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The timing’s interesting: as Windows 10 approaches end-of-life in 2025, and when users are being nudged towards a cloud-first model, this week's APC’s saying: maybe don’t. Maybe go Linux.This isn’t a niche Linux mag. It’s a mainstream Australian tech publication telling average users that Linux is now the smarter choice. That’s a shift. Feels like we’ve gone full circle: the same headlines from 2005, but this time it’s not about hope. It’s about practicality. Bloat, telemetry, UI friction maybe Linux’s time on the desktop really has arrived.
Windows 7 was a beautifully simple yet versatile OS capable of running on some really weak hardware with little overhead. Windows 11 by comparison is a bloated monster that demands too many resources for mandatory background processes and wants to get its tentacles into every facet of your privacy.
Gaming, simple office tasks, and web browsing work really well in Linux for the common layman. The next big hurdle is to offer some more niche programs that are easy to work with.
I spent my whole weekend trying and failing to set up ZoneMinder, Motion, Shinobi, then finally ContaCam through WINE in an effort to make a simple air gapped security camera system in Linux Mint installed on a 13 year old laptop. I struggled through countless command lines trying very hard to understand what each one does, Time shifted a dozen times through installation failures, and I still couldn't get it done. The best I could do was unintentionally turn on my webcam after somehow managing to install Motion without then being able to access its functionality through a solely console based interface.
I wanted to gift this laptop to my tech illiterate mom and give her peace of mind that no one was sneaking around in front of her house. Linux failed me on this if I couldn't even set up the software on my own, let alone my mom if she'd have to learn how to use a terminal to make it work. I wanted it to work so bad but the learning curve and difficulty to figure out why a PPA command failed after following an old and likely out of date guide had no workaround since support is so scarce. Old YouTube video guides with a couple hundred views offered no hints when a line I followed verbatim didn't work in my setup. As midnight was fast approaching I finally threw in the towel and set up Windows 7 with ContaCam running in less than 2 hours.
Devs for Linux need to do better. If they want their OS of choice to get more mainstream then they need to develop for more mainstream users. A lot of these nittty gritty setup configurations need to be moved to the background with greater reliability and cross distro functionality. I get that there are things like Software Center that offer flatpaks have at least some ease of use when it comes to installing software, but the point is lost when some of that software doesn't actually run or even appear anywhere after installing, like ZoneMinder.
I remember the same kind of discourse for each and every new version of Windows. But hey, if it can help switching to Linux I won't complain.
I don't. XP was great, Vista sucked, 7 was great, 8 sucked, 10 was okay and 11 sucks.
But honestly where I live tech magazines try to push Linux every now and often. Which, paradoxically, alienates people from it further connecting it to "computer people".