Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10

Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years ago.

I was/am totally prepared to use GPU pass-through to a Windows VM to get native gaming performance or work around bugs-- but I haven't needed to.

I'm using PopOS but am pretty indifferent toward the distro I use. I honestly got it confused for different distro, but it was still Debian/Ubuntu based so I'm chill (ha).

Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice. It's a little weird to even think about dialing in the aesthetic more to my liking coming from the world of MacOS. But I've found themes like Nord (https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/) provide some visual familiarity while maintaining their own unique aesthetic qualities.

Making apps, or interacting with the OS, is absurdly easy using GTK and Python vs anything Microsoft or Apple have to offer. I have the same effective level of support which is to say none-at-all or via the community of volunteers. I can't ever imagine calling Microsoft or Apple for meaningful help (roflcoptr and we say we pay for support).

Linux is rocking the desktop hard, if you haven't tried it in a few years or just maintain a Windows installation to play games-- seriously give it a try. It's wonderful.

I am a sample size of 1. For me, the inconveniences of using linux are far greater than the inconveniences of using windows. This article is targeted at the developer community mostly.

As a programmer, I cannot recall being hindered by file name conventions, un-resizeable dialog boxes, bug trackers etc., as much I have been inconvenienced on linux by poor driver support, and regularly dropping to command line for configuring my system.

As a gamer, well, there is no competition for me, really.

As your average user, I find the user interface on windows nicer and see more compatible programs.

If there is anything I absolutely have to have linux for, I can just use a raspberry pi, a cloud server etc.

Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.

Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.

Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.

Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.

Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.

Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.

Linux is free.

"Most people use Windows on the desktop because it's the default"

That's just a stereotype, and that's not true. I keep using Windows (hardened and almost isolated Parallels instance of Windows 7), because Linux has serious lack of software I need.

I need fully functional MS Office, including API bindings for data import to Excel, and no, Libre Office Calc does not have even 20% of features I need. Of course, I need 3rd party addons, like Grammarly for MS Office.

I need Enterprise Architect, modeling software of that class simply does not exist on Linux.

I need Photoshop (I have one since old good times when Adobe offered lifetime license), I use it occasionally and not 100% effective, but nope, there are no functional open-source alternatives for Linux with the same comfort of use.

People don't use Linux not because it is not pre-installed, they don't use it because it's a totally foreign ecosystem. Doing a fully functional ports of software people use under Windows would've probably moved 1% share of Linux on desktops, but it does not happen, partly because open-sourse software designers do not recognize the problem, partly because it's an immense amount of work, impossible without huge financial and human investments with unclear outcome.

I don't even say about technical issues, like total lack of backward compatibility, it's mostly a headache for techies like us.

I know quite a lot of folks here are fed up with moves away from native apps and towards Electron-wrapped web apps (and often for totally valid reasons) but it's been a godsend for making Linux a usable daily driver OS. IMO if you're doing eg web dev work in a GSuite / Slack / Figma / etc organization, it's never been a better time to try desktop Linux!

I started my journey with linux at the age of 12 when Canonical was sending out free CD's of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. After nearly 13 years of usage I am a happy user of Windows 10 now. My reasons are:

* Horrible font rendering that makes me not even want to code

* Terrible application support

* Audio and touchpad support is noticeably superior on Windows

* Small things that you have to tinker with in order to get everything set up

But the most important thing is that I am just tired of tinkering. Nowadays I just want to open my computer and get on my programming job and have everything just work. MacOS seems to be a good compromise though (Application support and UNIX subsystem for programming)

Microsoft is doing what Linux claims to be faster and more aggressively than ever before. If you couldn't beat windows 7, the OS that ran for decade with no major upgrades to functionality, at the desktop game how are you going to beat an OS that changes faster than we can keep up as admins?

We all cried in 2016, 17, 18 when ms was patching too fast, releasing too fast, now they are steady pushing a semi-annual build with little problems. There will no windows 11 and because Linux is OOS, with no central model for support, Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop space. It's just Windows now, not ubuntu, arch, mint, red hat, deb, gnu.

3 main gripes:

Cost - sure? MS doesn't really make money here it wouldn't cost much to ship windows to the planet for free. Forced updates - again 3 years ago yes big problem, last year still killing my nic drivers, future 3-5 years? Unlikely that we will even notice them, we are down to a monthly reboot.

Telemetry - not going away.

Whilst the OP is after ostensibly practical examples, I would add something I haven't yet seen mentioned and that is education. If you are wanting to learn more about computing and how operating systems work, Linux is excellent at giving you this opportunity. It actually takes one of it's weaknesses and turns it into one of it's biggest strengths. Because you often need to tinker a bit with scripts and problem-solving in order to get certain things working the way you want, you learn a lot.

For example, when I was into gaming in my younger years I was lucky to have access to a family computer rather than a gaming console. Because of this, I gained experience tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to make my games run on limited memory, and later, learning how to add hardware like 3D accelerators for faster performance. If I had been stuck with a static console without any room for modification, I may have taken a less interesting career path as a result. I feel a similar lamentation when seeing kids with iPads, but feel hope when I see them tinkering with Minecraft :)

It's worth noting that these days you can move Windows installs across hardware/VMs and fix issues from a live image.

