It's gets easier and easier every year to want an alternative to Windows, but it remains impossible to actually switch, at least for me.
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Unpopular opinion but to stop Microsoft's shenanigans = legislation. Opt-in by default would be a good start. Transparency tools to show what's being exported to MS. How about stopping forced major updates too.
User needs protective legislation fast.
One thing I’ve noticed is remmina isn’t quite the same as mstsc windows Remote Desktop but I think it is high praise that I could even get to the point of someday expecting it…
The only reason I stuck with Windows on my desktop machine for so long was gaming, and the last time I tried switching over was 10 years ago. Spoiler: it was a shitshow.
This time, things are MUCH better! The Mate desktop environment is simple, stable, clean, does the job and gets out of your way (kinda reminds me of Windows 2000). Steam's Proton makes running games a breeze. All of my favorites just work. I could even run battle.net as a non-steam game, USING Steam's Proton!
And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I've never before seen such sorcery.
So bye bye Windows, except when I'm running one as a VM.
I don’t have a car and no idea which company’s earnings they think I care about. Nobody takes a step back and wonders whether it makes sense
Feels like a real design by committee decision
Shame that Microsoft haven't given Linux Office 365, because Microsoft ♥ Linux. Right?
Bluetooth connection to my headset sometimes causes the entire system to hard lock, requiring physical reset.
Sound sometimes goes static-y, have to reboot to fix.
I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a sound output device that I didn't want to use.
Tearing of full screen video, I don't even remember how I fixed it.
A notification about something called "snap store" keeps coming up and needs a command line fix to dismiss.
The built-in app store keeps notifying me about a firmware update for my wireless keyboard. I'm not interested, and there is no way to dismiss it.
Firefox on Linux has an obnoxious habit of refusing to open a new tab until I restart it for updates (that were installed automatically, not through the system updates app). Sure, I want my browser up-to-date, but this is not an issue on Windows where it will never force you to restart the application. I looked around why this is the way it is, and the answers were that it had to do with how Linux works.
And, yeah, games.
I use 10 now, as locked down and 'fixed' as I was able to make it (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).
The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I'm so in love with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize and program every part of my UI, allowing me to have something absolutely perfect and tailor made.
For my basic needs, I've found that the office web apps actually work much better than the classic ones. Outlook, in particular, is much snappier. I use it daily on Firefox on Linux for work, since they're married to MS.
So, as another poster said, my solution is to have two pcs. A laptop with Linux I use basically all the time, and a desktop with an actual GPU for when I want to play or mess around with my photography.
This arrangement works well enough, since for my everyday needs the iGPU is more than enough, and I would rather not lug around a 10-pound brick with a dedicated GPU. And, in my particular situation, it's actually cheaper since my desktop is a hand-me-down from work which only required a new GPU, which at the time was beefier and cheaper than what I could have had in a laptop.
When I click in the search box, it converts into a drop-down list of news headlines.
If I want news, I'll click on news. Don't force it on me : I avoid news normally, because I find it's almost all unpleasant click-bait. I do not appreciate being forced to look at it, even for a few moments.
I have a BT keyboard (keychron), mouse (mx master 3s) and two headphones. They've all always connected instantly under Linux.
The headsets can use LDAC and aptx HD, which are both unsupported under Windows but work perfectly under Linux.
The mouse has noticeable lag under Windows, while under Linux it's indistinguishable from its wireless (non-BT) dongle. Installing the Logitech app and drivers doesn't change anything.
The keyboard and headphones usually take a while to connect under windows.
Except for the mouse, I've had these same peripherals on multiple PCs, all with Intel wireless cards, and all have exhibited the same difference in behavior between Windows and Linux.
> I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a sound output device that I didn't want to use.
This is weird, I can disable any and all sound peripherals from the pulse audio control panel. I don't use ubuntu, though, so not sure what its default apps are.
The same thing happens in web development. The developers and designers of news sites don't want to create an unusable mess of ads and auto-playing videos, but the business development guys love that shit.
You need to do the same on Windows and MacOS. I remember finding the latter very confusing the first time I tried to play a movie with a projector connected and the lid closed. It would sleep, unless I first connected an external keyboard.
I have a Windows installation that I boot sometimes and pretty much every time I do something despicable happens, though I understand I am not the target audience.
- I don't game that much anymore, but yeah, I hear games are still far from 100% on Linux.
- There are various graphical issues linked to fractional scaling (I think), such as random lines appearing near the edges of windows or windows leaving behind lines when being dragged around, etc.
- My external monitor doesn't appear to be affected by energy management settings (dimming/sleeping after some time, etc.) whatsoever.
- There is no option to disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected.
- Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it (I wonder who came up with THAT genius bit of UX).
- A lot of things can still only be achieved via the terminal.
I'm curious (as a KDE user myself), why KDE and how do you know it's the one you want given it's not accessible? Why not any other desktop environment?
By the way, your testimony to the KDE team could matter!
I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.
Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's not your friend.
In view of this, it's hard to read this article as "why is Windows showing their stories and not mine?".
Under the hood there's price discrimination on the Hypervisor and other services that regular users wouldn't use, but there seems fundamentally to be no difference in the interface between the two versions of the OS.
I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive. So Microsoft doesn't have to care at all about "productivity", and is free to bombard users with all the crapware of the worlds as long as there's some remote way to disable it.
I immediately embarked on my search with safeties off - Noscript, Ublock, disabled
I surfed through various Indian websites - times of india, yellow journalism websites, local language tabloids, desi xxx sites - I expanded my search globally- dailymail, cnet, piratebay - my cpu fans whining in protest as i trawled through the darkest, most malware-infested, crypto-miner-laden, chumbox-ridden corners of the web. The average number of trackers was now in the triple digits but still i felt i could do better. That i had seen worse. Suddenly,it clicked. I could almost feel time stop and spacetime warp around me as my dsl connection struggled to load up tomshardware.com. Ding Ding, My quest had ended by a healthy margin.
So thanks for the coffee, tomshardware.com
Sorry to sound like the trope of an annoying mac fanboy, but Windows is grosser than ever, and I want nothing to do with it.
Genshin Impact and Fortnite are unusable.
Unreal Editor requires Windows too.
And I don't know how usable VR is on Windows.
Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that one that only works on Windows for some reason.
But at this point it's just a matter of time, I guess.
I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months later, I can say that it's been a bliss :)
PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it's hard to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...
The markup for Apple hardware is really not big at all. They just don't have a budget option. If you compare macbooks to really any competing device the prices are similar (and the competing device will be much worse). Same situation when comparing iPhone to flagship Android. In fact, new iPhones are often cheaper than new flagship Android phones.
There was once a time where what you said is true, where a truly great Windows laptop could be had for half the price or less than a mac, and a flagship Android phone could be had for half the price or less than an iPhone, but that was in the past. Now, there is almost price parity.
If not for GDPR, my email and phone would be still vacuumed up by every e-shop and sold in bulk to some shady data aggregator. If not for the upcoming USB-C charger law, Apple would be putting their Lightning holes in all devices. Sometimes the invisible hand of the market has to be forced I guess.
Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed, and hard to change. But it's better then the current state of things, where the users are constantly screwed with no viable alternative for their OS.
It feels like both of the major desktop/laptop operating systems have been on a downward spiral for a good long while. I'd left Windows about 15-20 years ago for Linux, and then made it to Mac — but to my surprise I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to be and definitely not stable.
That's what I feel now — which is least worse?
That is hard, because they're both pretty damn bad especially if you don't want to use an Apple account or Microsoft account.
Linux is least worst, but let's be clear that to say that you're already accepting terrible power management on a laptop and fun with audio visual things and having to hope your job doesn't require some piece of proprietary software.
Least worse if you do need proprietary software? It's all bad, may as well use Windows with a Mac wallpaper or vice versa just to signal general disdain at the hellscape we've collectively incentivised.
Currently the notification center on my mac has stories from USA Today and The Washington Post. It's not that different.
As someone who hasn't used Windows in more than 10 years the whole desktop is full of distractions popping up unasked. IMO it's horrible for a productive environment because it doesn't allow to focus properly
The other day I was frustrated with several Linux quirks my laptop was experiencing and decided to give Windows 11 + WSL2 a try.
The sheer amount of bloat, sneaky privacy settings, ads, clunky UI etc. literally make Windows unusable. I was willing to put up with the switch (leveraging WSL2), but the entire operating system feels like a browser with toolbars from the 2000s.
IMO the most important aspect of a desktop environment is that you never notice it. That's what I loved so much about Windows 2000 (and why I lamented every UI change they made since then).
The teenager me would have no problem, he had a (fairly) working Enlightenment config and tried an array of distros, and it was fun to tinker. But he had way, way more time, and didn't spend his own money on the gaming hardware.
If you go for a ThinkPad however there are usually no issues. Plus you can usually fix the power issues by just installing the right drivers or disable one or two well documented settings
Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. If it's shoveling annoying ads to users, that's its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of annoying ads. If you don't like the product your vendor has sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS that doesn't come from a company with a profit motive won't have this same problem.
But I've been using Linux desktops for years on my laptops and virtual desktops, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect before changing my PC over.
But for games I'm completely intolerant of annoyances, which is why I took so long with this step.
Therein lies the rub, or lies the lie to be exact, a 38-year old+ lie: Windows was never an operating system (neither is MacOS for that matter). The system worthy of that name, operating system, is only a type 1 hypervisor (such as Xen because open source), where you truly operate over the system(s): any issue with some weird quirk in a machine? nuke it from orbit and spin another one.
Your Adobe Photoshop application has nothing to do with your Fortnite game, and both of them have nothing to do with your browser and your propensity for tabloids: they should have never been and should never be on and under the same "operating system", perhaps not even on the same disk. Isn't it insane that we must sometime restart the operating system with all the apps because some single app crashed? How could this system design ever use the name "operating system"?
The only benefit of cohesion is the corporate benefit: the system, and hence you, your data, your consumption patterns, are easier to manage if they are under one "operating system". And you, the faceless, nameless, general you, because you don't actually care about your data, about your attention, and perhaps not even about your life, oppressed as you are into being choiceless, hence powerless, deserve "operating systems" such as Windows, MacOS, and companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and nowadays "Open"AI.
They're natively Linux machines to begin with. All the manufacturer-coded power management stuff is upstream in the mainline kernel already.
There's a reason numerous governments and industries have switched over. I suspect you are vastly overestimating the complexity and trouble you would face in switching.
I also have much, much less time than I did as a teenager, so I can only stomach console gaming at this point. Games need to Just Work.
One thing I vaguely remember is bluetooth being started with more options that you generally need. Can't remember what options I removed but using a more bare Bluetooth driver often fixes things.
You can control your sound output via alsa, usually a alsa control is shipped with Ubuntu.
Annoying you with snap is one of those typical Ubuntu things why people stopped recommending it.
So yeah, try using not Ubuntu
There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.
I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.
With my 7 year old GTX 1080 and Ubuntu/Steam Proton I can still play most games at very high settings (except raytracing stuff).
Unix was the first to start using 3 button mice as standard, almost a decade before they really showed up in Windows world, and paste on middle mouse click has always been the standard behaviour in the Unix world, so changing it now would be very weird for *nix users. Whether Linux should follow the common Unix defaults or Windows defaults for their UI/UX has been a long running debate in the community.
I would personally be really confused and annoyed if I sat down at a Linux machine and middle click didn't paste, because that is the behaviour I've been seeing for literally 25 years.
True journalism no longer exists and the reason is that nobody wants to get killed for uncovering the truth.
I was later to the Linux Desktop party, and it was the default ads, bloat, and telemetry included in a base Windows install that was the final nail in its coffin.
I still use Windows for work, but that's outside of my control.
Another vote for PopOS here as acknowledging nod to fxtentacle.
Giving maximal screen estate to whatever I focus on while being as distraction less as a WM just can be.
However anyway, glad you found something that works for you! That's what choice is for
However I understand if people don't like that, it's new and maybe won't last it sure is easier to stick to a taskbar, etc when you are used to it.
The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" has been a thing since at least the heyday of Slashdot, which would put it at 20-ish years.
Unless that was intended as a humorous joke? Your post, I mean - not the Year Of the Linux Desktop, :)
- `regedit`
- go to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft`
- add a key (folder) `Edge` (ignore the folder `MicrosoftEdge` if it exists)
- in `Edge` folder, add a `DWORD` with name `HubsSidebarEnabled` and a value of `0`.
- in Edge, go to `edge://policy` and click on `Reload Policies`
- it should list the policy and the 'Discover' button should disappearAs mentioned in the article, it can't get used to ads or tabloid news everywhere, it just feels wrong. I could spend some time removing them, but I'd rather not have to fight with Microsoft every time the product updates, I'd rather just avoid using it entirely. It is insane that you pay for a product, but is still served ads or tabloid news.
