I still wonder why Wine exists at all given that Windows 10 is an excellent OS - definitely more secure than their counterparts, and completely free.
Some advantages of Linux:
* Can choose from a variety of window managers to suit your needs, from windows-like (Chalet, Zorin), to developer focussed (eg i3)
* Linux is free. Windows 10 isn't, unlike you claim. Unless I'm been mislead, the Windows 10 for-free offer was simply an ugrade for existing Windows installs; not a free to all offering. It's therefore unavailable unless you've already 'bought-in' to the Microsoft ecosystem.
* Linux has had updating figured out for years and lets you update in the background. Windows still pesters you do reboot.
* Package managers are a much more efficient way to download and install software than any way I have seen on Windows.
Some disadvantages of Windows 10:
* Bundled with a lot of bloatware (from what I have seen)
* Tracking / selling user data (PII? Not sure.)
* Ads on the start menu
Plus, with the existence of Linux, at least Microsoft doesn't have a full monopoly over the PC OS market. That said, I'd rather have myself be nestled firmly in the hands of a community than a corporation.
I still wonder why Windows exists when Linux is such an excellent OS. /s
It even worked on pirated versions. You could even upgrade say your Windows XP to a later version (pirated or not) and then upgrade to Windows 10, for free. You get a valid license that way.
You paid 2-fold: one, you were an early adopter and therefore beta tester. Two, you paid with your privacy. The anti-spyware toolkits to remove the telemetry and other stuff weren't sophisticated. Plus, Microsoft went out of their way to sabotage these.
Linux also requires reboots because of kernel upgrades. Microsoft maybe does it more, but its also due to bad programmed 3rd party apps.
Windows has its own package manager these days. Apple's App Store and Microsoft's Windows Store are nothing more than a GUI for a package manager with some Web 2.0 (or 3.0) capabilities.
Your disadvantages are fair enough, but they can all be circumvented with say O&O ShutUp or one of the many other applications which remove the spyware/bloatware/adware.
What I f* ing hate about Windows is the lack of shell scripts and the need for Powershell and CMD.exe/*.bat. I don't want to use or (re)learn that shit. Microsoft could've adopted Bash but they went with Powershell instead. Windows Subsystem for Linux is decent, as was Cygwin, but it just isn't the same as native. The same's true for WINE. So I still prefer macOS; seems to be the best of both worlds. Although terrible for gaming. You want a gaming rig for that. Which could very well run on Linux, these days, given Steam's adoption plus WINE.
Good summary though. Could use some nuances (which I did mention) but we gotta start somewhere.
Microsoft needs to reboot to do most of its updates of its own tools, not because of badly programmed 3rd party apps but its own badly programmed apps. Out of the box with no additional software it still needs to reboot, it also takes forever, hijacks reboots without the users ability to override (sometimes for 30-60 minutes while it tries to install updates). Linux only needs to reboot for kernel upgrades, and even that isn't a full requirement (there are ways, but they aren't worth it, to load a new kernel without rebooting).
Windows store is very far from anything like a linux package manager, and it ties you into their ecosystem without extensibility. Same with Apple. Linux package management is extensible and controllable (get packages from these sources, not those, blacklist this version, etc...) so I wouldn't consider them anywhere remotely equivalent.
The obvious/known privacy issues in windows 10 can be disabled, but the fact the user has to know about find and run third party, reasonably advanced tools/scripts to stop the operating system from spying and advertising to you is absolutely not acceptable from my perspective.
I guess sometimes nuance needs to be more nuanced
For the record I use osx/linux for work, linux/windows at home. Windows only for games that don't work on linux yet.
That is one of the reasons.
> I wouldn't compare it to Linux being free in any way.
Obviously not, given "Linux" is free as in speech. But free as in beer, when you also take into account things like support, doesn't exist. TANSTAAFL. And with macOS you pay via the hardware.
> (sometimes for 30-60 minutes while it tries to install updates)
On a SSD? Very unlikely, unless you're upgrading to a major version. True, Microsoft could make most of these updates being applied whilst OS is still online.
You can schedule these reboots if you got Pro. macOS also sometimes needs to reboot btw. My Android reboots every week (LOS) for new firmware.
