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Comment by SomeHacker44 | Hacker News Reader

I get it worse. Sometimes it goes in a permanent loop asking for my password infinitely many times and doing nothing, until I Force Quit, which does not usually help the problem.

It truly sucks and I regret the few purchases I made with it. But, the light is at the end of the tunnel: Windows 10 and WSL.

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Grass is not greener on the windows and WSL side. It’s yellowed and littered with turds to stand in. I run both platforms side by side and the Mac is by far the least painful. Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show.

A fine comparison is the windows App Store which is genuinely like playing Russian roulette with a gun made of butter. The Mac App Store is much much much less crazy.

The Mac has its fair share of suck but my word at least they actually tried to put something cohesive together.

Going to put it honestly but I don’t think Microsoft are earning my respect or attention, just shouting about how wonderful their product is while it’s falling to pieces in my hands.

Microsoft isn't really pushing their store though. Is there even any exclusives on it? It certainly isn't even close to my first stop look for software.

Also, WSL1/2 has been great - docker on WSL2 is fantastic, close to zero configuration required.

WSL distributions and Windows Terminal are both exclusive to the store.

Wait until you try mixed mode windows and Linux containers. That’s the definition of a shitshow.

> Windows 10 on an average day is like gargling sand. I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken on 20H2 release. No fix incoming yet. Zero days unpatched for 90 days etc. On WSL it’s a networking and HyperV encrusted nightmare. Have fun trying to get anything vaguely complicated to do anything even remotely sane. Total shit show.

This is a rather bizarre list since I never had these issues on my Windows 10 installation.

It's a bug with Microsoft Edge's integration with Windows Explorer: https://github.com/microsoft/WinDev/issues/40

Neither did I, until I did.

> I mean for two months now alt-tab is broken

Not on my 20H2 release, wdym?

There are two versions of WSL, one is Hyper-V based, the other isn't. If you have trouble with Hyper-V, simply switch to WSL1.

That’s even worse. File system performance is so terrible that it’s unusable for anything past trivial operations. AFAIK it maps the Linux ABI/syscalls to NT and that’s it. So you get the dire small file performance of NTFS to contend with (MFT locking).

Wherever you go there are puddles of this ick to stand in.

I’ve been at this long enough to know when to give up and walk away.

Slightly tangential at best, but there was software I used to use in a former life that was developed and designed for Linux systems first. They were then able to cross compile it for Mac and Windows. When first using the software, it was only ever used on Windows. Once I started using it in more advanced ways, I wanted to try out the Mac and/or Linux versions since they had a CLI client. Both of these systems ran circles around the Windows version in how much faster they were to do the exact same processing. Turns out, they were using the same C-style calls to access files. That C-style code is very slow on windows, yet using a Windows native call brought their software to the same speed.

TL;DR Windows definitely has its own way of doing file system access

I think the light you're referring to is Linux, and the tunnel is Windows :D

On a more serious note, you shouldn't be so dismissive of open source desktop environments, KDE 5 is quite usable today, and GNOME 40 looks to be pretty good too. Give it a whirl, you might just like it.

I’m using Pop OS now on a Dell XPS. It’s quite good. But Macs and Mac OS are by far the best machines you can buy. People complaining about the store is kinda funny. I can’t even get sound to work out of the box and I have to reboot every few days. Once in a while my machine will shit itself when I open the lid.

But the Apple Store, that’s the nail in the coffin? You’re going to go back to googling to find which specific drivers you need because of the Apple Store?

Yeah what gives - the software "stores" for most distributions are great. Elementary is particularly interesting in helping developers to make a living doing FOSS.

I just did a double take on GNOME 40. They really did just go from 3.38 to 40! I'm confused about what'll happen when GTK 4.0 comes around.

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