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Comment by happy-go-lucky | Hacker News Reader

As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve never had to use any other antivirus, a ‘junk’ cleaner, etc. Once bitten, twice shy :)

Edit: I hated investing in anti-stuff.

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CCleaner is not an Anti-Virus. It does not run in the background (at least the free version) and will not slow your PC. It helps users locate and remove temporary/cache files buried in the OS to free up disk space. It is very useful - even for pros. Defender will not do this.

CCleaner does sell a bit of FUD though - "your computer is slow, use us so it goes faster". I don't think "crap" is causing significant slowdowns anymore, maybe frees up some disk space but nothing that the OS can't do itself either.

Deactivating that programs start on boot, maybe?

Just do that in the task manager

Wasn't an option until Windows 10, I think. autoruns from SysInternals is my go-to.

There's also "msconfig", present in Windows 7.

And XP and 2000 and maybe earlier versions too

msconfig has been around since at least XP.

There are also a similar tool from Nirsoft.

How many times have we all noticed our computers running slow, only to find a bunch of tempfiles not touched by anything!

CCleaner is also essential for cleaning up poorly uninstalled apps leaving registry keys lingering around. It's also great for when you need to fully reset and reinstall a misbehaving app, such as Symantec Endpoint Protection, which fails to clean up several critical registry keys that it checks during installation, and then refuses to re-install if they exist. Sure, you could hunt them down and write a script for Symantec, but CCleaner does it for all apps. I've fixed so many terrible apps and installs using CCleaner, it's an absolute necessity.

That and RevoUinstaller. You run RevoUinstaller then CCleaner, and maybe a reboot in between, and you've really removed an app. (The paid version of Revo is even cooler, as it will let you log the files generated during an install, and then on uninstall, it'll make sure to remove all the files and directories you had previously logged.)

This is one of the many reasons why I always prefer UWP apps on Windows 10

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...

In addition, this also gives you granular privacy control

https://www.howtogeek.com/221864/digging-into-and-understand...

I have always assumed the vast majority of software meeting this description is malware. I don't know if I should feel silly or if it's a sensible assumption for end users to make.

I never liked, nor used CCleaner. I always thought it was for lazy people or those who refused to do it the hard way.

Categorically disregarding the use of automated maintainence tools under the guise of "lazy vs real techies" seems short sited, arrogant, and regressive.

It may be more expensive but hand-crafted, artisanal system administration is well worth it. The difference between it and cheap, factory produced system administration is night and day. Also, it's Local and Made In The USA so you are helping people around you in the greatest nation on earth rather than poor people in another country.

If being some sort of sysadmin craftsman gets you up in the morning, all the power to you. But for many others, "good enough" really is good enough.

Whats wrong with helping poor people?

Also, quick question: are Puppet and Ansible "factory produced" sysadmin?

Why would you do it the hard way, when there's an easy way. Especially when it's an unpleasant activity like deleting unnecessary files.

The free version does load itself into the background these days to pop up messages reminding you to clean your PC.

You can turn it off in the options.

Doesn't Windows 10 basically do this itself?

The latest Win 10 has a new setting that vaguely indicates it will look for and delete temporary files automatically. On my machine it was not turned on by default.

No idea how much it gets vs. leaves behind and since turning on it hasn't thrown up any obvious notifications lauding itself.

This is on a secondary machine. My primary machine isn't Windows.

Hardly. CCleaner can easily remove 5-6GB of junk.

I use CCleaner for maybe even 10 years, a great tool.

But Windows 10 (a few older versions as well, but somewhat hidden) has something similar called "Disk Cleanup" (Win key > enter "Disk Cleanup" > "Clean up system files" > Check all marks). "Disk Cleanup" removes stuff that CCleaner doesn't, so I use them together.

You can even remove system restore and shadow copies (Win key > enter "Disk Cleanup" > "Clean up system files" > "More Options" tab > "System Restore and Shadow Copies" > "Clean up" button).

> Disk Cleanup" removes stuff that CCleaner doesn't, so I use them together.

And vice versa if you use CCleaner combined with CCEnhancer[1]

[1]: https://singularlabs.com/software/ccenhancer/

"a few older versions as well" - It's been in every version since Windows 98 :)

You're asking for too much!

