user-friendly” distros like Manjaro or Garuda?
- Truth!
- Do you not know that mint is Ubuntu based?
Erm I'll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
- Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
The person is correct in this isn't a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $user
To ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
What happened the one time you were more frustrated?
- Playing Final Fantasy XIII. That legitimately made me cry with how frustrating that game was to play.

Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:

Domain integration, e.g. ActiveDirectory
Group policy configuration

You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly

Extending on this as it's the first serious answer.
Intune; cloud managed, deeply integrated configuration and automation
Autopilot; having new laptops delivered directly to end users that automatically set themselves up is magic and saves a lot of time
Backwards compatibility; Linux can do this, however kernel and library dependencies make this not as good as Win11 running WinXP stuff

Just run stuff out-of-the-gate

Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)

Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)

Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)

*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box

*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)

*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out

Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
True, but that's more due to Nvidia's stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
- It's not just Nvidia, though... I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn't supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
- True, I really do think Linus was right when he said "fuck Nvidia" but sadly it's still a point against Linux :(

I'm going to go with "be normal".

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.

Run Microsoft Excel

This is literally the only current reason I use windows
- I started using Google sheets. I know the implications on storing/sharing personal data with Google.
  But Google sheets is being used as my mini db to store all kind of data. I automated many stuff with Google app script with telegram bot.
  I am 100% sure that now I can live without Excel.
Run Microsoft Excel and collaborate with others*
*Google Sheets does this too but anything Google really a better option?
Wine
- Please direct me to anyone who has gotten Excel to run under Wine and documented the procedure.

Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.

Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it's an adventure each time.

seamless sleep
On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience
- The wake on LAN option is an absolute joke too.
  Leave computer for a while > goes to sleep
  Come back in the morning > computer is on and room is warm
  No magic packet was sent, it just decided it was going to wake up and then ignore the "sleep after X minutes" setting and just remain on.
  Get your shit together Microsoft...
i hate Linux (users) as much as the next guy but my windows pc wouldnt stay asleep if i gave it an od of ambien
it wakes up randomly throughout the night fairly often
I think that's a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Mac really does not do this well. You're ostensibly just not noticing it.
- I dislike apple as a company but I have about 19 years of experience very much to the opposite of this claim.
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn't wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn't perfect still but it's way better than windows was.

Change your audio device seemingly at random.

I feel like any time I get a Teams call, my Windows audio goblin rolls a d20 to determine which combination of devices will be used.
- And what volume your outgoing mic is at. After the pandemic, I'm numb to telling people over voice chat that they're too quiet and should check the "levels" (in the hidden sound device menu) to see if windows conveniently set it to 5%.
  Sometimes it would do this to people in real time while we're talking. One friend couldn't figure out why it was happening and just wrote a script to constantly set it back to 100%.

Literally everything easily with much less effort

seriously
"I used Windows all my life and am unwilling to learn anything new"
- Oh please, I use Ubuntu and Kali at work. Just because I don’t suck the Linux penguins dick doesn’t mean my statement is any less true. Using Linux is a pain. Even some of the most mundane tasks with application installation, setup, or maintenance take 20x as long and require non stop troubleshooting at every turn when nothing works as expected or you encounter new things you don’t know how to get around. Down vote me to hell i don’t care, I don’t hate Linux but I stand by my statement and everything is more difficult.
Dealing with SSL on windows is a pain vs Linux
- I mean install OpenSSL for windows and it’s exactly the same

I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.

Blue screen. Embed advertising and spyware in everything.

canonical has had it's run with the latter two, at least briefly. it's not out of the picture at least
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/linux-distros-are-about-to-get-a-killer-windows-feature-the-blue-screen-of-death/#:~:text=The%20systemd%2Dbsod%20component%20is,photo%20or%20write%20it%20down.
Yeah I just get a purple screen instead (when I last used Ubuntu and it crashed). And actually come to think of it, I think I did get a blue screen on some OS I installed on my pi.

Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.

ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.

Can Linux mess with my default browser preferences every other time it applies updates? I'm pretty sure it can't.
- Shit you got me there

Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.

But really it's not Linux's fault. All games could (probably) run on Linux if someone ported them
- Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn't have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every "PC" game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.

This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
_ /\ _
What wasn't working that you couldn't use Linux? If it was wine then I totally understand and it sounds like you're a media editor or something in which case you're stuck with Mac or Windows. I personally just always dual boot and run Linux 99% of the time and only open windows when I really need it, which is almost never.

Spy it's users

Linux can totally do that. Even if your distro doesn't package it, you can always install spyware from source.
Redstar OS would like a word with you

Being intuitive.

On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.

On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.

Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$

Restore the screen resolution when an old game crashes

Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.

How do you know?

