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Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing.

Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools?

Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless.

Also, leaving the matter of whether or not I should even be seeing ads after I paid for the damn thing aside, the company that brought us Internet Explorer is the last one that should crack jokes about other browsers, even if they're good (which this one isn't).

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>those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing.

>Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless.

This doesn't surprise me. As someone else old enough to remember the Halloween documents, MS has long suffered from serious organizational incompetence. Just look at that whole debacle they went through with music players: "PlaysForSure", Zune, etc., where each one obsoleted the last one and screwed over any users who had bought into it. Exact same with their phone OSes.

Maybe it has to do with that funny org-chart picture with the different MS business groups pointing guns at each other. They collect a bunch of personal data, but can't look at things from a big picture and think "we collect all this data from our users, so maybe we could use a little of that to target our ads better". Of course, if you look at MS's marketing over the past 20 years, it should be readily apparent that they have some of the worst and most clueless marketing talent in the entire corporate world.

Organisation chart comic referred to: https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...

And for those who wonder like me, the original is still there: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point.

>I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point.

It's a good idea IMO. Now that the web has been around for literally decades, I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something, found blog/forum posts to read, and then tried following links in those posts only to find they're dead, because they're so many years out-of-date.

Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least.

Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full.

I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromebooks than on windows

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

I've used Linux for about the same time and honestly, I understand it completely. I would switch, were it not for muscle memory and for the fact that at least 50% of my work involves systems-level development for Linux (mainly embedded stuff, so a lot of cross-compiling). In the last five or six years I've come to dread the Linux desktop and its constant churn of rewrites and UX "improvements".

I have a Windows machine that I use for work the other half of the time and honestly... it's great. Yeah, the occasional update breaks some fringe feature. But the chances of something like waking up to the announcement that Microsoft is removing desktop icons in the next update and you can just install this third-party application for it (which will break with every update) are practically zero.

Microsoft puts out a lot of broken stuff (some of which slowly morphs into non-broken, useful stuff over time, e.g. Powershell), but you can mostly be assured that, if something works today, it'll work ten years from now, modulo some registry hacks. That's incredibly valuable.

I really don't care about things like UI consistency and whatnot -- what I do care about is stability and functionality.

Edit: tbh, the main reason why I'm not switching today is that I don't really trust this whole OS-as-a-service model. If it were Windows 2000 instead of Windows 10, I wouldn't think twice before switching, but these are different times.

(More edit: please realize that I'm the same person who posted this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 , yeah?)

Or you could just use a window manager that doesn’t change? I’ve had the same desktop env for over a decade and nothing has changed at all. In contrast with windows and osx where we literally cannot opt out.

I do, but that doesn't help much. I don't really have a choice about GTK applications, for example -- I'm going to get the GTK 3 open file dialog and the colour picker with every GTK 3 application.

I entirely understand alxlaz's position, buy my solution was exactly sticking to better window managers (in terms of long term support). My workstation is Linux since '98 or '99, and since then I've used GNUstep for about a decade, then i3 and now sway (basically i3 for Wayland). I'm free from the breaking changes alxlaz describes.

I just checked, and GNUstep is pretty much alive. Even that change was caused by me wanting to try tiling window managers, not support failure.

Ah, I'm in a similar-ish boat, I use WindowMaker :). This isolates me from most, but definitely not all dubious changes. I've been down the tiling WM rabbit hole a while ago but it's just not for me, I like the mouse, I like icons...

It's a little unsettling that there are two ways to get a stable experience: using window manager from 1998 (OK, ok, WindowMaker is still maintained-ish, in fact a very tiny portion of the code written after 1998 is mine :-) ), or getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM).

On the bright side, though, yeah, at least we have a choice!

> (...) getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM)

Not really, unless it's a tong-in-cheek remark. Tiling window managers use virtual desktops and programmable positioning of windows to produce a predictable layout. Windows 1.01 had neither of those.

Add muscle memory to it and, if you can endure the learning/customization curve, you get a very efficient window manager. Whenever I'm alt-tabbing in search of windows in Windows or OSX I feel I'm using old software.

It's tongue-in-cheek of course :). That being said, I did find tiling WMs to be very unwieldy on most screens. When I first went down the tiling WM rabbit hole, I was using a laptop with a 15" screen, and that was great. After a while I got a 27" monitor, though, and tiling became extremely annoying -- every window is now either too wide to be read comfortably and I end up padding the screen with useless xterms, or too small for contents to fit in any reasonable way.

How are useless xterms different from uselessly used space for a simply centered window?

I have 2x4K monitors at home. Moving to i3 is the best thing that happened to me.

> How are useless xterms different from uselessly used space for a simply centered window?

You still have to open them and move them around, especially if you do change your layout eventually.

I actually didn't have that problem when I was using ratpoison, but some applications (looking at you, Eclipse...) don't really work with it. (I know about stumpwm, and I do know Common Lisp, but alas, we just don't get along too well). When I moved to i3, which is greedy with screen space, I actually wrote myself a couple of scripts to handle this situation "gracefully" (automatically pad the screen with empty X11 windows, automatically un-pad them when needed) and bound them to a couple of key combinations.

I mean it sort of worked but at one point I decided I want to spend more time doing fun/useful things and less time hacking on my window manager.

notion is a bit like i3 but with fixed containers that don't disappear when they become empty: https://notionwm.net/

herbstluftwm also has containers something similar

Why didn't you use gaps instead of empty windows? Instead of hours writing scripts you could have spent 10 seconds adding a few lines of config.

This was before i3-gaps was a thing, if that's what you're referring to.

Tiling window managers are a great way to fiddle with window arrangement LESS not more. Shoving terminal windows between other windows for spacing is spacebar heating. I3 has a branch with the feature required its called i3-gaps. This feature is on its way to becoming a part of mainline i3 but has been available for about 11 years now as a separate package.

https://github.com/Airblader/i3

The setting

    smart_gaps inverse_outer

Would give you a configurable empty border only when you have a singular window ensuring that the single window isn't so large as to be hard to read comfortably.

As far as windows being too small to read comfortably I'd advise you to place no more than 2-3 windows per workspace. For the benefit of those who don't use i3 workspaces are per monitor.

Given 2 monitors you can easily show 4-6 windows which is easily enough context for about any task.

So, like I said in my other reply: this was back when i3-gaps was pretty fresh. I don't recall the inverse_outer outer setting, and looking at the github repository, it looks like it was merged in 2018. I'm talking about something that happened like ten years ago :-).

As for this part:

> As far as windows being too small to read comfortably I'd advise you to place no more than 2-3 windows per workspace. For the benefit of those who don't use i3 workspaces are per monitor.

Yeah, this is pretty much where the fiddling comes from.

I don't want to use 2-3 windows per workspace. I sometimes have to work on a piece of code and have 8-10 PDFs open for it -- datasheets, reference guides, schematics and whatnot, at which I want to be able to look from time to time. Sometimes while I'm also looking at the code, sometimes in full-screen (because I'm looking at a big diagram). Sometimes I need to look at a part of a diagram while I'm looking at the code. So I need them to be in the same view as the code. All in all -- including specs, standards, the code window(s), a few xterms -- I easily have 12-15 windows open in order to work on one thing, and it's not really optional.

i3's tabbed view is sort of what I wanted for the PDFs but it's annoying that, if you want to switch to the right one using nothing but the keyboard, you have to go through all of them. You go back and forth, not to the Nth tab (or at least you couldn't back when I tried i3).

That's actually what I liked about ratpoison. Instead of trying to be smart, it just let me multiplex my screen, which is what I really wanted.

I could sort of bend my workflow around all this and, through a complicated set of chords, make use of the whole thing in a productive manner. However, it was anything but convenient. I'm way happier with a floating WM and do a lot less fiddling with the windows.

