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Comment by SpaceManNabs | Hacker News Reader

Every day I am happy that I switched to Ubuntu and Firefox 24/7, except for work computer...

I'm glad my employer lets me install any system I want on my work machine. I really can't stand dealing with windows outside of a VM.

When an old employer required us to use windows, I just built a Linux VM that was always set to fullsceen. Surprisingly they were okay with it, so maybe you'll have the same luck?

The primary reasons I prefer to use Linux over Windows:

* No intrusive notifications or ads from the OS. For example, by using Linux, I no am no longer interrupted with a notification that Windows Defender just finished an entirely purposeless virus scan; containing a "see less of this" button that takes me to the settings page where I am informed that Group Policy is configured by my employer such that I am not allowed to disable this notification.

* No purposeless automatic virus scan wasting my laptop battery in the first place.

* The ability to use a lightweight tiling window manager

* The ability to mount filesystems other than NTFS and FAT, logical volumes, and soft RAID arrays.

* No mandatory updates interrupting my ability to shutdown and halt the system.

---

None of these is resolved by running Linux in a VM.

Erm? Preaching to the choir there. The Linux VM was only used because I wasn't allowed to wipe Windows from my work machine. It was the best alternative for the situation.

Sure, I definitely feel for your situation, and agree that that is the best you can really do in that circumstance.

I just feel like it's important to say it out loud: Windows is not good enough to be mandatory. How else is anything going to change?

Don’t forget docker engine and disk encryption.

For sure.

I could continue adding to this list all day if I let myself...

If nothing else, WSL is part of windows now, so it's trivial to get that set up and hard to argue against most places. You still get stuck with your UI being largely windows, but the guts all being over on linux is enough for me personally.

WSL is great but it does nothing against the invasive advertising, political messages, clickbait articles in the start menu, and surveillance - some of the main pain points of Win10/11.

May I ask, what political messages you've been seeing?

Not political messages, but the first time I used the start menu in windows 10 after years away... They showed an MSN article for Kim Kardashian. Within seconds it completely validated my dislike of windows.

They are presumably talking about the MSN news feed that Windows thinks should create popup notifications in Win11, and you have to go into the settings and turn it off to stop having opinions about the House Speaker vomited onto your screen. MSN is factually biased one way in terms of how often they post from particular sources, but they post articles from all manner of sources (which is not always what you want[0]) and seeing an article from an extremely biased source will cause the user to assume MSN is somewhere near that biased themselves, since that heuristic is applicable to outlets themselves.

[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/narrative

Connecting an IDE to code managed within WSL is certainly more complicated. I've also had my IDE freeze pretty regularly because of a three-way fight between WSL, my IDE, and corporate scans.

Fwiw I do all my rust and c# from within wsl with gwsl (Not wslg, the x windows that comes with windows 11).

It's worked flawlessly for the past year for multiple Jet brains IDEs and was trivial to set up.

Fair. VS Code has worked for me very well, but I'm sure experiences vary.

Find a new job?

Only slightly kidding. I do most of my work on a System76 laptop, and I loathe every minute I'm forced by my employer to check my email through Outlook. The day they shut down my Alpine connection to my work email was the beginning of a long slide downward for the quality of this place.

kmail and thunderbird work with outlook's web popup authentication thing.

I dont mind Mac and chrome.

I'm considering the same, especially as Apple has gotten quite heavy-handed in their push towards iCloud. Question: what kind of mobile phone do you use, and how's the OS integration? I am expecting it to be markedly worse than Apple's, but also curious what kind of integration does exist.

I recently jumped ship from Apple to Android after being a diehard apple user for 10+ years. So far I am enjoying no longer being constrained by Apple's ecosystem and way of doing things. Worth noting Android and OS integrations are significantly less polished, but any technical user would be able to recreate the same features. I'm now using a S23Ultra + Tab S9 Ultra.

Genuine question, I’m in a similar position (gonna replace my still mostly perfectly working iPhone 7). Do you think the tradeoff of shorter device support times and less polish which leads to occasional frustration worth it? I mean, I can’t roll out my own solutions to everything, I simply don’t have time even while I’m able.

For the life of me I can't get excited about my Tab S9, though it works nicely with s22 ultra. The bizarre 16:10 wide-screen decision makes it so bad for reading, way worse than you would expect the the relatively small jump to get to a square-er resolution.

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