Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
himthe.dev
himthe.dev
Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.
Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.
The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.
CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
We used to have a few days set aside regularly to fix things that would never get prioritised.
Little a agile is about pushing back against dysfunctional business dynamics for the sake of humanistic goals like employees’ mental health and doing right by customers.
Big À Agile co-opts that, and is more about squeezing as much money out of everyone as possible while wearing the trappings of agile values to make it seem more palatable.
By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.
AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.
They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.
The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.
Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.
If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.
Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The result window will just be blank. If I press enter after having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so laggy.
And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a defective screen - nope, only certain apps.
If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers, hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.
People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).
It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is today.
Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)
Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.
At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.
But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...
There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.
And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.
And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.
And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.
Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.
I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
In fact, given that it includes perpetual priority support (within a business day!) I expect the author's gonna change that soon, once he gets one of those infinitely demanding customers and realizes what a terrible mistake he made (inf support for a one-time payment, oops!). So better bite while it's hot!
The €40 option for one year of updates is a lot more economical and is still a perpetual license for the software itself.
It's easy to lose a few minutes each day to Explorer shenanigans. For people making real money that adds up fast.
£50 for a heated seat, perhaps, but you also get by far one of the best turbocharged inline-6 engines ever put in a 4-door saloon, the S58. Analogous to Windows NT, a well-engineered kernel.
Interestingly, TC was one of the few software that I considered paying for, but in the end I didn't because they asked for too much information at the time. Not long later I switched to Linux, and I couldn't use TC there.
Windows users just don't pay and keep using Explorer.
They obviously have an advantage, but it’s not insurmountable to being garbage.
Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/
Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
Fun trivia: Mark Russinovich went on to greater heights, and he's CTO of Microsoft Azure.
I wish Microsoft would do the same for another amazing freeware "power tools" suite: Nirsoft Utilities. https://www.nirsoft.net/
I really don't know how Voidtools has survived all these years, by giving away their primary product (Everything Search) for free.
Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.
https://www.voidtools.com/faq/
For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.
(Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)
Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.
I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.
I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).
So much so I donate to them monthly.
Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....
To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.
I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.
> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.
If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.
> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.
I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.
It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.
I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.
Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.
Yup, definitely intended
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
That was then.
Now last night my partner comes back from the dumpster with a Toshiba laptop that's in great shape, its 20 full years old, came with Windows Vista, had been upgraded to Windows 7, has 1GB of memory, 120GB SATA2 HDD (slower than modern SATA), dual-core 1.73GHz CPU.
Seems to work perfectly and With W7 it's snappier than the 2019 HP booted to old or new Windows 10 or Windows 11 even more. All comparisons at baseline without the internet.
When you try W11 on a HDD it really emphasizes the difference from W10 on the same hardware.
But when this kind of W7 thing just falls in your lap, it really hits you how much better performance could have been available by now from Windows if they really tried.
Or didn't drop the ball every time they were at bat, depending on the general manager ;)
Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is instant.
I'm so happy I haven't had to use a Windows machine in more than 10 years.
For me, MacBookPro for coding, Linux Mint for home desktop and Steam + Xbox Live online for gaming. We live in excellent times
Why is this set to 400ms?
Any reason it's not 0?
I can't test it on my current computer, but does the setting affect menus that are triggered by hovering over something?
If so, then 400ms makes more sense, and the real bug is that menus summoned by an explicit click should be exempt from the delay.
The reason for a hover-delay is that it allows someone to flick their mouse to their real destination without triggering a "trap" of content which pops up on the way to obscure their goals.
1. Remove the sleep(30) statement you added a month ago and forgot about"""
-Lars Doucet
A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.
I turned on hiding the taskbar the other day. I don’t think they’ve changed it since Windows 95. I have a modern gaming laptop, and the animation is purely linear, no acceleration. It feels so weirdly unnatural. Even worse, it’s not smoothly animated! I have a 120Hz monitor but it seems to be animated at 5fps.
Nobody on the Windows team seems to give a single shit at all.
So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that more people are having problems with 11 than they did with 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are universal.
Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of the bloat/junk).
Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had some issues getting my video to work properly across all of Teams and Zoom.
I disagree. I've got windows defender as the only endpoint software on both my daily driver machines, and I see the same issues.
In 2019, I was working for a place that installed Carbon Black on my desktop and it went from fast to unusable overnight. I've since changed jobs, and I've seen a decay in the baseline of the OS over the last 6 years.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.
Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.
Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.
But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.
Nope. The experience was just rubbish. Out of the box, the machine was incredibly slow. It would get warm to the touch while sitting idle, and the battery would die in about 45 minutes. I quickly figured out there was some HP audio process running all the time to do noise cancellation on input from the microphone. For some reason it was active all the time, and it needed about 30% of a core to do its thing. So I got rid of that. But windows explorer was still slow... of course, it was some HP antivirus rootkit program preinstalled doing who knows what. I spent hours clearing crap off that machine. Anything with HP in the name, to start. It probably would have been faster to reinstall windows completely, but I didn't want to do that from a hotel room over wifi.
By the time I was done, it was ... ok. The machine still lagged when you opened programs for some reason. But the battery life went up to 3-4 hours, and it was fast enough I could get work done.
I think about that laptop a lot. Imagine all the people who buy those laptops. What % will spend the hours it took to clear the crapware off them? I can easily imagine my mother buying a laptop like that and just assuming that's how fast computers are.
I think this might be the #1 benefit for regular people to buying a mac. When you buy a computer from apple, there's no 3rd party who installed a bunch of crap on the computer before you got your hands on it. The only people who install crap software are Apple. And as much as I hate apple's greedy background processes, they tend to pause while you're running on battery.
> You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco.
Never underestimate how much bloatware is running on that costco laptop. Open up task manager. You'll see.
When I saw it was still absolutely crap and unusable, I considered putting Linux on it, but didn't want to end up as support, so...
Long story short, a clean install of Windws 11 was functional. Updates took forever and a day. The computer itself takes about 6-8 minutes to become usable on boot, but once everything is cached into RAM, it's usable.
More usable initially than my work issued Dell (when I actually worked at Dell) that within a week I cloned and installed an SSD on, probably breaking all kinds of terminable policies. So,story time:
I did some silly things in those 4 years there to bypass bureaucracy: Cloned my entire laptop into a VM to have a secondary method of accessing work stuff. Created an entire test lab using unauthorized disk cloning into VMs for remote access. Disabled auto updates by management software so PCs wouldn't be kicked off the network. Probably set off all kinds of alarms. Would occasionally reenable to keep VM authorized.
The kicker is that I was recognized company-wide for creating something useful out of basically nothing but my time and curiosity. Got a bonus for it, on top of it.
To your point, my 96GB DDR5 24-core desktop-replacement "gaming" laptop, when used regularly, with a decent amount of startup apps, still struggles to be responsive on boot. There is a lot of bloat I don't want to get rid of because they provide updates and performance features. At startup, I'm usually at 14 GB RAM used, which is nuts. Not sure how to fix this trend.
I know this isn't an option for many, but I think swapping to linux might be the right first step. Linux would be fast as lightning on a computer like that.
This is 100% on point! For the past three years all of my in-office work was done on a ChromeBox running ChromeOS, I work in a contact center, but my specific project does not focus on customers but other stuff.
At first I thought they did this because Chrome-anything is usually cheap, but the devices they give us are all around or above $1000, so now I think we use them only because the client wants us to use them, since on some other projects they do use Windows, but with this client we have A LOT of project and A LOT of work, so it's not like we're the exception.
I think with the advent of SteamOS, ChromeOS and Android merging, we could legit see a serious move away from Windows, even in corporate worlds, but who knows, my vision could just be clouded, I'm not a genius or some smart person like a bunch of people here on HN, I work for basically a minimum salary (Portugal), live in a room, that the company that hires me, rents to me, and read HN mostly for entertainment.
I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.
Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.
My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.
You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.
The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.
You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.
There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.
You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!
Not OP, but why? I have a perpetual license and a 12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine. I see no reason to compulsively update something that's feature-complete and functional.
Updates break shit or make shit worse for me all the time. See: Windows 11, macOS Tahoe, and KDE next year when they drop my working X11 session and expect me to use busted-ass Wayland that's missing functionality I use daily.
Why do I need updates? "Security?" I'm not exactly a nation-state hacking target. I don't run random pirated software. I'm firewalled to hell, and behind CGNAT on Starlink. I'll keep my browser up to date, fine, but I'm still running -esr.
I get where you are coming from. That was my stance roughly 20 years ago too. I also note that you are quite clearly not daft!
You and I have different "jobs". I worry about thousands of systems on many sites, one of which is my home. I'm an IT consultant and am the managing director of my company. I think you are an engineer, perhaps retired ("12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine")
If Solidworks, Catia, AutoCAD or whatever (?) works then fine. You might like to firewall off whichever vendor's website/security systems might want to stop a 12 year old copy of a corpo CAD from working if it isn't licensed. It probably is because all of the above generally need a license service.
I worry about many 1000s of PCs and I think updates, patches etc are a good idea. If you are an engineer, then you will have to do your own "deploy, fix issues" cycle. IT is just the same.
>>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
This can also be due to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Teams etc. Which I suspect supports your point.
A hard lesson I learned was that cloning a git repository into a directory managed by OneDrive is a recipe for interesting behavior.
The other thing is that both Git and OneDrive are in some sense fiddling with your file system at once.
> The other thing is that both Git and OneDrive are in some sense fiddling with your file system at once.
Why would .git be fiddling with your file system? It writes into .git, and changes files, but shouldn't do more than that.
Unrealengine taking 40 extra gigs because of underutilization on small files is one rampant case.
Large python project disk ballooning is another.
That it's file copy move is also dramatically bad at handling such scenarios compounds this further as can be seen by shuffling the same lot with teracopy vs explorer and windows default behavior irrespective of drive formatting. Can easily be hours of difference.
How is that fairer? :P They set the defaults, they could change it, yet they don't. Seems entirely fair to point out shitty defaults as faults of their OS, regardless of how that came to be.
It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.
>I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.
It seems to be a common complaint online, dating back to the launch of 11. I see some of the blame being put on extensions but what changed in the extensions between 10 and 11 to cause this?
I know on my work computer I was experiencing this plus I almost always have to click show more and wait for that lag to finish.
I was able to edit the registry to show all at the cost of 1 lag...so I guess a step forward?
Not necessarily. Every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to install a context menu item on Windows. Corporate or not. Just like every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to send you notifications on mobile.
On Windows the solution is Total Commander, on mobile the solution is to turn all notifications off :)
When it's slow it takes 3 seconds on win 10.
It's hard to tell what makes a non-stock Windows install slow.
I had the same issue with a loan machine from a client, super responsive onsite, but once I connected through a VPN from an external network, all the basic functionality in the file manager was brought to a halt. Even something as simple as right click on a folder to show a context menu would take several seconds.
The files were all local (also with Onedrive sync disabled) so I am almost positive it was whatever they were using for endpoint protection (Can't recall 100% but probably something from CrowdStrike).
I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.
Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.
Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though.
Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.
Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.
Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load.
I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.
We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc..
It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches.
With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025.
I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.
The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM.
It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.
The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux
If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/
My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad.
I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop.
[0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...
Sadly Linux isn't any better on this front because it's a hardware issue. Laptop vendors have gotten terrible at managing sleep states. S0 sleep is a joke. I changed my laptop to hibernate on lid close after the second time it nearly cooked itself in my bag.
The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.
I purchased a Surface Pro at one point, with the intention of using it for sketches and using Windows on it, thinking it'll be better because the hardware and OS is from the same organization. Nope! Slow out of the box, horrible thermal management and software bugs galore. Installed Arch with Gnome on it, ran better in most aspects. However, pen usage and touchscreen even after I tried my best to adjust it was worse than Windows, I guess they won there.
I didn't use to hate Windows, because at least it wasn't utterly broken, just stupid, but they're really in a deep decline lately. Maybe it's time for one of those "stop the press" type of moments where they have to stop, take a serious look and fix what they have as it currently feels impossible to use reliably.
I have moved to Bazzite at home but it is ridiculous that you can't just use your language right away. A normal person would just bail out.
If you choose Chinese, all of the content is localized but you have to enable an input method and that doesn't even actually allow you to input Chinese characters!
It shows you a scrolling(!) pop-up that tells you you have to enable a different option in order to type in the language that you chose at the very beginning. Hope you didn't choose the wrong one out of ibus, fcitx and fcitx(wayland experimental) – whatever happened to scim, and xim, I miss editing environment variables.
Even the cheapest Android gadget can do this out of the box.
It has happened since win7 or older but still not fixed.
Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.
The trick I found to get out of it is to hit ALT+TAB. It ironically puts another app into focus and when that happens, the snipping tool exits. Snipping tool is pretty great though. I wish macOS had the same.
Personally I hate when people copy/paste images as it often results in bad filenames like "image.jpg" (as in literally the word image) and then requires me to rename them when saving them when the file probably had a perfectly good default filename. I make sure to save images and reupload them, and I have a one-liner to check my pictures dir for bad filenames in case I saved one without noticing (worst case I run my routine rsync and am repeatedly replacing some image.jpg with a different picture). I also made a short script to put the current unix time on my clipboard in case I need to rename some of these bad files in a pinch. I tend to think less of people contributing to this bad filename problem, although chat programs and such could likely detect and "fix" it on their end also.
My screenshot workflow saves an image with the dimensions and date/time in it to my ~/scrot directory and then I can quickly post it somewhere by just sorting that dir by mtime with newest files on top.
99 files should be enough for everyone.
It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable.
maybe it helps
What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.
I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now
in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the user base and openness of the forums; when something breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real fix.
I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production server for change management reasons alone, but for a home desktop and my home server, it's actually the distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux crap" to keep it going.
Although it is hard to say. Ubuntu also has, I guess, intentional behavior that is hard to distinguish from a bug, like packages switching from apt to snap. So it might just be that my subjective experience feels more buggy.
Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.
> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don’t many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/
That’s not too dissimilar from what you’d get running stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in potentially undesired ways, windows users just don’t blame the OS for that
ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#...?
If you have a modified config file, it puts the new default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which seems strictly better to just deleting the new default one.
Anyway I think the discussion boils down to semantics. ArchLinux is not "unstable" in the sense that it is prone to breaking. But it also delivers none of the stability promises that stable release distros or rolling release distros with snapshotting and testing like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed deliver. To call ArchLinux stable would make every distribution stable, and the word would lose all meaning.
Most distributions promise that an upgrade always results in a working system. Instead moving the manual maintenance to major release upgrades.
I dunno. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.
Any issues are usually on the front page of archlinux.org what the issue is, and how to fix it.