Boot every day and expect everything to just work

Plug a random device in and it just works

- sounds like a skill issue
  What exactly is your intent here? All you're doing is further alienating people from even trying Linux when you act like such a shit about people's genuine issues they might encounter with it.
Oh, if we speak about "boot every day", than Windows is notorious for changing peoples updates settings and then downloading broken updates. Linux (unless you set it up otherwise) won't do shit if you won't update anything over 10 years, everything will stay the same.
Think you got it backwards, these are Windows issues?
I have more luck with Linux than windows on this one. My windows installs end up way more fucked from trying to bring in random shitty device drivers and shit whereas most Linux drivers are built into the kernel. Now sometimes you're just out of luck on Linux and there just isn't a driver but I haven't had that happen in like a decade for me.

Run normal games like fortnite and warzone, and run other games not through steam without needing to install proto tricks and get the right dependencies for every damn game

That's like blaming your English teacher for "Don Quixote de la Mancha" being written in Spanish. Linux isn't the reason those things don't run on Linux. Fortnite and Warzone developers are responsible for failing to develop for anything other than Windows, consoles, and sometimes Mac.
- Fortnite and Warzone developers are responsible for failing to develop for anything other than Windows, consoles, and sometimes Mac.
  The worst part is, they don't even really have to target Linux if they don't want to. The guys working on Wine and Proton have already done the hard work there. All they have to do is not use garbage anti-cheat software, or Linux-compatible anti-cheat software.
  The other worst part is that they do use Linux-compatible anti cheat software, which other games like Apex Legends use and work through Wine/Proton in Linux, but they just don't enable it for Fortnite for some reason.
Ah, I can see that you haven't tried gaming on Linux in the last 5 years. Dependencies? Hah

That's not Linux fault though
if fortnite is a 'normal' game i'm good ta
you mean games with kernel level "anti-cheat" fitting the textbook definition of malware? Essentially being a rootkit?
good riddance, although you can patch for example Genshin to be runnable on Linux

Play all my laptop's speakers

Same, or use the fingerprint reader.

Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.

Reinstall Candy Crush.

Power management on certain chips is simply better than anything Linux has to offer (AMD Zen+ mobile for instance)
Modular driver architecture with drivers that aren't complete jank to manage and install. A lot of people see this as a pain point, but in reality it's not such a bad thing, especially nowadays.
This is a given, but as lots of stuff runs on Windows (namely older games), you can only really make stuff for Windows on Windows. So if you need to develop Win32 software, you really have to use Visual Studio for proper development. Mingw cross compile exists, I know, but that's never going to be as good.

Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.

Play games on GeForce NOW at a higher resolution than 1080p. :-/

Nowadays I'd say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don't even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.

Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.

I'd also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.

You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it's just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
- Nah I don't run anything related to graphics. Mainly clang compiler. Speaking of native speeds I mentioned, sysbench gives me pretty much the same results in WSL and in native Linux, with a margin of error here and there.
Except in the install process, which makes it pretty much unusable...

Play Netflix, etc at 4K.

Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works. Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn't valid.

Edit: to clarify, i'm exclusively using linux since 2008 and i'm not 'afraid of editing config files', downvoting me doesn't fix the problem. I'm also not fond of fixing your header files for them to compile.

i could see this comment maybe a decade ago. things like Mint have made most of these complaints just echos of a different era.
These things exist for windows as well but they are not accessible. Linux is a car without the plastic hood over the motor. Its not dumbed down.
Does that make it hard to see the three things a noob should touch? Yes.
But there are linux distros that take care of this so this comment isn’t correct.
SUSE is weird but their YaST was compelling enough to make them an option. Cockpit in RHEL doesn’t compare. I think that having admins edit text files is bad. The capability should be there, but it should not be mandatory. Editing files manually instead of a GUI increases the odds of a mistype trashing the system.

i tried producing music with linux native daw and plugins via yabridge. pain in my stupid ass.

You could check out renoise, bitwig studio, I mean, did Microsoft made daw? It would have been awful

Use the map editor for C&C Generals

Oh look, another command & conquer comment from me. How surprising.

I totally forgot about that game.
- I wish I could forget. C&C owns me and I'll never get a new one because ea is awful

Full screen "please wait while we get your system ready for you" narrated by Cortana, and if you disable Cortana you still have to wait the amount of time it takes for the audio to complete. Like an invoiced video game narrator with unskippable lines.

