The best one I’ve ever heard is they like the Microsoft wallpapers. Yes i told them you can use them on linux too. But they argued with me that they wouldn’t be compatible.
Most people’s reasons in my experience demonstrate to me that they have a perception of Linux as it was 15+ years ago.
I discussed switching to Linux with a group of friends in a voice chat some time ago, most were fairly open to it, and one or two have switched since, but mainly their reasons were time constraints, not wanting to go through the process of backing up files, and finding alternative software.
One guy in particular brought up gaming, MS office, and some other particular software they used. I showed them protondb and every game they looked up was gold or higher, showed them libre office which they could not complain about since it generally works a lot nicer, and it turned out that other software was available as a .deb. After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.
Fair enough I guess, though they couldn’t really produce the reason as to why.
Generally, people just don’t like any kind of change, even if it has the potential to make them a lot happier.
After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.
This is the response I normally get as well, which infuriates me to no end, because it isn’t an actual reason, it is ultimately their decision, and I feel like they are making a mistake out of laziness or perceived comfort.
It’s my opinion that most people think of all the technology as it were 15 years ago. Apple was innovative, Google wasn’t evil, Windows worked well, and Linux was not as accessible as it is today.
I had two bouts with Linux in the distant past, and neither time did I think Linux was anything worth pursuing. Not that it was bad, I just didn’t see a benefit over the alternatives. In fact the alternatives had all the benefits in my mind.
When I switched a year ago, I was blown away how far it had come as far as being accessible. Now I can’t imagine using Windows as my primary OS ever again.
“Never used Linux,” They say, typing on a chromebook or android phone, before picking up their steamdeck.
while browsing the web (hosted on linux).
Not to interject, but when people talk about using “Linux” they’re generally referring to desktop Linux (usually GNU/Linux). ChromeOS and SteamOS are Linux distros of a sort under the hood, but they’re also highly curated experiences. Android technically uses the Linux kernel but architecturally it’s so drastically different from basically any other system using it that it’s quite misleading to call it “Linux” in the colloquial sense.
If it came pre-installed on laptop majority wouldn’t mind.
This was quite a few years ago, but a friend of mine said he’d tried Linux but had switched back because some clipboard feature he was used to using didn’t work (sorry, I forget the details). He was a programmer to, so perfectly capable of troubleshooting or finding some alternative tool. I just stared at him dumbfounded.
I get him though, mouse wheel click for a secondary copy buffer is one of the main things that’s extremely annoying to me when I have to use Windows, I can never retrain my brain to stop doing it and I get annoyed that it doesn’t work until I remember why.
“Lack of consensus on pronunciation of name.”
And I stand by it.
Agreed. But it does make it easy to tell evil Linux users from good Linux users. I pronounced it so you can tell who is who.
I’m so glad you agree that Linux users are the evil ones.
Obvious, right? Only an evil person would say it that way.
Most silly excuse was my boss refusing to install Linux because he just had a friend give him original windows 98se licenses for the PCs we just bought for the company.
Well it gets less silly thinking that getting the eprom programmer software and orcad 4 working on Linux was probably impossible.
Then it was outright the best decision ever, because those machines never required a reinstall and worked flawless for the 5 years I was there working. Never understood the bad rep W98Se had. Never used it on my personal rigs of course.
“not polished enough” when comparing to widose
Sounds like they’d like gnome
“I wanna try out this FreeBSD thing.”
Sometime around 2004, I somehow managed to get a friend to try Linux. They spent an entire weekend compiling a custom kernel just to run some experimental beta driver that might have made Doom 3 somewhat playable on their system. Everything compiled just fine, but whenever they booted up the system, they discovered they had forgotten to re-enable sound support. A recompile fixed that, but performance wasn’t what they were expecting. I think they got like 15fps or something like that. After a few weeks of using Linux they reinstalled win-xp…
that was a pretty valid response in 2004
last few years tho …deleted by creator
Hard to say, but I’d say no…
Nope, but gaming was essentially non-existing. We had almost no native title, and wine while great was very hit or miss. I remember having to tweak a lot for each game, from the basic whine version to the DLLs installed, etc, usually going only by what was on WineHQ, or troubleshooting yourself on guesses. Eventually PlayOnLinux was created and we had a repository of a “stable” way to run a game, but it was still bad. Eventually some Indie games started releasing for Linux, and I swore off wine except for some very specific stuff. When Steam was released for Linux, it was a great time, and some native games came our way. And then Proton happen and while lots of us were a bit uncertain about it, it turned out to be great, and thanks to that we’re now in a state where the majority of games just work.
But back to your question, the general Linux experience outside of gaming (and other software compatibility) was not much different than today, with the exception of Xorg configurations, which I still to this day remember I don’t have to do anymore and immediately all other problems seem insignificant.
for alot of people their relationship with windows is like that of an abusive partner. which is why you see alot of the same excuses pop up
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“I could install linux, but what am I gonna do on Linux?” (Note: Some people just think OS is an amusement park)
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“I could install linux but then I have to type commands into a terminal?”
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“it’s not for desktop use”
“I don’t want to learn something new”
How tf am I supposed to respond to that?
Some dude just posted that he’s not going to Linux because he can’t play Rust on it…
These reasons are always the dumbest to me, they act like they can’t dual boot. I think most of the time they just can’t be bothered which is fine, but just say that.
To be fair, dual booting is not really for people that aren’t very tech savvy. Just thinking about trying to explain partitions to some people I know is giving me a headache
If somebody says they cannot use wallpapers on other operating systems, just give them a thumbs up and move on.
Why would you want to recruit such a person.