This is just nonsense, pacman doesn't do this. If you'd modified a config file, it will create a .pacnew version instead of replacing it. Otherwise you'll get the default config synced with the version of the software you've installed, which is desirable.
It's pretty rare to modify any config files outside of ~/.config these days anyway. What few modifications I have at the system level are for things like mkinitcpio, locale, etc and they never change.
From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it. Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get help from him. I once had university admins very happy to help me with something and even give me some tips.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy) installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special GUI appstore).
BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other things. There is also Desktop Environment support and support for hidpi monitors and such.
Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch, where you have to format your hard drive without GParted or any other GUI.
I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you wanted to know what mattered in the past.
My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids.
No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
AUR helpers like yay are not supported officially. The other commenter sheds some light as to why.
If users mental model is mostly "yay is like pacman but can also install packages from AUR the same way" wihout thinking deeper about the difference then I think it using it is very risky and that you should just stick to pacman + git/makepkg. Only consider helpers once that's become second nature and routine. Telling people to "just yay install" is doing them a disservice. An upgrade breaking the system isn't even that bad compared to getting infected with malware due to an old package you were using being orphaned and hijacked to spread malware or getting a bad copycat version due to a typo.
I think EndeavourOS is doing users a disservice if they provide sth like yay preinstalled and ready to use out of the box. It isn't installing packages from a shared repo: It's downloading code from arbitrary locations and running it on your machine in order to produce a package. Being able to read and understand shell script (PKGBUILD) is kind of a prerequisite to using it safely.
So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
Can you elaborate on this?
For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy.
Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked.
Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows.
All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have.
Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game.
But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
I used Linux Mint for 2 full months, 99% of my personal computing. Really like it. BUT... not all games my gaming group plays work on it, and social gaming is very important to me.
That doesn't mean I'm sour on Linux PC gaming. I think it's great, and will work for a lot of people, and it's so close for me. And I might switch, since my gaming tastes are shifting.
I have an Nvidia card and use mostly Ubuntu (mate), also for gaming. It's even a problem now, because I would benefit from a hard divide between the gaming and working\studying system (I have a gaming user in backlog). On Linux it's mostly KSP, Factorio, but sometimes DeepRockGalactic, Valheim, Euro Truck Sim or Warhammer: Total War1\2\3. These games work flawlessly or with <10%fps hit.
There are games that kind of work - Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey, Cyberpunk, Hunt: Showdown. But you lose comfort and I'd rather just play them on Windows, than suffer decreased functionality on Linux. I know that some of it (definitely Cyberpunk) is only because of NVIDIA.
When buying games I usually don't buy Windows only games unless there is a very good reason. And I quit League of Legends and WRC rally because of anti cheat scam. I feel scammed after putting lot of money in a game and suddenly losing the ability to play it.
Comeon. If a customer bought a game that says it runs on linux, they should be able to play it on linux well, not just launch it and quit within 5 mins.
I get you have the ideology up in your head, but don't lie and embellish linux to this degree. The attitude just turns people off.
It's like saying something works on "laptop" without specifying whether it's a Thinkpad or a Chromebook or a Macbook.
Actually there was one thing I couldn't do but this isn't unique to NixOS. I tried to install a GTAV mod that allows you to ride your smart bike trainer in game: GTBikeV. The mod can be installed, but the Bluetooth doesn't work. This is a WINE limitation.
None of those games say they run on Linux.
- Starcraft 2 is available for windows/mac: https://starcraft2.blizzard.com/en-us/
- Anno 1800 is available for windows: https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/
- Hogwarts Legacy is available for windows: https://www.hogwartslegacy.com/en-us/pc-specs
Every game I've purchased that actually says it runs on Linux, has worked beautifully on Linux (stellaris and factorio come to mind). Most windows games work beautifully on Linux too, but Blizzard isn't lifting any fingers to make it that way.
And I choose to use Windows for most of my personal computing, due to my gaming preferences, some needs (concussions + poor eyesight means things like scaling and brightness controls and refresh rate matter a lot to me), and my preference for DxO PhotoLab (which isn't Linux compatible.)
StarCraft 2 worked, oddly enough, run from Steam as an external program. (Lots of search results tried to get me to use Lutris/bottles, but I couldn't get it to work consistently under Lutris.)
Was also able to get WoW, Diablo 4, WC3 and SC1 running well this way, since they're all in a single Wine Battle.net install.
For the people that it just works for, well it just works for.
For anyone else, apparently they are the problem? Not Linux?
Well sorry no. I did get StarCraft 2 working with Lutris... once. Then I couldn't get it to start again. Eventually I switched to running Battle.Net from Steam and for some reason that did work. But it wasn't a "just works" or "piece of cake." It was a puzzle.
I think Canonical and the Gnome foundation have made some really bone headed decisions over the years, but I stick with Ubuntu because the mass of users on it means I never get left high and dry. Or at least I'm not alone when I run into a problem.
Though any kind of documentation is like Linux, scattered and inconsistent. And I'm "OK" with that, as in I think the way that Linux came to be and is maintained, and provides user choice is also the reason why it's not "user-friendly" in every scenario. You can choose your distribution, and a lot of other things. And then look in a wide variety of places for bug reports, user questions, etc. You'll get a variety of answers from "it just works for me" to "change your distribution that you chose" to "even though some guides say to use Lutris, it's easier to just put it in Steam's external program launcher and choose Proton version x.yz."
Even then, not everything will work because it wasn't written to work (for Linux). It was written to work for Windows, and then some smart people rolled up their sleeves and found ways to make a great many things work for Linux, and it's all amazing. And I find using Linux (mostly) quite pleasant. But when things don't work... there's going to be friction. It will take user effort to find a solution, or a solution might not be found.
And for me personally, being someone who really likes to poke and customize and do things my way, Linux is a blessing and a curse, because I can guarantee I'll hit "weird edge cases" like trying to use the online multiplayer part of a game instead of just single player, or try to use my laptop's brightness controls, but they don't work, or I'll want fractional scaling to work, but it won't. And maybe there's a fix out there, or maybe not. Fixes like "it works for me" or "change your distribution", though, are non-fixes. They just frustrate people. If changing my distribution fixes an issue, how many new issues does it create for me?
How do you fix this? I dont know - most of these are the developers refusing support because of anticheat or just support overload, but it's insane to suggest that linux works for gaming when the most played games in the world straight up do not work. I'd love if linux was more viable though, can't wait to ditch the slowness from windows.
I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers
I think Starcraft 2 broke me from this habit, once you're studying various metas rather than having fun you need to take a step back and reevaluate.
https://game-data-packager.debian.net/available.html
The games on that list have native ports that can be integrated into the Debian environment just by installing packages, and the game data packages can be automatically generated from each game's official install media.
People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.
I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?
Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of the Linux doesn’t boot with it or you have to go though hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia, gentle-yall).
I’d all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0 euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of unpaid overtime to get comfortable
But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at the right entity if we're going to get them to change. Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found that they can bully people so much it gives them Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
I've had Windows in one disk and Linux in another for maybe a decade and use the boot selection to pick what I want. Never had a single issue.
Although I haven't opened Windows in months, so I'll likely nuke it soon and give more space for my Linux.
Still, you haven't said what are these extremely horrible cons that two systems have. For me they're so small it's not even comparable to having to submit yourself to a shit Windows system only to avoid the "hassle" of having two systems.
I used Windows only for gaming and Linux for everything else. Now I'm fed up with games that choose to block Linux out, so I no longer need the two systems and couldn't be happier.
With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete and come out of others ???? who would guess
But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.
Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.
You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.
It used to be the reverse as you stated, but that hasn't been true since about 2015.
The built-in amdgpu drivers are awful, constantly crashy and with very poor hardware support of anything more than a couple of years old.
This is a bewildering assertion.
What good is it?
You can't use it for editing video.
Well, duh.
> unless you use the binary-only drivers
Which you also have to do with nvidia cards.
> which only work on a handful of very new cards
So get a new card?
> You can't use it for editing video.
Yes I can.
----
I actually switched from a 7900 XTX to a 4090 BITD because I wanted CUDA, so I get that angle, but that doesn't mean I go around telling people "AMD isn't accelerated," because it's not true and it's a silly thing to try to claim.
Post last week I put in an Arc B580 and I had some issues at the start, but that's more to do with the fact that my workstation has a Haswell Xeon v3... Otherwise it was just turning CSM off.
That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.
VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.
I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.
And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
It's so weird to me that people just allow this, or even defend it. Game companies should be legally obligated to scale human moderation and curation of multiplayer games, and if you're paying for service that gets moderated and curated, there should be some legal expectation of process - a requirement that the service provider lay out a specific "due process" framework, even if it ends up mediated, that gives a customer legal recourse. Instead, they try to automate everything, which has notoriously indiscriminate collateral damage with no recourse.
If you pour significant chunk of your private time and money into a game, you should be entitled to not arbitrarily lose an account or gameplay progress because some poorly configured naive Bayes classifier decided you did something wrong, without corresponding evidence or recourse to undo bad bans.
For some reason companies are entitled to infinitely expand their reach without concurrently expanding their responsibilities in providing service to individuals. Must be nice.
11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)
9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)
11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)
So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works
If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?
People have been saying "vote with your wallet" every time gaming companies do something anti consumer like day one dlc or buggy releases (don't pre-order!) or $90 games, but gaming companies continue to push the envelope on what gamers will pay for because gamers keep paying for it.
It's a sad reality.
Don't do it like "let's play this game because it runs on Linux" do it like "let's play this game because it's fun".
If you want to be the one to lead this change you have to do extra work. Dual boot Linux and find a game that's fun that you can do online. Find the other friend or two in your group that will do the same (at least play the game, Linux is optional but encouraged for this subset). Just play together for a bit, give it a trial run. Then when playing the other game with the larger group say "hey, so and so and I have been playing this game, you guys should play with us sometime". They don't have to install Linux, just play a new game that their friends are already playing. That's why they're there, to play games with their friends. Don't try to get them to switch to Linux, just play games with your friends. You might have a holdout but if most people move then everyone will. But if you want to do that move you have to find what works and at least one other friend to give it a trial (who won't need to do as much work as you). That's how you do it. No crazy scheme and honestly not massive amounts of work either. Just the normal process of finding new games to play with one constraint. It just seems complicated because I stated the process explicitly.
> It was because it was fun
> it was part of the cultural zeitgeist
> it's popular,
Maybe you're obsessed with PUBG or Battlefield and then yeah, Linux isn't going to work for you. That's okay! But looking at the numbers, for most people, they can still be a part of all the cultural excitement. It's not going to work for everyone, and that's okay! If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. But I want to make sure we can distinguish real blockers from ones Microslop and EA want you to believe in.
> the community is fun
> You can't really replace something like that with just "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
There's one more important thing I want to bring up. I think it is important to ask "where is your line?" How much junk can Winblows shove in before you're willing to make sacrifices? Is EA installing a rootkit enough of a security concern where you won't take it? What is? You don't need to tell me what the answers are to these questions. What's important is that you yourself know where these lines are beforehand. The lines are personal and unique to you. People are going to have other lines than you and that's completely fine. I just ask you think about what conditions would cause you to make sacrifices? That way if they happen you can respond.
Note that this is skipping over some extremely popular games which aren't on Steam. Notably Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Valorant, and everything else from Riot Games, none of which work on Linux. From the Steam examples there's also some grey areas, GTA5 singleplayer works but multiplayer does not, and Counterstrike works on official servers but not on Faceit servers, where a lot of serious competitive play happens.
The costs of switching can only be answered at the individual level. No one can answer for you. But people can state their experiences and help you understand the costs and benefits.
Let's make sure we can accurately understand the costs and benefits and differentiate from imaginary ones.
I also said that you can take a stand without switching to Linux. Maybe the costs are too high for you right now. But maybe the costs of meeting up with your friends to play Dota rather than League is easy. At the end of the day the costs are due to the network effects. You can reduce those costs slowly and make it easier for others to jump ship without you needing to, which makes it easier for you to jump ship in the future if things change. The same is true for social media. Maybe you can't break from Instagram as you have too many contacts where that's your only way to communicate with them. But you can still encourage others to text you, Signal message you, or whatever. This still reduces the power of that network.
Here's the thing: the less sticky platforms are the better it is for everyone. I'm not going to tell you that you aren't going to have to put in more effort, but I will criticize you if you think that effort is insurmountable. I will also say that this is also part of our social duty. If something like using Signal instead of Instagram to communicate with your friend because they want to is "too hard" for you, then I envy the life you have where such trivial actions are your biggest concerns. If trying new games with friends who want to try new games is "too much" for you, then I think you should question if you're an addict.
I'm not saying you have to switch. I'm not saying you have to play certain games and not others. But you do have to be open to changing things and recognize that if you don't then you're creating a doomed self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're unwilling to have the slightest inconveniences then the enshitification and dystopia is on you. If you are unwilling to have the slightest inconveniences then you have no right to complain as you are the one preventing that change. But also, if you don't have any of those concerns of enshitification and tech dystopia then you have every right to stand your ground and not be inconvenienced. But I want to make the conditions clear. We live in a society. The society has a duty to you and you have a duty to the society. You don't just get to take and give nothing back.
> It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.
The whole point of this subthread is that companies are not going to make Linux compatible games as long as there are customers OK with installing root kits on their companies to play their games. And most gamers are ok with that line being crossed. It sucks for the rest of us, but capitalism gonna capitalism.
Besides, more likely is that I leave to do my own thing, 0-1 peers joins me for a bit, then we all kinda drift away. Friendships in this era are much more ephemeral.
Honestly, I'm disheartened to hear this. Frankly, those don't sound like friends, or at least close friends. If a friendship can evaporate by the simple act of wanting to try another game, then it barely seems like a friendship and it seems like those will evaporate as soon as the next popular game comes about. I don't want to tell you to abandon your existing friends but I would encourage you to find friends you can have stronger bonds with. To have closer relationships. Hard truth is you need to put in work to make this happen. It doesn't matter what games you play or on what platform: everyone deserves to have deep human relationships. I really do hope you can find some friends. I hope the friendships you do have are stronger than you have conveyed because frankly, as humans, we all need close friends.
I've had long conversations with some former guild mates yet can't point you to a name or face. I know quite a few never even lived in my country. But things loosen up once the game shuts down or one of us needs to move on. It's neat in some ways, hollow in others.
On the larger scale, it's why local community is also weaker than ever. No one really puts and effort to come down to community events, or they may come once or twice and never again. Those gatherings are also less frequent than ever, often once a month. You can't really form a deep bond meeting once a month. So meetups end up frustrating in their own way (at least, the tech meetup. Maybe a run club would be different).