When I use debian for my server usage, I have most of the essential tools available, but when I use windows I either have to install a whole bunch of tools, or make do with the lackluster experience. I dread having to fix a windows server installation.
MacOS as well feels overrated, the UX has gotten noticeably worse over the years, unnecessary notifications that doesn't go away themselves, lackluster window management out of the box. MacOS is best for me when it exposes its unix roots so I can just get to work, the native stuff feels half baked at best. It does feel fast at least (m1 is a beast, by far the best laptop I've ever owned)
Linux (Arch) feels like it puts the user in control, I've had less errors for my arch home-server (which does see quite a bit of traffic), it does have sharp edges but I always feel in control of what is going on, or at least have the tools to fix it.
The desktop side is not quite as reliable, I've had to tinker with the bluetooth settings more than I'd like, that and audio (which may be a kde issue). Steam has been great, and I rarely have to jump into windows anymore.
Linux (Debian) feels solid, it has been super reliable over the years.
I may have become too used to the Linux way, which is why I am shitting a bit on Windows and MacOS, and those product definitely aren't for me. So take my rant with a grain of salt.
The downsides I will acknowledge are the modal dialogues (which are worse on macos) and the fact that many system tasks require diving into the win32 api, although I've at least always found that to be well documented.
At the time of 7, Linux desktop options were not great
Windows went downhill from 7. Although I still prefer it over macos.
I have high hopes for Asahi, which I'm hoping will save my despicable work macbook
This!
What keeps me working on Windows (besides the fact that I somehow have completely missed the in-OS ads) is the time it would take me to replace all the random little quality of life apps that I've gotten used to. I'm sure there's a great Linux clipboard manager that does everything Ditto does on Windows but I don't have to go and find it, get used to it, figure out all the quirks (and the things it lacks that Ditto provides, and all the things that it provides that Ditto lacks, etc, etc).
Click on open a new tab and tabloid news are shown below the shortcuts of often used domains / links. Same when swiping left on the start screen (don't know what that screen does as I never used it due to the SHOCKING content..)
There cannot be any good in this and it should stop. I see this as a notch to getting people accept more cookies etc so Google can present more relevant content (it's not like I browse any gossip page besides HN). But somehow I doubt that better content will be shown in those ad spaces if I allow for more cookies.
I still need to check whether all my favourite games are supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution. My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.
But I really think the time is right for something better. An OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn't make sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple's lunch. There's System76 of course, but they're small. I want something that's for everybody. A new standard to draw everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple and Microsoft.
At some point I saw something about the Kardashians from my taskbar! Wtf, I though that with all this analytics Windows would at least show me something about Cardasians.
I mean MS365 is nice, VSCode is nice, GitHub is nice... I gladly pay for all of it (not VSCode atm of course). But I really prefer them all from my clean KDE (or sometimes Gnome) environment. It's like Windows is the cheap part of the ecosystem, if you want to go full premium you replace that part of the chain with something else.
The risk is worth it for the life that LineageOS really breathes into an older device.
Been a Linux user for over 20 years, still use it for work, and yes Proton does look great, but I don't see using it for gaming anytime soon.
I am super annoyed about my Sony Android TV which for weeks shows me a huge "Audi" add that fills half the home screen. I am not going to buy that car ffs!
Often EU regulations, especially tech-related ones (e.g. the USB C one) come with baked in provisions for how it will be updated to stay relevant in the future.
The upcoming DMA and DSA will hopefully enable a lot more interoperability and interchangeable software and standards.
Microsoft's Windows bullshit (the EU already established they can't force you to use their browser, why are they allowed to do it once again) will need a heavy slap down too.
> Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don't see any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.
The only people who sneer generically at regulation are people who either misunderstanding or are just oblivious to how much their lives are shaped (in probably 90% of the cases, even in the US), for the better by existing regulations. One can argue on the merits of a specific proposal or law, but otherwise it's just absurdity like a house cat.
Get a cheap small box that can run Linux and slowly start to build the tool familiarity alongside your defaults.
That's pretty much how I did it. Went back to Windows less and less until it was only ever for Windows-only android flashing tools (which is about once every 6 months). Still annoys me how much space Windows takes up to dual-boot just for this use-case. Bloated PoS.
[0]: If you're going to do it. I'm not saying you need to do it, I'm not that guy.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/dnfdragora-missing-up...
You can check ProtonDB for compatibility. The information is valid even if you have the GOG version of the game. For games that are not on Steam there is WineDB but I find that the UI isn't as nice as ProtonDB.
Steam has a Linux launcher and let you install Windows binaries directly. For GOG or Epic games there is Heroic launcher which is very easy to use.
Don't overthink your distribution choice, just go for one of the major general purpose distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc) and you'll be fine no matter what you pick.
It also has a KDE version, which is similarly a fantastic GUI and actually influenced a lot of the design patterns people today associate as "windows-y" (I forgot where I read that one though, so I can't cite that particular tidbit)
Not that this takes away from your overall point.
That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.
I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.
The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint on the status of gaming on Linux
Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases - what's missing?
Others refuse to support Linux thinking it’ll bring more bug reports, but there was an interview in recent years where the game company realized the Linux community knew they could submit bug reports, they submitted good bug reports (that affected all platforms too), and didn’t see software as a black box for consumption but a community effort. They ended up praising the Linux community for their bug reports even if the number of reports were higher.
I rather spend time on getting some weird hardware to work (yes this is still occasionally a thing in Linux land), that getting my system "reasonably spyware free" (as we have no clue what actually happens since it's closed source).
What I mean is preparing a custom ISO for installation.
I realize that technically it should be possible: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
I have to handle relatives Windows machines quite often and have to reinstall Windows quite often.
I like how Rufus adds a default local user to standard Windows ISO. So something like this with more customization would be fantastic.
OSs are offers organizations, some may be friendlier than others. MS has shown not to care for your privacy the least bit. Apple at least tries to uphold the facade of respecting your privacy: so they probably will go to greater lengths.
Linux (+ desktop packages) otoh are closest to what I consider a does-not-skrew-me-over OS-friend. Al east they do not have a public history of sneaky deals with 3-letter agencies and/or a business model that involves me being the product.
Apparently it happened in July 2022.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/07/unreal-engine-5-editor...
These last few years have been moving way too fast, whew.
Thanks for telling me.
I had, in a sense, the opposite experience.
I was discussing in a social circle of mine the reasons why one should avoid as much as possible the upgrade to Windows 11... and I completely failed to persuade anybody.
Non-power users use a very limited subset of O/S functionalities (I'd say that as long as device and applicative support is sufficient, the O/S is essentially transparent to them), so, from their perspective, all those ideological and "weakly concrete" motivations are essentially pointless.
I definitely bothers me ideologically because this is a large scale covert assault (and it will have long term effects), but sadly, to non-power users, it's completely irrelevant.
Either way, it should be a configurable option, not hardcoded deep inside the bowels of the system, which appears to be the case as far as I have been able to determine.
However for years the main thing holding me back is the lack of a proper RDP alternative. And yes I've tried them all, nothing comes close to RDP on Windows.
I use it all the time to connect home from work, so I can separate work from personal stuff, as well as from my laptop when I'm away. I just have Firefox installed on my laptop, RDP takes care of the rest.
Also under the hood Windows is pretty good technology for the most part, letting this solid technology base being vandalized by anti-social middle management assholes is almost a criminal offense by whoever oversees this stuff (but I guess the fish rots from the head).
I have a subscription to GFN, not to play games not supported on Linux but to play on max specs without needing an expensive rig, and both Genshin Impact and Fortnite are supported there.
Anyway, it's never going to be a full drop-in replacement. Like you can't just replace your XBOX with a Playstation and play the same games. But still, Linux is a very valid option even for gaming.
I did manage to enable follow focus a while ago, but it didn't behave as I was used to (I don't remember the details), so I disabled it.
I switched from Windows to Arch Linux on Thinkpads for about 15 years and had a great time and learned a lot, but dealing with things on a daily basis was why I switched back to Windows 10 a few years ago, along with a new gaming habit during the pandemic. Gaming on Linux with Steam is wonderful these days, but the daily overhead of random stuff to deal with was too much when sometimes I just want to play games.
Meanwhile, despite being more experienced in what I do than 20 years ago my productivity is not increasing much, mostly due to the barricades introduced (when I am not distracted and able to work I am more performant than before). And the biggest component in it are the tools and 'services' that forgot how to support users instead of asking users to support the whims and needs of software, making the life of software vendors not the life of the users easier. Which is especially true for Windows which is in an eternal and constant incomplete reshuffling of concepts while previously working easy matters got ruined and confusing to use. Taskbar, notifications, navigation, positioning of frequently used features, behaviour and reaction to actions are altered, with less benefit than the mere change disrupting the user workflow.
The software highjacks and intentionally diverts the attention of the user instead of helping them work. Having higher and higher maintenance level instead of being helpful.
Never ever asked marginal but broadly advertised things pushed through without choice generating noise and nuisance in daily, hourly work! Focusing on experimental AI matters while a simple switch between windows and similar elementary things are more difficult than 20 years ago is maddening. Shortly: I am increasingly dissatisfied with what and how MS is doing (while not having a bright history to begin with). I feel increasing disgust trying to do anything with Windows. This will not end well in our relationship.
For everything development related, Windows is just that layer that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.
I don't want to buy the overpriced hardware that comes with Apple.
For Linux, I'd like something that provides some kind of stability without me having to search for obscure shell commands for fixing new issues every 2 weeks, which unfortunately has been my experience with using it on my laptop in the past. Maybe it has gotten better, I'm open for recommendations.
I'd been playing with Linux for a while but hadn't got beyond the dual-booting phase. Then at some point I realised that if I put as much effort into Linux to learn how things worked etc. it would probably be just as good in practice. Why did I continue to put up with Windows? Turns out I was right. I haven't had Windoze in my house for well over a decade at this point. I never had to use Vista. One of the best choices I ever made.
Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.
I would argue against that. Just the fact alone that you can’t use Windows 11 Home without your machine being connected to a Microsoft account is proof enough that Windows is more anti consumer than macOS.
It is pathetic how they promote (push like madman) telemetry as a tool for improving user experience while all it is used for is ruining it and exploit their paying users for their own benefit only (marketing).
I think it fits quite well, XP was good, Vista sucked, Win 7 was good, 8 sucked, 10 was good, 11 sucks. Windows 12 is going to be the next version to try I guess.
In late 2019, when I got my new work computer, I decided to try it out.
The Windows 10 experience was surprising. Imagine never having problems with wireless bluetooth, WiFi, graphics card etc. Imagine everything always working and never having to worry about updates breaking anything. That is what I got with Windows coming from Linux.
Thankfully, I had given up on macOS a long time ago after a few years of use, because it is deliberately developer-hostile. Added bonus is the fact that I don't have to take the label of an Apple user... and it is not based on what non-Apple users think of Apple users. I couldn't care about it less had the devices worked for me. It is entirely based on how other Apple users talk to you when they think you are an Apple user. It always made me wonder how otherwise intelligent people can be like that about a brand. They act like they are "different" in a way that they should feel better about themselves because they bought this product. It somehow feels disgusting to be associated with them.
If i want entertainment, i open entertainmap apps or websites.
I was wondering, that Microsoft is not in able to reduce all these things when you select a "work profile" at installation.
They use windows too (i hope, or did their employees switch to apple or linux?), they must know, what productivity killer such "Features" are.
Despite its generally good quality (particularly regarding software and hardware compatibility, which is important for an OS), Microsoft's potential to innovate and monetize Windows further appears limited.
This plateau is common among operating systems, with hardware breakthroughs in the 90s and 00s sparking innovation in PCs and later in mobile devices. The same could be said about business computing OS innovations in the 80s and 90s. But now the OSes for all this hardware and purposes roughly meet customer and consumer requirements. So what more innovation could there be?
In response to this stagnation, Microsoft has to resort to adware and spyware to profit from the Windows franchise to extract further financial growth from the platform. They could probably earn a stable income from Windows for many years by just maintaining the OS in an ethical way, but "stable income" is not what tech companies are looking for, they are looking for infinite growth.
Also, analogy between a sometimes visited scoped web page and the operating system that you use 100% of time when your computer is on and is the foundation of any activity? Are you mad?
Are you perhaps distracted from the message by those awful annoyances, ironicaly demonstrating the harmful nature of those in Windows too inadvertently?
For the software side, you need to learn it, just like anything else. You've spent years, perhaps the majority of your life, learning Windows. Of course there are going to be things you'll have to learn again. But you'll be better for it. I'd rather learn to use a system that respects me than one that treats me like a commodity.
I quit my job to avoid using it and I would do it again.
When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer widespread and quality over new or cheap.
That is probably (next to using a enduser-friendly distro like Ubuntu) the most important point to circumvent nasty bugs and digging deep into the OS.
