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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft seems determined to push people away from Windows with its user-hostile tactics—built-in ads, constant nagging about Edge, and forced OneDrive backups. It's really soured my experience. I’m done with Windows personally. While I have to use Win11 at work, I won't use it anywhere I have a choice.

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I finally made the switch earlier this year after realizing just how good Steam Proton is for gaming on Linux. Day-to-day computing on Linux is just so nice compared to Windows. It doesn't feel like I'm fighting with the OS anymore; the machine actually serves me now, instead of it constantly trying to undermine my intentions.

I grew up gaming on PCs. I still game regularly, and haven't used Windows for around ten years.

Anybody that wants to explore alternatives to Microsoft has every reason to do so, the software works about as well or better than running natively on Windows.

For $reasons my son has been gaming on my PC for the last month or so. First on Debian, now on Bazzite (I installed it out of curiosity, will probably revert back to Debian as I saw no advantage).

Last night he wanted to play a game that doesn't run on Linux because of its anti-cheat. I have a Windows 10 partition that hasn't been booted on for months. He went on it and that's when it really hit him how bad and user hostile Windows is. He always knew but it was only after being on Linux full-time for a few weeks and then trying to go back that he actually understood.

For people who never use anything except macOS / Linux, I challenge you to install Windows and experience it for yourself. The entire OS is like surfing the internet without ad block on. The nags, the pop ups, the malware you can’t remove. It’s truly incredible how awful Windows is. They are just milking the aging demographic who still uses Windows and squeezing as many clicks out of them as they can before Windows is dead as a home OS.

It's the Standard Business Operating System! What you say can't be correct!

enterprise gets a better version too. less ads

I use Mac as my personal system and used Linux for many years. Yet all this Mac and Linux experience is part of the reason I didn’t hesitate to have two Windows machines: one for work, one for light gaming. Windows isn’t that bad. I use it the way most folks probably do: just a way to get to the application I need. I don’t notice most of the ads. It works. Its auto-update mechanism is better than the Mac’s.

I don’t love Windows, but as a launching pad for proprietary software made for it, it gets the job done.

> its auto-update mechanism is better than the Mac’s.

Wow, what can a Mac auto-update do that is worse than Windows blocking your screen for 10 minutes during a Powerpoint presentation because the OS is «updating itself». (The only auto-update I know to be worse than Windows is Telsa's, bricking your car in the middle of the road for 45 minutes if you missclick on the touchscreen in traffic)

And yet, my Windows machine somehow applies a simple heuristic to figure out my active times and always does the updates when I'm not typically using it. Of course, it means the machine has to be on during those times, but I've never had the update in the middle of the day problem you've described. At least not as long as Windows 10 has been around.

> when I'm not typically using it. Of course, it means the machine has to be on during those times

This “simple heuristic” only works if you let your computer on while not using it (why would you do that? Except to accommodate for a broken update mechanism…)

> 10 minutes

I guess I have never seen Windows update take 10 minutes. Did you add the restart time into that? Because the restart after an update usually takes half of that alone.

10 minutes is around the login time for new user at my work computers. (That is, after it is fully booted and loaded, just the time for the user to log in.)

But yeah, the Mac updates aren't even remotely as bad as Windows.

> Wow, what can a Mac auto-update do that is worse than Windows blocking your screen for 10 minutes

Rename random internal user accounts without informing the user, breaking many third-party package managers with an overnight upgrade? https://determinate.systems/posts/nix-support-for-macos-sequ...

Oh, or it could depreciate an entire class of software you may-or-may-not use without any opportunity for replacement besides downgrading your Mac? https://support.apple.com/en-us/103076

More mundane, but it also unconditionally blasts a bunch of config files under /etc that rightfully belong to the user/administrator. I've not seen any OS as willing to simultaneously Sherlock existing apps and rip out the APIs they depend on, either.

macOS upgrades are indeed generally exceptionally disruptive to applications.

I do hate the direction Windows is going. That said as someone who also uses Linux / macOS I just use group policy to disable all of this and do not notice any of it, even across major version updates.

I've mostly used Mac for the past 15 ywars os so. I was in a situation where Windows wasn't really politically acceptable for work and Linux was still sort of a pain in the butt to get work done for someone who wasn't familiar. So I just bought a Mac for the first time. At this point, I'm not sure it matters but I'm not a gamer, ChromeOS is mostly oriented towards low-budget educational market, and I have no particular reason to run Linux.

I use UNIX systems since 1993, Linux since 1995, subscribed to Linux journal during its lifetime, do devops stuff, yet I gave up on the Linux Desktop other than Android and WebOS, which is debatable how Linux kernel matters in a managed OS userspace.

Windows in all private laptops, at work we also do macOS, with GNU/Linux on VMs when required.

There is always that one little thing that makes one spend a couple of weekends, last being a NUC whose EUFI couldn't get to read any distribution installed on the internal NVMe, only when used from external devices. Windows, no biggie, works both ways.

That really depends on the hardware and the quality of its firmware.

Got myself some refurbished Lenovo M910q Tiny with 32GB RAM and low-power (35Watt) Core i5-7500t and 7700t (Kaby Lake).

Upped one with Mushkin Essentials to 64GB, put new SSDs (1x Sata, 1x NVME) into them, and they are all fucking flying,

with all crappy mitigations ON, while staying mostly silent.

Everything runs on them without problems. Even Hackintosh which I tried for fun.

Switching them on or off via keyboard, or resuming successfully from suspend?

No matter if to RAM or DISK, works every time.

Virtualisation? Covered.

2x 4K via DP? Covered. Though at 60Hz only. (Don't care, don't have faster screens anyways)

LAN could be more and faster, only 1x 1GB. (Don't care ATM)

Could even be expanded via 1x half-length and low-profile

PCIe 3 x8, depending on the card and PSU. (Don't care ATM)

Any relevant video-codec is HW-accellerated, for de- and encoding. No sweat.

It remains to be seen if they'll still get BIOS updates for any new vulerabilities,

but again, I don't really care.

Excellent (small) homelab or automation stuff.

Depending on configuration they come from 200 to 300USD/EUR.

Edit: This stuff https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/desktops-and-all...

...while staying @40° to 44°C during heavy browsing, streaming yt-audio in one tab with no tricks at all (like using ytp-dl -> mpv). Just one tab in FF-ESR with uBo playing along.

Bootup is @34°C, while room temperature is @19°~20°C.

Edit:

> Everything runs on them without problems...

Even https://genode.org/ from USB-Stick.

Never seen such clear booting, kernel-logs, DMESG regarding ACPI/DSDT, workarounds/quirks. Not even on a ThinkPad T60p or HP-Elitebook 2540p (which was very good for the time).

> They are just milking the aging demographic

It can't just be an aging demographic.

Young people today use Windows.

Mac has an eerie vibe to it.

Linux sounds too difficult.

And you want to play games.

I'd imagine people using MacOS are well familiar with in-desktop ads, random news articles popping up in your task bar, and notifications that are literally indistinguishable from marketing.

> built-in ads, constant nagging about Edge, and forced OneDrive backups

I must be using it wrong because I don't have any of those things.

It's a very common experience. You not seeing it does not invalidate this reality.

Perhaps it doesn't invalidate the reality but it does suggest that the sort who experience it are not very good at figuring out to properly operate an OS and are just as likely to encounter problems when they switch to any other OS.

I imagine the moronic mass-bricking a few months back also forced people to move away from that eco-system.

No kidding, I'm building a PC for someone to move to Linux, probably MX

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