I've even heard notions that it's easier to find a mate than a close friend these days. I can completely believe it.
The other thing is recognize where friendships came from. Most of it was just being physically near people. Sitting in the same classrooms day to day. If work doesn't create that space (or isn't good enough or you want to distance from work) you need something else that does the same thing. Join a club. Set up weekly beers with your friends. Or literally anything that puts you in the same physical space with the same people, routinely. A friend of mine gets together with his gamer friends once a year and they socialize off the game too.
The convenience of social media is also its weakness. The ease of connecting makes it just as easy to disconnect.
Real friendships require work. That's true of any relationship. I'll tell you my friends can be annoying and exhausting, but I love them and I'll gladly put up with their shit to keep them around. After all, who else is going to put up with my bullshit? lol
indeed. Perhaps that is part of my frustration. Friendships can also be a 2 way street, and it can feel like I'm putting in a lot more effort than the other party when it comes to trying to form them. I don't expect 50/50 effort, but when it's 95/5, are they a friend or simply a familiar guest?
Maybe I need to accept that the tech circles here aren't going to have that deep bond and expand. But I'll admit that the job hunt also slowed down my efforts to break out of my comfort zone.
What works for me is finding communities. I participate in Toastmasters, which meets every week (one meets twice a month), and it's a good way to make connections with people and get to know them better. It's also fun because there's people of many walks of life. Retirees, college students, business owners, executives, everyone in between. It's a great way to meet people I probably wouldn't have otherwise met in tech circles.
So this ends up being easier said than done. I've had success, but that's my friend group out of however many.
Try to find a shooter with a playerbase that doesn't use EAC/etc. - it's a crapshoot, unfortunately. You've got Valve's stuff and one or two outliers, but if those don't meet your group's genre needs, you're whomped.
Indeed! i have some online and irl buddies who aren't on linux that i've got playing games like veloren with me, simply because they are good games. i've got loads of hours in games like veloren, luanti, xonotic, pokeMMO, and osu! for example lol and encourage everyone to check those games out if they're up their alley. :)
i only do this for those couple of games i play with friends that won't support linux because of the aforementioned rootkit it wants to run on windows machines. console for those games, and all my other games run happily either through steam+proton or natively on linux, and there are a fair few FOSS games with amazing multiplayer. i love luanti, xonotic, openarena, veloren, etc, and play them frequently with some friends. :)
I don't personally play fortnite. But substitute fortnite for any DRMd multi-player game (or MMO).
2. Network effects. Works as well on them as any of us. Especially in a world that makes it more and more hostile to have them meet IRL.
3. It's a generation raised on "forever games". They are used to games they pick up and will continually play for years. Games that will always provide new stuff for them. They fundamentally have different habits from Millenials.
4. Mobile support. So many kids play on mobile. So they are even more isolated from the consple market.
Apex Legend used to work but doesn't anymore (still marked Silver) https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470
Delta Force used to work but also doesn't anymore (still marked Bronze), people are tinkering with config files but nothing seems to work https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
NARAKA: BLADEPOINT is working but requires custom Proton, some tweaked settings, launch options, etc https://www.protondb.com/app/1203220
GTA V public lobbies don't work, requires you to tweak launch options, disable battleeye anticheat, seems to just not work for some people. https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
BG3 also seems to require a custom Proton and tweaked settings for some people https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
It goes on and on these were just from the first few games sorted by player count. Much of the tweaking seems to be different person to person, sometimes it just works sometimes it's Nvidia's fault, sometimes it's something totally different. There's a "recommended for tinkerers" option for reviews. To be clear, every single one of these works right out of the box first time on Windows.
> but requires custom Proton, some tweaked settings, launch options, etc
The line is
PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12=1 PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1 %command% -force-d3d11
PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12: Disables DirectX12
There are also D3D11, D3D10, D3D9 options too
PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1: Tells the game you have an AMD GPU instead of Nvidia
The default setting is that Proton hides the GPU, so this option here is superfluous.
-force-d3d11: forces usage of DirectX11
This is already going to happen because you disabled DirectX12
PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12=1 %command%
Alternatively
%command% -force-d3d11
Here's a useful resource for understanding the settings. Use this before you ask the AI: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Also, let's be clear about what those rankings mean on ProtonDB
Native: Just works
i.e. Devs are cool
Platinum: Just works (but is using Proton)
i.e. Valve has got this shit handled
Gold: Works but you either need to use proton experimental or change an option that someone has already figured out.
i.e. Community has figured it out, Valve is tweaking.
Note that many people are on Proton Experimental by default so possibly that's why it "just works" for them.
Silver: Very likely to work with a setting someone has listed.
i.e. Community and Valve working on it
Bronze: People are figuring it out, leave it to your friends that know Linux
i.e. Sorry, you're probably out of luck. Leave it to the tinkerers
Borked: Publisher is actively working against the community.
i.e. EA hates you
You're implying that 'clicking the cog icon > properties > and then copy pasting some text into a text box' is overly burdensome. To be frank, if you believe that then not only is Linux not for you, but neither are computers, and I really really am curious why you're on a website called "Hacker News".
If talking techy is annoying to you, you're on the wrong forum
> isn't worth it
This is a gross reduction of why people choose Linux. People don't choose it just for a snappier file browser and fewer anti-consumer dark patterns.
1. games that install what amounts to be rootkits on my computer are not ok 2. windows potentially spying on my data without my consent is not ok
If you wanna label these as dark patterns, that's fine, but let's not pretend that this behavior is ok.
I like playing games. But I like privacy and security more than playing games, which is why I have a linux gaming machine and a PS5. Some people would rather just play games and not worry about the other stuff, which is understandable for the reasons you mentioned.
Nope. Not Nadella. He'll kill windows in a heartbeat.
It’s the competitive progression shooters and ranked esports games that go in for the restrictive anti-cheat
The idea that you'll be missing out is ill founded. Yes, there are some games that won't work. PUBG, Bongo Cat, Rust[0], and EA Sports FC 26 are the ones on the top 10 multiplayer list. But it's also not like you don't have plenty of massively popular games to choose from.
I'll even say don't switch to Linux, just stop playing these abusive games. Honestly, if you're unwilling to change OSes but willing to do this then people that want to jump ship can. We all win from this behavior. Even you as it discourages Windows from shoving in more junk and discourages publishers like EA from shoving in massive security vulnerabilities like rootkits. I mean we've all seen how glitchy many AAA games are, you really think their other software isn't going to be just as unpolished and bug ridden?
[0] Apparently works with Linux servers? https://www.protondb.com/app/252490
P.S. If anyone wants to check for yourself:
- Steam Multiplayer by rankings: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=3859
- Proton Support: https://www.protondb.com/I just don't really play multiplayer to begin with. So I was never on the spectrum.
But tens of millions are. They won't even be aware of what's happening. That's why this remains.
It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for beingn reasons.
To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays, that if you and your friend group can skip some of those "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer games to play.
I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.
And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.
[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.
That's no secret, but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass. That's why some developers choose not to enable it, or in the case of Apex Legends, enabled it but later backtracked and disabled it again.
Shrug. Rumor has it that the Windows version is already fairly trivial to bypass.
That's an excuse. It's mostly incompetence or more often than not the company doesn't think it's worth the effort. With more Linux users, the balance will eventually shift from "fuck them" to "we have to figure out a way".
https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/e2ww5s/mike_rose_linux...
Now if you do care about quality, having a committed, technical audience giving quality big reports is a godsend. But that's not where we are this decade rife with layoffs and rampant outsourcing in the industry.
You also don’t need to arbitrarily support Linux. It’s not difficult to say “this has only been tested on Fedora, Ubuntu, POP, and SteamOS; other distributions are unsupported officially”.
Right. The most one needs to do is to support Proton and let Valve sort the rest out.
Besides, if your anti-cheat only ever looks at the system level, it'll easily be bypassed by hardware cheats. At some point I think anti-cheats will have to "know" the game to be able to detect anomalies. It's the only way to effectively stop many categories of cheats.
And yes, of course it's not fool-proof. It's not supposed to be. It's about probabilities: for a given online game, what is the chance that I end up in a match with someone who is obviously cheating and using that to ruin the game for everyone else? The harder you make cheating, the lower that is.
Companies don't do this out of laziness/incompetence, but even some large anti-cheats work on Linux and some games simply choose to not enable it (cough, Tarkov, cough). Their problem, I'm no longer gonna play games that don't work on Linux.
Funnily enough the best FPS game ever (Counter-Strike) runs absolutely fine on Linux. Thanks Valve!
There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?
Out of curiosity, what games are those? I wonder if I also play a subset of them.
Like this guy mentions [0], for all but one of the games I've tried, [1] I see comparable or superior performance to Windows.
I'm running AMD hardware, and I'm using KDE without a compositor on Xorg (that is, not on Wayland). I strongly expect that I've successfully disabled KDE's compositor because I seem to get the same performance when I use WindowMaker, which has never had a compositor.
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799656>
[1] That game is the Deus Ex that takes place in Prague... I think it's Human Revolution. It's mind-boggling how slow it is.
Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.
Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.
Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK- WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games... everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said that, I do know that -when using KDE- some fullscreen games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up and remain that way until the notification disappears. I expect that that performance problem would go away if I was using the compositor... but I don't want to spend the VRAM on it.
I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]
[0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not match what I've been seeing for years... so some percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really, really can must be coming from distros that ship either dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg installs.
I switched my Gentoo box from X11 to Wayland three years ago at this point.
It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in 2026 except with very old hardware.
Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in my distro's package manager.
> That means regressions are entirely ignored.
Should I ever actually have a problem, and it's something that I can't (or CBA to) fix, and my distro's maintainers don't want to try to fix (and then tell me that upstream will never fix), then I'll look more closely at XLibre. XLibre may or may not be a dumpster fire at that point, who knows? If it is a dumpster fire, then I'll look around for other alternatives.
> It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in [TYOOL]
Nah. It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland. The shocking thing would be if I were to waste a ton of time chasing the new shiny... especially when those responsible for the new shiny have been lying for the past 10+ years about how it's ready for everyone's general use. [0]
[0] Perhaps it's ready now, after nearly eighteen years in development. I can't rely on the statements of those responsible for the project to tell me, and I CBA to go searching for (and evaluating the trustworthiness of) information on the topic.
Yea these are security updates but the eco system requires a lot of desktop manager scaffolding in user space. That has basically stopped. It's baffling why you would run X11 today. The X11 emulation layer for Wayland works great too by the way.
Just as one example when you screen share from discord or zoom or Google meets there's now a pop-up that asks you to select the screen or window you wish to latch on to for streaming. This provides some security. With X11 anything can just take a screenshot at any time. Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore. As someone that made the switch three years ago I get how you might think the old system is better but in reality you haven't tried the new one so you don't really have a way to compare. I noticed so many quality of life fixes that I can't even imagine running X11 anymore.
As I mentioned:
It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland.
Really? If true, I don't seem to run any of them. I've certainly not noticed anything I've been running over the past couple of decades suddenly stop working on X11. Given that QT, GTK, FTLK, and other cross-platform GUI toolkits support X11, these must be particularly special programs.
> Just as one example[, screensharing...]
Sure, it is a bit nicer to be able to control which windows which other programs can see. I've been watching the slow-moving, many-years-long shitstorm that has been "actually get screensharing that works the way ordinary people need it to". It's been quite a show.
Thing is, I do know that the X Access Control Extension was standardized in ~2006 and updated through 2009 with the aim to make additional fine-grained access control modules [0] easy. I don't know how long it would have taken to use what existed (or even write something new) and update the major Desktop Environments with tooling to manage it... but I suspect it would have taken far less than seventeen years.
> I noticed so many quality of life fixes...
I'm sure that were I 16, I'd believe that I cared very much about that. Now, -mumble decades later- the fanciest things I want are OpenGL and Vulkan support with performance at least on par with what you get from Windows, a window manager that lets me Alt+mouse-button to move or resize a window, functioning global hotkeys that I can command to run arbitrary programs (and that I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently), and functioning screen-sharing (that can I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently). And it's so, so silly for me to feel the need to mention anything other than Alt+mouse-button. You'd think that the rest would be "table stakes", but the Wayland development process has demonstrated that many folks disagree.
[0] Ones that could -for instance- prevent undesired keyloggers and screenshot tools
Just basic stuff wayland has that X11 will never have:
- No screen tearing by default - Proper vsync - Lower latency for input → display - Per-monitor refresh rates (144Hz + 60Hz works correctly) - Fractional scaling is actually correct (no blurry hacks)
Seriously, move on.
QT, GTK, FLTK, and friends handle scaling correctly. Perhaps in the future there will be a Wayland-only GUI library, but I'm not sure why anyone would bother when there exist Wayland backends for the major existing ones.
> Pipewire
I don't use it. I use JACK2 with a PulseAudio fallback for Steam games and other programs that don't know how to hook into JACK.
> - No screen tearing by default
If you're using an AMD graphics card, the TearFree option gives you this. If your distro hasn't enabled it by default, then it's two minutes work, and work that I did years ago.
> - Per-monitor refresh rates
$ xrandr | grep -A2 DisplayPort
DisplayPort-0 connected primary 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 698mm x 393mm
3840x2160 60.00 + 60.00 50.00 59.94 30.00*
2560x1600 59.94
--
DisplayPort-1 connected 1200x1920+3840+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 546mm x 352mm
1920x1200 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00 50.00 59.94 59.99
--
DisplayPort-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-A-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.
Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).
When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.
But I'm still gaming on Linux!
So there's only one channel left.
Things that don't work out of the box tend to be proprietary stuff, like GPU drivers. That falls back to converting companies.
Dual booting is one of the best ways to introduce someone to Linux in theory as they’ll feel safe trying that without having to delete their whole old system… except it’s also the scariest and most difficult way to install it and no installer makes it easy. It’s a real foot gun.
Not for long. The Steam Machine aka "GabeCube" is also a gaming console, and will run all these games.
As for me, I'm still stuck for professional reasons. I do intend to develop natively on Linux when time comes to make my own game.
https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount
This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.
Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.
I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.
Ha, same. Windows XP for me had a horrible habit of booting into a blue screen randomly after updating video card drivers (happened with both ATI and Nvidia). Trying to do a repair install wouldn't work. The only option was a full reinstall.
Installation from the disk took an hour. Then (if you were going about this the legal way) you'd have to call the microsoft number to register your install, but be on hold for another 30 minutes. Then it was multiple hours of install your favorite video player, reboot. Install video codecs, reboot. Install firefox, reboot. Apply all of your registry tweaks, reboot. Install all your games from CD-ROM, more rebooting. And multiple hours of that.
