I switched to Linux after using Windows for 10 years
shalithasuranga.medium.com
shalithasuranga.medium.com
I will point out that File Explorer includes a shortcut for opening PowerShell at the current directory, which can be triggered through the File menu or alt-f-r.
Its worth highlighting that Linux isn't an option for everyone. I personally prefer the design to Windows 10 and hate Microsoft's anti-consumer stance. I'd love to confine it to a VM that I only run when I need something specific. Unfortunately, Ubuntu at least cannot handle using Intel graphics with Nvidia graphics in a mixed-DPI setup (one monitor 1080P, one monitor 4K). I think this is a reasonably common setup. Running a kernel update is also troublingly likely to render the system unbootable (it has happened multiple times on Ubuntu, zero times on Windows; I've done many orders of magnitude more Windows work than Ubuntu work).
I feel slightly jealous of the folks who are feasibly able to run Linux on the desktop without compromising on hardware.
In my case I also need KVM etc. On Windows I just use Hyper-V when I need a VM (many years ago I'd use Virtual PC). Hyper-V has never rendered my device unusable, even when pushing the limits with things like GPU pass through. I think my 2018 attempt failed when trying to update Ubuntu kernel after setting up KVM for a Windows VM; I had restarted between getting KVM set up and doing the Ubuntu update.
I haven't documented anything - I wanted to but I never really found the solutions I was looking for. I'm not making this up; I'd really love to be typing this from Ubuntu right now.
edit: I reviewed and made changes for a more constructive tone.
The only borked Ubuntu kernel upgrade I've ever seen did not render anything unbootable, but a bad OOM Killer patch caused programs to get spontaneously killed in some cases - and I'm runnig, and automatically updating, tens of Ubuntu machines automatically all the time.
Yes, this is unfortunate and means I don't run Linux at home much. IIRC it's an Xorg issue though, and Wayland supports it. I got it working on Wayland, but then there was a different issue with Wayland that I don't remember so I went back to Windows :\
It's unfortunate because even my usual reason to use Windows (games) doesn't matter at the moment, Overwatch runs perfectly on Linux with Wine.
(I'm going to venture a guess that the "kernel update [can] render the system unbootable" is due to nvidia binary-blob driver needing some glue code to both update and recompile for new kernel versions ... it can work fine, usually, but for best experience, skip the hassle of nvidia on linux, or keep it as simple and vanilla as possible with a distro that takes care of it for you I guess.)
CUDA is a key use case for me though - I actually use quite a lot of software that depends on it and my understanding is I can't do that with AMD graphics. I'd also like to get in on the RTX 3080/3070 action and I think I might value that performance more than being able to run Linux natively.
The ones that rely fully on the the dedicated video card are high end and usually have different disadvantages (weight, battery time).
You can also type "powershell" or "cmd" or whatever into the Windows Explorer address bar.
Shift-right click should show "open powershell here" and a few others. You can also type "powershell" in the file explorer path bar and it'll do the same.
Both defaults are crap. I use Total Commander / Double Commander on Win/Lin.
Quote2: "Linux still has a few (~2%) market share in the general-purpose users' segment compared to Windows. Therefore, there are not so many malicious programs that target Linux users"
Ah yeah, the famous security through obscurity. I think I prefer a battle hardened OS instead of one kept in an ivory tower. But that's not actually true. As a freelancer I use them all, and I know Linux is actually more battle hardened due to majority of cloud infrastructure running it. Which means Linux nowadays is way more under attack than Windows. Except the article's author is looking with horse blinders at the situation.
Conclusion - crappy article, not worth of a place atop of HN.
APIs to restrict applications accessing your user data? Sandboxing for GUI applications? A secure GUI path, i.e., something where you can trust that this kind of window is not malicious software but your OS? Biometrics? (making non-techies into using some authentication at all)
I agree that article is crapy and I wasted my time reading it.
Is that actually true? For example, we know NSA targets sysadmins and sysadmins use desktop Linux at much higher rates than the general public.
Relatively few people use desktop Linux, but those who do may generally be more attractive targets.
Now look at the history of Apple. Did they or did they not always delivered same hardware performance at double the price? I'd say you paid for malware, fully and on top of that you're also proud. Q.E.D.
I unfortunately agree with a lot of what he says (this after using linux either a primary or secondary desktop OS for over 23 years) have kind of the same fatigue.
It really saddens, this current state of the linux desktop.