What is left are problems, that are mostly easily solved with a quick internet search and maybe copy pasting something in your command line.
That will probably happen at some point, but not every two weeks. More like in the first month after setting up your system and then once a year or when you add new hardware to your stack.
Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart):
#1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090
#2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620
#3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250
And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead
#1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470
#2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290
#3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730
Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).
Then a few days later, a colleague shared his screen, with the French UI. The text was cut off mid-sentence. Something like "type here to". The remainder would have actually fit if not for the random icon displayed at the right of the search field.
Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to their "partners"?
It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you can run applications if you are really disciplined and persistent. I don't understand how people keep up with it.
I've used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.
I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.
As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.
LTSC is awesome, everything removed it's just an official vanilla Windows 10. I use it as a daily drive without any problems.
Just don't force us to use the same behaviour by default.
Linux provides easily the best dev environment, is free, gives you all the control you could possible want, runs on lots of hardware and is speedy even on old hardware. Most of the internet is probably hosted on some flavour of linux, and open source frameworks so it's easy for you to do the same.
Windows is good for games and if you need to use Excel? It also has the best drivers for my printer. Am I being unfair here?
I used Linux for around 5 years, with Arch as my distro of choice, after which I switched to Windows 11. Most of the time, I didn't face any problems - but the problems I did face sometimes took me hours and hours to solve.
And there were always issues that were basically unfixable: hibernate, battery life, security, CPU drivers, hardware acceleration etc. I say basically here, because I could have spend hundreds of hours to address some of these things, but I'd still end up with something very brittle and maintenance intensive.
Some people will immediately point out that I should have been using a more "User friendly" distro like Ubuntu, but Arch has been the most stable and easiest to maintain distro of any that I tried. With Ubuntu and its ilk, the inevitable issue would take me ages to track down, because I had to first fight my way through a dozen layers of abstraction and figure out which of the hundreds of packages was the culprit. No, a simple and minimal install has always served me best with Linux.
And yes, I tried other distros - every single major one - and I faced the same (or similar) issues in all of them.
And outside of the OS, the entire Linux philosophy seems to be as user-unfriendly as possible. Packages, because they're maintained by someone in their free time, are very barebones and need extensive configuration to function. Which is especially annoying because I constantly needed to edit config files, each one with it's own unique syntax that required multiple Google searches to discover (and rediscover if some time had passed).
With Windows, the only true issue I faced was with the telemetry. I bought an enterprise license, disabled it all, validated it with some external tools - and the problem was solved. I never saw ads, slowness or any UI/UX problems.
And the benefits were numerous, I now had access to high-quality, powerful software for free. And these programs were easily configurable and usable - no googling necessary! On Linux, I sometimes wondered how so many people could quickly create graphics and audio, because that was always an incredible chore on Linux. Now it feels like a breeze, almost as if I've been catapulted a century forward.
In fact, the reason why I switched was because there was a very insidious hardware problem that I couldn't track down on Linux, even after spending months on it. When I installed Windows on my secondary drive (to update my BIOS), I found the problem in one minute using ThrottleStop.
And security wise, Windows is also far superior. Aside from the obvious Linux vulnerabilities, Windows allowed me to spin up lightweight sandboxes with system integration to isolate browser tabs or files I downloaded. As someone that used QubesOS for some time, this really impressed me.
All in all I see no reason to go back, the only thing I miss is i3, and how it made using a single screen feel just as productive as using three.
I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop.
The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.
Personally when I have a few dozen data points and I want an X/Y plot with a line, I find a spreadsheet is a better tool than MySQL.
MacOS is locked in to vendor's hardware.
Linux's support for closed source drivers is not that great.
I wish there was an open source OS with stable driver ABI, so even closed source driver blobs would work for decades.
Disable search & news, install Microsoft PowerToys and use PowerToys Run. Never open the start menu again
You’ll have to live with it. Some people prefer Windows, no matter how wrong you think they are, how horrible you think the experience is, or how evil you think Microsoft is. I guess you don’t use it anyway. Just continue.
You don’t have to be condescending. What kind of validation does hating on Windows bring to software devs?
let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?
That said I don't even know if it is a viable option for windows server, but probably not =D
What we need is Linux laptops being sold in supermarkets. 99% of people won't even notice they aren't running Windows anymore.
My solution for this is to have 2 computers.
I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents, study, etc.
And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only. I treat this pc as a console, it’s only for gaming. Any OS annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it’s still more flexible than a console.
The drivers often just work. The sad thing is for desktop usage you often have to choose the drivers preferred way of updating. I.e. downloading graphics card updates, as opposed to through the package manager. I haven't investigated whether it is possible via. chocolatey yet.
Linux desktop still feels quite grassroots. Especially as it is community effort to bring a lot of drivers to it. It is still quite sad that the Nvidia support is as poor as it is.
I have only experienced the elitism or whatever you want to call it from non-tech friends and family. Apple's marketing definitely worked. Also the entire Intel saga was quite bad for their brand in regards to developers. At work some of us have been upgraded to m1, and others are still on intel the last few generations before m1 was published. It really is apparent how different those machines are. Intel macs are loud, overheat and unstable as all hell, while m1s are super solid for the most part. I wish I could buy a Linux laptop with the same specs and quality, I would pay a pretty penny for it, I have to give asahi a shot one of these days, if the company allows =D
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V is superior. The shortcuts are easily accessible and you can use it to select and replace a specific part in the middle of text. If you try that with MMB-pasting, you will just overwrite your clipboard with the part of the text you want to replace, due to the selection-to-clipboard feature.
The answers from your "quick Google" only provided solutions for specific programs, solutions with self-admitted performance issues and a solution for X11 when I'm on Wayland. At a glance, the latter two look pretty hacky too.
Lastly, stop putting words in my mouth. I have said my issue was that the "Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it" and "I just wish there was an OPTION to change them". It is YOU who is forcing your defaults on me, without even a consideration that my preference may also be valid.
So yeah, it's not all sunshine and butterflies, but "extremely low number of games that work out of the box" is not true in my experience.
(Important side-note: I don't play online multiplayer stuff, so the whole anti-cheat software topic does not apply to me.)
An operating system should boot my computer and give me access to my hardware on my terms. Full stop.
Any exfiltration of telemetry about my use of the OS without my uncoerced consent is a much worse quirk than any bug I have ever encountered in Linux.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
S3 was disabled on some models which meant for the first 6 months of release you couldn't go to sleep.
The new thinkpad yoga x gen 10 uses a intel webcam which uses a special binary blob and doesn't work out of the box, but only if you buy it with windows installed, which makes for a fun game of "does-this-laptop-support-linux-out-of-the-box"
The thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 has problems when waking up:
* Sometimes not waking up until you plug in a power problem
* Sometimes having to disable/enable the trackpad to make all buttons work again.
I'm quite happy with using linux on my devices, but many modern thinkpads have issues.
Edit: didn't want to sound aggressive
Oh, and to be clear. The Intel driver would disable turbo boost even when the laptop was plugged in and the CPU wasn't running hot.
I had other issues when the CPU would run hot, but that turned out to be a faulty sensor triggering BD_PROCHOT. In fact, this was the issue that ThrottleStop allowed me to find and solve.
EDIT: The reason why I knew that this was a faulty sensor and not BD_PROCHOT doing its job was because I manually measured the temps on various components, each of which was completely within its normal operating temperature.
Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.
Why? Because of all the numerous and significant backend improvements, a relatively less schizophrenic UI, and more.
Certain things that affect power users and common users alike, such as proper Intel 12th+ Gen CPU support and variable refresh rates, are Windows 11 exclusive, not being backported to Windows 10 (let alone 7).
To be clear, I have my fair share of gripes with Windows 11 that I've worked around. But overall it's an easy upgrade over Windows 10.
So yes, Windows does collect some information akin to a keylogger.
Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.
I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.
But on topic - the latest Gnome on Rocky 9: if you open Settings then the first... tab? is WiFi settings. For some reasons when the Gnome builds the list of available networks it demands sudo password prompt. But with or without entring it you would be prompted the same password again. And again. And again. No, you can't navigate to some other tab while the prompt is open. No, you shouldn't be asked for sudo/UAC/whatever elevation to display the list of WiFi networks.
'User friendly', my ass.
I wonder if it the root cause could be the same.
> 've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc.
Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so it _did_ have some crashes).
I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.
Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.
no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx, or ios, or android.
People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.
Which is worse? :)
One reason I think Linux (the kernel) would be a poor fit as a Windows replacement is the lack of a stable driver ABI. Linux is a monolithic kernel and all the drivers are expected to be part of it. It is a model that works because it fully embraces open source and community driven development. But not all manufacturers want that, first because they may not want to, open their code, or maybe they can't due to licensing arguments. It also means they need to invest significant resources into getting their code accepted by the community. The Windows driver model drove its rich hardware ecosystem. And if you think switching to a Linux driver model is going to be better, more free, think again, because we already have that with Android. Manufacturers fork the kernel and don't give much back to the community, just having them comply with the GPL is a struggle, and hardware support besides what is built into the phone is extremely limited, and because they don't work with the community, support for what's in the phone isn't carried on for more than a couple of years.
And Windows really strong point is backwards compatibility. For example, I still use the "free" Photoshop CS2, 20 years later, works perfectly fine as a binary, I can run stuff that dates back from the 3.11 era, though as I understand it, it is mostly emulation at this point. This is part of the reason people use Windows. Microsoft tried to start clean with Windows RT, it was a failure. Apple can get away with it because they have complete control over their ecosystem, not Microsoft.
Also, games.
And while macOS isn't as free as Linux, it's certainly less "spyware" than windows.
There are games made for xbox. On Linux, the story is sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games made for windows to work on Linux. It's not the same to the xbox vs playstation situation.
[0] https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go...
Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).
I haven't rebooted this particular machine since the time it said it was required for an update, which was weeks ago.
I use it as my primary dev machine for my day job and it's a gaming machine that I use for gaming daily.
Something else is wrong. It's installed on billions of devices, noone would accept constant BSODs, crashes and forced reboots if this was the normal experience.
As it is though, I'll just give up on VR and whatever else I like that doesn't work on Linux before I go to 11.
Seems to still work.
I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable gaming platform!".
Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings.
[0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could never get their shit together enough to actually be a platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own platform.
The opposite is basically "Yeah you pay for an OS that shows ads in your face and that you hate, but on the other hand you don't need to occasionally google error messages for that latest game you bought or worry that the anticheat doesn't work" Sadly you can't have both. But my point is if you absolutely must play all AAA online PC multiplayer games perfectly, then you must also use windows. I guess the contentious part is, is that the definition of "usable" to me it is, but clearly not to everyone.
That's exactly how I felt when I started using MacOS after many years on Windows laptops!
About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart, and from some experimentation, they’re largely not wrong.
I'm waiting for Valve to maybe make a successor to Index with proper Linux support, but I'm not holding my breath.
For gaming / work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but otherwise, Windows is the main platform.
I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.
Just a couple weeks ago I was backing up some scripts and adding some arcane linux lore to my obsidian database when it occurred to me that I haven't re-installed my OS in 2.5 years. That felt pretty wild to think about, especially when I consider all the scripts, packages and late night pamac hammering I occasionally do when I find a curious piece of software. While I tinkere with my linux installs far more than windows, they seem to have held up over time far better. Whether this is a consequence of the software itself, my behavior changing, or whatever, I cannot say for sure. But it's been a far more pleasurable experience using and maintaining my linux systems than windows installs.
I think there is a distinct difference between people who compute for the sake of computing versus people who compute as the means to an end. One is a person who uses tools at least partially for the joy of tool usage itself, while the other a person who uses tools to complete tasks, the other . I cannot fault the latter for just using whatever works, if they are happy in doing so. But I think those of us who fit into the former category are far more likely to engage with linux and its brethren. My computer is a machine which, largely, I demand does what I instruct it to do. I prefer an OS that will do so and then get out of my way and I will accept idiosyncracies in exchange for this. So long as a laundry list of dependencies doesn't explode overnight from a goofball update or my nvidia drivers don't just disappear because they feel like it, linux meets those needs very well.
This can be done in a user respecting and useful way but that doesn't make $
On Windows, you sometimes cannot even install the OS without hunting down the right drivers for some piece of hardware like the RAID controller, if you can even find them. Most drivers are authored by the hardware vendors whose main competency may not be writing kernel code, so driver quality tends to be extremely variable. The result is often drivers that just don't work well (which can look like a hardware issue, e.g. lack of performance) or crash the whole system.
Not all Linux drivers are bug-free or feature-complete of course, but they tend to be reasonable or high quality due to the fact that they are written by and/or reviewed by the kernel community. Since all the drivers come with the kernel, the user generally has to do nothing to make their hardware work, it just does right out of the box.
