So they basically messed around with third-party software settings to push their shitty products. This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.
How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?
I don't; I develop on Linux. Ignoring this, within my very limited usage of Windows, it seems to me that MS has become increasingly more hostile over the last few years or so.
To answer with something actionable: I discourage people from upgrading to Windows 11.
WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.
Windows 11 is VERY solid and you can play lots of games on it too :)
I am dead serious. I have been using Windows since 3, using betas of Microsoft products since Longhorn - right now, Windows is reaching it's PEAK in terms of performance, ecosystem. Sure, they will need 2-3 more UI/UX iterations, but who cares - I use the terminal, File Explorer, Visual Studio 2022, Office apps and Outlook :D
As someone who also has a Linux desktop and laptops in addition to the Windows machine, WSL is terrible next to the real thing. Unless you need software that only runs on Windows, I advise against using it as a reason to stay on Windows.
I am now reaching 36, I just like 'things that work' - like Windows. Windows works with all my hardware, with all my 7 laptops, with all my 2 towers, I can install Visual Studio 2022 on it, I can install Ubuntu in WSL2 and I can play Dota2/Civ/Baldur's Gate/Warhammer 40k Insquisitor Martyr/listen to Spotify/debugging/deploying to Azure/writing an email/writing a Presentation in Power Point.
And then go back to my family - because not worrying about Wayland, that new driver or that new update or "that new thing "- suprsingly leaves a lot of time that you can spend with your family :)
And of course I am using the .NET stack with Angular- all smooth, all good, no hassle, just smooth sailing :)
- a desktop on Arch
- an arm-based NAS on Debian
- a router running OpenWRT
- a backup target on Debian
- a media player (x86) with Kodi/Wine/Dosbox/Mame/other emulators
All are in regular use, but only the NAS and router run 24/7.
- One very light (and slow by today's standards) Fedora laptop I use mostly from the couch and used to go with me to conferences.
- One reasonably sized (also old, but still snappy) Ubuntu laptop I use tethered to a desk with a keyboard and monitor.
- One that's mostly a file server that all computers on the network can see.
- One that's a "write-only" file server for backups.
What about the times when windows take forever to "getting things ready". I once spent around two hours updating windows. And just after the reboot there were ten new updates.
https://changewindows.org/platforms/pc/releases/windows-11-c...
[Version 10.0.22538.1010]
I had ZERO (0) issues with upgrades or downtime.
I too could make coffee or read a book while apt or dnf do their magic, but the truth is I can continue working while they do it, probably because, unlike Windows, they can delete and replace open files while they install, making the update-on-reboot issue on Windows a non-issue on Linux machines.
It's been a while since I had a BSOD on Windows, but I have been forced to restart it quite a few times when something didn't work or stopped working, or the VPN went crazy or some other malfunction. Unscheduled downtime is still very much an issue on workstations and I wouldn't want to look into Windows Server and how it handles this issue.
They also break Intel ANS on every single release - i.e. VLANs and LACP will stop working until Intel releases a new version. For Windows 11, Intel gave up and there will be no ANS anymore[1].
And the last, january 2022 update? It casually killed L2TP...
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
My NixOS machine updates in a few minutes even when it needs to compile some custom things. And it will not change settings without me changing the configuration. If it does, I can just reboot to the older version and file a bug report...
Edit: has anybody tried to install Windows on ZFS or Btrfs? If update does something you don't like, just boot to a snapshot and get rid of the update.
I used to do banking on a VirtualBox immutable disk image. I only made it mutable when it was time to regular updates, then made it immutable again for using the bank and government software (in Brazil you had some govt issued tools that made life easier). You can also make it work with filesystem snapshots as well as letting VirtualBox manage its own snapshots for you.
I don't game all that much; most of what I play that doesn't have a Linux-native build runs fine through Proton on my laptop. If I did do any serious gaming, I'd probably reluctantly have a separate Windows gaming rig that I'd use solely for gaming, but otherwise avoid it like the plague. Life is too short to deal with user-hostile OSes.
I get that my use-case doesn't apply to everyone, but I want people to know that if you do mostly web stuff etc... even as a non technical person, Linux can "just work".
Then my father's printer and sound card stopped working after upgrading to Windows 8, and I moved him to Linux as well.
In all this time there's only one thing I couldn't fix for them: the library's audiobooks had some form of Adobe DRM on them, and of course it didn't support Linux. I told them to take up the issue with their library, but of course they didn't have a satisfactory resolution to the problem.
Ironically I switched away from Windows and onto Linux precisely because I was sick of things not working on Windows. Sure, it has the best desktop application support of any operating system but to use it for anything more than just a desktop machine requires hours of configuration because everything is tailored to supporting technologically illeterate people (eg file extensions being hidden). Very little of any of this config can be automated -- or at least not in any easy way. And then Microsoft will pull some bullshit move that undoes half your config and you need to start all over again (much like the author of this submission has experienced). Or every few years you need to upgrade to a new release of Windows and you have to find where to change all those settings again plus learn a stack of new settings you need to change too.
Eventually I realised I was spending as much time maintaining the OS as I was actually writing software on it. So I stopped using Windows. Or rather decided to keep Windows around for emergencies but use Linux as my primary desktop (instead of keeping Linux around for emergencies and using Windows as my primary desktop).
My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades), but you can keep your config in Git so it's sync'ed across multiple machines or kept safe if you do need to reinstall your OS. Everything is automated and just works. Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).
I'm not saying your experiences are wrong but just offering the counterpoint that "thing that work" might differ for different people.
Instead, you run into "Firefox not supported" issues.
Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long. Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade", and it insists that you update every day.
On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.
> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head
[2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.
It's certainly introducing more risk but these days I only update my Arch systems a maximum of once every 6 months (usually less than that) and never have an issue. This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.
> Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade",
In theory it is a possibility but in practice that's not really the case. I mean you're not going to get breaking changes every week ;) Arch's package manager has really improved in recent years too so a lot of occasions that might have needed manual intervention can be handled automatically by the package manager (which wasn't the case back when this meme was true).
Also there is a news section on Arch's website so if you're genuinely nervous about running `pacman` you can check there first (this is the recommended best practice but most people don't bother these days because it's rare to have an issue).
> and it insists that you update every day.
Only if you kick off your package manager everyday. But this is true for any Linux distro since they're all pushing updated packages everyday so I don't really see how Arch differs in that regard.
> On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.
I've had a Debian dist-upgrade fail before but that's just once out of a dozen(?) of successful dist-upgrades so I do agree Debian is solid. Never had an issue with upgrading CentOS either. Nor FreeBSD.
The only thing Arch does better than the above is you don't have an hour(s) of downtime during the upgrade. But as you said, that's paired with the risk that you might run into a breaking change at any point in the future. For that reason alone I wouldn't run Arch on servers (or at least not professionally -- thrown Arch on some personal servers in the past)
It's not a meme. Just this week I attempted to update an Arch system that had been left unattended for only a couple years. It got caught in some kind of cycle where it didn't have the GPG keys required to download the latest GPG keys. Then there was some package conflict issue. Finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I completed the update and rebooted... "kernel not found".
I gave up on it.
And lest I be accused of incompetence, here's another Arch user's 3-year update story, only a few weeks ago, on our very own HN:
"Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053
So I'm sorry, but "pretty smooth ride" my ass.
Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion.
So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.
Funny how the best thing to have happened to Windows in the last 10-ish years is gaining the ability to install Linux on top ;)
Also making Python and Angular first class citizens in their dev stacks. Both of which are prominent open-source projects.
also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience
> also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience
For a very limited set of values of "works". ;-)
Eh, pretty sure it is mostly Office, specifically Outlook, that keep Windows alive. Glorious PC Gaming Master Race is relatively small, although they do spend a lot of money.