I haven't used GNOME in years because it was too unstable when I used it myself.
then you live trough your first pulse audio upgrade. or maybe you have to bring a laptop in two wireless location with slightly different network configs. or it's just a distro upgrade where the default filesystem changed and they dropped the older fs kernel module. or you have a second monitor, or a multitouch pad, and at every update there's a chance for some package change breaking their config.
I started a new job and my boss installed Linux Mint on my work laptop because that's what he was using; after a month I installed Mint on my home desktop. The defaults are sensible, there's tons of customization options, and I don't have to hack my way into really simple and obvious changes.
That's what I have been doing the past 7 years.
I put my dad on Ubuntu about 10 years ago and never looked back. I do 100x less support than I had to do when he was on Windows. Windows was a malware shit show back then, but I have no interest in trying to switch him back to Windows again.
Define "properly" - I'm running Win 10 2004 on 1GB of ram and it's absolutely fine. Maybe the author is confusing "need" with "will use all available ram to prefetch".
/s
Edge and Chrome use much more RAM compared to Firefox, atleast on my machine.
Maybe if all you do is stare at the desktop all day (or use your computer as a dumb terminal).
Upgrades (both NixOS and kernel) are also fearless and trivial to roll back.
It's really nice to declaratively manage stuff like NVIDIA drivers (w/Prime), udev, printer drivers, etc. Much nicer than running commands and getting my computer in a stable state that I hopefully never mess up.
The Linux desktop is what you make it. The tools are there to make it work, choose wisely. If it doesn't work for you, try something else.
I think this must be a typo. 2008 seems quite a late time to buy a Pentium II, I had my Pentium II in 1998ish.
If I had to give an introduction to programming to someone with absolutely no prior knowledge, I might still use QBasic (or rather something like QB64 or an online interpreter) for it. The simplicity of the syntax and no required boilerplate for getting started really lends itself to it.
I've posted it here several times myself :)
Packaging systems make things easier. You can install software in less than a minute, and keep things updated pretty easily.
Linux is not the frequent target of malware, specifically ransomware. There will be always that one non-compliant person in an org that clicks every link and believes in every email and having that person use Windows is a bad idea.
Office suites used to suck on Linux... not anymore. SoftMaker Office is on par with Microsoft Office for the most essential use cases.
Gaming is getting better on Linux with many native games, as well as Wine, Proton and DXVK... Many games run pretty well on Linux, you can check ProtonDB for details. Perhaps not every game or the newest games, but you can have a decent gaming experience on Linux.
And for development, Linux is king. Everything is observable, everything can be measured, most things have debugging symbols and source code. On Windows, get used to read assembly code and become a reverse engineer if you want to understand what's going on.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has been using Windows since 3.1 and Linux since 2.0.x (early Debian). Nothing in this article is exactly "news" at this point in history.
(and I've been using OS X on the desktop longer than both of those combined, at this point)
My main beef with it is driver support. It's far better than it was 10 years ago but nobody wants to be dealing with that. It's annoying. I can deal with program crashes or some minor feature not working right. I can't deal with being hindered due to no drivers.
Linux will always just be a tool to me and nothing more. It's a great fleshed out fully customizable tool. But it is hardly what it needs to be before widespread adoption will occur.
My main beef with it is the telemetry and inconsistent UI. It's far better than it was 10 years ago but nobody wants to be dealing with that. It's annoying. I can deal with program crashes or some minor feature not working right. I can't deal with random UI changes, random resetting of settings, and uploading usage data behind my back.
Windows will always just be a tool (slowly becoming an integrated Azure client) to me and nothing more. It's a great fleshed out customizable-as-Microsoft-allows tool. But it is hardly what it needs to be to quit non-creatives from migrating to iPads and smartphones.
Or a device didn't work out of the box because the company didn't make drivers for it? How about the amount of times you needed to run wine on windows to play a specific game.
Linux is awesome. But you gotta get out of your bubble and realize it's super niche and for techy people. Not average joes that just wanna watch youtube.
But honestly, the Windows 10 network I used to manage had just as many, if not more problems per-machine than my linux network at home.
Honestly, I can not recall ever having a major issue with Grub. It's probably the most reliable part of a Linux machine. Sure, getting the right graphics drivers can be a pain on Linux. Then again, I can say the same about the process on Windows too. And as far as gaming goes, I can play 85% of my Steam Library right out of the box with default settings. Steam has it's own Winetricks built in. And default Winetricks has come a long way too. There really isn't any Windows program I can't get running with 30 minutes of tinkering.
