Reasons to switch from Windows to Linux | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to switch from Windows to Linux

lpi.org

143 pointsjlpcsl336 comments

Disclosure: I'm a developer advocate at Microsoft with a focus on Linux, I am typing this on a laptop running Windows 11 (it also has another SSD that runs Linux), and I'm a diehard Mac user.

I hate this sort of SEO-driven clickbait that is trying to inflame wars that frankly, were settled two decades ago. Use Linux. Use Windows. Use macOS. Use Chrome OS. Use OpenBSD. Use Haiku. If you're a complete masochist, use GNN Hurd. Use whatever works.

It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!) and poorly-written articles like this do nothing to help change that.

Plus, the article is wrong. There are plenty of Linux distributions with tons of telemetry and spyware (Deepin Linux is literally run by the Chinese government) and talking points against TPMs and secure boot are so completely 2010, I had really hoped we had moved past that by now.

Again, use whatever you want. But this is such lazy writing, I'm disheartened to see it rank so highly on HN, just because people want to get territorial about what computing platform other people use.

> There are plenty of Linux distributions with tons of telemetry and spyware (Deepin Linux is literally run by the Chinese government)

Trying to "Both Sides" telemetry and spyware fails because you can use Linux without either, whereas macOS and Windows are inherently married to it and you can't use them without submitting to their respective surveillance regimes. Oddities like Deepin barely matter and can't be used to honestly say Linux is just as bad as a closed-source OS.

That's weird because I ran a tool to disable it in Windows the day I installed it. I'd wager it was even easier than disabling it on those Linux distros.

the tools don't disable all telemetry, besides, most linux distros have no telemetry to disable

Just wait for an update that will reenable everything you've disabled.

Don't forget that it might come bundled with other helpful updates with no way to choose which pieces to pull in.

I can't believe people are actually comparing telemetry in Windows to Linux.

> I can't believe people are actually comparing telemetry in Windows to Linux.

I'm not surprised - at least some of these people are Microsoft employees so it's no wonder they try to use the same strategy as always - fear, uncertainty and doubt. After all, if people start believing that "Linux also has telemetry", why even consider switching?

Actually I'm happy to hear it from the mouth of Microsoft employees (especially "advocacy" guys, i.e. paid to convince others): it means that Microsoft does care, they do consider Linux a threat, and the war is definitely not over.

There's no FUD. Ubuntu actually does have telemetry. KDE does too. It may not be quite the same in implementation as Microsoft's telemetry, but it is there. There is also nothing to be afraid of here either, the effects of it and how to use it are all spelled out clearly in the respective privacy policies.

https://ubuntu.com/legal/data-privacy

https://community.kde.org/Telemetry_Use

"Why even consider switching" is the eternal question that Linux companies have not been able to adequately answer for the last few decades. If you know of a good reason, let me know. Otherwise we can agree that the "war" was already over a long time ago and Microsoft won pretty clearly.

> Ubuntu actually does have telemetry. KDE does too.

Ahh, yes, Ubuntu and KDE = Linux. Very logical.

> It may not be quite the same in implementation as Microsoft's telemetry, but it is there.

There can be a world of difference between telemetry implementations. Debian's popcount, for instance, is opt-in - Windows' are mostly (if not all) opt-out. Ubuntu and KDE send their data to organizations that I trust - Windows do not. Ubuntu and KDE's telemetry remain off when I turn it off - Windows' does not. I know exactly what data KDE collects, because it's spelled out in that page you linked - I don't know what data Windows or Ubuntu collect.

Given the extreme variance in telemetry implementations, trying to falsely equivocate Windows and Linux telemetry is FUD.

"Ahh, yes, Ubuntu and KDE = Linux."

In this case, yes. Ubuntu and KDE are two major players in desktop Linux. There really is not anything stopping Linux vendors from using telemetry, and in fact I'd expect them to use more of it in the event their products get more popular.

"Debian's popcount, for instance, is opt-in - Windows' are mostly (if not all) opt-out."

This is a minor detail and I don't think it actually matters. If a company actually needs that data and is not getting it from that telemetry then they're getting it from somewhere else. For example Canonical builds products on Debian and doesn't use popcon, they use other data collection mechanisms, which are detailed in the privacy policy I posted.

"Ubuntu and KDE send their data to organizations that I trust"

This has nothing to do with the implementation. Plus, Microsoft's dedicated customers do trust Microsoft to similar degree, so this is not going to be convincing to them. You need a better selling point.

"Ubuntu and KDE's telemetry remain off when I turn it off - Windows' does not."

That sounds to me like a bug or glitch that someone should fix. Ubuntu or KDE could also manifest such bugs, I guess we're just lucky they haven't.

"I don't know what data Windows or Ubuntu collect"

It's possible to change that. You can just read the Ubuntu privacy policy that I posted. Windows also has a similar privacy policy, you should do a search for it if you're interested.

"trying to falsely equivocate Windows and Linux telemetry is FUD"

Actually I have not done this, I mentioned they're different, and I explicitly explained how you shouldn't be afraid, uncertain or doubting anything. In a lot of cases (including some you mentioned) telemetry is not actually bad, and Windows users may feel that it's not bad for them either. I can give you more details if you need them. Please just don't misuse the phrase "FUD" like this.

It is clear that we have completely different perspectives. What is a "minor detail" for you is a decisive factor for me. I happily enable the Popularity Contest in Debian because they ask and because I trust them. I deliberately block all possible telemetry on Windows because they don't ask and because I don't trust them.

You know what is a crucial difference? I can take my Linux box and inspect all packets coming in and out and understand what they are for (it will take a long time on a modern system, but it's doable). And if I don't like something, I can block it and be sure (compromised systems aside) it will block everything I ask it to. With Windows... not only I can't be sure what all these packets are for, but I can't even be sure the built-in firewall and the related API will successfully block all packets communicating with Microsoft servers (same with Apple tbf). This is something that doesn't bother 99% of desktop users. But it does bother a certain kind of people who don't like being treated like that. We're different, that's all.

I wasn't talking about my perspective or your perspective though, this would be the perspective of the majority of Ubuntu users and Windows users. (Disclosure: I don't use either of them, I use Debian and I don't have popcon installed)

I'm not sure what you mean you can't sniff packets coming from a Windows machine, Wireshark should just work there as it does on Linux.

I'm not talking about being able to sniff packets but being able to to (1) understand what they are used for, (2) block them all on the same machine reliably, that is, including all communication to/from MS servers. In other words, being able to control the system I own or not.

Well there are a number of ways to set up a firewall, I think you can install from a number of them, and it's also trivial to use a raspberry pi for that. Can you mention which packets you're having trouble understanding? I may not be able to answer, but someone skilled with Windows probably could.

> In this case, yes.

No, not in this case. It does not matter that Ubuntu and KDE are the two biggest desktop Linux vendors, because (1) their telemetry (and, more generally, spying) are in a different league from Windows', and (2) users are capable of choosing to use another distro - a luxury you don't get with Windows.

> This is a minor detail and I don't think it actually matters.

For almost everyone, except possibly you, this is a huge point. Opt-out and opt-in anything are completely different, both in a conceptual sense, and in an actual privacy sense. On a conceptual level, opt-out vs. opt-in defines the normal behavior or expectation for a thing - Microsoft wants you to believe that it's normal for lots of your (potentially-)private data to go to them. On a practical level, many users aren't aware of (or change) the settings, so opt-out vs. opt-in significantly changes the number of people who actually receive telemetry.

Here's a thought experiment to help you understand how important opt-in vs. opt-out is to most people - how many unhappy people are there that organ donation is opt-in - or opt-out? What if you made college opt-out - and got billed for the first semester even if you didn't attend unless you cancelled? What if social security payments were opt-in, or legal rights as an adult, or protection by civil or criminal law?

> This has nothing to do with the implementation.

Red herring - we're not concerned with just the implementation, we're concerned with Microsoft's behavior as a whole, and whether telemetry as a whole is different between Windows and Linux - the answer to which is a resounding "yes", because the exact same data going to Microsoft is far more likely to be exploited (not for the user's benefit) commercially than data going to the KDE foundation. So, sure, it's not related to the implementation - and that's irrelevant.

> That sounds to me like a bug or glitch that someone should fix. Ubuntu or KDE could also manifest such bugs, I guess we're just lucky they haven't.

This issue has been around for years and noticed by thousands of people on the internet, so if it's not intentional, then it's gross negligence, signifying a complete lack of concern for user privacy...that is not shared by Ubuntu or KDE. But, given Microsoft's past history of user abuse, compared with KDE's non-existence history (and Ubuntu's questionable status), it's rather more likely that it's intentional.

> It's possible to change that. You can just read the Ubuntu privacy policy that I posted. Windows also has a similar privacy policy, you should do a search for it if you're interested.

A snide and absolutely useless reply. My point, which you conveniently missed, was that I don't understand what Ubuntu or Microsoft collect because their privacy policies are obtuse, not because I haven't read them.

If you were actually concerned about seeing what data was collected, you would have read the Ubuntu policy and then seen that it does not make clear what data is collected. For instance, on that page, there's a sentence: "Canonical may collect non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request." ...that doesn't enumerate the complete list of "non-personally-identifying information" collected...and all of that applies a hundred times more to Microsoft and Windows, with Canonical being exceptional in being this bad for Linux distros.

I also noticed that you didn't include a link to the Microsoft telemetry privacy policy. Perhaps that's because you weren't actually able to locate it yourself, just like I wasn't? For instance, let's search for "Windows Telemetry Policy" on DDG[1] - none of the first-page results are what we want. Meanwhile, "KDE telemetry policy" returns the document you linked and one on their telemetry philosophy on the first page. (I couldn't find anything on the Ubuntu telemetry)

Meanwhile, if you were to actually go and read the generic Microsoft privacy policy[3], you would see that it is so vague as to not allow you to understand what is actually being collected - like I said.

> Actually I have not done this, I mentioned they're different, and I explicitly explained how you shouldn't be afraid, uncertain or doubting anything.

Except you didn't - you made vague false equivalences meant to try to portray Linux telemetry as being similar to Microsoft telemetry (even though you couldn't actually provide the technical details to back it up), meant to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt in Linux by trying to associate Microsoft's brand of "telemetry" with them. You also didn't explain away any worries about Microsoft's telemetry itself.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=windows+telemetry+policy [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kde+telemetry+policy [3] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement

"their telemetry (and, more generally, spying) are in a different league from Windows', and (2) users are capable of choosing to use another distro"

I just find this to be not convincing, sorry. It doesn't matter that it's in a different league, they're always going to be different because the requirements are different. And it doesn't really matter that users can switch to a different distro either, what seems to be happening is that the more popular the distro gets with Windows users, the more telemetry it seems to gain. Saying "you can just switch" is more of the same reason why Linux is not popular to begin with. People don't want to keep switching to a new distro every 6 months to evade crapware because some vendor went rogue. So they just suck it up and deal with it all up front from Microsoft.

"For almost everyone, except possibly you, this is a huge point."

Please avoid making these assumptions, see my other comment. This is not about me because I don't use Ubuntu, this would be specifically about those Ubuntu users.

"Opt-out and opt-in anything are completely different, both in a conceptual sense, and in an actual privacy sense."

I get what you're saying but this is one of those things that just doesn't work when it's opt-in. Using one of your examples, social security is another thing that would not work if it was opt-in.

"we're concerned with Microsoft's behavior as a whole"

I don't see why this matters. Microsoft is a huge company, you can cherry pick examples of bad things and good things they do to try to prove a point, just like with the Linux community. In fact the whole point of open source seems to be that companies can commercially exploit the source code without paying. I get what you're saying about the KDE Foundation but that's just it: you've made a value judgement based on their privacy policy, other users can do the same thing about Microsoft and come to the same conclusions, and in fact millions (billions?) of them already do.

"This issue has been around for years and noticed by thousands of people on the internet"

So have many other bugs unfortunately. I just haven't seen any reason to suggest that this one is intentional versus any other bug, what you've made is a guess. If you have some hard data I'd love to see it.

"A snide and absolutely useless reply. My point, which you conveniently missed, was that I don't understand what Ubuntu or Microsoft collect because their privacy policies are obtuse, not because I haven't read them."

Please stop assuming bad faith, this is not helpful. If you're having trouble understanding it then let's go through it together and we can try to clarify. It should be easy enough for us if we put our heads together, those policies are written for laypeople.

"'Canonical may collect non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request.' ...that doesn't enumerate the complete list of "non-personally-identifying information" collected.."

So that would be whatever your web browser transmits, not strictly under the control of Canonical. I suspect that's why they can't say more there.

"and all of that applies a hundred times more to Microsoft and Windows"

If you could mention some things you're confused about then we could work through it. Just let me know, thanks.

"I also noticed that you didn't include a link to the Microsoft telemetry privacy policy."

Well no I figured you could find it because it's pretty prominent when you install Microsoft software or use any of their services. Most companies won't have a "telemetry policy" and I have no idea where you go that term, it always ends up in the privacy policy. And you did post the right link to that privacy statement, that's what I would have posted.

"it is so vague as to not allow you to understand what is actually being collected"

Again please mention what is vague, I'm really not sure what you're referring to, it could be a number of things.

"you made vague false equivalences meant to try to portray Linux telemetry as being similar to Microsoft telemetry (even though you couldn't actually provide the technical details to back it up), meant to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt in Linux by trying to associate Microsoft's brand of 'telemetry' with them"

I've done none of that and I explained why, my whole reason for posting here is to try to clarify the differences and clear up any fear or uncertainty. Please avoid taking this kind of combative attitude and assuming bad faith, we won't have a productive discussion. I don't really know how to put this any clearer. I am a Linux user trying to explain what is happening with Linux. I don't use any Microsoft products and I don't really care for them. If you're looking to accuse me of disparaging Linux to make it look bad then you're barking up the wrong tree, IMO what really makes Linux look bad is the constant infighting among its community members. I wish people would stop that.

> I get what you're saying but this is one of those things that just doesn't work when it's opt-in.

So be it. We have had many operating systems without telemetry at all. If this is the will of users, they should respect it. Instead, you get two buttons: (1) give us everything, (2) give us the things we care about most. There is no third option "give us nothing" so people are downloading third party packages from various sources just to block that, possibly breaking parts of their system. And then MS changes things so it becomes an even worse mess. This is the very definition of being user-hostile - just because they can.

What is missing here is that no other method to collect feedback and product analytics has been proposed. It is impossible to make decisions at a company the size of Microsoft without that type of information. All the larger companies are doing it for this reason. Opt-out telemetry is the easiest and cheapest way to get it. Most Linux desktops don't have to deal with the problem because they aren't that big, and the operating systems that didn't have it at all were built for a different era. You're framing this as something being about the will of the users or being "user-hostile" vs not, but that's honestly not important here, this is a very real technical problem. Overwhelmingly it seems that Windows users (and some Linux users, definitely Android users if you count those as "Linux") are fine with the current state of things.

In some places it seems that people did care, for example the GDPR is a step in the right direction, but there seems to be about zero political will to do anything like that in the United States. And even that doesn't really change the state of telemetry in Windows that much.

