Nope. Most (especially smartly programmed mods) don't care as long as the file structure is right. For example, I'm running the Caveman2Cosmos mod for Civ IV. And aside from that mod pushing the Gambryo engine past a sensible limit, it does run entirely.

Does that depend on the browser?

Because at least I have noticed that for me in Chrome/Chromium the Youtube links autoplay, while with Firefox they don't but instead I have to click the play button on top of the video?

Or is that related to me saving cookies etc. in Chromium, but not in Firefox?

I think it's because newer versions of Firefox have started to block autoplay (which, IMO, shouldn't have been a thing in the first place).

You are implying that Linux requires more tinkering and technical skill, this is generally not true. Someone with almost no technical skill can still use many distro's of Linux without problem. Note it depends on the distro.

In Firefox you can disable auto-play (in my version under Privacy & Security -> Permissions -> Autoplay). But I'm not sure what the current default is.

Using Linux, sure, that's pretty straightforward these days if you just want to browse and use LibreOffice. But fixing things in Linux when they go south? That's a different story. I know people that would walk out of the room at the very sight of a terminal. Editing a config file would appear something completely unreasonable to them.

Ease of usage, ease of adaptability ... just to name two for starters.
For most people, who aren't nerds it is a steep learning curve. Hell, I am 50% nerd, and I still find it a tough task at times.

That said, my previous post qualified everything ... depends on where you are coming from and where you want or need to go.

Technically speaking, Linux might be superior to Windows, which would make it great to use if we were all appropriately trained robots. However, coming at it from the perspective of being human, you have to take human considerations into account.

While many Windows programs work in Wine, not all do and not all do it well.
And even though many Linux fans say there is a Linux version for every Windows program, my experience is that is far form the truth. Windows has far more apps available than Linux, and I still find I need to create my own at times.

And then there are drivers for hardware etc.

Many developers of hardware and software completely ignore supporting Linux. That means you have to seek out non standard solutions, which requires a good amount of savvy and effort ... most people are not up for that and don't want to be, they just want things to work.

So like I qualified earlier, whether they are the same, or go one step further and say is Linux better, is purely subjective, taking all things into consideration ... not just some.

I doubt that. This is stuff you can easily come up with yourself, but choose not to like so many religious zealots.

I guess but on the other hand if Windows goes south, you're just screwed. Well I suppose you could pay for some fancy expensive technical support from MS. On the other hand Linux has IRC chat rooms and forums where you can get help for free, as well as online guides that will tell you exactly what to enter into a terminal. So having options verses not having any options when things go wrong, Linux wins.(aside from erasing and reinstalling, but that's the same with both)

Also Linux is very stable, definitely way more stable than older versions of Windows. Not sure how Linux compares to Windows 10 in stability, but you won't typically have things go south, like almost ever. Well as like as you aren't using something like the distro Arch-Linux, but then if you're choosing to use Arch-Linux, that's just the deal, bleeding edge for less stability, use a distro meant for newbies then.

I'm trying to think about a similar issue in Windows and Linux, and how one would have to try to fix it... My hunch tells me that quite often the case in Windows is "can't be fixed" or "edit registry" or "you have to go to the command prompt or PowerShell anyway", but then the examples that pop into my mind are more about administering Linux and Windows servers, rather than what a normal desktop home user would have to do.

However, following online instructions where you give commands in the terminal/command prompt are much easier to follow than instructions which tell graphically "go to control panel, double-click that icon, select that tab, click that button" etc. With terminal examples, it is quite often just about copy&pasting all the commands from the instructions to your terminal, and you are done.

Graphical interfaces don't always make administering a system easier, but sometimes harder when you have to know where in the depths of the GUI some option is found (and this is even worse in Windows 10 as the options may be dispersed between the legacy Win32 user-interface, and the new simpler interface; for instance power and firewall settings), and then it presents you a couple dozen different checkboxes etc. That is not necessarily easier than using a text editor to edit some config file, where there is an explaining long comment over each and every option.

For instance, I am currently configuring to two of our client's servers "postfix" so that they can send some alert and info emails from those servers to users, and it started by me merely googling "centos 7 postfix installation", and I got right into detailed instructions how to install and configure postfix. Or earlier, I needed to set up ftp server on a Linux machine, and even a monkey could follow the instructions on how to set up e.g. vsftp. I didn't find it more challenging that when we set up a similar small-time ftp server program on Windows (on Windows it was more about finding "what would be a good free FTP server program to install that doesn't have nagware, adware or malware" and how to configure it).