With herbstluftwm I address that issue by just doing a split; you don't necessarily need to put anything in a given pane, so it's possible to just resize the pane for the window about which you actually care, and ignore the unused space entirely.

Of course, I typically end up sticking a terminal or editor or chat window or music player or something in there anyway, because why not?

KDE 4 was released in 2008 and has been stable and consistent for more than a decade. That predates Windows 7. So in the same time KDE has been consistent you’ve had had the migration from XP or Vista to Win7. Then Windows 8 and now Windows 10. They’ve all bought massive changes in the UI experience.

If you don’t like KDE then use LXCE or Enlightenment or any of the other Linux desktop environments that have been pretty static (and have been even longer than KDE).

So yeah, there actually is a lot of choice on Linux and not all of it looks dated.

Mate desktop has been fairly stable (the default green tinted icon set is gross but fixable). I switched to it after Ubuntu long term support, and Debian on my other computer dropped gnome 2. Just didn't like gnome 3 or unity. Cinnamon was okay but at the time was still coupled to the brain dead ideas the gnome team had been perusing at the time. I haven't checked it out recently enough to know if it had improved.

Similarly, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE are all alive and well and haven't changed much in the last decade, either.

Almost all my Linux work has been via command line for quite a while, so maybe this has changed, but my recollection was the GUI inconsistency had little to do with the window manager. It had much more to do with the X libraries that the developer of each app decided to use.

I used to have a screen shot showing me running something like 5 different GUI apps on a Linux system, all of them trying to open a file, each with a completely different file chooser dialog. That's because one app used Motif, one use GTK, one used Qt, and I have no idea what the others used.

>I used to have a screen shot showing me running something like 5 different GUI apps on a Linux system, all of them trying to open a file, each with a completely different file chooser dialog. That's because one app used Motif, one use GTK, one used Qt, and I have no idea what the others used.

But they all perform the same function of choosing a file right? What does it matter if they all look the same? I don't understand why anyone would care so much whether the file choosing windows match eachother visually between different apps. As long as I can pick a file effectively, I wouldn't really care if the app had pink sparkles or something. As long as it does what it's supposed to.

Apparently a lot of people care, but programs not having the same style across a system always seems to be a top 3 issue with electron apps.

It's not that there are aesthetic difference like pink sparkles on some.

It's that some have a file type filter and some don't. Some show all files while others hide dotfiles and provide a checkbox to show them. Some show files and directories in the same pane while others show directories in one pane and files in another. Some show ".." in their directory list and you go up by opening that, others do not show ".." and provide a button for going up.

I understand this, but modularity is one of the philosophies and benefits behind linux, with modularity unfortunately comes inconsistency. As many of the apps available on linux are open source and open source developers are mostly free to use whatever toolkits they want or are comfortable with, you're not likely to get the consistency you want with linux.

With windows you have an API provided by windows for ui programs, there will be more consistency between apps because of this.

Linux providing a standardized ui API would go against the core philosophy of it and you're not likely going to be able to convince every developer making gui apps for linux to agree on and use only one graphical toolkit.

Like with anything, every os has tradeoffs and downsides, personally I prefer modularity and control over my system to ui consistency.

Actual modularity would imply a common way to plug in different file choosers so you could use file mangager A with desktop b with application from desktop c.

Inconsistency comes not from modularity but rather from incompetence.

A standard API can provide more modularity and control than the current approach.

You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on.

There would be a per user config setting specifying which implementation the user prefers. If a program wants to put up a file chooser, it can read that, then load the right library and use the API. A program might also have per program settings to override that, to handle the case where a user really does prefer, say, GTK file choosers for most programs but Qt file choosers for some specific programs.

This gives you more UI consistency, makes things more modular than having every program include file chooser dialog code, and gives more control to the user, and doesn't interfere with the developer choosing whatever toolkit they prefer for things other than standard dialogs.

>You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on.

OK, now who's going to do this? At what level would this be implemented at? Would this be at the windows server level? Would I have to pull in GtK, motif, qt and every other library that this API will rely on just to install Wayland or xorg? Will it be at the window manager level? Will I need to pull in GfK, qt, motif etc. for every desktop environment and window manager relying on this API? Which versions of these libraries will this API rely on?

The last graphical app i wrote, I used dlangui for a GUI, should I have been forced to use Gtk or qt despite them being heavier and more complicated than what I needed?

Your program in dlangui would do something like this (but in D rather than the C-like pseudocode I'm going to use...). At the place where you want to put up a file chooser dialog, which now presumably does something like this:

  char * result = dlangui_choose_file(...)

you would do this instead:

  char * result = 0;
  char * (*standard_choose)() = get_standard_choose();
  if (standard_choose)
    result = (*standard_choose)(...);
  if (result == 0)
    result = dlangui_choose_file(...)

get_standard_choose is a small function that would:

1. Check a standard set of configuration locations to see if the system administrator or user has configured a standard file choose dialog [1].

2. If a standard file choose dialog has been configured, the configuration information includes the path to a library that implements it. get_standard_choose() loads that library, gets a pointer to the standard_choose() functions from it, and returns that pointer.

3. get_standard_choose() returns 0 if no standard choose dialog is configured or it runs into problems trying to load it.

If the user wants GTK or Qt file chooser dialogs instead of dlangui file chooser dialogs, you don't have to use GTK or Qt. The user installs a GTK or Qt file chooser library and points to it in their standard dialog configuration.

(I'd expect at some point that toolkits like dlangui would incorporate get_standard_choose() functionality themselves. After that, you'd then just write

  char * result = dlangui_choose_file(...)

and it would deal with using the user preferred dialog if available. It would be completely transparent to the programmer using dlangui).

Same idea for other common dialogs, like color picking, printing, and font selection.

[1] Probably something like check an environment variable first. If it doesn't find a match there, probably then a config file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. If no match, then something in /etc.

And NONE of them have usable keyboard shortcuts so you can avoid using the mouse.

Don't worry, soon it will be 'systemui' and there will only be one way to do anything. /s

The devil is in the implementation details. Are favorites/shortcuts in the same part of the screen? Are they in the same order? Does the dialog remember sort and view configuration between folders? Does the dialog differentiate between mounts, symlinks, and tangible files? Does it display networked machines properly? Are file icons consistent in design if not color scheme? The problem most people have (in my experience) is behavioral. The mismatching visuals is just the most jarring aspect that's easiest to point to.

The aesthetics are not a completely invalid consideration. People recognize patterns and find choosing behaviors/reactions easier when recognizing a common pattern. It takes more effort to respond to unfamiliar stimulus. Aesthetics aren't the only consideration though.

File choosers typically allow one to bookmark commonly used directories unfortunately this is per chooser purely for reasons of lack of coordination.

Further despite people asking for it for the last 15 years the gtk version doesn't have a very good way to visually pick out an image in their picker. To date the only good way to pick out an image in a gtk app even GIMP is to open a file manager alongside the application and drag the file into the application or file chooser.

I find it unlikely that most people figure this out.

Windows has this same problem, with 3rd party and its own apps. I don't know why it needs 3 different file open dialogs, and it confuses the crap out of normies. Don't even ask me about people getting upset about not knowing when to click or double-click.

I tell people that if the cursor changes to a hand, then it's a single-click.

Everyone doubleclicks anyway though.

This comment reminds me of this meme image that I saved a few years ago:

https://i.imgur.com/JG7I2hu.png

Odds that it's even worse since this was created?

I found my screen shot: https://i.imgur.com/Wcwaiwu.jpg

Nice. Actually some of these remind me of Windows, too. It's less common on Windows but plenty of applications seem to link against antiquated libraries which provide really unusable and nonstandard file selection dialogs. One thing I remember being annoyed with is old-style ones that are very small and you can't resize. Here are some, but I've seen weirder ones:

https://i.imgur.com/jYa3qX8.png

With sandboxing, macOS is now forcing devs to use their file selection dialog because it will grant access to the selected files - a custom dialog box has no such blessing.