I moved to linux back in 2006 or so and never looked back. Documented part of the journey here https://net153.net/ubuntu_vs_debian.html
They largely have now, archinstall.
It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.
The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.
I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.
Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
Exactly, Arch allows you to do many bleeding edge things. An installer would never keep up are give you that freedom.
> I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going.
That's why many installers allow you to drop a shell when it's time to partition.
> I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC
To be honest that would largely be helped if archiso would start using NetworkManager
Yep, removed in 2012 as the last maintainer quit. Maintaining an installer seems like one of the least fun hobbies.
* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption
* The limine bootloader
* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
* sway with my custom ruby based bar
* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0
If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
PS I keep Snap disabled.
As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.
Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?
Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.
Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on startup. The gnome response for that was basically "You're not allowed to do that".
It's flexible and popular, but I don't know that I'd call it simple. It still feels 90s in a lot of ways.
This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?
It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.
That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice
[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.
Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
[0] - https://massgrave.dev/
On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.
The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).
PS I keep Snap disabled.
I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more recent.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.
But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.
Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
> Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)
Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.
One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.
Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it.
The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system.
The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.
Personally, I get joy out of setting up a new machine exactly how I want. I haven't broken an arch install bad enough to require re-installing in almost 10 years so its rare I'm actually installing it anyway. If I want a system up quick I'll pick another distro.
Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.
If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense.
Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.
You quit without even trying.
Windows 10 and 11 can have all local accounts by using RUFUS to create the install media. And if your PC comes with Windows already installed, there are still commands - even with 25H2 - that allow you to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement during setup and configure a local account.
And this is with both Home and Pro.
In many ways, Linux is a complete paradigm change away from what is familiar and known in Windows, requiring a complete re-training from top to bottom.
Modifying the OOBE to bypass Microsoft Account requirement and permit a local account is a pebble in the road compared to the alpine pass that is switching to Linux.
And just installing Linux isn’t the issue. Learning from scratch an entire OS that behaves and is structurally very differently than Windows, and requires hundreds of hours to get equally as comfortable and knowledgeable in, is the issue.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. But to say it’s “the same amount” is deeply disingenuous and borderline anti-reality.
Because in reality, you should be able to use the wiki for installing. Because if you can't, you might not be able to use the wiki to support yourself in the future.
The issue most people have with slapping some paint on arch then riding the coat tails is the eternal September effect. Arch community prefers folks who try to help themselves _first_ and reading an install wiki is a good indicator you're going to do that.
* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.
* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.
I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.
- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.
- You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.
- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right way and everyone else is "holding it wrong" so there's no need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even possible).
I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).
The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.
Windows is the only one that does this properly.
Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]
Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.
Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.
And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.
On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.
On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
How can you say this when applications render either minuscule or gigantic, either way with contents totally out of proportion, seemingly at random?
I don’t have to pull out a magnifying glass to notice those issues.
Right-click on the `.exe`
Properties
Compatibility tab
Change settings for all users
Change high DPI settings
Under 'High DPI scaling override' section, tick box for 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour. Scaling performed by'
In the drop-down box below, select 'Application'
For MMC snap-ins like `diskmgmt.msc`, `services.msc`, or `devmgr.msc`, there's a Registry key you can set. See this ServerFault question: https://serverfault.com/q/570785/535358
The thing is X11/Xorg can also theoretically do the same thing (and most likely Wayland too) but it needs, you guessed it, application (and window manager / compositor) support.
This is not our [0] experience. macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis. You can split a window across two monitors at two different DPIs, and it will display perfectly. This does not happen on Windows, or we have not found the right way to make it work thus far.
[0] ardour.org
No, it does not. If you have two displays with different physical pixel densities, and especially if they are sufficiently different that Apple will consider one 'Retina' and 'not Retina' (this is usually the case if, for instance, you have your MacBook's display—which probably is 'Retina'—beneath a 2560 × 1440, 336 × 597 mm monitor, which is 'not Retina'), then the part of the window on the non-Retina display will be raster-scaled to account for the difference. This is how KDE Plasma on Wayland handles it, too.
In my opinion, any raster-scaling of vector/text UI is a deal-breaker.
Actually, the default in MacOS is that the window is only on one monitor, and its the monitor where the cursor was when you last moved the window, so you might have a window appearing invisible because you dragged it near the corner and some sliver ended on another monitor.
Look at this complicated tinkering MacOS makes you do for something as simple as spanning windows across monitors! https://www.arzopa.com/blogs/guide/how-to-make-a-window-span... (OK this last part is slightly facetious but Linux gets dinged for having to go into menus because the writer wants something to work the way it does in on other operating systems the whole time)
I don't think this is true. I use non-integer scaling on my Mac since I like the UX to be just a little bit bigger, and have never observed any kind of ringing or any specific artifacts at all around text, nor have I ever heard this as a complaint before. I assume it's just bilinear or bicubic unless you have evidence otherwise? The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional blurriness, which barely matters at Retina resolution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Stream_Compression
There are a few Reddit threads that crop up when one searches for 'macOS ringing artifacts scaling'. For instance, these ones:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1252ml8/strange...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ki58zk/fractional_s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/l8oadr/macos_fringin...
All are ringing artifacts, typical of downscaling. I no longer have a Mac (chose one for work to try it out, saw this issue, returned it immediately), but I assure you this is what happens.
> The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional blurriness
At no scale factor should there be any blurriness unless a framebuffer resolution is explicitly set. The 'scale factor' should be entirely independent of the physical resolution, which macOS simply does not do.
Apple's understanding and implementation of 'Retina' comes from a singular source: the straightforward doubling in each dimension of the display resolution of the iPhone 4 compared to the iPhone 3GS. It has not changed since, and has applied this algorithm throughout its OS stack.
Like I said, absolutely nothing like that happens on my display. I see the ringing in the first link. That doesn't happen to me. Not even a hint of it.
I get you don't like the scaling, but like I said, the very slight blurriness just isn't really noticeable in practice, especially given how Macs antialias text to begin with. Of all my complaints about Macs, this particular one is close to the bottom.
So I took my Mac Mini, hooked up to a 4K monitor, verified there were no DSC artifacts at native resolution, set it to "2560x1440" and sure enough the same artifacts appeared for me too, but still no telltale signs of DSC. So yeah, I gotta say, this is on Apple. Between this and dropping subpixel antialiasing support for text, it's pretty clear that their only properly supported configuration is 2x scaling on high-DPI displays.
OK, I just grabbed my loupe to make sure I'm not missing anything, and pulled up an app in dark mode (so ringing should be more visible) on my MBA M4. I'm using its built-in display. I've cycled through all 4 available resolution settings in Display, and absolutely zero artifacts or ringing. Then tried connecting to my LG UltraFine 4K which connects over Thunderbolt, that gives 5 resolution settings instead of 4, and zero artifacts/ringing on any of those either.
So I have no idea what's going on. I don't doubt that you're seeing it, and it's there in that Reddit photo. But maybe it's something specific to external monitors over a certain connection type or something? Seems very strange that Apple would use a different downsampling algorithm under different circumstances though.
I'd normally assume the most likely culprit would be some kind of sharpening setting on a monitor, as that can absolutely cause the type of ringing seen in that Reddit photo. But on the other hand, if you're testing it right now and not seeing it at native 2x, then that would seem to be ruled out, at least in your case. Maybe it's some kind of resolution negotiation mismatch where it's actually the monitor applying a second scaling that has ringing, since monitors can accept signals that don't match their native hardware resolution?
* = You have to go click "Advanced...", enable "Show resolutions as list", then when back on the main Displays page, enable "Show all resolutions", to get this and many other options -- but this is only necessary on the internal display, the external display offers "2560x1440" as a non-advanced choice
This happens on the native displays of MacBooks and iMacs, too. Try any of the 'looks larger'/'looks smaller' settings and it'll show up.
For the record, this isn't just visual. Rasterising to a framebuffer that is considerably larger than the physical resolution and then scaling produces a tangible effect on battery life. Not that it matters much with the impressive efficiency of the M-series SoCs, but it is there nonetheless.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding. Yes, raster scaling is how it works. I haven't disputed that anywhere.
I'm saying the ringing artifact specifically that you're complaining about is not happening on my setup, nor does it seem to be widespread. You were complaining about the specific Lanczos algorithm due to its noticeable ringing, I'm saying that therefore doesn't seem to be the algorithm being used on mine, nor is there any documentation that's the algorithm Apple uses. Your criticism seems to be based on partially wrong information, even if something like it seems to happen on certain external displays -- whatever it is, it's not a universal problem.
If you somehow missed my other comment, please read it:
Is this more of an aspirational thing, like Windows supports "doing it right", and with time and effort by the right people, more and more applications may be able to be drawn correctly?
[edit] I guess so, I see your comment about setting registry keys to make stuff work in Microsoft's own programs. That aligns more closely with my experience.
I think Android does it properly too because they have to handle an entire zoo of screen sizes and resolutions there. Although they don't have the issue of dealing with subpixel rendering.
To be fair, UXGA was a thing 20 years ago. I don't think it makes sense for Apple to care all that much about low DPI monitors. They don't sell any, and they wouldn't be acceptable to most Apple people, who have had crisp displays available for > 10 years now. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of Apple users on low dpi is single digit percentage.
This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0]
Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with.
At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure.
[0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
I did look a bit into this at one point, but I've found that it's mostly QT apps which work fine with different scaling (telegram comes to mind). GTK apps never did, but I admit I never went too deep in the rabbit hole. Didn't know there was supposed to be some kind of daemon handling this. I do run xsettingsd, but for unrelated reasons. I'll have a look if it can update things.
In any case, except for work, I always used everything at 100% and just scaled the text as needed, which worked well enough.
> I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors...
Would you care to go into some details? What systems are those and how do you notify them there's been a change?
But more and more laptops start having higher resolutions nowadays, and using my external screen at a scale of more than 100% would be a waste. But a 3-4k 14" laptop at 100% would be unusable.
Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003 or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to communicate system settings, the absence of "non-integer" scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI toolkits.
> I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.
When doesn't GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland's problems have been because a project that expects protocol implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was required.
I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse.
For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux.
On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.
I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.
At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.
I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.
If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).
If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
For eons the standard was: the only one with the title bar showing the theme accent color. That is consistent, predictable, keeps the user in the flow.
With CSD each app does whatever inconsistent thing they can fancy. You type and oops deleted something in the wrong window.
Alas now even many default SSD setups fail at this (selected and non-selected windows look pretty much the same) and keyboard-first workflow is much hindered.
KDE favors server-side decorations.
The problem is that sometimes you need to use a GNOME app that looks completely out of place.
Doesn't matter which OS they all have different styles. I can understand it's not liked by everyone, but that ship has sailed and no "big" app will use SSD anymore.
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.
Except even with Linux Mint you have to choose which one ;)
Linux user for decades, but headless since the early aughts. Decided to dip my toes back into the desktop space with Mint Cinnamon.
I can mirror or run lots of phone apps on Windows or macOS, but ironically, not Linux. I decide to run an Android emulator so I can use some phone-only apps.
I read up on reviews, then download and install Waydroid as the top contender.
Does Waydroid work? No. It fails silently launching from the shortcut after the install. Run it from the command line, and, nope, it's a window manager issue. Mint Cinnamon uses X11, not Wayland, and Waydroid apparently needs... Wayland support.
OK, I log out, log into Mint with Wayland support, then re-launch Waydroid. My screen goes into a fugue state where it randomly alternates between black and the desktop. Try a variety of things, and I guess this is just how it is. Google and try any number of fixes, end up giving up.
Yes, that's my old pal Linux on the Desktop. Older, faster and wiser, but still flaky in precisely the same ways.
I've tried it as a challenge for a couple of days (lynx, mutt, some other TUI stuff) and it made some things like Vim stick (although that may have as much to do with that challenge as Tridactyl did). But I couldn't last longer than a week. It does free you from the burden of system requirements. CPU: Optional.
I imagine your display is almost entirely black for the majority of the time, with your (most probably) LCD backlight blasting away, trying its hardest to get a few thousandths of its light output through the few pixels on the screen that it can escape! XD
And powertop (great piece of software, thanks Intel) tuned to the max + powersave scheduler. All that on Windows or KDE results in about 4-5h of battery though. So fbdev must be somehow really frugal.
Get yourself a most recent plasma 6 Wayland setup with pipewire for audio. It even has rdp server now.
What's most likely happening is your user space app wants the newer API but you're running old builds from two years ago.
It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM.
Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.
The context here is that I was commenting on the parent's assertion that one "can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things." Nope!
> It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM. Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.
That's my impression as well, and again, with the 2nd most popular Linux distro using X11 by default and with "experimental" Wayland support, that only reinforces my rebuttal of parent's claim.
Likewise you cannot run Wayland programs on X11 without a wayland compositor like Cage (a wayland kiosk) or Weston. Both run as a window on X11 inside of which Waydroid works just fine.
It's an odd complaint that incompatible software is incompatible.
"Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things."
Windows will run at least basic OpenGL and DirectX in software if you don't have hardware to accelerate that, and those software renderers are included as part of the OS. It'll run like garbage, but it will run.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darti...
Waydroid compleatly fails in comparison, while giving you no pointers on what the problem might be or how to solve it unless you're already a Linux power user.
The Flatpaks I've tried don't seem to understand this, however.
I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.
The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework running under a totally different DE.
Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way. It'll run on your machine.
[0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter
Sure they all look slightly different, but it's definitely worse on Windows in that regard.
Just like Linux. You can run most if not all apps in any DE. Yes gnome will look ugly, but that's gnome's way of doing things. If you pick a decent DE, you will have most basic apps using the same styling, and the rest have CSD anyway.
Each GUI toolkit has its own specialties, but you'll use at most two of them, and they will be kept in separate apps. (Apart from flatpak portals which use gtk instead of the system's).
Windows has 3-5 different UI/UX layers within the same application ... And the rest have CSD anyway, so they look the same no matter the OS.
Amen.
But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel.
Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI.
So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).
> Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi].
Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this.
IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size).
> Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.
If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They'll notice that.
But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.
This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop
Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial to set up: https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice
Some other rough edges in Linux I've encountered:
- a/v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can't just use something else) and a/v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that's mostly Slack's fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it's probably low on their priority list.
- sleep / hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won't wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that's not an issue)
- power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks.
- occasional X/Wayland issues, as mentioned
On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works.
On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work.
It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work.
(Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)
I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...
I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.
Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.
I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.
Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.
It's like a 10 second fix and basically everything is gone.
Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty plainly how to turn off.
I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up about this. You read some internet headline and start screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take 2 seconds to literally turn off.
But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.
And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well, at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.
Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn off. What, you want to use a BMW? Be a BMW-user? A sheep? All your tools already integrate with our car anyway. There's no real choice, is there - unless you want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.
Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my software.
It's not a feature that should EVER exist at an OS level... I didn't even mind the adjacent product ads or the Recommended section you mention that much... but it's emphatically not what I'm fucking talking about.
The fact that this was even something that was implemented and tested means that I'm not someone who will buy or choose Microsoft Windows at all from here forward. I have over 3 decades of development experience on/for/with software that runs on Windows.
An even then... It doesn't matter if I can shut it off, it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
I know this is splitting hairs, but I like data and not emotional driven decisions. When I tap "Start" and search for "World of Warcraft", which is installed on my PC, the very first item is the shortcut to WoW on my PC.
In terms of Start Menu Zones (as I'm calling them), on the Left is the "best Match", which links to WoW on my PC. The next zone beneath that is "Apps", which are the multiple permutations of WoW on my PC, and beneath that is "Search the Web", which offers a few search terms related to WoW. Beneath that is a "Store" link to WoW, which links to the Microsoft Store. The right zone of the Start Menu offers a menu of what I want to do with the app: Open, Run as Administrator, Open File Location, Pin to Start, Pin to Taskbar, or Uninstall.
This is the same behavior on all programs I have installed on the PC: I can type "Steam", same behavior. Discord, same behavior, Signal, same behavior, Battle.Net, same behavior, etc.
Now, for items that are not installed on my PC, for example, Half Life. Since I don't have it on my PC, it immediately wants to only search the web. On the right zone, which on installed apps shows a menu of options, this now shows a mini Bing search window which basically has sponsored content at the top with ebay links to Half Life editions (also holy crap those are expensive).
So for applications not installed on my PC? Yeah, it's showing me some search bing ads. For every application installed on my PC? It's not showing any ads.
From what I'm reading, it seems many people have a workflow that leverages the start menu pretty heavily. My workflow since the early days of XP has never included the start menu. In Windows XP, I used the Quick Launch Bar and always had a 2nd row of icons above my taskbar for which I used to open apps. When Microsoft changed this, I simply pin everything to the taskbar instead and use that. The only time I use the start menu to search and load something is usually if I want to CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to run whatever that is as Administrator. And that workflow has never once "tricked" me into loading any ads, websites, bing searches, or anything. It has always, for over a decade including on Windows 11 25H2 done exactly what I was expecting every single time.
So perhaps our workflows differ for which this is an annoyance for you, but I cannot replicate your specific problem that you mentioned.
But I like data. And that's what I'm going to stick with. Your experience is not my experience.
That said, I distinctly remember back in the Windows 98 days (inarguably one of the most highly regarded versions of Windows ever released which had extreme staying power throughout the Windows XP era); they used to automatically include the Channel Bar to the right on the "Active Desktop". This bar included links to Disney, AOL, MSN, MSNBC, among other items. No doubt Disney paid good money to be default installed and opened on every Windows PC of the time.
So it's not like including some level of advertising hasn't been a precedent for 30 or so years.
You're right that there are simple fixes but the point is that Microsoft is no longer on your side. You're now stuck defensivly scrambling for value in a product where you are no longer the customer.
The problem isn't that ads can be disabled. The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place. Full stop. There's no universe where that's acceptable product design, and the fact that you can disable them (for now, at least) doesn't make it less offensive.
I don't understand why you're going to bat for a trillion-dollar corporation here. Your settings work now. Great. They won't after the next feature update, this is a well-documented pattern. Windows updates routinely re-enable telemetry, Bing integration, and promotional content that users explicitly disabled. You're not configuring your OS, you're fighting it.
The TPM2 requirement is pure planned obsolescence. Millions of perfectly good machines binned because Microsoft decided hardware from 2016 is suddenly "insecure"... whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
It's a corporate compliance tool, not a security feature.
The Insiders build being referenced had actual web advertisements in search results. That's where this is headed. If you're comfortable defending that trajectory, carry on flipping those settings.
You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean. Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is just that ...
But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.
And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10. There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time W10 was well polished and less buggy).
The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more, then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows. That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the os/desktop switch.
I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa versa, and it will simply work with the correct full performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.
For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back. Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases. What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?
Often a lot of programs that are less developed or stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers involved lol
I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again. Resulting in this lag ...
That is my yearly Linux rant hahaha. And yes, i know, W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then get a better W12 again.
This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner experiences (often with the same manufacturer).
Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.
I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have used them for work off and on over the years... I'm currently using a very locked down windows laptop assigned from work. Not having WSL and Docker have held me back a lot though.
In the end, I do most of my work in Linux anyway... it's where what I work on tends to get deployed and I don't really do much that doesn't work on Linux without issue at this point. Windows, specifically since Win11 has continued to piss me off and I jumped when I saw something that was just too much for me to consider dealing with. I ran insiders for years to get the latest WSL integrations and features. This bit me a few times, but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore.
C# work is paying the bills... would I rather work on Rust or TS, sure... but I am where I am. I'm similar to you in that I looked at Linux every few years, kicked the tires, ran it for a month or a couple weeks and always went back. This time a couple years ago... it stuck. Ironically, my grandmother used Linux much longer than I ever did on her computer that I maintained for her. For her, it just worked, and she didn't need much beyond the browser.
All modern Linux desktops feel more advanced than the corresponding windows version, IMO. I just installed standard Raspbian on a bunch of Raspi5s, and it feels snappier and more advanced than Windows already.
As a power user, there's no point trying out OSes occasionally, unless that's your hobby. Think of it as switching between flying Boeings or Airbuses as a pilot; there's going to be a learning curve that you're going to have to commit to if you want the full benefits. I use the analogy to illustrate the point; OSes as users are definitely not nearly as complex to drive.
That said, the unstable experiences you're describing are odd. Maybe you're running into some odd edge case because that unstable experience hasn't been the case for mainstream Linux users for a couple of decades.
Neither is there a need to tinker with the big mainstream distros either. Most are install-and-forget these days and have been so for a while.
> Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?
First thing you do after you install windows is fine tune it lol. For what it's worth, I just installed the latest debian on a Minisforum mini PC and it was clean and easy. Everything works out of the box, including bluetooth and gaming (surprisingly well given only has an integrated GPU). Same experience with two of my wifes laptops.
Now I did have issues with my desktop due to running bleeding edge hardware, but those all got resolved within months on its own and a clean install is now no hassle at all.
In short, I'm now older and don't have time to tinker with my PCs. That includes reverting whatever bullshit Microsoft decided to foist upon me, so now I run base debian and won't be buying bleeding edge hardware anymore.
And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free. Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system UI.
Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year. They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away with it, not because they need to.
If the largest advertising company on the planet isn’t making it part of the base operating system — then that should tell you something, don’t you think?
I appreciate manufacturers who make this obvious. For example, when I bought the Framework laptop I'm using now, the OS choices were preinstalled Windows 11 (default selection), preinstalled Linux (-$150), none/I'll install my own (-$150). Made it clear exactly what I would have been paying for the Windows license if I had chosen Windows.
This is not highlighted nearly enough. It's very bad.
The TPM2 requirement (and kind of by extension the IOMMU requirement, which is the one itself that bit most people) has significantly more benefits than "DRM" or "planned obsolescence". For one, did you know that TPM1.2 didn't include SHA2? Would you be okay relying on SHA1 hashing in 2026 to be used for digital signing? Of course you wouldn't. If I told you today to go generate an X.509 certificate with SHA1 you're going to look at me funny. Did you know it also didn't include ECC? Also much more useful in this day and age for cryptographic speed. There are many other features I don't feel like digging into at the moment, but you get the point.
I would counter that the downstream requirement for the IOMMU (useful for Hypervisor Enforced Code Integrity), in which Windows itself is broken up into "Virtual Trust Levels" (VTL0, VTL1, and I think there are some newer ones now as well); is extremely useful for securing early parts of the platform boot.
Or did we collectively forget about the early rootkit era of Windows XP from 2005-2010 when running with legacy/MBR boot mechanisms?
Establishing a trust boundary as early as possible to force possible attackers into userspace as much as possible (where it can be more easily removed and remediated) is significantly important in modern operating system security--and this goes for any platform: MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, or Linux.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft have some form of integrity control over their platforms along with dedicated security chips. Short of some exploits, the most common vector to get into Windows' early boot process is to steal or abuse code IHV kernel driver signing certificates; or in some cases, be maliciously issued one from Microsoft (lol, now THAT is indeed a problem, but a tough one).
This is just part of modern platform security at this point so I don't really see the issue.
In addition, TPM2 offers significantly more storage and
I notice you omitted the BSDs and with OpenBSD in particular I’d argue your point is correct for the majority school of thought but not necessarily most correct whatever that means. Correct for a certain set of priorities.
Modern OS attack surface is an insane nightmare. The concept of securing it at all is.. idk what it is. OpenBSD default install you run ps you get 12 processes. You can reason about the OS. You focus on you boundary. You don’t admit scenarios where your attacker is poking around usedland. That’s game over on these byzantine OSes we have now. Even better NetBSD where the arch is the security. The SELinux idea makes the best with what we have where you need Linux for driver whatever support. So I’m not disagreeing necessarily but adding context. As far as generating certs users are better off with piv yubikey etc for pki so it’s in their hands, literally
The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product is pretty much "done".
There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with performance in windows 11. There should be people in the windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete it.
If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old menu that has what you are actually looking for because the old extension interface was broken.
Want a real exercise in fun ... just for fun, because I know it's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it... that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in there, but every third update will disable it all again. I get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.
Of course, I still use Windows for various things, but I have too much "ick" for it to be the system where I check my email, manage my business, keep my important files, etc.
Windows is really great for lots of things, but I don't trust it.
You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Not insignificant at all.
Again, not huge numbers but also not insignificant. But they are quickly growing and taking share from Microsoft. If we look back at (Dec) 2021 the numbers are 1.8% and 2.2% respectively. Those gains are meaningful.
It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.
I suggest referring to Cloudflare instead: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&loc=&dt=5...
They're actually even putting Linux on 5.1% for desktops as of now - strangely, down from 6.5% in June last year.
The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.
Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.
And nice downvotes... Typical in Linux Desktop topics.
Are people even browsing on Steam Decks? Because everybody in this thread seems to be referring to stats published by a rather obscure web tracking solutions company. "High-traffic sites using Statcounter include khabarban.com, codelist.cc, and download.it"
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
I _love_ Linux, but I agree with this as well. I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor. I hope to be proven wrong, though.
What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
If it helps, I setup a few elderly folks (now approaching 80s) across two continents that have been merrily using Linux/Ubuntu-LTS for a decade+
The only reason I wouldn't do this is because that elderly neighbour wouldn't be able to install Linux and might not have any obvious place to get support from. Where can Grandma go to get support for her Linux laptop, even if she's willing to pay?
However, in a world where they can buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled and receive support from the same shop they bought it from if they do run into problems, then absolutely I would (not that that support is going to be great, but then they're at least no worse off than they were when they need support with Windows or a Mac, and I imagine they'll run into less problems on Linux than on Windows, given their use cases are likely to be very narrow and simple, i.e. web browser, e-mail, maybe simple office stuff).
> What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
Aye, I agree. MacOS has been getting a bigger slice of the pie, but it's hard to ascribe what's the main cause, and to what extent each cause is contributing. We got the M chips being ungodly good (even the M1 is still serviceable, and damn right affordable even at this point), Windows growing worse, but the laptop market is also contracting, with a steady stream of people leaking out, saying 'screw this, I'll just use my phone or tablet. I don't need a PC for anything anymore.'.
All the casuals I know use a Mac for a laptop because they want something simple and functional, and Macs do that job, but they keep doing that job worse and worse. Everybody else casual might have a Windows laptop, but barely ever use it. The rest are gamers and power users, and thus need a proper machine and can't stick to a phone and tablet.
Apple could attract from the groups who would otherwise be done with non-phone/tablet computing, but their offering is growing weaker and weaker.
Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.
E.g. I recently installed Linux Mint for my grandma so she could use email and an up-to-date web browser on her old laptop that can't run (secure) Windows anymore. The UI differences are marginal for her, and she can do everything she needs to much better than she could before (which was not at all).
Most of that fear is not all that rational. It's not unlike kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your mind just tries to make the most of what fundamentally is a really messed up situation. You'll tell yourself it isn't that bad or that the next update will fix it or that you can get some magic software thingy that makes it go faster. Whatever.
Once you realize you are being abused, you can make some choices and do something about it. Most tools can be replaced if you look around a bit and do a bit of research. And virtual machines on Linux can run Windows just fine if you have one or two things that just really need it (been there done that). There's also wine and proton which aren't half bad these days. And they work for lots of things other than games. You can dual boot. Etc. Try it and find out. The absolute worst case is that you have to go back to being a lame abuse victim here. You'll feel extra bad because now you know. The best case gets you out of that abusive relation ship for the rest of your life. Life is too short to get subjected to this kind of abuse.
But the talk of abuse is also heavy-handed.
I've spent months testing and trying out RAW photo editors, and months trying out Linux gaming.
Linux is incredible, but my experience with Windows is still better. As many that still use it can attest, you can disable almost any annoyance. It's extremely stable. Things just work including brightness controls, fractional scaling, high refresh rates and high FPS gaming, and my favorite RAW photo editing. I could switch to a less enjoyable experience with Linux but I choose not to after extensive evaluation. I don't spend any money on Microsoft services, no Office or OneDrive subscription.
But my decision isn't permanent. My hobbies, software use, gaming selection, etc. can change over time, and Linux is getting better while Windows is getting worse. If it's ever "abuse" and I can have a better experience with Linux, I won't hesitate to change. But it's also a lot of effort to try out alternatives, and dual booting is slow and annoying. Plus when I dual boot to Linux Mint the kernel fails to boot every other time and I have to select an older one, reboot, select a newer one, reboot. It's a huge waste of time. A bad experience and I have chosen to avoid it and try again in another year or two.
In the end I love, love, love DxO PhotoLab and would really like to stick with it over the alternatives.
It had to get worse to finally break the inertia and also make me realize that it's only going downhill.
So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.
Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.
Let's be real. It's because new systems support DRM and Microsoft has been captured by the media company lobby.
Remote Attestation of Immutable Operating Systems built on systemd
Its the "remote" thing that has no place in personal computing, or rather, computing that is to extend one's own autonomy, or agency. Its no one's damn business whether my system is attested or not! I mean, sure theres certainly benefits for me knowing if its attested, but the other road is one of ruin, and will basically be the chains of the future.
It has nothing to do with drm.
If you're NOT trying to remotely attest anything, you're fine. Just use your chosen OS, dawg.
