I frequently explore the possibility of switching to Linux, and while it's not the garbage fire it was 15 years ago, it's still just not a peer to Windows for the way I use my computer.
With windows's new mandatory driver signing, some of my hardware will never work with newer windows. I have to either dig up a copy of 7 or XP, or throw it out. Even on 7 it's a pain. The same hardware works fine under linux.
Also, your "manually editing obscure config files" is my registry hell. I'm pretty sure every operating system sucks (I'd say OSX's equivalent is defaults.write)
It's truly tragic. As a species, we're hoping to build a self-enhancing mega-AI, but we can't even keep relatively basic OS technology stable without breaking it.
I absolutely understand that some of the reasons for breakage are economic and political. But even so.
Thank you.
As someone who uses all common OSes on a regular basis I am always surprised, almost intrigued, when seeing the huge confirmation bias causing some users who mainly use 1 OS to bash on the others with reasons which usually come down to 'I actually don't know how to use your OS but once I did and it sucked so yeah my OS is definitely better than yours'.
With windows 10, this has gotten /way/ worse. Sure bluetooth works out of the box, but sometimes it just disapperates. I'm doing like, rain dances and getting tons of wrong answers out of google, only to find out that somehow Windows decided to turn the radio off, and there's actually no way to re-enable it except booting into linux because when the radio's off, windows says the hardware is physically /not there/.
I install it for a while, play some steam games, then usually just boot it out and go back to linux.
It's generally hard to switch operating systems, not just one way.
I would highly encourage you to learn the command line as it is considered a valuable skill on this site. You do not need to learn every obscure program. I often forget how to use quite a few Linux comamnds and just refer to Google or man.
- Setting up a scheduled job
- Manipulate the firewall (I don't include third party packages as "UI")
- Configuring a website
- Changing permissions on a .py file to execute it
I also had huge problems a few years ago when the only Linux servers I could rent from OVH had no UI, and I didn't manage to figure out how to install the UI from a command line.
I'll need to get into Linux. But I find it to be hard work (for someone who does that as a hobby).
http://corntab.com https://github.com/alseambusher/crontab-ui
> Manipulate the firewall
> Configuring a website
http://apachegui.net (How can you do it in gui on windows?)
> Changing permissions on a .py file to execute it
Any normal file manager, i.e. thunar.
> I don't include third party packages as "UI"
Why? They're not hard to install if you need it.
IIS has a UI for pretty much everything
> Why? They're not hard to install if you need it.
Yes but 1. pretty much everyone uses txt commands so configuring these things with a UI would typically not appear in search results when looking for how to do something 2. having a UI is about making the OS self discoverable and intuitive. If it takes to be aware of and install some third party packages then the UI failed its objective.
Another thing that often tripped me in linux is the variety of distributions and tools to do the same thing. I can understand why advanced users appreciate having the choice, but from a beginner point of view, it makes it quite hard as the syntax that will work on one distribution of linux or with one tool will break another.
And it was game of "where they did hide that thing I need to configure right now?" at the beginning. Fortunately, later they did allow config files.
Additionally, GUI does not allow all the thing you can (and want) to configure using the config file.
You can also put your config files into svn or git repository and track changes to them over time. No more "what did I set to that server two years ago?" moments. You can also recycle config from one server to another, without clicking all the days.
So as a beginner, do not get used to GUI applets. Later, you will be thankful you didn't.
And sadly that is a game that the Linux user space devs are getting very adept at implementing...
So I guess you are talking about transitioning from Windows client to Linux server.
> I also had huge problems a few years ago when the only Linux servers I could rent from OVH had no UI, and I didn't manage to figure out how to install the UI from a command line.
Never heard of OVH. Try Digital Ocean and select their premade options, you can get a fully configured WordPress image from them.
> I'll need to get into Linux. But I find it to be hard work (for someone who does that as a hobby).
I don't know what to tell you. Sounds like you need to take a class or attend a Linuxfest where people will sit down with you and guide you through it.
