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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
The risk is worth it for the life that LineageOS really breathes into an older device.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go...
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.
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
Give me a Jupyter notebook written in a language I don't yet know any day before you give me a complicated excel monstrosity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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