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You think that's bad? I'm using Linux at work on a laptop specifically designed for Linux and it's been a nightmare to get even basic functions to work right. The computer immediately resumes after going to sleep, it took several days to get hibernation working, the nvidia driver keeps locking up the system, external monitors aren't automatically detected, after an apt upgrade, hibernation stops working because my EFI loader file gets overwritten and I can't figure out from where, I managed to completely break X after trying to get Optimus (GPU switching) to work, applications written in different GUI frameworks (QT, GTK) use different themes and even different mouse cursors, applets don't always show up, bluetooth crashes randomly, and the list goes on.

Windows has annoyances, but Linux is like building a car in a garage full of car parts. Yes, you can build a working car, but you better be a mechanic.

that's the reason why I went with Win+WSL in the first place, I feared all the driver crap.

So... our choice now is between a great OS on laptops with next to no I/O and totally unacceptable keyboard, OR great hardware running on an OS that's put together with duct-tape and strings?

Yes unfortunately that's about it.

At this point, for me the best option is charge more and put up with windows being a dick periodically.

We really thought the future was great right around 2007 didn't we? You had nicely put together Macbooks that could run all the software you wanted, including from Windows and Linux land, they had pretty good support and overall decent hardware. Then they released the iPhone, SJ died, and everyone else in their management just started hunting either quarterly numbers or pretty&stupid design that works well for TV ads. It's a wonder that their software departments have actually turned around and started producing decent releases again. Here's to hope their Mac department will recover as well.

Stick some distros on a USB stick and give them a go. Your 480s should be fine with it if you're on Intel graphics. I'd recommend Ubuntu in whatever flavor appeals...

I'm not sure I ever liked the Mac hardware. I thought I did. TBH the old white plastic MacBooks running 10.4 was my last good experience. After that I bought a top end 2011 15" rMBP with 16Gb of RAM and 1TiB SSD.

What do I use now?

A second hand i5 T440, because it's more productive.

I started with a Powerbook 12inch. Totally fell in love with that thing. By far the best trackpad at the time, plus a very decent keyboard. It even had CD burner and expandable RAM in an incredibly tight package. From then on their hardware became worse with every iteration in some way or another - either it was graphics driver issues, thermals, faulty boards, or now completely crap I/O and keyboard. But IMO till 2016 they still had overall the better package than windows PCs, mostly thanks to a far superior OS.

Try to install Fedora Linux on it. It should work okayish on such hardware, if you switch it to Mate desktop (Gnome 2 fork): https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/ .

Look, it sucks to find out there are thousands of devices, but none with the specific attributes you want. (I'm currently looking for a phone.)

However, the (sad?) truth is for most people, MacBooks works just fine, but they aren't vocal about that. Personally, I thought I'd hate the new ones, but was given one for work, and it's fine - to the point where I bought one for home, too

I think I could live with the 2018 iteration of the keyboard, although I‘d want to wait another 6M at least to see about reliability. But the dongles man, they‘d just give me headaches. Using a Thinkpad just reminds me of how great it is to have all the ports built-in.

I actually love usb-c. Thought I'd hate it, but I vastly underestimated how much I plug stuff in. It helps that usb-c docks are pretty awesome if you don't buy the cheap ones. My only issue is Yubikeys when I'm not docked, which is only for meetings though.

Don’t use Linux with a laptop which has discrete graphics. I use Thinkpads with integrated graphics, and haven’t had a problem with drivers for a decade. I don’t use hibernation though, I just use standby.

Agreed. So many things breaking are to do with the binary dgpu drivers, that issue goes away with intel.

I've been running ubuntuMATE for years on my t450s. It is remarkably boring. The only things that don't work for me is the fingerprint reader and docking/undocking can be funny if done hot.

Docking just works on my Neon on Dell E74-something setup.

But.. if you want to game and/or do stuff like games programming, video rendering etc you kind of want discrete graphics.

If you want to do any of those things, Linux is already so niche that you probably know what you're getting yourself into.

But for most people, the discrete graphics option is easier and more stable, but counter-intuitive - usually more power is better. So worth mentioning.

