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Comment by jmmv | Hacker News Reader

From a quick look at the article, I can see a few subtle "omissions" or "rants that have easy fixes". I can't tell how long the author has spent on Windows (it's not in the article) so it's hard to know how much effort they have put in getting adjusted. It takes a really long time to switch platforms and feel comfortable in them, and without spending a long time adjusting, it's too easy to complain and quite hard to provide a fair review...

For a more positive spin, I'll leave here my own review of Windows after being off the platform for 25 years, spending 15 of those on macOS, and then spending the last year primarily on Windows. TL;DR: I'm quite happy with the switch, but obviously there are many things that could be different/better and some of the issues that the OP highlights are valid.

The intro and index: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-intro.html

[edit: wording]

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Funny, I've read the "finale" part and the PowerShell part. When I read you, my fealing is that PowerShell is not there yet and telemetry and Defender have big issues (telemetry 'cos it allow MSFT to remove feature, spy on me) and Defender ('cos sometimes it just eats my time)...

As a dev/data scientist/netflix/websurfer/photo-sorter/privacy-aware dude, well, my Linux box just rocks and Windows is not fun (although it does the job).

Perhaps PowerShell will be ready in the same year as Linux for the Desktop?

Powershell runs on linux too so it can be the Year for both of them!

This is basically required software for windows10 : O&O ShutUp10++ https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I will say in windows defense that the linux kernel seems to need updates almost every week requiring a reboot.

The linux kernel updates every day, yes, but unless there's a security issue, you don't _have to_ reboot into every new kernel your distribution pushes. Certainly no one forces you to.

Why does it nag me so often, then?

Because Ubuntu is trying as hard as it can to turn into Windows-but-with-the-Linux-kernel.

Indeed, it sometimes feels like they are getting right in lane for a Microsoft acquisition.

I'm kinda surprised it hasn't happened with all the mutual love (eg Ubuntu being the poster child for WSL)

This drives me nuts and I wish I could turn it off.

To be fair, it doesn't bug me when I use stumpwm instead of the default WM, but the default WM is otherwise quite nice for most things.

Unlike Windows, you CAN turn that off. Ultimately it's a service you can either configure or remove or even replace with another.

Even at it's worst, the worst distro with the worst default behavior, it's still nothing close to as inconsiderate as Windows.

I don't understand the complaint.

You should be able to disable all updates or set a time period of how often you want to be asked

"Need" is a bit much. I know companies that haven't updated or rebooted servers in years. A few weeks ago I logged into a server with a 1400 day uptime.

That doesn't mean it's not a ticking time bomb though.. I could understand this in very special legacy production situations with almost air-gapped security mitigations. Otherwise it's just laxness and a hack waiting to happen.

We have some Windows 95-era crap that's still there because it controls stuff that would cost millions to replace and the vendor is long out of business. But certainly nobody is "logging into it" as a side note. They're physically and logically isolated. You can do it if the risks are otherwise controlled but it should be the last resort and it's extremely impractical. You basically need a situation where every single network packet allowed to go in or out is dissected and validated. And I don't just mean at the protocol level.

That server better be well fenced off from general internet access and have a couple of layers in between. It is prime pickings for a root kit.

You can pin the kernel version if you like. Still things might get wonky and you'll have to log out of the DE and back in again after an update.

Powershell works fine for me. Not sure what the complaining is about.

As someone who works with AD, Azure, and Windows servers all day (I'm so uncool), Powershell is wonderful.

> Speaking of keyboard shortcuts provides the right segue to the clipboard behavior. I don’t know who had the brilliant idea of making copy and paste preserve the formatting of the source text. This is almost never ever what you want.

Holding shift while pasting will remove all the formatting for most programs! Still annoying but usually an easy fix.

I'd never heard of this, thanks for the tip. I just tried it in Word and had no luck, but it worked in Chrome. Any other programs you're aware of that respect this?

Use Ctrl-Alt-V to paste without formatting in most Office apps. Lots of other Windows apps support Ctrl-Shift-V though.

Wow, thanks!

Yeah the two main places where it comes up for me is LebreOffice and Google Docs! I'm surprised as word doesn't have it as its quite useful. It's really nice when I'm doing citations as most titles have some annoying color / font size.

I think there were a couple other programs that worked with it but I forget them! I've had quite a lot of success though as It seems like most of the programs I use respect it.

Word just has you press Ctrl+V to paste the text, and then Ctrl again to select the type of formatting you want to paste it with. It's not as elegant as Ctrl+Shift+V, but it works.

