It is the best thing because it makes Linux so easy to install and get started with on Windows PCs which dominate the market.
It is the worst thing because desktop Linux users are no longer forced to dogfood and fix laptop hardware issues, and so these issues will continue to go unfixed, and native desktop Linux installs will thus continue to suffer.
Case in point: I've used desktop Linux for more than 20 years and I recently moved to using WSL on Windows because I love having all my hardware devices like my photo printer "just work" on Windows and I love getting great laptop battery life.
It looks like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon is the only killer laptop you can buy with Linux preinstalled that has a 4K UHD screen option, but Lenovo makes the buying experience extremely frustrating. Lenovo overprices Thinkpads most of the year and then occasionally does killer sales. And Lenovo has lately been suffering 4 month shipping delays on many Thinkpad configurations. I'm sick of wasting time waiting for the sales and then trying to buy before the reseller bots buy up the deals. So I bought a non-Thinkpad Win 10 laptop instead and I run WSL on it for my Linux needs.
I just switched a few months ago (after having tried it n times over 20 years), and this is the first time I'm sticking with it. Gaming works (I haven't found any games in my steam library that don't run OOB with proton), all developer productivity tools work, office productivity is solved with the rise of O365/GDocs, as hated as electron is every (or almost every) electron app out there is cross platform.
The only things that I haven't found suitable replacements for is graphics editing (I use the affinity suite on a VM), and probably CAD products and the like. But for 95% of users, desktop linux works better than Windows atm, everything works perfectly after installation.
Regarding the printer, in Windows I have to go to brother's site and download a driver, I've never had windows auto detect and properly configure a printer + scanner (just the printer, if your lucky). On Linux I just click add printer, it auto detects it and installs it, including the scanner.
Microsoft is basically telling us "Here you go, your developers can do their weird dev thingies now, so you don't have to bother with that Linux desktop stuff anymore. We've killed their last excuses."
I think this is a really bad thing to happen to Linux. Microsoft Loves Linux?? More like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're trying again to displace the Linux desktop marketshare, small as it already is, by pushing it into the software dev niche.
Personally I use Linux because I don't want to use Windows, with their choices made on my behalf and telemetry that can't be turned off etc. It's because I like choosing my own desktop environment, because I like full control of my machine, because I like to choose whether I want to use a TPM or not. It's not because I wanted to use some dev toolchain or something. I want to use Linux because I love Linux. Not because Windows wasn't good enough for my purposes.
echo 'Xft.dpi: 192' | xrdb -merge
export GDK_SCALE=2
Windows is actually better for online privacy because a Windows browser is so much more mainstream. If you are broadcasting your "Linux" OS in your browser User-Agent string to every website you visit you are not terribly anonymous online because you are broadcasting you are among the elite 1% of computer users. Yes, you can install a browser extension to say your User-Agent is Windows, but have you?
Just use KDE or anything else. GNOME is not the only option.
> DPI scaling
Wayland.
> User agent
You don't need a browser extension for this. Enable Resist Fingerprinting for Firefox and it'll hide your user agent as a Windows user, similar to what the Tor Browser already does.
Wayland still isn't 100% there for nVidia yet. "Well don't use nVidia then!" Well, for many machine learning workflows and other use cases non-nVidia isn't 100% there yet. But yeah, Linux users should avoid nVidia to the maximum extent possible.
Your Firefox tip sounds good, thank you.
It's true that the mouse doesn't auto scale but you can manually make it bigger in settings. Same with the "taskbar" height. HiDPI is still a bit in development and I heard the next release 5.23 will bring a lot of goodies in October. But overall I think it's fine.. Where it falls down is mixed DPI (e.g. one screen at 200% and another at 100%). But even Windows is still very flakey with that. Only macOS covers that scenario perfectly.
One thing I love about KDE is the wealth of options. Gnome is heading the way of Apple: opinionated software and minimalism. Windows is heading the same way though not as strongly. That doesn't suit me. KDE is really my thing.
There was also a story 5 days ago that putting an XPS in a bag voids its warranty unless it is completely powered off. Dell says you can't just close the lid to put the laptop in a sleep state before throwing it in your backpack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
(Of course, this could just be a CYA cover-your-ass clause that Dell's lawyers said to throw in to reduce lawsuit losses from lithium battery fires that affect all laptop makers including Apple. If the sales losses from this CYA clause's bad publicity are less than the reduction in lawsuit losses then I guess it's a win for Dell's balance sheet. I haven't seen any evidence that Dells are more prone to fires than any other brand.)
EDIT: I was just reading the linked XPS thread and it sounds like the overheating issue is due to a change in how sleep states were traditionally handled (S1/S3 etc.). This affects all Windows laptops, not just the XPS. A Linux XPS can actually avoid the issue if Linux sleep states are configured correctly, according to posters in the discussion.
Linux: fast, private, under your control, user empowering. Windows: slow, spyware, under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user.
Just blows my mind.
That being said I hate windows 11 and the choices made. While I love windows 10, as it mainly just works and was a big set up from 7.
I use Linux nearly 90% of the time in server space. With Windows VM's mostly for the AD Domain Controller and Print Server, as Windows AD in a Azure AD Hybrid setup works great for user control. Integrates into my Linux server for a synced user control. The Linux alt is a janky option. Keeping user accounts locked down is pretty important for production systems.
The Linux desktop scene however is a great deal better than it used to be. Back in the Day I used to rock opensuse on a IBM T61, everything worked out the box with that install. Something Ubuntu at the time did not do. But the lack of software was always an issue and wine was not what it is today. Office 2000 and other old windows apps ended up working fine.
>under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user
I think that you and I are alike in that we care how we use a computer, what that computer is, what kind of software runs on it and so on. The key bit of empathy we need to understand the reason why most people use something that "works to wrench power from the user" as you put it, is that in fact most users want that powered wrenched from them because with power comes responsibility and for most people that juice is not worth the squeeze.
You can now create documents, communicate with people and consume entertainment (that is to say, most of what most people use a computer for) by doing little more than poking at a limited selection of large rectangles on a screen. Most people are happy with this and it's pretty hard to convince someone that they should spend time from their life on the effort of learning a new UI or an alternative operating system, or even think at all about what their operating system is. Honestly I get their position, and if I didn't care about computers I probably would not either.
Linux on the Server is by far the reality, and windows on the server is mostly for use as a domain controller or print server.