 don't think that it is wrong to say that I dislike Windows like I'm not a Windows fan I disparage Windows all the time and I know that there are Windows fanboys out there like there are people out there who legitimately likes the way Windows is and how it works and they wouldn't do without it they wouldn't even think of switching to Linux for obvious reasons those people probably don't watch this channel I mean Linux is right in the name but for everyone else the people who have switched to Linux people who are maybe considering switching to Linux and those Linux fanboys among us who absolutely wouldn't hear of ever using Windows there are a few things and I know that this is a bit of blasphemy to say that Linux could actually learn from Microsoft Windows and that's what we're going to talk about today I have five things that Linux could learn from Windows and honestly these are things that have been around for a long time there's nothing new here but there are definitely things that Windows does better so that's what we're going to talk about today let's go ahead and jump in the first one is something that people who are in the Linux community have been talking about for literal decades and that is the Linux should come installed on more hardware this is the number one thing that is preventing Linux from being used by more people most people have never installed an operating system in their entire lives they never will and there's nothing wrong with that obviously because for the most part it's a technical process and most people just when something goes wrong either have someone else fix it or they go buy a new laptop or desktop or whatever that's just the way things are now in ideal world we would have more people fixing stuff when stuff goes wrong and we wouldn't have all this e-waste and all this stuff but we're not in that world for the most part when things go wrong and things break people go out and just buy a new computer and unfortunately when you go into Best Buy or whatever you can really only ever find a Windows PC in there now this is not so true anymore because there are Chromebooks alongside those windows and those have become very popular but for the most part Windows is still the thing that you can buy and the biggest thing here is that people don't go into Best Buy saying yeah I'm going to buy a Windows computer they're just going to say that laptop costs $300 it's good enough for me I'm going to buy it they don't care if it has Windows or Chrome OS or whatever on it that's just they're looking at the price does it do the things that I need to do and then they pay for it well they pay for it after they get harangued into buying a insurance plan for it but then they buy it and they take it home they use it for two or three years and they repeat the process that's how they work if Linux was on more hardware and was available to be purchased at places like Best Buy and Amazon and whatever Linux would be more popular because most people could still do the stuff that they normally do on Linux and they probably wouldn't even know that they were using Linux now it could be argued that we don't even want that to happen because those people aren't really truly Linux users or at least some people wouldn't consider them Linux users they're citizens that just kind of float through the technological side of life without a care in the world and never really care what they're using and that really kind of goes against what it means to be a Linux user and that you know you want to have participation and you want to get involved and all this stuff but whichever way you look at it Linux would definitely be more popular if it came installed on more hardware and was available to buy in more places the second one on the list is that sometimes too much choice is a bad thing so one thing that is that Windows is notorious for is basically telling the user exactly how they should use their computer for the most part if you want to have a start menu on your system and you have to have one you can either have it in the middle or you can have it on the side if you're using Windows 11 and we can talk tell we're blue in the face about how stupid it is that you have to pay Microsoft money in order to move it to the side but that's not really the point of the thing is that Microsoft has very much perfected the idea that too much choice is definitely bad they make decisions for their users and sometimes those decisions are anti competitive and horrible but also it has the benefit of preventing users from having too much choice which can cause them to never make a choice at all so when someone decides they're going to switch to Linux the first thing that they're going to do is they're going to get on Google and I guarantee it's going to be Google and they're going to search for best Linux distro for beginners and they're going to find approximately 10 articles all of them saying these are the best Linux distros for beginners and they're all going to have the same distros on them for the most part they're going to have a boon too they're going to have Linux Mint they're going to have Manjaro it really doesn't matter what order they have them in those are going to be the suggestions from those articles and some of those articles they're fine some of the articles they're absolutely horrible and they start talking about terminals and all this stuff that new users really don't need to know and some of them just have blatantly false things in them so those have their own problems but the point is is that those choices are things that they've never experienced before on Windows when you choose Windows you're choosing Windows that's all you get you may choose between Windows 10 and Windows 11 but even then you're probably not making that choice you're going to do whatever comes with your hardware when you go into Linux you have the selection of you know 30 different distros plus how many ever you know sub tier distros there