(Notable exceptions here are vendors of certain video cards and wifi chips who refuse to either write Linux drivers or supply the information needed to write them. So you do have to be somewhat careful to avoid those vendors when purchasing hardware.)
I'm not a heavy gamer but my understanding is that a surprising number of popular games run just fine on Linux, thanks in part to the WINE community and the efforts of Valve.
Few people think to visit it and report that a specific game works great for them.
Windows' strong point is basically some large software vendors just don't support Linux (Photoshop, finance software, etc). And of course corporate. For the day to day 'casual' user Linux is every bit as good. But, much as we all had to 'learn' Windows when we started using it, so there will be at least a little learning required for Linux.
Did you know Win32 runs as a subsystem on top of NT, as there are several more such as a subsystem for Unix?
Definitely agree. It's almost there. But some things are still holding me back.
1) As you mentioned, VR is shit. I don't use VR a lot, but a couple of times per year I just want to try it again.
2) There's definitely a performance hit. Some games are very jittery on Linux, while running smoothly on windows. I spend a lot of money on my gaming PC because it's one of my oldest and favorite hobbies, and if an OS just tanks the performance it's kind of annoying.
3) Some games just don't work. Mostly multiplayer games. Normally I exclusively play offline, singleplayer games. But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day with debugging.
3.1) My work-life consists of debugging linux servers and fixing them, or setting them up. After work I just want to turn on my PC and game a bit. With Windows, that's 99.9% doable. With Linux, I have to debug and fix things during my free time as well, because the chance that a game just works out-of-the-box is pretty slim for me, even though Steam Proton is quite awesome.
4) A smaller hobby of mine is video editing, which is also not optimal on Linux. Aka., I would have to find a different tool, which I've tried unsuccessfully.
Basically, I use windows on my daily, free-time PC because gaming "just works" and sometimes I like to use VR or video editing softwares. If all I'd do in my free-time was browse the web etc., I'd just use a cheap laptop with Linux on it. After all, I really dislike Windows for anything else because it's such a bloated piece of shit OS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10 years ago things improved a bit when Valve started bringing Linux ports to Steam but still most games didn't work and needed effort in Wine to launch. Now you literally click one check box in Steam and install the game and it just works most of the time. If it doesn't work you can often use ProtonUp Qt to get the latest Proton build and that often solves it. It's about as much effort as updating a GPU driver on Windows. For non-Steam games Lutris and Heroic are pretty similar.
I'm not just talking indie games either, big AAA stuff like Marvel's Spider-man work well. Online kernel anti-cheat games are really a pretty tiny list. Obviously there's some popular, high profile stuff on there but a lot of good recent stuff that does work.
I have a device in our work environment which runs on kernel 2.6.32, last patch 2014. Can't update the machine because they do not update the drivers for that machine's hardware. The "open" (aka diy) driver runs on 4.9 at the latest and won't be updated any further despite the EOL being only this year.
It's all about money, they just want you to buy the new hardware and cough up some extra cash for them.
The price was pretty stiff, so it looks like I got priced out of the reasonable default experience.
It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are very likely to just work in practice).
Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case most of the games work out of the box regardless of the rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks.
Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?
If they are USB they just work.
I imagine something that uses a serial port or the microphone jack to function as a joystick would need a special driver, yes.
Linux is the opposite, nearly everything has a documented fix. It can be fixed in less time than it takes to backup, reimage, and reconfigure your machine.
And I'm a power user who loves systemd. :)
And the hardware is too good for the software longevity. A 10 year old Windows machine works fine if you have decent hardware (so, desktop, not laptop) but Apple EOLs and rots the software compatibility of your perfectly functional hardware after 7 years
If it doesn't work out of the box and requires fiddling, then it's at most "barely usable", it doesn't even meet the standard for "decently usable" much less "perfectly usable".
Saw that it's even usable on Windows, so I could try the workflow before having to switch the OS completely. Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve but I'm not really a power-user anyways.
Thanks for the tip!
Give me a Jupyter notebook written in a language I don't yet know any day before you give me a complicated excel monstrosity.
In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my problems were...definitely me problems.
At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes sense.
Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them.
Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.
This sounds like an experience from 2007.
For the past 5 years, every piece of hardware I have ever bought, even from aliexpress, either works automatically or downloads a driver from windows uodate automatically.
Coming back to linix, I want wifi 6 on my little linux server, and you have to hint down the few pieces of hardware that are compatiable.
The only reason, and I mean the only reason, that I continue running it on any of my machines is that software often won't support Linux for edge case situations like VR games.
Also performance is just trash. If you've tried to run windows on a non ssd in the last decade, it's an absolute slog.
I'm slowly but surely trying to cut this windows software out of my life.
This is also making me strongly consider moving off of .net and looking into any alternative I can find for it, which the only real option at this point is probably Kotlin.
I only used .NET for modern Unity development, tho. I was using VS for C/C++ before using CLion and Riderfor that.
Sounds like something I would see on hacker news.
You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac, and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to the operating system every other week? Maybe you don't, but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the settings that ultimately make little difference in how games actually play. I know, I know. "Mouse and keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models, there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!
GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files).
I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits.
The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.
It was more stable, that's why I used it. Then starting with a certain Windows 10 update I had to reinstall the system multiple times because automatic updates kept breaking it overnight, it started crashing the USB driver, suddenly it kept randomly switching keyboard layouts by itself, and somewhere around the third ruined weekend due to an unbootable system I had enough. Switched to an Arch-based distro for 3 years in which I only had one update-related issue and it took me a whole 5 minutes and one reboot to fix. Now I partially use Mac OS and while I'm disappointed by some of its aspects I can at least be certain it will boot tomorrow and it won't install a system update without my confirmation.
Oh, how the turntables.
Ha ha ha. You know what happens when you "assume," right? I work for a Fortune 250 with 30K employees. We just "upgraded" the fleet at the start of the year. We're getting all the crap by default. It takes about 10 seconds for Edge to start and show the landing page with all of the stupid garbage. At least they NO LONGER prevent us from changing the start page on our browsers, and you can turn off the start menu crap. The only thing I can figure is that they got a discount on the licensing for leaving this stuff enabled. Like the general public, I assume that most people inside the company just live it.
Lately I've also had it sprout similar dialogs about converting my local account to a Microsoft account. Those are even harder to thwart, requiring multiple clicks through "Are you sure?" dialogs and dark patterns.
It's easier to bear this little weekly hide-and-seek ritual when you think about it like a small child making bids for attention. "Mommy, Mommy, I hid your glasses! Play with me before you start your workday!" Kind of endearing in its own way.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...
I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
>> reduced laptop battery life
??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something.
>> general UI clunkiness,
For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.
More importantly: the core framework just outright omits many of the core features that I've come to expect in tiling WMs. There's no support for i3-style window stacks, for example; I've tried several community solutions, but they're all trapped on a too-high abstraction layer and inevitably end up fighting with the WM in ways that you simply never need to deal with in first-class implementations.
All in all, I'm planning on returning to i3wm. For me, it's a bigger struggle to try building up a usable environment from scratch than it is to start with a solid foundation and then replace the undesirable components (i3bar => polybar, bindsym => sxhkd). AwesomeWM is very fun to work with thanks to the great APIs and documentation, but I can only wholeheartedly recommend it if you need absolute and total power over the UI, since that's AwesomeWMs whole schtick.
To be fair, though, there was a short-lived period a couple of years ago where a lot of laptop trackpads wouldn't work, and I had a work-issued laptop that didn't seem to want to play nicely with an external monitor.
So I wonder if this is largely what you're used to. I run Linux on all of my devices, which are hardware I've chosen myself and had high confidence would have good Linux support. It's only been the work-issued machines that I've had issues with... so I probably just have a sense of how to get things to play nicely because it's what I've used primarily for so long.
At very least, since many of us have enough to concentrate on as Developers, the install should either ask you "do you want loads of crap to read from the news?" or it should be a simple global switch.
I think probably as a big company, Microsoft have lost the Bill Gates character who could decide everything in a holistic way and not random groups of people with their own objectives slinging mud at the OS to see what sticks and annoying everyone in the process. How much has been tried and dropped in the last 10-15 years of Windows?
The different libc backend is a bit of mess though and it can be quite cumbersome to get good compatibility of programs between libc variants.
I used to think educating people was a solution, which it might be to some extent... truth is without regulations brought and enforced by people who understand the modern digital world and have the end users best interest in mind (lol), the cat will never go back to the box.
As for widgets, I've had no trouble with that, there's quite a few fantastic collections and I've found everything I've needed.
Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it is an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can also write a rule to deal with them as needed.
I'll take a completely customizable lightweight interface that I can tailor every aspect of every time, especially when it's so user friendly (for what it is).
After a lot of GPO settings and hacks I've tamed W10 to be acceptable, but it's still crappy on principle.
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Even MS themselves moved from their proprietary .NET implementation to .NET Core, which works just fine in Linux. But I'd give a +1 to Kotlin anyway, its a great language. I'm also fond of using Python with Pydantic to enforce type checking.
So if you look at "N titles of M work well" then the Linux glass is half full. If you look at "X hours of Y of the total played hours of recent popular AAA games are played on games or modes that work poorly on linux" then it's still half empty.
Both Mac OS and Windows have had this stuff sorted out for decades. Windows was not as good at it 20 years ago but it was still very good at it. Mac has been phenomenal at it even longer, largely because of the limited number of hardware configurations.
It has always been a chore in Linux. Always. It's a hard problem to solve with the extreme diversity of PC hardware, and Microsoft really started doing a good job with it around Win 95 and later. Prior to that Dos & Windows 3.x you did have to jump through a lot of the same hoops linux is famous for.
Linux has gotten better but is still relatively terrible about this. Users are not supposed to have to search compatibility lists and tweak config files to the degree they still are.
I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's possible for power users like me or you, but if it requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to google an error message or visit a forum to look for solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people.
I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do that.
My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g. visit a forum or google the occasional error would this work for.
Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's still not so frustrating when put next to the windows start menu ads frustration.
The "notable exceptions" of video cards and WiFi (and Bluetooth) chips are huge ones. But I would also add fancy keyboards/mice, printers, RGB, VR, etc... There is a video by LinusTechTips where they try to do tasks like printing a document or streaming a video game that I find very interesting because I think it is representative of what the experience of an experienced Windows user coming to Linux would be, and it is painful. If I remember well, at one point they have to run a Windows VM to have some of their hardware work.
Sound cards tend to have pretty good support, but as often with Linux, it is all about the details. You will get sound, but maybe you won't be able to reassign your outputs, or that physical volume knob won't work. In my case, which is a somewhat complex setup, I sometimes get Pulseaudio crashes and sync issues I don't have on Windows. The setup itself was a pain on both OSes, on one side, a mess of drivers and broken Windows 10 UI, on the other, obscure text file configuration and Pulseaudio plugins.
I feel like people give open source way too much credit in general when it comes to how it can be abused. There is still a very very large barrier to control over the ecosystem when it comes to core, so if Microsoft decides to start getting to 4E the project I fully believe they'll succeed.
I will 100 percent look into that python option though. The main reason I've ruled it out is performance. JVM and Core just thrash python in terms of out of the box speed.
The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games, but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due to anti-cheat software like Battleye.
I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing.
I would pay the NSA money in addition to letting them spy on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.
I've used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware).
I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip that was fixed by loading MS-NT & copying their firmware from a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS - Dell Lat 360 or 36x).
It's the community widgets that tend to have memory leak problems, not the core package. As mentioned, this seems to be a quirk in how Lua and GTK interact (many community widgets use GTK).
> Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it is an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can also write a rule to deal with them as needed.
They're not. I've used all of them. It's not an issue of rules, it's an issue of the core UI framework fighting against the hacked-on stacking implementation. There are design-time assumptions baked into the AwesomeWM layout engine that cannot be worked around using the API. You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that I've tried very hard and for a very long time.
> I'll take a completely customizable lightweight interface that I can tailor every aspect of every time, especially when it's so user friendly (for what it is).
I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the ease-of-use goes.
install Windows 95
skip Windows 98
install Windows 2000
skip Windows ME
install Windows XP
skip Windows Vista
install Windows 7
skip Windows 8
install Windows 10
skip Windows 11
This is so consistent that I beleive there are two teams inside MS alternately developing next version.
They say, though, that Windows 11 is the last version and there will be only updates since. I really hope this is not the case.
Others might shrug and say "hey 9/10 that's great, and if 3 of those run even better then I love it!"
But otherwise, I agree with you. Windows should not be in the business of syndicating news. That should be the job of a third party widget (maybe provided by MSN!) that you install if you're interested.
Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking the board I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily driver a decade later. And though there have been issues I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.
What widgets are you referring to that you found to have leaks?
> You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that I've tried very hard and for a very long time.
It's just that it seems to contradict most of the other reports I've seen, but then I don't care about stacking myself, so ok.