In my experience, it is usually merely about googling "linux <insert your distro here> <hardware unit> drivers", and you usually end up into detailed instructions how to get the piece of hardware to work.

Also, when it comes to older hardware, the tables tend to turn so that there is no support at all anymore in modern Windows 10 (the hardware manufacturer hasn't provided drivers for the hardware for years and is not providing ones for Windows 10 either, and neither does Microsoft), while that same piece of hardware works just fine, usually out of the box, with pretty much any popular Linux distro because someone somewhere (could be even the original HW manufacturer) had made open source drivers which still are included with Linux distributions.

It is just my experience that older hardware tends to preserve support in recent Linux releases, than recent Windows releases. When I've tried to install e.g. Windows 7 or 10 on older PCs in the past, two symptoms have quite often been that the wifi adapter and audio do not work, as there were no suitable drivers included with the Windows release, and then I need to first find out what audio chip and wifi adapter I have in my PC, and google for suitable drivers for them.

While with Linux, usually wifi and audio just work right out of the box, like recently when I installed Q4OS Linux on a 15 years old Dell Latitude D610 laptop.

You don't have to convince me of the technical superiority of Linux - I'm with you on this one. That was not what I was even attempting to debate.

My point is that some people just don't want to bother with anything that they perceive as even remotely technical, meaning if they can't "click their way out of it", then it's a big no-no. You can't possibly argue Linux is better for those people, because it's simply not meant for them.

If you have to consider a scenario, just think what disabling a device would mean for Windows vs Linux. Does clicking on Disable in Device Manager not sound simpler than messing with udev rules or module blacklisting to you? Perhaps you'd say it's not that complicated after all - and I'd agree with you. But you have to understand that for some people this amounts to (at least in perception) taking a few steps vs climbing a mountain.

P.S.: I guess I also have to mention the following, since it might not be all that obvious, but most people mean "Is Linux just as good as Windows if I were to use it?" when they ask these questions. They don't mean to inquire about how OSes are designed or their technical prowess, but rather about usability and perceived user experience. Therefore you can't take the human factor out of the equation when answering it, because that is essentially a limiting factor sometimes.

Neither was I. I was specifically arguing the point that for Linux you'd need to be a "nerd" or that administering a Linux system is harder and more involved than administering Windows.

In quite many cases, I've found the opposite to be true. Quite often even at my work, I have to ask my colleague (who is more about Windows server administration than me) "Ok, so where the heck do I find this option in Windows, or is there such an option at all?". And then I usually get some quite complicated instructions on where to go in the Windows user interface to find that option, in fact usually we need to open a Skype share screen session so he can instruct me specifically where to go and what to choose because even he doesn't necessarily remember it by heart, and it may partly depend on the Windows version as well (as the user interface has changed).

With Linux, the same instructions could be e.g. "copy&paste this line into /etc/fstab and save it, and then give the command "sudo mount a", and you are done.".

Some recent example of that that I remember was when he was instructing me what kind of Windows user we must add, with what kind of privileges and user group memberships, to a Windows server so that we could monitor that system. The instructions were quite convoluted and meant visiting two or three different places, all the relevant options were not in one place. I think we spent at least 30 minutes inspecting and configuring it together, over Skype.

Adding a similar user in Linux is about copy&pasting a couple of commands in the terminal. Takes less than a minute to instruct someone on that over phone.

EDIT: Since I like anecdotal evidence, here is another one:

The machine (be it your workstation or a server) is running out of hard drive space, and you want to see what is eating so much space.

In Windows: With basic Windows tools, it is just too time consuming, you'd have to go through each and every folder from the root, right click and select properties for each separately, then do the same for each subfolder...

So the better way in Windows is that you try to google how to check something like that, and then hopefully you see suggestions to using a third-party utility SpaceSniffer, installing it into your system and running it as an administrator. It gives you a graphical presentation what are the big files on your system, but depeding how big (how many subfolders, files etc. your system has), it can became quite hard to look at that picture it is constructing, and you have to wait quite a long time for it to complete.

In Linux:

cd /
sudo ls -lh
sudo du -hs *
cd <the directory that seemed to contain quite a lot data>
sudo ls -lh
sudo du -hs *

Repeat as many times as necessary, until you find the culprit(s). This is how I recently found how some log file had grown to 64 GB in size on some Linux docker system, and was the reason it had went into an inert state due to low amount of free space. (I am sure it would be trivial to even write a small bash script to go through each and every file in your filesystem, and list them in size order; but above is what I'd suggest for someone to try over phone.).