I'm a longtime Linux user and every time I have to do this on Windows I find the documentation poor, but it is possible to do things like load kernel modules (drivers), partition a drive, format a new NTFS filesystem, copy all the files over preserving special filesystem features, reinstall the bootloader, add required additional drivers, ensure the drive assignments are correct, etc. all from a command line prompt which you can pull up from the Windows 10 installer image. The process ends up being very similar to doing the same thing on Linux at a high level, just with different tools.

What Windows needs in this regard is something like the Arch Linux wiki.

Just in case it's useful to someone, here are some pointers:

To add critical (e.g. storage) drivers to a mounted Windows install (or image file within installers): dism

To modprobe a driver within the live environment: drvload

To rsync files over to a new filesystem preserving (almost?) all critical metadata: robocopy (use the latest Windows 10, older versions had trouble with stuff like directory junctions and symlinks; read the manual carefully to figure out what options to use)

To fix drive assignments (i.e. fstab): you actually just pull up regedit and edit the registry directly; you copy the (binary) drive ID info from the live instance, mount the registry hive of the target, and paste it there (this isn't really morally different from running blkid and then editing fstab by hand to paste a UUID). Search terms: MountedDevices and DosDevices.

Fix the bootloader: bootrec is the top level "fix stuff automatically" tool, kind of like grub-install and grub-mkconfig. However, you may have to delete your BCD (grub.conf) first so bootrec can make it fresh, as it often won't fix existing bootloader entries with a problem. bcdboot and bcdedit are the lower level tools.

Does it have to be better, or even preferable? Is "it's sufficiently good for my needs but it's free" not enough?

Whole industries have died because a free product has emerged that's "good enough" for 90+% of people. When was the last time anybody bought the electronic Encyclopedia Brittanica now we have Wikipedia?

Here is a website with opposite arguments (against Linux on the desktop specifically)

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

In the end you have strong arguments both ways. I personally use both on a daily basis. Generally that's Linux for work (coding, mostly) and Windows for fun (games and media).

For me the greatest thing about Linux is that I am not at the whims of Microsoft or Apple about when they decide to change the UI. I have been using XFCE for years and it is basically the same as fifteen years ago.

If I want to change something, I can do it fairly easily, like add a dock or even change Window managers. I don't have to do things the Microsoft way or the Apple way...if I don't like something I can just change it.

The list is so convoluted while it doesn't touch on real Windows issues at all. Wow. And it often talks about issues which have been resolved, or haven't been relevant in ages, or are not a concern for most people out there.

https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html

And some things from it are outright cringe-worthy, e.g. "Ineffectual read-only permissions semantics". Windows ACL for files/directories is 100 more powerful than what Linux offers.

Some Windows advantages are shown as shortcomings, e.g. case-insensitive filenames vs. case-sensitivity in Linux which in absolute most times just leads to confusion. In my 20+ years of using Linux I haven't found a single usecase for case sensitivity.

I spent roughly 1999-2015 trying mightily to get off Windows and become Linux only. I finally decided that the Linux desktop was never going to solve its feature and compatibility shortcomings to make that possible. I much prefer Linux as a development environment, but for anything related to office productivity, compatibility issues force me to be on Windows so much that it's not worth the effort to switch to Linux for the few things that I could do there. I could rant about lost opportunities, but that's already been done many times by others.

None of these reasons have anything to do with user experience -- no wonder none of these reasons have earned Linux any market share outside of picky developers.

I use linux for my personal server, but I still use Windows in my desktop (with WSL). I have Nvidia GPU, multiple monitor, so Wayland don't seem to be ready for my use case. I aware of proton too, but needing tweaks to run games doesn't seem to be ready to me. I expect games to be "just work". Also, there are also non-steam games and anti-cheat. Currently, WSL perfectly fit my needs for development environment.

I had used KDE, which gave me a good experience, but the general Linux desktop ecosystem doesn't feel ready for me. Maybe years later, the situation will be good enough to switch, but it is not now.

Linux on desktop used to be great, but does anyone get the sense that it is going downhill?

I don't even touch proprietary Nvidia drivers, all my machines are Radeon or Intel GPU and they used to work fine. But currently on Radeon I have to revert back to kernel 4.19 to get sleep to work. On Intel anything newer than 5.6 won't even boot. I don't get it. Maybe kernel devs mostly care about servers and VMs and are letting the desktop stuff bitrot?

Who cares which is better.

If it works for you and your situation, great. Stop trying to make me change what works for me because you believe it would somehow be better.

Also can we just stop this endless bickering over irrelevant things like this.

I say this as a Linux user for a little over a decade, and someone who can not tolerate using Windows with its extreme need for bad system gui to be able to achieve anything, and lack of the software suites I have gotten used to.

You do you, and I will do me.

/edit: I am mostly talking to the comments here, not the document as I find it refreshingly non judgmental in its analysis of pros and cons.

Some people want a Nespresso.

Some people want a bean to cup espresso machine with built in grinder. Others want something similar, but insist on a separate grinder and brewer.

Some people want to hand grind their beans then put them through an Aeropress, possibly while sitting in a field.

A handful of organizations will brew by the ton, freeze dry the results, and sell it on as a kind of brewing as a service product. It’s worse and better at the same time.

The fact that these are all called coffee is a simplification that makes most comparisons more complicated.

File extensions are a much better way of determining filetype than "magic"; they mean that the user can actually see what type a file is. It would actually be easier to dupe Linux users into running malware than Windows users if it weren't for the execute bit.

