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Comment by bactrian | Hacker News Reader

This post was interesting in a morbid way but you can count the Linux nerds that want leave the open world of Linux for Microsoft very easily. They all work at Microsoft.

Microsoft is losing on mobile, desktop, servers, and IoT. Their entire ecosystem is a technological deadend.

If you're a Linux Nerd, you should probably keep using Linux if you care about having a good career going forward.

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Losing on desktop. Yeah, any decade now.

There is of course a constituency of Linux Nerds primed to move to Windows: people who want to develop software for Linux servers but don't want to run Linux on the desktop. Many of those people are using OS X, which is POSIX enough to run some Linux software unmodified. WSL is a way to target those people, who may be being left behind by Apple's changing strategy in laptops (and the continued neglect of the Mac Pro and Mac Mini).

Yeah, that's me in a nutshell. My employer recently sent everyone new hardware and I was initially bummed about getting the just-before-Touch-Bar MBP. Then I saw how gimmicky and awful Touch Bar was for the "lucky" colleague stuck with it. I'm typing this on a five year old MBA that isn't quite up to scratch for work anymore. If Apple would take this case, stick updated hardware and a Retina display in it, I'd buy it on launch day. Never gonna happen so I guess I'm never gonna buy another Apple laptop.

Desktop Linux, especially when your employer runs Exchange, is a barrel of pain I've opened far too many times for my own good. Not going that route again.

> Desktop Linux, especially when your employer runs Exchange, is a barrel of pain

That's been me at my current employer. The whole dev team moved to linux, becuase it's just so much more productive. But the #1 pain point is Exchange.

I tried Evolution, which connected to Exchange without any issues, but the mail client itself was buggy as hell. I tried thunderbird with some plugins (can't remember which ones) and that didn't work at all. Then I found out about Hiri. I thought it would save me, but it couldn't connect to Exchange at all.

So our last resort was outlook webmail. What a fucking pile of garbage, but at least it "worked".

I lived with that pain for months until I discovered davmail [0]

I could easily connect thunderbird to exchange via davmail. I got all my email, contacts and calendar synced up nicely with exchange. I have had 0 issues fo far.

[0] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

I think the touchbar is a very cool idea, but I don't understand why they put it on their pro machines. Who uses function keys? Pro users. Who would benefit most from the touchbar? Consumers.

nobody is doing Linux dev on Windows, the only people I know at work on Windows are sysadmin types that just never learned Linux desktop and non-programmers. 95% of the dev people I know are on OS X or Linux

On my bubble the only place for Linux is on servers. OS X machines are too expensive and we get to share a pool of devices.

95% of devs are on Windows.

How healthy is the desktop market outside of the corporate environment? Consumers seem largely content with phones and tablets.

Still pretty healthy if you include laptops, which are functionally desktops, down a bit but still quite healthy (includes a forecast): https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

As long as PC gamers exists, the desktop market will never die.

And that is the single most popular reason to run Windows I hear in my bubble.

This is a great comment. I have never been a gamer... but now that I am moving back to windows... it just might become a thing.

Tablets are still a thing? Large phones and Laptops is what my bubble uses.

The vendors aren't doing themselves any favours.

I'm typing this on a Samsung Tab A with a bluetooth keyboard. It's actually a pretty slick form-factor -- 9.7" screen, 1024 x 768 dispaly, 128 GB additional storage, and converts from a deskable or lappable landscape to portrait in under a second. Charge lasts all day.

The basic concept of a mobile device whose display is separable from its keyboard is _wonderful_. Laptop hinges suck.

That's the hardware -- and you can do better on several counts (memory, ROM, MicroSD, display) now.

But for two major limitations:

1. NOBODY has a decent keyboad, and there is NO standardisation for cases, outside a minsuscule handful of products. Samsung's Tab 3S has a keyboard ... five rows -- no function keys. Which kills off a whole set of applications right there. The keyboard I've got (Logitech Type S) was broken from the start, and Logitech have abysmal warranty support. The keyboard is no longer made (they claim), and loses keys and other function over time.

2. The OS and applications space is abysmal. Here I'm including iOS and Android. Neither Google nor Samsung support updates to my device (it was apparently EOL as I was buying it). It's also not supported by CyanogenMod / LineageOS. The best thing I've found since getting this has been Termux, a Linux console environment, which offers a small but very, very, very useful set of utilities. Even that is crippled by what appears to be a bad terminal emulation (exceptionally slow on any scrollback), background-process termination (I'm never sure I'll find my sessions when I return to them), and something insanely buggy with SSH emulation.

iOS of course doesn't even have a userland / console space.

