It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.

Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.

Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?

Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.

Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.

I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate

I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.

I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.

I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.

> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here

For the creator: videos can be monetized trivially

For the search: YouTube results are often highlighted top of the page on Google search results.

Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.

Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.

I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.

> I guess I'm out and out of touch

I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.

I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.

If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.

My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.

But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).

it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.

People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux. But they don't similarly complain about these ultra obscure, ugly commands. When Microsoft necessitates commands, somehow it's different.

"Linux is too hard for people"

Then maybe Microsoft should add a "Use local account" checkbox to the installation screen.

Google is here to protect Microsoft OS users? Where do we draw the line on what Google (owner of Youtube) is responsible for.

So you'd advocate for github to remove any install script that users wget + curl, and any documentation references that instruct users to wget + curl? That's much worse than a handful of limited commands in which you're modifying your own user account.

It is easier to understand what a command does, than to derive how it is called from first principles.

What you're describing applies to just about every programming tutorial out there.

>To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff

Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this?

defaultUser0 is used by windows for the OOBE if you don't delete it along with the registry keys it will just boot back to the OOBE again. defaultUser0 gets removed by the OOBE after setup leaving your system vulnerable. The administrator account is a built in account that is disabled by default but won't be disabled if you completely bypass the OOBE or don't use the old local account setup which you no longer can do because of microsofts removal of the feature.

Has Microsoft removed the option to disable Microsoft Accounts via the Group Policy Editor?

I have a microsoft account. I made it for Windows Live to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista back in the day.

Except, then Microsoft adjusted their account infrastructure, and now it's also an Xbox Live account. Then it became also a Windows Messenger account. Then it was required to login to Visual Studio. Then it ate my perfectly working Mojang account. Now I need it to install stuff from the Windows store like the damn Windows debugger you use to analyze BSOD dump files

I do not want my computer preferences saved across machines. I want to set up each computer separately. I do not want cortana. I do not want to connect my local computer to my account.

I gain nothing by using my microsoft account to log in to my local computer.

The singular goal is that I just want to use my damn computer, to do local computer things.

gets you a local account

Weird, I used to play LoL on linux all the time a few years back. I assume something changed

And in the Linux community, "run" apparently has a slightly different meaning than what ordinary people are used to.

And much better keyboard control. It can also do interesting things such as run in 1:1 scaling mode (for example, 4K on a 1080p monitor) and then you can use your mouse to zoom in and out (wheel) and Ctrl+drag to pan around.

VLC walked so MPV could run.

I like the CLI / scriptability of MPV so much better than VLC. Absolutely fantastic.

> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close

This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.

This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.

Calc is far better than Excel.

CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.

Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.

Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.

Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...

> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite

> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close

For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.

For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.

There are users (me included) that state the opposite, LibreCalc is better for my needs (complex formulas table driven) and that Excel is a toy for more “scientific” calculations.

If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel. But otherwise Libre office calc is perfectly fine.

Writer is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.

LibreOffice Calc works well and does the job for what most people needs, I don't see any issue recommending it.

I've come to the conclusion that anyone trying to use a spreadsheet in a way that requires excel, probably shouldn't.

Any task that warrants a complex spreadsheet can be done better in a Python notebook using pandas or polars IMO

I've used calc every day for years. It works well.

google sheets sucks too.

excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.

Manufacturing and automation is another big one. Think about a water plant that is air-gapped but needs computer automation software to run. These things are everywhere, in every town that has indoor plumbing and sewer. The specialized software that automates these plants only runs on Windows. It relies on industrial hardware and touchscreens that are designed for use in harsh outdoor environments. All of these types of plants rely on high school educated operators that need to understand what's going on at a simple level. Having an OS that in any way relies on Internet access is a non starter. A Linux based system would be removed within a year of operation. You could get it approved maybe if you really worked at it but it would not be accepted in the long run, after the initial startup. There are physical constraints, technical constraints, and human/political constraints that are all working against Linux.

What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM? Without going to extra effort the environment should be indistinguishable for the application.

Have you tried PCI passthrough of a USB bus? Worked for me with a device that didn't work with regular USB passthrough.

Agree on all points. Basically, Windows could suck to any degree whatsoever right now, it still has enjoyed an hegemony for decades and the vast majority of the population considers it the default, it's not impossible for this to change, but it's definitely going to take time.

