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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

There's 288 Linux distributions currently listed on DistroWatch, multiple DE, package managers, and yet, Windows is still dominating on desktop.

Having an open source clone of Windows makes perfect sense. Imagine if, after all those years, this project received more support from the open source community. Today we would have a free and open source OS that would be able to run Windows drivers and the Win32 apps people want to use. Adobe's stuff, AutoCAD, AbletonLive, games, MS Office, etc.

In the end, the average person doesn't care about operating systems. What they care about is their apps.

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Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though. I don't know, maybe I'm just too old now because I'm already tired typing about it. I still scratch my head when I see people developing non Windows apps on Windows. And I run Nix on everything. But I'd accept 'I like Windows more even if I could run my expensive industry specific software on Linux' without feeling the need to explain why they're wrong.

>Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though.

On a fundamental technical level, windows 10 is a pretty finely tuned os.

On any other benchmark you might choose (privacy, invasiveness and advertising, user control, user experience, active user deception) windows has been going downhill for years.

You're missing the point about criticism of Windows 10.

Almost nobody could claim that it's a bad OS from a technical standpoint, though there are certainly significant improvements to be made. The real issue is lack of any semblance of privacy, user unfriendliness, and frankly the closed-down nature of it is never going to do it any favours.

In my view, apart from gaming, it has nothing going for it.

>In my view, apart from gaming, it has nothing going for it.

What Windows has going for it is that it supports a lot of different desktop/laptop hardware very well.

macOS doesn't support a lot of hardware. Linux supports a lot of hardware but much of it not very well.

If I list my desired specs for a laptop or desktop and then go ahead and buy the one that best meets my criteria, chances are pretty high that Windows will run best on it.

I have been a Mac user for many years. I'm using a Mac mini right now. But if I had to replace it today I wouldn't know what to replace it with.

> What Windows has going for it is that it supports a lot of different desktop/laptop hardware very well.

I don't think that's the case. It's not that Windows itself supports more hardware, but the fact that drivers for said hardware are built only for Windows. It could even be seen as a vicious cicle: 1) HW manufacturers create drivers for Windows because It's more popular; 2) Users use Windows because "It Just Works (TM)" and so userbase grows; 3) goto 1

> Linux supports a lot of hardware but much of it not very well.

Hence I think Linux supports more HW but driver support isn't as good.

I get what you're saying though.

A lot of the crap in Linux hardware support comes borked hardware that under Windows is papered over by the OEM drivers.

Damn it, Foxconn managed to ship a desktop motherboard that would produce junk ACPI data unless the OS identified itself as Windows on boot.

There are other issues as well that to people who know how to use Linux are not issues. Take running a program for example, on Windows telling a user they need to open CMD and run a batch file to get a program to execute is insane. Yet that's fairly common even with modern Linux software.

For Linux to compete with Windows realistically for average computer users it needs to have a distro that is like macOS in that it's idiot proof. I should be able to sit someone down in front of a computer running it with no instructions and the OS should do the teaching without telling them to open a terminal and look at man pages.

I agree with you, but I don't think GNU/Linux can compete with Windows at that point. The things you wrote about should have been implemented in most distro years ago.

If you speak about this in /r/linux, the people there will tell you that "if people are not willing to learn how to use the terminal to install apps, then they're just lazy/too stupid". This is the kind of mentality we're dealing with and that's why there's 288 ditros without any chance of mass adoption.

There are decent GUIs in most major distros that do this for you now.

And yet, where's the popular apps people want?

Which ones are you thinking of?

When they say the privacy issues of Windows I see a double standard. Android is, to my mind, equally "invasive" as Windows, if not more. Except the fact that Android's source code is open, they are pretty much same regarding end user experience. Yet every time Windows 10 is brought up people say privacy.

Yeah, I understand that Windows wasn't like this, so people can get upset about the recent changes Microsoft is pushing onto. On the other hand Android has been like that from the beginning, so there might not be much expectation. But still I don't care Windows-as-a-service because nowadays pretty much every software I use is provided like that. It's just that the OS becamse not an exception.

It isn't, as you can disable or replace parts of Android you don't like. With Windows you are stuck with whatever Microsoft decides.

The best place to put spyware into is closed source unauditable software.

On Windows the entire system and most well known applications are closed source, therefore not trustworthy, but on Android things are not that different: Android makes heavy use of closed source device drivers and so far any attempt to get a completely open system while keeping all the underlying iron useable has failed because most device manufacturers keep their hardware undocumented, save for Google and a few big players under NDA.