I'm looking at the Samsung Tab Pro line. It's expensive -- more than twice the price of an Asus Chromebook, say, but has the benefits of a folio-case and seperable keyboard form-factor. It seems to come with Windows 10 rather than Android, and I'm trying to sort out if that can be converted to either LineageOS or Linux.

The surveillance-capitalism market of Android / Google is no longer tenable. The App ecosystem is fatally broken. Google's own apps (notably Chrome) are beyond frustrating. So really, the faults are all on the OS/applications side.

I've some fairly strong reservations about installing Linux on a tablet as I doubt that Linux tools will play well with a touch-based surface (and touch itself ... has massive problems). In particular, the inability to distinguish a touch vs. click/drag action, the inability to navigate with the pixel-perfection of a desktop/mouse (though with high-def displays even that is pretty dicey these days), and the lack of multi-button mouse equivalents. I find all quite annoying.

But for straight console-mode operation within Termux, the tablet's actually reasonably useful.

What would help here?

1. Size standards on devices, including port and switch locations, such that cases could be designed for them across vendors. There are cases which work for only specific variants of Samsung model lines.

2. Keyboard standards, including interactions with keyboards, "special" key placement, and standardisation on a six-row, ~78 key standard. Samsung's 64-key error on the Tab 3S is absolutely inexcusable.

3. An alternative to straight-touch interfaces.

4. Bootloader unlocking and a sane standard for non-cloud device backup.

5. Mandated, effective, and usable privacy controls.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/lqgtwy_rhsfbdh5cdxb1rq

There used to be a very good terminal environment app on Linux, far better than termux. It was called Terminal IDE, and it was basically a full Debian bootstrap. Unfortunately, it was never updated for lollipop or later, possibly because of pie/technical reasons.

Personally, I've given up on using Linux from Android. I'd love to, but it's next to impossible, you'll run into other issues you haven't even seen yet; for example, my phone doesn't even have ext support for the sdcard; I'm stuck using fat32 for a 32gb partition. You also can't mount a network drive with fuse and expect to access it from another app.

If you want a software keyboard, use hacker's keyboard--it does a full keyboard layout with alt/Ctrl/other keyboard keys. If you want a physical keyboard, you shouldn't use a keyboard case anyways, a full size keyboard is far easier to use. You can get a microusb numpad-less keyboard for around $10-15 online. Alternatively, just get a full 100+-key Bluetooth keyboard

If you want updates, buy Google and/or deal with unofficial community updates if you can get them, because only Google updates their devices. I'm stuck on lollipop because Verizon has decided not to release Marshmallow in the US (VZW Moto E2 has MM in EU only)

The adb backup/restore commands may also be of some limited help to you. (They use archives that aren't openable, but they do work)

I'm well aware of external storage limitations.

Google/Nexus devices have no damned onboard storage. That's a fail. I don't do cloud.

The lack of usable / findable docs on this stuff is another PITA.

Pretty much, even as a developer, I feel the desktop paradigm is less and less important each year since I mostly only use a web browser and a terminal.

You're one particular kind of developer. There are others.

For example, my usual "working set" right now includes:

Araxis Merge, Calculator (the Windows 10 version with the new programmer features), Dynalist, Evernote, FlashDevelop (don't laugh), IntelliJ IDEA, TraceView Plus, Notepad++, Office 365, Process Hacker, SecureCRT, Slack, SmartGit, Visual Studio, VMware Workstation, VS Code, XVI32.

And less frequently:

API Monitor, Dependency Walker, Spy++, Hexinator, PaintShop Pro, IDA Pro.

Also utilities like 3DxWare, 7-Zip, AquaSnap, AutoHotkey, Brother scanner utility, Eye-One Match (so my monitors are calibrated the same), Everything (the search utility), GraphicsMagick, JKLmouse (keyboard mouse control), Macrium Reflect, FolderSizes, Pandoc, ZoomIn/Zoom+, and the usual browsers and stuff. WSL too.

Along with more personal tools like Foobar2000, Google Earth, Moneydance, Musicnotes (sheet music player), Total Recorder, Transcribe! (music transcription and pitch shifting), TurboTax, VLC.