It's nice, actually; it's finally making the file selection process feel uniform. Too many Java apps are still using random Swing dialogs though...

How do the java apps use their own file selection dialogs if they're sandboxed?

Sandboxed Java apps don’t. Here I’m talking about apps that you can’t get on the App Store, many of which are older Java programs which haven’t been updated to use the newer APIs.

The push to force sandboxed apps to use the system dialog had the nice side effect of forcing many GUI APIs to actually use the native file pickers, which meant that a lot of non-app-store apps started to use the native file picker. But Java apps don’t automatically get that upgrade.

You could, but the fact that (one of) the default mainstream DE does not respect its users' workflows is a valid gripe. Going against the grain requires energy investment and it's not sure tomorrow we will still be able to run Xfce. That and e.g. systemd's changes which make one use case easy and everything else impossible, everyone but red hat be damned, leave a bad taste in my mouth - most recently homed not supporting remote login. There has been a push for projects to adopt a Code of Conduct to make sure the maintainers act with respect towards all contributors. Maybe the CoC should also include "do not yeehaw into the codebase", because I am getting tired of cowboys tripping me up and accepting no responsibility.

Then don't use that DE that is targeting at clearly other people (I agree it sucks that most distributions use that DE but as power user you can install the distribution or DE that fits you better).

Unfortunately the triplet DE--GUI-Toolkit--Applications is often intertwined or at least evolves in the same manner.

For example, I don't want GTK-3, I only have GTK-2 installed. It could be all fine and dandy if, one after another, year after year, applications wouldn't give up their GTK-2 backend to only maintain/develop their GTK-3 one. The set of (up-to-date) applications I can run decreases, despite the fact that, as Alxlaz, I still run WindowMaker :-)

On Qt side, there are applications which requires an exact version of Qt (not only the main version Qt-3/4/5, but the point version), or require KDE, or require an exact version of KDE. If you want to install a new application, you have to go back in its history and find a version of the application that matches your installed library version. Or install another Qt version and hope it doesn't break other programs.

---------

A bit different, but many years after my last try, I tried to use Scribus. I quickly remembered why I had not really used it long the previous time: text input is still convoluted and not WYSIWYG, which is a bit annoying (understatement) for this kind of program where you precisely want to see how text flows. So I gave a try to the new branch (which BTW required a new version of Qt, if I am not mistaken), hoping that they finally did something about it after all those years this program exists. Alas! Apart from the underneath Qt version change, the visible changes were: icons are now flat and monochrome (i.e. you cannot recognise one from another), keyboard shortcuts have been slightly and viciously modified (what was F3 is now F4, stuff like that... but why, oh why? what is the freaking point of doing that?), and it crashed on me after 5 minutes.

---------

So basically, even if you'd just wish to have a few bugs fixed, and possibly a long-time missing feature finally added, by getting the new version that does this, you are forced to follow the crazy flow of adding or updating all libraries/toolkits/environments, because maintainers have decided it was way more interesting to rewrite their stuff for the umpteenth time with a different/new back-end (toolkit, environment), rather than polishing their existing, mostly fine for the job, code base.

It is exhausting, I am, too, really tired with that churn and constant breaking.

>For example, I don't want GTK-3, I only have GTK-2 installed. It could be all fine and dandy if, one after another, year after year, applications wouldn't give up their GTK-2 backend to only maintain/develop their GTK-3 one.

gtk2 is deprecated, so it makes sense that any actively-supported applications are moving to gtk3, which is still supported. By refusing to use gtk3, you're locking yourself out of not only newer applications that were only written for it, but older ones that have moved to it.

Why do you think an actively-maintained application should stick with a deprecated toolkit?

>On Qt side, there are applications which requires an exact version of Qt (not only the main version Qt-3/4/5, but the point version), or require KDE, or require an exact version of KDE.

In all my years, I've never seen this with an actively-maintained application. Of course, I generally stick with stuff that's available in my distro repo, so I never have any trouble.

Also note that with both gtk3 and Qt5, both these toolkits have been around for something like a decade now. Looking at Wikipedia, gtk3 3.0 came out exactly 9 years ago (10-02-2011), and Qt5 came out on 19-12-2012. Neither of these is at all new. I will grant you, though, that gtk3 is now already headed the way of the dodo, since they've announced gtk4. Personally, I'm not a fan of gtk and prefer Qt as it seems much more stable and better for GUI development anyway, and I don't see anything about Qt5 being phased out. Qt is also used a lot in embedded systems in industry, unlike gtk.

>the visible changes were: icons are now flat and monochrome (i.e. you cannot recognise one from another)

That's all the rage these days. I'm not a big fan either, but it's what most users want. This isn't a brand-new fad either; it's been going on for years now. I do wish I could try living in the alternate universe where UI design mostly stuck with way things were done in the mid-2000s.

I use Kubuntu LTS, sometimes I had to compile a program that was abandoned and I wanted to keep using it. In the last year though we get snap and flatpacks so in theory this could work in future unchanged(though you can't be 100% sure). About the icons, good developers use the system icons so installing a different icon pack compatible with GTK2 would solve the issue(not if the developer included his own icons). About OSX , I think they just dropped 32bit support so I suspect you would also hit issues where your old favorite application is broken,

I understand the frustration with tech , I also went for a short while to Windows10 then I went back to Kubuntu and not even dual booting anymore, the largest frustration I have at this moment is sometimes my video card crashes and I am not sure if is the NVIDIA driver fault or is an hardware issue and on top of it people would say "Why did you bought NVIDIA ?, AMD is better" but at that time I bought my card AMD drivers were shit and most Steam Linux games only supported NVIDIA.

I would also blame developers, the open source and proprietary software developers want to use latest and coolest thing, then sometimes they are forced by deprecation of old tool kits to change (at least sometimes GTK2 apps are ported to the better Qt toolkit)

> I really don't care about things like UI consistency and whatnot -- what I do care about is stability and functionality.

I was on Linux for about 20 years, and now I've been on Mac for 6. Of course, I've had to deal with Windows all this time, too, for gaming and work. (I was even certified on NT.) Anyway, I've no doubt that Windows is pretty stable by now, but the glorious configuration that my company sets up on their laptops starts bugging us to reboot after 5 days, just because it's been "a long time." I blame Microsoft for making their software cater to people who cut-and-paste from Google results to create IT policy, and creating an ecosystem which leads companies to do things like this, and, say, locking the desktop background, of all things.

And you can keep Powershell, along with WSL.

Sure, Apple doesn't play well with enterprises, because they start with the fundamental assumption that the device is PERSONAL, and you're not using someone else's loaned device. I'm very glad for this. (And I'm never giving my company permissions to remotely wipe my devices with Mobile Iron.)

I'd really love to see OS usage percentage numbers with corporate use factored out. My gut feeling is that Windows has absolutely nosedived for personal use over the past few years, and it's only corporations that are keeping the numbers in the air. Half the people I know don't even have a computer, and are just using their phone or an iPad.

> Apple doesn't play well with enterprises

Well, it plays too well actually. At my current job and at previous one we had a choice Mac or a Windows laptop.

Mac ones were alway much more rigid with restrictions, less hackable (e.g. Installing Linux side by side was impossible on Mac, because it broke macos somehow as a result of enterprise drive encryption).

Well, I just had to take my laptop in to work to get the firmware updated because BitLocker hiccuped, and locked me out of the machine. I'm doubting that you're going to be any safer on Windows in this regard, unless Corporate IT is NOT turning on drive encryption for Windows. (And even I would probably advocate for this particular policy.)

It wasn't a firmware update, if bitlocker detects hardware or disk config changes - it needs to be unlocked from the enterprise side. Most deployments have a self service portal so you don't have to bother IT for it.