> CCleaner is not an Anti-Virus

I never said that.

> Defender will not do this.

I know what it does.

The culprit was the non-free AV. Gone are the days of simple passive signature scanners. Now they all sink their claws deeply into the OS intercepting filesystem operations, network packets, and any other privileged activity. Performance be damned.

Gone are the days of simple passive signature scanners. Now they all sink their claws deeply into the OS intercepting filesystem operations, network packets, and any other privileged activity.

Well, things have been like that for a long time already. E.g. Thunderbyte used an ISA card in the early 90ies to insert itself before and outside the operating system [1].

Old anti-virus programs also used Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThunderByte_Antivirus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSAV

On the note of ISA cards, i once helped install a card on some school computers that inserted itself before the OS loaded and split the HDD in half. This so that on certain conditions a clean version of the OS etc could be loaded from the half that was hidden during normal use.

DeepFreeze? I thought it was all software.

Do not recall the brand, i just helped install them and set up the initial install of OS and software.

Free and non-free AV are liabilities at this point (for Windows). Microsoft has never had an official way to let AV hook into the system calls needed, so they all relied on hacks and shifty stuff.

Surprise, surprise, now there is more attack surface available since AV is kernel level. And so now we see attacks getting root or kernel level access via AV vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately attack surface on AV also includes Windows Defender itself:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/lates...

This is why security mono-culture is dangerous and it's in our interest to maintain a diverse ecosystem of security vendors in every area. Security is hard and anyone can have a serious vulnerability.

I'll still take 1-2 vendors that actually have security as a top priority over a variety of vendors that care plenty about features and detection rates but not about actually hardening their code.

> The culprit was the non-free AV.

Yes it was. After using it a couple years, when I decided to get it off my system, it was far from easy. It simply didn't go. Because of the trouble it was giving me, I thought I had no choice but to renew my subscription. It was at this point I started looking for an OS alternative.

To be fair, they're responding to more sophisticated virus distribution.

There's always ClamAV/ClamWin that does just that...

[0] http://www.clamwin.com/

Definitely test drive a couple of Linux distributions. I do so periodically and love seeing the progress.

There are really only two things keeping me on Windows.

    1. I run some Windows-only applications that don't work with Wine.
    2. A lot of Linux software often doesn't work well on a hi-dpi monitors.

Aside from that, since Windows 7 (and later versions of Vista), Windows is fine. IMHO, operating systems aren't terribly interesting these days. Everything interesting is in applications on top of the operating system. Windows, macOS, Linux? Whatever. If the application I need runs on that operating system, then I can be productive.

hi-dpi is in a sad state right now. Fortunatly, there is good support for hidpi in wayland, and as things migrate that way it will get better.

As for running windows apps....how much time do you want to waste? The only windows stuff I really run is games, and the way I do that is by running windows in a VM with the graphics card direct assigned. It works really well, and is super neat, but it was a huge pain in the ass to set up on consumer grade hardware.

Exciting to hear about HighDPI support in Wayland. I had to switch back to windows after getting a 4k display because it's basically unusable for a 3 monitor setup on Ubuntu (1 4k + 2 1080s). We'll see in a month :)

If you give it another shot, make sure you are running Xwayland and that you aren't manually setting the scaling factor. In the current version, it will guess a scaling factor based on the DPI of each display, but if you manually set it it will be applied globally and you will be right back where you are now.

I will buy a Chuwi HiBook for any developer who wants to make Linux and HiDPI not suck.

> it led me to discover Linux

As someone who is the same boat but hasn't discovered Linux yet, how hard would you say it would be to install a version of Linux that support 3 monitors (using an onboard ATI card and a PCIe card)? Last time I tried installing it this is the part I gave up at.

Also as a person always been aware of Window I find the graphics in Ubuntu lacking some finesse, i.e. the scrollbars, window panes look like that created using Java applets (granted it is a matter of taste and personal choice) but what is the most professional looking desktop to try right now?

Sorry i know this is off-topic but I too really want to switch from windows and don't want to waste money in Macbooks so any advice would be appreciated.