I actually disagree. Ubuntu has a lot of telemetry on by default (unlike Deepin, they disclose this, but I'm pointing this out) and for many years, Canonical really tried to push the whole account login thing (RIP Ubuntu One). Not to mention the time Ubuntu inserted Amazon affiliate links into the search app (which to their credit, they eventually removed -- tho the Amazon app that was just an affiliate launcher didn't go away until LAST YEAR).

In fact, I would argue that most distributions with a focus on user interface and usability tend to have a lot more of the things that macOS and Windows have, like user accounts (tied to app stores or whatever), giving back telemetry (which is often really, really important for developers to have), or are part of major enterprise servicing agreements that have a lot of tracking and management by design.

Plus, whether you use a Mac, Windows, or Linux, most users are going to be using Chrome as their web browser, almost certainly attached to a Google account, watching Netflix, using a cloud service for storage, and what, playing games using Proton, which is sure giving Steam a whole lot of your data. The web won and the web surveils us. It just does.

If it makes you feel better that your chosen distro doesn't have as many options enabled by default and that you can't have a common user account to sync settings across multiple desktops, that's awesome. But I think that ignores a fundamental way humans use computers and the web -- regardless of OS. You're being surveilled. Linux isn't going to save you.

> I actually disagree.

Of course you disagree because it's your job. Satya Nadella himself makes sure you try to sway the opinion here in favor of your company [0]:

"In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

Hint: criticizing Linux in such a heavy-handed way won't work that well.

[0 ]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2019/earn...

Please don't be so cynical. I don't work for Microsoft, I've been using Linux for about 20 years and I haven't used Windows seriously in about that long, and I agree entirely with her comment. Once you go adding all the things to Linux that Windows users want, it starts to look a lot like Windows in more than one way...

Actually, that isn't my job. In fact, very few comments I have made on HN have ever had any association with what I actually do -- and that is by design. I don't speak for my employer, and I'm certainly not astroturfing here.

Hint: Being a jerk to people online using a random account makes you look like an asshole.

I'm not talking about you specifically, but Microsoft employees in general that Nadella says are working hard in order to sway the opinion of HN users towards you ("you" meaning again not you personally but your company).

EDIT: To clarify: I don't know how this works in practice, I assumed accounts explicitly identified as belonging to Microsoft employees are used, so that Nadella can open HN in the morning and assess the efficacy of your (plural) advocacy efforts. That's why I initially not excluded you could be one of these people as you have introduced yourself as an advocacy person at Microsoft. Now that you said you are not, I see no reason not to believe you. But it doesn't invalidate the fact that other Microsoft employees are trying to game HN and that this activity is very important for your CEO.

> Canonical really tried to push the whole account login thing

And yet Ubuntu has no "account login thing", and Windows has one. If Ubuntu is doing thing you dislike, it can be easily forked (that's a bit what Pop does, and it works well).

> If it makes you feel better that your chosen distro doesn't have as many options enabled by default and that you can't have a common user account to sync settings across multiple desktops, that's awesome. But I think that ignores a fundamental way humans use computers and the web -- regardless of OS. You're being surveilled. Linux isn't going to save you.

I'm glad I'm not using Windows if that's the opinion of a developer advocate at Microsoft.

Can you link me to the source code where these egregious privacy concerns are taking place? I'd love to open an issue if you're reluctant to.

> Ubuntu has a lot of telemetry on by default (unlike Deepin, they disclose this, but I'm pointing this out) and for many years, Canonical really tried to push the whole account login thing (RIP Ubuntu One).

You can try to make me conflate Linux and Ubuntu but I'm not going to. Debian and Slackware don't have those kinds of things, and, more to the point, you can use the Linux kernel without those kinds of things. It's both technically and legally possible. Can't really say that about Windows or macOS.

> like user accounts (tied to app stores or whatever)

No, most package repos don't require user accounts.

> giving back telemetry (which is often really, really important for developers to have)

Plenty of developers manage just fine without it. The developers of most of the software on a Linux system, for example, with the exception of mainstream web browsers.

> or are part of major enterprise servicing agreements that have a lot of tracking and management by design.

Enterprise is Enterprise. They're off in a world all their own.

> But I think that ignores a fundamental way humans use computers and the web -- regardless of OS. You're being surveilled. Linux isn't going to save you.

Inviting the surveillance into my home is different from being watched when I go outside.

> It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!)

Android(Linux) is used by majority of users (40%), while Windows holds just 32.3%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share .

Desktop...

x86 Desktop, to be precise. On non-x86 desktops (e.g. Raspberry Pi 4), Linux holds it position very well.

Linux+ARM desktop can replace Wintel desktop.

Obviously, mobile devices far outnumber desktops and laptops now (servers too), but I think conflating Android with both Linux and the Linux desktop is wrong.

The whole meme of the Linux desktop wasn't meant to say, "uses a highly modified version of the Linux kernel with a custom userland, proprietary interface, proprietary services, custom drivers, etc. The idea was not to replace one proprietary system with another mostly proprietary system that happens to have a modified version of the Linux kernel and that puts some of the software in a git repo. I do think it is telling that the most successful user-facing implementations of both Unix and Linux have had to create largely proprietary wrappers over them both.

> but I think conflating Android with both Linux and the Linux desktop is wrong

I think when people say that it's more about saying that the use case for computing in general has changed. Linux is everywhere and runs everything so the fixation on desktops is old-fashioned and not really necessary anymore.

Linux kernel is not a public API on Android, app developers don't care where ART + NDK (public APIs) run on.

I feel like with the uptick in Linux gaming, Valve's investment in Proton, the Steam Deck, EAC/Battleye compatibility with Proton, modern desktops catching up to Windows look and feel, it's closer to being 'the year of the Linux desktop' than ever before.

Sure, 'the year of the Linux desktop' is a loosely defined term that doesn't necessarily have any key metrics that you'd agree with, and it's not like any of the world's governments or corporations are suddenly going to overhaul their entire desktop IT inventory in 12 months, but for the first time ever I have seen people say '2022 is the year of the Linux desktop' and I think that there is actual substance to it rather than just blind naïve optimism.

"The year of Linux on the desktop" is a meme for a specific reason.

It'll take longer than a year.

The claim is funny because you imagine the whole world switching to Linux, like, overnight. Which is obviously unrealistic. It's a gradual process.

But last year Chromebooks outsold Macs. Chromebooks are Linux. Even if they're not "Linux Linux," there isn't much you can do with one that you can't do with most other distributions. Which demonstrates that the barriers to adoption are falling and a major factor is now the need for better marketing.

That still doesn't mean the percentage of desktops running Linux will be at 97% by end of December. But it'll probably be higher than it was last year.

I agree with this. It's hard to engage with people like GP saying things like 'the year of the Linux desktop will never happen', as they are using the term to essentially dismiss Linux as a platform, however in order to counter it or to highlight the progress that has been made, you are effectively having to sidestep bad-faith framing of the issue.

I don't think GP was universally dismissing Linux in the way that it is normally used (there are plenty of better examples in this thread, though), but it is similarly an inflammatory comment to make that detracts from proper discussion.

>they are using the term to essentially dismiss Linux as a platform

The original framing of 'year of the Linux desktop' from back in the 90s was predicated on the assumption that desktop OSes were mature, that Desktop Linux would soon catch up in usability with the proprietary ones, and then free would win. It was the precursor to Google's "open always wins" mantra with Android.

That is almost certainly never going to happen, and it's fine. The Linux desktop scene is very mature at this point, and we're all the better for it being there as a developer, sysadmin and hobbyist playground. If the traditional GNOME, KDE, xfce, etc style Linux desktop never becomes a mainstream option for high street users that's fine and it's not dismissive. It's just recognising the reality, after well over 20 years.

I think there is a difference between recognising current reality and trying to snub something out of hand. I find those that are doing an honest appraisal of the current situation usually won't use the phrase in either a positive or a negative sense.

But again, I’m not snubbing anything out of hand. If it is controversial to say that regardless of kernel, successful consumer operating systems require billions of dollars of investment, I’ll own that. But that’s being dismissive. That’s being a realist and responding to the nature of the article posted, which in my opinion was a lot of recycled from 2006 talking points that are still getting clicks and discussion like it’s fucking Slashdot or something. OS wars and text editor wars are eternal, I realize. But my response was to the article, not snubbing or even impugning the very hard and very impressive work that has happened over the last 30 years with Linux.

Again, I think there are some really valid reasons to move to Linux. I don’t think this article was a good example.

I think your responses to it being a very flannely, clickbaity article without much substance are fair, but I find that responding to the article by making sweeping statements isn't refuting the material of the article - it's making an appeal to authority where the authority is just the fact that Linux is bad on desktop.

>Again, I think there are some really valid reasons to move to Linux. I don’t think this article was a good example.

I can agree with that. I definitely wouldn't be sending this article to anyone to convince them...

One of the things I learned watching decades of development of computing is to never say never. Things like "the laptop I bought just a couple of years ago is not supported by the most recent version of Windows" might seem insignificant now, but in the hindsight it's one these little things that influence global changes and future trends.

As someone who has done a lot of hacking with Linux as a desktop platform, one would be absolutely right to dismiss it. The desktop platforms on Linux are still heavily fragmented and in some ways are still decades behind Windows/Mac. The existence of a better compatibility layer to run Windows games doesn't really change this fundamental flaw. I personally don't think it will ever be fixed because this fragmentation seems to be the whole reason why people want to use Linux on a desktop. That's what I personally would say is meant by "the year of the Linux desktop will never happen".

To put it another way, It's not like the existence of some Steam games is going to suddenly make it so you can go into a Walmart and buy a machine with Arch or Slackware preinstalled on it.

But what of the Steam deck? If it sells well enough then you will absolutely be buying a machine with Arch pre-installed on it from Walmart.

A big 'if', and not currently the case, but also not as impossible as commentators such as yourself would suggest.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the desktop. AFAIK the steam deck is a handheld gaming device similar to a Nintendo Switch, not a desktop PC. It seems about as related to desktop Linux as google stadia, i.e. not much. When I say machine with Arch I mean a desktop/laptop with just the stock Arch on it.

Edit: And if you really want to be pedantic, ChromeOS is technically Gentoo underneath the covers, but the only reason it works for its target use cases is because it's heavily modified with some proprietary components. Getting one of those is really different from the experience you would have with trying to put upstream Gentoo on a laptop.

>AFAIK the steam deck is a handheld gaming device similar to a Nintendo Switch, not a desktop PC

It is essentially a fully fledged desktop PC in a handheld form factor [0]. It is identical architecturally to a desktop PC with integrated controller running Arch-based Steam OS 3.0.

>When I say machine with Arch I mean a desktop/laptop with just the stock Arch on it.

Which is fair, but not what I asked.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/steam-deck

Yeah I get that, but you still probably are not going to want to run desktop apps on that thing. It doesn't have a keyboard or mouse. It looks more suited to running tablet apps. And regardless of that, my point is that the status of gaming APIs shipped by one vendor on a proprietary bundling of Linux has little to do with the status of the rest of the platform, which by the way is also woefully inadequate for shipping tablet apps. And also: Linux still is not able to adequately run the majority of desktop software for Windows that people actually want to use, which is all proprietary. Progress has not changed or increased here, Wine is still about as far behind (relatively speaking) as it's ever been. AFAIK the only reason Proton is able to work is because support for Direct3D 11 was added, which at this point is a 13 year old API, and it still doesn't work perfectly.

With a dock you can have a keyboard and a mouse :)

Moreover, given that the Steam Deck is essentially a PC, any investment in the Deck in drivers, APIs, desktop environments, display manager (Valve have invested in KDE Plasma/Wayland and Gamescope), native game compatibility, compatibility layers (applies to all software, not just games) is also an investment in desktop Linux as a whole. Even if we are just limiting it to games, having more games on Linux makes the platform more viable for people who want to use their computer for gaming.

This isn't even mentioning how much has moved to either web or cross-platform electron apps in the last 10 years (which includes Teams, Spotify, Discord, Youtube, VSCode and others)

>which by the way is also woefully inadequate for shipping tablet apps

I will bow to your experience on this one, I don't have any experience in this area.

>adequately run the majority of desktop software for Windows that people actually want to use

Actually you can run pretty much all Microsoft Office on Linux - the big ones that people still have trouble with are Adobe Creative suite.

All of that stuff is fine and good but it's the same incremental progress as always. I don't see anything particularly special about using this device with a dock, that seems like a really niche use case. These type of devices are not new and have never been big sellers. I'd assume most customers would just use it for games and don't care that it technically runs Linux and allows them to switch out of their game and fumble around trying to use LibreOffice or GIMP on a touchscreen until they get frustrated enough to plug in a keyboard. Unless Valve is planning to invest billions of dollars in overhauling KDE for general uses (including non-gaming uses), then I don't think anything is going to change significantly. Yes, that's how much money it would cost. This is what Google had to do to with Android to make that kind of "Linux" a viable platform, it won't happen with anything else unless similar amounts are invested.

And for windows software I'm not talking about Microsoft Office or Adobe, I'm talking about the "long tail" of Windows apps that don't get attention from Wine developers. There's still a lot of those.

> Linux still is not able to adequately run the majority of desktop software for Windows that people actually want to use, which is all proprietary.

All of this has been getting replaced by the web over the course of twenty years.

The primary exception to this is games, because they're so resource intensive and benefit from being closer to the metal. Which is why gaming APIs are significant -- AAA games don't get converted into a web page and therefore are the main thing still tying a large group of consumers to Windows.

You assume customers don't want to be tied to Windows which is not the case. Maybe you and I got sick of Windows 20-30 years ago but Microsoft's customers (the vast majority of desktop computer users) don't care. They see ads in the OS and they think "that could be our ad up there".

Sure they don't care. But that means they don't care.

If you tried to sell a PC with Linux on it at Walmart in the year 2000, people would return it because it wouldn't natively run Microsoft Outlook or Starcraft.

If in a few years from now you're on webmail regardless and it can run every game on Steam, there is no reason to return it. And it costs less by the amount of a Windows license, so there is a reason to buy it.

That cost reduction doesn't just come out of thin air. If you want to build software that is competitive with Windows in other aspects, then you will have to charge similar amounts. Otherwise you're just leaving money on the table, because we know by now that customers are extremely willing to pay for it. And as long as Microsoft is shipping new APIs on Windows, Linux will never be able to run every game on Steam or every Windows program. It will always be perpetually behind playing catch-up, just like it has been for the last 25 years. The problem with your plan (and with all of these type of plans that I've seen people post) is that it requires Microsoft to give up and cede the market, which is not going to happen.

> That cost reduction doesn't just come out of thin air. If you want to build software that is competitive with Windows in other aspects, then you will have to charge similar amounts.

The assumption here is that development costs are linear.

If you spend a thousand dollars developing an operating system and your competition spends a million dollars, theirs won't be a thousand times better than yours, it will be infinitely better because theirs might actually boot and yours won't.

But if you spend a billion dollars and they spend a trillion dollars, theirs won't be a thousand times better than yours, it will be 2% better. Maybe. Because your billion dollars already caused to exist an operating system that does everything people need from an operating system and there is a point of diminishing returns. Which is where all the major operating systems already are.

