Another example of “nonconsensual computing” from Microsoft. I don’t know what I’m going to do once Windows 7 reaches end-of-life next year.
After using Manjaro Linux / XFCE for the past year, I never want to go back to Windows for work in the field of web programming. I had been working with Linux servers since the mid 90s, but mainly my work revolved around Microsoft tech until about the last 5 years when I switched almost completely to JavaScript/Typescript. I had tried various desktop distros many times, but Manjaro was the first one that was truly very stable for me without a lot of babysitting so now I run it on all of my workstations and work laptops.
Having used Macs for various purposes over the decades, I never want to use one again. Unfortunately, I need to keep one around to build iOS apps and to debug my iPhone or iPad.
So, where does that leave Windows?
Mainly on my TVs and gaming machines. Every TV in the house has a Windows box and we love them for having "YouTube parties", watching Netflix, Amazon Prime Video et. al. and of course for playing games. I have only one Windows workstation in case I need to do some C# programming or something, but I haven't done it in a long while.
If there were a Windows or Linux tablet with comparable battery life and stability as an iPad, I'd definitely use that instead because about 90% of what I do on my iPad is browsing the web. I have tried using some Windows tablets and they do work great, but battery life and stability are usually nowhere near the iPad. I really miss the "Quick Javascript Switcher" Chrome extension on my iPad. Ad-blocking seems to work alright in general, though I wish I had more control.
I just hate the locked-down feel of mac and iOS and I resent Apple daily as I use their devices, whenever I can't do something that I want such as being forced to copy and paste addresses out of Contacts into Google Maps because Apple is such a petty asshole about locking you into their shitty feature-barren digital properties. You can't just do whatever you want, how you want to do it. It's Apple's way or the highway as they say. I hope one day that they become completely irrelevant again like they were in the 90s. (I know it will probably never happen, but I can hope.)
Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that they all suck in some way and shine in other ways. I can't stand Apple but I still use their iDevices since they protect me from more bullshit than Android does. I hate the groups inside Microsoft that push ads and dark patterns, but there's no way I'm going to try playing Rocket League on Linux or Mac because I want to have a good time, not a headache. I love the dev division of Microsoft that is open sourcing everything, building great free products like VSCode and so forth too.
You need an MSDN subscription however.
Unfortunately, if you're not a huge enterprise, there's no legal way to acquire it...
That's neat. I was under the impression Microsoft had made it significantly more exclusive.
But increasingly, it seems like the saner choice.
My wife's Windows machine kept slowing down. I wanted to put an SSD in it but we didn't have the ability to do a reinstall on a new drive. So we put an SSD, more RAM, and Xubuntu on it. She's been smooth sailing for 6 months.
My sister (40), needed a desktop at home but was cash strapped, so i pieced together a machine and put Xubuntu on it. She's been happy with that for about a year
I put my elderly parents on Xubuntu about 2 year ago, and other than a printer ordeal that I solved, they've been smooth sailing.
it's not going to be perfect if you're a graphics designer or still need some kind of specialized desktop software where they're no web version, but I've been using it as my main driver for 6+ years now.
Price. Control. Privacy. Flexibility. Linux IMHO solves all of those problems way before you get to FOSS ideals or security/AV stuff. And i don't think there's ever been an easier time to do Linux on the desktop. Driver support is better than ever, most software being web software makes it better than ever. As does Electron apps or some kind of standardized packaging (Snaps, FlatPak, AppImage)
That probably has more to do with the hardware upgrade rather than the OS
I also tried Ubuntu on the same system but (among other niggling problems) i couldn't get the ATI graphics drivers to work.
What that practically means is that any linux distro with a kernel at least that new should support your card without needing to download anything from AMD's website. (Generally speaking, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website is a windows-ism. There are some exceptions, like Nvidia, but a machine well configured for linux use should aim to use hardware supported by FOSS drivers (such as your AMD card.))
It got a hardware upgrade.
But i couldn't do the hardware upgrade without re-purchasing another Windows license since her install was an OEM install and they don't provide install disks.
Secondly - Windows slows down over time. Horribly. Linux does not.
Third - You don't really have to run an AV in Linux, thus chewing up resources.
A couple of examples that come to mind:
1. Key combinations. They're completely inconsistent across the software I use and frequently can't (easily?) be changed. Sometimes commands are cmd+key, sometimes they're ctrl+key. To delete the previous word (something I do hundreds of times a day), some kind of strange incantation seems to be required. The one that works in iTerm deletes the whole line in most other programs, so I accidentally delete work dozens of times a day.
2. Missing window manager features, even basic ones. I can't do focus-follows-mouse, I can't double-tap to click and drag, etc etc. Stuff that's obvious and present on basically every other system.
3. The keyboard (mid-2014 model) is much worse on this MacBook than my Dell XPS.
4. The story for terminal-based and open source software simply isn't as good as it is on Linux. Homebrew is great, but it's limited and can't compete with the convenience of the many binary packages on most distros. Software that's supposed to integrate deeply with the system in some way is a bit of a pain as well.
These won't be problems for everyone, but for what I consider basic power user features, neither Windows nor MacOS are up to par with Linux. But stability and hardware support in Linux is as good (in my experience) as at least Windows. I've had the same install on a rolling release distribution for 6 years without issues. I don't know the last time I found hardware that wasn't supported on Linux.
About a year later, they're now asking me to come over and reinstall Linux on the new computer. Setting up Linux is the hard part -- if they don't need to worry about that, their comparison is that they had a Linux computer that just worked, and now they have a computer that keeps asking them about some thing called One Drive, and updates at inconvenient times, and that forces them to use some kind of weird photo software instead of just letting them organize their files into folders.
If you have a non-technical person you're trying to support, often the easiest thing is to set up a small system that does exactly what they want and nothing else. Linux makes that easier than Windows, at the (small) cost of forcing you to actually take some time and set up the computer correctly from the start.
It feels weird, because when I started using Linux this wasn't the case at all -- but Linux is nowadays my go-to solution any time I want to set up a computer for a tech-newbie. A big part of that is you can set up a system once and trust that it will continue to work the same without missing out on security updates. You can still set up a Ubuntu system with Unity if you want to.
That's a massive advantage, because it means I don't need to re-teach people how to do things every time Microsoft or Apple "innovates" their interface.