A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases

I've not really had a problem with Japanese software, but I mostly stick to old games and the like. You do need to make sure you install cjk fonts, and if your system locale isn't Japanese you need to make sure jp locale is enabled then set it before running with `LANG="ja_JP.UTF8"` (or possibly LC_ALL if that fails) but other than that I've not had any major problems.

What kind of software isn't working?

I've run Japanese windows software under Wine, and with no configuration it was a sea of crashy mojibake. With the right locale configured, it worked fine.

Have you tried Bottles? I helped a friend a few weeks ago getting his game library to work after he migrated to Bazzite and there are a few games from Japanese studios / indie devs. It was mostly setting the locale for a separate bottle configuration and from there they installed and worked.

If it's a one-off program, have you tried Winboat or running it in a Windows VM?

Sorry, but could you list any program I'm never thought about japanese software and since I'm interested on japanese culture, I'd would like to know which kind of programs they are

Aren't they're used for slightly different things though? GIMP for image manipulation and Krita for digital drawing?

(Krita is pretty awesome though, it's up there with Blender for me)

or https://photopea.com

If you run gnome then I made this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8238/gnome-speech2tex...

How about OpenAIs whisper[0]? My social science friends tell me it‘s been great for them. Not sure whether data privacy et all would be an issue of course, but I guess you can just run it locally :)

[0]https://github.com/openai/whisper

Dragon in Wine. A lot of the Talon users do it that way.

What would you use for that? Does docker work or is there a better solution, more oriented towards gaming?

Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff

Players like mpv are way better unless you want to use nightly build of v4

VLC always had the ugliest UI of the open source media players. It also renders subtitles in a really ugly way (at least the last time I used it, which is years ago).

I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.

If you trust Russian developers

VLC doesn't have gapless playback sadly.

cant Office be run in a VM?

Outlook on the desktop is pretty much in maintenance mode only and Microsoft is already breaking it[0]. As for web version runs on linux just fine so you are in luck.

In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.

[0] e.g. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-cant-help-break-window... and couple others

And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?

Have you tried Thunderbird recently? It's had quite a lift.

Can you briefly explain what it is that you like about Outlook? I've had to use it at corporate clients, and I really detest it. The interface seems to suffer from that same ribbon-nonsense that Word suffers from. Its search is poor and slow. It offers very few display customization options. The calendar in particular is horrendous, I can't even seem to select a time block by clicking/dragging the way I've been able to do in Thunderbird for (probably) 2 decades.

Or maybe you're talking about needing Exchange integration? I don't know what the state of that is on Linux these days.

Outlook in its recent versions is (barely) functionally just the repackaged web version.

It is the poster child for enshittification.

That may be true but, as you've not given any reason, it will come up again next time.

Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case. This is also why as you said, the amount of people working on it is low.

It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.

Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger

The overwhelming majority of games that came out this year are from smaller studios and will work perfectly on Linux. It's only the big budget "AAA" games with corporate publishers pandering to shareholders/investment firms which insist on custom DRM and anticheat which are a problem.

Online competitive games with anti-cheat are the problematic ones in general.

If you play single player games with no or limited online features you'll be fine in 99% of the cases (number pulled from my ass).

Expedition 33 is a GOTY contender this year and it’s been working great for me on Linux

While I can understand that it's frustrating. Kernel level Anticheat is a abomination in itself and should in no way be supported. It is a security flaw in itself!

Read this: https://gist.github.com/stdNullPtr/2998eacb71ae925515360410a...

GIMP can't compete even with the version of Photoshop from 2000.

GIMPs UX is wonderful, and Photoshop UX is poison. The problem is that after torturing yourself to learn Photoshop, and sitting in it for 8 hours a day (for many people; I worked in prepress) makes you think that it has been designed rationally rather than simply cobbled together and stuffed with ads. Illustrator, being older, is even worse.

People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.

One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.

IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.

I've never had a VLC problem in decades of using it.

correct, the solution is to fully switch and use the native software there not wine

Every year is the YOLD!

2025 is it!

It honestly is, Linux is great on desktop. However, most people have laptops now which are a mixed bag.

To be fair to Linux, Windows has many, many rough edges as well. The difficult part for newbies is that those rough edges are _different_. In the long run I feel pretty confident saying that Linux is overall better, and that's because of the customizability. Ultimately, with some experience, one can essentially choose one’s own rough edges :P

I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.