What you would expect in a market like this is price competition. 80% as good for 20% of the price wins. 98% as good for 0% of the price wins even more. We're already there -- Microsoft has been giving away the Windows 10 and Windows 11 upgrades for free. They now need that to be competitive.

They can add new APIs all they want, but if Valve is providing ones that are just as good and will allow your games to run on their consoles which have any non-zero market share in addition to Windows, developers will prefer those.

I don't think they are at a point of diminishing returns. There are still advancements in hardware and drivers, and that's where the investment really pays off. Microsoft has historically been really good at designing APIs for this stuff that developers actually want to use. The vertical integration with shipping the whole OS really pays off for them. In Linux, it's extremely difficult to make any changes because you have to plumb everything through several layers of the stack which are all in separate disconnected projects. Only a few wealthy companies can really do it well and those tend to have a narrow focus on a specific vertical (Google, Red Hat, etc).

Price competition on the OS doesn't actually matter, as you have noted the market has moved towards additional services. When you say "98% as good for 0% of the price" you're not factoring in all the additional paid services that the company wants (and needs) to sell. I can tell you that Canonical certainly does not charge 0% of the price for everything, if they are taking a customer from Microsoft then they would probably like to gain 100% or more of that price from any given customer.

I have seen nothing to show that developers will prefer any Valve APIs, a lot of the games still seem to be running in Proton which actually shows that most developers still prefer to use the Microsoft stack and tooling. I should have mentioned this earlier but Visual Studio (the original, not VS Code) is also extremely important and entrenched, game developers are not just going to all switch to Vim and Emacs because Valve sold a product with Linux on it.

While I doubt that many people are going to want to run desktop applications on the Steam Deck, it appears to have the ability to connect a monitor and keyboard/mouse. Devices like this, Chromebooks, and many others will make Linux a more consumer facing OS in the decades to come.

I agree that the Windows API, beyond those needed for games, is a thorn in Linux's side. On the other hand, I also see the Linux desktop taking a larger percentage in the years to come. It won't really be because of growth in the Linux user base. It will be because desktops will have less of a presence outside of business use.

"Devices like this, Chromebooks, and many others will make Linux a more consumer facing OS in the decades to come."

Can you see how that's the point I'm making? "Linux" is still decades off from being a viable desktop OS, and it will always be so. A new embedded device running Linux that you can technically connect a keyboard and mouse to doesn't help the general case that Windows targets, or the case of purpose-built desktop/laptops that Apple targets.

I mean, I’m not dismissing Linux though. I am dismissing the idea that an operating system not funded by a trillion dollar company can make inroads with many , many end users, yes, that’s true (Google, Microsoft, Apple are all in that category), but I’m not dismissing Linux or the massive impact it has had. The Linux kernel is one of the singularly most disruptive forces in computing of the last 30 years. I think there is an argument to be made that it is the most disruptive. But Linux on the desktop, sorry. It’s not going to happen. And I just don’t consider Chrome OS Linux any more than I consider iOS Unix. I’ll probably still call macOS Unix (tho the Unixy bits are getting eroded with every release), but I personally don’t consider the kernel the operating system in this way, I just don't. I actually think the success of Chrome OS and macOS show what is necessary to make a successful desktop operating system: billions of dollars in investment. Not millions. Not tens of millions. Billions. It isn’t about the kernel. It’s about everything else.

My TV has a Linux kernel inside it. My coffee maker is running some variant of Linux or Busybox or something. Again, the Linux kernel is one of the most disruptive and important advancements in computing.

But the article was about switching from Windows to Linux on the desktop. And I think there are plenty of valid reasons to switch. I don’t think that particular article is a good example of them — and I think debates about what desktop OS people want to use are inflammatory by nature.

> I mean, I’m not dismissing Linux though.

> But Linux on the desktop, sorry. It’s not going to happen.

I mean this seems like a dismissal to me. I am specifically talking about the desktop. I don't think the impact that the Linux kernel has had on the server or mobile spaces is up for debate - as you say it's pretty massive.

The issue I have is the certainty with which you can dismiss the viability of Linux desktop. I've seen you mention Proton, but I don't think I've seen you consider or weigh up whether you think that Proton will or will not have an impact on viability of Linux on the desktop. What about EAC and Battleye anti-cheat? The fact that in the last 10 years we've transitioned from Flash to HTML5 and other cross-platform codecs.

I just can't see how you could wave all that off as 'sorry not going to happen'. Like, there has been improvement. There just has! (Going to use your own debating tactic there...). That isn't to say that Linux on the desktop is happening or that it has happened. I am saying that it could happen, and that is in stark contrast to how dismissive you are being about it.

I’ll put it this way, I think that a successful Linux on the desktop would not be something a lot of the people that advocate and love Linux on the desktop would embrace. It would be a lot more like Chrome OS (and Google is writing their own kernel, which just blurs a lot of the lines even more), meaning purposefully obfuscating the Linux bits, using custom or highly-customized desktop environments, being tightly configured with close-sourced backend cloud services, and being very difficult to use custom libraries or app repositories. I think Proton is a good example of this, actually. Valve has done some great work with compatibility and its great to see the work they have done to improve the gaming situation (tho people who claim that Windows and Linux are equivalent in gaming, as far as the desktop goes, are being disingenuous imho) and desktop Linux as a gaming platform is certainly superior to Mac, in terms of library. But Valve’s primary motive is to create a front end for their storefront and to do it in a way so that Valve can avoid paying various licensing fees. Gabe has been very upfront about that from the beginning. Steam Machines were a massive failure (I was at the launch party in Las Vegas the CES they were unveiled) and although I personally preordered a Steam Deck, I don’t think we really know what the actual market is for that kind of device. It could be on-par with consoles or it could be a lot less. But everything we’ve seen from that shows that the experience is very much designed to mimic a console experience — albeit with a lot more freedom for nerds like us. I don’t think that is at all the same thing as Linux Mint or even Ubuntu being the primary desktop OS for end users. Or that if Steam Deck is successful, that we will see computers sold with traditional Linux distros pre-installed at Best Buy (and the developer edition XPS and Lenovo machines aren’t what I’m talking about).

And that doesn’t touch on the still existing consumer software issues on Linux — getting developers like Serif (makers of Affinity) to target the Linux desktop (I’m not even going to try for Adobe) or for existing commercial software to come over.

Now, some of this ceases to matter because the web won and the web runs everywhere. But keep in mind that you’ll need to use that proprietary version of Chrome on your Linux desktop to watch HD Netflix or other DRM content and to access other stuff. The web winning doesn’t mean that software freedom has won.

As I said in my OP, I’m a diehard macOS user and I certainly appreciate the POSIX underpinnings and the fact that the OS has some BSD roots. In fact, it’s a huge part of the appeal for me (like many nerds in their late 30s, I embraced Mac OS X in the early 2000s because it was kind of like Linux but pretty and had Photoshop). But most Unix purists I know don’t like macOS (especially these days) for a variety of reasons and would rather use OpenBSD or pine for the days of Sun OS or Solaris.

So yes, despite the many notable efforts that have been made, no, I don’t think the Linux desktop as I think you define it will happen. If it were to happen, it would look and act a lot more like Windows and macOS with everything good and bad that that entails.

Well that's definitely the answer I was looking for. Thank you for this. I will concede that I agree with your points.

Nothing further to add, your honour.

Hey, thanks for the very nice back and forth. I really enjoyed the discussion!

As a peaceful bystander, I enjoyed it, too! Many good points. And specifically, things to address, like the DRM situation that is unhealthy. Also the browser ecosystem is a concern: if web app developers start to ignore Firefox and encourage macOS users to use Chrome instead of Safari, the user experience on Linux will face another serious problem that we already went through in the early 2000s. Many other things will need to be solved - but what makes me very happy is that we are actually solving issues one by one, and the situation of Linux users in 2022 will be incomparable to what they needed to go through twenty years ago.

> > I mean, I’m not dismissing Linux though.

> > But Linux on the desktop, sorry. It’s not going to happen.

> I mean this seems like a dismissal to me. I am specifically talking about the desktop. I don't think the impact that the Linux kernel has had on the server or mobile spaces is up for debate - as you say it's pretty massive.

There's never been on a ‘year of the Mac desktop’ in the way that people typically discuss a potential ‘year of the Linux desktop’, and instigating one is pretty obviously not part of Apple's strategy. Imo it's easy to imagine Linux desktops carving out a more secure place in society and ‘the market’ which doesn't involve any kind of mass adoption, meaning that it's safer to assume compatibility or other measures to accommodate desktop Linux users (from vendors, from governments, from social clubs, whatever).

Outside US school market and Googleplex, Chromebooks are nowhere to be found.

Also running the Linux kernel is an implementation detail, those that allow for GNU/Linux applications and Android, without breaking security into developer mode, do it with additional VMs, hardly any different from running WSL + WSL/Android on Windows 11.

> Outside US school market and Googleplex, Chromebooks are nowhere to be found.

Lots of consumers buy them directly from Best Buy etc.

But let's say they're only used in schools. Well, then the next generation is being brought up with machines that don't depend on any Windows apps.

> Also running the Linux kernel is an implementation detail, those that allow for GNU/Linux applications and Android, without breaking security into developer mode, do it with additional VMs, hardly any different from running WSL + WSL/Android on Windows 11.

That means it's a subset of Linux. It can't do things Linux can't do, so switching from there to "real" Linux has no significant barriers.

> Lots of consumers buy them directly from Best Buy etc.

Here in Germany every single time they appear on consumer stores in shopping malls, they get promoted every week until finally they manage to get rid of the stock.

It is always an interesting experience to see the same units with different kinds of offers similar to the pile of Android phones close by.

Most consumers have no idea what real Linux is supposed to, they just see a Laptop that cannot make use of the software most of their friends are using.

IMO "year of the linux desktop" is a meme left over from the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, when everyone was starting Linux companies and everyone thought theirs would be the dominant one. We know now that it's not a growth market, and most of those companies failed. You only have to watch Canonical's missteps to see how this continues even to today. (And realistically, they are the dominant one and have been for some time, not Valve or Red Hat or anyone else.) I actually heavily dislike that phrase and would suggest that people stop using it because it just reflects on the terrible type of bundle-open-source-and-get-rich-quick thinking that plagued that era, and distracts from the actual problems that need to be solved in order to ship Linux in various environments.

> modern desktops catching up to Windows look and feel

Honestly, ever since Gnome Shell Linux has been ahead of Windows in look and feel, IMO anyway.

That being said, the year of the Linux desktop isn't a thing anymore because honestly, desktops (or laptops) aren't that much of a thing anymore. For consuming media, phones, tablets and TVs are the main devices. For gaming, phones and consoles. Laptops/desktops are mostly for work, most people I know don't even own one.

This is a fair argument that I don't see as often as I should.

I think in some ways ‘the year of the Linux desktop’ is an artifact from thinking about computing and operating systems in a way that is now outdated in ways unrelated to the situation of desktop Linux.

‘The year of the Linux desktop’ was an interesting vision of the future when thinking about the way people use computers at home meant thinking about Microsoft, and when people commonly (if probably erroneously even then) thought about Microsoft's market position mainly in terms of Windows desktop licenses. But nowadays the computers we use for most things at home are phones or tablets, and web apps have displaced native applications for a ton of the most common activities in desktop computing.

The question of the year of the Linux desktop is also one that's not really asked from the position of Linux users. It's a question about market trends, or what big desktop and laptop manufacturers might be doing with desktop Linux. But for existing Linux desktop users, or even just Linux desktop dabblers, the propositions that might actually impact their decisions or quality of life aren't really interrogated directly by the question of the year of the Linux desktop as it's usually framed.

Existing and prospective Linux desktop users are mostly interested in a ‘weaker’ year of the Linux desktop than one envisioned by massive corporate or government deployments:

* can I buy hardware that I know will just work with pretty much any Linux distro at a reasonable price from more than one or two vendors that are convenient, given where I live? * when I buy peripherals or other accessories, will there be enough options at the store (physical or online) which mention Linux or bear the Tux logo that I can quickly make a choice without having to go online to consult some compatibility database? * will my employer let me use desktop Linux at the office if I prefer it for my workflow? * if I use desktop Linux at home, will I have to do a bunch of extra work to play a few casual rounds of the trendiest online multiplayer game with some friends?

and so on.

> for the first time ever I have seen people say '2022 is the year of the Linux desktop' and I think that there is actual substance to it rather than just blind naïve optimism.

I'm inclined to stay away from the phrase ‘year of the Linux desktop’ because it still recalls a lot of thinking firmly footed in the landscape of the late 90s and early aughts. But when we re-evaluate the YotLD as a proposition centered on current Linux desktop users and users who are likely to consider it in the moderate term, I think it makes sense to talk about it as something that's rapidly arriving or already here.

It is because of our frustration with Windows. There was a time when it was a private system. Sure, the first couple of versions weren't particularly stable or secure, but for some reason you trusted the vendor of your operating system that they won't spy on you.

Unfortunately, things went in the same direction as other greedy companies that pay lip service to valuing their users while exploiting their privacy in all possible ways. Microsoft went a step further, being actively user-hostile, for example changing telemetry settings so that your previous choices wouldn't work and enforcing remote accounts. Name a dark pattern, and Microsoft used it somewhere.

So how couldn't we be frustrated? We receive a box full of adware with little control of how it's updated and what is going to run on it tomorrow. Sure, there are nice things like WSL, but they don't somehow cancel your shady doings. Fortunately the future is more and more web-oriented so it's getting easier to switch from Windows now than it was a decade or two ago.

> that frankly, were settled two decades ago

No, it wasn't. Windows didn't have a camera, TPM, TPM 2.0, and mandatory Microsoft online account requirements two decades ago, nor did it come "bundled" with Cortana, Teams, advertisements in your Start menu, Windows Defender, forced/"highly incentivized" OS updates, loads of dark patterns meant to try to get you to use a Microsoft account or switch to Edge, and telemetry that repeatedly re-enables itself after you disable it.

All of that is new in the past two decades, and even before that, Microsoft was pulling anti-competitive shenanigans like the Secure Boot requirements and bundling IE with Windows.

This article is extremely timely given the recent release of Windows 11, and gave me new information that I didn't have before (such as the requirement to have a camera). Poorly-written as it is, it's still both useful and relevant.

> It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!) and poorly-written articles like this do nothing to help change that.

Are you able to predict the future? This is such a shallow dismissal, and the logic is both absurd and defeatist. Even if you had good reason to believe that "the year of the Linux desktop" (which is kind of a straw-man to begin with) was never going to happen, it's still useful to encourage people to switch away from a user-hostile operating system, both to preserve their own freedoms, and also to pressure Microsoft to walk back some of their anti-features.

> Plus, the article is wrong.

One point that you can kind-of contrive to not be universally true out of eleven doesn't seem like a good reason to call the whole article "wrong".

> There are plenty of Linux distributions with tons of telemetry and spyware

Telemetry? Sure. Telemetry that's mostly opt-in and doesn't magically (re-)enable itself, and sends data to a source that I trust. Telemetry that doesn't fit those requirements, and has actual spyware, is rare both by user count (except for Deepin, which is kind of irrelevant for non-Chinese users) and absolute number of distros - and, you know, you have a choice as to which distro you use, whereas I believe that all versions of Windows 11 share the same set of anti-features...