As for installing Linux, that should be fine as long as you're not pulling company data on that - and it should be gated with whatever endpoint protection there is for Linux.

I absolutely get the distaste for gratuitous UX changes. I've been using Xfce since 2004 and it hasn't changed all that much since then.

Overall I'd never claim that a Linux desktop is a "Just Works" proposition, but judging from the issues my colleagues have with macOS, I wouldn't trade my Linux problems for their macOS problems. I can't speak much to Windows anymore, but I can't imagine it'd be all that much better.

(Full disclosure: 2004-2009 I was a core Xfce developer.)

OSX problems range from:

- oh look, apple decided to change their security model. Now old apps don't work. (necessary to prevent malware).

- oh look, no more 32bit programs.

- oh look, you plugged in a monitor CRASH.

- oh look, you plugged in a charger... CRASH.

- oh look, a touchbar.

- let's all pay a $1000 premium for hardware.

On OSX backwards compatibility isn't a concern apparently.

Windows problems range from:

- Who installed this thing? And to where? WTF is it?

- Why is there 2+ interfaces for all system configurations. 1 of which is pretty but incomplete, and the other hidden and terrible but complete?

- Why does it insist on using edge and bing for fucking everything?

> let's all pay a $1000 premium for hardware.

Worth it IMHO. I have a Mac mini that I bought on a whim while a Windows desktop was in the shop.

I’ve had it six years now, and in that time I’ve had three Windows machines die.

Yeah. Now try again with the latest Mac mini and compare :(

Yay for anecdotes. I've had the same windows desktop for 6 years without anything being replaced.

I also use a Linux laptop which runs great and "just works".

> Why is there 2+ interfaces for all system configurations. 1 of which is pretty but incomplete, and the other hidden and terrible but complete?

Of all the complaints, that one I totally understand the rationale for. It's an iterative design, they simply haven't finished building the new one yet. Until they do, I ignore it.

It isn't exactly advertised as an incomplete alpha product. Everything in Windows 10 funnels you into the new interface. The fact that the first-class option for system configuration is woefully incomplete is pretty hard to forgive. This is the only supported version of the flagship product of a fortune 500 company, not an early-access Steam game.

Agreed, W10 has been out for years. Apparently it has hit maintenance mode before they could finish. Honestly I'd rather have the XP control panel, with no extra clicks.

> Why is there 2+ interfaces for all system configurations. 1 of which is pretty but incomplete, and the other hidden and terrible but complete?

This is one of the most absurdly awful things in Windows 10. Trying to disable a network adapter requires navigating a maze of useless New Design(r) config pages (where, for example, the ONLY interaction is "set connection to Metered mode"), complete with broken back buttons that take you somewhere arbitrary.

- WTF are all important links on the M$ website dead?

Thank You for all your contributions to Xfce. I switched to it on FreeBSD and it is rock solid. When WinXP went EOL I setup a FreeBSD desktop and it has been fabulous. Truthfully my only gotcha is bluetooth support on FreeBSD is pretty bad. I can work around it as I listen to all these horror stories about Win10.

Xfce allows me to mimic XP quite well. Drag the bar to the bottom of the screen and setup a dark blue background and I felt at home. I like feeling in control of my desktop experience. The switch to GTK3 was not better but GTK2 is getting stale so I understand..

If you want Bluetooth for audio, there are USB dongles that have standalone Bluetooth controllers in them and are only exposed to the OS as an audio device. I use it on my OpenBSD desktop.

And the occasional "we changed all network settings and turned off all network devices" system update. And then of course "if you need help go to www..."

Linux desktop is a horrible UX. But is also an amazing server environment.

Also windows can run on partially broken hardware and still not crash. Which is incredibly impressive.

> just don't understand why people run windows.

Honestly, its DPI scaling and windows management with 4K monitors. Both Microsoft and Apple are still not perfect in this area so I assume its an extremely hard problem. The other issue is not all programs, like Daws and video editors, have a Linux version.

> In the last five or six years I've come to dread the Linux desktop and its constant churn of rewrites and UX "improvements".

Not like Windows is especially immune to this, either, though in Microsoft's defense they actually listened to the users somewhat and backpedaled to a proper Start Menu instead of continuing to shove Metro down everyone's throats.

Windows has a big ole flaw nowadays: not friendly to SSD+HDD setup where you put the OS on the SSD. It insists on storing everything on drive C:\ which is on the SSD, even the behemoth that is Visual Studio (though that can be offset in large part with junction links). I've allocated 64GB of SSD space to my Windows and it managed to fill it up already even though I make it a point to install and save everything the HDD. Now, Win10 can't install any of its stupid updates anymore. Microsoft seriously needs to stop living in the 90s where it was okay to shove all data to drive C:\...

> But the chances of something like waking up to the announcement that Microsoft is removing desktop icons in the next update and you can just install this third-party application for it (which will break with every update) are practically zero.

I get your point, but I do think this has actually occurred. Remembr when 7 updated to 8, and when 8 updated to 8.2 (I think) and when 8 updated to 10? I didn't use Windows much back then, but I really remember those three updates.

I forget which, but one unexpectedly took nearly 4 hours. Like an entire morning waiting for updates to finish, unable to use that computer, which was the one computer hooked up to the beamer, but it had to be updated at some point. I actually wrote a "windows update game" during that time, where you had to play a platforming hourglass, collecting percentages of progress. If you got to 100% it said something like "Restart to finish upgrading", then it started at 0% again, and you got ONE point. I think somebody got a high score of three.

And the first update completely changed the UI, removed the Start Menu (or hid it?), made icons into "tiles", some of which were "active" (?), which is to me a lot like you're describing. I was truly lost in Windows for a while. On all sides, not just the UI, but the settings, the folders.

And I still don't know what I have to do in Windows to disable ALL the telemetry and advertising in menus. Is it still possible? It's probably about as hard as setting up an Ubuntu install. And it's keeping me scared away from Windows, just like setting up Ubuntu seems scary to some other users.

It's not that I don't like Windows, like you say, if it were 2000 (or XP, or 7, I've also gotten used to those) ... actually you're right that 2000 might have been the last Windows that I wasn't slightly scared about (spying on me, even though what we considered "spying" in the days of XP, are like Tuesdays now).

There's this one thing that will always make me go back to Linux, however. And is that (perhaps the way I use it?) Windows has a "honeymoon" period that is one or two years, after that it just degrades in quality, responsiveness, just getting slow. And I have no idea how to fix that, clean it up, or whatever, besides installing Linux. Which makes the thing run smooth again. The only thing that seems to slow Linux down after a while, is the browser because the web just keeps getting heavier.

But I don't hate using Windows for those 1-2 years :) Especially now they got better command line stuff, who knows.

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

There are many, many products that either run significantly better on windows (Office) or are completely unavailable on other OSs (many video games).

That's changing, for sure. But there's still a long tail of products that semi-necessitate windows.

How is office better than Google Docs?

Works completely offline?

For real document creation, Word and Latex are the best out there, bar none.

For detailed and powerful spreadsheet use there is nothing that compares to Excel. This coming from someone forced to use Google Sheets at a former company, after having Excel.

Try using bi-directional text, or including equations in Docs. It is practically unusable.

Excel is so powerful that people are doing with it stupid things and than their businesses rely on them. That stuff will never work in Docs.

Office is a killer product, with extremely rich feature set that works very well. Sadly, there is nothing in the market that even close. It is the main (perhaps only) reason I still have to use a Windows VM.

FWIW, I don't think it is necessarily.

But, a lot of people are forced to use office for various reasons - trying to edit a docx in Docs/Pages/LibreOffice, for example, can be really frustrating for any number of reasons (fonts, margins, etc. all sometimes break spectacularly).

