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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

Compared to Linux the amount of bloat shipping with Windows 10 is simply unreal. Open up Task Manager on a fresh install and the only two questions I can ask are "What the fuck do half of these services actually do?" and "Why is Windows Defender ALWAYS running up the CPU?"

The start menu is loaded with trash like Candy Crush, which I can only guess is a revenue stream at the expense of user experience. You can't rid yourself of OneDrive, Cortana, or the mountain of other trash professionals and power users don't care for. If you try to, you'll rudely find that the GPOs to do so were removed, even from Professional.

The only way out of all the bloat and social media noise is to buy Enterprise, and I don't even think those are for sale to consumers or available in units of one.

I'll stick with being forced to use it for games only.

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> I'll stick with being forced to use it for games only.

Steam just got an upgrade that automagically runs a lot of games via a modified version of wine (called proton) sometimes even with better performance than on Windows. It's worked very well for everything I have tried it with so far. So that just leaves games not available in Steam. The biggest of which has to be Blizzard, however a lot of their games already worked decently well with Wine, so hopefully proton works with them as well.

As of today most games may actually already run better on Linux than on Windows.

Proton is open source, isn't it? I'm sure you can convince it to run a Blizzard game. Not sure about the results though. D3D9 WoW works very, very well under wine-d3d9[0], but D3D9 support was dropped from WoW a long time ago.

Can't say anything about the rest of Blizzard games.

[0] https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-emulation/wine-d3d9

As I mentioned on somewhere else on this thread, the problem with Blizzard games and other multiplayer games you may want to play on Linux under Proton/Wine/whatever will fail to join the actual online games because anti-cheat like Battleye don't support Linux because Battleye on Windows loads a kernel module.

> As of today most games may actually already run better on Linux than on Windows.

I think that may be overselling it quite a bit. Every time I've checked to see how a game I'm currently playing would run, there are always caveats. Like random crashes in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Monster Hunter World.

It hasn’t been my experience most of the games I’ve tried have worked pretty flawlessly but I also don’t play a lot of AAA games.

I've tried running Grim Dawn and Rise of Nations after every steam update (I opted into Steam Play's proton beta and get reasonably frequent steam client updates now) and no luck so far.

I've migrated my daily driver to linux, a large amount of gaming to linux and/or consoles, and am down to a handful of games that only run on Windows. If that gap closes then I can get by with Windows in VMs only.

The thing is, Windows 10 is starting to look more and more like a Linux distribution. Half-assed and inconsistent UI, broken updates, etc.

I'm fine with this in Linux, because it's built by people who donate their time for free, and might not be experts in UX, etc. But seeing the same in a commercial OS that Microsoft wants you to pay for is unacceptable.

Have you seen elementary OS? Very clearly macOS inspired and they've done a great job with it. Worth a look for anyone who hates half-assed and inconsistent UIs.

I'm not a regular user (just toyed with it in some VMs) so I can't vouch for how the updates do, but I was impressed with the overall level of polish. It's an Ubuntu-derivative based on LTS releases so it lags a ways behind the cutting edge.

EDIT: looks like elementary OS 5.0 "Juno" is in beta and should be out soon. This release is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Elementary is good in terms of looks on the face, but starts to break down as soon as you dig deeper. Inconsistent updates and strange issues requiring manual intervention via the terminal are still there.

I do remember some UI inconsistency showing up as soon as you want any software that wasn't written specifically for elementary (like VS Code), but that's inevitable since it's basically rolling its own UI no matter what OS you're on.

Not recalling much repeated terminal intervention, though there were a few safety nets that I immediately turned off the moment I had it installed (I think related to package manager installations?)

Dropbox did not work well.

Linux Mint has been nothing but solid and consistent since I started to use it.

> The thing is, Windows 10 is starting to look more and more like a Linux distribution. Half-assed and inconsistent UI, broken updates, etc.

Desktop engineering is hard (as Microsoft are demonstrating). There are a very small number of really good desktop distributions (Fedora, Solus, Ubuntu Mate, may be a couple of others), which are not inconsistent or half-assed, but the side-effect of Free Software is that any motivated developer can have a go and put out their own distribution.

> Compared to Linux the amount of bloat shipping with Windows 10 is simply unreal. Open up Task Manager on a fresh install and the only two questions I can ask are "What the fuck do half of these services actually do?"

I invite you to list the processes running on a fresh install of a modern Linux Desktop distribution for comparison. There's plenty of bloat to go around.

It isn't too bad. You got your oomkiller, maybe a kworker.

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