The point is that security is an OR: a chain whose strength depend on the weakest link; if one closed blob can contain a keylogger, having just one in an otherwise 100% open phone still makes the phone 100% potentially not secure.

By your definition, Linux is also insecure since it depends on closed source BIOS and closed source device firmwares, as well as closed source hardware.

Security is a process not a if/else choice, and Android is more secure than Windows because it is open source and you can replace Google parts. Good luck doing that on Windows.

The key is "potentially" and from whom the risk of exploitation comes from. Having one closed driver instead of 20 makes the system statistically a lot less prone to exploitation by the usual malware writers, but if a government or any entity with enough power wants to take advantage of that weak point to install say a keylogger, their chance of success is 100% like it would be on a system that depends on 20 closed blobs.

And yes, Linux (and BSD) is also potentially insecure (or less secure if you prefer), which is the reason why the same effort who brought us a lot of quality Open Source verifiable software now should be directed towards obtaining also Open Hardware. We need to build a culture as we did with Open Source software so that people will understand the importance and associated risks.

There is a very clear difference. The MSRP of Windows OS is over $100 or the Microsoft tax if you bought a Windows system. Secondly, you can turn off Google services when you setup an Android phone. Where is the option to turn off all Microsoft services and not have to interact with them at all?

but the proprietary nature of Windows 10 is the problem. Cost. Spyware. Security. ...

> Spyware. Security. ...

I hope you don't use web apps, ChromeOS or Android then.

For web, I always have Privacy Badger + Ublock + ScriptSafe (which I selectively disable). For Android, Instead of StockRoms + GooglePlay I use Lineage + F-Droid (only open source apps). And on my ChromeOS labtop, I installed Parabola Linux (free-software-only version of Arch Linux).

How is that philosophically different than using Windows with Spybot Anti-beacon (or similar telemetry-blocker)?

You're critical of Windows for collecting data, but use other software that collects similar data, saying "that's fine I have 3rd-party privacy tools". These same tools have existed for Win10 since week 1.

> How is that philosophically different than using Windows

He has entirely FOSS stacks for his devices? Quite literally no proprietary code wherever possible?

They're not "3rd-party privacy tools" he's making a point of, outside of a browser which isn't what the complaint is about on Windows, since that is outside the bounds of OS-specific complaints, but he mentioned it nonetheless since you asked about it.

Regarding web, that is only partial security, as you cannot avoid everything that gets stored on the application servers.

I don't like the way Microsoft has lately begun treating both their devs and customers, but nevertheless they are a corporation - they have to someway make a profit - a business survives by adapting to their users and telemetry ("spyware") is data; data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs.

The fact that you can spell out the motivation of someone's shitty behavior doesn't elevate it above criticism!

Some time ago, I had a desktop PC with a mechanical HDD (capacity reasons), and I made a mistake of installing W10 on it. Very quickly I noticed that even on a fresh install, HDD was literally never idle, and that's after all updates. There's always some more crap MS wants to push out, or something wants to update, or reindex, and so on and on. Seriously, it interfered with my sleep in another room.

Windows 10, never again.

Did you ever run a profile to see what was going on? Or run ProcessMonitor to see what was using the disk etc.?

It could be the indexing service for files. There is the NTFS MFT which is used by tools such as Everything by "void tools", but Windows also has its own Windows Search (WSearch) service which indexes files and contents. I believe this is similar to the Indexing Service found on Windows XP that would give you hopeless results (duplicates between its database and the actual file system). This is meant to make Cortana be able to give you helpful results when you search for things like files locally.

I have found it to be slow to type something into the Start menu (just type), particularly compared to the results from Everything (mentioned above) or Apple's Spotlight. It is very odd because Microsoft has its own SQL Server division (and SQLite is free if they want to use that!) as well as embedded SQL Server for file-based database systems yet their start menu search is horribly slow so as to be useless (for me at least).

I recommend buying Windows Internals 6 volumes 1 & 2 to understand what is going on, at least under Windows 7. There are not versions released for Windows 10 yet (and will there ever be? It's a constantly moving target).

Yes, spent some time with Perfmon, as expected, it was due to various system components constantly finding some reason to update/install something I have no use for.

Moving Chrome profile to a RAM disk helped somewhat, as did turning off some icon update stupidity or something like that in hidden Chrome settings.

But as you mentioned, if even the Start menu is lagging, I have no patience and no desire to investigate further, this is it. So instead of buying some utilities to make windows less crappy, I've finally had enough and installed Ubuntu on that last PC. Just to think about it, I was an MCSE+I and MCDBA some time ago, now I only boot windows for games.