> Again, use whatever you want.

Nobody (well, except maybe RMS), including the article, is telling you that you must switch to Windows. The article is a persuasive piece - and there's nothing wrong with that? If anything, I would expect to see persuasive content on HN (although, ideally, better-written than this one), right alongside technical content.

From the guidelines:

> What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Persuasive pieces generally satisfy my intellectual curiosity. Rants without any good arguments made? Not so much.

> just because people want to get territorial about what computing platform other people use

Sure, some people might be getting territorial - but many others (most?) are actually talking about the very real issues that Windows 11 has. If your best friend tells you that they're planning on quitting their job to play video games full-time, you might get worried about them, and try to talk them out of it, right? That's exactly what's going on here.

> I'm disheartened to see it rank so highly on HN

I'm more disappointed to see responses to it that rely on a bunch of emotional manipulation and shallow dismissals that don't stand up to scrutiny.

well put! one nit pick:

> Nobody (well, except maybe RMS), including the article, is telling you that you must switch to Windows.

you must mean, switch /from/ Windows

Postscript: all comments adjacent to "I'm disappointed to see x on HN" is absolutely against the ethos of the site and intellectual discussion in general - please never use it here.

As someone who has been using and hacking on Linux for pretty long time and doesn't even use Windows, none of what you said is particularly alarming, and I don't think there are any significant changes that happened in the last few years to warrant any changes in one's outlook. I heard similar comments from the Slashdot crowd when Windows Vista and Windows 8 came out, about how Microsoft is fucking everything up and this is the end for them. And those products were probably much worse than Windows 11 from a perspective of being bad for the user, and just being bad products in general. But in the end nothing happened.

But even if they did fuck up badly, the fact is, the "Linux desktop" is still a bad platform that people don't want to use. The APIs suck and are too fragmented, the developer experience is confusing, the documentation is bad and often missing, the story around packaging and shipping is dreadful, it's just all around not good. There are so many little bits of polish that need to go into something like that to make it really good, and the Linux community has never been able to do that at the scale it needs to be done at to make it competitive with Microsoft. Yes I know there are people working on all of those things but their progress is extremely slow. (I know because I'm one of those people.) You might think I'm being defeatist but honestly this is the way it's always been. Most open source projects are just understaffed and underfunded, and nothing about this has changed in the last 20 years. That's my experience anyway. If you talk to more app developers then you'll probably hear the same complaints.

> It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!) and poorly-written articles like this do nothing to help change that.

The “year” already happened, I don’t know when specifically. We are years into Linux on the desktop. The idea was to provide a perfectly usable DE on Linux and comparable software for the every day user. Which now has several options and a plethora of software. Lots of people run Linux desktops on the daily. Is it mainstream? No, but no one actually cares about that because to get to that point you need some giant exodus migration from every platform to Linux…it’s impossible. So what’s possible for desktop Linux in a practical sense? That it’s available to install and use and is supported. So it’s here and no one cares that there isn’t a big giant annual release with lots of media attention crooning over how awesome the new OS menu is. Instead it’s people working and developing on Linux.

I’m sorry for all those people who can’t live without their niche OS features and software, but it also tells me those people have no real technical skill or understanding anyways. Which is fine that software plane exists too.

Windows 11 is launching with literal TV commercials. The Surface Pro 7 earlier this year launched with commercials comparing the device to Apple laptops -- again, literal TV ads.

So why is it suddenly toxic for a Linux Institute blog to advertise Linux? Why is it toxic to mention in a blog (completely accurately) that the average Linux distro (even commercial distros like Ubuntu) have less telemetry than Windows 11? Windows 11 Home edition does still require a Microsoft account that users need to use airplane mode during setup to circumvent, right? It does genuinely have camera requirements for new manufacturers, right?

It's a wild double standard here to argue, from the position of a company that runs TV ads mocking its competitors about touchbars -- that the Linux community is stoking division by publishing a blog post that compares Linux to Windows on the day of a new Windows release.

Of course there's a bias to the article, it's an advertisement. But I don't understand why the Linux community is held to this standard that no other OS manufacturer follows. Apple/Microsoft/Android run ads attacking competitors all the time, much more prominently, and nobody accuses them of being "territorial" because they try to distinguish their products.

> Again, use whatever you want. But this is such lazy writing

It is, but I also think ‘use whatever you want’ is lazy, or at least resigned, in a different way.

There's a pattern that often takes hold with new desktop Linux users involving an intense evangelism phase. Some of the reasons for that phase are cultural artifacts that aren't especially interesting or valuable, like a tendency to ground one's identity in consumer choices.

But the evangelistic phase in a new Linux user's journey with desktop Linux is also grounded in experiences of joy, wonder, and a kind of digital ‘pride of place’ that really are special to free software desktops, and is nowhere realized as fully as in the desktop Linux world. Those kinds of experiences are worth sharing, examining, and celebrating, even in naive forms. Some good examples of content creators who've gone through this process in the last few years are Jason Evangelho (Forbes writer and longtime tech/gaming journalist) and Chris Titus (longtime Windows sysadmin and power user gone Linux YouTuber).

The ‘right tool for the job’, ‘use whatever works’ nostrum is as uninteresting and useless a meme as ‘Arch Linux is teh best and Ubuntu is for n00bz!!1’, with the additional problem that that its emptiness is obscured by its apparent even-handedness.

To be clear, I agree with most of what you've said and overall critique of the specific article in the OP. But I want to point out that ‘why Linux’ as a genre or topic is not just flamebait, and that there are other articles along those lines that I think have a legitimate place on HN or any forum where people are interested in people's experiences with computers.

> To be clear, I agree with most of what you've said and overall critique of the specific article in the OP. But I want to point out that ‘why Linux’ as a genre or topic is not just flamebait, and that there are other articles along those lines that I think have a legitimate place on HN or any forum where people are interested in people's experiences with computers.

This is totally fair and I wouldn’t want to imply otherwise. My issues are with this article and the others of its ilk, but not the general genre of content.

And you make good points about “use whatever you want” being an uninteresting meme too.

And you make excellent points about the evangelism phase (which I think we both agree, this article isn’t indicative of, tho I imagine the person who shared it might be in that wonderful phase themselves), which is definitely important. As a longtime Mac user, we have that phase too (also, the fact that I still primarily identify as a Mac user even tho I’ve been using Linux since 1998, even if primarily on the server (I still distro hop like a mofo all the damn time tho), speaks to those cultural artifacts you mention that just stick with us), and Mac users are just as obnoxious as Linux users but in a different way.

I truly have come to a place where I want people to enjoy what they enjoy and share that. I’m just exhausted by the evangelism and fierce defensiveness by any sect. But I’m definitely guilty of it too (she says as she types away at 100 words a minute on her iPhone that she is slavishly devoted to).

28 years of Linux at home and about 20 of them with full linux (ie, no windows at all). I feel sooooo great.

- I update when I want to (but admitedly, I have to understand what each lib is about; not for the end user)

- I don't feel constantly baby-sitted

- Nobody pushes his "latest new version that I must try unless I tell I don't want to"

- the window manager just does the job

- when I want to understand what happens, I can definitely look in the code, on the web, etc.

- there's a community of people like me :-)

but that's true, now and then, there's this tricky config stuff I want. Nothing fancy, but certainly out of reach for regular users, such as : making the sound mono; fixing grub 'cos debian's update screwed it; installing stuff which is not in the repo, fixing KDE's theme install gone wrong,...

But now, to me it's more of a choice : either you get advertisment and a real feeling of being screwed versus sometimes there's something tricky to fix...

(and 28 years ago, that choice didn't exist. It was either an almost working Windows versus 3 months of ./configure;make install until the go*amn sound card could play something... such a long way)

Yet another one of thoses guides.

When XP came out everyone was going to go GNU/Linux, due to Toy'R us interface.

When Vista came out everyone was going to go GNU/Linux, due to DX 10 drivers and hardware requirements.

When 8.x came out everyone was going to go GNU/Linux, due to tablet UI.

When 10 came out everyone was going to go GNU/Linux, due to telemetry.

Now Windows 11 came out, naturally everyone is going to go GNU/Linux yet again.

I went to linux around the time ME was on the shelf, not sure why I'd want to move to windows, I want something that just works.

Funny, that's why I still use Windows on my desktop.

To add to the funny story, I have Ryzen 1900X on my desk (literally, the cpu in a small plastic box). Nowadays, those 8 Zen cores clocked at 3.8 GHz are not enough to run Windows, apparently.

This is obviously not true. Which Windows can't you run on that?

Does it meet 11's hardware requirements? I thought I had heard older Ryzens wouldn't- not from performance, but other chip features.

He's talking about the Windows 11 hardware requirements, which are very strict and only support the newest CPUs.

However Windows 11 can be installed on the same hardware that runs Windows 10, it just won't allow you to upgrade. Otherwise it runs fine.

Microsoft is basically turning Windows into what mobile OS's are: tightly controlled and requiring specific hardware to ensure a particular set of user expectations with their devices. In other words, it's becoming a laptop OS.

> However Windows 11 can be installed on the same hardware that runs Windows 10, it just won't allow you to upgrade.

It was not possible to either run the update assistant or boot from install media and install from there; both means said that the machine doesn't meet minimum requirements.

They didn't even say which ones, just shown a generic link. Only the Health Check running under W10 said that it is the CPU.

Yeah, who should I believe, you, a random stranger on the Internet, or my lying eyes? /s

It is Windows 11 that doesn't run on it.

Yeah, I don't feel that way at all about Linux and I daily drive it. Could you imagine our mothers troubleshooting any of the following things that have regularly happened to me on Linux in the last 5 years I've been daily driving it:

* Hm, my sound stopped working. * Hm, dhcp stopped working. * X has completely failed to start. * This website just straight up doesn't load. * Thia game won't load (pretend it's solitaire). * This update broke my boot. * Seemingly doing nothing broke my boot. * This update broke my browser. * This application does not work without configuration. * My monitor layout is broken.

Maybe things are better in Ubuntu land, but I doubt it's as seamless as Windows/Mac.

My mom uses Fedora Linux for more than 15 years. She never saw any of that. I perform upgrades when necessary.

Similarly, my parents are on Ubuntu LTS since 6.06 (not on the same computer, obviously), when I got tired with regular windows reinstallations. There have been exactly two problems:

- "internet doesn't work" -> yanked ethernet cable. Later I made sure it cannot be easily yanked.

- "printer doesn't print" -> classic inkjet problem with dried ink. Inkjet replaced with b/w laser. no problems since.

I also want something hat just works! When I boot Windows, my 2 plugged monitors work seamlessly. When I boot Linux... it's complicated [1] (pragmatically it doesn't work because I am using Nvidia drivers, and won't use the shitty Nouveau drivers. And even if you use them , good luck tinkering for hours with text config files and whatnot)

Linux mint 20 is my main OS in my self-built PC ( and works for me pretty well (for development, browsing and gaming via Proton). But I wouldn't try to convince ANY non-technical user to get into Linux. Because installing it is half the battle, once they start doing "their stuff" (plug a second monitor, plug some device, open some file, etc) there's good chance that it won't work.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/593938/how-to-run-both-intel...

While I can imagine that making Nvidia cooperate with another GPU is difficult under Linux, it is not just "plug a second monitor".

It is running two GPUs, one of them Nvidia. That's an entirely different league, than plugging a second monitor into a Linux system.

Your experience is clearly different to mine, I have 1 monitors on my desktop which work fine, I also have a separate fitlet PC for monitoring purposes with a hdmi monitor and a separate touchscreen USB one.

Both just work, with the only configuration I had to do was to swap them round (left/right) is display settings.

Maybe windows has caught up with this now, last time I used windows I had to install "drivers", which seemed to be advertising programs which took up most of my CPU, to use basic peripherals.

> Maybe windows has caught up with this now, last time I used windows I had to install "drivers", which seemed to be advertising programs which took up most of my CPU, to use basic peripherals.

This comment kind of decreases the your argument. If you are using Linux you know what a device driver is. This naïve take on drivers just doesn't fly. I couldn't ware less about windows, but the last time I used it (I think Windows 7) I didn't have to install any additional driver.

And on Linux you also have to install "drivers" either closed source (nvidia) or open source (nouveau) to make use of 3d acceleration. So, if you don't know what these "drivers" are, I suggest you read on them and how to install them in your preferred Linux distro, as it can strongly improve your Linux experience if you happen to have a discrete graphics chip in your computer.

Why is Windows 11 the only one that you don't give a reason?

Vista was just complete shit BTW... I skipped over it to Windows 7. Switched completely to Linux after that.

It still too soon to know what problems and pains will Windows 11 cause.

Personally, I don't like 11 because of telemetry as well as missing features, particularly with its new desktop shell. I can't see how removing useful taskbar features (resizing, changing position, ungrouping window buttons, etc) and turning the start menu into an abomination with less functionality then my phone's damn app drawer is an upgrade. To top it off Microsoft still just can't seem to resist the temptation and decided to include "sponsored" applications in the Start menu pinned section on a fresh install. An average user doesn't know they're not really installed, but it looks like it. When you click on them it installs the application without consent similar to how they did it in Windows 10. They never learn...

The ever coming year of the linux desktop.

Full disclosure: I dual boot, but only to game. Linux been my daily driver since before 7 went eol. I am that linux fanboy. Debian, primarily.

Linux desktop already came for me personally a long while back. I've been single-booting Linux and gaming for an incredibly long time.

CodeWeavers[1] has done amazingly for the Linux gaming scene via

- Steam's Proton (Steam pays CodeWeavers for development, and I happily throw my money at Valve for that) and

- their own CrossOver product which I use for non-Stream games. (I paid for their lifetime subscription[2] because I wanted to support them so much.)

Stream's Proton works well for many games that don't officially support it (one can check others' reports in protodb). Examples of games I've played recently that don't officially support Proton include Iron Danger and Horizon Zero Dawn. The latter runs surprisingly smoothly given what I'd heard about its PC performance issues from when it first came out. Granted, I'm playing both of these 1 year after their PC release, but I've already got a long Steam backlog of games to play, so that's not bothered me.

For reference, I run PopOS on a System76 Thelio with an 8-core AMD processor and Radeon RX 580.

[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/

[2]: https://www.codeweavers.com/store

I run Linux desktop with no issue, been doing it for years. The year of the Linux desktop has been here for a while, you just haven’t looked.

Apparently chromebooks have broken 10% of sales, which are sort of Linuxey. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...

I got my wife, who is not tech literate, a chromebook and it is all she uses. There's enough web software that she wouldnt need and doesnt want anything bigger.

It is hardly a traditional linux given how locked down it it is out of the box, but so what? She'll never use 99% of the features that windows or macOS come with.

OTOH, 11 is the first version of Windows where Microsoft actively tells a large portion of their userbase that they don’t want them to run it. I’m not a believer in “the year of the Linux desktop” either, but those insane policies around fictitious hardware requirements surely must have some impact on market share?

> I’m not a believer in “the year of the Linux desktop” either, but those insane policies around fictitious hardware requirements surely must have some impact on market share?

