While free software may not have a marketing budget, its freedom aspect is generally an inherent advantage over other software (no licensing, no user hostility). There may be proprietary alternatives to Aufacity and Gimp, but nobody knows them because the FOSS versions are so easy to get. If there are two largely equivalent pieces of software, one proprietary and the other FOSS, the FOSS one will win. It just has to be good enough.

But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be.

FreeCAD is getting better and getting quite decent for hobby stuff (I still find Fusion much more intuitive, but it's getting alright), but we can't just go "why doesn't everybody switch, they must be dumb", just because we are happy with the functionality.

This isn't specifically directed at you, but a specific FOSS-high-horse attitude I see every now and then and used to hold myself. I think it's something that keeps FOSS from gaining market share by solving real problems people have. I could tell you a bunch of stories of people trying really hard to switch and ending up in a world of pain. We can't hand-wave that away. We have to actually improve the things we want people to use.

This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close.

For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation.

Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with.

And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts.

That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.

I really want to agree, and I am a big advocate for using Linux exactly because of the hostility from Microsoft, but for most users it definitely is not a drop in replacement. For an average user that is used to Microsoft Office, the difference is simply too big.

It might not be the best example, but just look at how Linus from LTT struggled to get one of the "most user-friendly" distros working.

This is especially true nowadays, as Steam has gone a LONG way to make gaming viable in linux.

I also don't want to recommend Ubuntu (if I had to pick a single reason it would be snap), but from a problem-googleability-index point of view, it's hard to beat. Perhaps Mint, because it's mostly Ubuntu, but without snap (last I checked).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549295 has some of my complaints about my work laptop

* Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB.

* Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit.

* Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid.

I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.

Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me.

Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it.

I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer.

Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.

I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person.

Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing.

Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora.

Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update.

I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft.

Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat.

Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware.

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...

Sorry, but that's not a drop-in replacement.

Honestly in this regard, Windows struggles to be a drop in replacement for Linux, not the other way around.

And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.

And you would have to reboot on Windows. Rebooting would also restart your display server on Linux, so that is at worst equally as painful as Windows.

> I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows.

I think you probably choose the command line way to do things because you "know very well how Linux works". The whole GPU driver installation process can be done without knowing what a terminal emulator is. If you choose to take advantage of your existing knowledge, that isn't a flaw of the system.

> Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows.

I have not opened a terminal on my Steam Deck with the intention of making a game work. The most I have ever had to do was copy launch options from steam reviews or ProtonDB. Sure, that's not perfect. And that still leaves a few games unplayable. At this point about 80~90% of games can simply run though, which is way more games than anyone has time to play, and is a sizeable catalog when compared to other gaming systems. It may not be a "drop in replacement" in the sense that it can play 100% of games, but functionally it is a drop in replacement.

> And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.

I'm a noob when it comes to thunderbolt vs usb-c vs whatever else looks identical. I dock my work laptop (which runs Fedora) with some usb-c-like dock though and I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. I don't have anything to add other than that anecdote.

Also, it doesn't really matter if 80-90% of games work if the one that you really want to play - doesn't. And some very popular games still don't work on Linux.

Yes - the USB-C standard is a mess. A USB-C port that supports Thunderbolt looks identical to any other USB-C port. In my case, I was trying to use a PCI-E enclosure, and it just refused to work on Linux - no matter what I tried.