What I said about apps requiring unnecesarily a reboot is true though. It used to be far more pervasive as well.
> Windows store is very far from anything like a linux package manager, and it ties you into their ecosystem without extensibility. Same with Apple. Linux package management is extensible and controllable (get packages from these sources, not those, blacklist this version, etc...) so I wouldn't consider them anywhere remotely equivalent.
Depends if you view it from the eyes of a power user or a casual user. The non-technical user just wants something which works ie. a good UI. App Store and Play Store provide that. Those non-technical users don't give a rat about features like "get packages from these sources, not those, blacklist this version".
> The obvious/known privacy issues in windows 10 can be disabled, but the fact the user has to know about find and run third party, reasonably advanced tools/scripts to stop the operating system from spying and advertising to you is absolutely not acceptable from my perspective.
Yeah, true, though the default settings aren't difficult to apply this is a feature most users won't use (just like "only" 33% of the browsers use an adblocker). That, together with their old model of selling licenses, is their business model.
Its funny how in these last 2 points we both shift from PoV of power user to ordinary user and vice versa.
That's the primary reason as I've been told by former MSFT employees.
> But free as in beer, when you also take into account things like support, doesn't exist.
Support exists, red hat and other foundations.
>On a SSD? Very unlikely, unless you're upgrading to a major version. True, Microsoft could make most of these updates being applied whilst OS is still online.
I just upgraded 6 systems over Christmas, every one to SSD, all running core i5/i7 with more than 8gb ram. Yes, 30-60 minutes for the fall creators update on half of them, one of them took 2 hours to finish other updates.
>You can schedule these reboots if you got Pro. macOS also sometimes needs to reboot btw. My Android reboots every week (LOS) for new firmware.
Once in a while I need to reboot osx or linux for a kernel update or other deep system update. Every time I need to reboot windows. The difference is staggering and in no way does the occasional restart from linux compare to windows. To pretend they're even in the same league is ridiculous. Windows 10 barely fixed that by moving a features to apps.
>Depends if you view it from the eyes of a power user or a casual user. The non-technical user just wants something which works ie. a good UI. App Store and Play Store provide that. Those non-technical users don't give a rat about features like "get packages from these sources, not those, blacklist this version".
Reasonable point, however non-technical users do want to be able to find their software. Microsofts store sucks compared to apple and androids from my experience, and the vast majority of non-technical users still don't use it for many/most of their software installs from numbers I've seen. That may be changing, i'm not sure the trends. My point was in linux, you're advanced enough to use the package manager and you probably know how to add sources as a casual user. In microsoft its a walled garden, and a shitty garden.
Beyond that, casual users don't want to be spied on, just because they aren't technical enough to understand whats happening and the implications does not mean microsoft should just get a 'pass' on making it difficult/impossible to disable spying on their users. This is, if anything, significantly worse if you're looking at it primarily from the casual user side which you seem to insist on.
Because Powershell is a better designed, more powerful, saner implementation of the original Unix philosophy of having small tools that do one thing well and combine easily to do complicated tasks. Bash and coretools are primitive bullshit by comparison.
(Yes, Windows 8 has the store too, but I think that there are a number of difference that makes the distinction relevant)
That plus the people who run older versions of Windows already paid for it. If they're pirated they didn't paid for it, but its unlikely they will and they didn't pay the PII tax either.
Package managers are probably my second least favorite thing about using Linux as a desktop (the Linux Desktop community would be the first by a wide margin). Package managers, as implemented, are a horrible mechanism for software installation. They have all the problems of walled garden app stores, shared namespaces, and the registry. Ever see a package manager database get corrupted? Good luck ever fixing that. Want to install two different versions of the same application? Too bad, unless they're different enough that the repo maintainers decided they were separate software (only python 2/3 comes to mind). How about installing software to a different path? Nope, sorry. Good luck with make install.
There are even Linux developers sane enough to realize that this is silly, which is why you have things like AppImage. Not that more than a handful of applications are distributed that way, because Linux people quite often mistake tradition for wisdom. Oh, and the little problem of Linux not having a defined base system you can rely on.
Installers/uninstallers aren't any better, but they're only worse in different ways. That's why there's Portable Apps.