> ... (I don't include third party packages as "UI")
Keeping UI as optional is deliberate as it reduces the surface attack structure of a Linux system. It also reduces resources with scaling a server farm. This is an important point to understand if you want to learn why Linux (and Unix like) dominates in servers. If you really want a UI, rent a CPanel managed Linux system.
That seems like an unimportant distinction, if it otherwise does what you need. It makes it sound like you're not making a sincere appraisal of the tools based on their merits.
Windows just works, and I'll happily pay money for a good product.
Woah? I was impressed anyway..
As someone who's suffered OS pains you wouldn't believe (I mean.. I ran solaris 10 on a hp probook as my main workstation for a year one time...) and for well over a decade -- things are MUCH better these days then they were.
Windows? Fair enough for you I guess. I'm not trying to convert you...
I'll come off badly here, but I'll be honest: I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum.
I'm not an elitist or at least; I'm really not trying to be.. Please don't take me wrong. At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver.
If you're a photo editor or a journalist or writer or something, sure -- I get why that stack works.. Programmer? Sysadmin? I can't get my head around it.
I'd like to understand, though.. What do you do? What tools do you use? Are you just living inside some IDE all the time and not interacting with lots of different tools?
Thinking out loud as I type, maybe that's the difference here then? We *nix folks tend to use lots of small tools and if you're just sat in one big IDE perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to us??
Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.
The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me.
I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other?
I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
You are right about vim. It works well everywhere, so that's not likely to be the application that dictates what the rest of your system is. If you use vim and play a lot of Call of Duty, then you are probably going to use Windows. If you use vim and absolutely depend on Final Cut Pro, you're going to be on a Mac.
I am a beginner on linux, and outside of a few basic settings, I find myself very quickly in front of a terminal window, trying to guess the state of the system or what syntax could work and not break anything.
I'm genuinely just curious how your world looks as it's so different to mine -- I must live a sheltered life but even junior devs I have with routinely push makefiles and bash scripts etc..
Are you a dev? Do you just live in one big contained environment like visual studio or such that has all these kind of tools rolled in?
GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc. I know a few command lines for some basic things I do all the time, but for things I do occasionally, it is just not worth me investing time doing it with a CLI, like creating a VM.
But then I am hostile to this new Microsoft...
It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations?
If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time...
If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..
People from Windows commonly have this impression because in Windows everything is either a GUI or the registry, and nobody wants to touch the registry without a long pole and a hazmat suit but you occasionally have to anyway. So you quickly build the intuition that anything without a GUI is painful and wrong, which isn't the case on other operating systems.
Most configuration files on Unix-like systems have manual pages that list what options you can set and what they do. For example the man page for logrotate.conf says you can add the line "mail address" to have it email the oldest log to address before deleting it. It's no more difficult to read the man page and find the option you want than look through seven pages of GUI settings to find it, and often easier because man pages are searchable. With the further advantage of actually describing what the option does rather than just giving you a GUI text box with the word "mail" next to it and letting you guess whether you're supposed to type an email address or a filename to mail or something else.
> like creating a VM.
There is a GUI program called virt-manager to do this on Linux. Most desktop Linux distributions have GUI programs to do a lot of things like that, people just don't use them as often because the GUI-alternative on Unix-like systems is actually reasonable. Although you picked a good example in the sense that creating a VM directly using qemu-kvm is harder than it probably ought to be.
Because it's way less work. Simple as that.
Windows, in my experience, just works. The things about it that don't work are the exceptions. Windows gets out of my way and lets me work with minimal setup and maintenance.
Linux, on the other hand, has been a pain in the butt every time I've tried to make it my primary desktop OS, and I have tried multiple times (granted, the last time was 6 years ago). Editing endless config files; building some obscure driver from source to make a device function correctly; and heaven help you if you want to do an OS version upgrade.
Yours was the exact reason I used OSX for almost 6 years; it stopped being true and I switched back to linux at the end of last year.
Since then, I've had exactly one time my laptop didn't wake up from sleep in around 2 months VS daily crashes and annoying popups from my last mac.
Also lots of grateful family/friends who recieved all my old apple gear ;)
Ubuntu 16.10 can't handle an external monitor with a DPI/resolution. And keeps throwing up error boxes after a fresh install on a Linux machine that came with Ubuntu by default.