> I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the ease-of-use goes.
I said it was user-friendly for what it is. There is nothing else really like it that allows that level of extensibility, and given how it abstracts so much complexity, I would say they did indeed do a good job of making it user friendly. Again though, that's keeping in mind what it is. It isn't trying to be i3/xfce/etc or as user-friendly as those.
Now, I love Linux and don't really like Windows that much, but when I want to game I just want the experience to be as smooth and easy as possible. And if I spend thousands of dollars on hardware I want it to be used as effectively as possible.
Maybe the problem with gaming on Linux is my own laziness...
The time of the desktop has come.
I agree with you though if it exists it should optional and from credible (or from user selectable) sources.
Then again maybe the modern NT no longer has that capability.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1938090/Call_of_Duty_Mode...
Looking back over the previous call of duty titles, it doesn't seem to support any of them. Missing giant and popular gaming franchises like this is why I would not even be comfortable calling it 90-95% compatible.
I also checked BF 2042 which I play probably 2nd most often, same, not compatible.
And 3rd most played for me, Rainbow Sig Siege, also not compatible.
These are not exactly small games or small gaming franchises and so basically steam deck or Linux doesn't support basically any of the games I play.
Just wanted to give my perspective.
If you're saying that games work better than windows that they do in Linux I'd have to say that this is changing very quickly.
The proton layer is really changing the game on that. And it seems like many companies like Google will be moving to running applications in that environment. I could see The day where this leads to companies developing native applications for Linux.
I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works. I don’t mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It’s pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they’re able to make strides on the experience.
Can't play Rust on a steam deck.
>It's ok for windows to push sponsored content because Tom's hardware is sponsored content, but its not ok to push bad sponsored content.
I dont understand how you could arrive at this claim. Surely the only reasonable diagnosis of the problem is that Windows is pushing content at all.
Oh boy where to begin?
>Nvidia and Intel driver issues
Not a personal dig, but this is a result of having been spoiled. I still remember the small dime novel that came with my box of WinNT 4.0 workstation, all it did was list the various hardware that was on its hardware compatibility list. You wanted to buy some piece of hardware? Better do the homework because not everything was going to be compatible or even supported at the same level. Today everyone expects everything to just work out of the box when you throw an operating system at it. They've completely forgotten the need to even check for compatibility, they've outsourced that to the operating system. They expect it to 'just work' without input.
When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing and that to get the best use of your hardware you're advised to research it before purchasing and to make sure you check compatibility with the operating system(s) you plan to use.
>package manager bugs
OK, this has hit us all eventually. Valid. But I've noticed most of the time when I've run into this it was a result of me doing things that I really shouldn't or at least which should prime me to monitor my system more carefully. Such as installing Debian packages into Ubuntu. Sure it can work, especially if you do your best to install any needed dependencies. But you'd better know what you're doing and watch for issues after doing so. I'm sure there are other ways the package manager can crap the bed. It's not all on us when it does so. But I really don't think Windows is any better in this regard. I've had stuff eat itself there too with applications and systems upgrading DLLs and leaving me up the famous creek without a paddle.
>reduced laptop battery life
Valid as well. But have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life?
>general UI clunkiness
This heavily depends on your desktop of choice. As a Mate desktop user I've been fairly happy with how my UI behaves. To the point where it is actively annoying to be in another desktop now. Different strokes for different folks though. If Windows is the UI you rely on to the point you have muscle memory, I can sympathize. I'd argue there is a desktop that can match that UI for you on Linux but you'll have to customize it a bit and you'll have to test for which one is closest to what you prefer.
But if your preferred desktop UI is indeed Windows, it's not Linux's fault that it is not Windows any more than it would be OSX's fault it is not Windows. You have to adapt and accept that things work differently in a different operating system. Not wrong. Not misconfigured. Different.
Honestly - has this ever been a problem on Windows ? After the initial setup, I am done. I occasionally update the Video Drivers - but thats once in 6 months. Only if you change the keyboard, mouse hardware, would you need to run through the driver update process again and that too - only if Windows did not auto-detect and install the driver.
Source: experience in maintaining a dozen family windows installs on PC/laptops.
non-snark reply: we're once again going to have the "what is fake news" argument again I suppose.
I can't think of any other user-facing features I'd miss if the UI otherwise reverted to Win98. Several things, I'd like better in their Win98 versions.
Under the hood, it's nice that it doesn't crash nearly as often, and the driver situation is better. NTFS support is nice (consumer Windowses didn't used to have that) when the alternative is FAT32. Beyond that, not much I care about.
..but its the popularity of Android and Google which put Microsoft to this direction. They get away with it, why not Microsoft? On my Nvidia Shield TV, I have to watch about 33% of my startup screen with commercials. Commercials which sometimes aren't meant for my children. What have we come to that we accept this behavior from a TV? And Google gets away with this. (I'm not trying to downplay Microsoft's behavior, however.)
Yes I recently switched from windows to PopOS[1] and this is one thing that I haven't found a solution for. There doesn't seem to be any good video editing software for Linux other than blender and in my experience video editing on blender isn't that great.
[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
> Turn Discover back on to see your feed. You can always turn it off in Settings. Turn on Discover
There’s a weirdly long thread of dorky gaming infighting happening in the top comment where people don’t seem to know that you can just use Windows for a few games and otherwise use a main OS for the rest of your time.
I was a Windows user for a long time until Windows 11 came out that was the last straw for me.
[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
I think the only issues have been some formatting options are hidden, I honestly don't remember them because it mostly works.
It was more a cheap jab that they don't want to actually support Linux.
Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes out though.
Win98se was considered damn good, compared to what had come before. Disruption for little benefit, at launch, though.
2K was only for businesses, bad driver support and lacking in some software support on account of using the NT kernel before hardware & software vendors were expecting home users to have it.
ME was a pointless refresh of 98. Buggier and with system menus subtly messed-with to no purpose. The first miss-step of the Vista/8 variety.
XP was good by SP3. Not so much at launch.
Vista, yeah, slow as hell while adding nothing.
7 was still slow as hell, but wasn't as ugly and our hardware had gotten better so it was less-noticeable. Not much to recommend it aside from "XP's going out of support, and it's less-ugly than Vista".
8 was pointless and ugly, like Vista.
10 was another 7: de-uglified 8, but not much else going for it. Adware and shitware and spyware galore. This leaves 7 as the last "good" Windows.
11's 10 on steroids, so, two scoops of shit instead of one.
In the amount of time you took to do that, you could have opened a browser and typed weather.com to see the weather.
I think this is the grandparent OP's point: Showing you news or showing you the weather is not the job of an operating system. The operating system is there to manage system memory, the filesystem, networking, security and permissions, drive peripherals and accessories, maybe provide a desktop environment.
That said, I would expect my operating system's vendor to also ship high quality applications that I can optionally install after I install my operating system. Ubuntu should have a weather application, or at least a strong opinion about which third party one is the best and that new users should use. So, you're not wrong. The whole "search through 40,000 half-assed weather applications and hope user reviews are accurate" situation is also bad.
I don't think I'm going back. I use Win10 at work, and fortunately most of my actual day is in VS Code under WSL. And that's about all I can stand.
this is hackernews, not usernews
Just the other day I had to get some bloat ware off a friend's computer since it was making it unusable.
Not like there’s actually an incentive for them to do that, but I can dream.
Well I've had the exact opposite experience. Windows was an endless source of bugs, crashes, and instability. Linux (Mint) is rock-solid, clean, fast, pretty, and stable. I've had more blue screens that I can count but I remember less than a handful of kernel panics over the last 10 years. No more fiddling around in settings, no more having to use external tools off some forum thread to accomplish something as simple as updating drivers.
The only issue I give you credit for is the battery life, which is indeed better on Windows by some ~20%.
maybe at one time, and it might be cool if that were true...but I would say HN is probably 90% fully committed to the Apple ecosystem at this point
no different than the general public for their age cohort...we are slowly running out of people...even "technical" people, who understand systems under the hood
I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications. Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't. I haven't had a Windows update break things in years, where my last Linux experience had the Ubuntu live USB work fine and completely fail to boot to a GUI environment after the install. I don't have time in my life to troubleshoot kernel issues anymore.
Hell, my last two HP laptops, nothing fancy, had worse hardware support on Windows than on Linux (where they were working 100% since day one), even with all the HP drivers installed. Took them about a year to fix this. So even "don't need to futz around with drivers" is no longer a reason.
And I think MS realizes this, seeing that recent .net things work on Linux, MSSQL Server now works on Linux (but not the studio, though). So, I guess they're just trying their damnedest to stay at least somewhat relevant. Companies are usually a bit slower to change user-facing things, so I guess MS won't go out of their way to help with the switch.
Compare to powering on a Linux machine and bringing it up-to-date in one shot with "sudo dnf upgrade."
I wonder why there's a difference in our experiences here?
Incidentally, Apple News is not uninstallable (fortunately, you can disable it) on Mac and it needs to be for mental health reasons.
I've also used a few other intel mini pcs, since the pricing for RPi went insane from limited availability... 8gb RPi 4's were going for close to or over $180, adding in a case, drive, power and the intel mini pc options were about the same price, coming with storage, ram, case, etc.
Will have to see which direction things head over time.
Intel is pretty good about upstreaming drivers into the kernel. The only bugs I've ever ran into are around brand new wifi cards that haven't been mainlined yet. And even then I don't think I've seen that in about ten years. Nvidia on the other hand is a huge pain on Linux, but thats deliberately done by Nvidia.
> reduced laptop battery life.
Been using Linux as a daily driver for over 15 years and laptop life has been better than windows nearly the entire time.
To be fair, I cut my teeth automating Linux environments in physical datacenters. So I've lived in a world where power consumption mattered, know how to select hardware with good driver support, and can tune the os.
That said, you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w.
> For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.
Funny how you and I have the same value but wound up at opposite conclusions. I guess it's all about the tools and how we need/expect to use them.
Edit: grammar
They do make pretty decent machines for work, due to spec., large battery, and generous cooling. While many find them too heavy or bulking, but I do not mind that bit at all. However, the amount of heat needed to be dissipated, and GPUs having very low power envelop, makes them quite pitiful for the price paid.
Heck, if a linux user wants to know the weather, all they have to do is lok at their windows. (might have to go up the stairs though :-)
-
I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.
it only happened once - but WTF - and I havent seen it since, and I couldnt find anything on google about it. WTF is that?
Do i want write code. Yes.
Do i want to write ALL of it. No.
But linux assumes you kinda sorta do want to do it.
Ughhh: good idea, terribly implemented. Last time I used Windows 10, it seemed like every time I tried to drag my window around, Windows would guess that I wanted to also full-screen it, or pin it to one side, or close all other windows, or anything else besides just repositioning it. I feel I need to have a surgeon's precision in order to just drag a window around my desktop now.
I don’t understand how they think such hostility is a good idea. It only makes me despise the site and note never to return. But presumably some people go for it?
It's really quite embarrassing to see the low quality content and to imagine that somewhere within Microsoft a human actually made the decision to allow this content to flourish within the OS.
My guess is that there is some product manager at Microsoft who has a bunch of friends who are creating the interfaces and garbage content generation "news" feeds and they are simply milking this for profit before it gets turned off.
Overall, when there is not some specific hardware issue, I've found linux running much smoother and more user friendly _for me_. Gnome is a lot less cluttered, things are easier to find. It is also often much better in supporting older hardware and, ironically, older windows applications.
Man I havent played at a lan event in a long time. So many games now don't seem to support that. All my friends I use to play with have moved away. I would be nice to attend a LAN event again someday :D
Unfortunately it's not by hours but peak concurrent players. It's also pretty similar to the top grossing list. I checked each games Steam Deck rating and if it was verified or playable (usually means it needs text entry with a keyboard or doesn't support controllers) marked it as "works" (with the exception of TW: Warhammer III which is listed as not working because the performance isn't good on Steam Deck but it's a native linux title). If it was unsupported and the reason was given I marked as so, if it was some other reason I checked ProtonDB and noted the rating. I assumed if Valve marked it not supported it doesn't work regardless of ProtonDB rating (except again TW:Warhammer III). Out of the 90 titles there 21 are marked unsupported mainly because of anti-cheat or 23%, when weighted by player base that rises to 26%. So arguably it's 3/4 full. ;)
Of course if you demand every title MUST work and no alternatives will ever suffice I doubt you'll ever be satisfied. Anti cheat also gets rarer as you move away from big online games.