are you know hundreds and you're expected to make an informed decision on which one's best usually based on the suggestions and advice of other people who might not necessarily even know what they're talking about so a lot of those articles are being written by freelance writers who maybe have done some research but probably not they're probably getting paid a penny a word and they don't really care how accurate they are they're just trying to get to their word count and then move on to the next client so that information may or may not be the best thing to make the choice and that makes the whole thing you know really hard now i'm not saying that Linux should become close source or should start ensuring that their bars are on the same spot all the time and can't move that'd be dumb and that'd go against Linux what i'm more saying is that sometimes too many distros is a bad thing so i can also understand the argument of having so many distros is kind of the linux way like because it's open source and people can kind of create their own distros to suit their own purposes that's kind of the way linux is supposed to work and it's for the most part a good thing but the best thing we could do to foster linux adoption other than putting it on more hardware and even that plays into this somehow is to choose a distro that is absolutely the best for new users as a community we should all get together and say hey that one there is the one that we're going to promote for new users we're not going to get rid of all the rest of them but this is the one that's going to get the most attention the most whatever and it's just going to be something that we kind of all agree on now this is never ever ever going to happen the linux community doesn't agree on anything other than that windows is bad and even then there is a subsection of the linux community that thinks windows is just fine they just happen to like windows and that's fine and so even on that one key point we can't agree so the second one's never going to happen but the idea of having one distribution that is kind of promoted amongst above all others for new users is something that would definitely help because it would kind of tone down the harshness of the number of choices if that makes sense the next one is more technological in that it is more about how linux functions so this does exist in some cases but it's not something that is widespread and what i'm talking about here is the ability to reinstall your distribution or your operating system without having to do anything else so one of the things that windows does really well is that if something goes wrong which it often does you can go into the settings and click reset to factory settings or reinstall windows whatever those options happen to be you can go into the settings and do those things it will do some stuff there in the operating system then it will reboot it will format your drives reinstall windows on top of it usually with all the bloatware that came with it to begin with but the point is is that it is very easy for a windows user to go back to those factory settings it's very easy for them to nuke and pave without having to download an iso without having to burn it to a disk without having to deal with uefi without having to deal with boot menus all the stuff that they would normally have to do if you're on linux so some kind of option inside of linux that is standard and across distros that allows you to say hey my computer has gone wrong i need to reset it to whatever it was to begin with and go on from there that would be a great thing for linux and it would help not only new users but everybody else too because a lot of people when something goes wrong and they cannot fix it they don't really want to get rid of their distribution they just want to work against so if there was an option just to say hey reset this maybe even working with something like butterfly snapshots something that is very user friendly we could do this to the point where they just press a button it goes back to the way it was 10 minutes ago or it goes back to factory resets whatever happens to be that'd be great thing for pretty much everybody now i understand like I said that this exists so there are manufacturers and distro developers out there that do have an option like this and there also exist tools things like timeshift and zapper or zipper whatever hell it's called uh that will allow you to interact with butterfests snapshots and allow you to roll back things but none of them at least in terms of the butterfests stuff are really user friendly they're not new user friendly at least is what i should say so what i'm talking about here is something that is absolutely something that pretty much anybody could do okay so the fourth one on the list is probably the most controversial of all of these and i know i'm going to get laughed out of the room when i say this but linux needs a blue screen of death let me hear you laugh i know we all laugh at the blue screen of death because of course windows has the blue screen of death all the time and the thing is is that when windows crashes and you see that blue screen of death it's easy to point it then like ha ha ha windows crashed again but the thing is is that that's a graceful way for something to crash now it doesn't have to be blue but linux needs something like this where when something goes wrong like catastrophically wrong we need something that says hey something went catastrophically wrong we're going to reboot your system to say things or whatever it's going to say i mean whatever it needs to say right maybe it has an error code or some kind of error reporting mechanism whatever you know needs to happen because everyone who has worked on linux or used linux for a long time knows that when linux fails like when something goes absolutely devastatingly wrong usually it does one of three things one it freezes completely okay so your windows won't move your