Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.
I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).
I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.
I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability.
Dunno why you are being downvoted - there is a certain type of person who contributes virtually nothing on Wikipedia except peripheral things like categories. BrownHairedGirl was the most toxic person in Wikipedia but she was lauded by her minions - and yet she did virtually no content creation whatsoever. Yet made millions of edits!
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