I'm not saying my set of tools is typical either, of course! Just that for some of us the desktop is alive and well, both for business and personal use. I have no idea how I would replace most of these tools with a terminal and a web browser, other than the ones like Dynalist and Slack.

I assume that is because you can SSH into the machine of your choice?

Most of the developers who don't live in a country with fast internet connection will still continue using a desktop for the foreseeable future.

Nope, just vim, and a browser mostly. I use sublimetext sometimes. That's the bulk of my desktop app usage.

Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop. I try it every year, and every year it sucks very slightly less. It goes beyond drivers and application compatibility, Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste.

The Desktop/Laptop market is not nearly as important as it used to be, but within that space, Microsoft's dominance is about as strong as ever. Apple might have been able to take a dent out of it if they were committed, but they decided the obscene margins on iPhones were more important (and I can't entirely blame them).

Outside of admins and linux developers, Linux has no chance on PCs. Every year that passes convinces me more of this. We are going on the 20th "Year of Linux on the Desktop". If they were going to do it, they'd have done it by now.

Been using Linux as my primary desktop for 17 years now. From ancient Redhat, through Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, now linux mint. Linux mint on my 7 year old laptop (very high end for its day, still no slouch: 16GB ram, updated to SSD, and NVidia mobile graphics) is a more pleasant user experience for me than the corporate Macbook pro.

Everything I need works. My windows environment is an old installation of windows 7 on VirtualBox that I boot up about once every 2 months to get updates, then shut down again. That VM has cygwin, which I'd been using on Windows for a long time when I used it.

Everyone will have their own preferences, and I accept that. Claiming that "linux desktop sucks" and has for a long time, doesn't quite meet the reality of my daily (corporate) life. I am one data point, but certainly not the only one.

If I were, then distros like linux mint wouldn't exist. Nor any of the other desktop/user centric ones for that matter. But they do exist, and appear to be thriving.

As I said, preferences are personal. Linux desktop is quite productive for me.

My sister, who majored in philosophy and is in absolutely no way technologically adept, has been a fulltime linux user for 12 years now (including 4 years in university).

My partner, who is a grade school teacher and is in no way interested in learning about technology, has been using it full time for 2 years now.

My dad, a 6 year user (4 years fulltime), same story about level of tech competence...

There are others. I suspect that you are expecting to not have to learn anything new and are looking for a visually identical Windows clone.

Having dabbled in enough Linux over years and still preferring Windows for most of my work, even though I make sure there is a Linux box up and running in the corner, I would say this Linux excels at extremes, i.e. powerusers and novice users who need "restricted" usage. For the rest of the people who fall into the range of not poweruser but want enough autonomy to install and uninstall various software applications, but who do not care to summon script-jutsu Windows still beats out in that experience. I not want to disparage non-poweruser Linux users but they are who they are.

How so? Virtually every linux distribution has package mangers - which mostly also have nice graphical user interfaces. I would argue this is a much nicer user experience than having to search on the web for the installer, dealing with incomplete uninstalls, each application doing their own thing in regards to updates, etc.

Not to mention the sketchiness associated with downloading and executing arbitrary installers from the internet. I bet most of us can get by OK in that situation, but your average user is not going to be able to differentiate two identically-looking installers for their desired software, where one is malicious and the other might be legitimate.

Am I correct in guessing that they all use Linux at your recommendation and ask you for help from time to time? Regardless, I'm glad it works for them. But if they do benefit from your help, keep in mind that not everyone is so lucky. And for individual users who aren't using their computers in a corporate/institutional environment with a sysadmin, the best software is software that just works without any help from a techie.

My father is 74 and he uses ubuntu. I installed it for him and he doesn't know the difference, really.

Most people are just using browsers and I don't know, maybe a spreadsheet once in a while? Primarily browsers. My dad casts videos to his chromecast and reads a few forums, checks his email.

Ubuntu just works for "normal" users. I installed it because I have to help him far, far less than I did when he had windows.

Same with my 81 year-old mom. She has been using Ubuntu for the past 10 years. She even updates it herself (after asking me what she needed to do once).

I disagree. Just my personal bias but I don't care for Windows on the desktop at all. It's just... annoying. The slashes face the wrong way, can't resize a terminal. Weird file system. WTF is this registry thing? What's wrong with config files? Too much junk in the interface. It's just not... clean. I like clean.