> "Linux is more flexible and customizable." > "Linux gives you more control over your computer." > Stop it.

I think the above reasons explain this better rather than the deep dive the article tries to accomplish.

We're talking about preferences here. If I prefer Linux I don't need an explanation. Personally I like the lesser restrictions (Both Windows and Mac are locking down more and more) and the higher customisation it offers.

But the thing about preferences is that they are largely a feeling. Therefore reasons don't have to be concise or defined scientifically. One example: I hate the way Windows 10 forces me to update whenever it wants, and doesn't allow me to turn off telemetry. Neither of those things will actually affect me very much: I would usually update within the required timeframe anyway and the telemetry is minimal.

However it is the feeling of increased corporate control over my machine, in a time where corporate surveillance is already rampant that makes me hate this.

So objectively these arguments are hardly valid but still I feel better moving to Linux (or rather: FreeBSD) as a daily driver. That's ok as it is my preference :)

PS: I use pretty much all platforms every day for various reasons

I've been exclusively using Linux (PopOS specifically) with xanmod for the past 2 months. I do my work (programming), game, etc, etc on this one PC. It's been honestly great.

I've had to change some things I do normally, but for me they weren't a big deal.

Games I play that work well on Linux:

- Overwatch

- League of Legends (not so much anymore because URF is gone)

- Hades

- Frostpunk (highly recommend)

I use an Xbox controller for Hades, and I use it in wired mode (one of the things I needed to change about how I use my computer). Bluetooth has some issues I didn't want to bother fixing.

I am using Xanmod because the regular Linux scheduler is just trash in my opinion for desktop use. It doesn't prioritize UI threads which just makes the linux experience so much worse for me.

Most uses of linux are in server or embedded space, and so are most of the contributions.

By contrast most of Windows development is focused on it being a consumer OS. It's unrealistic to expect Linux to ever catch up to windows as long as this is true, especially when we spread effort too thing creating 15 different distributions.

They both suck. They just suck in different ways. Choose your poison.

Or don't choose and use both.

My home computers have been GNU/Linux exclusively since 2003. Recently I had to install Windows 10 on a computer at work, and was horrified that the thing has advertisements!! Not only that, the level of manipulation to avoid you from just using a local user account (and get an online one instead) is terrible. You get two choices: 1. Get an online Microsoft Account, 2. Miss on all the great user experience!

Who wants to be a loser and miss all the great stuff?

Hence if I ever needed more reasons to prefer Linux over Windows now I have "to prevent the creators of the software from manipulating me".

I think part of the issue with Linux for a casual user can be perfectly illustrated in this HN thread. The comments are filled with endless recommendations for different packages that do the same thing. Choice is great and part of the Linux charm, but for the average user keeping up with it all is overwhelming and simply not worth it.

The title doesn't appear to match the text. It seems to be mostly a list of things that might trip up Linux developers when moving to Windows. Which is fair enough but not why I clicked this link.

But to address the list's content, it would be interesting to update it to take into account developments made in more recent versions of Windows 10.

Last Windows-based system I used professionally was Win2K and it was bearable after some heavy-duty configuration.

Switched to MacOS around 2002. It was not user-hostile back then and a decent Unix env. and Apple seemed to be headed down the right path, promising to support FOSS.

Switched from MacOS to Linux circa 2008 when it became abundantly clear that Apple's "backing" of OpenSource was a complete hoax designed to attract FOSS hackers to the platform and lock them in (the only parts of the OS that were FOSS were the lower layers, the entire stack above it was closed source - a tiger simply can't change its stripes).

Never had to look back, and when I look at the locked-in walled garden privacy hell that OSX has become, boy am I glad I switched.

Ever since I've installed WSL a few months ago, I've stopped booting into my Linux partition out of laziness. Last week I booted into Linux to access an old project and the UX felt like an uncanny valley. I suspect it might be due to Windows/Linux having different mouse acceleration formulas which is pretty noticeable when I try moving across 3x 1440p monitors.

Now that Windows dev experience (for me) is almost comparable to Linux and will continue to improve, I don't see much reason to switch back to Linux.

Of course that's not to say I don't have any complaints for Windows. For example file names are not case sensitive and it drives me crazy when I need to change a file name's casing.

I really hated the intro. There are less confrontational ways of making that point across.

Then the points being made did not resonate with my own reasons for using Linux.

Microsoft loves Linux and Open source, in paper, but the reason you are not using Linux right now is mostly due to Microsoft.

MS Office, the defacto Office suite, runs only on macOS and Windows, and the OOXML standard was created with obfuscation in mind.

Microsoft bought Corel, and shortly after Corel Office dropped its Linux release.

Microsoft lobbies governments so that they adopt MS Office. Some of those goverments are starving impoverished countries that could rather use that money for humanitarian reasons.

OpenGL was the target of a FUD campaign that scared game developers forcing them to adopt DirectX.

Ability to read through all of the code that's running on my computer, and understand it all at some level, is what I like a lot.

Arguably my desktop is not that complicated (i3wm), so there's not a ton of processes running around.

When I find a bug, I can try to fix it myself. When I want an extra feature, I can add it. I did this so many times already, it's ridiculous. From adding support for new HW to the kernel, to patching my postgresql to support my language better, to adding zstd support to qemu qcow2, and hundreds of other small things over the last 15 years or so.