So if you're using office quite frequently, windows can be very appealing.

Not to mention how just plain ugly LibreOffice’s page renderer is. The kerning and spacing and shapes just seem so off all the time.

Advanced formatting. I could do things in Microsoft office that Google Docs can’t even dream about.

As much as it pains me to say it the power of excel is uncomparable, especially for people who can’t program and are never going to learn how.

Interoperability.

For me, a common use case is to receive a large document from someone using MS Office, make small alterations or comments, and send it back... while being certain that I have not changed anything else (including formatting and layout of included illustrations) that I did not want to change. Neither Google Docs nor OpenOffice currently support that, simply opening and saving a nontrivial Word document changes the layout.

OpenOffice doesn't exist anymore, and hasn't for a decade.

or are completely unavailable on other OSs (many video games)

I get a chuckle whenever I realize how things have changed.

In the early to mid-80's, there was a popular mantra that the IBM PC ecosystem was for "serous work," and anything else was "just for games," which was a slap at Apple (then dominant for business, but rapidly slipping) and the other alternatives.

Today, it seems that for the majority of ordinary people, the only reason they stay in the Wintel ecosystem is for games.

Games back then weren't an important part of our culture. They are now. Consequently they are a requirement.

Seems simple enough to understand.

Games back then weren't an important part of our culture.

The mind boggles.

I think you've just outed yourself as someone who wasn't alive or awake back then.

I was writing games back then, thank you very much. :-P

> the only reason they stay in the Wintel ecosystem is for games.

Is it still "Wintel" when a lot of gamers are going AMD now?

It is until AMD goes mainstream with an instruction set not developed by Intel.

Such as AMD64? :)

Okay, or directly descended from an instruction set designed by Intel :P

support is an obvious reason. with the exception of some dev tools and mac-only creative software, pretty much everything supports windows.

I can go out and buy any high end laptop and be confident it will work well with windows. similarly, if I want to throw some random hardware in my desktop, I don't have to worry about whether drivers exist for my os. all this stuff requires an additional research step with linux.

in short, if you're a power user (and especially if you like choosing your own hardware) and you want your os to "just work", windows is the best of few options.

It really depends on your needs.

For example, my in-laws got a Chromebook a few years ago. My father-in-law definitely liked it better. For my mother-in-law, it was an unmitigated disaster. He really only uses the computer for watching Netflix and reading the New York Times. She, a teacher, also uses it for work, and she found that most of the programs she used for classroom prep simply weren't available for ChromeOS, and didn't have any equivalent. So I ended up helping her give her old Windows desktop a nice deep scrubbing, put some more RAM in it, all that good stuff, and that's now what she uses when her iPad won't do.

My own parents prefer Windows, too, though that's a more fuzzy situation. Basically, it's just that it's what they've always used. They've tried other platforms a couple times, and quickly found that it just wasn't even remotely worth the hassle of learning all the differences. That's down to differences in file sharing, printer set up, all that good stuff.

Me, for a while I was thinking of switching back to Windows at home for a while, simply because I used Windows at work, and I was getting sick of having to remember two different sets of keyboard commands and suchlike. (Then I went to a shop where all the devs were given Macs, so I ended up there instead.) For my purposes, running some other OS as the host and Linux in a VM is plenty good enough.

Because everyone has their own priorities.

My main priority is to give my family technical solutions they could manage if I were to kick the bucket, and to ultimately own their data they need.

Between my wife and I we have 1tb of photos and videos. We could store it all in the cloud, but then if they shut her account down for whatever reason we would lose them all. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't find this acceptable. I do seem to be in the minority here, everyone I know just hosts all their files at a single cloud provide. It seems nuts to me.

And I haven't found an off-site backup solution that works with Linux. CrashPlan used to offer family plans but they got rid of them. Backblaze only has B2 for Linux - not really acceptable given my requirements.

So my family runs Windows. I run Linux.

Chromebooks are far worse, if you have any privacy concerns.

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

I like gaming. That's pretyty much all I do on Windows. I have a macbook for work because MacOS gets out of your way and just works. I have a linux server and a linux workstation for other stuff - the workstation for coding, experimenting etc, the server for VPN endpoint, gitlab, time-machine and various other servery things.

But for games, if you're wanting to game on PC, windows is King. And that's why my workstation has windows installed too.

(My mother and my brother still use it because I can't be bothered to try to teach them anything else)

> I just don't understand why people run windows

I've seen so many good answers but to me, the main one is that people don't know there are alternatives.

I know virtually no one in "real" life that knows what Linux is. Windows is pre-installed and people just roll with it. Some are aware there's this thing called "Mac" that it is more expensive and that's it.

Video games.

My windows computer is for goofing off and gaming. That is the only reason I keep it. If I want to get real work done I boot back into linux or use a macbook.

> I just don't understand why people run windows

I do. And just a disclaimer, I am using linux 100% on desktop (and prefer freebsd on servers). Where I run firefox, i3, terminal, evolution (as I am forced to use it due to Exchange support, while I actually prefer mutt) and this is it. I rarely run anything else that is windowed.

The reason is simple.

Linux desktop really sucks. Instead of whole community stepping together and make ONE well made, bugless desktop, where most of people wouldnt need to install 3rd party hacks, edit config files and do everything using mouse, you need to fight which one is better and you end up with 20+ desktop enviroments that all sucks one way or another. Linux would have edge over windows desktop if there wouldnt be higlanders fractions fighting which half finished desktop is better. And I am observing this for 20 years.

Same goes with binary compatibility.

Personally I dont care but for ordinary "dumb" user it is revolting. And immidiately when freebsd will give me working hw support, I will move away from linux too. As it is a mess since systemd came, where more and more non existant problems are beeing solved while you still cant clean dhclient mess from the system without killing it (-r? -x? Only in man pages.)

It is a sad story of egoism and vanity where something that could be great, never was.

As someone who uses one of the minority desktops within a minority distro (Fedora w/ Cinnamon spin), I agree that all of the trash-talking within a community is to the detriment to its spread.

I almost wish we could get all Linux users to verbally agree to something like the following:

"I will not trash popular Linux desktop environments to outsiders. Ubuntu is fine. GNOME is fine. I understand that for the sake of the Linux Desktop's survival, it is more important that I be helpful and supportive of people's choice to use Default Ubuntu, rather than telling them that my Arch/Xfce/i3 setup is The One True Path."

Use whatever you want in private. Just shut the f--- up about trashing Ubuntu/Mint/Manjaro at every opportunity because you disagree with some decision of theirs. It makes us all look bad.

I think you misunderstood : the problem is not the trash-talking, the problem is that all Linux DE are trashes and if people were only putting their effort on one it wouldn't be trash.

Everyone thinks that different part of it is trash, so you get 20 desktop. Its like in that xkcd where you creat ultimate desktop and end up with 21 desktops instead of original 20.

And why would Linux need Such desktop-to-end-all-other-desktops? It would be a trashy configure me only with mouse desktop. Let such users stay at Windows or Mac and allow power users to have their choice if 20 desktops with majority of them allowing at least a text configuration.

GNOME isn't fine. See, on switching keyboard layout it switches focus from current window while it writes some file to disk. Yes, it's not terrible on SSD, and I bet whoever invented this monstrosity has an SSD. But needing an SSD not to lose some of the letters you type just screams of insanity.

OTOH, yes, the rest of Ubuntu is fine, and to anyone fed up with Windows I gladly recommend anything else based on Ubuntu LTS. [LKX]Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Mint — they are all really fine.

How often does a user switch their keyboard layout?

When writing in Russian, every time when they switch between typing prose and typing equations or code. So, maybe about a dozen times per sentence.

At first my jaw dropped on your comment, but then I thought, maybe we non-latin-writing people are just abusing a feature meant for something different? Do you use several layouts, but switch between them infrequently?