I suppose it comes down to what one knows and is used to, but for my part I don't see myself ever working regularly with Windows again I dis-enjoy using it that much. So all this talk about how bad Linux desktop is nonsense from my perspective. I like KDE. I like Mate. I like i3. I like Gnome. Doesn't really matter, a terminal and web browser and a small handful of tools is most of what I need. Especially if I can set it up as I'm used to. Which if windows were kept simple would probably be ok as long as Bash or like is around somewhere. But no. It has to be all gooped up and just... controlled. Not what I'm looking for in computing at all and not what I enjoy.

Oh, the registry isn't that bad. It's just a hierarchical config file that's very well hidden, requires using either a separate tool (sort of like dconf-editor) or weird tricks like cd'ing into it like it's a directory (thanks Powershell), and that has several versions that get overlaid to give the actual contents you're looking for. Totally normal and sane. /s

WAY more fun is getting file associations working, on corp systems where they fail to persist. I can't double-click a Python script and have it run, despite having the exact same registry settings that I have at home for .py, Python.File, etc.

> Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop

Shrug I've been using it on my main machine (a laptop) for 8+ years now. Works well for me.

> Outside of admins and linux developers, Linux has no chance on PCs

While I'm ever so slightly afraid you might be a little right, I'm super thankful that Canonical keeps putting out excellent new releases.

That's one of the three (?) answers you get when someone says they have a problem with Linux.

I can relate to the quote and I use Linux.

Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

I think the linux desktop user experience has improved exponentially over the last few years, you should give it another shot.

I was an early desktop Linux user 1996-2004, before switching to the Mac.

I think I've heard "you should give it another shot" every single year since.

Kiosks or super locked down experiences like ChromeOS have a decent chance at making an impact for some use cases (especially less technical/senior users)

But as a general purpose desktop OS ? Still no, thanks. It's not just the lack of major commercial desktop apps (especially in the creative space, where browser apps won't take over anytime soon)

It's also the fact that desktop Linux's priorities still largely mirror those of its left-brained developers, who don't value good design and human interface guidelines nearly as much as they should. Or as another commenter has put it : they have no taste.

To be fair, I'm sure (well, I hope) there are now some professionally trained UX/UI specialists at Canonical and other places, but by and large there's still this mentality that it's a soft skilled task that a dev is perfectly capable of doing if need be (and yet, devs are horrified when a web designer quickly cobbles some PHP snippets together and calls that development, as ops people are generally horrified when they see servers set up by developers :) )

The last and maybe most important issue is that good design is necessarily strongly opinionated, it needs a leader to make hard calls so that the user doesn't have to, and this is completely at odds with the Linux/OSS philosophy. And why Apple became so good at it, having a (not always benevolent) dictator at its helm for so long.

It's just a friendlier way of saying 'you probably weren't doing it right'

these are operating systems that reward expertise - it takes time and patience to get your workstation the way you want it. It's a time investment to learn it, to some it's worth the effort, to others it's not.

edit* and I will concede that the various linux desktop environments have learned a ton from apple's design and UX concepts, and some of them have branched off into very interesting directions.

Are you happy?

Nice UIs won't fix people's broadcom wireless cards.

Responding snark with snark: Then don't use them.

Most wireless cards out there work just fine. When I had to use a laptop with a Broadcom chip for uni I used my Android phone as tethering (charging it as a bonus) and the guy sitting next to me just used a dongle smaller than his thumb.

Most people (even developers) aren't willing to open up their laptop to replace their laptop wifi cards or to have to use dongles to get on their wireless or to play endless hardware roulette.

OSX doesn't work on all windows-only hardware either. You have to buy something with Linux support.

I have linux distros running on 3 of my apple laptops with broadcom cards - it just meant using a nonfree firmware

I even have problems with Intel card from time to time.

I am legitimately excited for Ubuntu 17.10, the GNOME theme looks great.

Looks have improved a fair amount. The normal user still wouldn't know how to install any software they know on it, however. And I'm not talking about an open-source alternative from apt.

Also, touch screens <3

for some users, half the fun of switching to linux is realizing there's open source versions of all the software they used to pay for.

Why bother, when in most countries they can just pirate it?

I find no need to pirate software using linux, everything I need is available for free. Pirated software that goes un-updated is a huge security issue anyway.

So around many universities around the globe, specially in poorer countries and see how many care about those security issues.

Or many street bazaars around the globe.

pirated software with a bunch of malware in it?