I use Windows for audio recording, mixing, mastering and gaming, here are my examples of Windows not "just work"ing:
My Windows bluescreens immediately after booting on my Threadripper build with an MSI MEG x399 if I don't have the wifi driver installed. On a new install I have to deactivate it in UEFI settings, then boot/install windows, then install the driver before reactivating it.
Windows Update tries to install certain useless crapware (nahimic) that I can't reject or properly uninstall without a few obscure hacks to trick it.
I use an external audio interface, if Windows goes to standby I have to unplug it and plug it back in, otherwise it won't detect it anymore (this does not happen on Fedora 35).
Also windows will occasionally just switch my default input device after reboots or going to standby. This behaviour is not consistent, so I have to check everytime before I use it for calls. This problem does not occur on Fedora 35.
I currently have 13 .NET redistributables and Windows runtimes installed that all required manual downloading and installing for various games and software to work.
It truly is, the only part on music production that is keeping me is not even the DAWs themselves (I mainly use Cubase and Reaper, and Reaper already offers a Linux build, which works well), it's the VST plugins, which rarely if ever offer Linux versions.
Other music software I make heavy use of: Transcribe!, which offers a linux build and Musescore, which is open source and runs on Linux as well.
looking for some beta users, to get feedback as we're thinking a cross-platform component on similar lines.
1: https://aspsecuritykit.net/guides/aspnet-policy-authorizatio...
Today I use Slackware 14.2 on a netbook and -current (almost 15 nowadays) as my desktop OS. No driver issues, every emulated game works. I use either text mode via framebuffer (I can even watch videos and run SDL2 based cool stuff like mednafen) or fluxbox.
I don't care on modern gaming, Slashem and IF killed modern graphical-intensive games but with a childish and boring script. Kinda like the current decade trend of Marvel superhero movies. I had more fun reading classical sci-fi comics from the 50's. BG was cool... at 18. Today I have no time to follow a 20000 pages long script based not on sequential reading, but on choices. Slashem has better and more inmersive RPG elements (Nethack was the king of emergent gameplay) and I can play it anywhere on any machine from a 486 or a Classic Mac. Mednafen does magic for my gf, two player 8-16 bits classics with a gamepad while I use the keyboard. It works even without X. No DLC's, no always online. Oh, and Jap nerds translated loads of games into English. I am not an English native, but for sure I can read English better than Kanji.
On media, I don't care on Spotify, I have curseradio-improved, yt-dlp, Jamendo and Radio Paradise, and MPV plays HD content from Youtube and may other sites perfectly. My offline music collection (streamripper to Radio Paradise) does it better with the "shuffle" function on mocp. Fire and forget.
Time for my family? No social media, no "always connected" bullshit. I don't have to follow 2000 notifications on the framebuffer as in a GUI or a smarthone. https://68k.news, https://lite.cnn.io, https://efe.com for my country's news and Slashdot/HN/Lobste.rs has anything I want to read. Even in text mode. I also have some good times with Gopher and magical.fish/sdf.org and the tildeverse. Condensed geekeery thanks to few members, code sharing and a low volume of posts. Heaven. And, maybe, bbs@uncensored.citadel.org via SSH from time to time. Ah, a lot of people posted personal blogs on Gopher, so I can read posts back to ~2007 with the Gopher revival, and I can read it on a slow pace. The protocol is fast enough and there's no lag to load the sites, OFC.
Visual Studio? Heh. Nowadays almost everything I do it's cloud containered bullshit so there's very little to code, I almost do (jim)tcl and a bit of C for fun.
At home, everything else it's scripted over with a script called "do_the_internet.sh" pulling and fetching rss, mail, usenet news and podcasts. Once a week. No info overload.
Ironically thanks to that I spend much less time with the computer than you thanks to scripting ;), so I can focus on different stuff such as reading long books and biking.
And, yes, I geek sometimes, OFC, but with a fast as hell Fluxbox netbook, I can chat everywhere thanks to SSH (mosh) and Bitlbee (IRC gateway to Telegram/Jabber and whatever Pidgin supports), and hack and slash with Slashem on top of a mountain by using the phone's wifi sharing.
No ads. No unwanted updates. No pop-ups. No crapware. Batteries last hours.
If you are on Windows, get a Gopher client and head to gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org. Your brain will thank you.
It boils down to which OS you want to be the "second-class citizen" on your machine. With Wine, it's Windows. With WSL, it's Linux.
That equivalence is only valid for WSL1. Since WSL2 runs the real Linux kernel on a VM, the equivalent for it on Linux would be running Windows on a VM.
Not quite. When Windows is on a VM, you mostly run only Windows-specific software on it. Within the VM, everything works mostly flawlessly. Most platform-neutral software will be running on the Linux side, which makes accessing data from the Linux environment a non-issue.
And don't even get me started on Windows-1252 and CRLF line endings.
WSL2 still has some issues with VPN software and my company doesn't support it on my corporate Windows laptop.
I am genuinely interested on knowing your reasons for saying WSL is terrible. Just for clarification, I'm a Linux/MacOS user but the times I've had to use WSL in the past whether experimenting at home or in some companies where I was force to use Windows, I though it is actually one of the most decent things Microsoft has created on its entire existence. It is easy to enable, to operate, it integrates well with the network stack of Windows (kubectl port-forwarding or docker run -p8000:80 works out of the box) it performs very decently (with exceptions on IO filesystem operations) etc.
It's just that it's poorly integrated with the host environment (because there is a host environment). On Linux and Macs, the Unix side is the machine itself. With WSL1, you have a Windows kernel pretending to be a Linux one (I kind of prefer this approach) but my home folder is not my Windows home folder, but terminal still opens the Windows home anyway. On WSL2 (which I can't use on my corporate laptop because the VPN software breaks something in DNS and networking I haven't had the time to debug) the Windows side needs a network share to get access to the WSL environment (which is not present until the environment starts - and there are other side effects whether WSL starts before the VPN or after).
A Linux box (or Mac) is a so much simpler (to understand what happens) Unix environment it's not even funny.
Having said that, when you overcome those impedance mismatches, it mostly works for the typical use cases. Like you mentioned, Docker works (I need to set a DOCKER_HOST variable to point to the Windows box). And Windows Terminal is excellent (double height and width chars are still missing, but they have overline support).
It's death by a thousand paper cuts.
I finally gave up on it and went back to using my underpowered OSX machine instead of continuing to try to get WSL2 to do the job.
Was it possible? Probably. But I'm not going to spend the time to figure it out. There's probably a correct way to install everything we needed, but I didn't find it, and I found numerous wrong ways.
Did the switch to debian a couple of months ago. First two days was weird, after that the only thing I use Windows 11 for is gaming, and Lutris is making me think twice about that too.
I don't care how "solid" or performant it is. And I don't need WSL2 when I can just run Linux directly.
Actually, I decided to downgrade to WSL from WSL2. I often need to do some quick work in a Linux environment, and sometimes this even involves some files on my Windows machine, so WSL comes in handy. The problem is, WSL2 startup time is terribly long when compared to WSL. With WSL, i type wsl and a second later I run a couple of commands. With WSL2, once it has finally started, I already forgot what I wanted to do.
As far as I remember, XP had no tracking and advertisement build in by default. And it left control on when to update and when to invoke antivirus with you.
Is this really all good to you? Or are you so deep invested in windows, that you can just disable them? Because I surely can disable most of that shit, too - but it takes a while and one update later it can be all back.
Last solid Windows very Win Server 2003.
PS: I prefer to update once a month in controlled mode.