1.- Make your computer slower and slower every year for no real reason. 2.- Get your files virus infected for not using an antivirus software. 3.- To be fair, get some really cool games.

upgrade my jabra headset firmware

Windows saves me prescious time to do other things. I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does. I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go

VBA support is non existant on Linux

Don't worry, Microsoft is dropping support for it soon too
- Vba isn't being dropped. They stopped allowing macros to run automatically without warning the user. That was for security.
  MS isn't Google/Apple. They keep backwards compatibility in Office for forever.
- Could you elaborate, please? I tried looking it up and I only found a post from 2010, asking if VBA for Access and Excel will stop being supported in 2012" and a couple articles that state how much MS apparently dislikes VBA (the lack of some feature-updates are shown as evidence for that).
  I currently rely on a couple VBA scripts at my job that I wrote myself. I understand that they likely won't just stop working tomorrow (too many companies use VBA in important documents), but if it's already clear what will replace VBA sooner or later, I'd like to know so I can get a headstart, kind of.

The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect. Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.

People really dislike it when you point this out, But the security model on Linux is lacking. Yes, we have things like apparmor and SELinux, but compare it to sandboxd on macOS. The windows sandbox isn’t perfect, but it’s really user-friendly, and it works in most cases. Linux doesn’t have a direct equivalent. We’ve made great strides with making immutable distros through things like flatpack, and snap, but something that they failed to do is implement a least privilege model that is as robust as sandboxd on macOS.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sandboxing+on+linux&ia=web
I feel like android did that first, but I'm not sure.
I can understand disqualifying VMs, but why wouldn’t a container be that?
Podman container completely closed off. ChromeOS shows that everything is possible on Linux (their Linux integration is a VM, running a container with the Distro, and the apps are displayed over wayland on the local host)
There simply is no good GUI integration

HDR support looks to be a ways off.

Unfortunately the HDR implementation in Windows also isn't flawless and has some big issues.
- Yeah Windows HDR is incredibly buggy, it breaks in a huge variety of cases, and is completely incompatible with screen sharing.

Run fusion 360... Easily.

Photoshop and Lightroom.

You can run both, but especially Lightroom is a bit slow especially when using RAW files. LR is slow even on Windows :'(
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I checked the Creative Cloud manager/installer for Adobe apps doesn't work on Wine, because it uses the windows system webview that Wine hasn't fully replicated. Only pirated copies or installations copied from a Windows machine work.
Gimp/krita and darktable?
- Those aren’t drop-in replacements. GIMP for example doesn’t have anything close to Photoshop’s content-aware fill capabilities, I don’t think Krita does either.

Flash a code plug to one of my Motorola radios.

Play call of duty, for the better or the worse.

Take hours to update every 2nd Tuesday. Run like squat on old/low end hardware. Require an add blocker to stay safe.

Oh please. If I let it, Linux would install updates every day or two. Windows has many flaws, but its updates are not among them. Not that it is better than Linux at updates, just that it is fine at them.

The largest OS for spyware and monopoly shenanigans is Google's android ecosystem and that's Linux based.

Honestly I don't understand all the Windows hate. Sure it made since back in 2001, but smartphones outshitify anything Windows ever did. The proof of it is that Redmond has been trying to phonify Windows since version 8 so they could be more shitty.

I'm not a Linux fan boy by any means, but you've at least got to give it a fair deal...
Saying Linux sucks because of Google's Android is the equivalent of saying you hate all vegetables because Brussel Sprouts suck.
- I think it's more like saying you hate vegetables because one particular farmer grew a crappy brussel sprout
Just because there are other things that are worse, or at least as bad, doesn't mean we shouldn't call put bad behaviour when it happens. And written MS it keeps happening.
Man, I'm with you with being against the windows hate, but you lost me completely at the android hate.
I agree Google sucks, but let's not pretend iOS is better. And yes, I realize Apple loves to tell everyone how much they care, and that they love to exploit the fact android allows third party installations, which can (if you're an idiot) lead to all kinds of problems with viruses.

Windows can force crapware and "features" into your system without asking. Linux can't do that.

coughs in snap
- coughs on the other 20 million distros that don't do that
internet explorer
edge
cortana
Just the easiest ones. Also, please remember that M$ was forced to make edge removable.
Source: windows and linux admin.
What sort of crapware? I often hear a lot of lies out of Linux users these days... For a few months last year the rumors of start menu ads were relentless.
I'm quite certain windows has a huge list of problems, but it is quite functional. I build my PC's, though. I've always suspected third party installations are what turn most people off. Like, any HP computer pretty much is going to be trash due to their extra crap.
- An entire suite of apps that come pre installed that you, until recently, couldn't remove. Candy Crush, Facebook app, Netflix etc all being installed without permission. Co-pilot AI being mixed into your OS for no reason. Nevermind the phone home nature of Windows as a whole. Hell, you can't even easily make a local account.

ITT: Many legitimate use-cases, and people shitting all over them.

