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Comment by Narrow2890 | Hacker News Reader

Windows is dead, there's no good reason for most people to use it as their primary OS anymore. Desktop Linux has proper fractional scaling support (or KDE plasma does anyway) AND doesn't catch fire every five minutes now, now's the time to make the switch.

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I use Linux professionally and personally. Out of all of my peers, at work and my personal circles, osx or Windows is preferred.

Our senior-most devops guy even claims that Windows is the best Linux, because of wsl2 (he knows windows itself isn't a Linux, but he likes to get a rise out of people).

Windows is still the best average-user OS after Chrome OS (not exactly Linux, IMHO) and maybe osx.

I think this boils down to the state of DEs. GNOME and KDE have come a long way but aren’t quite there yet for different reasons. The former goes too far with minimalism (outstripping even Apple in some ways) and KDE has just enough idiosyncrasies and lingering rough edges to be offputting to users who are uninterested in desktop tinkering.

To help address this at some point I’d like to build a DE that’s a near-clone of the XP/7 desktop as well as one that clones macOS (both classic and modern). These would make switching more painless and would eventually become very stable due to targeting fixed feature sets with development being focused solely on optimization and bug fixing once feature-completeness is achieved.

I think it would be more impactful if you contribute to Linux Mint and Elementary. The former reminds me of Windows 7 and the latter is a MacOS lookalike.

Elementary is a non-starter because even if it resembles macOS aesthetically, it’s more like GNOME or iPadOS in how it eschews a proper menubar in favor of hamburger menus or removing functions that don’t fit in the toolbar altogether. It’s also missing number of other power user oriented features like a GUI for modifier key and per-app key shortcut remapping.

Mint/Cinnamon are nice but I think its ties to GTK+ and various GNOME components are a liability.

It seems like you already have a list of pain points you can improve on.

Not if those "improvements" go against the desired grain by gnome/etc maintainers.

If I'm not misremembering, the gnome team is especially notorious for being closed to changes that go against their desired design goals.

Trying to get changes upstream like what the parent was suggesting would be somewhere between arduous and impossible, let alone being a pain to implement.

Edit: case in point: https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2023/01/05/on-the-gnome-pr...

I use KDE plasma without any customization and I find it perfect. What "tinkering" is required according to you ? I even found the defaults super powerful. I got a notification on my NVMe having a failure, and I wouldn't have thought of this if it didn't show it to me.

Nothing major, just lots of little differences from Windows that in aggregate are enough to bother a lot of people.

Not really a KDE thing but having multiple screens with differing refresh rates is a pain on all distros I've tested. Either you add a lot of buffering to avoid screen tearing, or you get screen tearing.

I use KDE Plasma on Fedora, Wayland, and it works in the latest kernels. I remember it was an issue for me before, but now I have my laptop screen (120Hz) and desk screen (60Hz) working well.

For me it's stuff like the size of toolbars. They are too small and i tried a bunch of scaling before but couldn't get it right. The size of borders is also an issue where it seems like theres a few pixels i need to grab onto to resize a window so its difficult to do. Recently i ran into an issue in Nautilus where it doesn't auto refresh the contents of a folder when files are added, and there's no refresh button in sight either - you have to know the shortcut is F5. There's just a lot of tiny issues like that that keep cropping up. Then linux people will say "oh it works for me" and that's the end kf of the discussion.

There are also plenty of apps like Unreal or Davinci that while supported on linux tend to be more buggy just because they have a smaller user base and less investment by companies.

Yes, I get you, I also sometimes run into tiny issues when I try to shape the things how I want to be. That's why I kind of abandoned this mindset, and use as many defaults as possible. If I use KDE, I'd use the default file browser etc. I'd use the default functionalities and shortcut provided... I still run into some annoying issues (like, can't properly write with the korean characters).

For apps that "should" run on Windows (game, game dev, or other stuf), I'd just boot Windows yeah. Honestly it's so much time gained in just running the stuff how it's intended to be. As a bonus, I think it forces your brain to "adapt" to the stuff you have in hand (which sadly means that yeah, you won't be a power user most likely)

If reading/writing files isn't that slow across the host Windows and WSL, I would agree that Windows is the best Linux.

I've definitely joked that WSL makes Windows the most popular Linux DE.