As far as linux being niche and for techie people, you're somwhat right but it's still a frustrating misconception that an average Joe couldn't figure out Linux. I mean, modern Ubuntu is no more complicated to use than Windows 98 was. I just plugged in a Canon printer/scanner into my Lubuntu desktop tonight and fired up included SimpleScan and did some scanning. I didn't need to open a terminal. It all just... worked. Most of the casual things I do just work. It's me messing with stuff that makes things go haywire. But I'm one of those techie people and that's what I enjoy doing.
Don't think of Linux like a geeky alternative to mainstream. Think of it as the mainstream that Windows is trying to improve upon. In all reality, it is. Linux is to computers what the manual transmission (stick shift) is to automobiles. It takes some getting used too, but it's easier than it looks. And if you can drive a stick, you can drive literally any vehicle with wheels. Same with linux. If you can use a linux PC you posses the knowledge use any PC.
Linux you have to mess around CONSTANTLY or learn more about how things work in order to get them to your liking. Linux IS a "geeky alternative to mainstream." Linux is exactly as your example is about manual vs automatic. Stop and think for a sec why over 90% of cars are automatic and not manual. It's easier! We can argue all day how Linux is superior to windows but at the end of the day, what OS are you wasting more time on trying to get something to work as opposed to that being just abstracted from you in the first place since you don't need to know about it 99/100?
For me, it's not just driver support, it's the deep dives required to get random things working. Like finding the right commands to get my 4k monitor scaled correctly.
I try about every day to use Linux on a desktop for day to day work. It is dreadful when you install it, and then a pain if you want to use office files to a greater extend, connect to Exchange etc.
I constantly have problems with my cursor.
So I give up and I go back to Windows 10. They work consistently for me, are fast enough and I have all the software I need.
The choice is simple, but still I diligently try on Linux.
As for servers, I never use Windows because I do not feel they ate made for servers But others do it successfully so why not.
The only thing I really miss from the MS world on Linux is their Active Directory that manages users, computers etc. and is so tighly bound with the OS.
When I decided it wasn't, I checked the dateline, as it seemed likely to have been written a decade or so ago.
I installed Win10 for a relative who needed Win10 a couple of years ago, and ran Tr0nscript at the time. Somehow, that machine is usable and doesn't feel like a commercial. All other Win10 machines I've encountered do.
I'm using manjaro now, I want see what happens when there's a big version change.
There are other, simpler ways of doing a lot of that stuff. If you want accented characters, enable the Compose key.
E.g. https://www.setphaserstostun.org/posts/setting-the-compose-k...
If you want Mac-style keystrokes, try Kinto: https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
But there are other ways: https://medium.com/@petrstepanov/a-macos-like-keyboard-remap...
Me, I use old Apple mechanical keyboards on my Macs, and IBM mechanical keyboards on my PCs. The different feel engages different muscle memory, and I use Cmd-C etc on macOS and Ctrl-C on Linux without thinking about it. For terminal emulators, use Ctrl+Shift+C etc. I personally find this a much simpler solution, but YMMV.
If you want an easier life, dump GNOME. I've tried every blasted desktop out there and XFCE makes my life easier and happier than any of them.
I will admit.. at some point adding in the logic to pull in the currently mapped keys into Kinto's config directly would be the preferred method and is doable.. that just isn't how Kinto works today. It assumes you are using your DE's or distro's hotkey defaults.
The system tray only works for DEs that support Appindicators however. And at one time I was like you in that I would just know what keys to press by OS or keyboard feel, but as I've spent more and more time in the terminal I've discovered I just like the mac way of doing things more and it really is more comfortable for long coding sessions, especially on a laptop.
You're welcome.
I left a comment on your project a year or 2 ago, seeking clarification what it was or did -- I did not understand from your original description. I hope that this was more helpful!
I'm happy with my way, but if I may say, the desktop which really needs this kind of tool is GNUstep. http://www.gnustep.org/
There's a new GNUstep-based OS called LIVEstep, based on FuryBSD: https://github.com/probonopd/LIVEstep
At present, GNUstep uses Alt instead of the Mac's Cmd, leading to weird keystrokes which are neither Mac-ish nor Windows/Linux-ish. It's a mess.