Better? Maybe. Good? Hardly.
Out of the box, Ubuntu & friends (which have improved a lot in 6 years) are far more functional than Windows, assuming the hardware is properly detected and configured. When something goes askew, it's a toss-up whether it will be easier to fix on Windows or Linux. Familiarity/experience play a huge role here.
In return, I judge people who use technology choice as an indication of skill as inexperienced. At one point, I was like that too. I was all about tweaking and customizing Linux; getting it to run just so on hardware that, in some cases, was actively hostile to it (I still haven't entirely forgiven Broadcom). Moreover, at that time I was time-rich and cash-poor, so it made sense for me to spend extra time in order to gain open-source versions of closed-source tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
But, at some point, I realized that I wasn't really getting anything out of it. Watching stuff fly by on the command line, and tweaking config files by hand makes you feel like a 1337 h4x0r the first time you do it. But after you've had to tweak config files to get your wifi working for the twelfth time, after you've had to apologize to your collaborators because you can't edit their documents, after you've wasted people's time because your laptop can't connect to a projector, you realize that the real determinant of success isn't whether you're using Windows or Linux. It isn't whether you've memorized man pages or obscure command line flags. It isn't whether you can rattle off the contents of your xorg.conf and smb.conf by heart. It's whether you get stuff done. All the rest of it is just means to that end. And I realized that Linux, on the client, was more of an impediment to getting stuff done than a help.
I still use Linux. I have a half-dozen or so Linux VMs running on this machine right now for various projects. The fact still remains that new programming languages and server technologies come to Linux first, OSX second and Windows much later. But in terms of desktop/laptop experience? Linux still requires far too much tweaking and configuration, and I find it much easier to get stuff done with Linux on the server and Windows on the client.
Well, better late than never.
First off; I totally agree with you.
I wasn't trying to say that ability to configure xorg or tweak your desktop setup constantly was any indicator of technical skill and I've also met a lot of people who think that it is and they irritate me significantly too.
I'm not one of those. I don't judge skill on how well one can edit config files and I disregard the views of most of those who do as juvenile and in search of a measuring tape.
I had a similar journey to you w/r/t the need to get shit done vs having a fragile mess of customization to maintain and eventually it drove me to OSX (one 'yum update' before going away for lunch and coming back to an 80x25 console just as a change window opened was the straw for my particular camel).
I was comfortable there for a bit. It stayed the hell out of my way for most of the time (I just have fullscreen terms and a browser) which is what I needed from a machine that I'm working on. OSX stopped being the best tool for that job recently, but that's a post for another time.
So, back to my judgmental/biased statement.. I'm not really sure in both what I'm trying to say here or how to say it, but I'll try again for the hell of it.
I have found through years of personal observation (YMMVx1000) that windows users in any tech position that I'm involved with is an immediate smell of lack of technical skill. Again, that sounds really bad. Once again to be clear: I'm not saying there aren't smart .net or whatever folks around and I'll be proven wrong at some point (happily!), however I'm sticking to my view that as far as I've seen, on any team I've had (be it java devs or sysadmins) that the one or two folks using windows are always the weakest members of those teams.
While you can shoot me for being honest, I find the idea that a capable ops engineer or java developer would willingly choose MS as a driver, after they're at the point where they understand the issues around closed source and privacy, incomprehensible.
It also depends on your field. Yeah, if you're doing web dev, seeing Windows on the desktop might be a smell. But if you're doing embedded programming? Or gamedev? Or even just native software development for desktops? All of those areas pretty much require Windows. The toochains are, in many cases, Windows-only, and even if there are cross platform toolchains, 95%+ of your users are going to be using Windows, so you may as well run it to experience the app as your users will see it.
In fact, this is why I lament the lack of Windows in web development. There are so many web sites out there where you can tell (usually from font choices) that the entire development team was using Macs, because the site looks fine on a Retina display, but absolutely atrocious on, say, something like a 1366x768 TN laptop panel.