Here's the full list:
Over 240,000 Peak players:
Goose Goose Duck - works Ark Survival Evolved - works Elden Ring - Works Dota 2 - Works COD MWII (2022) - Doesn't work, anticheat PUBG Battlegrounds - Doesn't work, anticheat Yu-gi-oh Master Duel - Works Apex Legends - Works Lost Ark - Doesn't work, anticheat CS GO - Works Destiny II - Doesn't work, anticheat Dyling Light 2 - Works
Over 130,000 peak players:
Cyberpunk 2077 - Works New World - Works Monster Hunter Rise - Works Total War Warhammer III - Works WB Multiversus - Works V Rising - Works Path of Exile - Works Team Fortress II - Works Naraka: Bladepoint - Works Rust - Doesn't work, anticheat GTA 5 - Works Wallpaper Engine - Doesn't work? (is it really a game though?)
Over 75,000 Peak players: Raft The final chaper - Works Vampire Survivors - Works The Sims 4 - Works Rainbow Six Siege - Doesn't work, anticheat War Thunder - Works Fifa 23 - Doesn't work, anticheat Left 4 Dead 2 - Works Unturned - Works Witcher III - works The Forest - works Civ 6 - Works Valheim - Works Fifa 22 - works Football Manager 2023 - Works Dead by Daylight - Doesn't work, anticheat Dread Hunger - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warframe - works Terraria - works Football Manager 2022 - works NFS Heat - Works Warhammer Darktide - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warhammer Vermintide - doesn't work, anticheat Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga - Works
Over 40,000 peak players Skyrim - Works Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Works Fall Guys - Doesn't work, anticheat Don't Starve Together - works God of War - Works Gundam Evolution - Doesn't work, anticheat Cycle Frontier - Doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Stray - Works Deep Rock Galactic - Works Stellaris - Works The Scroll of Taiwu - Works Mirror 2 Project X - Doesn't work?, ProtonDB silver Conan Exiles - Doesn't work, anticheat NBA 2K22 - Works Farming Sim 22 - works Marvel's Spiderman - Works Battlefield 1 - works Battlefield V - works Risk of Rain 2 - works Crusader Kings III - works No man's sky - works Final Fantasy XIV - works Red Dead Redemption II - works Warm Snow - works Mount and Blade II Bannerlord - works World of Tanks Blitz - Works Payday 2 - works Hearts of Iron IV - works Super People 2 - doesn't work, anticheat Stardew Valley - works 7 days to die - works phasmophobia - works VR chat - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Undecember - works garry's mod - works Halo Infinite - works Stumble Guys - works Day Z - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Mir4 - doesn't work? ProtonDB borked Project Zomboid - Works Cult of the Lamb - works Victoria 3 - Works Rimworld - works
huh?
Also, game companies share the blame. Even now in 2023, they're still not writing their games portably enough so that the macOS version is a recompile.
I work in .Net for a lot of backend code, mostly in WSL/Linux on VS Code. And it's not been horrible, though I'm much more efficient with Node or Deno at this point. Since .Net Core (and now .Net 5+) the space has changed a lot.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
It's not necessarily or often a huge problem, but it's still enough to cause this. I've never had chkdsk fail to fix these little issues.
Also bluetooth, who even needs that? It's important that we have out of the box docker support. /s
Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking.
If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep blaming the world for your choices.
Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all live in together. It's up to each individual to make right choices for this world to change.
I've never seen anything as abhorrent as the stuff this article is reporting on, in macOS. A lot of Apple's hardware policies and anti-consumer, I'll give you that — is there anything in macOS that you're aware of, that's in a similar ballpark?
When I run Windows these days, I assume every single part of it is compromised, either by scummy third party software running in the background or by Microsoft's scummy software running in the background. This includes cameras, microphones, any radio, the networking stack, any drives (local or network) the machine can so much as ping, everything. I have a special vlan prison I put my Windows machines in because I treat them like the hostile attackers they are.
Say what you will about Apple's "walled gardens" but every time a frustrated 3rd party developer complains online that they can't do X, Y, or Z on Macs because of permissions or security, I get a little more comforted that my Mac's software is not constantly attacking me.
Thanks, I needed that laugh this morning.
Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this, and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).
It's an exfiltration path in practice, from what I've seen far more than an ingratiation path, despite what MS's intentions may have been. Once you get devs able to spin up a DB via Docker in under a minute vs. the desktop installs, refresh/update, etc... it's a path away from MS.
All said, I really liked PopOS, it has some very sane defaults, good out of the box support for hardware as well. Most of the support is upstream via Ubuntu, but a lot of UI tweaks and custom additions are coming from System76, and they have been doing very well. Will likely switch back for the next LTS release.
I have auto ZFS snapshots, the choice of 5+ competent desktop environments, every piece of software I need and use (including Halo, emulators, etc), an immutable OS, rollbacks to nearly any point in time, have never, ever, ever had anything "break", and have never remotely seen an advertisement or nagware, ever. Not to mention that my NixOS skills directly translate to running servers the way they're meant to be run. With my recently setup zrepl, I also have an exact replica of all of my data on a portable SSD. I can travel with a single laptop and know that I can literally get it back to its identical state in about 15 minutes, should it ever be broken or stolen. Entire classes of anxieties eliminated in a way that other OSes can't even dream of, on top of complete control, and again no nagware.
It's about tradeoffs and I'd much rather put up some up front investment and then never think about it again. Go re-install Windows and watch how long it takes to disable all the telemetry, un-privacy features, default browsers, application and desktop configuration, etc. And then realize for maybe 3x that cost, you could learn something new and move past all of this nonsense. Or just keep dealing with Windows Updates and Bing shoved everywhere it doesn't belong.
> Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Seems like a fail to me…
A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards: the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon 9600 with a built-in capture card.
This was also around the time I was really getting into Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008.
As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support. I lived it.
At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good. I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager", and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of virtual desktops.
This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future of Linux was bright and close.
A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering). Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for whose benefit?
A few more years passed, and fglrx became the best driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful card for ~$30, so the point was moot.
When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a major hardware company found the value in making a full-featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the first place: proprietary video drivers.
I did that once. Every single component had an OSS in-kernel drivers.
Compositing wouldn't work with an external display connected. After about 10 years of Linux on the desktop that was the last Linux desktop machine I ever used.
I did, on my Windows 10 box. The issue isn't random games that no one would ever have optimized, the issue is bleeding edge games that most people want to play, and play right now.
If you didn't, can you? If (the royal) you can't, get started in the time remaining, download speeds allowing, the year of the Linux desktop isn't here.
That said, I saw a lot of fan curve, temp issues in the later Intel macbooks... I had a $4000 macbook pro i9 that was effectively unusable with background services or Docker containers running at all.
I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it had to be running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it wasn’t it’d perform 20-30% worse while running just as hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia driver is split up into several pieces which then resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all sorts of things.
I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a custom built tower instead, which has had none of these issues.
I've never had something unexpected like that actually get to me the way those news notifications did, and as a result, I've become almost militant about managing notifications. Life is too short to have your day ruined by some product manager/growth manager trying to get clicks to earn an extra $2,000 bonus.
Also not saying that things aren’t getting better, but it’s a snail’s pace.
Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.
Mostly true, it's been a long time since Microsoft made a CONSUMER operating system.
Windows Server isn't plagued with this crap, it costs a whole lot more, but doesn't have this nonsense. Also, isn't designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get a powershell prompt, and that's it).
I did notice some dark pattern bs in the Windows menu with the search bar looking like a system search, but it providing web search results. Does Microsoft think this is endearing them to anyone as a product?
Saying that because I've used black electrical tape for years, including over the camera lens of my iPhone SE.
But it turns out the iPhone SE can take pictures right through that (at least in daylight), and they're not terrible quality.
Showed a friend photography inclined friend and he was as surprised as I was. eg very
The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups of any kind.
Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or use software that is either Windows-only or works much better on Windows - even if we really dislike some aspects of Windows.
Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.
This × 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as 'facts of life'.
I'm someone who switches games pretty fast, I'm not one to play the same multiplayer game for a long time. So each time I started a new game, I had to debug in Linux to get it working.
Since January I've played Planet Crafter, Steep, Back 4 Blood, Bioshock Infinite, Atomic Heart, Hogwarts Legacy and now Elden Ring. No idea what percentage of these games "just work" on Linux, but I doubt that the experience would be the same as on Windows.
There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.
I guess vendor lock is the key problem. As long as everything is nailed down without options, any defect or even design choice can be effective anti-consumer. All hardware issues become a whole product issues, because OS and hardware are inseparable.
Some day maybe I'll try it, even just to see what's all the fuss is about, but vendor lock makes is just hard enough that I simply upgrade my Windows box every time.
I'll cite myself here: https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-widgets/issues/11...
Here's another affected library [1]: https://github.com/deficient/volume-control
I've had similar issues wherever GTK interacts with awful.spawn. Basically: glib (GTK) + awful.spawn.easy_async + polling = extremely leak-prone. This is a very common pattern in community awesomewm widgets.
[1]: No bug under the main repo because they're considering it as a framework bug. See here for discussion: https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/3584#issuecommen...
------
Did you try the Linux appimage of "Shutter Encoder" shutterencoder.com/en/, it works fine for me to convert H.265 to DNxHD or DNxHR (a better format than h.@265 for editing in Davinci) and I can use these files in the free version of Davinci Resolve 17 & 18. But I'm just a hobbyist and I'm using Davinci only for basic things, I'm at the beginning of my learning path... So I hope I'm not giving you a bad advice !
I'm on Arch Linux with ffmpeg4.4
CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for example.
Essentialy banking apps hate unlocked bootloaders. GOS (GrapheneOS) avoids this relocking the bootloader (the key is theirs, if you want to build your own GOS you'll have to sign with your own key). However GOS still fails Play Integrity checks: it fails CTS Profile Match.
So, Banking Apps probably work but Google Wallet won't.
Additionally, they run Google Apps as non-privileged apps, using a compatibility layer called `gmscompat`. It's cool because it's easy to Degoogle your phone in an instant if you wish to. But certain niche features, for example, using your camera to help Google Maps match your surrounding with Street View data crash Maps.
Otherwise all runs mostly well. Waze a few weeks ago was wonky but I assume the bug they fixed in Wifi-location allowed Waze to behave -- haven't tested though.
I actually miss all those transparent windows :)
It absolutely is not! I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and automatic everything was. It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual driver installation or anything. Things just worked after a reboot.
Early versions of NT (pre 2000) were not consumer oriented and that's why they were more finicky, but by the time of XP, you could expect it to just work with mostly anything again.
Microsoft are often taking the blame for, and working around, other vendor’s bugs. Just because they fixed it didn’t mean they broke it.
e.g. https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/13632662289708113...
What's the best way to help improve the Linux Desktop experience?
Gotcha. macOS has its own paradigm and does certain things differently, that's for sure, but I don't think it's anything a reasonably experienced user couldn't get used to. It's added things like full-screen in recent years — not as good as a maximised window, IMO, but there are utilities that can handle that.
> There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.
I've never run into an upgrade issue, and the fact that they're free is a big bonus. I've had one or two issues with my macbook pro, hardware-wise, but the general quality of the hardware is second-to-none, as far as I'm aware.
> everything is nailed down without options
This is typically why I, and many others, prefer macOS. I actually don't want to be endlessly tinkering with my OS — I quite enjoyed doing that in the early days, but now I just want to get my work done in the most pleasant environment possible. However, I haven't used any recent Windows versions, so I can't really compare.
> Autoplay it!
>> Oh no, they are scrolling away from it now, how do we get them to keep watching it?
> literally make it always present on the screen no matter where they have scrolled to!
The road to hell, these days, is often paved with marketing OKRs.
I'm guessing that was probably Windows Hello attempting to use your camera for face recognition.
I use Linux daily, but its not ready for everyone, creative apps for example are nonexistent, And games aren't exactly plug and play.
In addition to not having a distro that combines gnome + zero hassle driver installs + friendly defaults, it was Ubuntu till they ruined it with snap, and now there is still nothing like it.
I just hope canonical gives up on snap.
If you do Windows development you'll probably have a Visual Studio license which will include a server license for "testing". I use that license as my base OS.
Every now and then I get my hopes up that the year of Linux is finally here and I install the latest.
I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition.
I am still using just windows and macos for my personal computing needs.
Binary compatibility on Linux is often out of the question. Frequently this means picking up some old libs. libc5, old stdc++... For really old stuff with fewer dependencies that may not be a problem. As you get into a more modern era where software started to pile on large heaps of dependencies it becomes more challenging.
Source compatibility typically means porting, sometimes nontrivial. Likely something is written in a time capsule of that era's poor C and C++ standards compliance. (i.e. C89 or C++98 existed, but compilers of the day accepted lots of nonsense, so software of that era doesn't even conform to those.)
In contrast the Win32 API or COM is designed around binary compatibility. Maybe early 2000s dependencies (when MS started getting worse at this) are a problem. I think Win16 on modern amd64 is also a problem. But on average, compatibility is higher.
It wins because it's less friction, not zero friction. There's a reason, other than old applications, that there are still Windows 7 installations. Many people don't want to upgrade their Windows until they upgrade their hardware because it's a hassle getting the interface back to the way you want it.
