Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

There was a time when operating systems were pretty good and the future was full of hope. Windows was capable and felt modern, Mac felt powerful and had neat things like "delete an app to fully uninstall an app".

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.

To be fair the power management issue is pretty much a niche issue at this point. Sure if you run closed down hardware like a Mac book don't except your drivers to work from day 1.

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

The secret trick for flawless power management and sleep on Linux is to buy a Chromebook and put Linux on it.

They're natively Linux machines to begin with. All the manufacturer-coded power management stuff is upstream in the mainline kernel already.

When was this? People have been moaning about Windows for over 30 years. If you just go by headlines, Windows has been getting worse and less capable with absolutely no improvement, and there are people who (probably on this site) unironically think Windows is worse now than it was in the Windows 3.1 days.

thinkpads do have issues...

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

> I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to be and definitely not stable.

Can you clarify this comment? I haven't seen any stability problems in macOS for years.

My linux ThinkPad has a roughly 25% chance of failing to sleep when I close the lid, causing it to go from 100% battery to completely dead the next day when I take it out of my bag. I've caught it not even turning off the screen sometimes (you can see the glow through the crack).

Yeah likewise. In ten years of macbook use the only change that really threw me a bit was stopping 32 bit apps working.

True, I should have specified the T series and even then the most recent models don't have perfect driver support

I don't think anyone compares it to 3.1, but XP and 7 did reasonably well. I think those two are considered the acceptable versions of Windows.