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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Every day of bad new for Microsoft and Windows is another great day for Linux. You all have a choice. Make it.

Yup. With Linux I don't get bullied to install their stuff. But you'll say "but you get bugs, less mature desktop environment" (just one point of my daily usage). Yeah sure, but instead of complaining about being bullied I get a chance to help the folks who make the programs I use (bug reports, small commits). So instead of a negative feeling, I have a positive feeling.

That's an enormous difference to me.

Let's have this cheap Linux phone and my life will be great.

> I get a chance to help the folks who make the programs I use (bug reports, small commits

Approximately 0.0% of users see that as an opportunity.

Approximately 0.0% of the users actually produce those programs. And yet, we got those programs...

Yes, the fact that there are far more users than developers is my point. "All users have a choice! They just need to learn to write and debug software to address the bugs they'll encounter in the alternatives" is a bit of an unreasonable position.

> With Linux I don't get bullied to install their stuff.

$ sudo apt full-upgrade

...

Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled

...

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro at https://xxxxxxxxxxxxx/pro

That's not even close to the same quality of nagging, on a single distro.

Yea, there are distros with ads and tracking, and that's a stain on them, and on the people who willingly put up with it. Debian and Pop!_OS are great, btw.

> "but you get bugs, less mature desktop environment"

I don't think a linux distro maintained since 2020 feels less mature of more buggy than proprietary alternatives.

Agreed. I'm currently on Mac OS and almost daily I get UI glitches/bugs in the dock and notifications, which puzzles me a bit. I mean I understand that they don't care about whatever crashes the terminal when it runs with 10 windows for weeks at a time, but the dock is visible for all users and I don't think I'm doing anything special to it.

Bonus: No more forced reboots!

Switching to Linux has saved me sooo much time. I go to my computer, log-on, and it just works. No reopening files, nothing lost, no having to save 'recovered' files, no browsers reopening all your tabs for a few minutes.

Every week with linux has saved me something like 5-10 minutes.

Invest those 5-10 minutes into fixing those random Linux bugs until those random Linux bugs are gone. Now its just pure time savings.

Sorry, I don't have a choice. And I find it naive to think that I do.

You work with a MS stack? My condolences.

Yeah this is a point that a lot of people forget: we don't always have a choice. Same happened to me years back but with MacOS. CEO was high on how "startups" all used Macs, and forced me to use an old shitty Macbook instead of my Linux. What an awful experience.

Thankfully I now WFH with my own equipment and was never again forced into any particular OS.

So I'm not alone! Once worked for a Apple-only company using only Apple hardware and even their office and cloud stuff. Thought there can't possibly be a lot of those.

To give Microsoft some credit, at least you can run Windows in a VM pretty seamlessly. Low bar, I know, but Apple doesn't allow you to run macOS on non-Apple hardware IIRC. Using a Windows VM for a client that has a Windows-only (for now :P) stack, and the experience is a lot better than at that Apple-only place back then.

Mine was a cheap bastard... they gave me an old Macbook my boss had dropped from the top of a server rack. It still "worked" (with random freezes and other intermittent issues), so they thought: why not save a buck?

I'm sure my experiences with that tainted my views of MacOS somewhat, but still nothing compares to having real control over your OS. In the long run, Linux always wins in that regard.

Absolutely.

Plus I think I've gained a significant chunk of my understanding-a-new-system and debugging skills from growing up fiddling with Gentoo, Linux From Scratch and what not. Now I make my money from these skills. In this day and age I'd argue a major Linux distribution is generally less hassle to get started and work with than macOS or Windows, but it's still good to know that if anything _really_ bothers me, I _can_ change it to be any way I like.

In the meantime, make sure you email your software vendors asking for Linux support. Its getting late, and Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to handle their responsibilities in the computing market.

I am still Win 10 user for my home laptop, but was thinking that it's about time to try the Linux OS, as most of my friends did a long time ago.

Oh yeah... I love the Linux version of Accounting CS. It's great. You know what else is great? The Linux version of CCH ProSystem fx is also rock solid.

Ohhh wait. Those things don't exist. Just like a bunch of EHR software that I have to support doesn't exist either.

They all run on Windows. Most of this stuff doesn't even run on Mac OS X.

The business world runs on Windows. Period. That'll change when Linux developers start making software of the same caliber and ease-of-use as Windows. Until then, nothing changes. And this childish - and I'm being very generous with that assessment - idea that everyone has a "choice" is ridiculous.

I'm not familiar with any of the software you've mentioned. But in my neck of the woods, more and more software is moving to web-based SaaS form. There's no reason to insist on using the PITA that's Windows when a Chromebook or similar would do as good a job, or very likely even better.

Sure, for "heavier" local software, you may not have a choice. But in the company I work for, nobody uses such software any longer, yet they still cling to Windows. "Because we've always used this".

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