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if people assume that non-latin languages have all the characters you need to type in that language on a single layout. For English at least, you really only use a single layout.

In various non-european scenarios, possibly multiple times per sentence. For example, including the word "Microsoft" or "Linux" in the middle of non-latin script requires two keyboard layout switches, to latin and back.

I code on US keyboard, but i write mails and documentation for work on Slovenian keyboard.

It's not bad if you focus on one or the other. But when you combine the two, (talking about techical stuf, tickets, code reviews, ...) I often have to switch.

I'd say i switch on average few dozen times per hour.

Huh? So? Surprisingly, Ubuntu MATE has bugs too, you can look here too see some of them: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate

1) This bug is a major one for a big part of the world.

2) It belongs to the part of GNOME that exists solely because GNOME decided to reinvent keyboard input.

3) Google shows lots of people aware of the problem (bugreports, stackexchange, whatever) — of course it does, see (1) — but not only no solution, but also I couldn't find any workaround short of using another DE, although — see (2) — disabling the feature altogether would be a decent workaround.

Of course all programs have bugs. Do other free programs tend to have bugs of this lasting quality?

> on switching keyboard layout it switches focus from current window while it writes some file to disk.

I don't use GNOME, but I've noticed switching keyboard layout in Fcitx being slow. This is especially annoying since I have four different layouts and switching back-and-forth requires cycling through all the others.

I wonder whether this is actually a problem at a deeper layer. (Possibly that layer was originally created for GNOME.) Do you happen to have a link to a bug tracker for this issue?

My roommate at work used to give me grief for using MacBook. He used Ubuntu on some kind of Lenovo laptop. His keyboard would stop working at least once a day. I knew because he was using really loud mechanical keyboard. So I would give him grief about spending half his time "fixing" his Ubuntu. One of the best work roommates I ever had.

On a more serious note; I could not believe how little, at least from looking over my roommate's shoulder, Linux desktop experience improved since I last used it in 2005.

I think a missing piece of the story is that there haven't been UX designers involved in the development of Linux DEs. MS and Apple have money and motivation to hire UX people and do user testing on their interfaces and they don't even get it right all the time. The folks doing open source desktop environment development are mostly scratching their own itches and so (I think) by definition, developing niche products.

EDIT: For which I am extremely grateful BTW. I love to see experimentation in the UI space. Just pointing out a reason we got here that I don't see mentioned often.

> bugless desktop

Nobody has achieved or will achieve that. Moving between macos, windows, and Linux - all have their issues.

> where most of people wouldnt need to install 3rd party hacks, edit config files

It's pretty close. Using either Fedora or Ubuntu, I didn't need to tweak anything in years to make normal desktop experience work.

> The reason is simple.

Linux desktop really sucks.

While I am as idiosyncratic as anyone about Linux desktops (I run the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is basically the old KDE 3 kept up to date), and I am no fan of systemd or hw support problems (amdgpu, for instance, insists on locking up my laptop every so often), I don't think any of these things are the primary reason people run windows. I think the primary reason people run windows is that they have to use it at work and so they're familiar with it and don't even bother considering other alternatives.

> Instead of whole community stepping together and make ONE well made, bugless desktop

The reason this hasn't happened is simple: there are no market forces driving it to happen. What would create such market forces would be for large corporations, or governments, to abandon Windows for Linux. It would probably end up cheaper, since the cost of development of a well made, bugless Linux desktop would probably amortize to less than the Windows tax per unit. But it would require someone to be willing to do something different from what everyone else is doing, and that's not a way to get ahead in a large corporation or government.

>I don't think any of these things are the primary reason people run windows. I think the primary reason people run windows is that they have to use it at work and so they're familiar with it and don't even bother considering other alternatives.

I think this is slowly changing. I'm seeing more and more people who have given up Windows and moved to 1) Macbooks, 2) tables, 3) Chromebooks, or 4) just using phones.

I agree that the Linux desktop failures aren't the primary reason people run Windows, but it hasn't helped.

>It would probably end up cheaper, since the cost of development of a well made, bugless Linux desktop would probably amortize to less than the Windows tax per unit.

There's no "probably" about it. We already have fairly decent Linux desktops (just use Ubuntu: for most people, it "just works" most of the time, and it costs nothing). The Windows tax is already the largest BOM item for a PC. The additional cost needed to make Debian or Ubuntu into something even more bug-free and fully-featured wouldn't be that much. In fact, this was basically the whole idea behind many Linux distros: give them away for free to the masses, but sell support contracts to large corporations and governments to finance it. Unfortunately, that didn't work out so well. It's worked for Red Hat, but that's about the only company that's done well in this space, mainly because of US Government contracts.

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

My use of my home computer mostly consists of making/learning music and playing games. Both of these activities pretty much require Windows. There are some ways around it, like I could be running games under Wine and use a Linux DAW and use something like LinVST to get my plugins working, but it requires a lot of effort and the results are not guaranteed (people seem to have mixed experience running Kontakt 6 under Wine and not all games run equally well). Or I could go the money route and buy a console for games and a Mac for music, but it seems like an overkill and I would be exchanging a nasty proprietary system that is Windows for two separate nasty proprietary systems of Mac and PS4/Xbox.

>Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least.

Yet, a large majority of computers are running an operating system that spies on you and serves ads to you. Not just personal computers, but most businesses too. Buying a computer that doesn't come with windows on it is difficult for the average person who isn't trying, I don't mean Chromebooks or those system76 type computers, I mean walking through best buy or something the way a lot of non tech people end up buying computers. I mean i've had windows restore itself on my hardrive after a boot issue despite formatting it away years ago. Or at least try to, I was really confused when the windows recovery prompt popped up. As far as I.knew it had been gone since the day I got my laptop.

Not to mention, thanks to Microsoft, I now essentially need their permission to install anything other than windows on modern hardware(I know it's not quite that simple and kernel modules can be self signed etc.), but effectively, at least from the issues i've dealt with...and continue to deal with, the most recent being with virtual box and having to self sign kernel.modules to make it work, uefi really feels like Microsoft trying to keep whatever bit of control they can over every computer whatever you decide to do with it.

I'm not trying to start a uefi debate, I know there's work arounds and other things ways to deal with it, but since it's existed, it's been nothing but hassles for me and it's something I never asked for or wanted in my computer.

Because I work in a Windows-only facility, at least where my level of dev work is done.

And I live in a house where the only other person has only ever user Windows, and hates change. Like even desktop icons shouldn't relocate unless she does it herself.

She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason, then there better not be any more differences than the ones indicated.

> She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason

Unless you are in the IT industry or at least an enthusiast, this is a rational approach.

I'm in the IT industry, and it's my approach. I changed my desktop from fluxbox to xfce about 10 years ago, but have much the same keyboard shortcuts as I did 20 years ago, and the occasional icon has appeared in the dock as time progressed (namely volume, battery, wifi). I still use xplanet as my desktop for the rare times I see it, and I certainly don't have any icons on the desktop.

Actually the opposite. Unless you work in IT, you likely don't understand changelogs or release notes very well. Unless you can assess the risk of not updating, the safe approach is to auto update everything. Yes, it may be annoying and you may run into new bugs.

On the other hand: Your USB ports stopped working? You should've been updating the bios. You got breached via the browser or email app? Should've been updating them.

Kind of sad that our industry standard is: you need to put up with us changing shit on you all the time so that things can keep working.

If I were a marketer, which clearly I am not, I would think it would be bad marketing to have your computer constantly be telling you "HEY, you need to drop what you're doing to apply this fix for me at random, because if you don't someone is going to install ransomware. Oh and by the way, we're going to install Candy Crush Saga with this, because fuck you."

Maybe the person not updating isn't rational, but if every update is fucking candy crush I couldn't blame them for saying "maybe microsoft is worse than the hackers"

>I just don't understand why people run windows.