This is what's great on GNU/Linux.

20y on Windows, 2y on Mac, 2y on Linux: Linux is sometimes painful, but beats the alternatives.

Pros: Customizability, speed, MS/Apple can't dictate what's on my PC.

Cons: Wifi issues, screen tearing, time spent configuring.

These kinds of post very often confuse people.

We need to divide the debate into two perspectives: Development and Desktop environment.

As a dev, I always use Linux. I love to use shell all the time. However, I use Windows as a desktop environment because I fed up with the whole Xorg vs Wayland situation and inferior VNC experiences to Windows RDP.

The article says determining filetype via heuristics is better than via extension. I don't agree with that, heuristics are confusing. File extensions lead to behavior that a human can predict.

Where is the corresponding document listing objective reasons to prefer Windows over Linux? Without that, this effort cannot be taken seriously.

Linux works pretty fine now for me, but I did (and still have to) put up a fight with it to actually work properly.

Just recently kwin started freezing occasionally when starting up KDE with the logs mentioning absolutely nothing related to that. I've tried several solutions I found through research but the issue still remains. Even restarting kwin won't solve the problem and I have to resort to rebooting to hope it fixes itself. Quite annoying.

Also occasionally my nvidia dGPU (with power management enabled) just doesn't power itself off even if its not being used by any process. I've once again played around with all kinds of parameters and configs without any luck. I'm aware it's an experimental feature but it's still a major issue for me since its the difference between 6 and 3 hours of battery life.

On top of that for some reason all of my games randomly decide to drop down to very low framerates while barely utilizing my CPU and GPU. It's nothing to do with my temps or either CPU or GPU throttling down (they're still at their max clock speeds), there's nothing in the background using any kind of significant amount of system resources and the niceness / ioprio of my game's process is set high enough so some random process going rogue shouldn't affect game performance too much.

These are just some examples of random problems I'm facing regularily and it's just frustrating having to tinker around (sometimes for days) to (hopefully) fix them. Which is a shame since I'm really enjoying my Linux install.

I've been full time Linux for about a year now, and prior to that I relied heavily on WSL. I'm very happy. I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on my main machine (Windows for games), but I haven't booted into Windows for over three months (busy semester is mostly the reason). My laptop is full time Linux and I wouldn't have it any other way.

As a developer, Linux is everything I could want, and I really want desktop Linux to continue to gain traction. While DEs like GNOME (which I use) and KDE look and feel modern and come with some great software out of the box, I still run into issues on occasion. The desktop environment is where Linux begins to fall short in my experience.

Windows and MacOS have the advantage of having a single "DE" to worry about, where as Linux offers a variety which are independently developed. That's awesome, but when I run into a bug once a week, it really sucks. I can fix the problem no issue, but it makes me hesitant to recommend GNOME to a friend to relative.

Granted, this can be because I'm using a 4K display with a new version of GNOME. I haven't used KDE or XFCE recently, so maybe they take care of these a lot better. If they are significantly better, please, let me know. I'd love a good out of the box desktop experience on Linux.

This may seem silly to a bunch of people in this thread, but MS Office and OneDrive is what is keeping me on Windows. I rely on the core MS Office apps enough that I wasn't able to switch to Linux full time. Also, I rely on OneDrive and the "download files as you need them" feature which isn't available with any of the open source apps.

That said, Windows 10 is solid and with the combination of WSL2 and Hyper-V, I can do everything on Windows that I can do on a Linux desktop.

Linux updates dont force themselves on my machine and brick it once it reboots.

For some user categories, Linux is simply not a choice, whether you like it or not.

E.g., for musicians. There's Reaper/Bitwig, but you no longer have Live/Cubase/Logic/etc. Your multi-$k audio interface no longer works because its proprietary drivers only work on macos/win too. None of the hundreds of plugins you have work on Linux either. So it's between win/macos most of the time and the choice there is obvious.

What makes GNOME3 good is it keyboard usability. GNOME is comfortable and fast to be used with the keyboard. For professionals as well as normal people. It is incredible how underestimated the success of GNOME-Shell is outside of ther user base. GNOME made mistakes with GNOME3 and the removed beloved features and many required options. But getting rid of the flawed Desktop-Metaphor and concentrate on usability improved GNOME a lot. And yes, GNOME is also usable with a pointing device.

Aside from GNOME. For professional users CLI and TUI usage on the terminal is bless and necessity. What is needed are more developers, testers and companies investing into it. The decline of Nokia and their withdraw from Gtk was a huge setback. Then the lost of Sun. And least Canonical helps now again but - years where lost. Canonicals current improvements are significant.

Aside from that. Free software seems to strive always to improve existing solutions when necessary, people see actual problems and want improve them. Within closed-ecosystems this is impossible and you're required to stay within boundaries to survive.

> Unless you're obsessed with downloading software illegally, it's not an issue in Windows either. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with malware for my +20 of friends using it.

I can't remember the last time I touched one of my friend's computer without seeing any kind of suspicious search bar or fishy "helper" installed. I'm pretty sure this counts as malware.

Linux being open source is reason enough to prefer it over Windows.

