I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along.
Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.
Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.
The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that's not at all the same thing as updates being applied without actually being invoked by the user.
I dunno, I've heard multiple reports of people leaving their machine alone and coming back to it having upgraded and rebooted into a new version, sometimes into an unrecoverable blue screen.
How would they have opted out of that?
In this case, the forced W11 upgrade was forced on me by my company via push.
Fool me once, etc.
Eh, not very accurate in my opinion. If you want to use the latest software you are very much forced to upgrade Linux because they have no concept of separating the platform from the applications that run on it. Either everything is bleeding edge or nothing is. Or you compile things from source like it is 1979.
There are Windows programs released today that will run just fine on Windows 7. How many Linux programs released today will run on Karmic Koala without recompilation?
Compiling from source is the most reliable way to run the latest and greatest version of a particular application that I've found to date, leaving out all the middlemen like package mantainers, whose competence I may or may not trust.
And generally speaking, I'd trust a several-decades-old technique much more than something just released.
As far as Windows software goes, I've found Wine to be a much more reliable platform for old Windows applications than Windows 7 or 10, although there's nothing better than emulated Windows 9x for running programs of that era.
(I make "any browser" websites, so running 1995+ software is something I do on the regular.)
I have not tried to use that recently, but I am quite happy running 14.x today, and it runs everything I need.
I use IntelliJ 13.x for my Git stuff, Geany for most of my text editing, a dozen different browsers at whatever versions they are for my Web things, and whatever versions of mpv, mc, LibreOffice, etc. it came with for what those programs do.
With only 1GB of RAM it's not always as snappy as I'd like, but I use the periods of swapping to meditate.
I don't have to use programs released today, only ones which I need today.
Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen.
Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped.
I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros.
Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.
If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.
They might scream in horror at how containers often get (ab)used though.
Also, previous incarnations were hard to maintain, had no logging before the mount of filesystems, had ill-defined service life cycle, etc. Booting is a hard problem. Having it all around the system in million shitty bash script is a ridiculous idea. Make it declarative as much as possible and have it handled by a single core program. And systemd does these perfectly, my only gripe with it is that it should not have been written in C, but such is everything in linux land.
The reality is that systemd's wide adoption has made many people unhappy, for many reasons, some outlined in the Wikipedia article[1]. Systemd is overly complex, to the point of being obfuscated; systemd has many interlocked dependencies; systemd takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a fat binary; systemd goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well"; systemd creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture, and so on.
Lucky for us, unlike with Windows and Mac, there is no "One And Only GNU/Linux Distribution", and instead there are many options and alternatives, many of which have not integrated systemd at all, or only ported small parts of it.
Every day I am ever so grateful for the miracle and gift of FOSS. Thank you. Gracias. Spasibo. Dyakuyu. Merci. Danke.
> It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides.
...a suicide over a different init system? Seriously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Reception
Summary: It's overly complex, it has many interlocked dependencies, it takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a huge binary, it goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well", it creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture...
Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
The Mac-like global menubar which they've grafted on without being able to adopt the applications is an atrocity IMO.
I consider Windows 95 / NT4 / 2000 to be "peak desktop GUI" and use distros which allow me to emulate that look, feel, and behavior. I use it until it fails to deliver that experience and then keep trying other distros until I find another one who has not yet rotted out.
So far, I have only had to switch distros a handful of times.
I used Windows 2000 starting three betas before gold, downloading each build over dialup from AOL warez scene releases and didn't stop until a while after they stopped patching Pro, don't recall having any issues. What an amazingly solid OS.
My choice today is Xfce with the Chicago95 script, I can barely tell the difference.
I'd say Mint has the best default tuning for Xfce, with Manjaro I have to add the fewest additional packages on top of the base install, and Fedora is somewhere in between.
Thanks for the memories :)
My Arch + AwesomeWM setup I've been running for the last 5+ years would disagree with you. Kinda one of the reasons I went with this setup, I have total control over all updates, installed software, etc.
I know it's probably a typo, but I can't help but imagine the wonderful OS that Windows 6 never was :)
I still stuck around until Windows 7 because I had just grown so into it, was very comfortable with keyboard controls, etc. Then a computer I knew upgraded itself to Windows 8 without being asked to, and started booting into a bsod...
The overall intent and attitude matters more to me than the details, and the general intent of Microsoft (and Apple, and Gnome, and Ubuntu, and many others) seems to be "we know how your desktop should look and operate better than you do."
This is completely the opposite of what I want, which is to have a workstation which is configured to facilitate my work, where nothing changes without my explicit REQUEST.