My parents use Linux for daily browsing and general computer usage. My dad is pretty computer savvy but all his experience is with DPS and Windows. Since I convinced them to switch, they haven't needed to learn much about Linux to use ubuntu & debian on a daily basis (for almost 10 years now.) My mom knows virtually nothing about computer internals but she's at least been a desktop computer user since the days of DOS. I rarely get support calls from them about Linux problems. It's solid and reliable.

Windows has 68% desktop market share vs. 3% Linux[1]

Hackernews User: Windows is dead

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-has-over-3-of-the-deskto...

Windows is certainly dead to me. Grew up using Windows, bounced off of desktop Linux a decade or more ago, then eventually got fed up with the increasing ad infestation as Windows enshittified and realized the desktop Linux is lovely and usable nowadays (and the Steam Deck exists for any games I want to play). I'd sooner give up on computers entirely than go back to Windows, unless they drastically change course and remove all ads from the product, permanently.

I haven't used windows since 2013 and I haven't ever looked back. Don't miss it one bit. I used MacOS for a while and then went fully Linux by 2015. The world is getting worse every day but at least my desktop OS isn't.

Parent is not talking about market share, they're talking about utility. The utility in using Windows over the alternatives is none, they're saying.

And you could argue that, if you wanted. But pretending they were talking about market share and then using it as a "lol HN" generalization is disingenuous, at best.

Plenty of good reasons. Best reason world be because you need to use software that only runs on Windows to do your job.

I don't have that problem but using wine or even spinning up a VM is always an option. My advice is to choose something more open though, almost everything has an alternative and even when the user experience is worse the freedom is worth it.

I'll never understand people who put up with an OS (at this point spyware) they don't like because they "have to", like being stuck in a abusive relationship.

I prefer Windows as my host OS and I've primarily worked in Linux professionally for 13 years.

Prefer it to OSX and every Linux desktop environment. IMHO it's just a superior windowed desktop experience.. I prefer to develop in Linux since my background is Linux systems engineering..

So, hard disagree.

Interesting, what about the windows experience do you find better? I don't use a desktop environment and haven't used Windows since version 7 but I'm curious.

> what about the windows experience do you find better?

Everything outside the terminal(though Powershell is pretty cool tech). Wifi, bluetooth, HDR, fractional scaling, tiling/snapping, virtual desktops, general device compatibility.

This is the first time I hear Linux has better fractional scaling than Windows. Is this because of Wayland or something? Windows always had reasonably good fractional scaling story. Wanted to hear why you think Windoes fractional scaling is broken.

I don't, windows fractional scaling is very good, until very recently there was no good solution on Linux, but Plasma implemented a proper solution a while ago and it works about as well as Window's. This was one of the main things keeping me from making the permanent switch.

The only issue is the shitty support for nvidia cards courtesy of nvidia.

At least AMD cards themselves are really good now, I just wish there were more of them.

There are still some kinks in KDE fractional scaling on Wayland unfortunately, like Aurora window decoration themes not drawing elements correctly. If you want to use something other than Breeze your only choices are a handful of C++ window decoration themes (usually forked from Breeze).

I think they were remarking that fractional scaling on Linux is no longer a dumpster fire so you can ditch Windows for the reasons that make it a dumpster fire.

Yeah this is what I meant, Linux on desktop is now stable enough and sufficiently usable to be an actual viable replacement for windows.

Linux is slowly getting better with time, Windows is rapidly getting worse.

Mint Cinnamon had the best support I've seen in Linux. Maybe KDE is better, but I know for sure Windows is way better haha.

I think you misunderstand. I don't think the parent is saying fractional scaling is better than Windows, just that it sucks less than it used to and is almost usable now.

X and Wayland has had fractional scaling for a long time, but getting apps updated to pay attention to it is moving at the speed of Open Source.

But still unable to do this simple task: use the external screen when I close the laptop lid! I've tried everything on multiple distros but the external screen reduces to 1 FPS as soon I close the lid. My laptop has multiple GPUs but still!

Mac laptops are also superior in every way (excluding gaming).

I saw an article on stable diffusion for Linux and how to set it up with some extra.

It went reasonable for a moment, git this, pip that…

Then as predicable as ever, the Linux pseudo-child sacrifice routines began, some sudo JRE incantation to move JRE version up or down, then some absolute voodoo with piping something or another to some what’s it, then some command line apt deal with a very specific package name and version that you are just supposed to know is the exact one that is quantum linked to the code you want to run.

… I WANT to get away from windows, but learning and remembering all that nonsense that doesn’t make me money is exactly the issue with Linux and I assume the massively autistic crowd that likes that process.

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