Similar experience. Win10 was really, really sluggish on my spinning rust drive. Problem went away with an SSD. Must be tuned for use on a solid state drive.

I would guess that would be the case for the most part these days... I don't think I'd want to use a modern OS on a spinning drive, at least for the OS/swap. Of course, linux (ubuntu) has its' own issues, like the 80+gb ~/.cache/upstart/unity.7.log file filling up the ssd every couple days (still haven't caught it when not full to be able to dig into, annoying all the same).

Though worst from MS on spinning drives has to be using Visual Studio on a web project (or node dev for that matter)... it's painful.

Is the desktop still a market worth dominating? It's relevant today, and will remain relevant, but in decreasing amounts. I think we're in a new era of thin clients and beefy *nix machine clusters again, and I think it will matter less and less what IT departments buy as long as they have a capable browser.

I think this would've been a good answer 6 years ago, but with tablet sales decreasing YoY and desktop/ laptop finally growing again, it might not be entirely accurate.

6 years ago we thought netbook thin clients paired with powerful backends would dominate. But here we are in 2017 - server side rendering of UI is waning while rich and robust client side interface applications are thriving.

I think that late 2000's/ early 2010's vision of local computing withering in the shade of cloud resources is over. It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea.

> robust client side interface applications are thriving.

But a huge amount of them use web technologies which are pretty much OS independent. I'm using Linux for 10 years now and I used to have trouble to work with others because they where all using Windows-only software (proprietary chat client, MS office, etc.) but it's less the case anymore because for many use-cases everybody uses web applications instead of native software.

> It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea.

That's why JavaScript is the dominant language out there. And with WASM comming, even what's currently out of reach of JavaScript will be doable on a web plateform (except high-end gaming maybe).

That's very nice, but I feel that the price we're paying for running the Web-stack on top of normal application stack is atrocious, especially where a native, local application would be far more efficient. It works, yes; and I'm glad I'm not getting as many "Linux? Go away" issues these days; yet the bloat and latency of web-stack is something that remains largely unadressed in 2017.

Case in point: OSM editors. iD has very low barriers to entry: it's all in-browser, integrated with the website, nice rounded corners, and no dependencies - but it's slow and unable to keep up with edits > 500 nodes (because it's a memory hog built on a memory-hog JS framework running in a JS+DOM memory-hog virtual machine inside a memory-hog application). JOSM, on the other hand, is not quite native (Java being a memory hog of its own), but is capable to use persistent caching and relatively efficient memory structures. (I'm explicitly not comparing the feature set, which stems from different usecases or ease-of-use, which is somewhat subjective: this is in comparison of rudimentary editing operations)

With local apps there are issues of updates, security and platform lock-in. No such issues with web apps. And thanks to modern JS engines, web apps are now fast enough for most tasks.

>>but it's slow and unable to keep up with edits > 500 nodes

It is perfectly possible to build a fast JS app. The one in your example is not well optimized.

It is also perfectly possible to build a clean PHP app. Yet, the overwhelming majority of PHP apps are piles of hacks and the overwhelming majority of JS apps are bloated behemoths, because those are languages that are sloppy or hungry (respectively) by default, these are the paths of their least resistance. With the current "ship it first, fix it maybe later, never pause to think it through" mentality, all you'll ever get is the default.

(And don't get me started on Web security, or rather lack thereof: security is not inherent to web apps"; DROP TABLES; --

> With local apps there are issues of updates, security and platform lock-in. No such issues with web apps.

With web apps there are issues such as vendor lock-in of your data (like doing accounting in a webapp) try getting your data out.

Vendor updating to a new non functional version of their web app while you liked the old one.

Security issues because your data is now on the internet instead of on a local PC.

You are just trading one set of limitations for another and also removing your ability to address issues by yourself.

>>With web apps there are issues such as vendor lock-in of your data

You can use self-hosted web apps or a vendor that allows export of data. You can use a vendor that allows loading/saving data locally.

>>Security issues because your data is now on the internet instead of on a local PC.

The same is true for most local apps. How do you know they are not leaking your data?

>>Vendor updating to a new non functional version of their web app while you liked the old one.

True for local apps as well

>>You are just trading one set of limitations for another and also removing your ability to address issues by yourself.

There are always limitations, but web apps have less, which is why they are winning.

Updating a local app is under your own control.

While self hosting webapps certainly is possible, this is not an option for the average user.

With a local app you can make it certain that it isn't leaking by not connecting it to the internet?

I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this as you are clearly looking at this from a different angle as I do.

Well, now the lock in is at the server side instead... Google Docs anyone?

