Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

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https://web.archive.org/web/20230315200925/http://antitrust....

What did changed since Microsoft used ACPI as tool against Linux?

Enforced Auto-Updates, Ads, Cloud Account enforcement, Blocking Firefox partially in Teams [1], Setting Teams as Browser (Edge?), WSL (intent is not compatibility, it is to prevent migrations to Linux), Azure is a giant security problem and finally the deal with Qualcomm (hinder Linux on ARM) like we are in the 90ies?

The crap named Secure Boot with Microsoft as Certificate Authority. After certificates proofed to be miserable on the internet for 25 years. What about signing with a user generated private key (stored in a keyring or similar) of the superuser and storing the public key in the UEFI? Which would be simple and reliable. No. Microsoft opted for the solution which depends on their goodwill and the biggest possible attack surface.

And Pluton looks so awkward that Lenovo and Dell turned it immediately off.

I will not trust them. Their business model is greed, making the users itself hostile actor against all others. Using something intentionally incompatible and borked isn’t “your department”. You harm others with incompatible APIs, ABIs, weird “Word” files and Teams.

I didn’t considered to use DotNet. GNOME removed it a long time ago and it is fine (Tomboy/Mono -> Gnome/C++). The only thing which seems good is LSP. But the hard work is done by CLANG and others. Not Microsoft.

[1] Teams worked six months ago flawlessly with Firefox. Even screen-sharing on Wayland. But they greyed out and blocked the video-call button. Until I figured out that I can initiate calls through the calendar…lol. It is like 2001.

"yOu cAn cHaNgE sEtTinGs"

I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora.

I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years. Likely irrational.

But Fedora has been an option and I didn't even know.

What makes Fedora better (apart from having more recent packages)?

bookmarked for the response.

No snaps, better reliability during upgrades, more trustworthy devs.

That was enough for me to switch some of my machines.

I never upgrade Ubuntu straight away, because I don't want to deal with broken packages.

Imagine a world where the distro tests its updates.

You should check out Fedora.

If someone is looking for a snap-less system, but will like to stay in the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem, do give Linux Mint a look.

You've had a lot of issues with debian family compared to fedora?

>> I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora.

Had something similar happen when I finally relented to all the constant pestering to upgrade to Win11. I did so reluctantly. Suddenly, I needed to link everything to my onedrive account. Oh, you have an MS365 account? We need that too to set up your onedrive. Oh, you should use teams, let me make Edge your default browser and connect all your accounts to your edge account.

I didn't have any of this on Win10 and now it was just hijacking all my stuff, setting every MS program as the default and after I switched it, it would hijack them all back when I ran the updates. I purposefully keep all my stuff siloed for security reasons and here it was forcing them all together without my permission.

The last time it reset Edge and Teams and forced me to use my MS365 for Teams, that was it. I uninstalled it and then installed MX Linux (Debian based) and have been much happier since. I still have a Win10 desktop and I'm not surrendering that until I absolutely have to now.

Except they changed their mind on their CoPilot+ devices, as it is a required piece.

WSL is the proof how Desktop Linux isn't happening, while everyone keeps pushing for their snowflake distribution.

They aren't alone, Google on Chromebooks, Android, and Apple with Virtualization Framework, are all variants of what WSL achieves.

None of them has bothered to actually support the Year of Desktop Linux.

Regarding WSL, I tried very hard to use Linux exclusively on my desktop for about five years. While native Linux is excellent for servers, the desktop experience still has many shortcomings and unpredictabilities. It often feels like something breaks with every new release, affecting everything from power management to input systems. I grew tired of feeling like I was rolling the dice every time I performed an upgrade. Eventually, I concluded that using Linux on the desktop (at least on a large scale) is just a pipe dream. Although Windows has its problems, WSL provides a Linux implementation with the least friction, in my experience.

I have 100% the opposite experience. I was a Windows user for many years. After heavily using Linux for several months, I cannot work in Windows anymore; it just doesn't make sense to me. I feel like I can never predict what the system will do next. I would open a folder with a bunch of subfolders, and it would show me a progress bar. For almost half a minute. "Why? What the fuck are you trying to do, Windows? Why can't you just simply list the files? I just need to see them, nothing else. How come that literally not a single other file-explorer software does any shit of that sort? And why does it happen every single damn time when I open the same fucking folder?"

Search doesn't freaking work anymore. I can't even find an app that I just installed seconds ago - the search instead would take me to the web, opening Edge. Which is another damn pestilence alongside OneDrive Cloud. "No, Microsoft. I don't care about your damn browser, let me use whatever I want to use... And no, I don't care about your cloud." There's now built-in telemetry everywhere, and they're making it real hard to use the thing on your own computer without logging into an MS account.

I like my Linux. It makes me feel liberated from bullshit. Sure, it can feel brittle, but it doesn't feel "broken all the time". Windows feels like it's fundamentally broken beyond repair.

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