Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah I ran Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017 and I regret it.

Since then I run Windows 10 + WSL and life is good.

Win10 support ends next year and I am at a complete loss at what to do.

Linux desktop never worked, never will, the incentives are not there. It's only free if you don't value your time. As I wrote before , your choices are Ubuntu where an OS upgrade shatters your entire system so throughly it takes days to get back to a working system or you can go with Arch where Bluetooth/multifunction device/etc might break every so often. But at least most of the system remains standing. And if you need to connect to some funny enterprise wifi or VPN, the IT department of the client will have Mac and Windows support but Linux? X Windows doesn't get new features, Wayland is not ready, and the package manager landscape is just getting worse https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/616/9...

Windows 11 is hot garbage. No other way to put it.

Send help.

FWIW, I continue to run Linux as my primary desktop, and I do not regret it. Nothing is free, but very few things are worth your dignity. I made my choices.

It's somewhat of a grey area but if you can get your hands on the IoT version of Windows 10 LTSC - the supported lifecycle end date is all the way until 2032.

I have a dual-boot mid-tower running EndeavourOS (Arch Linux flavor) and the non-IoT version of Win 10 LTSC (support ends in 2027) with strict group policies around disabling of telemetry that's been humming along for several years now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/rel...

Disabling telemetry is easy with O&O shutup, I have been using that.

That's the kind of thing where I prefer to manage the services/group policies manually or at least run something open-source:

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Why would you use a proprietary program to do that?

Go Mac. The GUI is stable and boring: the Finder hasn’t changed much in years. It’s Unix underneath so you can use command-line stuff or dusty programs like Emacs.

You can now pick up a MacBook Air at Walmart for $700. Considering the inflation we’ve had, that’s actually reasonable. It will do the Unixy stuff well. My Mac is of this same class and I’m happy with it.

Very happy for people who are pleased with macOS and Apple in general. Well, I guess realistically, I'm kind of happy for whoever is actually pleased with their computer in general, even if somehow for someone that is Windows.

That said, I just want to make it abundantly clear: I can barely even tolerate the macOS desktop for a fraction of my day. I hesitate to rant about every single thing that pisses me off about it, I think it's wasted time: the direction macOS is going in is not compatible with me and my computing needs and I don't think anyone has to worry about it. The point is, macOS is not the solution for everyone. I don't think I could have a stronger distaste for Apple and their philosophy if I tried, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

(This opinion is, unfortunately, up to date. I am currently using macOS in some capacity, regrettably.)

This is strange to read, as someone who really enjoys OSX. Except for Finder, which has failed to evolve in a useful way.

But I use my MBP without a mouse because the synergy between the OS and hardware is so nice. Window and desktop management in particular.

I'm very happy with my Mac, but... while the key point here is the unasked for enabling of OneDrive...

Untangling synced Docs and Desktop folders between multiple Macs, and trying to revert to something akin to a default and reconcile what is in various folders, not pleasant.

I use macs as my daily drivers and have no idea what you're talking about? Don't even have to sign into iCloud to use it

You don't have to use it, but iCloud Drive and Sync is a fairly commonly used feature:

> Desktop & Documents Folders: Keep your Desktop & Documents Folder in sync with iCloud and access them from other devices and iCloud.com

But easily has issues reconciling files on different devices, and then, if you turn it off, things get messy and need a lot of moving things around.

Makes sense. I generally avoid anything Apple Cloud related; those products are not their strength...

After I moved continents (again) I am now more stable and since I use my 55" 4K TV as my monitor, I decided to make a desktop PC which can game on it -- I went with an 5700X3D CPU with a 7900 XT GPU and 64GB RAM.

I do not think there's anything like it in the Mac world.

Wayland is almost-ready. This is what I needed to do to switch (caveat: this is ubuntu 22, so I may be 2 years out of date):

- Accept inability to use monitor color profiles (this is still WIP)

- Accept inability to use full-screen sharing (very likely to be broken, in theory fixable, in practice its unclear how to fix the portal mess)

- Forked libinput because it behaved unacceptable with my touchpad, and the original developers don't want to add the configuration options to fix this. (Well kind of - custom acceleration profiles may be available in later versions)

- Spent some time adding all the "use wayland" cli flags to everything electron based. In theory, ~/.config/thing-flags.conf is supposed to work, in practice it doesn't, so I have a bunch of wayland replacement clis for everything (wcode, wobsidian, etc)

- Spent some time looking up tool replacements (i3wm -> sway, dmenu -> rofi, xclip -> wl-copy, xprop -> ... its complicated etc)

Benefit: for the first time ever my Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen3 laptop (4K screen) outperforms my Android phone in graphics rendering performance and responsiveness, even just using the Intel card. Using it feels gloriously good. This includes the OEM Windows install as a comparison point, which is doing significantly worse, even with nvidia card enabled.

Replacing Xorg is an absolutely impossible task, with a long tail of broken things left in Wayland's wake. But I think it might finally be getting to the point where its worth it

Maybe try to debloat windows with a debloat script.

Whats wrong with debian?

Why shit on the group of people who are taking the time to create a viable alternative to the bullshit that Microsoft and Apple try and cram down our throats?

Instead of begging for help, why not be that help for someone else?

I have been an open source developer for twenty years.

You're woefully out of date at this point with your experience. The vast majority of the visible polish to make desktop Linux viable has been done in the last 4 years. I started using it full-time in 2020 and since then the progress has been remarkable. Just yesterday I upgraded to KDE Plasma 6.1 and it's truly incredible how well done it is. It's better than windows at this point.

I use Linux desktops daily but even I can recognize that it's not quite ready to compete. Anything you've ever had to fix by googling or opening terminal would be a complete showstopper for the vast majority of users

That's true and what's more is that's what so fucked up about this discussion.

They would literally rather suffer with the kind of impressive surveillance and advertising that Microsoft heaps on them rather than change themselves and the tools they can/could use for the better.

It's the epitome of learned helplessness.

Those users can't really use anything that's not OEM anyway, so Linux isn't ever gonna threaten Microsoft. Apple is the only realistic alternative.

press X to Doubt.

I have a friend from HS who had no interest in computers beyond using them as appliances until he asked me how to extend the life of a shitty laptop that he owned and I suggested that he install Linux on it.

This was about 20s ago now and between now and then he's become a distrohopping person who is quite knowledgeable in hardware with no impetus from me beyond the initial push.

I look at what rural farmers can do when push comes to shove in all kinds of domains and I wonder why not with the general public and computers.

If we had a Cuban embargo type scenario where westerners couldn't get modern hardware and the operating systems that run on it they'd figure out how to.make.die with the cheapest and most reliable software/hardware combo.

People don't grow to learn new skills because they aren't pressed to by circumstance not because they can't.

Win 10 telemetry can be removed and there's no advertising.

Visible polish is utterly irrelevant when the problem is with drivers -- the manufacturers have zero incentive to produce Linux drivers and the open source ones are of uneven quality simply because they don't have the information. This is not to shit on the developers, it's 100% the manufacturers fault but at the end of the day, it's my printer-scanner that doesn't work regardless who is to blame.

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