Fedora[0] might be what you're looking for. There are various "spins"[1] that use different desktop environments if the main one doesn't take your fancy. You can use a live image to try a few before you install.

[0] https://getfedora.org/ [1] https://spins.fedoraproject.org/

The boring answer is that if you have a graphics card with good Linux support, you're going to have a good experience. Otherwise probably less good. So without knowing the specifics of your graphics hardware it's impossible to give a clear answer.

People generally don't fault MacOS for not supporting whatever hardware they bodged together, yet they expect Linux to work with anything because hackers and magic. I guess that's a good reputation to have but it's not very useful if you want something that just works.

In the case of Linux, what just works is generally the drivers that are built in to the system, with vendors that take an active part in Linux development. And since Intel started to make both network and graphics cards, that's usually your best bet. ATI is generally usable too, but performance and power consumption generally lag their Windows equivalent drivers.

With that said, it's quite easy to test. Download the latest Fedora (or Ubuntu) live DVD and boot it. If that works with your display, a native install is going to work too.

Just don't install Linux as an almost-Windows or cheap-MacOS. If you want Windows software then that's what you should run it on. Run Linux because you want a UNIX desktop and the kind of software that goes with it (gcc, bash, rsync, native TCP/IP utilities and those things).

I recommend KDE, it feels a bit more well put together for a desktop these days.

With regards to your question about triple monitors. I mean, I managed to get triple monitors working on FreeBSD without much fuss so I am not sure of how much help I can be when I say "it should just work". I am obviously biased.

But, it's likely that it will just work, the open source drivers for AMD are significantly superior to the open source drivers for nVidia. Although I only have nVidia cards running and I have 2 setups with triple monitors.

Give Ubuntu desktop a try. The installer allows you to run the OS live without installation. You can use this to see if Ubuntu is something you may be interested in.

+1 for this. Try before you "buy" so to speak. In a very similar vein, Linux Mint also allows you to do this. Both OSes work very well out of the box and there are large communities for help.

My experience with Ubuntu (xubuntu 16.04.x) is that you really need a modern Nvidia card to get high/native resolution. Especially for someone who wants to run 3 monitors.

I'll add the caveat that for HiDPI displays you're still likely to run into scaling issues, particularly if you have differently sized displays. I hear that for some specific cases Ubuntu/Gnome 3 handle things acceptably, but there's still a lot of rough edges (not that Windows doesn't still have problems here too).

This is true. I just installed Ubuntu on a shiny new (to me) Precision 5510 laptop. 4k monitor native. When I hooked it to my 27 inch, 2560x1440 monitor, the scaling became a disaster between the two screens. Setting the scale on the fly can also be a disaster. Best thing I have found is to set the res down on the higher-res monitor, and set the scaling to the same on both monitors. Or just never move things between monitors.

This Ubuntu user here is driving a 27" 4k Dell with an AMD RX460 that doesn't even have a fan. Works okay.

Don't you need an at-least-mediocre GPU to get high resolution on 3 monitors on any OS? I wouldn't connect 3 high resolution monitors to a Windows or Mac machine with no GPU.

Modern machines that seemingly have "no GPU" have an integrated GPU that's powerful enough for driving multiple monitors, desktop compositing and rendering some 3D (modern games at 720p, older games at higher resolution).

Aren't you still limited by the number of HDMI ports anyway?

Does AMD do this or is that still just an Intel thing?

AMD's APUs are actually more powerful than almost all Intel iGPUs. The only one that's competitive is Iris Pro 580 with the eDRAM addon, known in a previous incarnation as Crystalwell (not all Iris Pro 580s have this).

The tradeoff is that the CPU half of AMD's processors is kinda bad - they are all derived from either Jaguar laptop processors or Bulldozer, they desperately need to be refreshed with Ryzen. So Intel has the better CPU but a mediocre GPU (unless you splash out for Crystalwell), and AMD has mediocre CPUs but a good GPU...

AMD's non-APU processors (FX, Ryzen, TR, Epyc) do not have iGPUs however, same goes for Intel's lines of server chips (X99/X299/etc). This is something that is only in "client" processors.