I will give them (some) benefit of the doubt -- they probably are using Windows 11's more stringent hardware requirements as an instrument to drive increased security in the PC space. New PCs will want to be advertised as Windows 11 compatible, and will benefit from the newer features. Every type of Windows user will benefit. And yes, if it gets them more money, so much the better.

But Windows 10's retirement date is October 14, 2025[1] and I don't think that's sustainable. They'll almost have to extend that date.

Because otherwise, four years from now, there's a lot of devices that'll be out of support, on an OS that Microsoft sold as "the last version of Windows ever". There'll be lawsuits if that happens, mark my words.

Of course I suspect Microsoft is hoping most Windows 11-ineligible machines will have been retired by then, but we know people (public sector, developing countries, lower income groups) hang on to their PCs. More realistically, they'll either extend Windows 10's support date like they did with XP, or lower the system requirements based on user feedback. More likely extend the support date, because honestly, the cost of supporting 10 vs 11 is minimal, it's not that big of an update.

I'd definitely encourage people to put Linux on an old laptop though. For instance I know people who've put Linux on old Thinkpad X230s and given it to their children, who basically use them like a more-capable Chromebook. On the right hardware, Linux laptops are pretty darn good. But yes, if you have a weird hardware configuration which Linux isn't good with, and you have no time for mucking around -- do yourself a favour and stay away from Linux.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...

Security, with rootkits signed by microsoft.

> public sector, developing countries, lower income groups

there are also people who think that the incessant production of e-waste through planned obsolescence is obscene and a crime against nature (and eventually ourselves). devices should be reparable, long-lived, upgradeable by design. and don't get me started on privacy and the grave risks from normalizing the ubiquitous collection of data.

no need to mention names but you can perfectly well be a "tech titan" and a moral dwarf. each tech company (and each one of their employees) must assume their responsibility for what kind of world they are (literally) engineering

Developing countries, lower income groups are more likely to use pirated copies of Windows bought on a street bazaar than bothering with Linux.

Yet another one of these comments.

When XP came out, people were switching to Linux.

When Vista came out, people were switching to Linux.

When 8.x came out, people were switching to Linux.

When 10 came out, people were switching to Linux.

Now Windows 11 came out, naturally people are still switching to Linux.

Guess what? People are going to continue switching platforms and talking about it.

Oh and 25% of developers are generally running Linux, 25-30% are on a Mac and about 40-45% are on Windows...and Windows usage is trending downwards year after year. [0]

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

Still good enough to power about 85% of desktop computers worldwide, one games console and game streaming service, all of which also need developers.

It's closer to 75%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

With Linux topping 2.3, what an achievement in 20 years, since XP was released (ChromeOS doesn't count it is a browser).

ChromeOS is a lot more than a glorified browser these days. Android apps are a big part of the experience, and the linux subsystem is one toggle away to runs alongside.

The only real show stoppers left are the usually wimpy hardware it comes with and the lack of polish, but otherwise it has come a long way. I would completely consider switching to it instead of linux if I had a Dell laptop for instance.

Oh, gee well I thought we were on a developer/techie forum.

McDonald's is also one of the most popular restaurants. I eat there once in a while. I still run Windows boxes to play games too.

And it's more like ~30% for Windows when you measure against all operating systems, not just the desktop ones. [0] Android is the top dog since at least October 2020 when it went to over ~40%.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Android runs ART + C and C++ NDK APIs, the fact that there is a Linux kernel underneath matters zero to app developers.

Of course. But the fact that I was pointing out was that the Windows percentage is actually quite small in the grand scheme of things.

I don't understand what you're getting at. When you develop for Xbox, do you connect a keyboard to your Xbox and launch Visual Studio directly on the console?

What do the Xbox or XCloud have to do with developer marketshare? They're targets, not development platforms. Are you arguing that the Stackoverflow stats are wrong?

Actually you can do that with a DevKit, yes.

Stackoverflow stats reflect the vocal audience that bothers answering their surveys.

That is the problem with statistics, when there is a chicken and two people, each has eaten half.

> Actually you can do that with a DevKit, yes.

I mean, with sideloading on an Xbox technically sure, you can do anything. But to be clear, your average developers are not doing development on Xboxes directly, they're using Unity/Unreal and treating their Xbox as a compile target. And certainly they're not doing remote development on XCloud, that would be a wildly inefficient way to write software when instead you could just develop locally on any machine.

> Stackoverflow stats reflect the vocal audience that bothers answering their surveys.

Do you really genuinely think that Stackoverflow's blog is so unrepresentative that it's undercounting significant numbers of developers that are installing Visual Studio on an XBox?

I still just don't understand what conclusion you're trying to draw. Am I just misunderstanding what you're saying, or are you really arguing that these are development platforms that people are commonly using as their daily driver to write software? Because... they're not. There's not a hidden uncounted majority of people who bought Xboxes because they love the experience of hooking them up to their computer peripherals and using them as their software development platform.

The first 10 reasons don't matter, really. Windows is proprietary software and should be avoided on ethical grounds just for that.

So software cant be monetized how do you make a living?

You can get paid for producing open source software you know..

It’s actually kind of shocking that people don’t know this these days. Have corporations really undermined free software so much?

I worked retail in xp/vista days the regular customers had no idea about linux existing, few knew about MacOS it has changed but no way these people would ever touch linux, laptops needs to come with it even then it would be a hard Sell..

... when Windows 12 comes out it will be half GNU/Linux

Might be, but that will be because Microsoft wants it, with their own set of rules, just like Google, not because the community managed to achieve anything.

And just like Android and ChromeOS, don't expect Windows 12/Linux apps to be available on GNU/Linux distributions.

And indeed these are points when many switch or at least try to, which is good. And some of those stick for good, some go back.

I agree with the sentiment, but... reasons to use Linux do pile up over time, and Linux desktop is getting a bit better every year too. I don't expect any kind of mainstream adoption, but there's a momentum.

It's worth noting that desktop Linux has improved remarkably in the last 5 years.

I know that this is always said, but compared to, say, 2012 when Windows 8 was announced we have:

* Youtube, Netflix and other services that Windows 7 users would have taken for granted that weren't available by default on Linux

* Stable drivers for infamous Wifi problems

* Thousands of games working since Proton was released in 2018 [0]

* Anti-cheat support announced by EAC and Battleye earlier this year [1]

* Easier install processes

I think the knee-jerk HN backlash against Linux in comments like these is getting less and less justified. There's certainly still reasons that you could be flippant and sarcastic about Linux. It still is at only 1-3% of the marketshare after all, but I don't think you can compare it to previous versions of Windows in the same way anymore.

[0] https://protondb.com

[1] https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/valve-making-linux-anti-c...

What if I don't care about games?

The real reasons I use Linux are mostly out of convenience. For example, updating all my software and OS using one command rather than clicking on 50 updaters.

This is it for me too. On my desktop where I play some windows-only games it makes sense to go with windows because it's less hassle. On my laptop, it's just easier to use ubuntu or fedora than to manage another windows installation and keep it up to date & click through another set of installers for each piece of software.

Linux has its conveniences but I think I definitely spend more times on updates. Some break things and some like Nvidia's drivers can take me ages to actually apply (though with that one the usual trick seems to be to remove --purge nvidia-* first).

Which is honestly what i never understood, why its not shared on a more "systematic" level beyond stack overflow.

A hardware and software config + the goal (print)- and a dialog pops up, offering your solution as a line by line shell script.

All this stored in a trustworthy DB and even complex problems could be plug and play on windows. Add a "support" button to finance the whole thing.

Voila. Year of the linux desktop.

> Linux has its conveniences but I think I definitely spend more times on updates.

That depends on which distro and hardware you're using. I use laptops that are known to work well with Linux and Ubuntu LTS releases. This way, I spend perhaps 3-5h a year on admin tasks and it's mostly easy stuff.

It's actually amazing how GNU/Linux allowed me to gradually transition from configuring everything (when I was a student: XFree86, custom kernels, ...) to using GNU/Linux productively with almost zero housekeeping effort.

On my optimus laptop fedora+nvidia work quite well, I recommend you give it a try. Use official instructions for adding nvidia drivers from the rpmfusion repository.

You can even try Silverblue. On the off chance something breaks, i do an rpm-ostree rollback, reboot and the system is on it's previous working state. I could troubleshoot stuff If I want to but I usually wait for an upstream fix before I update again.

Silverblue is far from ready for primetime. You'll have way less problems with fedora workstation.

I wanted to like silverbluez used it on the homelab as a host os for a while, went back to a normal server in the end, way less hassle.

Silverblue is a desktop os not a server. There is the coreos version that is intended for server use. It does need a different paradigm however. On normal fedoara server you are installing packages for applications you want to use, however on an rpm-ostree based system it is intended that you install applications by using containers.

Depending on what you want to do, you use the appropriate version.

Indeed if one is not willing/able to climb the learning curve of this paradigm shift, then they shouldn't use it.

Well I was setting up a desktop machine as a server. The idea of silverblue is great, only it sucks to actually use. Updates are slow, and everything is just needlessly harder.

I get why maintainers want to push flappypacks, I just don't care, it's a shit solution that leaks all over your users. Find a better way to fix your problems.

Which distro?

You might want to look into something less unstable.

I've had arch running unattended upgrades in a Cron for years.

Worst case I have to find my USB stick and do some debugging, not that an update has ever broken anything.

There is some minor maintenance I run maybe once every 6-12 months to clear caches or fix up any configs that need updating but I've never run into anything that prevents booting.

Just Ubuntu though admittedly I use a lot more packages than average so there's more that can break across updates. Also a lot of things that have caused me problems over the years are getting more stable.

Ubuntu is famous for breaking spectacularly as soon as you start install PPAs or non-stock packages. I'm still convinced that APT is not the right tool for a desktop OS, it's way too complex and has too much automagic to withstand a user that wants stuff like the latest versions of GCC, etc.

Once you learn to avoid NVIDIA, your life gets way easier. I've bought an RX 580 4 years ago and it's been a pleasant plug'n'play experience ever since.

Sadly for Deep Learning Nvidia is way better supported.

Which is nvidia's fault for not supporting Linux properly, right?

This and its dual, not having to restore apps configuration every 3 weeks because some bloatware has the rights to change boot settings etc

I like windows for various reasons but it's a constant maintenance chore. Linux is more like a stone wall.. set and forget.

Interestingly for me it is the other way around. I have Windows 10 on the main PC, KDE Neon on a NUC and "obviously" several Raspberry Pi's doing various things.

I spend far more time maintaining the Linux machines, while my Windows box just works.

KDE Neon has been much better last year, but still every now and then some conflict pops up which requires manual command line intervention.

Clearly YMMV...

That said, I'm quite happy with KDE Neon and would most likely be quite content if I had to use it as my primary OS and didn't have any need for RDP. Sadly the latter is a showstopper for me.

What exactly are you doing to maintain the Linux system? Configuring it? I haven't done much of any Linux maintenance over the past decade, and I'm nearing two decades of full time use.

The only issue I could sink time into is the lack of deep (S3) and that's completely an issue caused by Microsoft's capture of most laptop manufacturers (they have forced new hybrid sleep states that don't even work on windows machines).

Well I try to update packages every now and then, security and that jazz, which has a non-zero chance of requiring manual intervention. Merging config file changes is a common one, every now and then some package mess to clean up.

Not saying it's a huge deal, though I do worry about screwing up the config changes, but it's a lot more work than what I have to do to keep my Windows machine running.

Try different distro, e.g. Fedora. Fedora heavily uses "convention over configuration" principle, which helps to avoid issues with merging of configs, because each piece of config is stored in it own file in .d-directory.

I always found KDE to be too much of a moving target. Maybe I should have mentioned linux mint xfce over a thinkpad without fancy hardware nor fancy software config.

But even then, the same machine with the same programs on windows would require a lot more care to avoid rot.

> This and its dual, not having to restore apps configuration every 3 weeks because some bloatware has the rights to change boot settings etc

What type of shady apps are you installing that is modifying boot settings?

sorry not boot, more like the various windows user session startup stage

This still doesn't make sense. What type of software do you have installed that's messing with other "apps configuration"? Furthermore, what does "bloatware has the rights to change boot settings" have anything to do with "apps configuration"?

I do it out of respect for my hardware. On Windows, it wasn't unusual to be idling ~45c with Spotify and Discord open. That same workload stays well under 35c on Linux, even with my rather paltry 6-year-old CPU.

Might be different sensors you are reading.

winget upgrade --all

I've never heard anyone advocate Linux out of convenience! Windows is way more convenient overall even if it doesn't have a package manager because you spend so much less time dealing with hardware and compatibility issues.

So we all know that the Linux desktop is lacking in a few ways, and we all know there are a few reasons for that, but I really do think the experience is getting better.

Having more people use it and more development has been great. Valve, System76, and a few others have been pouring resources into making the experience better, and it's working.

As much as people aren't going to like me saying this, Electron has been good for the Linux desktop. I'm with everyone that Electron applications can be pretty bloated, but I'd imagine that I'd get late and/or sub-par access to plenty of programs if they weren't written in Electron. The fact that discord is 95% as good as Windows on Linux, despite having a tiny fraction of users is great. If it was written in GTK, I'd imagine that would be a good bit lower.

The fact we have multiple DEs that are of relatively similar popularity is great for choice, but affects development. MacOS and Windows have the advantage of the complete control over GUIs, while Linux has quite a few layers with different options at each layer. Not saying it's bad, but it explains slower development (as well as being FOSS without MS or Apple level of cash behind them).

Linux isn't for everyone, but god damn is the Linux desktop getting better. I won't indulge on the year of the Linux desktop meme, because it might be a while, but I'm happy at the current momentum.

Linux is not for everyone. Consult your Sys Admin before trying Linux.

I really like the Unix philosophy. And even if Linux it is not exactly Unix, it kind of shares the same philosophy.

I tried very much to like Linux and to use it on the desktop. In the last 20 years I've tried countless times to use it as a desktop. But it always failed. It always reqyired lots of time for configuration as opposed to "it just works". After some time, it always broke something, which required again time to fix. And it doesn't run all the software I want to run. And even if an alternative might exists to some of the software I need, it is always sub-par. It doesn't do what I need, it doesn't do it well and it will run poorly and/or has a poor user experience.

And I am not even convinced someone should relearn how to do things with another software just to give Linux a chance. Sure, if you are 14 and idealistic it might work. But after 30 your time will worth much more.

Software and drivers written some time ago won't work because there's no stable ABI.

The software landscape is very fragmented.

From my long experience with trying to use Linux on the desktop I can give a very long lecture of why it sucks from both user and technical perspectives alike.

On the other hand it is perfect as an server OS, and I make my daily living writing software that ultimately runs on Linux. But please do not force me to use it as a desktop because I've tried to like it but I couldn't.

I pretty much doubt that Linux will be a decent desktop OS unless some company will release an OS based on Linux, pretty much how Google did with Android on mobile.

For desktop community development simply doesn't cut it. Fragmentation, lack of direction and the reinventing of the wheel kills it.

To have a decent server OS you need a single architect and a dictator which will be the only one to take decisions. This is why macOS, primarily an amalgamation of BSD software with a Next skin succeeded.

Alot of what you wrote is true for MacOS and Windows and other major operating systems. Linux doesn't want you either.

