In late 2025, there are plenty of alternatives:
Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD DragonflyBSD Haiku Plan9 Redox ReactOS Debian Gnu/Hurd FreeDOS Genode SculptOS
And probably some others I haven't heard of. Using Windows in 2025 AND complaining about it is complaining about a self inflicted wound.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).
Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.
No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
Completely agree. Modern computers are basically just web terminals for most people, so a basic Linux distro + browser is all they need.
Windows is actually terrible for non-technical users now. The constant pop-ups, nagging messages, and decision prompts create genuine anxiety. People don't know what they're clicking on half the time. Yet somehow most technical people I talk to haven't caught on to this.
Look at what younger generations are actually using: Chromebooks in schools, Google Drive instead of Microsoft Office. Even people who legitimately need Office aren't on Windows anymore, they're on Macbooks. That's the case at my company anyway.
At this point Windows is really just gamers, engineers who need CAD, and office workers stuck on it from inertia. There's nothing inherently attracting new users to the platform anymore. I honestly don't know who their primary audience even is at this point.
Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook? Also Windows is increasing in its share again. Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not? They're combining it with Android, which honestly seems like a decent bet for what Chromebooks are meant to be. The end result will have a different name, but it will still be a cheap laptop to do school work and simple computing, and that isn't a Windows machine.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Is it? And is that pie even getting any bigger?
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was
> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.
Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.
The more likely option than any of these excellent free options is going to be MacOS… just because your average user with even semi-technical inclination does not want to use LibreOffice Present; they want PowerPoint.
I have just seen this first hand with my significant other: they are very technical and more than capable of it, but have zero interest in learning Linux and instead just bought a MacBook on Black Friday specials when their 5 year old HP laptop finally got too annoying to use.
Well, I didn't mention MacOS because it is not installable on the author's win10 computer.
Also, MacOs is as difficult to learn as Linux is for someone who never used it. Resistance to change exist in all directions.
Most people are fine with the web version of Powerpoint.
Haiku is very pleasing in an eyecandy sort of way, but that's sadly all it has going for it.
I personally wouldn't use it as a serious OS.
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.
Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.
I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".
I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
Having a job that requires Windows is not what I would call self-inflicted.
That is besides the point. In that case it is self-inflicted by the company choosing to depend on it.
Until recently (<10 years ago) Windows and native Windows apps (like Office) were the norm in most companies. Almost all employees knew how to use Windows. Re-training all was difficult. Now, with mostly web-apps for most non-IT employees it is a realistic change, but I am still not sure corporations will want to run without Active Directory and Crowdstrike.
True. It is a would inflicted by your employer in that case. Maybe you could find a different one that doesn’t inflict such wounds.
What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software.
I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.
I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
You are a digital serf, dependent on the good will and love of a lord that gives you access in exchange for a tax.
I really wish free(libre) tools existed that allowed you to do your work. Hopefully they will in the future, I am sure someone has tried/is trying to build them.
sounds like a bubble
The job should give you Windows Enterprise with the correct group policies that disable most of the enshittification. Otherwise it’s self-inflicted.
I think it would be less daunting for many if there were 1 or 2 popular alternatives to rally around. Including window managers / desktop environments. (Granted, it's nice they can all coexist peacefully.)
There are a handful of popular Linux distros. Ubuntu is probably the most beginner-friendly one with the most staying power; it's the easiest place to start if you have no other ideas/requirements.
The thing is, a healthy ecosystem thrives on diversity. Rallying behind one or two tends towards a monoculture.
I think Linux is the most popular of the alternatives listed.
Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit.
It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.
How do I download linux
Yep. Top search result was this, amusing: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install
But 2nd was this: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/
It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
As your first experience, I think Ubuntu is the easiest. Download it here:
https://ubuntu.com/desktop
Spring for a new hard drive, just in case you hate it with the fires of a thousand suns and need to go back. Then you just swap back to your old hard drive.
I can also recommend Kubuntu if the gnome UI of ubuntu seems too phone-like. If using a laptop where addinga 2nd drive may be too difficult, I have just shrunk the windows partition before running the ubuntu installer.
Looks like from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/archive/refs/heads/master.... but you could also try Ubuntu.
I have one machine that runs Windows (apart from one Windows 11 VM on my Mac laptop I use for work), all this nonsense has got me to install Fedora on a separate M2 drive on it, and I haven't booted up Windows in a few days now. Will be an interesting experiment, I've run it before but more for fun, but will try to go as full time on that computer as possible.
I literally only use Windows for games. And I guess now RealityScan which is gaming adjacent.
If I had the confidence that I could play a new release on Linux day 1 without trading an enormous amount of performance, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
Depending on your hardware and gaming needs, the current state of Linux gaming may already be enough.
I run Arch with an Nvidia GPU (which historically had poor Linux support compared to AMD), and I’ve been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.
There is one significant issue with Dx12 on nvidia, but even that has been root caused and should be fixed next year.
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.
Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.
Does TurboTax still distribute DVDs? I thought it was entirely online now.
The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue.
To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install.
[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...