> “terminal holds it back”

Presumably the it here is Linux? That’s not what I would have said. The terminal makes maintaining your own systems much easier because it’s all text. Opposed to having to mix screen shots and instructions. Which is to say, I don’t imagine people who can’t handle the terminal (and are on Windoz) are doing any maintenance or configuration beyond a few GRRR items they’ve convinced themselves is ultimately intolerable.

From a small business I’d say what keeps the accounting office on Windoz is software (ie. quickbooks, excel). But a close second would be tighter integration of file management and core office apps (ie email). It’s very easy to rename, move, copy, files on windows. You can perform many of these file management tasks inside an app experience (ie saveas dialog box). Apple has the mindset with their suite of Apple productivity apps, Chromebooks are very easy for general users to get their head around. If Linux could roll up a Chromebook environment with a QB clone into an expert system (e.g. no. We don’t need pictures, videos or games folders), I think our firm would consider the switch. It would certainly have the appearance of stability productivity, and simplicity which is always a plus when your job is not maintaining IT systems. (Now we just need to find new outsource IT for troubleshooting)

Yeah, I don’t understand the parent commenter either. Even with my latest laptop, it took days and weeks to make everything work (like audio, my monitors, DPI, VLC/mpv, even networking). And even then I had to turn off some hardware functionality, because it’s so buggy (bye-bye battery life). And this is before introducing Wayland for example…

Also installing is way easier for beginners with Windows. I’m happy that Linux installation now at least reached the level of Windows 98, but I still need to search for things every single time, even when I do it about every other years for several decades now. Just because somebody thought that it’s so important to ask simple users about an implementation detail which almost nobody care about. And this is before bugs… which I encounter quite frequently.

It’s getting better, but by not much. It could be a very stable OS with the right hardware even 20 years ago. That didn’t change, you still need to be very careful if you want a good experience with Linux and a GUI. I had no laptop or PC in the past 30 years on which I could install Linux without serious hiccups if I wanted anything more than terminal. I could almost always make it usable (it was impossible with one laptop), but I always had to give up something, like battery life, game performance, my headset at the time, etc. And of course a ton of time.

> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it.

What a dumb analogy. My mother can use Windows very well, it doesn't mean she could also install it. The same rule applies to most Windows users. That's why it comes preinstalled, and not with an attached bootable USB stick.

UX of recent Windows versions is crap. The bearish tendency started with 8 and have never recovered, with Windows 11 being the cherry on top of the crap. Telling that as a user of almost every Windows version since 3.11. Microsoft completely changes user interface with every recent version, this is an anti-pattern in UX world. How is that I can smoothly switch between Debian and macOS major updates, and when Windows does the same it is a nightmare? "Oh no, where are the network settings again..."

I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.

When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.

> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.

Have you done this, or is this just a science fiction story? Have you watched a dozen people install Windows on a dozen different machines?

The reason people sorta know Windows is because they've already used it, not because it is good. And if you don't give them something straightforward like MATE or Cinnamon as a Linux desktop, you might as well compare it to new Vista users, not Win11 users.

You don't have to convince me that Gnome is bad. But everything else now pretty much follows the WinXP paradigm that we're all used to.

I wouldn't compare the installation process since most people can't install Windows, but Linux does have an astounding gap in basic usability.

Every time I see a gnome app without a menubar I can't help but feel like Linux shoots itself in the foot just because Windows has two feet.

> When I upgraded to 7 I tried Linux

Most Linux distros have come a long way in the last decade and a half. Windows is worse, yes, but Linux is also better.

Plenty of frustrations pass along to me, but I am sure that the developers maintaining the software are also putting in a massive shift to make it all keep working. These companies are often quite small, or small underfunded teams within larger organisations, and I believe that they are doing a fantastic job working with what they have.

New features are few and far between, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing a good job. The current state of the industry is not a reflection of the developers working on it today, it's a decades long legacy.

I work primarily with GT3 teams across the highest level championships (WEC, IMSA, DTM, GTWC, ALMS), with a variety of manufacturers.

With a small team of software engineers and data scientists, I'm building a cloud based motorsports data analysis platform which eliminates the friction involved in handling motorsports data and the differences between different manufacturers' software systems, and quickly gives drivers & coaches insights on how to improve their driving. So this involves getting into the weeds of a lot of this legacy software.

There are a few teams I work more closely with where I've set up their entire trackside network/tech stack, although nowadays I'm more focused on the software. Over the years I've done a bit of everything at the track, up to and including physically laying cables in a bare garage or setting up the systems on the car, although I don't do anything related to vehicle dynamics.