> But after 30 your time will worth much more.

Once you know how to start an application and how to find the ones that are installed, the learning curve is within the app.

> Software and drivers written some time ago won't work because there's no stable ABI.

Not sure what you are doing here. Are you trying to load binary drivers written for an old Linux version on a new kernel? Isn't there a mainlined driver that works? Do you think it's a common use-case?

> The software landscape is very fragmented.

If I need to install something, I either get it from the distro's repos of its "app store". Not sure what "fragmented" means here.

> From my long experience with trying to use Linux on the desktop I can give a very long lecture of why it sucks from both user and technical perspectives alike.

It may be worth writing a more detail article or blog post. User perspective is always valuable.

Could it be that you are trying to use Linux like people use OSX and Windows? For instance, manually installing lots of things to try to get your system setup how you want? Messing around with tons of drivers for your funky hardware? Installing lots of applications from third party sources without checking if they're in the OS's own repo? The secret is to go with the flow, and use company-curated, community-and-history-grounded OS releases. Then you install almost everything using the system's package manager. The odds of breaking something if you go with the stream drop so close to 0 that it's not worth worrying about.

And the last and most important trick is to buy from companies which support Linux for enterprise customers.

Everyone's mileage will vary to some degree and no one but you knows what your specific requirements are, obviously.

I use Linux both at home and at work and over the last couple of years have been pleasantly surprised how much the software gap has narrowed.

A lot of this has to do with SaaS software which, ironically I don't like, but in a few circumstances it makes sense. Office tools at work, for example. If you're a G-suite shop Google docs and gmail will work regardless of your system, if you're a MS shop then Office, Outlook, Calendar and even Teams will run in a web browser.

But even for native applications this gap has narrowed. Zoom, Slack and Discord all have native Linux apps that just work for me. Google Chrome, which I wouldn't use for my personal devices but I need to use for work as a Web developer, has a Linux version that works as great as the Windows version. But the most important part is that all of these tools are cross-platform now. There is no relearning a tool unless you depend on a native Windows app for which there is no Linux version (which you likely do, from the sounds of it).

The desktop environments are where the real differences come into play. I can't even comment there since I switched to Linux Mint MATE when Ubuntu introduced Unity years ago. I like MATE a lot but I customize the hell out of it to suit my needs and I'm hardly qualified to have an opinion about what other people should be using.

I did, however, recently decide to go with KDE Plasma for a TV streaming device that I put together. It's a small, low-powered machine and I didn't think I'd consider KDE because it's kind of notorious as a resource hog. But I needed something that could give me a good UI for a TV and remembered that Plasma supports desktop widgets and is highly customizable. So I tried it and was pleasantly surprised how performant it was. That's how quickly things change. The last time I tried KDE on a desktop it was sluggish and I didn't care for it at all. But my information and pre-conceived notions became outdated. Not telling you to try Linux again. Use whatever works for you. Just sharing my experiences for conversation.

As a counterpoint:

Reasons to consider NOT switching to Linux

https://corn.codeberg.page/notlinux.html

Well he is right. Linux is not for everyone. It's for people who can learn how to double click an icon that looks different from the one in Windows. That excludes probably 50% of Windows users right there.

This kind of attitude from linux users is significantly responsible for its lack of wider adoption.

Who wants to learn something new when the people you need help from are going to treat you like a moron?

We both know its more involved than clicking a different icon.

I totally agree. I am still a Linux user, but at home I use a Mac now. Why? Because I got sick of having to work out why my laptop couldn't print things anymore after an update. Not once has that happened to the Windows or Apple devices that my family own. Linux is great for doing all sorts of clever stuff; it's not so good at doing the ordinary stuff reliably.

No, he's right. It's like maths. A vast majority of people like to not like / learn it.

I've spent a lot of time with average users of all kinds. They couldn't care less. To them it's a thing that has less value than a coffee cup.

I could, and would sit down and explain to them everything that is cool, cute about every layers of a computer, with simple language and pragmatic use, with history context, and bits of benefits for their lives. They just don't want to hear it.

Some will say it's geek stuff. Some will say "I'm too scared". Some will try and forget 13 seconds later.

The insane side of this is that these people will spend grands on a new machine that will tickle their sense of free improvement (which will not happen). Again every 3-5 years.. forced by ecosystemic pressure to push old stuff out.

ps: I agree that GP was a bit smug, but even then, the population is what it is.

pps: even at work, if I offer to explain something, or write a script, or a macro to help, most people will react negatively for various reasons (very often its petty emotions, like jealousy, or disdain).

No, he's not right. A computer is a tool. A tool should help you accomplish tasks. A well-designed tool that is meant to be used in the average household should be easy to use and hard to screw up. It shouldn't feel like it's getting in the way.

There's no reason why anyone should need to know the details of how a computer works to use the computer. The history you're so eager to tell should just be trivia.

> There's no reason why anyone should need to know the details of how a computer works to use the computer.

Paraphrasing the CEO of Sun Microsystems (IIRC): you don't need to know how to operate a nuclear power plant to get light when you flick the light switch.

Have you ever tried to teach people how to use a computer or is that paper talk ? because in theory everything is well designed, but very few things are.

Of course "in theory" good tools are solid and simple.. in reality bro how insane the world is. Every update, every fix, changes the poor ground of habits users tried to build. Just yesterday I had to help a neighbor because she couldn't grasp a word document embedding a invisible table as layout forbidding the caret to move right as she used too. I think you're very much misunderstanding the vastness of psychologies, of tooling variations, of hidden variables and parameters and the immense layering of software.

People are confused by the slightest change in computer interaction. How do you want to make them understand when to click, double click, right click, drag, press. What's an URL, what happens when they click save, why errors or not ? people don't even know what saving a file is. Really, go in any office you can pick 30% of users totally clueless about folders and files.

Every attempt at hiding information causes trouble, it taps into shallow understanding and rote memory. People become mere users and it sucks. History is interesting, details are interesting, your brain loves it, if it's tied to a tangible concept and use for the people. It's not about making VBA6 classes or a talk about Linus Torvalds acrobatics for the sake of geek pleasure. It's to situate what are the reasons (as in reasoning) for why things are the way they are. Even your keyboard has a long history.

It's quite easy to be smug when dispensing advice to a random internet recipient behind the wall of anonymity. It's much more so when someone comes to you, in person, asking for help.

I spent the better part of an hour this week helping a family friend over Zoom, trying to help her digitally sign a document. Her browser's PDF viewer couldn't render the form input boxes, so I had to help her download Adobe Acrobat Reader (yuck, I know, but, I'm not going to argue with her employer about alternatives). She's not dull by any stretch--she has a PhD. Just unfamiliar with the process. And when you see the process through fresh eyes, you get the sense that, oh, maybe this actually isn't intuitive at all if you've never done it before.

I don't know why so much of the Linux community lacks that feeling of empathy. Perhaps because their journey through Linux was a giant hazing ritual, and they feel like they've earned the right to haze the next generation? I have no idea.

Sorta-sincere hot take:

Software for the masses seems to always be dumbed down, lose functionality, or otherwise become less useful over time as its targeted at the lowest common denominator. I'm good with there being an OS that's primarily for people who have the time and desire to understand their tools and want to get the most out of them.

This isn't some dig at casual users, it's about market segmentation. Not everything needs to be for everyone, and that's okay. With few exceptions, the average PC has plenty of choice in its operating systems.

Honestly, it's true. People are creatures of habit. My mother has been an accountant for 20 or so years and will still call me to complain about having to learn a new Excel version (when they moved to the 'stripe' interface? God help me...), or moving to a job where they use any software that's different from what she's used to. God forbid her iPhone changes absolutely anything when it upgrades.

And yes, Windows users have complained mightily about nearly every upgrade (remember the Windows 8 fiasco? Windows 10 was lesser, but people still found fault, now 11...) but still use it. Oh well.

Also, there was a lot of bitching about Ubuntu moving from Gnome 2 to Unity. It led to a DE fork and an entire distro picking up the cause. So Linux users bitch too. But with OSS you can change what you want and the companies can also tell you to piss off...

This is the exact elitist mentality that the article writer is talking about. Not only are you saying everyone who can't figure it out is dumb, but you forget, there are actually people who probably can't understand it because its a different icon like very elderly people. My grandma would only use a browser if I set the icon to the little IE6 icon. lol

About half of windows users are dumber than the average person, and the average person is dumb.

Amen. Hell, I might be one of those dummies.

Actually (as a daily linux user) it's a nice write up! I was expecting nonsense.

Right. I was going to comment "Reason #12 to switch to Linux: you love reformatting the entire system every once in a while, typically after struggling to fix a driver for hours and completely screwing everything up in a way you can't figure out how to undo."

That may be your experience, certainly not mine. I do remember than from the days of windows.

For future readers: this is true (drivers/update problems), but easily fixable with for example Timeshift, or snapper (like openSUSE)

I have updated my laptop across 4 major releases of Debian now, never reformating the system. And the copy of my home directory (think user profile in windows) is even older. If you don't know what you are doing, saving a full system backup to an external hard drive is actually easy so you can try things and revert if it doesn't work.

Same here. The only reason the last install was a fresh one was because I upgraded the storage on the laptop.

My home folder has files that have been with me since 2006 or so. This laptop is 7 years old and this is the third fresh OS install it has in its lifetime - With one exception, it's always been updated to the latest Ubuntu version as needed with the Ubuntu tooling.

What I have been doing to prevent data loss (that never happened) is to keep the interesting parts of my home folder on a separate filesystem and symlink them into my home folder. This allowed the previous fresh install to format the root partition and I didn't need to worry about my data being deleted.

This is an interesting observation, considering that traditionally Windows has had these opaque failure and degradation modes that are "unfixable" unless you reinstall. Personally, it doesn't ring true to me - I've been using the very same OS install for around a decade now, I just kept moving it from machine to machine and I think my laptop install is actually a duplicate. I've restored it from backups a few times, though the leading cause is "accidentally powered off during system update".

Yeah; one of my favorites in recent history was the Windows 11 developer preview. I installed it ahead of time to test an application my company distributes. Eventually, Windows 11 is released, and I think: Well, I'd like to get this machine off of the "dev channel" and on to stable, so I can (1) run what my users are running, and (2) not deal with instability.

You can't. Their official recommendation, in the Windows 11 Settings app, is to reinstall Windows 11. There's no way to migrate "backwards" on update channels, you can only go "more unstable".

I wonder how much this has to do with first impressions.

Back in the late 90s when I first started experimenting with Linux, the parent's post definitely described my experience. I remember booting up into a text-mode login prompt and running 'startx' and having to do a lot of messing around with manual configuration files. One mistake with an init file could leave your machine un-bootable and you'd have to use a rescue shell to recover. Driver support was a mixed bag for sure.

In current year it's literally the exact opposite experience. I have more issues with installing Windows apps that will make driver changes or add stuff to the registry that causes weird unexpected issues than I have with Linux. Linux is quick and easy to install and tends to "just work" for me once it's up and running.

I'm sure choice of hardware still has something to do with mixed experiences. I did have one bad experience in recent memory with a work-issued laptop and the track-pad not working with Linux. I had to use a personal device while I was employed there since it was a known issue with that particular brand and the fix was an upcoming kernel update. But that seems to be the extreme rare exception for me. Most devices I've installed Linux on have worked perfectly right out of the install and have required me to do zero configuration to make it usable.

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages

I haven't done that once in 25 years of desktop Linux use. One of the reasons I use Linux is that I can actually understand and fix problems.

On my main desktop the image has been rolling forward since 2008 when I switched to 64 bit. Naturally the hardware has been replaced around it several times since then.

This is a good article. This very thread has a ton of examples of what the author talks about.

I've used Linux as my main OS for years now and I love it, but I've stopped trying to evangelize it. Just use whatever OS you want, I'm happy on Linux.

My only two reasons would be no Photoshop and fewer games, though it's definitely catching up on both.

Music making software is really lacking on Linux compared to Windows and Mac.

Unfortunately it is not catching up by the way of 1st party support. The compatibility layers are getting pretty good, don't get me wrong. But if to you a computer is just a tool that runs specific programs you need, then you should probably stick with what the software developer recommends you run their software on.

The top reason NOT to switch to Linux should be "Because someone told you to." The Linux community has a terrible problem with proselytizing and then gatekeeping ("Welcome to Linux! Oh, you're using Linux Mint? Get fucked, then.")

I just want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed that site. It feels incredibly grounded and a place where the author can have some fun. It tweaks some sort of nostalgia nerve while still having some good insights in his writings. The page on Aesthetics[1] makes me happy to see.

  [1] https://corn.codeberg.page/aesthetic.html

I'm surprised you can't see that this counter-article is just plain old FUD.

It should be a no-brainer that an operative system that is free, open, democratic, well documented and consisting of over 50,000 quality software packages---Debian, for example---is better than an OS which isn't any of those things.

Of course software is (also) about ideology. If you find yourself advocating putting more money in the pockets of the already super rich, or pretending that there isn't a digital part of human life where people have rights, well then obviously you have picked sides.

> I'm surprised you can't see that this counter-article is just plain old FUD.

Content-less emotional manipulation - just the kind of thing that I hate to see on HN.

You answered none of the points in the article itself, dismissing the entire thing out of hand with an acronym describing a concept that you provided no evidence actually applied to any of the arguments.

> It should be a no-brainer that an operative system that is free, open, democratic, well documented and consisting of over 50,000 quality software packages---Debian, for example---is better than an OS which isn't any of those things.

No. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade (and have spent far more time using it than Windows), and gotten a few other people on it, so I can say that, for actually getting things done and software just working, Windows is far better than Linux. An operating system where you have to struggle to get things done is a bad operating system.

Linux isn't "democratic", either - Linus Torvalds controls kernel development, and the userspace components have wildly differing development practices.

Nor is it "well documented" - Linux-related documentation is generally terrible to read. Technically correct? Sure - but that's not "well documented", that's an encyclopedia.

Neither can you say that those "50,000" software packages are "quality" - the vast majority of open-source software that I've seen is buggy, under-documented, incomplete, and difficult to use. (I mean, so is the vast majority of proprietary software - but that software being "also bad" doesn't make OSS software "good")

> Of course software is (also) about ideology. [...] well then obviously you have picked sides.

Please leave your manipulative speech out of HN, and don't try to drag me (or anyone) into your idealistic flamewar.

Microsoft is a company that is predatory towards its users, and that's why I recommend Linux despite all of its problems. Pretending that it has no problems, or is technically superior to Windows, and then piling on inflammatory dialog, does nobody any good.

As someone with RSI who uses speech recognition to control most software on my desktop, X11 -> Wayland has been a massive roadblock. Ad-infested Windows isn’t great, but at least it doesn’t feel like I’m fighting any devs just to be able to use my computer in an accessible manner.

How is OS X for that sort of accessibility? It seems to be the best for accessibility in general.

I’ve only ever used Windows and Linux so I couldn’t say for sure, but my impression is that it’s pretty good. Talon or Dragonfly with the Kaldi backend handle speech recognition and provide nice Python APIs for controlling the keyboard, mouse, windows etc.

Apple products are very good for accessibility.

