Dedoimedo on Linux/Win11 Article

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Dedoimedo has planned out a digital future:

A couple of days ago, I came across a forum post that pointed to a Web article that linked to the Windows 11 Insider preview Dev channel release notes, which mention a new requirement for Windows 11 Pro setup. Not Home edition, mind, but Pro. Internet access and Microsoft account will (or most likely will) be needed to finish the system setup. And I decided, that’s it, I had enough stupidity for one lifetime…

who then leads on to state:

I have zero intention of using Windows 11, as it’s pointless in its own right, and I have even less intention of being a subscription monkey. Services yes, products never…

On the money! and there’s more..

Full article over on:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/windows-moving-away.html

interesting..will be following that exodus.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Cybertooth, klang, HiFlyer, DrBonzo

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He’s a Linux expert.  I’m not seeing an true exodus.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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I don’t think dedoimedo would consider himself a ‘linux expert’ although I’m sure he’d be flattered by your comment. He is very good in the arts of Linux-fu and various different reviews.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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HiFlyer, klang

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“Official byline

Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. ”

” prestigious international conferences like LinuxCon, ”

That’s not an ordinary Windows user.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Thanks for bringing that to light, although a cherry-picked distraction does not do him justice. I rightfully feel obliged of a larger dsclosure in order to provide readers of his IT background with a link, so readers can read for themselves.

Ref: https://www.dedoimedo.com/about.html

Windows
I have been a “heavy” Windows user since about Windows 3.1, with deep troubleshooting skills and knowledge, including BSOD analysis, WMIC, group policies, and more.

So he knows of where he speaks..
which actually strengthens the article integrity further.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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HiFlyer, klang

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I’m a lot closer to being an ordinary Windows user than a Linux expert. I’ve been trying to leave Windows in the dust since 2017, and try as I might I can’t do it. I use Mint 19.2 Cinnamon as my daily driver and I like it a lot. It’s quite Windows 7-like, easy to use, rock solid and patching is seamless 99% of the time. Mint covers 90 to 95% of what I need to do so it makes a good daily use machine.

But it’s that 5 to 10% that’s problematic, at least for me, and ranges from the delightfully trivial to the excruciatingly frustrating. An example of each: I don’t need to print much and could get along nicely by bringing a flash drive to FedEx and getting documents printed. But I had a printer installed on a Win7 computer and wanted it set up on Mint. I connected the printer via usb cable turned it on and in three seconds had a pop-up message on the computer asking me if I wanted to install the software for it. I clicked ‘yes’ and 15 seconds after that I was asked if I wanted to print a test page. Said yes to that and I was good to go. Delightfully trivial. Potential caveat – the printer was listed as being supported by Mint.

Then there’s the excruciatingly frustrating. I needed to make a video with audio of myself a couple years ago. I figured I’d use VLC Player on my Mint machine. I spent about 10 minutes trying to do it on my own, thinking it would be fairly easy. No success. So I went to the VLC Player website and found a set of instructions for making videos with audio. After a quick read, it seemed pretty simple. Well, not so much. I don’t remember the details but it went something like this. Pull down menu ‘C’. Yep. Select ‘M’. Uh, nope, I don’t see ‘M’. I don’t see ‘M anywhere under any pull down menu. I read a few steps ahead to get an idea of what to look for. Couldn’t find anything that even came close even after pulling down every pull-down menu and selecting every option. Nothing worked. I emailed tech support and the answer I got back was “Oh, yeah, those instructions are obsolete.” That’s it, nothing else. I wrote back asking where the non-obsolete directions were. Answer: “Uh, not sure we have them. I’ll look for them but why don’t you just use Windows?”. I responded that my Win 7 machine wasn’t terribly reliable (a true statement at the time) and would you please look for the Mint or Linux instructions? “Sure”, but after several further attempts I never heard from them again.

It’s hard to get too mad about this since the software is free, Mint is solid, fast and offers no drama patching, but it can be very frustrating, and is probably why I’ll never be free from either Windows or macOS.

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Cybertooth, Microfix, klang

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DrBonzo wrote:

I got back was “Oh, yeah, those instructions are obsolete.” That’s it, nothing else. I wrote back asking where the non-obsolete directions were. Answer: “Uh, not sure we have them. I’ll look for them but why don’t you just use Windows?”.

Were the obsolete instructions Linux-specific? If not, they would be just as obsolete with Windows.

This is obviously a failing of VideoLan (maker of VLC), not Linux, per se. Not that it makes any difference to the person who just can’t get things done, of course. Perhaps a user forum of some kind would be more helpful.

I am at the point now that I’ve eliminated Windows from my gaming laptop and it never existed on my Dell XPS 13, which came from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled. The response “why don’t you just use Windows” assumes one has access to Windows, which is a silly thing to assume when the very software in question has a Linux version. If it can’t be done in a VM or WINE/Proton, well, guess I’m not doing it!

Speaking of that… I wonder if the Windows version of VLC would work in WINE.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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DrBonzo

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The instructions were found on a web page headed with “Instructions for making VLC videos in Debian based Linux Distributions”. That’s a paraphrase but it was something very close to that. Also, scattered through the directions were references to linux; phrases like …in your distro do… or If you have a Red Hat distro the following will not work.

I wasn’t trying to put blame on any one party, just an example of the sorts of things I’ve run into with Mint and Ubuntu. I do think that many consumer software vendors don’t pay much attention to Linux versions of their software. I get that since Windows is roughly 90% of the OS market, and Linux is probably 1%.