Moreover, in the Seattle area, at least, I'm see a slow but steady movement back to Windows machines from OSX because Apple is neglecting its offerings, and people are finding out that most server-side programming languages and frameworks actually work just fine on Windows these days. While setting up, e.g. Python and Ruby on Windows was really complicated and annoying at one point, these days it's as simple as just downloading the .msi installers from their respective websites and running them. And that's leaving aside WSL, which (though currently unfinished) promises to bring a full Linux userspace to the Windows kernel.
I don't know what you mean by, "Choose MS as a driver," but I personally have willingly chosen to go back to Windows as my normal day-to-day computing experience. Linux GUIs are atrocious messes designed by people too busy cargo-culting what Microsoft and Apple put out in their last iteration to do any actual UI/UX research. And OSX, for whatever reason, never really sat well with me. Maybe it was the lack of a proper "maximize" function. Maybe it was the menus at the top of the screen rather than the top of the application window. Maybe it was the fact that closing the last application window didn't close the application. There were too many decisions that I, personally found weird and unintuitive, even though OSX is supposed to be the more "intuitive" GUI environment. Again, this is all client-side. On the server, I still have no hesitation in choosing Linux. It works, it's stable, and it's very well supported.
As far as "closed source", well, honestly, I don't care that much. Like I alluded to above, I've seen too much crap open source software to have the illusion that open-source is some magic pixie dust that makes software better. It doesn't. The continuing state of Linux GUI (un)usability proves this. The fact that there are no open source IDEs that even approach the power, speed and usability of JetBrains products or Visual Studio proves this. There's a reason that "the year of the Linux desktop" only happened when Google took over and transformed Linux into something indistinguishable from a closed source OS.
When I said 'choose driver' I really meant 'daily driver' which means workstation/laptop OS to me (so apple, linux, windows, bsd, etc etc) -- almost everywhere I've worked with in the last few years allows anyone to use whatever they want so the choice is personal and not enforced.
It's all personal, I'm not sure what we're debating anymore. Use what works for you. I guess I have less requirements than you when it comes to interfaces. It's good to have alternatives and I'm glad that MS is becoming more friendly/capable as a host for developers..
My workflow for the last few years is I ssh into some big linux/bsd servers and do almost all my work there via tmux, my workstation is just a terminal and browser (two workspaces, both fullscreen). OSX was okay for this, the hardware was great (I had one of those fanless tiny macbooks after a few MBP's and it lasted 10 hours on battery weighed nothing and was really pretty) but now I'm on a XPS and I spent a single afternoon customising dwm which has turned out to be a much better fit for me (even though I still don't do anything locally).
Linux isn't a great desktop os for non-developers. It can work, sure, but I don't see it owning the consumer market and getting a tagged year :}
As for IDE's -- that's another personal matter and is largely dependant on where you work. You'll lose patience being the only member of a team using jetbrains when everyone else is on netbeans or the other way around; but I duck in an out of teams without having their specific IDE setup with just git and a term no problem.
As someone else in this thread pointed out, I've only seen the Candy crush ad once, that's all.
With bash on Ubuntu on windows, great hyperv based docker and the windows system I'm just much more flexible. I have an the advantages of Linux with WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) and at the same time I don't have to spend time on getting my computer to work.
Whenever I see someone presenting using Linux, they have to spend like 10 minutes configuring their beamer. I'm just connected, with great scaling handling and ready to go.
Additionally, I have a surface pro 4, so whenever I want I can just start sketching on it (great for a programmer).
Stop judging people by the technology they use, because maybe you're the one being fixated.
EDIT: Oh, and PowerShell is actually a nice to use terminal.
If you want a system that 'just works' with Linux you should buy from a vendor that supports Linux like System76.
Blaming Linux for not supporting hardware that the vendor did not bother to patch in support is like blaming MacOS for not working with your hackintosh.
I just played Tropico 5 on Ubuntu with Steam. All the hardware was detected. I installed a PPA to download the latest driver; that will keep me updated.
> This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files
I had to edit obscure entries the registry to block Microsoft's spying on my Windows 7 system. I have had to edit entries to fix obscure issues in Windows XP. I have yet to edit 'obscure config files' for my Ubuntu desktop in years.