>Ad-infested Windows

I don't see any ads from windows. Not sure what you're talking about.

Perhaps you disabled them all after you installed it?

no. Only thing I've done is remove widgets from UI - don't see cortana, etc. No special removals or disabling.

I don't see any either, maybe because its the Enterprise / Pro SKU?

Oh, yes, enterprise windows cuts out most of the ads. The personal additions fill the start menu with ads for various windows products (and paid placements, iirc? I can't remember, since them I disabled them all a long time ago).

Windows ads are mainly confined to the default windows apps, like 'news' etc. Also Cortana I think, but I never use it.

Wayland is still very green, most distributions haven't switched yet, why did you? I can understand that you would want to try Wayland, but when you encountered problems why did you decide to move to Windows instead of going back to X11?

Wayland has been around for a decade and X.org is in maintenance mode. Linux users have to decide between barely maintained software with a problematic security model or an actively-maintained project that is still somewhat half-baked in places.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintai...

What speech recognition system did you use on Linux? I'm interested in using speech recognition more after getting used to it on iOS devices (where it works amazingly well).

I had the most success using Dragonfly with the Kaldi engine, which handles the heavy lifting of speech recognition and provides a nice API on top of xdotool for desktop interaction. You can also check out Talon, although I think its Linux support is still somewhat experimental.

Thank you. These keywords (Kaldi, Dragonfly) put me on the right track and I found nerd-dictation [1] which is easy to use and hackable. Perhaps not useful for your programming purposes, but I need something for writing prose and it's a decent start for that.

[1] https://github.com/ideasman42/nerd-dictation

I've really given up on the operating system debates. I don't think it's a very interesting subject, because I think the individual constraints are more important than general 'UX' concerns.

My personal computer usage is about 60% web browsing, 10% coding, and 30% AoE2. The game really doesn't run well through proton, at least not enough to play competitively, so I'm kinda locked onto Windows. I think it's stupid to talk about which OS to use firefox from. I'm slightly biased against MacOS here, because for some reason I can't get the extra buttons on my mouse to be forward/back... It's a stupid reason, but it's my stupid reason.

That leaves 10% coding. Most of my programming right now is JS/TS (it's really grown on me), so again the OS doesn't really matter.

FWIW, AoE2 appears to have Gold compatibility[0] with Proton, meaning you can expect a Windows-like experience when launching it with Steam. Maybe it's time to give it another look?

[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/221380

It runs well enough to play SP, but the framer are is much lower and the MP laggier.

The first point I think is one of the main arguments. I've been using Ubuntu on a computer I bought in 2007. Worked like a charm (until the PSU blew up a few months back). Linux is a system that outlast its hardware!

One can also turn the argument around. What would be the reason to use Windows instead of Linux (if, like most of the people on HN I assume, you are computer literate) ?

Games I guess.

A lot of people apparently run into hardware support issues with Linux.

Personally, I have not had any issues in about fifteen years, but I cannot blame people for expecting their hardware to Just Work (tm). Back in the day, I enjoyed spending a weekend getting sound or wifi to work, but these days not so much.

At the same time, hardware support has gotten so much better over the twenty one years I have been using Linux, so it is much less of a hassle today.

Not having to worry that upgrading one app will break things for other apps.

Safe screen locking.

Not having to spend hours getting hardware working properly but unreliably.

Not having to deal with audio issues when you want sound from multiple apps.

A responsive interface that doesn't feel like a clunky children's toy from the early 2000s.

>Not having to worry that upgrading one app will break things for other apps.

That's subjective.

>Safe screen locking.

Slock.

>Not having to spend hours getting hardware working properly but unreliably.

No issue with Void. Good luck with Windows and old harware. You don't have your wifi drivers on your laptop reinstall? You are fucked. Yes, SDI Tool Origin, but you need an extra USB drive about 16GB to do so.

>Not having to deal with audio issues when you want sound from multiple apps.

That's bullshit, I solved that in 2004.

>A responsive interface that doesn't feel like a clunky children's toy from the early 2000s.

You mean, Windows 10 with UI latency and everything being felt as if it was ran over a layer of tar? Because, in comparison, MATE flies. And I don't even use a DE.

> That's bullshit, I solved that in 2004.

Not the GP, but just because you solved it in 2004 doesn't mean others don't have issues. There are still hardware/app configurations that are broken on Linux. Pipewire is helping, but it's not perfect.

For me it's the "it just works" factor. Just tons of tiny issues I have on Linux:

- I have to disable the compositor to get 144 Hz in programs - With the compositor disabled, animations become very drawn out and pixelated - Konsole's layout breaks on a new version so I have to keep downgrading it manually - Audacity takes like 10 seconds to load - I have to run modprobe every time I want to use my webcam - The cursor is different in login screen and main desktop - Spectacle (screenshotting tool) needs to be invoked twice to actually do a screenshot - I can't print double sided pages on my network printer - Dolphin can't connect to our household's Windows file share server (or maybe the fault lies in samba?) - VLC hard freezes every once in a while and needs to be killed with -9 flag

At one point I maintained a txt of these issues but I don't have access to that right now

Windows works on my new laptop(3 year old with TPM) perfectly. This doesn't mean Linux doesn't work too. I tried PopOs for a month. If in future I switch to linux completely this distro is going to be the one. But there are still bugs which aren't fixed yet on linux. Battery backup is also an issue on Linux (tried TLP too). There were many other problems too. To summarize it Windows was a way better experience for me with this specific hardware. And WSL is really a game changer for me as I can keep on using Linux without worrying about hardware issues.

I switched to Linux recently.

It isn't perfect, and had to be picky about what computer I'm using it with, but it doesn't suck as much as it used to. You have to have a bit of chaos tolerance but there's something interesting about being in a more collaborative relationship with software packages. I may go back to a Mac or Windows if they make something I really want.

For those considering a switch and just want to see workflows across OSes rather than the motivational essays or distro lists, I keep a humble spreadsheet on that here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3... . I spent about a year sketching out this list before committing to switch to linux.

I don't disagree with switching to linux, but this isn't a great list.

Points 1 & 2 are the same (don't buy a new PC), and quite a few of the rest are fixed as you can run all Linux software in the Linux subsystem for Windows.

The fact that those clowns insist on calling it the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" because marketing tells you everything you need to know about whether or not you should invest your time in it.

I always wonder who these people are who pick the OS first and applications second? If you need to run GarageBand, Visual Studio, or Returnal, Linux is not an option.

I have been dual booting for a while with no issues whatsoever.

I develop software on Ubuntu because the tools I use work out of the box.

I play games on Windows because the games I play work out of the box.

I'm a MacOS person (iOS dev for a living, no choice), but how is WSL; from a development perspective?

I've heard good things about WSL from other developers. My current setup (two OS, two SSD) predates modern WSL though.

Wait a minute... You need a Microsoft account to log into Windows these days?

Laughs in Linux

You also need to give up all your privacy and relax while Microsoft takes care of you....

You don't. You can still run local accounts.

Not on Windows 11 Home, from what I understand.

I believe the option is only shown if you are offline, so you need to disconnect from the internet.

As said in the thread it (currently) works if you do not setup internet until after the installation completes. If you set up internet before, you end up doong a full re-install.

Yeah if you disable WiFi which is a very dark pattern and user hostile.

last time I installed windows 10 this wasn't required - you just had to figure out which button took you past it. Maybe its changed since

It has, you need to disable internet access to have a local account.

I'm currently using two laptops, both running Win 10 with local-only accounts, and I've never had to disable internet access to do so.

You do not have to. But they sure make it a pain to not have that linked.

If you're installing Windows 10 fresh, you can bypass the account login thing more easily if you defer network configuration during setup.

I just went back after 3 years of Ubuntu. Admittedly I am a dilettante but I never did anything very "hacky" and still ended up with a broken upgrade path, twice. I can't have this in a work desktop machine.

My employer gives zero f's about my privacy concerns.

This is why I moved to Arch. Debian rolling release is a good way to go as well.

After using Arch for years every other package manager enrages me because it is so hard to rollback/undo bad changes or to pin versions. I use MacOS for reasons but I still miss pacman :(

My employer foists MacOS on me, I'm undeterred. VMware is worth the hassle.

You might like Nix or Guix. It's even easier to roll back bad changes there!

I love Arch, and have always considered Debian + debian derivatives to be subpar because of packages + community issues. I need to go check out Debian rolling, never knew that existed. Could be a useful hybrid for coworkers who believe rolling releases break things often.

For what it's worth, I found Kubuntu to be a much simpler and cleaner alternative to Ubuntu.

I missed an upgrade cycle and didn't upgrade for like 18 months*. turns out EVERYTHING BREAKS. They actually delete the f'ing repos and you can't upgrade, you just get a wall of 404s.

I understand the "We only to support on LTS releases" argument but I didn't think that meant "We actively sabotage our short-term releases".

Huge huge huuuuge barrier for normies IMO.

* FWIW, I didn't upgrade when it was prompted because I was "too busy sawing to sharpen my saw" so-to-speak. I was on a major project, have known video card issues with upgrading, and was worried I'd be unavailable for work for 3 days trying to fix my UI. So I waited until the next LTS to upgrade. Turns out you can't go from an old STS to the next LTS and you have to baby-step through the STS's ... which no longer exist. wtf.

:pretend-this-is-a-flame-emoji:

I honestly tried multiple times, I really wanted it to work for me. I have XPS 9570 and I simply could not get basic stuff to work, like fingerprint reader, trouble with proprietary gpu drivers etc. There was always something not working, something throwing an exception, something that requires this one simple bash command to get to work. I just gave up. I tried few most popular distros on multiple laptops over last 8 years and there was always a problem with something. When I was younger I had no problem with that, but now... I simply don't care enough to go through it, I just install Windows and continue with my mediocre life.

These articles are lame. If I were to give a reason to switch to Linux, I'd say it's because it's a full featured, nice OS and you can do nearly anything on it. But nowadays the browser is 90% of anyone's use case, games as well, and between browser standards, Steam making strides towards platform agnosticism, there's not really any major reason to use any OS over another unless you have a pretty specific use case (for Windows users that usually means Office or specific games, for Linux users usually something to do with dev environments). They all do mostly the same things.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4IpD_V...

You will learn a lot about kernel when your wifi, graphic card and hibernation does not work!

Never had problems with any. Ok, hibernation was a tough nut to crack, but you just have to make sure that your swap size matches your memory size... then it's just

$ sudo systemctl hibernate

Which, long term, is better that just being SOL when it doesn't in Windows.

Why would I want to optimize for working on planes, trains and in meetings? That's not a good work environment.

I run desktop computers and since I don't need to play video games on them, I just use the CPU graphics.

However, even when I did use a discrete GPU - every Linux distro I've used just prompts me to install the drivers and things just work.

Just bought a new computer, and I recently got a warning notification from Windows Defender. Clicking through, I discovered that the urgent message was that I should really consider backing up my files on OneDrive.

So I go to ignore the message, but the “dismiss” button was bugged; I couldn’t make the notification go away. After Googling around, I found the fix was to uninstall OneDrive, which had been preloaded, and restart the machine.

This is the type of thing that will get me to switch or simply stop using desktop computers outside of work at all.

My main reason for running Linux is the Terminal.

I'm 35. Began with computers ~10. Spent my first 10 years using Windows, followed by 10 years of the Mac. I'm (hopefully) in my 10-year Linux run?!

Doesn't Windows have a decent terminal nowadays?

No, it never even had a resizable terminal until early win 10. Unix terminals are an economic powerhouse in themselves and binutils like sed/awk/grep (which windows never had and you need to modify windows to have these tools).

Are you saying that installing or building software on your machine is modifying Windows?

There have always been plenty of terminal options on Windows.

Probably does. I'm also guilty of not having given Windows a chance recently.

They have 2 built in ones. powershell and cmd. CMD has been there forever and works mostly like MSDOS (mostly). powershell is pretty neat and is in many ways better than bash once you understand it. They have also in the past 2-3 years actually fixed up some very long standing issues with the shells. There is also an experimental shell manager in the windows store which is kind of nice. You can also install other unix shells if you want. But being different systems they can get a bit quirky.

And iTerm2 on macOS is a better terminal than any I've come across on Linux. The lack of iTerm2 is actually the reason I daily drive macOS at work instead of Linux in the first place.

It does, the new Windows Terminal app is pretty nice. What it does not have is a good set of command line tools. Powershell is powerful and great in its way, but it is cumbersome to use for little tasks. And the lack of a command-line text editor like vim is a huge pain in the ass.

However, if you install Windows Terminal you will find that Start menu behavior changes in a annoying way that the Terminal developers can’t fix without changes to Windows itself[0].

With Terminal installed, if you search for a directory from the Start menu — hit the Windows key, start typing, press enter — the menu won’t close automatically.

0: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/7122

That is not my experience. I just tried it twice, searched for Notepad, it opened right up both times and closed the start menu, and I have terminal open with two WSL sessions.

EDIT: OK, now I see it. It is specific to pinned folders in the Start Menu, not search or pinned Apps. I don't generally pin folders to Start so that's why I wasn't seeing it.

Interesting. It was happening for all of my folders, IIRC, although it’s possible the ones I tried happened to be pinned. I don’t use the pins on purpose anyway.

I personally have very strong opinions on what OS I want to use, on my own computer. (Not Linux, and not Windows either.)

However, I recognize that this is a matter of opinion. I don’t really care what OS other people choose. There will probably never be an OS that everyone will love.

So my stance is this: Just let people use whatever OS they’re happy and productive with. And where they can find applications they like. IMHO, having a nice selection of applications is just as important as the OS itself. For me, that is a compelling argument in favour of macOS. But if people can find applications they enjoy on Windows and Linux, then bully for them.

And when it comes to regular users who just want something that works – then it might be wise to not even use a traditional desktop OS. iOS/iPadOS and Android/Chrome OS are much more user-friendly than Windows/Mac/Linux will ever be.

Here's my reality: I know a lot of older people - people in their 50's, 60's, 70's, and even 80's - who can barely run Windows adequately. Do I think they'll ever run Linux as their daily driver? Nope.

Okay, perhaps you think that's unfair, maybe you think it's the younger generation that's going to abandon Windows for Linux. You might want to re-think that. There was an article here on HN just a couple of weeks ago where a CIS professor was lamenting that their incoming students didn't even know how to use a computer! Most shocking to the professor was the fact they couldn't comprehend the file system! They were used to using tablets and phones. And those are the CIS students - imagine what the other students are like? They're not even running Windows, do you really think they're going to abandon their mobile experience for Linux? I wouldn't make that bet.

Where does that leave us? People over 50 aren't running Linux and they most likely never will. People under 20 aren't running Linux and most likely never will. That leaves those aged 20-50, and frankly most of them aren't running Linux either and most likely never will.

The future for Linux on the desktop isn't looking too bright. Meanwhile Linux on the server? It's pretty much foolish to run anything else.

And 2022 will be the year of the Linux desktop™.

And <?php echo date("Y") + 1 ?> will be the year of the Linux desktop™.

This "list" is awful. I think we're heading into another Vista/8 cycle. Feels like MS really fucked up with Win11, but the writing has been on the wall for Windows for a while. Unless someone splashes them with cold water and they wake up, I'm staying with Windows 10 until they (artificially) force it. Meanwhile I'll be setting myself up a new future on another drive with a decent Linux distro.