.\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry DisableBeen doing it since I was 12. It taught me all about the ins and outs of `rm`.
Anyway, the officials thought I had just called 911 over and over, like to play a prank. They wouldn't hear anything about my computer or whatever (it was the early 80s). They were pissed. I was kept in the holding area for a few hours, then they let me go home. I was ordered to a bunch of community service, cleaning the parking lots of local parks, stuff like that.
A: I have a program that will format your hard drive. I just need your IP.
B: Ok, it's 127.0.0.1
A: Ahahaha, it 56% now! Lol.
A left the chat. Connection reset by peer.
Core2Duo, Opteron64 and Athlon64 can run W11 RTM
They will bluescreen booting after an update to 24H2 because they are missing the POPCNT instruction.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/windows-11-24h2-goes...
(No, I don't need gaming or LLMs.)
Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.
Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.
Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
So long as said abuse never results in a loss of marketshare and revenue, it will continue. Why would they stop if there's no negative repercussions?
However - EVERY single trick I have tried... the above command, LTSC, Enterprise edition, etc, results in a situation where after installation a few days (or hours) and some updates get installed, and... blue-screen-of-death on every boot.
Gave up, installed Linux - still working through some issues (GPU driver compatibility), but overall it is a much better experience...
That's, e.g., how I would determine what these commands do
I have had HN replies in the past that argued Windows is open source and thus comparable to UNIX-like OS projects where _the public_ can read the source code and make modifications, _for free_
Absent the source code, we can read Microsoft's documentation
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
It seems like WinPE is the most useful version of Windows, e.g., it allows more options to setup.exe
How does one quickly and easily download and install a copy of WinPE, preferably on removable media
You should be aware there's a 3 day limit to uptime, then PE reboots. You can work around that: https://lsoft.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011128377-I-n...
The other thing to tell you is that this is not a live version of windows with all the features of the full desktop. It is the windows that runs the windows installer application, so enough windows to do that and no more.
I would personally recommend linux instead.
Microsoft doesn't seem to be one unified entity, but a bunch of smaller competing companies under the same umbrella, each trying to destroy the other.
I don't think that Microsoft knows what Microsoft is doing.
So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.
It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.
But I get the feeling you were on the edge of transitioning anyway, which is fine! Sounds more like the straw that broke the camels back.
Honestly, I am really surprised this is a top comment here. This was an extremely easy work around. We are all mostly curious nerds here.
All this work because one couldn't google a easy work around?
Last time I tried Linux it sucked for gaming and I've spent hours trying to install a printer.
Not to excuse Microsoft in this situation, Linux is obviously more open.
I might try it on one of my older laptops which are in the closet.
MS is free to deprecate your work around any given Tuesday when you have work to do leaving you in the same spot with less time available to do anything about it.
You are wrongly assessing the value of the alternatives to boot if you think they were just too stupid to google. Based on the article they already viewed Windows negatively prior to this and thus already had a motivation to switch.
I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job. And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.
What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 - 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux. It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever corp crapware is installed underneath).
Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs) I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides a WIN machine...
> If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your device won't receive support from Microsoft, and you should be comfortable assuming the risk of running into compatibility issues.
> Devices that don't meet these system requirements might malfunction due to compatibility or other issues. Additionally, these devices aren't guaranteed to receive updates, including but not limited to security updates.
I can't be bothered. My 80386 worked fine without any of the above and I still don't need any of it on a Zen%d (except Linux)
Hold up, I'm no expert on Secure Boot, but LUKS allows you to have multiple entry keys to the same drive.
This means you can have one key of random gobbledegook which is kept and auto-used by the magic motherboard, and also a passphrase that you can memorize or write down, and either one is totally sufficient on its own.
You don't even need to set them up at the same time, you can start with one and then add the other as an option later.
TPM 2.0 is something else. It's typically soldered onto the motherboard as a physical device and the key can be generated and then used to encrypt the disk. The private key can not be extracted. Only the signature and you can ask the TPM to sign a binary blob with the private key while providing you the public key to verify. This protects you against physical access to your device. No one can take your disk and decrypt it.
Right, you can't recover or copy that specific key, but you also don't have to for accessing your data, if you set up some redundancy before disaster struck.
AFAIK: 99% of your storage is encrypted by a giant fixed unchanging master-key, and that is itself encrypted again with a non-master key/LS or passphrase, which is stored in the remaining "LUKS header". There's room to store multiple copies of the same master-key encrypted with different non-master options.
In that model, the TPM is simply providing (in a convoluted way) its own passphrase for one of those co-equal slots, so having one or more alternates prepared is sufficient to protect your drive from motherboard failure.
I've been using this for a few years now, and never had an issue.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-cryptenroll
> Imagine a motherboard failure and boom there goes my entire disk.
You can also set a long-ass key in addition to the other methods, and back it up somewhere safe. It works the same as bitlocker: you have key which can decrypt the drive without external help from a TPM in case something goes wrong.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/windows-11-the-ars-t...
> ... the best rationale for the processor requirement is that these chips (mostly) support something called “mode-based execution control,” or MBEC. MBEC provides hardware acceleration for an optional memory integrity feature in Windows (also known as hypervisor-protected code integrity, or HVCI) that can be enabled on any Windows 10 or Windows 11 PC but can come with hefty performance penalties for older processors without MBEC support.
> Another theory: older processors are more likely to be running in old systems that haven’t had their firmware updated to mitigate major hardware-level vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the last few years, like Spectre and Meltdown
If it was 2000 - it'd be like, "OK boss, you gotta upgrade that old dog of a CPU", but software bloat really hasn't kept up with CPU performance. I've got an i3 which is serviceable enough from 2014. Is it going to be able to keep up with modern SQL Server and Teams and VSCode and all that? Probably not all at once. But totally fine for basic computing.
Also, Linux has a great track record for not dropping support for older hardware. I think that is a lot more informative than whatever statement Microsoft's legal team has managed to come up with.
What will be the next instruction/ISA extension that is only supported since Intel 11th Gen that there will be a hard dependency on? Any bets?
Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually wants me as a user.
and I say that as a FreeBSD user.
We have Netflix and Sun influence but the former is not really putting its stamp on it and the latter no longer exists (and evil Oracle has zero interest of course)
I prefer the OS aligned with users like me not the big cloud boys.
https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rc.conf
It's not as completely declarative as Nix but it was never intended to be.
- /boot/loader.conf for kernel settings to be set only at boot
- /etc/sysctl.conf for kernel settings to be set anytime
- /etc/rc.conf for rest of configuration
The other big difference I notice between NixOS and e.g. Debian is that on NixOS I only have to specify the changes from the defaults. On e.g. Debian I usually have to change config files that already exist. Then when the package updates its default config I end up having to review all the changes to the config, even when they have nothing to do with what I've explicitly configured.
If you're the type of person who's capable of falling in love with software and software ecosystems, there's nothing like a first jump into Linux and understanding it as a world ready and waiting for you.
I can't be arsed, if I'm going to have to fiddle around getting that working I might as well move to linux.
Haven't touched it in a long time ever since debian8 was the point in time where it was fine to run on desktop and laptop for me, not only on server. Ever since then I have it on all my 20something machines
And if you’re thinking you’ll just Google another solution then you might as well spend that time googling efforts for Linux. Windows shouldn’t require constant hacking or tinkering to function.
But my Dell hardware drivers were flaky in Windows. My bluetooth had extremely variable availability. And then Windows rebooted itself, against my wishes, 3x in one week. And then there was the promise of Recall.
That's when I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. All my hardware issues went away (yes, I had to fiddle the sound driver a little so it didn't crack when it woke up from sleep, and I had to make one small change so suspend worked properly.. but both were easily solvable). My bluetooth has been flawless since and I was able to use my Logitech wireless mouse again.
I'm never going back.
I do a bit of napkin math on Apple Silicon single-threaded performance, GPU performance, and battery management against non-Macbook Air/Pro specs for same price. I follow DHH (who I otherwise object to) on his adventures with the Asus G14 machines.. but I'm not sure its GPU performance still matches the similarly priced Apple offering.
Less integrated OS, worse battery management, and weaker performance for more money? I'm not sure. But I'll probably still go that way.
The Intel/AMD laptop manufacturers need to get out from under Nvidia's hardware GPU thumb.
At work, we have BT Jabra headsets. I specifically asked for a corded version, I hate the latency for calls. My windows-using colleagues, for some reason, love wearing a wireless headset and talking through the laptop microphone.
Switched to Linux 8 years ago and haven't looked back.
Apple seems to support their previous generation OS on older macs for ~8-9 years or so from what I've seen. You just don't get the latest generation features, they cut it off and move on similar to how Microsoft did.
No they aren't. They've just convinced everyone that they are.
I've seen people meme about Android being for people who couldn't afford an iPhone when the fact is that a flagship Android costs just as much as an iPhone.
What’s the difference?
Either way, Apple consistently makes decisions that I think put them on the side of “luxury item” — even if I often disagree with those decisions.
It is convincing people to pay a premium for what is still at the end of the day a stitched leather bag, watch, computer or smartphone made in factories like everything else.
People pay for names, to project their luxury lifestyle.
It is very rare that the actual quality/performance of a "luxury item" is dramatically above a high-quality equivalent. Does a Rolex tell time and look better than a Breitling? Or a Tag Heur? Or a Seiko? Each of those represents a different price/style point - and ultimately it is subjective to a consumer - who wants to project a certain style/look.
There's loads of relatively young computers which can't upgrade to Windows 11 and therefore aren't supported anymore. That's the problem, not how long Windows 10 was supported.
Note: Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26 and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18 and so on).
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/depc4c80847...
With no option to install your own, of course. Boot loaders should be exclusively for running the manufacturer's lone security update from 5 years ago.
Microsoft was the backward compatibility king.
Windows doesn't support 16bit apps anymore, but Wine (at least Wine <9.0) still does.
The reason for this is that newer software will start using hardware features and capabilities that only exist on newer hardware, not because Tim Cook is evilly cackling in his office "hahhahha! Let's force people to buy new Macs!!!"
i think the last straw was the added telemetry that required so much effort to get rid of, but also for years they have made clear moves to make their laptops iOS-like progressively, which I cannot stand on so many levels
I hear it might be some TPM thing. If so, it still seems like a bad decision to require this thing, and it's telling that I'm working on speculation here - it doesn't _tell_ me that's what it is.
But I think you miss my core point. If "Ask an LLM" is the answer to this, Microsoft are doing an unforgivably shit job of maintaining Windows. Why on earth should that be necessary? Surely they can provide the minimum of information about why they think the upgrade isn't possible.
User: hello, my PC smokes and I would like to purchase an anti smoke software
Computer service: sorry it's not possible, you have to replace the hardware
User: no I really want an anti smoke software
(Later)
User: hello I would like to purchase a new computer
Service: see, I told you that an anti smoke software is not possible
User: wrong! I have purchased one from Microsoft. But apparently it's not compatible with my current hardware
To be fair, I recently had to switch distros for my little Atom-based server because of a similar deal:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:X86-64-Architecture-Levels#...
Granted, I only had to convert to Tumbleweed (not trivial, but easier than reinstalling), and the open source nature means there will always be lots of other alternatives, too.
Intel lists the launch date of the CPU (Atom D2500) as Q3'11, making it 14 years old when OpenSUSE Leap 16 was released.
It looks like Intel was releasing Atom CPUs without SSE4.1/4.2 up until 2013, e.g. Atom Z2420.
It's likely a large percentage of that code is also used in win 10 - it’s not like 11 was a complete rewrite.
And yet Nadella writes this:
"For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact. The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter."
Apparently resources are only "scarce" when Microsoft needs them. When it comes to your consumer outcomes you have to throw away working equipment and buy new.
Microsoft even evolved it all to adapt to and compete with new ideas from rivals, such as COM+ as alternative to CORBA, ASP.Net as alternative to JSP, etc.
Then Microsoft did the unthinkable. It inexplicably threw away all these IT dependencies away, that it had spent decades to build across the worlr.
Microsoft unleashed .Net on an unsuspecting IT world.
And M$ arrogantly expected the world to also throw all their years of efforts of building applications and databases revolving around VB/VC++.
To save their careers, millions of VB/VC++ programmers tried hard to scramble and learn these new technologies, but Microsoft just kept updating and upgrading the .Net landscape with increasing frequency and leading to more chaos and confusions. And as the learning curve steeper and the .Net scope became too hard for sane people to master in a short time, it became apparent that to the entire IT world (except Microsoft) that it had become too difficult and cumbersome to build applications for corporations using Microsoft's new-age tools. Thus, the interest and ambitions of the programmers and corporations quickly waned towards Microsoft tools, especially when they realised that .Net was a mess for installations, and it called expensive licenses to build and ship.
So programmers and SOHO/medium-scale companies, pivoted to alternatives to Microsoft imposed nightmares. Python, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, JSP, etc. took centre stage, even as the IT world moved away from .Net.
The worldwide chaos caused by Windows Vista and Windows 8, did nothing to improve upon IT people's disdain for all things Microsoft.
And Microsoft's rivals pounced at such golden opportunities, and they slowly ate away at Microsoft's dominance in corporate world.
Yes, there is indeed some lessons for Micro$oft to be learnt from these debacles.
"Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started." ~ Mary Midgley
"And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.
Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...
This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.
What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have applications running that don't do that, when Windows reboots for updates.
Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
I was replying to: "The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part". As long as you know which apps auto-save and know you can somewhat rely on them, it's not so crazy.
> Microsoft just doesn't care.
So you know why. Also, Macs have other apps besides textedit, do all of them preserve unsaved docs across restarts?
> what a computer should be doing
Ok, but the discussion is about reality
Every Mac app I’ve ever used does.
I don’t really care though, I reboot at most once ever six months
Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.
I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.
I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.
Macs (largely) don't have this problem, so it's clearly solvable. There isn't any inherent law of computing or the universe that says it should be this way.
I still press CMD+S on Macs every time I'm done typing in something, but that's only because I've been hurt and live with the trauma, so to speak. There's no reason to hurt others to learn a lesson that doesn't actually have any value.
But this is a bug, and it's very different from the OS voluntarily rebooting without your consent.
For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.
Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.
I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.
It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.
Yes. I know its more than firefox, but I don't have the full list. On 24.04:
me@comp:~$ apt info firefox | head -n 5
WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
Package: firefox
Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu7
Priority: optional
Section: web
Origin: Ubuntu
me@comp:~$It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.
I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.
One recent example I experienced is jumping through hoops to get virtualization enabled in Fedora… it takes several steps that are not obvious at all. I understand not having it enabled by default since many won't need it, but there's no reason that can't just be a single CLI command that does it all.