I've never experienced anything close to the stability and performance of a lean Arch build personally. It does a very good job of teaching you up front how your OS works, and how to configure it without dumbing things down for your grandma. Once I understood that, bugs just kinda disappeared, because I wasn't naively misconfiguring things anymore. I find linux pretty well organized and reasonable for most dev tasks. Your OS can be spectacularly powerful for automating things if you just understand it's basic components. It updates when I want it to, it looks the way I want it to, and darn near any operation I can put a name to I've writtent a script/elisp function/systemd service for. I feel limited really only by my own imagination at this point. Maybe the problem is Ubuntu or other such imitation distros, that rob people of that deeper understanding in exchange for a shallow illusion

I have been running Linux on all my personal machines for the last 8 years and I have to say that one thing windows has going for it is it’s graphics system. I have super sensitive eyes and I have to say that even wayland does not cut it when compared to windows. Everywhere else Linux on desktop is either far better or a bit behind but workable

I used to be on windows. I uninstalled candy crush, bloatware but what can you do. Windows reinstalled it some time later with an update. I have no use for an operating system that doesn't serve my needs but the needs of someone else.

There is no "Linux" operating system. There is Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and 1001 others. This is the primary reason GUI interface is lacking. So you must resort to command line, 50 years after computer mouse was invented.

I finally decided to try Linux "for real" (no dual booting) on my laptop. I have used it in the past, but for the first time it truly can be said:

The Linux (Gnome) UX is miles ahead of Windows.

I genuinely wish I could have Gnome on Windows.

>Finally, because Linux is a ubiquitous server operating system, its security is under constant attack, and Linux desktop users benefit from fixes to the vulnerabilities.

I think this kind of argument works both ways

Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but...

Attacking normal people is easier (I think its fair to assume normal user is worse at computers than e.g trained admin), so you can do it at bigger scale and normal user may not want to sue/find you/call cops meanwhile if you're hacking companies then things are more likely to be very serious.

Thus, both are under constant attacks.

I actually have Linux as my main work OS ( Linux mint ) and have been enjoying it. It’s user friendly enough to get started and if you can read instructions, not that difficult to install software ( even when some may be more difficult than others... Docker on Mint, for example ).

I actually prefer it to Mac, but there are some programs that I just can’t use on Linux. And I now use Windows as my gaming OS.

So while I wish I could do everything on Linux, I’m happy to switch as needed. Linux is my home work station, Mac for the cafe and some other things, and Windows for everything else.

I've been using Linux as my daily driver for about 22 years now. It's been great for me all the time, though, I do miss GTK and Gnome before they made it suck. I ran mate for a while, but now I've just given up and run i3.

That said, Linux is almost for everyone now, at least if they get someone else to set it up for them.

The single biggest problem is that there is still not one document format to rule them all, and most people use PDF (can't be edited) or Microsoft (can't be rendered correctly and have limited support in other programs) formats. For most things, openoffice or libreoffice can get the job done, but for things that need to actually look the same, or where one needs to fill out the "formula" it often falls short, and then we have to resort to a VM with Windows inside it..

Then there's battery life, at least for EVERY laptop I've ever owned, or serviced, Linux requires a fair amount of tweaking, and then it (or some software running on it) still results in a worse-off battery life than a stock install of Windows.

That said, there are so many good things about Linux and the tools on it, that it's definitely worth the shortcomings, it's still the best OS for me.

Disclaimer: I love Linux. I also like Windows (it's extremely solid).

RE path limitations. I actively -- and have for many years -- use paths much longer that 25x characters. Including in Windows Explorer. I can't recall the last time I had a issue, though IIRC there is some sort of operation (that I guess I never use?) via Explorer where one can run into issues.

The main issue, and it exists on Linux as well is this in code:

char path[MAX_PATH]; // or equiv

In Linux this generally gives you a 4k buffer so you're MUCH less likely to hit the issue of course.

No telemetry.

No overriding auto-update settings.

No license to pay.

Hi everyone, original author of the document here.

I was confused about why there were so many new Github issues filed, and sure enough I did a search on Hacker News and found it posted here.

This was inspired by my annoyance with the prevailing tenor of Windows vs. Linux comparisons at the time, which consisted largely of unsupported generalizations like "Linux is about choice" or undecidable debates like whether the GIMP was an acceptable replacement for Adobe Photoshop, or if LibreOffice was a good enough Microsoft Office. I wanted to go in a different direction and examine how technical design decisions in the kernels affected everyday use, which is why there's so much time spent on filenames.

Ultimately, though, it's just a highly selective overview of the operating systems at the time, with a few historical asides. (I'm particularly proud of digging up the part about case-insensitive filenames using less RAM in the DEC SIXBIT encoding.)

I haven't updated it significantly since 2014, so it is probably out of date in spots. However, much of it is still holds true today. I continue to use both Linux and Windows on a daily basis, and I still occasionally run into the same old problems with path lengths, filename restrictions, and file locking semantics.

I use both and prefer Linux. In order for me to stand Windows I have to run these two programs to remove all the crap.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://gist.github.com/telamon/85fbfb0caa482786483bd2b8d3fc...

I use Linux, Windows, and macOS basically every day.

All three have pros and cons.

I use Linux at work because I love i3 and am willing to put up with other quirks to have it.

I use Windows for games, Lightroom, etc.

I use macOS for compiling iOS apps (work) and in bed/on the couch at home for browsing (because I have an extra Macbook leftover from a consulting gig).

I use whatever tool works best for the job I'm doing.

No one OS is better at everything than another. They all have their strengths and their weakness.

