But it’s linux, so one obscure setting in a config file or slightly different hardware can make all the difference. I say this as a linux user since WinXP.
The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.
The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
I've also played FFXIV and Path of Exile extensively in Linux.
The only thing left is Adobe products which is honestly a matter of time. Just really takes hammering out some market share until Adobe relents.
A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Things are coming together rapidly.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
I assume by
> using a window manager for ever
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
Pnmixer for Pulseaudio, NM-applet/connman...
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
Eg https://kb.parallels.com/en/125105 and https://osxdaily.com/2021/07/15/how-install-macos-virtualbox...
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
However, it's ironic that the author has now given up on Windows, for the problems the script attempts to solve.
As a long time Windows and Linux user who recently got a MacBook Pro, I find the UI incredibly weird and confusing compared to what I'm used to.
The hardware is however more than good enough that I'm willing to put up with MacOS until I get used to it.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
Ctrl+d, like in emacs
> no home
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.