Thanks for adding this, as I thought you made a joke.
Ads, spyware, NSA backdoors, who still trusts them?
Also alternatives are just too readily available these days.
WSL2 has major IO issues outside of ext4, which is detrimental. It also doesn't support mounting NFS. It doesn't have systemd so lots of stuff doesn't work in a normal way.
To get a terminal that doesn't f*#& up you need to switch code page to utf-8.
Visual studio is almost as garbase as SSMS.
Windows is a pain
Linux is actually a much better OS for techies: you can make it look nicer, have a better workflow, and you can really play games now that Steam Deck brought so much focus on Linux compatibility.
Otherwise, Mac OS is doing just fine as well.
I've been using Lenovo's Legion devices instead. They don't run this horribly bloated BIOS, they run the much less critically acclaimed Insyde BIOS, but guess what, it just works. I've not had an unexpected wake-crash in years (aside from nvidia drivers with the mux switch on, but just use amdgpu instead). Desktop grade processors, weight comparable to a T420. Definitely not a device to use on the go, but very capable if you just need to carry a computer to the office.
It can't be an afterthought.
Same goes for phones. Buy the right phone, don't be upset you can't load GrapheneOS on your cheap Samsung handset.
Yeah, no.
You either switch to Mac and lose 99% of your applications and some of your hardware.
Or you switch to Linux and lose 90% of your applications and latest hardware; And enjoy random problems and figuring out which of hundred answers online is right. Answer could be none, because for example Wayland support for multiple monitors sucks.
Not everybody is graphics designer, video editor who needs Photoshop, Microsoft Excel etc.
And, I haven't found any random problems at least on PC. It might be problematic in laptop, which I honestly don't know.
Also, part of the problem people have with Linux is that it does not run Windows programs and they complain because they can't get QEMU or VMware or WINE functioning correctly. You shouldn't need those. When you switch to Linux, you lose your software. It's a reality you accept, because that software you used was not designed for Linux. Instead of trying desperately to get your old software to run, you instead use alternatives, be they open or closed, to run what you want. There are more than a few alternatives, many of them having similar or exceeding the power of paid windows-only products.
Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine (especially if it's a laptop) will often fail, and that's why people spend hours on forums looking for answers.
Long ago I tried to run Linux on Macs. I would always get it to more or less work, but it would take a lot of time and toil. I had the patience for that back then. Now I just buy a Dell XPS 13 and stop worrying about it, because everything works out of the box. It's not my favorite piece of hardware, but it's fine.
I also do wonder where all these critical Windows-only applications are. I spend 90% of my computing time in a browser, terminal window, or text editor/IDE. Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without, but the vast majority of users out there don't.
Not random, but my current machine. How else am I (or random person on the Internet) to migrate to Linux then?
Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.
E.g. You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away. Get AMD. Want dual monitors. Throw one away...
I honestly dread switching to Linux.
> Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without
Stuff like Office (not online ones), Adobe suite, video editors, sound editors, etc.
I understand what you are saying but it is not such a big deal in practice as it may seem. You migrate if your current machine supports linux (you have to do some research), OR you migrate the next time you switch machines.
Linux is my daily driver for 15+ years now and the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't bother me at all. I am currently using two xps laptops and one custom built desktop - everything worked out of the box. I had good experience with thinkpads in the past.
I think the answer to the last one is if you need Microsoft software then use it. Not much you can do if your chosen vendor doesn't support other OS (WINE, VMs, and such aside).
If it's a laptop then buying an entire machine is the norm.
If you want to test hardware you already own, then just do it. No need to do any real research there.
Should isn't won't.
If it was unclear that my sentence was in the scope of hardware, sorry.
I remember Luke saying multiple monitors broke at one point on his laptop, but that was a laptop.
I've used dual monitors on my linux setup for years without issues. Is this a common problem?
My current PC is using and nVidia 1660 GPU to drive this.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04. It wasn't out-of-the-box easy to install, but running installer in safe-mode worked and regular boots are as normal.
Even on laptops dual screens work provided the laptop supports it.
I've rarely seen it as i usually dock the machine with duplicate monitors.
Same with dual, triple monitors, etc.
Linux Desktop evangelists being like this also makes people not want to switch. Who wants to deal with a community like that?
For most of the stuff that runs on windows and mac there are alternatives on linux, some equal, some worse, some better. I have been mostly a linux users for years. I still have one laptop with a dual boot on windows...for only one use case: music production. Not because there are no music production software available, not because they aren't good, quite the contrary there are fairly decent tools both opensource and proprietary, but because I don't know them well. I only do music as a hobby in my free time and so far I have been too lazy, or more interested in producing music than learning a new workflow. I admit it is mostly about laziness and time to dedicate to something new. I intend to correct that because I don't want to feel forced to use windows, which I mostly hate for anything else, for that.
> You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away
Nvidia works fine (it has to, lots of ML shit on GPUs is done on Linux), you just need proprietary drivers. If anything their support on Linux is probably better than AMD's.
Why? Just make an Ubuntu startup stick and try it without installing... Nothing lost except maybe 10 minutes of your time.
True: a bit more than a year ago I bought a new computer with (I think) a B550 chipset motherboard which was very recent.
Wasn't supported by Kubuntu 20.04, I just had to install Kubuntu 20.10 and that's it.
IMHO Linux hardware isn't a problem at all. Software is more problematic (I had a lot of side projects WPF apps that can't run on Linux and I'm a bit lazy to port them to another framework or language so I have installed a Windows VM.
The vast majority of users would suffer if forced to use only Linux apps. Think Office Vs LibreOffice or Photoshop Vs GIMP. A lot wouldn't be able to work at all, like the folks who use Solidworks.
Let's not pretend that browser/terminal/IDE is the most common usage of PCs.
It's just there isn't a good path. So might as well remain on current thing that works.
In my case the $15 Windows.
tldr; Linux' hardware support is excellent these days.
[0] Since about 2010. Before that I had lots of issues, especially with graphic cards and broken ALSA drivers and stuff. All of these problems have disappeared for all practical purposes.
Same experience when I bought my thinkpad L14 AMD, no issues either.
Im convinced at this point that the entire "linux is bad on new hardware" is a thing of the past.
Maybe for developers writing games in C++ or their own engines (or small time engines), but for many, how is it better?
As far as I know, out of the most popular engines, only Godot actually offers out-of-the-box Linux support. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and the others don't offer Linux support for their editors, although some give you access to the source code so you can build it yourself on Linux, but that's often not so trivial.
The same was true for wii/wiiU (linux under the hood) if I recall correctly. I'd be shocked if that weren't also the case for xbox* though I don't remember that specifically.
The MBAs take over and implement KPIs that might even be well-intentioned but are ultimately easiest to satisfy by cutting corners. For example: KPI that measures market share of Edge; instead of making Edge better to increase its share, just screw your users by making Edge default on Windows on every other update.
I've seen it happen at my own company, and while I always had pipedreams that this isn't happening at the big tech players because there are too many smart folks around to stop that nonsense, I can well imagine that it boils down to these kind of bullshit reasons.
Quarterly Earnings reports. They've picked off all the low hanging fruit to show growth, now they're grasping.
You can Google for "microsoft (buy|acquire) canonical" and find points on why it's very likely.
On other systems, some things are literally (today) impossible to change, unless you have access to the source code, which you as a normal person don't.
You don't have to use Unity, and thank god for that.
They've moved it back to start in 8.1, but by that point I've already switched to elementary OS (beta of 0.2 Luna), and that's (mostly) where I've stayed for the past 10 years (there were a couple of attempts of switching to GNOME, they've all failed).
> It sounds like you did some great research on this, and you're right. Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed.
As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.
My daughter is vegetarian. We always cook her vegetarian food for dinner. Her little brother likes to bug her about it. We tell him not to, because giving people a hard time about their preferences is rude and annoying. But we also make sure that the vegetarian can't get cranky when everybody else is eating real bacon and she's eating vegetarian bacon. That'd be just as rude and annoying. It's called "tolerance", kids. I don't understand how we've entered into this world where we aren't all supposed to try to tolerate (let alone encourage and support) one another, but that tolerance only goes in one direction. That seems very odd to me.
If you would still feel uncomfortable if it were a photo of man and a woman doing the same thing on your screen in your open office at work, then no. I personally wouldn't want either in my work environment. I have a strong separation of my personal life and work. It's a simple test really, just imagine the reverse and if you feel the same way about a naked man and woman on your desktop at work, then no, you aren't being a homophobe.
Though the U2 album has become such a meme, I'm sure people would have a good laugh at Apple over it.
It's ironic that a "rolling release" OS is often more stable than a "mainstream" OS like Ubuntu. That's just been my experience over the past few years though, and I feel that it's important to help more devs realize that!
I'm also seriously considering Fedora Silverblue once I get more of a feel for how it works under the covers.
My disk encryption is a little complicated so I'm happy that my rolling release means I only have to re-install when I swap boxes. That was my biggest issue with Ubuntu -- your were SOL when EOL :P
Some of the more drastic changes aren't adopted this way, eg: filesystem defaults
I'm not sure how good or bad Bing, Edge etc are as I only use them occasionally, but it does seem concerning that Microsoft has changed these defaults during an update. Is this even legal, post anti trust etc?
Sure, there are some sharp corners here and there, but at least the operating system doesn't get out of it's way to stop you from fixing things. And since you have these sharp corners with any operating system, to the end user it doesn't really matter as long as they have any kind of informal support system (you know, the person in their extended family that 'knows' computers)
I offer tech support for my extended family and was able to slowly migrate most of them to Linux over the years. I'm much less inclined to angrily yell at people nowadays. I've also grown back much of my hair.
Only gripes are that I have experienced a few GNOME bugs with no explanation, like mouse gestures randomly breaking until I reboot - still, I just take this as an opportunity to reboot my computer. I also can no longer use Remote Desktop - VNC is too much of a pain and I can’t ‘steal’ my own session, and SSH forwarding is dead slow. (If anyone has a Remote Desktop solution for Linux that just works, I’d love to hear it.)
I can’t imagine ever really using Windows 11 at this point, at least not for a few years and then in passing.
GNOME has desktop sharing built-in. I believe it is VNC based, but maybe you'll have better luck with something built into GNOME. SSH forwarding works fine for single apps, but for a true remote X desktop, I've usually configured XDMCP in the past. If you use Chrome, there is also Chrome Remote Desktop (remotedesktop.google.com). It worked fairly well when I used it last, but that was a while ago.
With RDP on Windows, if I stay logged in with programs running and walk away from my computer and remote in to it, I will get the same session I left open. Unlike VNC, this session will resize everything to fit my client's preferences because it isn't just passing screenshots or a video feed of the desktop back.
I’m using Wayland, which is the Fedora 35 default. I considered X11 but the experience isn’t quite as smooth for the day-to-day stuff in Fedora and I just didn’t want to work around odd quirks if I could avoid it.
I tried the GNOME desktop sharing, but as far as I could see you need to be already logged in to jump in. Besides that it worked OK, though I recall screen resolution being a bit strange, like having 1024x768 or similar which is really quite small for GNOME’s big windows. I never looked into whether these issues I found were configurable, but they don’t seem to be easily accessible options if they are.
The issue I ran into was with multiple monitors. Stretching a VNC window to span multiple monitors is doable, but the window manager in the VNC session won’t know where the borders are and will treat it as one giant monitor. Using one big monitor is a workaround.
I have a private git repo for this. I keep a copy of whatever directory structure I need in ~/_files. I wrote a small 'install.sh' script to install my packages and move the files around. I guess I'll get around to rsyncing them instead of manually moving them some day, but changes are few enough to warrant that yet.
Hell, even outside of trashing the desktop experience, we've noted that we used to get support for our SQL issues directly from Microsoft employees and were escalated to engineers in short order for data corruption issues, we now deal with a third party company for support and they're basically worthless. We pay for this treatment. It's absurd.
Based on this very recent comment, even the creaters of Windows do not:
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
I made a joke about this after the Windows 11 update introduced the new right click menu, meaning things like 7zip and my file reputation tool where all an additional click away for no apparent reason other than putting bigger spacing and more icons.
That just had to be designed by atleast someone who doesn't power use Windows, and maybe even daily drives a different OS
It absolutely boggles the mind that any of this was shipped. This is Beta level software.
An issue like this would come up almost straight away if someone was actively observed while using the OS.
I suppose I should be thankful. Before the last refresh, there were so many items in the right-click menu that it was taller than the internal LCD could display, and I would need to scroll to get to the bottom.
Sure, the Mac has right-click (and I don't like how it embeds a possibly-very-long file name on the "compress" item), but the entire _way_ you work with files on a Mac doesn't rely on it. Windows has centered it's workflow on right-click, so their right-click menu is critical to using it in anger. Every time I need to do something on that machine, I'm just glad to stop and go back to my Mac.
EDIT: I used Windows Explorer for these figures, because that's what everyone has. I just did the same thing in Directory Opus, which I use as a replacement. It took longer to open the right-click menu, and has 4 more items.
I should run a poll: how many items are in your right-click menus in Explorer? How many of them are just "convenience" placeholders for things you would normally be doing with dragging-and-dropping between targets IN THE PROGRAM? How many are "convenience" items for compression-related tasks? I suppose I could remove a bunch of these right-click menu item targets if I did some research on how.
There are many similar design decisions in Windows that cause many orders of magnitude slowdown. For example, start menu indexing is also absurdly slow, despite processing only about 100 KB of data in total.
If one of the dlls is slow to respond, Explorer can’t show the right click menu. Even though 99 out of 100 times you right click the desktop, it wasn’t to open that ‘ati settings utility’ or whatever a driver added to that menu.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the reason they removed the items from the main menu wasn’t both to make it less useful to add crap items and to make it less painful if they don’t load quickly.
Maybe some blind people could sue Microsoft? I can only imagine that it has gotten harder for screen reading software.
If this is true, find a way to FIRE THOSE PEOPLE OR FORCE THEM TO USE WINDOWS!
I don't care how great they are (on paper), or how kewl MacOS is, they should either walk the walk or get out. I'm sure there still are more than enough designers willing to work on products used by 1 billion people.
Imagine the opposite scenario for Apple and how absurd it sounds: designers at Apple designing features for MacOS or iOS using Windows OS laptops.
This prompts the following question: What design apps are the Microsoft designers using on a Mac that they can't use on a Windows machine? (Is it Mac-only Sketch?)
The main designer tools, as far as I am aware, are bundled in the Adobe suite and that works on windows, as well as Mac.
But there are tons of other designer apps, that are Mac only - but I would assume it is mainly a designer thing to have Macs - they have been succesfully marketed (and to some excent were designed) for creative folks.
My advice is that, unless you are developing for Windows is don't. If you need the Adobe tools, you can get them for Macs and, since M1, Macs offer a lot of bang for the buck while being a perfectly usable Unix machine, they are an excellent choice.
If you don't need tools that aren't available on Linux, then Linux is a really good option. Hardware support may be an issue, so I always recommend the most boring machines possible - Intel, with integrated graphics - and only get components you know will work well with Linux.
laptops are a little more problematic but if you try to install linux on a random laptop, chances are everything will just work too. thinkpads are always a safe bet, in any case. or get something made for linux like a system76
The lack of a decent[1] RDP alternative has kept me away for years.
I use KDE Neon on a NUC as a secondary PC and I've been very happy with it, but without a viable RDP alternative it's a no-go as my daily driver.
I use this to access/admin a large amount of windows boxes.
The keyboard shortcuts are awesome.
It's so good that Microsoft uses it for WSLg.
Has this been improved now?
In my experience it feels almost as good as RDP for Windows, which I think is a great achievement.
https://ostechnix.com/how-to-configure-x11-forwarding-using-...
I don't use Windows 11. On Windows 10, I modify the installation image with DISM, removing as much of the unnecessary and user-hostile stuff as possible. (Some of these packages are hidden but can be un-hidden and then uninstalled anyway. Edge can also be completely removed at this stage.)
I make extensive changes to the registry that disable all the unwanted stuff. Some of these settings are not documented, and even the documented ones are likely to change without notice or become re-enabled by default in subsequent builds. For this reason, to avoid such unpleasant surprises, I prevent any automatic updates.
All of these changes happen before Windows is even installed, and for what's not covered by them, I have a collection of setup scripts that disable what can only be disabled post-installation, and also apply my preferred settings.
In the end, I get a system that does only what I want it to do, and nothing else, although to make this possible one has to go through extensive hurdles.
For the record, I'm not saying things should be like that of course. On the contrary, I realize the situation we're in is ridiculous and some improvement is long overdue. But in the meantime, this is how I've been able to solve the immediate problem for myself.
Which has led to something a bit drastic but I haven't looked back - blocking all Windows IP's on router level for the VM address space. I still run updates every few months.
Edit: If anyone want's a list of IPs here's one that I use and is maintained somewhat regularly : https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker/tree/master/d...
Windows Update can forcefully power-on a sleeping laptop, and then do 100% CPU load for a decent chunk of an hour whether you like it or not...
... while your laptop is in your laptop bag.
This destroyed one laptop for me already. It very nearly caught fire on a crowded train with no way to even throw it off for safety.
I keep saying: Microsoft will keep ramming this crap down people's throats until a laptop catches fire on a plane and a safety agency or two gets involved.
PS: Speaking of VMs and Windows Update -- the most hilarious thing ever is when 40,000 virtual desktop VMs forcefully run Windows Update all at the same time on a shared storage array. And then reboot to the golden image, resetting them to the previous state, from which they dutifully try to patch themselves. Again, and again, and again...
This was when Apple had already done a recall on the year/model of the machine for exploding batteries.
Apple then help the laptop for ~2months in the flagship union square store whike they 'investigated'
After 2 months, they told me that at some point in the laptops history a moisture sensor was set-off and thus, they would not honor the recall, nor the fact it caught fire in my bed and told me I was free to purchase another macbook at full price.
I have never bought a new apple product since. I never will.
https://www.latestly.com/technology/apple-macbook-pro-15-inc...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/macbook-recall-apple-recalls-43...
As others have mentioned, I don't! I left and went to Fedora about 3 months ago - still keep a W10 VM for my scanner as Linux still hasn't sorted that stuff but I use it once a month or something so no big deal.
It was my second or third attempt over the years to move to Linux and F35 is now rock solid and I can do .NET development with absolutely no problems now.
I had used Windows since DOS 5.x so it was quite a break for me :)
Probably someone' house at Kabo at Microsoft depends on some OKR and metrics to show growth for Edge. Pathethic, short-sighted, but most probably true.
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
Is this....a real question?
I'll bite - because Chrome signs into my google account and it seemlessly remembers everything I do between my PC, my laptop and my phone. I literally couldn't care any less what core it uses, the usability aspect is just better than in Edge.
That is not a feature, unless you are OK with Google spying on you.
To give another example - my Volvo allows me to track every single journey in the app, seeing the electricity/petrol consumption, mileage, start/end date.....
Yes it means Volvo now knows all of my travel history. But it also means I get access to functionality that is useful to me.
If that's not a feature to you, then don't use it.
The question was "why would anyone prefer Chrome" - because it's a very good browser which has useful features. Like, it's not rocket science.
Google biggest sin is normalizing all these spywares embedded in everything. It is spreading everywhere, even my Samsung TV, and legislators are like 10 years behind were they should have started to "GDPR" everything.
Not sure how this would work in a PHEV where the car is seamlessly switching between EV and ICE running, or in fact compliments ICE with the EV motor. You need the internal reads from the ECU to know exactly how much electricity/petrol was consumed.
You could - of course - provide that without syncing it externally to any servers and then avoid the whole privacy issue.
Literally all the time. It's a PHEV, and maybe not for every journey, but for 8/10 journeys I will look how many kWh of electricity and litres of petrol were consumed, and how many kWh of electricity have been regenerated. When I drive I try to stay in EV mode as long as possible, and regenerate power as much as I can and looking at those stats after every journey gives me a lot of satisfaction. I've driven across Europe last year and it was great to see detailed stats for the entire journey.
It's literally one of my favourite things about this car for me, alongside the ability to pre-heat and pre-cool it remotely.
Edit: also, I don't use it this way, but I know people find the online journal hugely useful for tracking business miles, you can just download an .xml with all trips from the app and that makes it super easy claiming tax/fuel costs back.
I don't think people need to record trips on non-shared business cars here.
No it doesn't. The features you listed could be implemented without the data reaching Volvo's servers at all, or reaching them in only an encrypted form, to which only you have the key. A better way to phrase it is that Volvo allows you to track your journeys, and they spy on you. The two features are separate.
95% of the time, the privacy-convenience tradeoff is nothing but a false excuse for spyware.
It has everything to do with what you allow companies to do. A few years ago the standard mobile app behavior wouldn't be acceptable on Desktop. User expectations have suffered since then.
On the other hand, once you disable the Google sign-in feature of Chrome and change the new tab to about:blank, it's the cleanest browser there is - much cleaner than Firefox, which is shovelware at this point, and adds new crap every new major version.
If I didn't make my living writing Windows software I would have left the platform a long time ago.
What does this have to do with a browser?
Also, at least Chrome lets you set a custom encryption passphrase. Microsoft managed to import every other feature from Chrome, except this one, apparently.
Microsoft has somehow done the impossible and beat Google in its own game. Edge is a complete privacy nightmare, only rivaled by the likes of Opera and Yandex browsers. If Chrome is the fire, Edge is a nuclear reactor in meltdown.
[1]: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/microsoft-edge-datensendeverhalte... (English version: https://www-kuketz--blog-de.translate.goog/microsoft-edge-da...)
For the novice user, there might be a use-case where this is a good solution, to revert settings settings in case you somehow messed them up.
Maybe that's the justification for the product manager or developer, I'm pretty sure though it's just driven by management to increase usage of Edge and Bing. That I have to tell Microsoft on a monthly basis that I don't want to use Edge is in no way user friendly. But same goes for Google which will always ask me why I don't use Chrome.
Did OP got this question?
Edit: d'oh, didn't realize question was about Win 11. I'm still on Win 10 and Win 8 on my machines.
wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll. Add 'Administrators' to permissions, then go back in and delete all permission entries. Basically deny windows access to its update system. Doesn't hurt to run Anti-Beacon as well.
NSudo as Trusted Installer to cripple security center and Update medic service, group policies can shut down most of Defender and Customer Experience Improvement Program as well as the nags about those. Also have a laundry list of scheduled tasks to kill.
Takes me days to get win 10 to run as i want, be secure (from MS) and stable, aka not just suddenly change something and mess up my work.
Its still a shadow of the operating system XP was (not that XP was very good). Just compulsory auto arrange and border-less windows alone really cripples its ability to multi-task or work with complex file sets efficiently. And the amount of bloat both in its install footprint and running services is insane.
If that also disables security updates that is not a good advice.
Forgive me for being glib but; Leaving a backdoor for good old papa Gates to protect you is a bad strategy.
Imagine a port open connected to a program with admin priviles which sole purpose is to give people full access to your computer and your desktop. Hidden in plain sight, maybe?
IANAL, but it sounds questionable around anti-trust laws. Certainly not the first time Microsoft have run into problems with their browsers[^1].
[^1] https://www.cnet.com/news/eu-resolves-microsoft-ie-antitrust...
The way Edge was funded was that the default engine was Bing. Bing ads is how Edge stays afloat.
Seeing how many users changed Chrome to default, this was a constant struggle. It seems some exec finally pulled the trigger and went full hostile to maximize their revenue KPI.
I legit still hate the Bing page. It’s slow. It loads with msn ad crap. They even put ads on start menu.
We had to constantly spin up new VMs to get Edge. The first user experience with ads on your face was very annoying. I don’t think the execs even seriously dogfooded Windows. It seemed like promo driven development.
I don’t know how Apple is able to resist ad revenue unlike Google and Microsoft, but oh boy Apple seems to be cut from a different cloth.
This decision seems shortsighted.
As for other Microsoft products - if you can aquire 21H2 LTSC, it's a very good alternative to Windows 11.
Yes, shitty dark patterns, but definitely not Windows Update replacing those settings behind your back.
edit: clarity
Not discounting your experience, just saying it doesn't match my own.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/12/21/a-recent-windows-update-pr...
Fresh windows 10 install. Installed a bunch of drivers fresh off the vendor's site. Asus driver installation installed some GUI i didn't much care for, Armoury Crate. Well, no problem, right? One can extract the cab/inf files and let windows add the driver rather than use the vendor's executable. Wrong.
Trying to uninstall the driver through the vendor's uninstaller - Error. Add/Remove (probably points to the same location) - Error. It ran a web service; Trying to end task it - Automatically restarted.
This went on for a long debugging session until I realized it's like fighting hackers for control over my own PC. An experience commonplace to windows. Sifting through dodgy forums yielded no results.
Thanks to AMD's professionalism, they added drivers for their latest video card gen to the Linux kernel well before their cards released. Which made my new gaming PC transition to an Arch based distro a no brainer. Didn't look back since.
For anyone interested, I'm using the Garuda distro for games successfully. All games that don't use intrusive garbage like Easy Anti Cheat work. It isn't an inplace replacement for ms and requires patience and tinkering. With the latest Proton 7 release, games work a lot better. Even Cyberpunk 2077 works out of the box with no tinkering.
Sifting through git issues, discussions, solutions and usually just a cli command away for Linux issues is worlds apart than the walled garbage dump that is ms.
If you're up for it, i suggest installing arch yourself as Garuda has its unjustified quirks.
I must add that regardless of anecdotal experiences with ms products, it is important to support the only competition by moving away from ms. Because of their monopolistic practices in tying up hardware to their own software such as TPM and Pluton. Security is great but not proprietary security that ties the hardware to a specific operating system. Something ms always strived for by thrusting their product as the default on any PC and laptop.
More interesting Question imo: If I can't trust Microsoft not to fuck with my desktop settings to maximize their revenue from bing adds via edge, why should anyone trust Microsoft not to do the same with azure?
I've been exclusively using Windows 10 since 2016 on my main rig as well as my laptop. While there are a lot of small annoyances, for me, it's been far from _on a daily basis_. I'd say, from 360 days in the year, I spend maybe 10 days dealing with some Windows bullshittery.
These are the things I changed on my system:
- Disable Windows Defender real-time scanning and related scheduled tasks.
- Use classic shell to replace the Windows start menu.
- Tweak privacy settings in the Windows Settings panel.
Everything else is pretty much default. Yes, I do update Windows on a regular basis.
There have been occasions where default applications associated with file-types break after an update, but for me this never occurred with the default browser setting. Not while I've been using Chrome, neither now while using Firefox.
I live in central Europe, maybe that makes a difference.
For my background, I mainly work on video game stuff, which is the main reason for running Windows. Still, it's development work (mostly C++), not just things that can be done in a browser where no actual interaction with the OS is needed.
Edit: I've not reinstalled the OS on my main rig since 2018-12-22.
Edit 2: My most recent hard-crash that forced me to power-cycle the machine was in March 2021. According to my notes it appeared to be related to the GPU driver (NVIDIA) and occurred while developing an application that utilizes Vulkan.
Why do this?
There are two reasons for doing this:
Firstly, it has been shown that the real-time scanning features causes issues with file access latency. It's apparently quite noticeable when using WSL. On a laptop there might also be a noticeable improvement in battery life, but I don't have any data to back that up.
Secondly, every now and then the real-time scanning triggers on some file, removing/quarantining it without asking me first. This often happens, for instance, for video game cracks that I'd like to analyze / revers-engineer [^1]. So, for me, it's a lot of false positives and so far I haven't encountered a single case where Windows Defender actually protected me from something. At least that I know of.
^1: It's a hobby, I don't build DRM, don't worry. The games I work on typically release DRM-free.
I like Windows very much on the client side - everything pretty much works without any problems. I used to use Classic Shell but I got rid of it when I realized that I actually always start programs though a search (pressing the Win key and starting to type).
As I said somewhere else, once every year or so I install Linux desktop on a laptop to see how it goes. It does not go very well on my Thinkpad with two monitors attached.
It may be very well that with some tinkering it will work - the difference is that with Windows it works off the shelf.
I would not install Windows on a server because i) I do not know Windows enough, ii) there is too much clicking and iii) there is too much magic going on.
The magic on the laptop does not bother me - worst case I will reinstall (though I was forced to do that only once, when moving from the Insider ring)
I specifically use Classic Shell _because_ I always start programs through search, i.e. pressing the Windows key and start typing. It's just that the Windows start menu search doesn't work well for me. Linus from LTT ranted about this on multiple occasions.
I ran Linux (tried Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint) on my Lenovo T460s and the experience was quite bad. Battery life was down to 2.5 hours; even in sleep state, battery drain was significant. Often the laptop would wake up from sleep without apparent reason. The log showed that the lid switch was actuated while the laptop was, in fact, just sitting on my desk without anyone operating it. This never happened on Windows.
About every second Arch system update spawned new issues related to either ACPI, using the docking station or HDMI output. Things were better on Debian based distros but still a pain. I remember trying to get a bluetooth speaker to work, giving up after 5 hours of debugging.
Recently, while visiting a friend, I connected my laptop to a bluetooth speaker, now running Windows, and was surprised that it just worked as one would expect.
Yeah, so far, my experience with Linux on the desktop hasn't been great.
I’m on the same stack (Sway, Arch) and it’s absolutely rock solid on a precision 5520, and has been for 4 years now.
I usually reinstall every year but I haven’t this time because everything kinda just works.
To be clear; I’m not doubting you but it’s wildly different than my experience and I would love to understand how to avoid this instability myself, if for instance you’re running strange kernel modules or a specific video card.
What machine do you have and what is breaking?
Ryzen 5600x AMD rx6600xt MSI B550M pro Zen Kernel
with 3600mhz XMP Ram and auto overclock settings i get a hard crash once a month with some random MCE hardware errors, bluetooth card spams my dmesg on boot with some errors i cant be bothered to fix, firefox sometimes crashes HARD, totally freezing, games sometimes don't start, today i had a random chromium crash and then i couldnt open nemo (file manager) anymore and when i opened a shell (alacritty with fish shell) the shell wouldnt allow any input. Two reboots later and it was fixed...somehow...
but honestly i dont mind its my toy system/work system from home because its so much faster than my notebooks. If I have to reboot once a day thats stable enough for that newscase
I would check your warranty.
Which DE/FM will allow me to configure menus? E.g. “git push” item on a folder containing .git, “npm run myscript” on a folder containing package.json.
Which DE has presets for window placement like FancyZones? E.g. you move/resize a window normally, but when you hold Shift, it suggests (draws) pre-configured zones where you may drop it.
Which FM allows for in-place folder expansion (like Finder)?
Which distro goes with already preinstalled codecs drivers etc, so I don’t get 480p max on youtube and low playback fps? It was an issue even with ubuntus few years ago, maybe 4-5.
Do distros support G-sync at all? Many monitors with different DPI? Different refresh rates?
Thanks!
Dolphin has "services" which allow you to get custom context menu items, though I've never written one so can't vouch for how much effort it is or isn't. It also has an embedded terminal for more adhoc commands.
> Which DE has presets for window placement like FancyZones? E.g. you move/resize a window normally, but when you hold Shift, it suggests (draws) pre-configured zones where you may drop it.
Tiling WMs obviously have options out the kazoo for this, but to my understanding, KDE also has snapping, though it's more akin to Windows 10 built in or Spectacle/Rectangle on OS X, than full on Fancy Zones.
> Which FM allows for in-place folder expansion (like Finder)?
If you mean the tree view features, Dolphin. If you mean the triple pane mode, no idea.
> Do distros support G-sync at all? Many monitors with different DPI? Different refresh rates?
G-Sync/VRR/mixed refresh rates: Yes. nvidia closed source drivers or Wayland required.
Mixed DPIs: I run my monitors at 1x, so can't comment about scaling. Apparently it's a clusterfuck though.
As far as I understand, not using e.g. stock KDE WM means I’ll lose a big chunk of KDE functionality, or will I not? I’m afraid to go all in on custom WM-panel-tray-menu, because that easily meant weeks of configuration. This I find even coolish at home, but not at work.
Maybe some popular-enough DE invented some sort of WM plugins aince then? I don’t mind working in lighter DEs like Xfce, but not sure if they play nice with modern graphics stacks and <SubsystemName>Manager things.
If you mean the tree view features, Dolphin
Yep, the tree view.
But it's obvious that the decision makers at microsoft are unethical and have been so since the beginning.
The employees who work on cool stuff that's useful to others could have done so anywhere, yet they _chose_ to do so at microsoft knowing that the higher-ups are consistently unethical.
That makes me question their ethics as well.
The same kind of rot is already starting. GitHub is now pushing its own CLI tools - in fact they're the only option shown to clone the code when looking at a PR. I wouldn't be surprised if in ~5 years you won't be able to use the regular git client with GitHub anymore.
still use Manjaro/XFCE as my daily & for dev but dual boot win10 for some tools like Affinity Photo/Designer and gaming.
https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-demands-tpm-20-and-heres-...
I still remember days when I knew every process on my laptop and know most of their settings keys. Software moved into direction I don't appreciate.
I like Windows in general but it has become a hassle to maintain. Actually, it's a nightmare. It keeps getting in the way, changing settings or adding new applications between updates.
Windows 11 specifically, I tried it for a week but went back to windows 10. It is not ready yet even though it looks nice. (Only have 1 machine with Windows, please don't throw stones at me - the rest is all linux)
I do all the above on a surface laptop which I love, but I may move hardware as no reason now to use it.
Edge has been popping up a modal on startup lately to reset your default browser, are you sure you didn't click that? Not that it's your fault, but if you don't open Edge it doesn't bother you in my experience.
That's the neat part, I don't. On the rare occasion that I use Windows 10 [1] (for some work), I try my best to get my work done quickly so I can switch back to my Linux boot.
[1]: Their desperate message to convince me to install Windows 11 makes me laugh.
Well, I'm still on Windows 10, so I don't have that particular crap to deal with. And I think by that point I'm used to Windows 10's crap, or at least it's not as annoying to deal compared to Windows changing your configuration. As long as I can use Windows 10, I don't really see the point in switching to linux, it (mostly) works for what I need and, more importantly, I'm used to it and not really ready to relearn another OS/ecosystem.
I cant use mac with my LG OLED cause refresh is limited to 60HZ (WTF apple) i dont have access to CUDA and a few linux based python libs and ofc most games just dont work.
I can't use Linux cause 60%+ of games (multiplayer) that i play with my friends just dont work on linux or have random crashes, my Bluetooth connections are trash and smoothness of the KDE/Gnome isn't as good as windows (on nvidia gpu).
On windows everything just works. If i need linux i just install wsl2 + cuda if i need video editing software i can even use KDenlive, if i want to turn on some multiplayer game i just press play and I can play it.
ofc. I turn off all the "seciurity" stuff and block most of the microsoft ad's domain in pi.hole but still from normal use cases for most people that i know of in age of 20-30 (mostly other developers) W11/W10 is just best overall experience and everyone is using it daily. Maybe when i get older and wont spend as much time on entertainment Ill go for some GNOME based linux distro and buy 5m cable to connect my headphones.
I had exactly this opinion until the grey beard mentor in my life said "bluetooth is stupid, get another laptop for real work and get a long cable for your headphones".
I still have a windows rig for games with friends (and so does my grey beard mentor).
In the enterprise environment I have control over all of these settings through GPO or our MDM so it's irrelevant.
At home it's a bit more cumbersome but can be overcome as well.
Windows is to crappy and bloated to deal with and linux desktop is great to some extent but nothing beats the hardware and software synergy provided by Macbook Pro.
I remember spending more than an hour, checking every possible setting I could to reveal less data. At the end, I felt somehow happy with the situation.
A few days later, an upgrade came. I didn't notice immediately but the upgrade has reset all privacy settings to their worst value (of course, default value is the one that benefits Microsoft).
I hated that feeling. I felt betrayed, angry and powerless. This was a terrible breach if trust for me (today, I know I seem like the typical naive user but years ago, I trusted their configuration menus).
I don't accept this feeling that my privacy should be in control of a small group of individuals who have absolutely zero respect for my privacy. I guess the fact that I had actually bought the pro version purposely to benefit from more privacy influenced my experience.
I uninstalled Windows and switched to Ubuntu.
Today, my problem is Android/apple. I'd like to get rid of them but I haven't solved this problem yet...
The downside is, I don't think you can buy LTSC for the personal use. Personally, I don't mind pirating, but since I buy most of the games these days, and most of the software I use has free alternatives, it would be nice to step away from using KMS (and, well, other) cracks made by fuck knows who.
After 5 years I expect enough customisation and features/fixes available for Windows 11 to not suck.
You also get used to the people who are "responsible for the desktop systems" resetting your settings with windows updates or group policy updates breaking web stuff, the outright blocking of websockets ... shall i continue ?
Ah, the best one. You also get used to the always-on-vpn not always working.
They are a troubled bunch running a desktop system you can not safely control.
Nowadays, I just hope that one day I'll be able to game on Linux and never have to boot windows again. The UI is shit (try using multiple languages inputs and have fun with windows), it's still unstable, a damn memory hog (I boot to almost 8 gbs of RAM these days).
At least I'll not upgrade to 11. The tpm requirement made sure of it, even if now I've updated my system - I don't think msft deserves my support as a user of their system, considering that they deemed my less than 6 years old machine unfit for 11.
And I know the security arguments. Was I more secure by being stuck with Win10? Don't think so.
If you don't like start menu changes, you install something like Classic Shell (I don't know whether it runs on Win 11 though).
If you don't like Explorer, you use something like TotalCommander. I've been using this fantastic software since mid 90-ties, crazy!
Btw. I'm tied to .Net and Visual Studio and can't change platforms. But even if I had a choice I probably wouldn't switch. I used Mac and Linux a bit and still prefer Windows. Probably old dog/new tricks kind of situation. Yes, Windows throws curve balls here and there, but you can usually work around them.
I also saw number of complaints about Mac OS in recent years. And constant cases of driver/sound/sleep issues with Linux desktops. And still, people use them and are happy. It's not like Windows is the only OS with issues you have to work around.
You'll instantly get after moving:
- No bitrot (it is there but like 5% of what it is in Windows) - No licensing crap - Sane file system (that can actually handle node_modules) - Unix environment (better for developing)
The default browser thing is a factor that cause me to revert, but I also got a problem relating to "Microsoft.Windows.SecHealthUI". Somehow its residue from 10 got removed, and the start menu just show the icon of an app that is not functional and cannot be removed. I know Windows Defender/Security can be opened manually, but seeing this kind of thing makes me feel that Windows 11 was a joke, and until they seriously tackle the issues, I will simply remain with 10.
Maybe this is nostalgia goggles but I don't remember my first weeks with Windows 98 or 7 making me feel like Microsoft hates me.
There is no third option really.
"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart." M. Aurelius
Sorry if i don't think having zoom and similar crapware is worth the cons of using win.Yes this is a strawman, and yes that's where the rest of the non-garbage software on windows is converging towards.
After that I installed CentOS 7 on machines I use for work development, including a desktop, and my Razer Blade 15. Our products are RHEL / Windows, and most everything I care about can be made to work pretty well on CentOS 7, including Teams, VS Code, CUDA, Python etc. A few things, including cmake work a heckuva lot faster in fact.
Other machines I have mostly run MacOS (anxiously awaiting Ashai Linux!) or Elementary OS, which is pretty awesome.
I do have Windows long term corporate whatever in my desktop, so to avoid most of the crap. I'm not very much a game, but I game from time to time. Didn't tested gaming in linux yet, but I'm not afraid.
I guess that if somewhere in the future Microsoft tries to make me swallow ther BS I'll just switch and be done with it. Ill suck it up with any difficulty and move on.
It's a pity because Windows is a good OS for most, but I can see in other people computers what they push for.
I deleted my last remaining Windows installation two days ago.
Linux is better for software development anyways, and with Proton, I can play all the games I like.
I run multiple browsers, Firefox is what I regard as my default but I use Chrome for work email. I launch the browsers on startup, and I just go into the browsers... once in a browser any link clicked is opened by that browser, so it all just works.
I can't think of a time when I've needed to follow a link that the OS has presented me with... or even of it presenting me with a link. Is that a thing?
I just don't bother with the concept of "default browser".
I use Portable FF for my main usage, I have firewall in a outbound whitelist mode, so in a rare circumstance something opens Edge... it's not going anywhere.
The only bother I had is with GitHub authenticator which doesn't have the option to just copy the auth link and opens the default browser. I copy the link from there and paste it in FF.
Before the Chromium update, on the other hand, Edge was an excellent browser considering it ran on a gaming console.
I have enough crap every time I install Windows 10, needing to use ShutUp10, other "debloaters", and having to use the task scheduler to remove telemetry tasks, so I don't need more things to delete with Windows 11.
Well, I went into settings and switched my default search engine back to Google. Wonder what I'll have to "deal with" tomorrow. Oh right, nothing. Because it isn't a daily occurrence. Far from it. Some people routinely exaggerate small rare annoyances into a constant ongoing process, and I don't really understand it.
I'm still using Windows 7 for specific Visual Studio 2019 developments where I must code. Most of times I'm under Debian.
For Windows specific build-only machine I use the free Hyper-V Server installation with OpenSSH installed via powershell and Add-WindowsCapability. I'ts one of the best Windows IMHO because there is nothing installed.
An M1 Macbook Air starts at $1k and is a perfectly usable machine for most tasks.
Linux really depends on what you do with it and whether you use a laptop or desktop. Desktop is really not a problem as you don't care about battery life, wireless connections or power management. But on laptops it can be tricky - Bluetooth is still a horrible mess in the Linux world for example.
As for all those hacks like disabling Windows Update, replacing the Start Menu etc, I prefer to stay on the standard so that the system is stable and there are less things to check if it becomes unstable.
For work: Windows 7 installed using FlashBoot Pro.
For games: Windows 10 Ameliorated + Firefox + FoxyProxy + SOCKS5 proxy on the router (github.com/rofl0r/microsocks) combined with default-to-deny firewall rules to filter remaining telemetry and updates.
Yes, they sometimes show a prompt after updates asking if I want to change the default browser to Edge — I always decline. And no settings change.
Boosting Edge's numbers by force-switching the default browser without asking would have such obvious, predictable backlash, I'd be pretty surprised if this ever shipped intentionally. Let alone changing Chrome's default search engine without asking — that very likely is illegal.
Is your Windows machine a personal one, or is it a corporate machine? I could imagine that poorly designed corporate IT update enforcement software would accidentally do this kind of thing.
oh my god i would be so pissed off. I'm a tab hoarder and I do have Session Buddy to save tab sessions but still.
I don't. I moved fulltime to Linux rather than try to mitigate Windows 10's predations. I wouldn't go back.
I don't
P.s. I use Linux everywhere currently
No techie I know does.
They're all on Linux and some still stuck on OSX.
The rest have left Windows a long time ago.
Possible exceptions: game devs
Does msft reset it daily? It sounds like no. On a daily basis windows is painless and easy to use.
though, I’m a big fan of Xbox
First: it’s defined not on daily basis. It’s on install or every blue moon update.
Secondly: I vastly prefer dealing with this occasional browser change then spending my whole week trying to discover:
- why my screen is tearing
- why my nvidia laptop is messed up
- why I can’t plug my external display and have the correct dpi on each display
OBS. I also vastly prefer to fix a browser change every once in a while than rebooting into tty to fix an unbootable system after a driver/firmware upgrade.
I don't. Been running Ubuntu since 2010ish.
I just setup a Win 10 box at home and have finally started to appreciate some of it, but the Edge hooks are all over the place. I've noticed clicking a help link in one of the settings sidebars will open in Edge regardless of your browser choice. It's also the default PDF reader.
I don't. Been using Linux for over 10 years. The few Windows machines I have to use at work are actually nothing but glorified browser launchers.
I try to use linux for a day or two to remind me why I don't use it instead.
Then I don't touch linux again for a few years.
We have only one more Windows device left in our household and this year that one will get replaced as well.
This is the "new" Microsoft - so absolutely hostile and shit that I felt forced to convert everyone from my wife, to my grandmother to move from Windows to Apple and they all feel so happy and keep asking my why they never used Apple before. The integration with their iPhones and iPads is wonderful and the OS really gets out of their way and lets them do the things they care about the most. Things work and don't break.
I’m only looking at computers that natively ship Linux from now on — that OS was a disaster, that doesn’t even support basic functionality and was shipped without support docs or training their support staff.
Switch to Linux. Live a better life! Give pop OS! (Or any other distro) a shot
Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. No updates and supported for 10 years. Rock solid.
Windows 10 does indeed update itself by default, but you can disable automatic updates using the policy editor.
Haha, no it's not your product, you have the license to use it, not to own it. Don't waste your time with Microsoft (if your not getting paid for it)
> This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.
> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?
This is quite low effort, and frankly doesn't add anything to the known status quo.