I see this argument often, but think about it this way: people use Electron style apps because they have no other real choice. If I had the same app written natively and another implementation based on Electron, I'd pick the native app every single time. It's developers who are pushing for JavaScript, not users.

> It's web developers who are pushing for JavaScript

Fixed that for you.

I am a developer, with UI experience going back to Amiga/Windows 3.x days, and will only touch Electron if forced by customers/employer to do so.

I feel the same way about Electron, because I don't like shipping subpar applications to users.

I've found the development experience using TypeScript and React to be fairly pleasant, though. I know some people gripe about JSX/TSX, but it seems to me it's a lot like XAML - declarative XML that you can use to lay out your interface and hook up event handlers.

I've been enjoying the UWP, WPF, and macOS ports of React Native. They make it fairly easy to get up and running with something that'll let you share 80% of your code cross platform while still making it easy to write extensions with the native OS toolkit when needed. From what I've observed, RN desktop apps are much more CPU and memory efficient than Electron apps. In my mind, this is a much better way to create desktop applications using (mostly) web technology.

> It's developers who are pushing for JavaScript, not users.

It's the business which is pushing for JavaScript: for most product nowadays you need to support both Windows and MacOS. Now you need to consider the following trade-off: do you want native apps at the expense of two code bases ? Or do you prefer a portable one at the expense of quality ?

In many cases the answer is a cleary the second option. Now you just have to chose which portable runtime you want: Java like it's 2000 or the web which is the current norm.

An hybrid approach is Qt since it wants to be a tool to build portable native apps, but in fact they are neither really native (the UI doesn't feel right) nor really portable (it often doesn't work out of the box).

> but it's less the case anymore because for many use-cases everybody uses web applications instead of native software.

As a user, when given the option, I always use native.

And I know many that do the same, specially in mobile apps.

At work, when given the option, I rather produce native applications than web ones.

I can render fancy fat ui on my phone these days though, and keep all the buisiness logic in my server service I charge a monthly fee to run. I don't think thick clients are driving notebook sales, except that maybe we put more ram in chrome books than you would expect?

Idk, maybe I a sheltered in Silicon Valley, and I know that most of the buisiness world has a lot of legacy windows apps you need to run your buisiness, and if it ain't broke no one is changing it. But, for new apps, I don't see why you wouldn't do SAS. It will be a slow process for sure but I can't see what will reverse it, except for maybe widespread privacy concerns about the cloud.

These things start off very slowly, and then tend to somewhat exponentially grow and improve over time.

Have a look at LibreOffice. StarOffice was open sourced in 2000 by Sun as OpenOffice.org and started somewhat slowly. By 2004 OpenOffice.org was making steady progress, and had captured quite a bit of market share.

Then the OpenOffice developers and Sun started stymying contributions, and eventually Michael Meeks setup Go-OO with a bunch of patches that made the program easier to use. Then Oracle bought Sun and really pissed off key external contributors so they forked the product and in 2011 The Document Foundation was formed to oversee LibreOffice development.

Since then OpenOffice.org has stagnated and withered on the vine, whereas LibreOffice has had entire swathes of old and cruddy code rewritten and each point release has not only got huge numbers of bugs fixed, but often new features - and often entire subsystems have been rewritten without the end user ever knowing.

So give it time - it's been just over 16 years since it the StarOffice source was opened to anyone. ReactOS has been around at least this long, and due to the nature of the project isn't quite as fast, but each time I read a new release it occurs to me that development is accelerating rather rapidly!

The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow.

This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft.

However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative.

As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not.

Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.

Windows subsystem stagnated since 2006. Win32 is on a standstill. All new efforts (Silverlight, UniversalRuntime, etc) are not very successful (and based on Win32 subsystem as well) and like a niche compared to the vast amount of WinAPI based applications. So Windows like Office are not a moving target like they used to be.

ReactOS aims for WinNT series compatibility including hardware drivers. And those driver APIs haven't changed for a decade or more.

From an end user perspective Windows 10 might not appear any more advanced than it's predecessors, but the NT subsystem has still changed quite considerably since 2006 (that date range covers Vista, Windows 7, 8.* and 10).

There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc.

As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.

"Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies"

And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.

It doesn't matter how much of the new tech is needed in Windows. It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. What matters is if it's used by applications. If it is then ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows.

I don't get why people are pushing back on this point. It isn't a criticism of ReactOS. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development.

This is why people more often talk about ReactOS being exciting in terms of supporting older software rather than new. Obviously if it ever got to the stage that it had parity with the latest releases of Windows then that would be amazing but the chances of that happening are miniscule.