EDIT2: Well, since this started bugging me, I googled for it and maybe this one command is all that is needed, in order to list all files in your system, in order of their size:

sudo ls -laShR / | more

(sorry I didn't get to test that right now, as at this very moment I am indeed on my Windows PC :)).

In Windows in these kind of cases your best hope is that someone, somewhere, has written a separate (graphical) utility specifically for that task. If not, you are screwed.

In Linux it is more probable that some existing command/tool, that is already in your system, can be used for the task.

In my experience, people overcome such fears by doing it once successfully, and then be like "Well, that wasn't so hard as I feared...".

Lots of this has certainly changed thanks to Google. Now you don't have to know things by heart and experience, or figure it out by yourself. Nowadays you just use the right search keywords in Google, and follow instructions. And my claim is that Linux terminal instructions are often quite much easier to follow, than Windows GUI instructions. The latter usually means a long web page full of pictures of which menu to choose etc., or even a long Youtube video.

Being a "computer wizard" nowadays means that you have basic knowledge of the system, and are good at knowing the right search keywords in google. Very rarely people fight with OS issues that someone else hasn't already fought, even years before.

If the person hasn't used Device Manager before, then I am not convinced they will find the instructions on Windows easier. (Also I am not sure how often a typical user even needs to disable a device... I don't recall if I've ever done that in Windows (or Linux for that matter). Maybe once in Windows, when there was some odd audio pause/lag issue for me in Windows gaming, and googling a long time for it, some suggestions mentioned that there may be too many overlapping audio drivers installed in the Windows system, for reasons unknown; so I followed the instructions how to remove the additional "audio devices").

Sure, I can also relate to that. In general I'm glad whenever I can dodge Windows Server admin stuff, because I find in unnecessarily tedious when compared to Linux. But we never were discussing administration here, rather just regular desktop usage.

So you only know reasonable people that are not at all stubborn and stuck in their ways. Must be nice :P.

I feel at this point we're arguing about a person's willingness to try out new things and pick up on technical stuff, so I'll leave it at that.

I feel there is a fine line administering your workstation, and a (small-time) server. The searching process for relevant information feels the same for me, when I am trying to find out how to solve some problem, or achieve some goal, either with my home PC, or a server.

Sure there are things you are less necessarily to need on your home PC, e.g. I haven't configured my home Linux PCs to use LVM with their filesystems because I don't really ever need to expand the filesystems by adding more (virtual) hard drives to the system on the fly etc.

Then again, on servers I don't really ever need to care about driver support for some piece of hardware etc., especially when I am administering virtual machines or docker containers or whatever... So yes there is some difference of course.

While I fully appreciate that Linux distros have certainly gotten better over the years, especially for older hardware, which was kind of always the case to a high degree, all of what I wrote still stands. And sure, I can agree that you might be fairly lucky and never find Linux wanting.

If Linux is as good as some claim though, I would have permanently moved to it myself years ago. I have no love for Microsoft and various versions of Windows have caused me plenty of stress at times over the years. I am wedded to Windows out of reality not marital bliss.

My chosen coding language, by far is AutoIt. Nothing even comes close to it in my experience for my personal use and requirements. That's not to say other programming languages aren't better in various ways, more powerful etc, but when it comes to my brain and how I think, AutoIt is a great match ... I've never been or wanted to be a real nerd.

AutoIt, except in simplest case scenarios in Wine, does not work well on Linux. So clearly that has a big impact on my sticking to Windows. So like I said earlier, it is needs must and subjective which OS is better for a person.

Many of the programs I end up creating, have alternatives out there, but clearly like Galaxy, I did not find them acceptable enough. And that is what it is all about when someone says Linux has a program to match every Windows one. No it doesn't, unless you are pretty tolerant and forgiving ... I'm obviously not. I want my programs to do what I think they should, not some proximity of that. I have a hard enough time finding Windows variants, which is why I often make my own, and Linux would be immeasurably worse with a much smaller field to choose from.

If someone's needs for an OS are pretty basic, then yes Linux could be just as good an option, maybe even better. But once you stray into being a power user, things change and unless you are starting out from scratch with computers, Linux is a steep learning curve in comparison to remaining with Windows and what you know. It is also harder to get help for Linux locally, which can make it tough for some who need other hands on the wheel, rather than do it themselves using online resources. Far more people (friends & relatives) are very conversant with Windows. In fact I know many more who are conversant with MAC than Linux.

P.S. For me, and I am sure it is the same for many, a change to Linux would mean giving up a lot of control, control that I personally have spent decades developing. I don't want to start over, even though I hate the MS monopoly. I've already lost a lot of my life to dealing with computer issues.