I have a small underpowered desktop running in my house that only has onboard graphics and it runs Ubuntu 16.04 just fine, but its only connected to 1 monitor, not 3.

The Intel integrated graphic card of my laptop does handle 3 screens fine and I dont need to mess with drivers, everything works well out of the box. I would actually advise against NVIDIA cards unless you need powerful graphic processing or to do GPU computation.

Cool. Didn't know laptops existed with 3 monitor ports. Which model laptop are you using, and would you recommend it for programming? :)

Ahhh, doing some Googling shows it's from add-on peripherals and/or docking stations. eg:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln115952/...

> how hard would you say it would be to install a version of Linux that support 3 monitors (using an onboard ATI card and a PCIe card)?

As a data point, the development desktop I'm using runs 3 monitors on Linux (Fedora 25). They're hooked into a single AMD R9 390 graphics card (overkill, but it was hanging around spare when putting together the pc).

The monitors are 1x Dell 30" in the middle, with 2x ASUS 24" monitors (one each side). No HiDPI stuff, and everything works fairly well. Using the "Xfce" spin of Fedora.

Didn't need to do any complicated setup. The monitors were all detected fine without mucking around, and I just needed to drag them into position in the Xfce4 gui tool so it knew which one was on the left, middle, right.

Lacking details, so nobody can promise anything, but I have run my current desktop with three monitors on two video cards. I currently run it with two monitors and two cards, with one bound to a Windows VM. That is somewhat trickier to set up, but multiple monitors should be fine.

My advice echoes others - you can try before you buy (install) with a few flavors of Linux; see what happens. If you have trouble, try to find a fellow human who can help - X is a little surprising to configure, if you haven't done it before.

How long ago was it, and what GPU did you try it with? Most relatively modern AMD GPUs (especially Polaris/RX 4xx and newer) work great out of the box these days, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon.

It was about 2 years ago. I'm using a multi monitor setup where i'm clubbing my onboard graphics card with the PCIe card (both ATI, though the onboard card is a very old model). On windows it works seamlessly but on Linux I couldn't do it. Thanks for the advice, I will try it again today.

Ubuntu makes this pretty easy. Also solus 3 would be a good choice. And there are a number of resources and tutorials for this very thing. You can also customize your desktop environment so the critique of scroll bars and such can be resolved.

ElementaryOS [0] prides itself in it's UI. Granted, this is very much a matter of taste, but if you're into the whole Mac look-and-feel, you might like it.

But frankly I find the Gnome-Shell desktop to be beautiful. Maybe try Ubuntu-Gnome? [1]

[0] https://elementary.io/ [1] https://ubuntugnome.org/

Elementary os looks beautiful. This is exactly the kind of stuff i found missing, will definitely install it today.

Great! If Elementary ends up not being to your tastes, do try Gnome-Shell. The UI is a bit "different", in the sense that it tries to innovate in quite a few places, but it's definitely pretty.

I found the animations on ElementaryOS to feel....clunky, to say the least.

That being said, the majority of UI animations in Linux are like that, so meh.

Um what did you install? Personally I have been an OpenSUSE guy for almost 10 years now. I would be surprised that you would have a problem. Ubuntu should also be found.

Stay away from Fedora and Arch unless you don't mind getting into some set up files. Personally it is fun getting things setup for me and so I enjoy Arch and Fedora and sometimes it they are just as quick and simple as OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

I tried Ubuntu only. Couldn't get the third monitor to work. As per another comment I will give it another try and see if things have changed now.

After trying a number of distros, I settled on Ubuntu and a while ago switched from Unity to Gnome. Most of the time I use two monitors without any problem and I live in a terminal.

KDE has that modern look, so install Kububtu, then figure out how to set up multiple monitors through kde

Don't go down that rabbit hole. Linux is not for desktop despite many years of efforts. Even the distro with the greatest focus on UI (elementaryOS) looks like a toy. That Linux is hugely successful everywhere EXCEPT in the desktop should tell us something.

Just my honest opinion after 15 years of continuous use in university and work.

XKCD still relevant today: https://xkcd.com/456/

I don't know... I have been on Xubuntu for about 4 years now, and love it. Just got a new touchscreen laptop with win10 on it and hate the experience. Switched the wife over to Xubuntu as her win10 laptop was running like crap, and she barely notices any difference in the experience except the Linux system is faster.