One of these days I’m going to try installing and using Wine. I’d really like to get it to work.

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klang

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Linux is somewhere around 2 to 2.5% of the desktop market, though MS seems to be committed to increasing this. They’ve lost another big one now.

The titular subject of the original post has written on Linux topics for a long time, but he always had a view similar to yours, I think, to the effect that he couldn’t get away from Windows for one reason or another.  Despite his position in the minds of many as a Linux guru, he was still a Windows user who continued to say that Windows was indispensable. Reading his articles, I sometimes thought he was exaggerating the utility of Windows relative to Linux, and that he was more forgiving of various transgressions MS has perpetrated than I am. But now they’ve lost him too.

For all of his Linux knowledge, Dedoimedo seems to have never tried to actually make the jump and make Linux the main OS in his own mind, with the eventual goal of making it the only OS, or close to it. He writes of having plenty of time to make the transition, as 10 will be good until 2025… I said something extremely similar in 2015 when I noted that I had five more years to complete the jump, as 7 was to be supported until 2020, and by the time I actually made the move, that had been bumped up to 2023, as I moved to Windows 8.1.

It turns out I didn’t need anything close to that length of time. At first, I used Linux a lot when it was on my main PCs, perhaps for the novelty factor, but things kept pulling me back to Windows, and once there, I would not immediately reboot and go back to Linux. I’d stick around in Windows a while, since it was already booted up and ready to go when I wanted to do something.

I was, of course, paying attention to what MS was doing, and I kept getting that feeling of disgust and contempt that filtered down to the particular Windows release I was using. At those moments I would immediately go back to Linux and seek to do whatever it was I was going to do there.

It went back and forth like that, but over time my disgust for MS was increasing, and the various Microsofty bits where it was meant to serve Microsoft’s needs while ignoring mine became less and less tolerable. The Windows sessions became less frequent and shorter as time passed.

Eventually I realized I’d been using Linux for several weeks, maybe even a month, without booting Windows at all on any of my PCs. That was when I realized the migration was nearly complete.

I still had Windows on my PCs then. I’d mostly retired my Asus (2008) Core 2 Duo laptop in favor of the Acer Swift 1, and I also had my Dell G3 gaming laptop and my desktop, with its aging but still decent Sandy Bridge i5. I reasoned that it was already paid for, and that it was better to have it and not need it than the reverse, so I kept it.

About a year ago, I mostly retired the Swift 1 in favor of my new Dell XPS 13, which was my first prebuilt PC to not come with Windows at all. I was also running short on SSD space in my Dell G3, so I finally made the leap of faith and eliminated Windows 10 from it too. That leaves only the desktop with a functional Windows installation, and it’s been a really, really long time since I have booted that. Could it have been a year or more? Quite possibly.

With WINE and Proton, the gaming laptop is quite credible as a Linux only device. Gaming is one of the “must have Windows” things that often gets mentioned, but they work really well in Linux these days. The stability is excellent, and frame rates are similar to what I would see in Windows.

I guess the bottom line for whether you can get away from Windows is how much Windows disgusts you vs. how much research are you willing to do to make things work in Linux. Most of the time, there is a way, but as you mentioned, it’s not always easy to figure out what it is.

I do still have Windows in a VM for those things that insist on Windows. I guess that means I am not completely free of Windows, but virtualized Windows on a Linux host is still more Linux than Windows in my book. It reduces Windows from an OS to an application, essentially.

Some purists also claim that even running WINE or Proton constitutes a lack of being “free of Windows,” but I demur on that point. Running Windows applications without Windows means just that… without Windows.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Bill C., HiFlyer, Cybertooth, klang, Microfix, DrBonzo

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@Ascaris  You’ve pretty much summed it up, especially your comment about disgust with Windows vs how much I’m willing to do to make Linux work.

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HiFlyer, Ascaris, klang, Microfix

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I don’t know when I discovered Dedoimedo, but since that day I have become a huge fan of his work.  His reviews on Linux are the best that I have found.  Distrowatch would be nothing without his reviews of the major distros.  He is very good at communicating with the reader in his reviews.  “He gets it, and makes sure you get it.”  His problem solving abilities are second to none.  You don’t have to be a fan of Linux to enjoy his reviews, he also reviews Windows, Office, Browsers, etc.

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HiFlyer, Cybertooth, DrBonzo, Microfix, G2500

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I agree. When I first started thinking about Linux and knew nothing about it, I learned a lot from Distrowatch and it was a huge help in deciding which distributions to try.

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HiFlyer, klang, Microfix

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For most people who are willing to learn a little and to not care at all about their privacy footprint, they could do many useful things with Linux, Chrome OS, Windows 10 or 11, or macOS.  Between Libreoffice or Google docs, and a browser, that would cover almost all tasks that almost all people do.

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HiFlyer

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It is a true Linux exodus since he uses exclusively Windows for production and only Linux recently (and in the remote past). Of course being his profession he’s very knowledgeable about Linux so its easier for him to transition already knowing what to do and being able to plan around Linux beforehand.
Also LibreOffice isn’t compatible with Microsoft Office so not a replacement if you go beyond writing a paper for yourself only and not collabing.

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Cybertooth

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I will be interested especially to see what he says about dealing with office issues.  He mentions planning to try MS Office 2010 with WINE.

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SueW

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