These are things that don't happen in Linux. Doing what you want to do might be difficult (depending on how unusual it is), but there's no one actively trying to stop you from doing it for their own purposes (except systemd.)
Also, as an aside, a reason that Windows and Macs might have easy virtualization (I have no idea if they do) is because of how often they're running Linux VMs.
For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.
I had to enable virtualization features in BIOS too, but that’s entirely separate and not the fault of any Linux distro.
'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.
Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).
Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).
> I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...
I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.
Then they switched to Gnome, meaning they gave up on their own desktop, Unity, so they were no longer dictating what their desktop was like, so how much did they care?
Since then they have replaced a number of apps with SNAPs which are only available from Canonical so many people see it as an attempt to corner the Linux market. Many see AppImages and Flatpacks as better than SNAPs.
They are a company. They exist to make money. Of course they are going to decide to do things that make more money and annoy their users.
Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.
I too was corrupted by Ubuntu's marketing strategy of being popular and using the misleading word 'Stable'.
I'm not interested in any distro that is controlled by a corporation. IBM is a corporation and they already screwed up CentOS and is eventually going to screw up Fedora someday because that's what corporations do, and I'm not interesting in going through that.
You have your fun running Fedora for now but know you're going to get burned someday.
Mint is also based on GNOME.
>Linux, for all it's issues
You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.
Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.
Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.
> For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.
I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8 engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.
The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http requests to downloads those ads.
Are you saying you would use React Native with a language other than JS?
Other engines include SpiderMonkey (Mozilla/Firefox) [1] and QuickJS [2]
[0]: https://reactnative.dev/docs/javascript-environment
15 minutes to deactivate an entire branch of notification pathways, 20 minutes to (mostly) restore the Right-Ctrl key they hijacked into a CoPilot key. 10 minutes to restore Win10 functionality to the Win11 taskbar with the wonderful ExplorerPatcher. $5 spent on Start11 to sidestep the whole start menu train wreck. And little 3 to 5 minute fixes with WindHawk (an amazing store-like platform to discover, install and manage open source Windows GUI patches).
I'm the stupid frog who didn't leap from the gradually heating pot. I acclimated to the boiling. And it's... okay. At least for now. But I know someday soon, the thousand faceless product managers at MSFT will break something unfixable. Somehow exceed the considerable abilities of the large community finding clever hacks and patches to keep the harsh Win wasteland livable for hardy souls.
While I greatly appreciate Linux philosophically and deeply respect it architecturally, I still really liked what Windows got so close to being - right before MSFT shifted biz models, simultaneously de-investing and turning it into a promotional platform for their other business. When that day comes, it'll suck to leave behind the wonderful third-party tools like Everything search, Ditto clipboard and AHK automation that streamline my day.
The thing I don't understand is why MSFT refuses to just make a version of Windows that's a Product again. I'd gladly pay them $100/yr for an upgraded "Windows Ti Super+" that just wants to be a good operating system for advanced users, instead of a strategic moat or monetization flywheel.
I recently had to install Windows 11 to play a video game that runs janky on Linux, and I am encountering all the annoying problems people are describing in this thread (forced updates, full-screen ads, etc). It does not bother me too much, since I effectively use Windows only to play that one game. But maybe I can tune Windows 11 into something less obtrusive with the custom hacks. Thanks.
Of course some of the notes become stale or irrelevant as things evolve but it's still invaluable insurance if this Windows install eventually gets crufty and needs to be hosed out for a fresh start (which eventually happens even with diligent hygiene). Also, don't forget ExplorerPatcher which restores some essential Win10 taskbar and explorer functionality MSFT removed from Win11 (promising to eventually replace with new code but now, years later, obviously never will). It's clear at this point MSFT isn't devoting any serious effort toward re-implementing previous functionality or creating new features for power users.
AFAICT, the only things getting meaningful funding now are fixing critical 0days / bugs, reworking the interface to create "more exposure vectors to support corporate initiatives" and a couple under-resourced teams clearing only the most critical technical debt threatening the whole edifice. Meanwhile, every PM or UX designer who suggests "Hey, it'd be easier to just decide that new feature or unrestored functionality will just confuse 'our average user'" gets promoted. I just feel sorry for the engineers still there who joined the Windows team wanting to build toward a state-of-the-art operating system supporting a powerful, flexible, extensible, customizable user interface. Now it's "If it ain't broken, there's no funding to fix it" and "If it just broke, see if we can just remove it instead of fixing it", "if it's there but incomplete, remove what's there, patch over the hole and we'll pretend it was never there." And finally, "You seem ambitious and diligent, we just wish you'd align your interests with current strategic priorities (ie sticking AI where it doesn't belong or pushing Office, cloud, etc subs)."
Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.
That all changed with Azure.
MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.
They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).
Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.
Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.
Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.
Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!
So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.
Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep old hardware to run older MacOS versions, and it's only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest OS you can run on your Mac.
I must have taken some shrooms before I downgraded from Tahoe to Sequoia a few hours ago then.
Uhh, I guess.
AFAIK iOS has been very locked down wrt rolling back upgrades since forever and isn't super relevant to this thread. Happy to be corrected.
The M5 Pro/Max variants aren't; but an M5 Mac is a thing you could have bought for a good while now.
What you did is a downgrade in what's called the supported OS.
However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1 Mac, it's not possible — Big Sur is the earliest version that runs on Apple Silicon.
Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.
I mean, KDE does 3x the stuff for 1/3 the cost. That's more memory and CPU for your IDE or, more likely, chrome tabs.
Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.
I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.
I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.
Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.
But, at least it has tabs. Jesus Christ, took long enough.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
With Linux/Windows you’re supplied with a toolbox and from that toolbox you’re expected to cobble together a workflow that works for you and maintain it.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that, which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle it. If you’re ok with their solution, great, problem solved. If you’re not, you end up either fighting with the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of needless stress from my life. There are some places I do go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really need these things and if they’re worth the trouble.
It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I just looking for the system to fade into the background so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get done and move on with my life.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
Btw search "modifier keys" in Mac sysprefs if you want to rebind command to control. I'm also sick of using separate shortcuts at work, but the other way around, gonna rebind Ubuntu.
I don't want to globally swap Ctrl and Cmd. For some apps, the keys are identical to that on Windows. For others, it isn't. I need to be able to do it on a per app basis.
macOS uses Command instead of Control for a lot of things, but they didn't change how the shell works.
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
Shortening the animation to minimum was not sufficient for my preference.
You can run nix on macOS now. You can also drag windows into corners or edges to tile them, it is almost exactly like Windows 7 or 10. You can even have tiling window managers on macOS that emulate i3.
Your complaints with the dock seem like a personal choice... I like the dock behavior but if you don't, probably not a lot that will fix that, it will always suck.
Sad to report that external monitor support is still terrible.
Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts… > Windows > Quarters
Make them whatever you think they should be. No one is being forced to drag windows.
I would suspect a sizable portion of Windows users didn’t even realize that snapping with the arrow keys was possible, since keyboard shortcuts are (generally) harder to discover than mouse actions.
On that note, is there any GUI tool that allows me to browse my zip archives without unpacking them, and is also free?
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
Have you tried this? I saw it as a fix over on Reddit.
Privacy & Security > Bluetooth > Click the + > Add Music from Applications > Toggle to disabled
(This is insane to have to do, but better than running a script to monitor for it and kill it)
Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard behavior? Like why even do that?)
If there is a window under another window, and you click on something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just activate the window.
So now you have to click twice, except what if it's actually active? So now you have to always check if a window is active - which is harder than necessary because of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual window. (This is especially bad when you have two monitors.)
The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or something like that to make the mac move it). If you do show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.
I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down. (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be helpful then?)
When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.
When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it manages to place the window offset - so it's the right size, but like 40 pixels to the left.
Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
I also like the first click in a window to not be passed through. I don't want to have to make sure I'm not clicking on some active part which will immediately have an unwanted effect. I've actually configured my Linux WM to behave that way. It still passes through the scroll wheel, though.
> The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
You can enable a clickable bread-crumb panel somewhere. Also, cmd+up. cmd+down goes down one level, instead of enter. This was very frustrating to me at first.
> I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
Never tried to do that, but I loved that there were system-wide shortcuts to access it, with an easy switch between modes (cmd+shift+3/4 for screen / area if memory serves).
> Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
On Windows, I have the opposite problem, kind of. It only detects my 5k external screen as such if it's plugged in when booting up. Unplug while it's running, or sleep/wake the laptop and it's gone. Linux, again, works fine.
macOS tends to use the arrow keys for this, with various modifiers. Command + the arrow moves to the start or end of things (documents or lines), Option will be at the word or line level. Adding Shift to either of those will highlight those regions.
> Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid.
I've never been a cmd-tab user, so I don't notice thins. Once Exposé (now Mission Control) came out, I just stuck with that. I bind it to an extra button on my mouse.
> The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinson explains it in this video. It's a trade off between having issues with menus when windows are small, and having to move more. I believe this is why they added mouse acceleration, so no matter where you were, you could get up to the menus fairly quickly.
https://youtu.be/Qg0mHFcB510?si=yc0uCunQiMufGc75&t=416
> There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
They're starting to get better on this. The full screen button has a menu to do many things, and one of them is to maximize (they call it Fill). You can also just drag the window to the top edge to maximize it, like Aerosnap on Windows.
> If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back
Windows > Center, will bring the active window to the center of the screen.
> I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
You can drag icons from LaunchPad to the Dock to add them. They'll still be where they were in LaunchPad, but now also in the Dock for quick access. LaunchPad is gone in macOS 26 though, so you can either right-click it in the Dock while it's there to tell it to keep in there (or just drag it over to the left and it will remember it)... or find it in Finder /Applications/Utilities/Screenshot
> I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory.
I usually show the Path Bar whenever I get a new Mac. In Finder, View > Show Path Bar. This shows your path at the bottom of the Finder window. You can click on any parent directory to go to it.
If you don't want to do that, or want another way, right-click the folder name at the top of the Finder window. This will show you a dropdown menu of all the parent directories, pick however far you want to go up the tree.
> If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
This one annoys me a bit too, and can lead to that window off-screen thing you mentioned earlier. It's one of the reason I went with a large primary monitor instead of having 4 external displays, like I had before.
> If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up
I think this has to do with the horizontal area the Dock is on being "protected" for lack of a better word, so nothing gets trapped behind the Dock. I agree, that having it do this for off-screen windows would be nice.
> When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen
This is what I mentioned earlier to maximize. It works pretty much like on Windows. It activates not when the window hits an edge, but when your mouse cursor that is holding a window hits an edge.
Top edge: Maximize Side edge: Half the screen Corner: 1/4 of the screen
By default there will be gaps between these tiled windows, which some people don't like. You can remove the gaps in the Settings.
> When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it
I think this has to do with scaling of the monitors, or just that one monitor is dramatically smaller. My main setup is a laptop + a large monitor. The windows on my main display are bigger than the entire laptop screen, so it makes them smaller so they fit.
> Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
On my work setup I use an CalDigit dock and I occasionally have this happen after a big upgrade. I don't have to disconnect everything, I just have to login using my laptop, then trust the dock.
On my home setup, I use my monitor as the dock for my mouse and keyboard. With this, every time I reboot I need to login with the laptop and then approve the monitor as the dock for the other things to work. I don't have to unplug/replug anything (thankfully).
I tried looking into this once or twice. People online talked about various trust settings, but nothing seemed to stick. I really only reboot when there is an update, so it's pretty infrequent. If I was rebooting daily I'm sure it would drive me insane, to the point where I'd stop using the monitor as a dock.
HOLY SHIT, my work Mac does this all the time and my personal Mac does not, I cannot for the life of me figure out why, nobody I have talked to understands it, it drives me absolutely insane.
Everything else in your post is either a personal preference and/or not a problem for my workflow
It's not just that it's opinionated - that's fine. It's that those opinions are often just poor UX.
No, good opinions exist, some of them include respect for user customization so that you can tweak your way out of pain.
> or rigid thinking.
Indeed, it's the users who are awful!
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-windows-mc...
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It's worth putting up with MacOS for the hardware.
My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.
Who or what is the "Linux" entity in this context?
Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.
And then:
- Butterfly keyboard
- Touchbar
- M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
The more people forced into the beautiful world of capslock is escape the better!
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"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.
That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)
Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.
32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.
32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).
As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...
A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk to a luxurious 400MB.
The first first computer I had was an old IBM PC.
I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA graphics card, 5.25" floppy (360K, double-sided, double-density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so you don't have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own controller cards so there's almost no more room for expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it out anyway.
First own "PC": Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation from a family member.
First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
40 Megabytes. I have photos that size these days.
Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,
(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,
(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?
It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.
(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
Edit: Reinstall, not rebuild obviously.
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
I would say 2009. Vista's troubled driver era was necessary, and Windows 7 was pretty awesome.
>(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
I actually laughed out loud when I read this, so I think extremely unlikely.
I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
The soft modular synth is called The Grid, fyi. Little square button on the lower left corner of any instrument lets you see it in Grid form.
Oh, man, and just wait until you find out that you can modulate literally every control in the UI...
Have fun :)
The apt command you're looking for may be the audio backend, though. `apt install pipewire wireplumber -y`. Won't break your existing pulseaudio setup, but will allow low-latency operations. (I think--I avoid the dumpster fire that is Ubuntu like the plague, so ymmv)
Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.
So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.
Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what you want) or get the key for archive.
Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you know.
You're right that I mixed up the Vivaldi repo (maybe you are the one who pointed that out on the thread I linked). But even after fixing that, it's still not working---slightly different warning message, but still about gpg.
Also can't find the red mouse cursor theme that I had on Ubuntu. (If I could remember the name, I might be able to find it, but the "after market" mouse cursor themes I've found are so much eye candy--I just want an ordinary set of cursors, but red. Yes, I could probably generate my own, but I shouldn't have to.)
And when I reboot, the windows don't come up in the same place they were when I closed them. Some apps couldn't do that under Ubuntu either, but most could. I think it has to do with Wayland, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to go back to a purely X-windows system in Mint.
Sigh...
You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it, there's no market for that anymore.
(for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for .../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )
If you're on Linux and have a firewall, so there are no listening ports, there is no threat from using public wifi. TLS encrypts your connection on ~all websites these days.
> And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.
This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
I had a friend who runs Windows host (because of gaming) and Linux as a guest OS for development for the same reasons :)
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
Which, similarly has more than convinced me to fight for PostgreSQL over MS-SQL everywhere possible.
Hu... use Dolphin?
Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
On Linux: pip install, done.
Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.
I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.
One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.
Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.
Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to select which *drivers* to load because, if you weren't careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the game you were trying to run.