This is a System76 laptop which only puts Linux on their laptops, so it's specifically designed for it. The two mDP connectors are only connected to the Nvidia chip, so maybe the Intel IGP isn't powerful enough to drive 3 4k monitors at a time (4k internal, 2x 4k external).

If you bought a laptop which came with Linux, why did you fight battles with GPU and hybernation? It is supposed to be supported, so let the vendor solve the issues. Or return the computer, if they can't. That's exactly where the vendors' value proposition comes from, have them earn their money.

Or use one that are supported by the open-source amdgpu drivers. Those have been pretty good.

I’d like to highlight a few points that are mostly not about Windows.

> * windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.

Not an OS concern. Most applications do remember, by the way.

> * terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.

Windows terminal doesn’t have a bell. WSL does, as does macOS or anything Linux/UNIX really. You can disable it of course. Google "wsl disable bell".

Either way, nothing new or objectively bad.

> * no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.

That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds

* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up

Nothing is "random". Except perhaps when the device is broken. Mouse buttons 1-5 have been well-defined for 10+ years now.

> * terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.

Yes, it sucks. You can either enable SSH and SSH into WSL or just use wsltty (which offers bell options!).

> * there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer.

That’s a given. WSL is only for developers.

> That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds

Actually that's a UWP / Windows Feature that music apps such as Spotify can hook into to display Now Playing info and media controls

>no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.

Is Spotify, go to settings, display options and deselect "Show desktop overlay when using media keys". For some time I had to do that after every Spotify update, but seems to stick now

thanks! at least something...

Your explorer issue is Windows Defender's realtime protection. If you toggle it off you'll see the operation you're trying to run complete almost instantly.

I like Windows 10 and generally have been happy with it -- but that particular behavior has been driving me nuts for a while. They really need to fix it.

"AV makes any computer slow" is still true. Scanning every file every time it's accessed simply can't take zero time.

"But think of the security!" they'll say... of course, it's always a tradeoff. I've experienced a similar problem with a large growing logfile --- appending becomes essentially quadratic, every time the process closes the log the AV opens and scans all of it.

Exactly.

I first noticed it when I would open my downloads folder (because I'm a heathen and never clean it out), and it would sit there and "process" for fifteen minutes. Just clicking realtime protection off fixed it instantly -- but it would seem there's no need to re-scan every file every time a folder is opened, scan them when I click on them, or scan them when I try to open them, or scan them in the background while I still can interact with the folder. Being unresponsive is a cardinal sin for any UX, and that's where Apple shines and MS still continues to drop the ball.

Like I said, I really like Windows 10 -- but it really falls short here.

Oh god, that's exactly what I have. There's nothing we can do short of disabling defender? Are there AVs that are as secure and don't slow explorer down as much?

No, they're all horrible.

Why do they scan anything on folder-open anyway? Shouldn't it just do that on file creation/modification events?

Presumbly there may have one time been some type of malware that executed through thumbnails with embedded data or some other type of convoluted nonsense that the scanners had to protect against. I think I'd rather take the risk of that though over the accumulated production loss of watching explorer hang for 5 seconds everytime I open a large folder

That's accurate. And I will say that I've seen it hang for as long as fifteen minutes opening up my Downloads folder - which isn't all that big really.

Defender is probably the least offensive AV in existence, sadly.

Frankly I think the entire concept of AV is bankrupt as it always causes many more problems than it is worth. Both false positives and false negatives are common. You shouldn't be afraid of running without Defender because, like all AV, it isn't very good at catching real threats anyway. If you really want to feel safe there are much better ways of doing that, like running untrusted programs in sandboxes or VMs, or using Software Restriction Policies to whitelist what can and cannot run. I haven't played with it at all, but there's even Controlled Folder Access to limit FS rights by application, which isn't a terrible idea given the era of crypto-ransomware.

I ran without any AV for years and never had any issues. Intelligent web use is generally a better protectant than AV programs. I use Defender now, grudgingly.

As you say, CFA is probably the most useful part of Windows Defender. I was very glad to see that included.

