Ask HN: Is anyone working on a true alternative to Windows? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone working on a true alternative to Windows?

3 pointsgreybox11 comments

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I'm truly fed up with windows. It feels like recently everything Microsoft has done with it has been a step backwards, from trying to force me to create a Microsoft account when I first log in, to trying to sell me One Drive at every turn, to just plain bad UI design & implementation.

That being said I don't want to buy a mac, I like having the power to control what hardware is in my PC. I like being able to choose between hundreds of different laptops to find the right price point to hardware power.

Is anyone working on a new premium operating system that could be a serious competitor to Windows?

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>I like being able to choose between hundreds of different laptops to find the right price point to hardware power.

You're definitely one of the weird ones (which may (or may not) be "good")

The overwhelming majority of people do not want to waste time choosing "between hundreds of different laptops" - they want to get whatever they need to get done done with minimal issues

Such variety in "choice" often leads to being overwhelmed with the options, and going for one of the three or four you already know anyways

Don't want to run Windows? Cool - get a Chromebook, Mac Book, or any of the scores of laptops that'll run Linux nicely

Why should anyone work on a "true alternative to Windows"? (Beyond, of course, the several options already out there (Macs, tablets, Chromebooks, various and sundry Linux desktop environments, etc)?)

I wrote this 9 years ago - https://antipaucity.com/2013/06/04/this-is-not-the-year-of-t...

And it's as true today as it was then

With very very rare exception, it does not matter what desktop you run

So run what you want

No.

The practical alternative is to stop dying on I-don't-want-to-create-an-account hill.

That means creating an account or finding another hill to die on (e.g. Linux).

There's no silver bullet.

No free lunch.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

Good luck.

The reason you mentioned is why I got sick of using Linux desktop, which I had done for several years. With Macs, yeah great...to a point but every corporation I've worked with has had 99% Windows machines and so I don't like to be the guy developing on something completely different to what people are running on.

Windows 7 and 10 have been ok for me, sounds like things are going downhill AGAIN!

You seem ready to try Linux, perhaps with extensive virtual machines running old Windows versions under recycled licenses.

I should have stated this in my question, but I don't consider Linux an option.

I don't want to deal with the bugs that come with it. Every time I try to use it, it feels unstable. Mainly that manifests itself in problems when opening and closing and the lid of my laptop, or problems with controlling the fans

That really depends on the distro you choose.

There are very stable distros (e.g.: openSUSE, Fedora, neon, Ubuntu...)

Mainly that manifests itself in problems when opening and closing and the lid of my laptop, or problems with controlling the fans

To be fair, I've had plenty of problems of this nature with Windows as well. Apple is the only company that has solved this, and they do it by controlling both the hardware and the software very tightly. Writing software that works well 'out of the box' on any laptop is basically impossible, even Microsoft is unable to do it.

Your only real alternative is to buy a laptop from a company like System76 that sell Linux optimised laptops and offer Linux specific support and warranty or perhaps a Linux certified laptop from a company like Dell. But then you lose the freedom to choose whatever laptop you want, and you will end up paying a premium over cheaper laptop brands with the 'same' specs.

Basically if you want something that is 'guaranteed' to work you have to limit yourself to very short list of pre-approved hardware. If you want something that will work on any hardware, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and hack. This is true for both Windows and Linux.

Is this on NVIDIA hardware perchance? I've never seen nor heard of issues like that otherwise.

The selling points of Windows are backwards compatibility and Excel. Neither is irreplaceable, especially with VMs.

no...

But worth nothing:

Fedora

openSUSE

Genode

ReactOS

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