I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for professional video editing and music production, with no comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily abandon all Microsoft products at this point.
Mint can use X11 or Wayland. I think Cinnamon didn't have Wayland support for a while, but that was fixed a couple of years ago.
After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
But make no mistake, it is very important for Microsoft and leadership, or they wouldn't keep updating it so much and talking about it so much on their keynotes and marketing.
But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.
For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.
That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.
I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).
As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.
This is an overblown issue. For the most it is a case of installing the proprietary driver package following the instructions for your distro. One more step than AMD which just works, but not really any more difficult than installing another package.
Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.
I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.
Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.
MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.
Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams
I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.
But the copilot business is AAF.
And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.
Not sure what’s left.
Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.
Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.
Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.
I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)
But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.
Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.
I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:
64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)
AMD Radeon graphics.
NVMe SSD primary boot drive.
UEFI BIOS support
Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.
If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.
So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.
But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.
(and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to move to Linux).
Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
The first couple of months are high touch after the switch. After that it's usually just smooth sailing for years. Much less work support-wise.
Been that way for my family and friends.
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update
Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.
Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.
Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.
I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.
I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(
RIP to your install CD!
For all of macOS' gaming advantages, it still can't keep an SBF-tier addict off The Rift.
So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether the Out of Band Update will solve mine, I'm very hesitant to update.
[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.
I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.
I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".
Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.
Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
I've heard of people doing this, do they?
I'm so desperate for Premiere, even 6+ years after switching OSes. Resolve won't install on Fedora (???), our all-Flatpak future cannot get here soon enough...
One thing that scares me is that Adobe apps are already buggy on their own officially supported platforms. If I encountered a glitch, I’d always have in the back of my mind “is it because of my crazy set up or is it their fault?”
Great Linux VST manufacturers: U-he, DDMF, Toneboosters, TAL, Bluelabs, etc.
And more, more, more native plugins: https://linuxmusic.rocks/
It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.
The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.
Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.
Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.
Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.
And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.
If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.
But in general, I play a lot of weirder, niche games that just don't get a lot of traction for community fixes and so on.
2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.
Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77 MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded to v5.0.
- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station
And then things started snowballing with every version.
Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.
But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.
And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.
Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?
I'm not, MS already lost me. But I would bet there's a market for such an app, if done right.
I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...
In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?
But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.
The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them, not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec movie or install from the “store” GUI.
The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work, and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.
Having to install codecs once every few years is a tiny inconvenience compared to the dystopia offered elsewhere. I also run commands on Win and Mac all the time to fix things. For example Windows wastes tens of gigabytes of space unless you run a couple of inscrutable commands to free it.
Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.
And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.
Currently using https://getaurora.dev which is basically fedora + kde but curated by people that actually care. So codecs are preinstalled, and other sensible defaults out of the box which makes sense as its in the same family as bazzite (without the gaming focus).
For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!
No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).
The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises. Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another. We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.
The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.
Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and 16 years.
MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.
Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.
The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
Now? CachyOS. Yikes.
Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.
Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and variations and distributions and desktop environments and window managers and the like, pretty much every popular distro uses a recent or near recent version of the monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)
I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?
People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works, where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for experimental kernel scheduler implementations!
I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.
Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.
My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.
I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities
I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1
I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way
NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most
1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM
Giving up Windows pushed me to play better games and stay off the unhealthy AAA release cycle that has strangled innovation for years. If I was still playing Rainbow Six Siege then I wouldn't know how to cold-start an F-16 blk. 50.
There's definitely a list of games that don't work; they're usually outnumbered 10:1 by better titles. I haven't booted into Windows for 7 years, there's just not many new releases worth the effort.
I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.
Only to see this article today. lol
I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.
I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of: "Linux users are open source people and expect everything for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no need to port them for Linux users because so few of them would be willing to pay for our products."
A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-
And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I hold out hope they will be one day.
Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?
All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.
Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.
This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.
2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares
Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.
To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time, I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time, the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.
So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer versions of the OS with ads.
Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.
I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.
jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...
I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.
Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck
That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.
This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.
Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.
I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.
Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.
As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments
My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
VMs are an option to partition your life as well.
For real financial/business work, Calc is just not a serious player.
Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.
There is no corporation, board, or CEO to force unwanted changes. Pretty much every piece of the operating system is free and open source.
If you don't like your "Linux", you can swap it out for another distribution or "distro".
That would be your desktop environment... Which is also typically open source on Linux.
If KDE (desktop environment) developers decide to add ChatGPT or Claude integration, I can simply uninstall it and install a different DE.
All of the patches are auditable. If I don't want a patch, I can *trivially* omit it from my kernel before compiling.
How exactly are open source kernel modules and drivers affecting my freedom?
I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.
Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so intel.
The thing is that I absolutely lost it, because of the bugs and the ads, and just wanted something reliable that doesn't nag me all the time.
I know that other people's linux experience may be radically different due to different hardware, so I'll consider myself lucky it all worked out.
Citation needed.
Uncited, I would posit that those complaints haven't really been a thing for at least a couple of decades. And any issues have been far less than in Winland :)
Conversely, I’ve been on windows 11 for work for a few years now with zero issues.
Do anecdotes constitute citable/useful data for OSes with millions of users? Especially for comparison?
> Conversely, I’ve been on windows 11 for work for a few years now with zero issues.
By your previous standard, this thread (and the OP's article) are the evidence of Win11 being especially problematic. :)
Also, is there an entire IT team supporting your Win 11 instance to make it usable? :)
That said, I bring up my point just to agree with you. I think there are plenty of cases where people had bad experiences with both Windows and Linux (and MacOS too, of course). Sometimes it’s hardware. Sometimes it’s the use cases. Sometimes it’s personal preference. Whatever it is, the anecdotes don’t make either of them the better choice.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Linux Mint is nice, but it's been a few years since I installed it. Back in 2018ish we had a lot of machines with old dual cores and 2-4GB of RAM that chugged on Windows. But after installing Linux Mint, they were given new life and ran very well.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
I have been daily driving Ubuntu Cinnamon at work for ~3 years and it works pretty well. Some minor bugs here and there, but I can't imagine going back to Windows for a work machine.
There is a bit of a learning curve for Linux, so might be worth dipping your toes in to start before you go 100%.
The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.
If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.
We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became a thing back in 2014.
When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the next day.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...
Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you're not using it. I'm on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random obscure hardware setup details.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running ./configure && make && make install
Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.
Arch Linux just sits somewhere in the middle, where you don't build anything, but you get a guided tour of partitioning and formatting a disk, installing some set of packages and setting up a bootloader, from a fairly rich adn comfortable command line environment of a USB live distro.
Today it's utter garbage.
My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.
I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?
Give them all a test drive, see what you like before committing. After install try new things in VMs.
Otherwise, CachyOS is extremely popular these days, and I suppose a valid choice.
I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps. But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.
Off topic, anyone else think Windows 98 is too old for this machine? At a similar era I built an athlon t-bird 1.0GHz, I was mostly using Linux by then but if I did Windows then it would have been Win2k, maybe by the time of Athlon "XP", Windows XP would have been a thing too.
Thankfully unless you're running a few specific applications that only run on Windows, you can use any other operating system. It will do the job, with much less frustrations.
The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
I was running win11 up until three weeks ago. Just a gaming rig, a steam launcher. A used behemoth tower I got for a song via CL. Installed Bazzite and have been incredibly impressed.
Also ty to the author for the link to the nvidia sleep fix. That’s been the only hiccup, and it sounds like I’ll have it sorted before bedtime.
I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.
But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in nearly 2 decades.
This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But I'm going to soon maybe!
I ran XP in a VM on Windows 10.
The start menu opens instantly. After one video frame.
Windows explorer opens instantly. One video frame.
If they had literally done nothing for 20 years, it would be like 50x faster now.
Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.
If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.
"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."
** Embracing the Dark Side here **
Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.
Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?
I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick taskbar -> leftclick “close” but this stopped working. Why??
I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.
It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.
This time Linux has very good game support to the point where some games have a higher FPS on Linux. It will be so expensive for Microsoft to attempt to turn this ship around, and it will likely still fail.
This is happening at the same time AI agents have gotten really good, so users will just use local AI agents to configure and troubleshoot the rough stuff about Linux. And then they will customize it so much they will never be able to go back to Windows.
Ubuntu is just fine for 99% of non tech users. Windows has so many anti-patterns, tricks, and OneDrive rugpulls now that Ubuntu is actually much safer and simpler for non-techies to use (I can also make the case it beats iOS in that department too.)
The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.
A wonderful writeup.
Made my day! :-D
More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.
I also appreciate you giving me an updated copy of the "Microsoft is a corporation" meme, as the one I have downloaded seems to become outdated each time a new Windows update comes out.
-- Napoleon.
Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.
Its really the only thing on macOS + iOS that I use. Otherwise I am so over the mac lifestyle.
I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.
I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the house, but do I hate using Windows 11.
Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.
Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.
2. Install O&O Shut Up
The behavior you're describing is not normal
this sounds like child abuse.
Product driven development and too many managers with MBAs led to this problem.
Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2
Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.
I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).
Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.
In Linux forums, generally speaking, there is either a way it works or agreement that it hasn't been fixed yet. The main source of spam now is actually StackExchange, that prioritizes discussions from 10 years ago on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than up-to-date questions and answers.
I’ve gone over the years from Visual Studio fanboy to writing everything in vi, entirely due to software decay.
Our culture and economy can no longer maintain complex GUIs.
"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."
Fair point though :P
Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.
Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...
I don't like it personally but I do understand why they do it. It just means I can't play those games on Linux, and some studios just don't care.
It's a shame that they don't care, though supporting such a minuscule percentage of the gaming market doesn't make a lot of sense unless out of principle/just do to it.
You absolutely can design a non-intrusive anticheat that doesn't hook into the kernel layer, and many games do exactly that. They do checks server-side, without hooking into your system. Or design their game to make it harder, eg if a player is behind a wall and can't be seen, don't even send the packets saying there's a player there.
Even with invasive anticheat, any dedicated actor can (and usually eventually do) find ways around it, and it becomes a game of cat and mouse. I feel a similar way about DRM in general.
Imo the tradeoff and danger is not worth it for consumers, but most are just not aware of the risk. Game developers take advantage of this and also do it because it's easier than actually designing their game in a way to minimise cheating (be it through code, or game mechanics)
On a tangent, even though it's for the wrong reasons (Even if I were a full-time user and a fan of Windows, I would not want to install games with invasive anticheat and pollute my system, out of principle), I'm glad that there is at least some pressure and pushback on invasive anticheat by gamers that usually run Windows, just for the reason so that it can run on something like a Steam Deck.
Some games do choose to go the route of server-side authority, only showing what the client should be able to see, though I understand that's super compute heavy. Final Fantasy XIV does something akin to this, but players still develop client-side plugins to make their lives easier (higher-than-allowed camera zoom-out, displaying hidden boss mechanics when the client receives them, etc)
Cheats are also financially supported, specially in higher-profile games like Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, or similar, so the incentive to produce higher quality cheats exists.
People have been caught by pretending to play but actually screensharing the view of a pro player on their account, so I suppose that won't cover this :P
Ever since I did that, League of Legends is great honestly, and able to be played daily with no toxicity or rage.
"I'll switch when Linux supports X."
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Okay, but how about my X?"
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Well, X is still missing..."
Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.
Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.
So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows
I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).
I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.
Dev in linux is so much nicer for me than dev in Windows.
I am currently on 10 so much that I installed the LTSC version that has support until 2032. Keep hammering Microslop, they deserve it. We need to keep bugging them, throw dirt on their face until they actually fix it. Seems that's the way with them nowadays. So I don't feel any shame to call them names at every corner.
But I am still not switching to Linux. Maybe in '32 when LTSC stop being supported and they still didn't fix 11. Oh, and from my experience, Debian will be the way to go. I like a proven distribution even if their repository is not the greatest and the latest.
I set windows update service to manual, and so far the updates have not reset it, and I have been able to choose to install when I want. I feel safer, but I KNOW microsoft will fuck this over probably on their next update.
Another trick is as a super-super admin you can make executables UNEXECUTABLE by anyone. Things like Edge, etc. They do not let us remove their TRASH, but we still can lock them out, at least for now.
Another thing I had to do with Windows 11 when I had to rebuild my system because of Microsoft's SSD bug they would not cop too... They got rid of the magic trick to disable to OOBE which forces you to login with a microsoft account.... I could not find a way to work around it, but as soon as I was in I created a local admin user and it works well, they only force logged me in when I had to run FUCKING TEAMS for a job interview.
I'm heading down the linux path very soon, I almost did last year. Dual boot for a while, to see if how well my Steam library plays (literally it's the only thing keeping me on Windows 11).... Looking at Bazzite for this but we'll see.
We must UNITE to fight this tryany!
Been using ubuntu + regolith as my daily driver for over a year now and haven't needed to use windows for anything. Almost all games all work well on Linux now too.
"I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact, sleep mode was broken from the start"
This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow hype instead of installing a stable distro.
As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming, video editing and 3D design, it just works.
It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.
If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having problems. They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao
I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.
I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.
I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.
Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.
But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.
There is some serious work needed inside microsoft camp to continue with a 6 month release cycle.
This, a 1,000 times. I hate, hate, hate this "feature". My Macs don't do that. My Linux systems don't do that. The whole, "screw you, we don't care" attitude of Microsoft is quite appalling.
Microsoft now makes it very difficult to disable this feature. After a few registry edits, I thought I was able to put a stop to the madness. But, then it went to rebooting on its own again.
Curiously, Office apps have auto-save, so does IntelliJ, VSCode, and even Notepad nowadays.. "restore my work environment after a reboot" almost works, but some things do disappear (e.g. unsaved web input forms) that it's aggravating enough. I wonder if they'll make it mandatory for apps to persist more across restarts.
Ok, that requires them to be competent, if they're competent we won't even have what we have now.
I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
Windows servers are still pretty good imho.
Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.
Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)
Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?
> DesignVerse
> AI website builder startup.
> - Tech Stack: Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra AI Framework
> - Role: Full Stack Developer
> - Built core features (full stack) and helped implement the AI-powered editing system.
I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Purely because they became annoying.
Or, of course, pay nothing and use Linux. But as much as we want to pretend that's a solution that works for everyone, that's not a solution that works for everyone. Especially as, just like Windows, you're not done once it's installed, you still need to do that one time configure-all-the-things pass on Linux, too.
And Copilot crap being shoved down our throats at every turn.
Don't even get me started on Teams.
Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.
Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.
I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.
I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.
I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.
My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.
I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).
I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.
The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.
And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.
1500+ points for a switch from Windows to Linux :)
It’s the year of the Linux desktop!
If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.
Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.
Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.
That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.
You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.
You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.