I don't want more people using Linux. Linux is great the way it is today. More users will make everything worse. Guys please stay on Windows.

I've been running KDE Neon on a NUC for several years now, and has been quite happy with that as a secondary PC.

However, as much as I like it, I've not even tried to run it on my primary desktop due to the lack of a viable RDP alternative.

The irony here is that with Microsoft implementing RDP support in WSL2, the thing that might finally remove the key obstacle might render the entire point moot.

I also switched to Linux after using Windows for 10 years https://medium.com/swlh/why-i-switched-to-linux-after-using-...

About ten years ago, I thought to myself, "Man, if I just reallocated all the time I spend fighting against Windows towards learning and customizing a Linux install, I'd have both a functioning OS, and an OS that I actually like!". I haven't looked back.

It used to take work and knowledge to use Linux as a daily driver, like you would Windows. But Linux has matured, and now all of the things you expect to work just do work.

And, aside from doing any .NET projects, EVERY programming endeavor I've worked on in Linux has been an absolute breeze. 98% of the time, everything I need is just an "apt install" away, configures correctly, and runs correctly. There is no reason for Windows to exist anymore.

I hope I can move to linux right now, but I just bought Ableton Live, and have to occasionally use stuff like Affinity Designer, or Adobe. Open source GUI software that runs on Linux generally does not have good UI/UX (for good ones I can only think of Blender), and big commercial softwares generally does not support Linux, being trapped between sucks..

But still, I'm looking for a decent distro that has minimal setup, very customizable, in active dev, and have decent graphics / audio driver for game dev, for a possible future shift. I haven't done much research yet but am currently looking at KISS and Arch, if you know more please let me know thanks!

I had to LOL a tiny bit when I opened up the webpage and found the actual name of the article is Objective reasons to prefer Linux to Windows. I wonder why that word got left out of the HN title submission... :^)

My experience with linux has been great so far I started out with ubuntu and then switched to manjaro with i3

Overall I loved i3 window manager as it made things much easier and keyboard centric

But after using macbook for a while I am leaning towards it as it works like a charm and I can do everything what I did on my linux.

Linux is great and one thing I like about it is that it’s highly customizable but sometimes you don’t wanna be spending countless hours customizing your environment you just want something that just works that’s just my opinion

Overall my experience has been great with linux but sadly i can’t run adobe suite on it :( So I decided to get a MacBook

Would love to hear everyone else’s experiences

Trying to convince someone to use an OS seems so pointless. People who care about it already have strong opinions on the topic and everybody else just uses whatever comes with the machine they decided to buy.

No more blue screens

Not having to reinstall Windows every 6 months just to keep it running fast

My reasons were that I had a better CLI and dev tools for the things I'm working on. I don't think I care about telemetry etc.

I still use Windows for games and stuff, but Windows terminal emulators mostly seem to suck and I spend a lot of time in there.

Either way the platform wars are over. Electron + WSL made them irrelevant. On Linux I have access to every modern app I want. This has been fantastic. All the guys who championed web standards and the web as an application platform should feel proud of being visionaries. Well done.

> In principle, UTF-16 would have the advantage of constant time addressing of single characters, but in practice most programming languages do not provide data types for this, with the exception of Go and rust.

No it wouldn't - UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding of Unicode codepoints just like UTF-8. Not to mention that what most normal people think of as "characters", i.e. grapheme clusters, are variable length even with UTF-32.

Interesting article. I personally think that some of the advantages are easily solvable, like the remote thing.

From my point of view, case sensitivity in filenames is not an advantage but a disadvantage.

Why would I want to have "presentation to management.ppt" and "Presentation to management.ppt"?

Same for some of the restrictions in file names. I never found any problem. Maybe it is because I write in english and spanish.

Interesting and detailed, I did notice the similarity's between RT-11 and CPM in my first Job.

And I do still vaguely recall RADIX 50

Bash is more intuitive than powershell, not saying powershell is bad. It's just a might beast.

But nix has vi, native package managers and doesn't need a GUI most of the time. Saying that, I don't mind hyper-v and it's VBS technology.

If you need to run a business use Windows, if you need to host infrastructure or run an app...use nix.

I find this whole Linux vs Windows thing pointless. I use both and have no real problems with either for as long as I do not try to choose only one. Each has strength and weaknesses and not necessarily technical. I use computers to make living and those non technical reasons are just important for me.

Linux, it just doesnt work straight from the box. To even install the most basic thing like wifi is a long search through Google and trial and error. Still doesnt work properly by the way. By any advice you find online, oh doesnt it work, try sudo in front of the command.

For work I use Mac. It is where native MS office apps intersect with a unix terminal. I really think your choice of OS is down to usecase. But linux often requires much more patience than windows or mac to get started. Windows update is still terrible though!

It is one of these discussions that simple don't matter. Firstly Linux can be an optimal answer to certain problems and also curiosity can give you different perspective. However the issue is that smart people in certain parts of this in industry constantly fall for these ideological traps that imply paths to glory, while actually they propose tradeoffs, at best. In reality these are just choices that have marginal impact for the vast majority of people and projects. These types of discussions really crumble on themselves when you ask the correct questions like: "Is it the best way to spend my time as a developer in order to improve myself" or the blatant "Will using Linux on its own bring me closer to becoming a tech billioire"?

Spend your time well, people. Solve real issues, have real impact.