I've been using FreeBSD, then Linux since 2002 and I'm seriously considering moving to Windows, which I haven't ran on any of my machines since back when Windows XP was fresh. If you think all the stuff you listed is bad, wait 'til you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).

(Or you can't have them at all without an extension, yeah, that too...)

Windows has progressed by leaps and bounds since 2003. Linux, not so much. We have this fixation on building something, then deciding it's full of legacy code that doesn't allow us to build what we really want, so we throw it out and do it all over again.

The good news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while. The bad news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while so I expect there's not much time left until the next "revolution"...

What surprises me is that around 2010 Ubuntu seemed perfectly fine, and then they started to throw everything that worked away.

Yeah, that was weird. I remember that as the only time I actually felt that Linux had a decent shot at the Desktop. New money had rolled on to the scene with a coherent vision, started fixing a lot of the suck, and quickly became the predominant distribution.

Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.

Let's stop with the NIH blaming, Canonical could not change GNOME direction, so they had no choice, if you remember Canonical wanted to add some fancy scrollbars in GTK but it was rejected, later when GNOME wanted same fancy scrollbars GTK accepted them.

I am a KDE user and I watched this from the side sao I am not invested in any camp, what we see is that when a meinteiner with big ego controls a project (it happened with KDE Plasma too) you can't bring any improvement that the meinteiner does not agree with.

I think that happened to all platforms then.

well you're not wrong :(. the "post PC" mania.

> wait 'till you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).

KDE has explicit settings to remember window position which works well. As for icons, I haven't had icons on my desktop besides a dock for years, so can't tell you.

So don't use GNOME? I like XFCE, but there are other desktop environments around that don't try to destroy ("modernize") themselves every few years.

Yeah, after sixteen years of this stuff, I definitely needed someone to tell me that there are other DEs than Gnome :-).

How are things in XFCE land, do you have a sane "Open file" dialog, or do its (so, so few...) applications use the new and improved GTK 3 version? Speaking of which, has it moved to GTK 3 completely, or do only some of its tools work on hi-DPI screens, and only with a few themes?

I am content with the cinnamon, the default in linux mint. It looks great imo, configuration is easy. The Mint developers are listening to their users.

Most of your terminal issues can be resolved by using http://cmder.net

Don't underestimate Microsoft's willingness to keep their system as a minimum that gets enhanced by third parties.

I actually just installed that before you mentioned it, and disabled its sound in the volume mixer. Finally something I can live with in terms of terminal.

Also don't underestimate our willingness to try and make our inbox stuff better - it just takes a lot of time to add new features without breaking some back-compat. We're hard at work improving conhost every day :)

I honestly don't get why people recommend cmder. It's really slow, even compared to the slower terminals on Linux. Also, and more importantly, xterm emulation seems to be utterly broken. I get weird incorrect lines shown all the time.

I found the WSL console to be a at least a bit more reliable.

> I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator.

You open whatever terminal you want and run the WSL command, by the way. So just 'wsl' or 'bash' or 'ubuntu', etc.

There's not actually a rabbit hole. You don't need to change the default launcher.

I c, thx. Will definitely try that.

Also note that there actually is a team hard at work improving the console, so fixes will probably come. See the last two entries in this blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/tag/console/

> terminal has no tabs and crappy colors

Okay, the tabs thing we haven't been able to fix yet, but if you want to change the console colors real quick, you can use ColorTool:

https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...

Also, it you want a tab-like experience, you could always try tmux. It's a linux commandline tool that gives you tabs, panes, and all sorts of other goodies, and as of 1809 you can even use cmd.exe within it.

When I first tried W10, I noticed a distinct lag before the start menu opens. Often, menus would pop under the taskbar, instead of over, being unreadable and unclickable.

I assumed they pushed it to market before it was ready, allowing users to find the bugs to save on testing costs (helping justify why it was free). Only, now, years later, the start menu still lags, and things still open behind other things.

Combined with all the mysterious data it sends to various IP's, I think that when you press Start, those first 300 ms are spent as part of some sort of distributed computing effort.

The slow start menu is awful. I want to press start then type what I want to open but it is so slow you have to wait nearly 2s to type or it will lose the first few characters. Add to that the search result quality is dire.