It is sad, but many people don't care about it, hence why malware is so rampant.

For what it's worth, for software installation there's now "snaps," the new "universal Linux package" format that Canonical has been pushing.

Yet another package format...

Obligatory XKCD : https://xkcd.com/927/

> Linux distros are ugly...

Have you looked an a modern linux DE in the past 5 years? It's within subjective opinion as to which looks better. And a lot of time that opinion is "what the user has used before". And Windows is far from a smooth experience given how disrupted the Windows 10 UI changes were in Enterprise and Educational environments

> Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop... Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste.

Linux is hard to beat for a fully customizable programming environment. You can easily customize the look of a Linux desktop, but can't with Windows or Mac. Windows and Mac have both taken UI ideas that have been around on Linux for far longer.

I have been working for a few decades and I surely can customize Windows and OS X to the extent that matters to me.

Sure I probably cannot do it like I used to do with Slackware and fvwm on a rainy weekend, but I don't want to.

I want a full stack developer experience with OS Framework APIs that I know are going to be available everywhere, coupled with a nice IDE and graphical tooling.

Different philosophy. I don't like OSX's animation/style, and I want scriptable, command line tools for development, not GUIs.

Yeah, but that is the thing ... I never wanted to customize the look and have zero willingness to spend more then a second on it. I want it to look acceptable out of box, but dont care about details. I suspect most people are like that. I thought I dont care how things look until I installed linux distro at home years ago and seen how it looks without tweaking. And I was unable to make it nicer, not because configuration would be hard, but because I am not artist and dont know how to make nice.

It does matter how the whole looks to the user and linux was never really good at.

>I am not artist and dont know how to make nice... It does matter how the whole looks to the user and linux was never really good at.

It sometimes takes a little bit of work, but it isn't that complicated. Linux is great at it, but you might have to do a little research.

An example of how to find that information: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+linux+look+good

Example desktops: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-looking-Linux-desktop-y...

I haven't said it is complicated. I complained that it takes time (aka "takes a little bit of work"). And most of that work is "try color after color and width size after width size and it still looks ugly while I don't know really why". Specifically, if I knew how to make things look nice, I would likely do different job then tech. And I don't really care about researching tons of schemes and about futuristic artistic whatever either.

What windows and mac do is that you open new laptop and everything looks alright. After few weeks, I change the wallpaper and I am happy. That is zero "make it nice" work.

You don't need to try color after color -- just find a theme you like and install it. It's very simple. :)

Make a visit to any Linux user's group, and someone can help set it up.

If you want to experiment with different kinds of windows managers (like xmonad or i3 for keyboard productivity), you have the option. With Windows or Mac, you lose many options.

Linux often has desktop features far before Windows and Mac, for example virtual desktops: Windows got them in version 10, Mac got them in 2007, but Linux had them since the 1990s.

I'm not trying to convince you to change -- just saying that it isn't complicated to make Linux look great, and there are always people available to help.

I guess it is hard to explain, but I don't mind not having those options - if in exchange I don't have to do what you suggest. It is an annoying chore and obstacle to me.

Virtual desktops were available in previous Winows if you care to install app. I don't think it is terribly important, I used them but most people did not cared even if they knew about it.

I know there are good friendly linux communities (and less good ones too).

I installed the virtual desktop software on Windows XP and it was not really usable so I removed it. Linux's virtual desktops have been much more advanced for a long time.

I did like Mac's three-finger swipe at one point, but as soon as I discovered xmonad, I could see that there are faster ways than swiping. (press alt-n to go to desktop n) Also, I think OS X still limits the virtual desktops to one row, which is inefficient.

It comes down to personal choice, but for comparison, it can be a chore to learn new things when programming too, but learning those things can make using the computer better and easier in the end.

I'm not trying to convince you to switch -- just saying that Linux does have great-looking, very advanced UIs, that are not restrictive like on Windows or Mac. :)

Have to agree. As a mostly linux sysadmin I absolutely can't stand Linux desktops. It seems that Linux desktop users never even look at "the other sides". Sorry, but usability is laughable. There is no consistency over time. New version? Oh boy, hang on to your helmets - there goes all your customization you had to do to make your environment tolerable for you.

I've used pre-1.0 KDE (and compiled it myself), seen Gnome pop up, tried a ton of WM's, and I try out some WM's and GUI-distro's at least once a year. Every time it comes down to: usable, but not great, and requires quite a bit of customization which I could redo for newer versions. When all you need is a terminal and a browser, it's probably fine, but I need a bit more than that to feel comfy.