mouse won't move or maybe your mouse does move but the windows didn't move some kind of situation like that where the screens are just frozen the other situation is that you are presented with a black screen with a blinking underscore in the top left corner we've all seen it and it happens from time to time and there's absolutely no information there over what went wrong and you're just expected to either troubleshoot from there or nuke and pay the other one that happens often is that you get to a tty or something and you can't log in or you are presented with a situation where it won't even get into grub or get into the boot loader whatever you happen to be running those are usually the three things that happen there's obviously exceptions where other things happen but none of those things are graceful way to ways to fail when your operating system fails you should have some kind of graceful way to do so and by graceful i mean a screen of some sort that comes up that says hey something went wrong even if it doesn't tell you what went wrong something went wrong we're going to reboot your computer or whatever here's a way to either report the problem or some steps you might take in order to troubleshoot that's basically what the blue screen of death is now the thing is is on linux this one happened very often like we wouldn't it wouldn't become a meme on linux if something happened it would be very very rare and that's the way things usually happen some people may have never experienced any of those three ways of failure that i've had talked about but the thing is is that despite how where it is we should still have something there that kind of you know provides a buffer between the absolute horror of booting up your computer and just seeing a black screen and you know what windows does which is to hold your hand all the way through so i really do think that there needs to be some kind of graceful way to fail now i know that there are some like desktop environments to have this i'm pretty sure genome has something like this but this should be something that linux has that is kind of more widespread across distributions if it fails if there's a kernel panic or whatever something pops up says hey something went wrong we're going to do this and that's the way it probably should be okay so the last one on the list is an oldie but a goodie and i'm going to say this because despite the fact that linux has gotten way better at hardware support over the last 10 15 years there are still areas where it's a definite problem and it's definitely area where windows does things a lot better so when you boot up into a laptop chances are the driver for your wi-fi card is going to be there it's going to work just fine you don't have to worry about it on linux that's still an issue if you buy a third party wi-fi card for your desktop there's a good chance you're not going to get to work because the drivers just don't exist and there aren't good open source alternatives for those drivers so the chances of you actually getting that to run on your system are pretty low and it's not just wi-fi there's things like bluetooth cards there's things like capture cards all this stuff and a lot of this stuff is very niche for the most part wi-fi cards that are built in probably are going to work but there are still some that are built in that don't work so this idea that you can just plug something in and it's guaranteed to work is something that you can really only experience on windows and it's definitely something that linux still needs to work on because we're still in a situation where there are some pieces of hardware that just don't work now i can understand that this takes a lot of effort and we don't have a lot of cooperation from the corporations that makes the hardware so this is a it's something that we're always chasing and never really going to catch up with because there's always going to be new hardware and there's only so many people and developers in the open source community to actually fix this problem so it's not something that we're ever going to completely solve and it has definitely gotten way way better in the last 10 or 15 years but it's definitely something that we could work towards being a little bit better on so those are the things that linux could learn from windows and i think that they're for the most part pretty reasonable i don't think that there's anything there that is you know out of the realm of possibility when it comes to something that we could do that would make linux just a little bit better there's nothing there that is going to really take away the freedom that we really love from linux now the only one there that is possible that would take freedoms away would be the second one where we talked about too much choice being a bad thing and the thing is like i said during that portion of the video is that we're never going to make that selection of just one distro and i don't even think that we would want to like despite how beneficial it would be for there to be like a a champion distro where everyone kind of disagrees that this is the one that new users should use and then they can go explore after that i don't think that even if we agreed on the benefits of that that we'd be able to make those benefits kind of realized if that makes sense it's one of those things that it's just it sounds like a good idea in my head but it's maybe not such a good idea in practice but it's one of those things where it you can see how easy it is to be overwhelmed when you come into the linux community over how much choice there actually is and while choice is definitely a good thing for the linux nerd amongst us for the new user it may be not so much be a good thing so that is it for this video if you have comments on this stuff which i'm sure given the title that i'm going to choose for this thing i'm going to hear it from a lot of people so comments in 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