For me the main reason is games. Dual booting is really annoying and jumping through the 15 hoops it takes to run games on Linux doesn't seem worth it considering how poorly games seem to run natively on Windows already. It's not a question of "there are no games for Linux" but rather "the game I want to play is not on Linux".

This one point is basically the anchor that all the other usage is centered around for me. Linux simply doesn't offer something amazing enough over what Windows does to warrant all this trouble for games. If the games I wanted to play ran decently on Linux with few problems then I'd probably switch over. But considering that MS is now doing that Xbox game pass subscription even on Windows, I think the chance of switching is becoming less and less likely.

Steam with Proton and ProtonDb was a game changer. What runs native in Linux vs using Proton is like night and day

Proton is fantastic, but you’re still saying I am going have to accept less compatibility and more work than on windows windows. Not worth it for me, especially with an nvidia GPU. I understand that’s mostly to blame on Nvidia but it’s still the reality of the situation.

Same reason for me. If not for games, I would have switched a long time ago. My favourite game runs only on windows and requires an anti-cheat that runs only on windows. So I just dual-boot.

I switched over to running desktop linux a couple months ago because I was so fed up with these things, but the truth is... it's just pretty bad. Like if I let my laptop go to sleep my touchpad will never work again. I had to do a bunch of weird kernel hacks to keep my wifi working when the device goes to sleep, and even then it's a hack (I had to enable the airplane mode button, and then make sure to hit it twice any time I open the screen. Come on!). And the lock screen breaks if I'm plugged into a monitor, it shows this weird low resolution version and a high resolution one on top of it. Everything is just incredibly sloppy and either outright broken, or kind of broken. This is Kubuntu btw! I tried Fedora and it crashed every two minutes if I booted X windows so, that didn't work out. Also the main thing with Fedora was it couldn't recognize my sound card, which is like the main intel thing built into every laptop. Maybe it's a winmodem thing again or something, but overall it just does not work at all.

So the reason people are still using Microsoft: You HAVE to unless you explicitly buy hardware for Linux. It's just unusable otherwise and the trajectory is getting WORSE, not better.

Exactly my experience! In addition to that, it kills your battery in no time

Yes, you MUST buy certified hardware [0], preferably with it pre-loaded with Linux [1].

Ultimately, Linux didn't make enough of a dent in the desktop hardware space in the 90's/00's. The level of interest from hardware vendors (ODM/OEM/component manufacturers) has gone down - that's why things are worse.

If you don't use non-preloaded hardware you are NOT signalling to anyone that desktop Linux is important. This reduces overall interest - vendors think that no-one uses Linux - over the long run this reduces the amount of work done.

The take-away is please buy a DELL Sputnik with support - you are signalling to the market you want desktop Linux - and if it breaks you can complain!

I confess I only partially practise what I preach - I'm on a thinkpad =-)

[0] https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and there are other sites [1] https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln310507...

Well, I'll definitely keep an eye on that piece of hardware. I do intend that the next system I buy can run Linux well. I mean I'm going to stick with it, even if it is bad.

That said.. even though I'm pointing out hardware issues I don't think the free software world should get a pass on these things. I get that a lack of corporate sponsorship can make things hard, BUT, a lot of the issues I'm running into are things that are just about having decent project maintenance.

Like, if my touchpad stops working after I close the screen, clearly they had enough info to actually make a working touchpad driver, but not enough to actually, uh, make it reliable. In most companies you have the concept of "alpha" or "beta" level of software, and I feel like EVERY component in Linux is alpha level. As long as you're 100% on the happy path your experience will be perfectly mediocre, and otherwise it's going bad VERY fast. Like I mean, it's pretty sad that the login screen is broken. I can't be the first person that plugged their laptop into a monitor! And it recognizes the monitor and works fine with it! So it's just an issue of kdm (or whatever the hell it is now) not actually being able to handle a multi monitor setup in... 2020? This shit has been old hat for 15 YEARS.

I don't know what it will take for free software to produce a decent desktop system, but I think blaming it on 3rd party companies is off the table at this point, there's obviously something not quite working with this model when it comes to producing software people can use.

It's not "open source" that's in question here, it is "work done for free without commercially paid developers".

A bunch of work happens for things like wifi and cpu because of Android and ChromeOS.

But, the number of professional paid developers doing "desktop Linux" drivers is probably fewer than 10 right now [0].

The number of full-time paid developers on "desktop Linux" itself is probably under 100? ... probably more like 50 honestly.

Drivers are of alpha quality (using your definition) because they are not written by the manufacturer. The reliability of drivers is down to the lack of availability of information. The bottom line is that the lack of access to information about how the hardware works means it's hard to make reliable drivers.

Your trackpad example is perfect because AFAIK synaptics had to reverse engineered.

Microsoft doesn't write drivers, the hardware vendors does. And Microsoft runs a test, if the hardware works then it passes the test and gets a sticker on it's butt. HP can only ship hardware that has the sticker. This outsources the cost to the manufacturer and the testing to the OEM.

Whereas, in Linux land those economics don't apply.

I get your points but if you actually want to use desktop Linux then this is one area where you have to go with the grain - buy a PRELOADED certified system because that's going to be built from the smallest set of hardware that the vendor knows is compatible.

[0] meaning there is no-one paid to work on monitors, there is no-one paid to work on that trackpad. What is being paid for is so that Android or ChromeOS can work.

So honestly, if the answer is "buy special hardware to use this thing"... I'm probably not going to use the thing.

I support desktop linux up to the point where I'm willing to use it, and contribute if I am using, but, I'm not replacing everything I own for an experience that's already proven to be bad. I'm not really convinced the problem is hardware, I think there are cultural/organization/design problems here. It shouldn't be hard to have multi-monitor support for a login screen 15 years after it's been a common setup. I shouldn't be battling with ACPI issues when ACPI is a standard that's been around since like 1996. I'm willing to be forgiving about things like graphics drivers or other things that are on the cutting edge with manufacturers that are mostly indifferent, but we're talking basic functionality. Even though I'm sympathetic to the manpower issues it doesn't change the fact that it's not really usable and telling people to buy new computers isn't a good solution.

I think you just have to accept that desktop Linux has a different set of tradeoffs. It's not right for everyone but you were driven here because you couldn't stand Windows but you're already dismissing the alternative as 'proven to be bad'.

Also I think you are underestimating how crappy and broken a lot of hardware is. See eg. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/tree/master...

or read some of the comments here, lots are about ACPI https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/pci/q...

Has anyone bought the libinput maintainer your laptop hardware so he can work out why it doesn't work? You can see from the commit log that it's mainly developed by one person, who also developed the previous Linux (synaptics) touchpad driver for years before that.

ACPI is an overcomplicated hostile Microsoft-led standard that has a side effect of creating problems on OSs other than Windows because most hardware manufacturers are only interested enough to test things enough to make sure Windows boots and has no problems. Forget the Halloween documents, this is far more diabolical.

It's an early attack toward making the PC platform move toward ownership and control of Microsoft, well before UEFI or Secure Boot.

Combine this with the modern trend of some hardware manufacturer's refusing to release details needed to create drivers unless NDAs are signed, which wasn't something commonplace in the early 90's when Linux (and Windows NT) was born, and this creates the situation where things don't "just work" on Linux.

With the proper hardware information and without a bad firmware interface like ACPI in the way of the hardware, the only limit is whether someone is willing to write and maintain a driver for it.

>there's obviously something not quite working with this model when it comes to producing software people can use

It might be that the model is never going to provide the financial incentives to work perfectly on every random Windows laptop, which is what you seem to mean by 'producing software people can use'. Meanwhile, plenty of people use it just fine - your laptop not working hardly invalidates the whole desktop Linux concept.