I've never seen a corrupted package database. I have seen lots of software on Windows that couldn't be properly deinstalled for some reason or other though.
"Normal users don't need that." "I've never seen it, therefore it isn't a problem."
You want to talk up a system for being stable, malleable, and under the user's control, then you pull out lame excuses like that. It's no wonder Windows still kicks the Linux Desktop's ass in the market even with all its crap and having to pay for it.
E.g. take me. I have used UNIX in some shape or form since 1994. I do not have anything against Windows. Technically the NT kernel is a marvel of engineering. But my brain is just fundamentally incompatible with Windows. The UNIX shell is ingrained, vim keys are ingrained, etc.
definitely more secure than their counterparts
Based on what criteria? And what counterpart are you comparing Windows to? Linux with X.org? Linux with Wayland and SELinux? macOS?
What I love with my Linux is the total control I have over it. I can customize many things, have my own desktop environment while leaving other members of the family with KDE. I can update what I want, install apps with "aptitude" super easily and nobody ever asks me for my position, my age, phone number or email. Life is sooo quiet on my Linux.
(Linux "breaks" (more exactly, userland stuff) more often than windows, but when it breaks I can do something about it and learn a thing or two while I fix it).
Plus the community is vibrant.
I'm lovin' it :-)
- design circuit and PCB using EAGLE (nonfree – and BTW fuck that Autodesk subscription model).
- perform circuit simulation using LTSpice.
- compile firmware using a GCC toolchain – if using a MinGW port on Windows the linking times even for small images are abysmally long; I don't have time for that.
- since recently: synthesize and route FPGAs using yosys and the iceStorm tools.
- flash using OpenOCD.
Not all of these tools work without flaws under Windows (neither as port nor in the WSL). Of all the tools above there's only one for which no Linux port exists: LTSpice. That's what I use Wine for.
Windows 10, by default, comes with Microsoft spyware (or settings) which one has to remove.
Running Windows 10 native isn't always possible or desirable.
You can run WINE (and CrossOver, the commercial 'version' of WINE) on any platform including Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), macOS, and [recently] ChromeOS.
Its also being used in more obscure OSes like *BSD and Illumos. And its a core part of ReactOS, which is basically a native FOSS Windows version which can run software backwards compatible.
One could even run WINE on say a Raspberry Pi, together with QEMU. Also, not every architecture has a good HVM with virtually no performance loss. Think of ARM or older Intel/AMD CPUs (if you'd reapply the cooling paste these machines could still run just as new).
Finally, if you'd run Windows 10 in a HVM you'd have a lot of additional bells and whistles. Though IIRC it is possible to just run one application in one window with say VMware or VirtualBox.
I've seen retro gamers do just this for old Windows games thus saving them having to running a massively outdated and insecure version of Windows on custom built arcade cabs.
There's also Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can get a full-blown OS like Ubuntu or SuSE that way. Well, that is, sans Linux kernel and sans X11.
You can use X11 applications if you install an X11 agent in Windows such as Xming. But it's not pleasant. I don't know if it's WSL or Xming at fault, but 2D performance in X is pretty abysmal.
I've run applications like gedit and evince on WSL with Xming. It's also fairly annoying that you cannot print from WSL applications, and to my knowledge you cannot access devices either (e.g. USB to serial adapter).
Xming probably isn't using the X shared memory extension, so everything has to be serialized and sent through the socket.
> It's also fairly annoying that you cannot print from WSL applications
Can't you configure cups within WSL to print to a network printer, and export the printer from Windows as a network printer?
That's true only for CPU scheduling, or losing CPU performance. For I/O, that's not true.
Intel’s VT-d & VT-c, AMD’s Vi.
However, even for modern systems, not all motherboards supports that. Also sometimes the setting is disabled by default in BIOS/UEFI.
From what I found its called Enlightened I/O as mentioned here [1] and with Hyper-V it works with Windows Vista & later, Windows 2008 & later, Linux kernel 3.14 and later, and "FreeBSD".
If what you say is true, and its also true for ESXi, Docker, VirtualBox, KVM, etc. It'd be devastating for containers and cloud.
Docker on Windows uses Hyper-V by default btw.