Yes, I could probably run Win7

Thank you. I haven't tried this. I'll look into it.

I imagine youtube has the same automated system comply with eu, but the videos linked in the reddit post mention how quickly the appeals were denied, so accessing and contesting decisions alone doesn’t fix the automated system problem.

As a lifelong Mac user, I'm mildly tempted to do something like this in SteamOS, but with limited real estate: two panels feels like potentially wasting pixels, and the bottom edge is probably easier to reach on a touchscreen gaming handheld. I'll do some tweaking, but the ultimate UX has to feel right on this device, not just familiar to what I use elsewhere. Plus, I mostly use Desktop Mode for Chrome, which doesn't really use the menu bar.

But I appreciate the share!

Obviously missing things:

1. Needs to fix keybindings, including setting readline shortcuts across all gui textfields. May be effectively impossible with so many gui toolkits floating around. 2. Needs a gui to manage configuration of startup items, login items. 3. Portable application distribution rather than futzing with installing a third party package source (may be effectively impossible for gui apps). 4. Cleaner systemd configuration tooling and especially documentation, even if it can't be expressed via a gui. 5. Cleaner process management. 6. Cleaner user management via GUI.

The look and feel mostly doesn't matter tbh; you'll just end up with something that looks like macos but still mostly functions like windows but without consistent keybindings or behavior or system management.

if only WSL existed ...

I like to think ActivityPub is a good candidate.

Seems very plausible. Still, you wonder why it got flagged.

I think the challenge with 10 IoT LTSC isn't going to be the OS itself, but the software running on it. Lots of software uses chromium embedded, and in the case of win7 the day that extended support (+3 years) ended CEF also dropped support and required features only found on more recent windows releases, then as other software updated their CEF dependency they also dropped win7 support. It might not be a major thing, but there is a slow erosion that goes beyond whether the OS gets patches. If nothing else, if it's a machine that uses software that goes online it's a notice that you should investigate moving to something else eventually.

Win10 IoT LTSC does not cover all use cases though.

When it comes to gaming, for example Windows Mixed Reality is not included and cannot be installed afterwards (but then again, Microsoft dropped it from Windows 11 too, so no loss there).

Only way to keep it is staying with consumer Windows 10 or use 3rd party software like Oasis.

In Europe it's free although you have to log in with a Microsoft account for... reasons.

Presumably even if you pay you still need to log in with an account so they can verify the update licence is actually bound to your account?

> VM for things that NEED to be windows.

The big two that spring to mind are online games and Adobe softwares. I don't think a VM can usually meet the performance needed for either.

I do wish more artists would take a chance on open source softwares, but most of the ones I know are still insistent that nothing can ever come close to Adobe. But that's a rant for another time.

I stayed on Win7 until December 2023, until there was some exploit that was attackable by just viewing an image, so just browsing the web would've made it vulnerable (I believe in the WebP format).

Although it seems there are people still Frankensteining Win7, and even patching DLLs to make the newest browsers/apps still run on it.

Famously MS Teams was really screwed up, but I had to use it for work..

Browsers are the problem.

Firefox outright refuses to install on older Windows versions for a couple of years now. Very lazy and negligent move on Mozilla's part.

OK, they aren't lying. They're just saying untruthful things to support their cause.

Linux is not a 100% replacement for Windows, and the reverse is equally true. LibreOffice is not MS Office except for being open-source. Your pocket tool is not functionally equivalent to a full toolbox. A turducken is not a pheasant. Etc.

no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.

shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?

Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.

You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.

You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.

I've only ever used windows. Recently got a mac mini so I could compile for iOS. I'm debating embracing the entire Apple ecosystem given I use iPhone. Not a huge fan of iCloud's pricing though. Curious what issues you ran into with your macs/Apple experience?

You can use mac, ipad and iphone without apple account at all. You can use app store without logging to icloud. You can install apps without app store. There is no nagging to use icloud after initial setup. There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself. Apple does not sell user data.

it might work well today for m1/m2 but the writting is on the wall for linux in newer macs.

asahi development slowed down and is getting further away as apple releases new malcs yearly.

i don't think this is a good bet for those who want to use linux.

The later Intel Macs with T1/T2 chip also come with a number of caveats on Linux. Don't expect those to work out of the box with standard Linux distros.