You're missing my point, which is that the problems extend past hardware support. Also it's hardware that frankly should work. MSI GS65. There's nothing weird hardware wise with this laptop.

Linux will always have unstable drivers (with a few exceptions where companies throw money at it) until linux kernel developers acknowledge that a stable driver ABI results in stable drivers.

> The level of interest from hardware vendors (ODM/OEM/component manufacturers) has gone down - that's why things are worse.

I'm sort of surprised the Linux community didn't put more effort into a compatibility layer so that Windows drivers could be used on Linux, or something to make it easy for vendors to quickly port their Windows drivers to Linux.

It's only doable for a small subset from the system side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper

On the other hand, large drivers like NVIDIA use their own blobs which likely share a lot of code between systems.

Right, what I'm saying is that I'm surprised more effort wasn't put into NDIS to make it work with other types of hardware.

This is why, despite Apple not caring about us anymore, you still see an overwhelming amount of Macs.

Unless you choose a laptop carefully by picking one that is known to run Linux well, you run the risk of running into driver issues.

I chose a Dell XPS 15 two years ago (although with Windows installed), and have had no driver issues beyond what was known at the time of purchase (no fingerprint sensor driver, some problem with chip that switches between Intel and NVidia graphics). Dell have updated the BIOS about once every three months, and there is usually mention of fixes for BIOS for Linux (none that have affected me AFAIK) - helpful BIOS fixes which you don’t get on most other laptops - a very clear indication that there is effort by Dell to support Linux.

The previous 5 years I used boring business Toshiba laptops and had a lucky run of few problems with Linux drivers.

I agree. And it's really, really sad. I have just switched to Debian with i3 and in so many ways it amazing. I have the most incredible shortcuts set up for managing my additional displays and sound devices, all run with bash scripts. I've managed to set up Syncthing to completely replace my reliance on cloud-based storage and I can do desktop gaming from in Linux or switch to windows by simply typing "windows" in a terminal. The breadth of open source source and the ability to run windows applications if necessary... it's just amazing. But it has been hella difficult to solve simple issues that for windows/mac os just work out of the box. A typical user is overburdened in Debian. Ubuntu is pretty sweet though, and with flatpaks, snap packages, and appImages becoming the norm, maybe it's only a matter of time before widespread adoption... for gamers we're surely on the cusp, Steam's proton is incredible.

"I just don't understand why people run windows."

Because not everyone wants to get things to work through command-line especially Broadcom drivers.

I use Windows because:

- Chromebooks don't meet my needs and Macs are incredibly expensive.

- There's a lot of software I care about which is Windows-only and doesn't have a good Linux alternative, especially games.

- I have not had great experiences using Linux. I still run into lots of dumb little issues that make me feel like I'm back in the Windows XP days, except this time I have to enter mysterious terminal commands I found on Stack Exchange to make things work right.

- You can easily avoid this kind of nonsense in Windows 10 with like half an hour of setup after your initial install.

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

Software that doesn't exist elsewhere (maybe OSX).

The Windows division has never really been part of the "New Microsoft", it seems from the outside.

Microsoft didn't buy Github out of the goodness of their heart. They also didn't buy it because of it's significant revenue, a couple hundred million is probably a marketing budget to Microsoft, not something that drives the bottom line. Microsoft also didn't buy it to score appearance points with the socially conscious dev community that populated most of Github, although it was a nice PR story for a bit. You could say the ICE thing has driven all that goodwill away.

Microsoft bought Github for the data set. To mine code to train models to write code to put developers out of business. Microsoft is coming for all of your jobs. They aren't investing billions in AI research and Open AI for philanthropy. The sooner people realize this the better.

Sure it's tin-foil, but it's a hill I am willing to die on.

I'm not scared of a "model" "trained" on the long tail of Github code any more than I'm scared of someone who can search stackoverflow faster than I can.

I shudder to think of the kind of code that a machine-learning product trained on the full set of public GitHub repositories would produce. It might be better than what Frontpage used to spit out, or Word, when you used the save as HTML option, but I'm not sanguine about that sort of thing ever putting anyone out of work.

Are they working on something like that? I'm sure that there are people doing so. Will it eventually trickle in some limited way as a productivity enhancement into Visual Studio or VS Code? Probably. Is it going to be some kind of magical no-code silver bullet that obviates the need for programmers? Not a snowball's chance in hell.

I think the OP thing is bad.

What you're suggesting (if they could pull it off) I would welcome. Either it turns into (an even worse than now) corporatist dystopia and there's turmoil before a reset, or it opens up for "everyone" and we're closer to post-scarcity.

But most likely they'll automate some stuff, because this isn't real AI, and I can adapt faster than they can and do stuff their models can't.

AI is a good thing if it takes all jobs.

The bad thing is the non-stop messing with standards and EEE. Because it makes existing jobs unbearable.

> train models to write code

I've seen "deep dream". You'll get models that produce stuff that locally looks like code but doesn't actually make sense. Code-like extruded product. People will waste careers on the "steering" and "minor fixups" necessary to make it actually work which will be orders of magnitude larger than the work needed to just write the software in the first place.

That's the cost of giving up symbolic AI in favour of pattern recognition.

Nah. Microsoft bought Github among doing other things (WSL, becoming top member of the Linux Foundation etc.) because they want to replace GNU/Linux with their MS/Linux which could be mostly Open Source and mostly free, but I'm sure will be engineered in a way that gives Microsoft full control of it. There is no need to put Linux developers out of business when Linux developers themselves already use a MS dev system (VSCode) on a MS platform (WSL). Just wait for the day applications will start to nag users with "For best user experience, this Linux application should be run under WSL".

Anything sufficiently advanced to produce working code from vague design documents would be functionally indistinguishable from true AI. Barring some kind of major breakthrough in the field of AI (not machine learning, actual AI), this is basically a pipe dream. At best they'll produce something that given a very detailed and rigid set of instructions can produce a working program... which is exactly what a compiler does.

Just wanted to mention that you can already mine the data that would be useful for something like you mention, like so: https://console.butt.google.com/marketplace/details/github/g...

Some friends think I'm overreacting for refusing to use Microsoft products to this day, yes they have open sourced a lot of cool tech but they are still Microsoft. I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

>I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

I don't have the same laptop so I can't comment on your exact situation. That said, I have a Windows machine and I am not using a Microsoft account to log in so your experience is not universal.

A colleague just bought a new desktop and set it up last weekend. He ran into Microsoft wanting him to login to a MS account _on initial install_. He ended up having to go into the BIOS to disable networking so he could force the installer to let him initially setup a local account. I don't know if this is for every install and is just my anecdotal perspective.

It's a dark pattern. You can get around it, but it's not easy for normal people to do.

it is a recent change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683

How about instead of a passive-aggressive ad try not showing me ads at all on my PC? It’s bad enough that it comes pre-installed and is the default.

> Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools?

Isn't this exactly what Microsoft is doing? Clicking on the ad leads to the product download page which also describes the features.

In most cases, average users like to try software by feel, not by looking at a technical spec sheet.

Exactly this. Show me facts, what percentage of battery life will it save my _specific_ laptop compared to FF, how much faster will _my_ experience be.

Is there anything that the dev tools will allow me to do that I can't with FF Developer Edition?

In any case I'm mainly a MacOS user, but still.

Just a few days, people were celebrating new Microsoft Edge being a viable competitor to Google Chrome and how it is all good for privacy. Let the thing take some hold, then complain about monopoly.

If people want to "ban" something, they should ban "browser detection / user agent" and targeted ads based on that.

If some state in "middle america" ran an ad targeted at users in SF stating "move to xyz, your life will be better", is that intrusive too? Well, then ban all targeted ads.

Win XP and Win7 was my all time fav microsoft OS. Screw 10. So much data collection and noise.

Not strong enough. Remember: Microsoft hearts linux.

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