Hacker News Reader

Comment by megaman22 | Hacker News Reader

Joke I heard this week was that 2017 is finally the year of the Linux desktop... except its the Linux subsystem embedded in Windows 10 desktops.

View on HN

The irony of this being is that it sucks bad enough still that I'm using Virtualbox + vagrant on my windows desktop.

Windows is a window manager for Chrome, vagrant/vbox, putty. I even use OWA for outlook on windows.

Why not Hyper-V instead of VBOX? Much better in every aspect other than maybe desktop. I wish Linux gained enhanced session support.

I've run Hyper-V in production with SCVMM. No thanks.

More seriously, it's not portable and not something I want to invest in any further brain-wise. Plus you can't drive half of it with vagrant. I burned about 4 days recently learning that.

in my experience hyper-v doesn't handle graphical stuff very well, so a desktop linux experience much worse than vmware workstation or virtualbox.

Yeah I miss this as well. I have a Hyper-V Linux VM into which I have mounted a share from the Windows host, and it works great for everything I can do from SSH, but the graphical desktop performance is awful.

I bought a Lenovo Miix 320 netbook with Windows 10 that cannot run Ubuntu (which would be my preference, but I pretty much only need Emacs). It's no doubt the worst computer I ever had, counting even ZX Spectrum+.

Part of the reason is very bad design of the case, but also the terrible UX of Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu. I think most Windows users would be amazed if they tried Ubuntu.

Windows 10 shows significant signs of software senility, which inevitably follows maturity.

I think you're just more used to Ubuntu. Last time I used the default GUI on it I wouldn't say I found it any more intuitive than Windows 10.

Just to clarify, I am talking about UX, not just UI. I use Windows 7 (classic style) at work and it's doable.

- Loads of things in the start menu that I don't need and cannot uninstall (like XBox games).

- Unwanted monitoring which needs to be explicitly turned off.

- Forcing Edge down my throat at every opportunity.

- Automatic updates still restart computer without warning.

- Unwanted wi-fi communication even in sleep causing huge battery drain.

- Ugly appearance.

I am sure there are other things that bothered me but I already forgot. They really lost their marbles.

Go load and execute the Reddit Tron script - https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

It's not perfect but it fixes many of your complaints including disabling stupid MS Store Apps you'll never use, turning off tracking, disabling cortana and giving you better control over updates.

Windows 8.1 + classic start was the last pinnacle of usability on windows. Ubuntu however isn't anywhere near what we need (yet). Gnome 3 is just vile crack smoking.

For quick installation of the usable system I usually use Fedora + KDE environment. It is always updated and KDE is easy to use. On the computers where I do need maximum working performance I do customize awesome (or Xmonad lately) plus many-many terminal applications. But if you don't want to waste your time on heavy customizations - imho, Fedora (27 will be released in a couple days) is a good choice.

I'll have a look at KDE. I haven't actually used it for 16 years :)

For anyone more into Vim and Tmux, then i3 fits like a glove. Got it running under Arch on an XPS-13. Best Linux machine I've ever set up, and it looks gorgeous. A lot of fun theming it, with lots of inspiration from : https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

I tried that but I just can't get used to i3. I spend most of my time in tmux but there are some cases where I just can't make it work for me. I might be a dumbass or just lazy though :)

Same here. I simply cannot work with i3. I think my brain stops working when I try tiling systems. Wish my childhood was not so completely immersed in windows.

I use win10 mostly (90% of the time). The other 10% is Ubuntu. And it annoys me so much that the taskbar simply doesn't work for multiple monitors! Just giving a common usage scenario where win10 is way better than Ubuntu. I'm sure there are some opposite examples too. But I don't think most users will be amazed in a good way.

Yes it does. What are you talking about?

The icons are identical on both monitors. Regardless of where a window is open.

That is configurable - right-click taskbar > Taskbar Settings > Show taskbar buttons on > Taskbar where window is open

Welp! I distinctly remember hunting for such a setting and giving up after a few minutes. Will have to try this.

I don't think most windows users would be amazed - or, at least, not in a positive way. I think they'd find most of their applications would not work, or they'd have to jump through hoops to get them to work at 90%. I think they'd find support for their machines scattered, incomplete, or out of date. This is assuming they're able to get their hardware to work at all under linux - you seem to be placing the blame on the hardware to support the software, instead of on linux to have decent hardware drivers. I'd think they'd be surprised by the entire appearance of the UI changing drastically between updates. I think any users using assistive technologies would be woefully underserved.

For Linux to have decent hardware drivers, the hardware manufacturers have to make enough information available to create the drivers. Unfortunately, they often don't do that, and only publish a Windows driver as a binary blob.

Even if the manufacturer does make Linux drivers available, they frequently don't actually work with the hardware. For example, the wireless card in my laptop only has one of two antennas and the default Linux driver tries to use the wrong one. The Windows driver somehow works around that, but on Linux I'm dependent on the work of one amazing guy who makes the driver actually work: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new

I know this is the question you don't want to hear, but: why didn't you switch the antenna? The card has rp-sma pigtail connectors and usually you have two/three antennas connected to them. If you have only one, and the driver uses the other, just connect the antenna to the other connector.

hey we'll take it however we can get it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com