I thought to myself, reminds me of the ol' "This is the year of Linux on the desktop"! But then I wondered, how long have I been reading THIS is the year?

Found this old headline on Slashdot: "Linus Says 2004 is the Year for Desktop Linux"

For me, at least, 2015 was the year of Linux on the desktop. I could get the sound and fans to work (Finally!) all the time without much work. The graphics card was finally stable. I could do nearly everything I needed to do on Linux and it more or less "just worked" most of the time. That's all I really want in an OS. Windows is probably required for most work and no small number of people get along just fine on MacOS. Linux gets the job done now, and it's stable and things tend to work really well without any major problems. Or so I've found, I know not everyone agrees and depending on what your work is like, things will be different. I've written before about how I find Linux to be a better OS on a home build desktop than my nearly new M1 Macmini. Just yesterday this damn thing gave me a greenscreen kernel panic for no apparent reason in the middle of an important meeting.

Linux is free. Did he list that?

Installing Windows is like inviting a really pushy bum to live in your house. Always asking for money.

"You want to open that Zip file? Oh well here's a link to where you can rent the appropriate application for the low low price of..."

After using Windows I feel the need for a shower. What a dumpster fire that OS is.

I never switched from Linux to Windows. Why would I want to?

Games would've been the big one, but that reason is disappearing pretty quickly. Proton is pretty incredible, and I believe there's been a recent development to allow games that use anti-cheat to work in the near future. More people on Linux for games means more attention to the Linux desktop, which hopefully means faster improvement to it.

We'll see what actually happens of course, but Valve taking an interest really gives me hope (big company with lots of resources to throw at problems).

You can run Adobe software on it for cheaper than the cost of getting a Mac. And you can run an enormous number of games which aren't available on Linux or Mac at all. At least that's why I do it.

As a person who has been using Linux as my main desktop OS since 2003, unfortunately there are almost as many impediments to the average user switching to Linux now as there was back then.

1. Although game support has gotten better, most AAA titles still don't work on Linux, even with proton.

2. There are still a lot of devices that either don't talk to Linux at all or require the kind of tinkering that the average user is not capable/willing to do to set up: iPhones, any VR headseat that isn't the Index, etc.

3. There are still a lot of highly popular industrial-strength applications that don't work on Linux, even with WINE. The entire Adobe suite, AutoCAD, etc.

For these reasons (and other smaller ones), I have always needed to have a Windows dual-boot setup, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We have three choices for the desktop:

-one that seems to treat anyone as an idiot and it's an walled garden -one that is broken -one that kind of works but is boring and it is kind of a new skin on a very old paradigma interested most in keeping backwards compatibility

20 years ago as an OS enthusiast, I was in Heaven. Apart from Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, we had a lot of new operating systems, each trying to work on a new paradigm: BeOS, Syllable, SkyOS, and some more which I forgot.

People were enthusiastic about the the OS landscape and we thought some new breakthroughs will be just around the corner.

But what happened is everything is aligned to money and if the money don't follow enthusiasm and ideas, then we end up with a boring landscape.

I think innovation in the OS landscape is at its worst but that it is because it is not rentable.

20 years ago there were a bunch of half-baked OSes that had very narrow hardware support, little to no security models, and horrible developer ergonomics that made doing native GUI Linux apps seem easy by comparison. It's actually good that these died out.

Are you sure about BeOS? Half baked? If any, the half-baked OS in that era was Linux. Until the 2.4 kernel it sucked having several sound daemons. BSD's got it right at least.

Haiku OS didn't die, and the day it gets hardware accelerated GL/Vulkan support (now it's done thru MESA/Lavapipe/LLVMpipe), we'll talk about which os is thruly half-baked.

On security, your sensitive data belongs to an unprivileged user, do unless you set your perms to ugo+r/ chattr +i to your sensitive files, you are screwed in the same way. Yes, OpenBSD has unveil/pledge, but it's still dangerous.

You can set another user account for that, sure, but the most correct to handle that is to set that data in external media and access it on demand.

Disk storage is dirt cheap today.

If someone asked me 20 years ago, I would have predicted that in the next 20 years we will have another OS paradigm. One that will actively help you accomplish your tasks. Not only the OS should not stand in your way, but it should help you find information in an instant, it should help you at tedious tasks, it should provide a framework for programs to exchange and process information. And by that framework I don't mean an Unix pipe or a Unix socket. I want a simple visual way to connect software which should do a lot of complex transformations.

Of course I've failed with predictions. We got a bit more polished UX and UI and that's it. No change of philosophy, no major breakthrough in the way we interact with computers.

I have been a Linux-only user on the desktop since 2011. I've been thinking of jumping ship to FreeBSD for better ZFS support and a more cohesive experience, but I'm still on Linux for now.

But I do try to make my software portable across all major OS's, so I have a hard drive specifically for Windows in my machine, and I do boot it.

I hate it when I have to. Even though the only thing I do when I boot it is work on open source software, I get nervous about how much data is being mined on me because I can't tell. Hence why I only work on open source software.

(And before anyone tells me that Linux is spying on me too, I run Gentoo with everything, including my ungoogled browser, built from source. And I watch my network traffic.)

I was planning to switch but Windows is still restarting after an update. The screen has instructed me to not turn off or unplug my laptop. I'm compliant but it's getting more difficult as the years go by.

It's kind of funny, but Eric S. Raymond seems to be reincarnating in multiple dudes even if he's alive and well. I doubt even he has still faith in desktop Linux.

So I wasn't the only one who got a huge ESR vibe from that article.

I triple boot; there are things I can only really do on Windows with full support (commercial art programs, Unreal Engine), but for software development and general usage Linux wins hands down; even the ability to switch out a wm and have it customized for my workflow is a major win, and the command line utilities and environment aren't even comparable. My third is OpenBSD, since I run that on my servers.

Use the best tool for the job.

> But for sheer feature richness, you've got to experience the two desktops associated with Linux, KDE and GNOME.

Are there only 2 desktops associated with Linux? Granted those 2 are from the early days, but there's a lot more. I'm writing this from a Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop, haven switched from a KDE distro because configuring a dual monitor setup on KDE doesn't work very well.

A lot of software are only developed for Windows though, for example, SolidWorks. But running it in a brower via cloud is another story.

I've tried but so many software that I am using is only available on Windows. Also, some minor annoyances like my Bluetooth headset identifies my laptop running Linux (tried w/ Ubuntu based distros) as a mobile so I can't connect to my mobile and laptop in the same time!

After the preachers of the Linux desktop, I expect a flow of "Linux is GNU/Linux" folks and some followers of the "GNU operating system" cult, followed by the "the only free software license is GPL" congregation, so I will run to take cover.

> the "the only free software license is GPL" congregation

That's not the position of the FSF, or anyone I've ever encountered.

...and the intrusive frequent updates as well. Honestly, one of the biggest pain points for me.

Off topic: since I've never developed apps for Linux, what is the popular language/API that people use for Linux (or better, cross platform) development these days?

(Ha ha, I'm already feeling like the is hardly a question that there is a simple answer for.)

electron

Qt/C++ allows you to develop software for Linux, macOS and Windows.

Every Linux desktop environment I've tried all have unnatural mouse acceleration compared to Windows. Their support for non-uniform sized multi-monitor setups is also pretty awful.

With WSL, I don't think I'll ever be using Linux on my PC

Windows Terminal + WSL 2 has been a game changer in usability and convenience.

Absolutely. Our company issued us Windows laptops but all of our devops/SRE/cloud services and workflows were developed and built by and for MacBook users, with no thought as to the other half of the company that would need to work with them. It took me twenty minutes to get WSL installed and running, and now I can actually support the things I’m paid to support! I have inadvertently also become the SME and one-stop WSL support shop, for everyone else in the same boat. Which, as it turns out, is a great many people….

They forgot reason #12: the ability to work in VR with a high resolution standalone/portable VR office headset: https://simulavr.com/

Until the minute I want to play a video game, or start using some non standard device with my PC. Then it turns into a 3 hour session like I'm back in college again.

I'm just impressed that this hasn't devolved into Fedora vs Debian/Ubuntu yet via "yes, but which flavor?" arguments.

I can now run Linux GUIs on Windows under WSL, so with Windows I get access to Windows and Linux software. What is the case for pure Linux?

Performance

No telemetry

No forced upgrades

No intrusive ads

I'm out of the loop - are there intrusive ads in the Windows OS? If so, what kind of ads and when/where?

>> are there intrusive ads in the Windows OS? If so, what kind of ads and when/where?

https://www.windowslatest.com/2021/05/30/microsoft-edge-nagg...

Windows 10 has adverts in your start menu by default

running windows 11 - no intrusive ads in the windows OS. Not sure what malware these people have on their computer.

Yeah, that start menu area (not sure what the real name is) has panels (I bet they have a real name too) for games and junk. Not to mention how the OS is really pushing people to only use the MSFT Chromium (aka Edge) browser now, similar to how it used to push IE. I'd call that an ad as well, though not exactly what you might think of an ad.

By default, yes. I always quickly follow the instructions online to disable all of that on a new install so I've never encountered them. For me it's no more hassle than the things I need to do on a fresh Linux install.

I haven't seen it push for Edge, in fact I don't think I've opened Edge since install day.

In my experience, ads appeared in the start menu as well as ad notifications on occasion. I removed the ads from the start menu but after an update some of them seemed to return. Similar experience with the ads in the notifications tab. Although a minor experience to re-disable the ads, it was enough to get me to switch. I paid good money for windows, only to get MORE ads than the free alternative

Performance and telemetry if you don't need anything Windows-centric like games are very good reasons. Upgrades though? Even if they are not explicitly forced I'd bet way more people (as a %) are fine using XP or 7 today than whatever version of Ubuntu or other popular distros came those years.

price

possibly security

free software (if one cares)

WSL performance is close to bare metal.

Telemetry is a problem, yes. Should be at least opt-in.

I believe that forced upgrades are a necessity if you have the end-user market penetration of Windows. It's a different thing for servers, and one could argue about the implementation details.

I don't see ads on Windows (and I'm on the 11 beta channel).

Less bloat. No random upgrades at inopportune times. More consistency WRT the file system, installing software, etc... Not being bombarding by start menu ads or Cortana randomly popping up.

Basically just not having to deal with MS.

Out of curiosity, how are battery life and touchscreen support coming along? Those are the things that killed Linux for me last time.

I use Linux and the fact that this poorly-written article ended up on the front-page of HN makes me wish for a downvote feature.

1) OK 2) OK 3) OK ... 7) OK 8) Hm, OK.. 9-11) Nope, you should’ve saved yourself some time and stopped at seven reasons.

If you use Wine or Proton, try running your stuff using Gamemode and a kernel that supports Esync, like xanmod.

I'm a heavy touchpad user and the sole reason I will not use Linux for the foreseeable future is because touchpad usage is absolutely terrible on Linux. Depending if you use the libinput or synaptics drivers it's either completely inconsistent between applications or all-around terrible.

I use Windows + WSL even though I practically never do anything Windows related.

Why is this allowed on HN? This is a spam, really poor quality article for SEO purposes.

in a world that had its mental faculties intact even one of those reasons would have been enough: e.g. windows 11 requiring a front-facing camera.[0]

but we don't live in such a world. we have entered the downward spiral of unaccountable tech oligarchies and it is not clear where the bottom lies.

[0] I pressume if you cover the camera you will get automatically blacklisted as someone having "something to hide" and you are tortured with daily updates

To clarify Microsoft will require OEMs to include a front-facing camera in new portable devices starting in 2023 if they want to be certified as Windows 11 compatible.

Windows 11 itself won't require a front-facing camera.

One reason not to: mixed dpi

Aren't these reasons (even if they are convincing) apply to Mac systems as well?

many, but not all of them

Good point, there are some specific places where Linux really excels over MacOS:

- 32-bit app support

- Nvidia GPU/CUDA support

- Encryption without a question mark at the end

- I can hide my topbar (or ostensibly move it wherever I want)

- I don't get a popup asking me to try Safari every week

For some of these, Windows wins against MacOS as well. And I have the impression, every Mac OS release, I have to debug the C++ dev environment of my students. 3 years ago I was praying that a new student had a MAC, because I could get them going easily. Now I'm praying they are on Windows, because WSL+Ubuntu just works. (I'm not praying they have Linux, because that realistically never happens. Would be great though.)

Everytime Apple upgrades Xcode I am worried something in my development workflow breaks (as has happened many times in the past). Same is true for every major macOS release the last 5 years or so.

I’m getting to the point that I consider switching to Linux, but the biggest show stopper for me is my work as iOS dev. Hopefully can move to some other tech in a couple of years so I don’t have to rely on the Apple platform for my income.

That sounds pretty painful, I've always felt bad for the people who are forced to use xCode as part of their job. I really hope Apple is forced to make cross-platform tooling, because while it's great for lock-in, it makes it really difficult for outsiders to publish cross-platform apps.

Okay let's go through this list.

1) Avoid costly hardware upgrades - valid, Microsoft loves to make you upgrade, and it sucks

2) Fight toxic waste - Eh, it helps, but most users don't want to use a 10-year-old PC anyway, so there's a limit to how much waste you can really fight. Plus mobile devices greatly outweigh PCs pound for pound.

3) Keep the right to run the programs you want - Total nonsense. The article says "what if the government forces Microsoft to block some programs". Won't that apply to Linux also? Won't they see what you downloaded from your ISP? There's a weird belief in the tech world that if you can just avoid the law technically, the government will just give up. "Oh snap, you got us, you're good man. Next time!" hearty handshakes all around

4) Run your computer without surveillance - Again, nonsense. This speculates that because Windows 11 requires a camera (which is technically a lie anyway), Windows 11 will stream a live feed of you back to Microsoft. Think of the bandwidth usage! Ugly photos of you will be in Redmond servers! This is another Linux user problem: assuming that if a company does A, they'll be able to take the next step without outcry. Oh, they required a camera? Well then they can just stream a feed of your video back home and no one will complain! They got us! Those tricksters! No. In reality if Microsoft sent a feed of video back home, they would be lambasted. They would be discovered by security researchers and they'd never live it down. It would be the end of Microsoft.

5) Avoid conveniences that lock you in - So because Teams is installed by default, you'll he "locked in"? In reality, no one uses Teams unless they're made to. By work, school, etc. and those decisions are made at an institutional level above you. So good luck avoiding Teams in 2021. Using Linux won't help you with that.

6) Run your computer without a Microsoft account - Valid. If this bothers you, you should use Linux!

7) Customize your desktop - valid, this one is obvious

8) Enjoy the most recent and stable versions of free software - valid

9) Increase computing diversity - valid, although diversity is also a synonym for "fragmentation"

10) Launch your skills as a programmer - This one is old as the hills, but it's kind of nonsense. Mac and WSL have equally good developer environments. "Use Linux become programmer" is just post hoc ergo proctor hoc.

11) Choose computing freedom - Valid. However, software freedom is a slight myth. You're "free" to modify Chromium and remove Google. But it's really difficult. You can run Ubuntu without systemd, but you're in for a world of hurt.

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