From a usability perspective I don't really care anymore which OS I have to use. All software I use for work runs in the browser (gdocs, gsheets, gmail, cloud9, slack, discord, asana, zoom, meet)

Only some games and ableton live are missing from some platforms.

Reasons to prefer Windows 10 over Linux: https://miscdotgeek.com/why-windows-10-is-my-desktop-os-of-c...

Impressive that this whole list doesn't matter really on a day to day basis.

My chrome, lightroom and games (a lot) work very well on my windows desktop.

On my nas, freebsd is doing a great job.

My servers? Ubuntu doing what it does best.

MacOS on my work laptop; Also not bad.

Linux is great BUT it has a lot of UX design problems every time I have to use it.

There are many factual errors in the text (config files, chocolatey not having moderation or that its worse then linux repos (its much better and more up to date then majority, even Arch), etc.).

Most others are not a benefit, just preference.

Many are simply omitted where Windows is better (such as MUCH more software, easy of use - for example no automatic mounting on many linux distros of usb drives by default in 2020 is simply insane, much better support all around from vendors, just to mention some).

Some basic and most important stuff are not there, such as difference between Windows and Linux process or difference between PowerShell and Bash.

Some thing are not very comparable but still involve performance differences (for example Windows role based security vs very limited linux default g/u/o security)

TLDR, another linux-is-better-then-windows article that is poorly done, although it pretends its not, by giving tones of references mostly for irrelevant stuff and talking about technological decisions that have almost 0 relevance for most of the people (importance of having API calls in unicode 16 vs 8 to end user is less then 0)

Lets be honest - there is 0 technical benefit regarding what OS you use today, the only difference is:

1. Windows costs money

2. Community

Unless you use thousands of containers point 1 is negliable for most services especially on Windows 10 which you can run perpetually in trial mode. Point 2. is not however, on linux open source mindeset and hacking culture is favored which is something that is for me personally much better (although I still use Windows as my main OS). Windows community just started to go along in that direction, but it will probalby take another decade to come to the level where Linux is now (if ever).

It lists file system case sensitivity as a pro, which it isn't. Case sensitivity is the default you get when you don't think about the users, and windows chose the opposite because it's better.

Windows as primary OS with WSL is perfect fit for my work.

I hope WSL will be better in the future. May be someday people will not compare Windows and Linux when they have WSL on Windows machine.

The article is too pedantic to the point of impracticality. Objective reason to live 200m underwater: there is no polluted air there.

I have been using both Linux and Windows for the past 25 years having both Linux and Windows machine as my primary machine for varying lengths of time and for various reasons.

I currently use Linux as my primary machine on both my PC where I do remote work and on my Thinkpad which is serving as backup and mobile workspace.

The Windows is on a company-issued laptop that I do not use at all and in a VM which is dedicated solely for carrying the invasive stuff that monitors my every keystroke and executed application that my company thinks is good idea to have on my private machine to protect company interests. Hopefully, they never learn to figure out they are running this in a VM.

When I use Windows as my desktop I feel powerless. If something breaks, there is no recourse other than trying stuff I read on the Internet. On Linux I can automate pretty much everything and pretty much everything is open to me and the only thing that limits me is how much time I am comfortable spending on solving my issue.

I hate that Windows does things on my own machine that I am not able to stop or audit. Should I resign myself to giving away my privacy to another company? I think not.

I hate that I am absolutely unable to create an environment on Windows that will still work, without maintenance, in months or years. I do electronics design and embedded development in my free time and I just can't be spending time figuring out what changed in my environment every time I go back to modify code for some gadget I did a year or five ago. On Linux, I just create a VM for every single project, set up my toolchain, turn off any automated updates and then back up the entire image to unfreeze it when I need it.

I find it funny, that Linux had an app store with huge selection of free, powerful application, ready for immediate installation and use, and Microsoft required decades and Apple and Google to finally figure it out and still fail to make it usable. I like the fact that I can bring in seconds a piece of software to be immediately available to me without having to find the installation package, worry about custody of the source of the package or that it might be doing some malicious thing to my PC, worry about how it will pollute and slow down my machine even if it is installed, and so on. I do work on my PC, maintaining it is not my full time job.

I still work on Debian Unstable that I installed ca 2001 which I successfully maintained over the years. The first PC that it worked on had Duron 600 on it (does anybody still remember it?) and 20GB of disk space which was quite a lot at the time. If everything goes well it will see another AMD CPU next year when it becames available next year. I just can't imagine doing the same with Windows. All Windows desktops I had required full re-install after couple of years of use.

It was true in the past that you had to use Windows to use any serious tools. That is no longer the case, most of the time. You can even play games (Steam works though not all games are designed to play on Linux). The tools that don't work on Linux are no longer enough to force me to misery of working on a Windows desktop as my primary one.

Granted, Linux is not fun either. The Gnome is buggy as hell, has trouble with 2 4k monitors. The Nvidia drivers aren't nearly as stable as on Windows and Chrome experiences issues every time I wake up my machine from suspend. The machine sometimes locks and I did not have time to debug it and I just need to press reboot button. Still, beats Windows.

its very amusing to me to see people say "its great it just works!" and in the same breath explain in detail all of the intricacies they had to go through to get basic stuff to work.

i use linux on a desktop every day but cannot even after trying for many years, develop blinders for all of the shitty parts

I don't get why it's either one or the other; nothing will tick all the boxes. Just run both side-by-side

Gaming on Linux really got very good in the last few years. And that contributed to a bigger influx of Linux users.