"It doesn't even matter if the tech is any good or not. ReactOS has to reverse engineer it if they want parity with Windows. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development."

I think this is where you're making wrong assumptions. ReactOS is free and open-source, and from this comes choice. Even if the main project chooses to work on reimplementing marginal or even unwanted things, a fork is always an option. (A fork from an immature project like it still is doesn't make sense for now.) After all, it's known that people don't appreciate bloat. ReactOS wants parity with Windows 2003 and that is a manageable target. Bits from later Windows versions may be added for important applications but it hasn't have to be nor is necessarily wanted all that Microsoft pushed from Vista hitherto. ReactOS doesn't have to cover all that much, really.

Also, an important nitpeek: ReactOS doesn't reverse-engineer. It employs clean-room engineering.

ReactOS is aiming for 2003 at the moment. A few years back it was 2000. Then previous versions of Windows before then. It's target has been upgraded every few years. I've been following and using ReactOS for about 15 years now. Trust me when I say I'm familiar with the project and what it's aims are and have been in the past.

Yeah you're right it's not reverse engineering in the technical sense. It's a lazy term to use because it sounds like the approximation of the process even though it's technically inaccurate. I should get out of that habit. :)

Those changes didn't change the fundamental architectural basis of Windows. There are quite a few subsystems in the NT architecture, let's look at them in turn, but first have a look at the following diagram which I created years ago and hasn't changed terribly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT#/me...

* the HAL - there have been changes here, but nothing so fundamental that can't be built upon

* kernel mode drivers - these have changed and new models keep getting released by Microsoft, but these rely on well defined interfaces and a lot of it is in the kernel mode driver framework (KMDF). A detailed history can be found here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/hardware/drivers/wdf/kmdf...

The user mode driver framework is similar.

I'm not going to go through the rest of the subsystems, you might want to review this document:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160113113554/http://research.m...

So... sure, things have changed over the years but they most certainly aren't radical enough to stall development of ReactOS.

I didn't say stall the development of ReactOS. I said Windows is a moving target. And I also listed a bunch of interfaces that had changed specification in subsequent releases of Windows.

And I didn't say you said to stall development of ReactOS, I said that I don't think it would actually stall development :-)

ReactOS has a target of Windows Server 2003. If they decide to upgrade to a later operating system, I'm not quite sure I see that as a huge issue.

It's not a huge issue. It's exactly what they've done already for the last 20 odd years. Hence why I say they're chasing a moving target ;)

Yeah, I guess we disagree that their progress won't increase quite a bit over time.

It is my understanding that you already can run an impressive amount of Windows software (I think including MS Office) under Linux using Wine. That doesn't seem to help the popularity of Linux very much.

In Germany we have a saying, "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht". Most people just don't care about operating systems, and hence they do not see the point in trying another system when the one they know works well enough for them.

A couple of years back, I set up my parents' notebook to dual boot either Windows 7 or Ubuntu 12.04. Despite the fact that both their printer and their (ancient) scanner worked out of the box (which did not work on Windows 7 at all), they have never used it.

On the other end of the spectrum you have young people who equally do not care about the operating system, but do not have such strong ties to Windows. I was amazed that when I gave my Ubuntu laptop to children on our family meetings, they had absolutely no problem using it for anything they needed. It was mostly just browsing the web and watching YouTube, but the point is that it was not alien to them. If more cheap laptops shipped with Ubuntu pre-installed, the adoption could go up significantly.

Until their school ask them to produce a document in MS Office, or they want to play a game that is not available on Linux.

I installed Elementary OS on my niece's computer because she lost her Windows licence. 2-3 weeks after that, she told me her computer was "broken". The reason was that she tried to run some apps (win32) but of course it didn't worked.

OpenOffice documents are compatible with MS Office (and I think OO can even save them in MS format, but I'm not sure of that.)

Changing habits is hard, most people don't want do it useless they are forced to.

5 of 6 years ago, my mother's old computer died. All the new ones where running Windows 7 while she was used to XP.

I seized the opportunity to install Linux on here computer instead of Windows 7, and she was OK with that because she was going to be in a new environment anyway. She is now a proud Linux user for 5 or 6 years :)

The only computer that runs windows in my house is my dual boot machine. My parents and my sister all have ubuntu distros, because 99% of the time they just need firefox and a text editor.

But if you only care about your apps, there's no real reason to run ReactOS. You'd also have to care about free or open source software.

Can't speak for the other stuff, but if you're not using wacky instrument drivers (I only have a pretty basic midi keyboard so I don't know what other instruments are like) Ableton Live 9 works like an absolute dream under Wine. I was shocked by how flawlessly it ran.

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