This highlights one thing that Windows undoubtedly does better, and that's community support. With Windows and OSX things tend to just work, or to have limitations that people just accept. Linux becomes a lifestyle, when some people just want a tool that does a thing.

Multiple screen RDP support. It is the only thing keeping me on Windows for my personal desktop. I RDP into my work laptop from my desktop so I can have all 4 of my monitors, but keep my systems separate.

Have the Year of the Windows Desktop.

~~Validate Epic James's greediness~~ Run Fortnite or Valorant.

Go fuck itself.

roblox

literally the only thing that took a minute.. i think i might have it now with vinegar. so i guess even thats kinda off the list

Windows has a better initial setup. Often, when installing a new distro I gotta spend a couple of hours installing, troubleshooting and customizing what I need on Linux (even on beginner distros) while on Windows, you just install it, download a couple of apps from the web and restart to catch up on updates.

The big one for me is running mobile apps as an integrated experience

Waydroid simply doesn't work well yet.

Streamdeck support too.

VMware install isnt as seamless as it should be

Windows tiling in gnome, but, magnet for Macos is far better than both

Run MS mail servers

Literally the only thing keeping me from switching:

Act as a host in Parsec. If hosting ever becomes available for the Linux release, I'll switch.

Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine https://moonlight-stream.org/
- I switched to moonlight, because it works better for my use case. But parsec worked better on a bad connection for me. Also parsec is owned by unity.
Hi to run into this problem. I have a Mac mini that I use as a bridge from my home network to my work laptop. Now, most workloads requiring horsepower, I will run in the cloud, but there are some workloads that I want to run locally. I can parsec into the Mac, but I can’t parsec into the Linux server I have. The state of media on Linux is not great, and there are understandable reasons as to why.
- I use it to host a weekly remote movie night for some friends and I and it's basically the perfect piece of drop-in software for that purpose.
  It's simple enough that non-technical people just need to click a button to connect and its protocol is low latency enough that we can all see and react to the same scene with no delay.

Running the desktop version of turbo tax. I will try again with wine or some other things. I did toy with the though of a vm on Linux that's running windows ten, but not sure.

use 100% of the cpu (so efficient)!!!

Manage app startup and profile settings

Linux is great, windows is great. Why not both? They both do things great

Why not both?
How many operating systems does your computer need? Haha

Play Siege. So Linux wins again.

winamp smoothly.

Which ones?

Serious question: Can Linux run all my smart devices (tvs, lights, plugs)?

Depends how those are connected. But check out Home Assistant.
I've got home assistant running on a linux machine that lets me control/monitor my smart devices [0] from my mac, windows, linux, and android phone.
[0] list of smart devices:
5 Lifx lights (Full functionality)
1 Wemo device (toggles a dumb strip light i have around a mirror.)
3 Google home devices (the big, small, and medium speakers)
2 Android TV's (Nvidia Shields)
Logs Temperature & humidity (full functionality and doesn't even require creating an account or using an app.)
Roomba (full functionality)
graphs my server's cpu, disk, ram, etc
graphs firewall traffic.
graphs minecraft server latency + player count.
Integrates with my Unifi controller and two Wi-Fi access points.
Yes
- With voice control?

Windows is definitely easier to install older programs on. Linux is getting better, especially thanks to steam/valve imo, but it's impossible to recommend Linux to just about anyone that's not in IT or interested in tech as everything seems to have a caviat or workaround you have to do to get stuff either working or just limping along. For instance..I installed endeavor on my msi gaming laptop and getting it to use my 2070 card over my Intel graphics was a nightmare for a first timer. I can't recommend it especially when I just wanna game.

Make Edge the default browser on its own

inverted (color) mouse cursor / pointer

Booting from VHD. Booting from RAM. WimBoot Mode.

Linux, browsers, and hardware accelerated videos on the web don't go along well out of the box. Which is a total shame.

When was the last time you drove Linux?
- Fresh and most up to date kinoite installation last week, based on fedora 39. The problem is not Linux, it's proprietary codecs and Firefox' hesitation to enable hardware decoding on Linux by default. It's not difficult to get it to work but it simply does not work out of the box.

Playing some of the best games I own since XP/7 era forever. They just refuse to run on Linux.

Reboot /s

drivers for lots of printers. no fuss gpu drivers. zero computer knowledge required.

Despite not answering your question correctly, I have something where Windows is superior to macOS:

When you start a Windows program and want the program window to fill your screen completely, you just have to drag the window towards the upper edge of the screen and the window fills the whole size of the screen.

On macOS there is not such an option. You have to drag the program window manually to the full size of the screen. Although there is a full-screen mode (green button in the upper left of the window), when activated, the window is in full screen, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is hidden. However, at least macOS remembers the last size of the program window, so you don't have to drag it to full screen size again.