Let me know when I can watch Netflix on it in reasonable resolution.

Until then it’ll be mainly a server OS for me

Objective reasons to prefer anything else over Linux: Security. Linux is now the least secure desktop OS available, with limited sandboxing and no provision for checking binary signatures. It's 2020, the net is a dangerous place, and if you want to avoid malware, signature checks must be done on everything from the bootloader up through the user application code.

Totally outdated and overall pretty useless. Objective in the sense it proclaims to be is not possible. Almost all of the points are completely irrelevant for the average potential user.

Superbly written by OP!

The article is obviously old and out of date (i.e. MAX_PATH, given you don't mention Office...) and at times incorrect (i.e. NT kernel performance where async I/O has historically been better than the various Linux implementations -- io_uring excluded as I haven't seen any comparisons).

I'll give my highly subjective experience. I used Fedora 3x on a X1 Carbon gen 7 and it was not awesome. While I had a highly customizable UI via KDE Plasma, the font always felt off. I had issues directly attributed to Wayland (screen sharing in apps), though I could have gone back to X11.

Eventually I switched to Gnome and the UI was just frustrating from a UX standpoint. The UI lacked so many options to make it more flexible, though some frustrations were taken care of by extensions.

For either DE, if I didn't want to use Firefox, many types of media were unavailable, including certain videos in YouTube due to lack of included libraries. Some of those libraries were available in 3rd party builds, but given the security sensitive nature of browsers, that felt risky.

Performance was fine and the apps I needed were available.

Overall, application in each DE felt more crash-prone. This was true of the updater for the Gnome app store, too.

More than a couple of times I would have odd graphical issues occur in both KDE Plasma and Gnome. A couple examples were font-related issues (incorrect font despite being set correctly in settings) and window-color issues. The Gnome app store window was in dark mode while the rest of the DE wasn't. Oh and lack of DE-wide mouse scrolling on windows was a bit frustrating. I had to get a plugin for Chromium but never found a DE-wide solution.

I was tired of Windows on a laptop, so I did end up buying a MBP, which was my first Mac since my PowerBook G4. MBP does everything I need for personal use and as a development playground, plus generally stable apps. I still use Win 10 on a P1 for work and of course have a desktop for gaming, primarily.

What I'd like to see from a DE is to be highly integrated into the system. We've seen successful implementations via Windows and Mac (classic and OS X/11), and perhaps the not-so-commercial success, BeOS. Many of the Linux DEs "feel" tacked-on.

With that said, I run unbound and haproxy on a handful of Linux VMs where they work wonders and I've had zero issues with stability, etc.

All-in-all my Fedora 3x experience was just OK. It felt rough around many, though not all edges. App crash was more than I'd see using the same apps on Windows (and now macOS).

There were other things that irritated me; lack of fingerprint reader support and lack of a Bitlocker-style solution (no password on boot) available.

Again, my experiences, my impressions. They could all be wrong.

To me personally, the biggest benefit is that I own the system and everything on it.

If MS decides to end support for whatever you're using, you're fucked. If Apple decides your hardware isnt supported any longer, or that you cant use your system without an update that makes your old apps incompatible, you're fucked.

If you're using a product, you rely on it not having its end of life before you stop using it, but you can't actually trust that, and we all know that. You know that, once you're in the MS ecosystem, you are at the mercy at whatever business decision they make for their products. If they decide to force you to pay for something that was free before, or decide that they are going to lock a feature behind paywall, the only reasonable thing is to comply.

Now, you might not care, and, hell, you might think the concept of owning your tools is idiotic anyways.

To get back to my point though - Linux gives hardware I own a system that I control. The OS I use helps me get done what I want to get done, it doesnt get in my way, it doesnt try to persuade me, trick me, sell me something, or anything like it. I like to pick what file browser I use, which browser I use, which keybinds do what - without the system acting like i'm an idiot with messages like "oh, you must have misclicked, im sure you want to use edge, not this 'firefox' garbage".

Do I have to pick which file browser I use? No, and I didn't, I just use the default, because it's good. If the developer of it decides to change it, I dont have to update it, I can use the old one, or use a different one altogether, or change it myself if I have the time.

I like Linux because it doesnt treat me like i'm an idiot, it doesnt treat me like i'm a customer, it doesnt actually treat me in any way at all, because unless i interact with it, it doesnt do anything.

When I need to write a patch, I open my laptop, and its immediately there. I open my messages, open my editor, pull, write the patch, commit, push, and close it. I didn't get a "didnt do AV scan in the last 2 seconds", i didn't get random programs autostarting, I didn't get news on my login screen, I didn't get programs notifying me that "its now up to date", it doesnt force me to update before i shut it down, and I dont have to look at a bunch of "welcome back" and "we hope your day is going great" and "did you know this random fact about a mountain in asia?" on my login screen.

Yet, all of these things happen regularly when I launch my windows machine at work. Yes, they're all small things, but once you're used to your system not nagging you for random shit, you can't help but notice.

Yeah

0

At least because Linux and GNU software is open source. Using GNU/Linux, you own your device, but using Windows, Microsoft own your device. So if you value your freedom, then this reason is enough for you