Just press Windows+Q, and start typing. Much faster.

Hey that works pretty well. Thanks for the tip! :)

Just the Windows key do the trick for me, have been using that since they started adding more crap to the start menu (Vista?).

I disable web search and Cortana, and it makes all the difference in the world for Win key + type the first few characters of an app:

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]
    "ConnectedSearchUseWeb"=dword:00000000
    "AllowCortana"=dword:00000000

https://pastebin.com/ApnfB7wC

Thanks for tip - will try this

Wow, you can do that??

There ought to be an unofficial Windows 10 Settings app that uncovers stuff like this. Somehow Microsoft isn't quite getting it right and they ship Windows 10 with two different ones...

It's at a new location now because why not:

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]

For me start menu is instant (well, animation takes few milliseconds, but it starts instantly) and I can start to type anything immediately, like <Win>cmd.

Oh users do find these things. Every time they release a new "Feature Update" full of problems (which is to say, every time they release a new Feature Update), it turns out those problems had all been well reported by people on Insider Builds. Nearest I can figure, in MS's continuing effort to Embrace OSS software, they have contracted the disease that prevents them from paying attention to what users are complaining about.

Have to agree on all points.

You’ll find the slow file operations are entirely down to NTFS. Regardless of how you play around in fsutil it’s hopeless on lots of small files. This incidentally makes WSL unbearably slow. Hence why I still use VirtualBox and putty.

I was suspecting as much. I wonder why NTFS gets so much praise, especially compared to HFS+. Yes, HFS has less features, but at least it lets me get my work done.

NTFS deserves no praise. None at all. Not sure I've ever heard any to be honest.

edit: fine example as I got a downvote.

SVN checkout on windows NTFS 8 minutes 30 seconds

SVN checkout on same kit on ext4 48 seconds.

This problem scales to git as well, so is not SVN related. Anything that does lots of small writes, so basically anything unixy, suffers like this.

^ This is true. Dealing with lots of small files is SUPER SLOW in NTFS for some reason.

NTFS was much better than FAT, and was one of the first journaled filesystems in widespread use. It was praised perhaps 20 years ago.

I've read/heard a couple times from people ridiculing Apple's HFS pointing out all the ways in which NTFS is superior, so in my mind at least the filesystem I never thought of as an advantage on macOS. I guess I was wrong then.

I think it depends on your metric. I don't know what's wrong with HFS, but I do know that Apple drops these .DS_Store entries all over the place, things that look ideal to be stuffed in NTFS streams.

I'm sure there are many metrics on which HFS is superior to NTFS; and probably many metrics where NTFS is superior. NT (and MS in general) has never philosophically worked well with more than N of X, wherever N is significantly larger than a consumer would deal with - whether it's processes, files, TCP connections, whatever. Their consumer heritage usually finds a way to shine through.

Never checked if it was NTFS issue, but it felt like logical explanation - when starting Stronghold Crusader through wine on Linux, loading took like 0.5s, compared to 10s or so on Windows.

Didn't bother to check the numbers, but it was order of magnitude for sure. Way more than just noticeable.

> Anything that does lots of small writes, so basically anything unixy, suffers like this.

To be honest, when NTFS was conceived it probably didn't have as a design goal that common Unix patterns should be fast. After all, Unix applications use the file system for lots of things where Windows has different mechanisms for that purpose.

SVN sadly has to traverse the complete working copy and lock every single directory individually because every directory is also a working copy on its own. Most of the time SVN spends on, e.g., update, is spent on locking and unlocking. Git/hg only need to do this in one place and avoid that problem.

It's definitely not 'entirely'. I have a folder with a bunch of small files where explorer and other programs sometimes hitch for tens of minutes, and WSL can reliably process in seconds. It's too many seconds compared to native linux, but it's still seconds.

It's not NTFS -- it's Windows Defender's Realtime protection.

If you turn it off it still runs like ass. I have spent hours on this one even down to fsutil tuning and I can't get more than about a 10% improvement.

This is because the small files are stored on the MFT which is global read/write locked.