Anecdotally I'm not a programmer and I switched to Ubuntu when I bought this laptop in 2013, with about 3 or 4 years of dual booting for software purposes before I stayed on Ubuntu. I'll switch away from Ubuntu to a more user friendly distribution with my next computer because it's pushing features I really don't like, and deleting features I really do like. My wife is also not a programmer and with the upgrade to Windows 10 we had to do a bunch of searching and tinkering to make the user interface satisfactory. She's avoiding Windows 11 for as long as possible.
I think in the same way we now see advertising on school buses and display-covered vending machines (even inside a state office), were going to end up with forms of outreach / ads in our tools unless there's more robust forms of support (could be paying, could be a more multicapital flow of support).
So you're no longer reality checking this prediction? What are the reasons for firing up the terminal? Config file editing? Or something more serious?
The original post I replied to argued that Linux puts the user in control, unlike Windows or OSX/Apple.
My point is that for the last 10 years or so, it has become increasingly difficult to avoid certain parts of a linux-based OS, such as systemd and dbus, that reduces user's control over the system in the name of convenience.
I would like a Windows without scheduled tasks - no longer possible. In the same way as Windows does things on it's own, I would feel less in control if a NON-ROOT app could open a connection to a wireless network, or auto-mount a block device, or start a service/daemon, or change audio settings. It's less about how dbus or systemd is set up, but more about capabilities. I can't say much about how a Linux with those things installed could again be made secure, private and obedient to root user, because I never had them installed. That's not the point. I simply don't like what it CAN do.
PS: I have 3 Linux systems. 2 of them run musl. It's actually A LOT easier to change glibc with something else than have a desktop without dbus.
A selection of games is Minecraft, Valorant, Left for Dead 2, CS:GO, Age of Empires, Stronghold, The Forest/Sons of the Forest, Valheim and some others.
As for these news you can disable them if you find them annoying.
I guess so? Overall Arch was pretty easy to maintain, I just got tired of bailing on friends because I needed to spend hours figuring out some random issue.
For you, nothing. The UI is just more Windows-esque.
It's often recommended to Windows users to make their transition to Linux desktops easier.
I get that a company the size of Apple or Microsoft are going to want to have syndication deals. It should not be integrated so directly with the OS though, and should absolutely be removable (really, out of principle it shouldn't be installed by default).
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-t...
Telemetry returns information about applications crashes to the "mothership" and MS is pretty quick to update the application compatibility database to fix problems.
How on earth could you ever pretend to do you job well without using the product you're designing?
It's a strange amorphous organism that can be coaxed into doing almost anything, if poorly.
Was it? I remember they added a tool that claimed it would clean it up but in practice it didn't seem to do much.
I thought Windows 10 just papered over the whole mess by doing an in place upgrade of the whole OS every 6-12 months.
Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager.
The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop doing stupid shit that worked with legacy BIOS and is not necessary anymore. Grub breaking itself randomly is mostly self-inflicted problem.
So the only sane course of action was to disable widgets altogether while I still can. And now I don't have the weather anymore.
Couldn't you do this in Windows 7 with WinKey+Left or WinKey+Right? I guess I am kind of keyboard oriented in my usage though, I mostly get frustrated with the edge of screen mouse features because I mostly enable them by accident.
I suspect you are talking about some other Windows that the rest of us.
> I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications.
Don't we all?
> Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't.
You, ok. Others? It's the other way around.
> I haven't had a Windows update break things in years,
Last time? Cumulative update 2022.12 for W19 22H2... that's not that long time ago.
In the Vista era, the OS was able to detect programs that crashed and give the user the choice to report it. It could even, with consent, check to see if there was already a known solution, which might involve an updated version or might involve changing compatibility settings.
None of that needs the MS personal info vortex and none of that requires trampling on consent.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/cfs-filesystemfile...
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/1pca.pn...
http://s3.jasonlitka.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/bluescre...
It's the times when it breaks that make the difference for me. One Windows, most breakage is an annoyance. On Linux it can grind my day to a halt. Here's something I did on an Ubuntu install recently.
apt install python3
apt autoremove python3
You can with emulation, compatibility layers, stuff like Wine and DXVK and using Linux drivers. Also lots of software ends up being written in top of Electron, so it makes easier.
Will it be a great user experience? Probably not, but that's not the point. If it will win Microsoft some money, that would be enough of a reason.
A better idea would be open sourcing Windows if that is legally possible for them to do.
At least it is silo'd away into its own app, and not part of the OS UI, unlike Windows.
To make it even worse, no one likes doing the last 20% of the work to make things stable and even less people like maintaining finished projects, so basically everything in Linux is about 80% done and gets replaced before it even hits the point of being reliable.
But mainly I like that it's the same every time unless I alter something, that it's very consistent, and that it's not constantly trying to steal my attention.
Oddly enough, this means that Linux tends to work better as the computer it's running on gets older. The reverse is true for Windows -- updates tend to make it slower and/or have more compatibility issues. A computer that worked better with Windows a few years ago will not-infrequently perform better under Ubuntu today. It's not usually suggested on new PCs unless it's spec'd specifically with Linux compatibility in mind.
True but at a loss of performance compared to running the game natively on Windows.
But my problem wouldn't be with games, it would be with software I either use professionally or out of personal interest. Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3D Max.
This was also the era of major desktop environments playing fast and loose with there UX. GNOME3 was released in 2011. Ubuntu started defaulting to Unity in 2010, and started their Wayland competitor (Mir) in 2014. KDE Plasma 5 (2014) defaulted to fancy composting, and felt really bloated relative to the others. The only desktop environments that really kept true to the good old days (~2008) are XFCE4 and MATE (the GNOME2 fork). KDE5 isn't bad, either, but it's still a bit too bloated.
The other problem caused by proprietary video drivers was package versioning. It's tricky to have the right kernel version and Xorg version necessary to run a proprietary video driver blob; and keep the rest of your system up-to-date. Ubuntu found its initial success by creating a generally stable package repository roughly as up-to-date as Debian unstable. Unfortunately, Ubuntu became a bloated mess with strange things like Unity and Mir bundled in. Archlinux has been a good alternative, but it does expect a level of familiarity with shell utilities. Linux Mint (an Ubuntu or Debian fork) is still my first recommendation to casual users. One of these days, it will be NixOS, which is a giant leap in stability and package versioning.
The last change of that era that has been breaking the Linux experience is the switch from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT. This shift was slow and messy, with most hardware adoption following the release of Windows 8 in 2012. GRUB used to break in one predictable way: windows overwrites the MBR, replacing GRUB with its bootloader. Now, with UEFI, boot entries are saved directly to the motherboard, and the bootloader itself lives in the ESP partition. The windows installer will put its bootloader in the first ESP it can find, and you don't get to choose which one that is. Now you have to worry about the ESP running out of space, but that's about it: everything else has been generally resolved, and the UEFI bootloader experience is very solid (apart from the windows installer caveat).
Now that AMDGPU is mature, and NVIDIA's drivers are relatively well maintained (and packaged), the Linux desktop experience is even more stable than its heyday back in 2008. If you install a distro that targets relatively recent package versions, like Archlinux, Linux Mint, or even Fedora; and you use a solid familiar desktop environment like MATE or XFCE4; you can avoid most UI/UX clunkiness and have very little need to fiddle with your package manager. Boot issues are pretty unlikely now, so long as you install in UEFI mode (not legacy BIOS emulation), and completely avoid MBR.
People are creatures of habit. Microsoft learned this when they removed the start button in 8.
Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.
Windows is the standard bearer of paid OS's - yes, true.
Ubuntu is the standard bearer of free Linux OS's - not really, and (this is important) less true over time.
What's happening is that, as Windows is improving, Linux appears to be getting worse. But that's really just an Ubuntu problem.
I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly, but it seems to be performing less well over time, and is, increasingly, not the default choice. I would understand if other distros are harder to learn or simply unsupported, but that's not the case.
It feels like 90% of these issues could be resolved by saying "Start with Fedora. In 2023, that's the actual default Linux distro that fixes these problems."
(Okay, I can imagine it; it's actually pretty funny.)
If I decide to go down a rabbit hole that involves totally messing up my system, I can undo all of that by simply rebooting into an older generation. NixOS never diverges from "fresh install".
Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be incredible.
So I was thrilled when I saw a headline saying that removing media would be fixed in Windows 11. The article informed me that Microsoft's solution was (pause for effect) to remove the system tray icon.
Apply palm directly to face.
I'll admit that modern Windows is more stable than in the past. But how much of that is simply the benefit of memory safety in C#? Also stricter oversight of third-party drivers.
from new era Macs it went 7, 8, 9, X. Then intel macs, still macos X.
I do know they're up to version 16 or something of whatever the OS is called these days. probably just MacOS.
I didn't believe either of them!
Here's the most crucial point: windows has the most thoroughly documented friction. If you ever have a problem, chances are 1,000 or more other people have had that problem, or a closely related one, and 1 or 2 of them even wrote about it somewhere. Life is way harder than it needs to be, but you are not even remotely alone.
Apple takes the opposite approach: walls instead of friction. If you can't figure it out, it's because you computer can't do it. That implies your computer shouldn't be able to do it. You would be surprised at how comfortable people are with this conclusion. It doesn't get them what they want, but it saves them time and energy by providing early and confident rejection.
Linux maximizes the ability to manage friction. There is always a way to actually resolve it with constructive effort. That's an unfamiliar strategy, and it requires some level of education that the average user refuses to accommodate, even if it will definitely save them time and effort.
The crux of the NixOS issue right here. I tried NixOS a few times, even this past weekend, and it was such a pain that I gave up each time!
I am planning to integrate Nix (the package manager) into my recent fresh OS install if I have some time this week. I want to use Nix to have, at the very least, a controllable way to install and remove toolchains of different versions in a reproducible manner; if I can swing it I am going to use it to install pretty much anything that requires any sort of configuration care (the rest I'll just use apt). I also want to integrate more tools like asdf or pyenv which help with that, but I prefer if I could do it all through one package manager like Nix. I finally separated my /home into another drive this time, so that'll be nice for future re-installs.
1. Service provider provides good service, but charges for it
2. Service provided becomes commoditized; cheap, easy to get
3. Service provider bottom line decreases
4. Service provider supplements service revenue with ad revenue
Cable TV was a notable example of this pattern. Now it's happening to MS Windows.
The best part is that it's trivially easy. Most games with decent proton support will install just like a native game. No frills. No mess.
When the Linux experience is smooth, it's smooth. None of the fake Fullscreen BS. No memory paging quirks or other background processes causing stuttering. No automatically putting your game process in sleep mode. Freesync works. You get to keep your favorite window manager/desktop environment. If you are lucky, you can totally ditch windows today.
> Microsoft's first foray into achieving Unix-like compatibility on Windows began with the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem, superseded by Windows Services for UNIX via MKS/Interix, which was eventually deprecated with the release of Windows 8.1.
There was also the possibility to run Linux software under Windows using coLinux.
No association, just a happy user when I had Macs.
I use i3wm and a split ergonomic keyboard. I use a shell instead of a file manager. I am fine with 99% of people never doing that, so long as I can.
The "Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so" is drastic in its understatement, and MSFT cant even make anything these days without adding telemetry on one side and "content" noise on the other straight out of a Philip K Dick fever dream.
"Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - "1984", Orwell.
Does the news you get depend on who you are?
NixOS is pain without scars.
Microsoft wants to sell me the british royalty and reasons why millions of people are excited about german hearing aids. I don't really get this at all. What is their snoopware even good for if this is the best they can come up with?
They asked for it. Red hat the former bearers of that crown dropped the ball and walked away, leaving it open for Ubuntu to step in.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031127055732/http://zdnet.com....
https://web.archive.org/web/20030812095615/http://www.linuxa...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040508195941/http://www.newsfo...
People forget now but Fedora was created because Red Hat abandoned the home desktop market in 2003. Then Fedora was spun off to be a test bed for their enterprise offerings and it was no longer possible to buy a copy of workstation in stores. So when Canonical showed up in 2004 and was focused on the desktop they were able to get a lot of people to move over fairly quickly. The fact that they were using a different type of desktop interface with Gnome that had the two panels unlike Fedora which still had the single large panel like Gnome 1.x made it stand out even more. That and the way almost every other Linux desktop at the time was KDE based...
So yeah, Ubuntu took the crown because it wanted it. It maintains that crown because outside of it and its various spinoffs and flavors no one else is really seeking to be a desktop operating system. Since Canonical has made it clear that its focus is now also Enterprise at the expense of the desktop experience, I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone else steals that crown by focusing on the desktop again. We just need one of these billionaires to fund a company to make it happen...Say what you will about Shuttleworth, he did put his money where his mouth was and I for one am grateful for the many years of good use I got from Ubuntu as a result. I will be sad for the day when inevitably the pain points out weigh the benefits and I must switch away from Ubuntu-Mate to some other system.