> Linux distros are ugly

Compared to the dominant desktop OS linux distros are beautiful and consistent. Windows doesn't even have a standard look and feel anymore. And if you don't like it you can tweak the whole desktop + apps in one place.

>Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste.

Of all possible complaints about Linux, you've picked this one? Come on.

I have a corp-maintained Linux laptop; Chrome does not get along with the graphics drivers and will freak out and start flashing white every hour or so.

My (corp-maintained) Linux desktop locks up under heavy load for every few days, usually recovers though. The person who sits next to me has it worse though.

And this is with standardized corp-bought hardware.

Any year now though.

Skype doesn't get along with my graphics drivers, On my corp maintained windows desktop it will sometimes peg the CPU/GPU and display garbage on screen until it overheats and hard resets.

I guess Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.

Not an issue with Linux though, you just have incompetent tech maintenance.

That is a major on-the-desktop constituency, though: company standard builds. If companies struggle to do it, that reflects badly on the system as a solution. There is a difference between something being technically feasible, vs a realised outcome.

I have had a shot at building a standard desktop on top of ubuntu. My situation was easier than most in that we only had two desktops to support (a thinkpad and a dell laptop). still, making driver setup work seamlessly is hard. Imagine a company with twenty variations and an audit directive to not give root to users.

WSL has huge potential to this market. You get a linux ui and kernel api, and it complements your existing standard build strategy.

Well yes, it probably isn't such a piece of cake. I was too harsh.

Windows seems to run fine even with incompetent maintenance.

The only place where Windows still somewhat matters is on corporate desktops. And this is for content consumers, or producers in very narrow silos, those generating Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. In every other aspect Linux is the superior tool.

Personally I use Arch and i3, my desktop is riced to the point that is comfortable for me. I can stand up a new desktop in 10m after a clean arch install. I can replicate my full dev environment on any linode, droplet or aws machine in less than 5m at no cost.

It amazes me that people can call themselves 'productive' using microsoft systems. Every time I land on a windows box I feel like I'm in some ancient broken world.

Elementary OS[0] is visually very nice, especially after a slight theme change[1], but the core team behind it makes quite radical changes and decisions about what the OS should be (mostly about how it should be an unmodifiable, unchangeable "OS for dummies") that is starting to push me away.

Especially when basic things like taking a screenshot with your keyboard, as well as setting up hot keys, has been broken for a year[2]. The eOS team appears to be more focused on forcing Windows 10-style OS updates that download in the background - even over metered connections - and force you to restart[3].

[0] https://elementary.io/

[1] https://wefunkster.deviantart.com/art/OSe-Light-Xtrlght-GTK-...

[2] https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/7703/unable...

[3] https://www.bountysource.com/issues/43123447-automatic-secur...

The best Linux desktop by far is ChromeOS.

Which is just basically a mix of Chrome and Android, with zero value regarding what kernel is actually being used.

Tomorrow Google could release ChromeOS using another kernel and no one would notice.

The only restriction is that the kernel needs to support the official set of NDK APIs for Android apps.

Sounds like you have not used LInux for a long time. Try Solus next time to get a fresh look at things.

Not exactly sure what desktop environment/theme or applicaition combination you were trying but I disagree.

Aesthetics is very subjective topic. But we can all agree that since Windows' Vista the focus hasn't been on eyecandy but rather functionality. Expensive visual effects are now removed and the UX is very plain, with not a lot of room for customization.

I personally use this theme:

https://snwh.org/paper

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1013706/

Contains a GTK 3 theme, icons and cursors. Looks way better than Windows.

Yeah, I still find GUI applications crashing on modern distro's all the time :(

... but this works amazingly well :)

  $ flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam

I guess you didn't get the memo on Azure being highly successful.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/microsoft-azure-growing-fast...

Azure is also superior product then AWS in any way. I wish I would use Azure instead of AWS at my job.

I think better advice would be this: You should probably not be a platform zealot of any stripe if you care about having a good career going forward.

> you should probably keep using Linux if you care about having a good career going forward.

I will happily bet beer that not only is Jess's career already better than 99% of everyone here, it will stay that way for decades.

I don't work at Microsoft, I just like that the Windows works more than I do Linux. I use Linux because that is what we release on so I guess I don't fall under "Linux Nerd"

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