I think for a lot of people who want to just browse the Web and watch movies, Linux is more than up to the task. And suit, recently even libreoffice is working fine for my simple needs for word processing and spreadsheet work.

It's like driving a car you have to work on all the time or something. I have fond memories of doing it but I no longer have the time or inclination to spend that much time configuring my desktop.

Lets be real; as much as I shit on systemd, since it released the desktop experience for people is much more well-rounded and I think it has helped distro maintainers really push usability.

Usability of Linux in the past 10 years has been exponentially increasing.

They're going to need something else. X11 and GNOME/KDE/etc will never be mainstream. Ubuntu made a mistake not contributing to Wayland but they were right to try Unity.

Ironically, Canonical is making money mainly with cloud services. Meaning servers - what Linux is good at.

> XKCD still relevant today

and I wish this to be true for any *nix system.

The ability to venture down the rabbit as far as you want, without black-boxes.

I think a lot of us sit here today because of that privilege.

It absolutely has its place. That place just isn't the mainstream desktop consumer.

Feels like you've vaccinated you brain and developed antibodies of security-conscious computer usage patterns.

Yes, because it was a lesson learned the hard way :)

Years ago I used to use CCleaner and their disk defragmentor tool. Now I too am on Windows 10 and use neither, still it's sad to see this sort of thing happen to what I remember being decent free software.

IIRC, CCleaner used to come with some unnecessary stuff that caught users unawares.

If you have an SSD then defragmentation does nothing

I rescued my neighbor's Mac from an adware invasion using Malwarebytes so I I would argue that not all these tools are created equal.

Malwarebytes is great. However, what if it was their installer that was attacked in such fashion?

Trusting old memories of what's good or not can be dangerous. I remember getting caught out once by CoreTemp which suddenly packed a load of dung in its default installer. :(

Sourceforge revolutionizes open source by providing free hosting for projects!

[later]

Sourceforge - You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

[still later]

Sourceforge is respectable again! (hopefully?)

> Sourceforge is respectable again! (hopefully?)

When pigs fly. I cringe every time I encounter a project hosted on SF and have to play their stupid find the download link game.

Uh have you been there recently? Like in the past year? The company is under new management, and cleaned up their act and download pages a lot. Sourceforge is headed in a better direction again.

Yet while SourceForge improved, Slashdot became a clone of HN's front page and is a cesspool of horrid editing staff, now.

So take that as you will. That tells me that SourceForge is probably bound to degrade some time soon.

For apps it supports, Ninite is a good way to avoid that kind of thing, although it may not have stopped the CCleaner issue. They package their installer with extraneous bundles removed.

I hope Ninite reads this and pulls them off their list of installers. It should be automatically removed from end users by Ninite as a direct response to this.

Well, it's not on the list currently, so either they never had it or they did indeed remove it.

BoxStarter is looking promising - http://boxstarter.org/

I pay for MalwareBytes, I think it's worth it.

Apart from that, I just use Defender.

Ditched when they started pushing FUD 5-6 years ago.

I worked in the anti-malware industry for 5 years. Pretty much across the board, this kind of software does more harm than good. AV on corporate email servers or your email provider makes sense. Rooting your own computer and leaving it vulnerable to shitty AV/AM vendor's software doesn't.

Literally saw malware in the wild that exploited AV software.

I downloaded a GTA 5 mod that had malware bundled and Windows Defender didn't catch it. I run Malwarebytes as well these days, but that's it.

I’m not a gamer. Also, I can’t recommend using or not using Defender. For aimless browsing I use my Linux box, and one of my favorite browser extensions is uBlock Origin. Nowadays I don’t have to carry flash drives or other storage devices and never plug in things that belong to others :)

Do you never run software you haven't written/audited?

I do, but I try to see if it's from a trustworthy source.

Pirform has been around for ages and has always been as "trustworthy" a software publisher as one could hope for. Supply-chain compromises are hard to completely mitigate, particularly with bundled windows installers.

Advertising never works for me. Linux and Windows are worlds apart.

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