You don't honestly think that's what everyone else experiences, do you?
I'm a gamer running Win10. In the past 5 years, I've had 4 BSoDs, 3 of them caused by Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat (Which I've uninstalled since I don't play Valorant anymore).
It sounds to me that you got a faulty laptop, and rather than consider that possibility, you decided that Windows is to blame.
A virtual machine you say? With a virtualized set of hardware prechosen for compatibility so that Windows would recognize it without issues? It just recognized this collection of virtual hardware selected for compatibility without further interactions? You don't say? ;)
As someone who began with Windows 95 OSR2 on real hardware you will forgive my amusement I hope?
>And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I've never before seen such sorcery.
This is exactly my litmus test. The requirement to touch the CLI indicates little thought for the UX or care for users who don't want to use the CLI. Every year I boot up another flavour of Linux and every year it fails this test. Linux is built by developers, for developers. That's fine, but let's be honest about it.
The thing is, it means Microsoft has completely abandoned Windows users that use Windows because it's not MacOS.
IMO, Win7 with the Classic theme was peak UI. It's been downhill ever since, starting first with replacing 3D button controls with flat buttons, which reduces discoverability and relies on using too much negative space. Over time it turned into displaying less information on the screen, like Win11 eliminating the option to have task bar items show the window text, and instead merely having the application icon, which then hides how many windows an application, and making switching between windows in an app requiring two clicks instead of one.
When I eventually install Win11, I'm going to have to buy WindowBlinds and Start11 just to make it usable.
There may even be some developers who prefer WSL on Windows over Linux, especially at work. When Group Policy turns off all the adware/spyware and annoyances in Windows 11 Enterprise, it isn't quite as horrible of an experience as it is at home.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Not open but free of charge and effective!
I mostly like it, but it does have one major downside.. the 4k font scaling is terrible compared to windows. When I adjust font scaling on windows it only modifies font size. When I do it in mint, it messes up a bunch of other things, and games start running at the wrong screen size etc.
So I still ended up mostly using Windows almost entirely because of this issue.. (These search ads/news can be disabled that this post is talking about, so not a problem for me).
If not for games I would NEVER run modern windows at all. It is explicitly anti-user. It violates my consent all the time with their Edge shenanigans, and it pushes all the MS services like Cortana that I simply do not care about. At this point it’s hard to say that windows takes less fiddling than Linux to set up, if you include the time spent fighting the OS and time spent disabling Microsoft’s crap
This is my biggest complaint about Windows (which I no longer use), in that it had the chance to be, and once was, an opportunity to bridge the gap between MacOS and Linux. More open than the former, more opinionated than the latter.
And maybe it's because I opt for the Pro version of Windows, but I don't have the advertisements people complain about. No Candy Crush, no news/tabloids, just my list of apps and a few shortcuts to things I've used.
You are sharing your screen and suddenly you access the stupid "news" menu, popping up with tabloid and perhaps the weather at best.
I try my best to use this software and disable what I can, but after an update to the OS or Edge you have to reconfigure stuff, and suddenly it has added back some horrible defaults.
Okay, it's "free" I guess.
> I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart
That change was the exact point in time that I knew sanity was gone and that Windows would get progressively worse over time. You can even end up with one window inside another where they sort of blend together. It's mind boggling and it's still the default.
Whoever is responsible for that mess should be banned from touching UI design for the rest of their life. Lol.
Back when the love letter crisis was ungoing I had a Linux machine fill the disk with log messages and deleting /var/log/messages didn't free the space because there still was a process that had the file open.
In a similar situation in Windows you can't delete the file. Either way it is a problem like looking at Cthulhu and something bad is going to happen either way you resolve the situation.
Their mobile aspirations were a walled garden because they wanted in on one of the ecosystems that was good for them at the expense of developers and users. I'm convinced that Microsoft would have a large share of the mobile market today if they would have tried to create a product that was good for users and developers instead of a product that was good for Microsoft.
And don't make assumptions about me, our 1996 toshiba came with OSR2, including beta USB drivers and more built in driver profiles for commodity hardware than the plug and play "pick device" window actually could handle (it wasn't resizeable!)
By the time of OSR2, and then 98, if your device had been reviewed in a PC magazine, you could probably just plug it in, select it from a list, and go on your way.
years and years ago we'd buy a roll of film, pull it out in the sun, and then get it developed but not printed. You could use that as an IR-passthrough filter on a camera lens - this is if my memory isn't faulty.
Every time someone mentions Linux driver problems, I see that name.
For me, the strategy that has worked for the longest time is to get boring computers. The boring Thinkpad, the boring Vostros and Latitudes, the boring ThinkStation and ThinkServer boxes. Large PC makers don't want their corporate-oriented products causing support calls, and that forces them to not be overly creative with their implementations. With that powerful incentive, the hardware is usually well supported by the two boring operating systems (for generic hardware) out there. Either that, or get a machine that's designed together with its OS (and know the odds of you installing anything other than that are slim).
You can buy a Visual Studio (formerly Technet/MSDN) subscription[0] which includes not just Windows clients but servers as well for ~USD$1200.
>I don't think its ridiculous to consider a hacker/developer edition in 2023.
Which (unless things have changed dramatically in the past few years) is exactly what such a subscription provides.
Such a subscription enables access for all current (and many old ones) products and, IIRC, these versions (unless changed from Technet/MSDN) are not consumer versions that allow you to "un-fuck" Windows and you'll have access (need to download ISOs, so storage will be necessary) to just about all of Microsoft's offerings.
Which, of course, can be used forever, although I'm guessing that a new subscription every five-ten years or so will update everything you may need.
[0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/
Edit: Fixed typo.
Also, I think the choice of window manager might matter more to my experience than the choice of distribution. I find some Linux wms too clunky, too Win95.
User A may want a weather app preinstalled; user B may not want their computer knowing their location. User A and user B might even be the same person.
And that's assuming Ubuntu knows it, which let's be real, Ubuntu isn't great at knowing what its users want.
And all of that is assuming it's even true that most people do want a weather app.
10 at least with the way I customized it is entirely stable and I'm not aware of any bugs that affect my workflow at all.
~woosh!~
The more painful it is to eat your own dogfood, the more it's necessary to do so. But it has to be mandated from the top down.
If the only people with the power to actually change the product aren't even using it, the god-awful UI/UX decisions in the latest version of Windows begin to make sense.
Absolutely! I've been using Fedora for a long time and have been very pleased with it for my home systems.
Although I prefer XFCE[0][1] over Gnome or KDE, and would definitely recommend it to recovering Windows users.
[0] https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/
[1] Note that I don't use the "spin" I linked, rather I have multiple Kickstart[2] configs (including a 'desktop' config), but XFCE is XFCE.
[2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-guid...
GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files)."
How dare you not have a problem in a discussion on Linux. (Not just there yet :)
I refuse to use my phone for banking due to trust issues in putting all my eggs into such a stealable, forgettable-in-a-taxi, and heavily monitored device basket.
I have also tried my work laptop on the same docking station setup though, and it uses an Nvidia GPU. It seemed to work fine too. I suspect the dual GPU is not well supported on Linux.
Windows is a completely unified OS where there is a huge repo that can build the whole OS from source.
That makes Ubuntu extremely customizable. You can swap out the window manager, or just remove it, use a KDE file manager instead of gnome, do whatever the hell you want. That comes at a cost.
Windows is just Windows. You can’t replace the desktop (you used to be able to swap the shell), or file manager or task manger or installer system. That makes things integrated and easy to use. That comes at a cost also.
For me, I use Ubuntu with i3 for work, Windows for gaming and personal stuff, and macOS because i have old work laptops that are MacBooks.
They all have their pros and cons. Having all three means I always have the right tool for the job available.
I use my W11 22H2 as a daily driver because of that: it just works (TM).
Also, I don't see any kind of news or the likes on Windows, and it feels really close to Windows 7. Here are the things I've done so far:
- Bought a Windows 10 Education license from a shady website, and it's been working fine for the past 4? years. The upgrade to Windows 11 Education went smoothly as well.
- Local account only. No Sign in to Windows crap.
- (Most important imo) Installed OOSU Shutup10++ (it's for Windows 11) and turned almost everything off there.
- Bought a Start11 license for 5 USD and installed it, and switched to the Windows 7 start menu using it.
No ads anywhere in Windows, feels like Windows 7, talks much less to whatever 3rd party people MS have contracts with to get my data.
FWIW, I did try daily-driving Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the best Linux for me imho. However, there is a show-stopping bug as follows:
I have 3 monitors, with the main one being a 4K over DP. My monitors are set to turn off after 5 minutes, and in Windows, they turn back on just fine when I move the mouse (minor annoyance: display scaling is not reflected across all application windows till I minimize and open the window again but no big deal). For Linux, the DP monitor won't get detected; it behaves as if my other 2 monitors are the only ones connected. I have to turn off the monitor switch and turn it on again for it to be detected. I looked around but didn't find any good way to solve it...
If all goes well, the entire government will be forced to switch off from microsoft and use something more reasonable.
Aquasnap can do the snapping, and more. If any of the 'more' bothers you — like "shake for always-on-top" activating too easily, you can adjust or disable that bit. Hmm, I should add that to my current Win10 machine. I did eventually get a license, so it won't complain about having more than one monitor.
Voidtools Everything can be configured as a search-to-launch tool, but I mainly use it for its blindingly fast NTFS searching. Where Windows Search typic'ly excludes large sections of your drives, eats CPU cycles while it 'indexes', and then still either gives you "Please wait…" or simply claims that it can't find anything, VE just works. Even does NTFS drives across the network (though it has to rebuild a local index of the remote media periodic'ly).
"Look at all these new features we have! (…that are so minor or quizzically irrelevant that you'll wonder why this is a whole version number upgrade instead of a .1 release).
Oh, and we rearranged a bunch of stuff into weird, often obscure, places with no justification, but we're calling those features, too!".
So, now at least I have some things to look up, even if I intend to skip Win11 for other reasons.
Can we not outlaw deceptive chumbox ads and make this cancer of poor quality gossip "news" for-profit disappear?
If Steam was not available on Linux then I would likely still have abandoned Windows and just limited my gaming to whatever runs on a Nintendo Switch.
Anyway, My husband decided to stick with Windows for his gaming computer (same hardware as mine) and my Linux computer (with ZFS) can load every game in under half the time it takes his machine.
It did take a day to figure out the magic environment variables to better performance in games, but now that I got them I just copy paste them for new games.
So officially, Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with new icing on top, but there are nonetheless significant changes and improvements behind-the-scenes that may or may not merit a marketing version number increase.
Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.
FWIW, KDE had both of these out of the box long before Windows 10. Sucks when you have to rely on some company that doesn't care about you for your desktop UX.
Android OEMs do the same. Some are worse (looking at you, Samsung) and do horrible things to stock images in the interest of service integration and capturing long tail software sales. You could argue Google does the same over a AOSP-level base image with Google Search/Play.
Things like LineageOS give a clean android experience, but it's hardware dependant.
And call me old fashioned, but scrombling onto Google to find w10privacy, download it, unzip and run it as an admin kinda sounds like the hell the Windows XP era community got into with adware removers just installing more adware. You can buy the first spot on Google. Much rather see a Github page, source, releases, etc.
It's absolutely not perfect, and part of that is there's too much choice, but if you're willing and able, you can make it work for you and yours most of the time.
And yes, I do think it's much better than it was.
With that out of the way I think it's completely irrelevant for the original discussion. Game developers are going to make games for the biggest platforms. So if you want to play the most titles, you choose the bigger platform.
Yes, so long as people keep using windows, the games will keep coming to windows . But I'm not going to waste my time crusading against that in order to maybe see Linux be a more viable gaming platform in two decades. Life is just to short. I'm not enjoying Linux on the desktop much to begin with, so in my case the game issue isn't really the deciding factor. For a lot of gamers it probably is, though.
I don't think most big companies will move away from Windows completely, there is simply no worthy competitor to replace the office suite and to have it all integrated from top to bottom.
Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles.
The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.
$ ls tmp -al
ls: -al: No such file or directory
Now, I only check the news on Saturday morning, to know what's going on in the world. It leaves breaking news time to get the facts straight, and to filter out the non-news of the week.
I’m annoyed by the “thoroughly pizzled” features in Windows such as the OneDrive file shredding system, attempts to stuff ads up your nose, etc. The thing is I can turn that crap off with a finite amount of effort, whereas Linux desktop enthusiasts can spend forever tweaking their desktop and it “just doesn’t work” no matter what you do. My satisfaction with a new Windows 11 machine I just built is about as high as my satisfaction with my Ubuntu server, the difference is that the Win11 machine has a GUI and the Ubuntu server doesn’t.
Here the Archlinux wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling