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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.