This might be because Word overrides system shortcuts (i.e. the 'paste without formatting' in this case). Google Docs tries to do this in the browser as well, but it happens to support this particular shortcut.

Is "paste without formatting" really a system shortcut? I'd never heard of it before. I feel like it might be something semi-standard that apps implement?

I believe I may have seen it in a shortcut editor somewhere, but I suppose I could be misremembering or that could have been a one-off implementation.

Most people who aren't programmers expect formatting to be copied and pasted.

Having watched my mother swearing at this on numerous occasions I would not make that assumption.

I think it depends on what you're copying. If you're copying text only, then no. But if you're copying text with images or other non-text elements, then possibly yes.

I think it also depends on where you are copying from and pasting into. If it's within the same document, you likely want to maintain everything. If it is within the same app (different docs), you may want to maintain everything. If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting.

But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.

Anyhow... so many options that a single feature doesn't fit all. The problem with Windows is the lack of a uniform solution to paste without formatting (my complaint) as opposed to macOS.

> But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.

Oh, to clarify: I meant: "if you're copying text along with images, you probably want to keep the text formatting [fonts etc.] too, whereas if you're only copying text, you probably don't want the formatting either." It's not a perfect heuristic by any means, but I think it'd be better than the current situation.

> If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting

You have some formatted text (maybe some bold or italic in a line) on a webpage, you want to copy it into an email (lets set aside the argument that email should be text only).

I like to use that: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

> I can't tell how long the author has spent on Windows

About 3 1\2 months so far. I tried to be fair - but my article is not as comprehensive as your series!

I've read some of your series and I didn't see anything, but you don't happen to know if you can get primary selection middle click paste on Windows? That's the only thing so far that I've got no kind of solution to at all.

The Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center (optional install) supports remapping the middle button to paste text, but I don't know if that works for arbitrary keyboards and mice. (I have a Sculpt keyboard.)

Also, I had forgotten about the common use of the middle button for pasting as I have not used Linux desktops for a while. Maybe I should remap this now :)

It's not really making middle-click be paste, it's automatically storing the last text selection somewhere that's the problem.

It's normally a separate clipboard, allowing you to wrangle two bits of text at once.

This worked for me in Windows XP and 7, but no idea if it still works in Windows 10 since it hasn't been updated since 2005: http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/

I am told, every time someone claims *nix isn't a good desktop, that having to fix things is unacceptable; if a problem can be fixed by editing a config file/setting or installing an additional program, that proves the platform will never be good enough for desktop use. I am perfectly happy to watch NT failing by the same standard.

It was interesting to me to see Linus, of YouTube's LTT, mess up unzipping and then last into the distro he was using because - even though there was on screen feedback (obscured by his massive screen) - a folder needed updating to see changes. But, for me, across dozens of machines and many years MS Windows' file explorer has failed to do live updates, egg when making a new folder from the right-click menu (even pressing F5) the folder doesn't show, folders occasionally get littered with New Folder subfolders. Same happens with unzipping, the exact thing that apparently made Linux unusable and "not ready for the desktop" ... except for me Ubuntu at least always shows a notification for unzipping (and new folders just work).

Mostly these things are familiarity, using Windows just boils my blood though, it feels so hostile to me,

Buying and installing Minecraft client on Linux was super easy and straight forward (I did that pre-MS), buying and installing on MS Windows was a total trauma, the account process was so convoluted. Their greed just wrecks all their awesomeness.

Mostly the same experience having had 10+ years on Mac before a switch to Windows. Powertoys[0] are great although some are slow (especially the one acting like Mac's Spotlight). UI is different but not a bad experience once you've used it for a couple weeks. I didn't see any mention of file explorers (i.e. Explorer vs Finder) in your articles but it's fascinating how those two concepts are the same thing yet so different in their strengths and weaknesses - and to be honest, my explorer experience improved once I started using QTTabbar[1] to customize everything to my liking.

I'm surprised your WSL article is so short, because WSL2 is so incredibly convenient for Linux and keeps on improving steadily. I've been able to set up and practice on virtual kubernetes cluster using KinD[2] (Kubernetes in Docker) thanks to the seamless integration of Docker for Windows into the WSL subsystem. VSCode can tap into Linux VMs with pretty much no delays too. Shutting down the whole thing to free up resources takes one line in Powershell and happens within a few seconds. The terminal app despite having a bit of a clunky UI is highly configurable and just works, etc.

There are things that scare me about Windows though, for example the mandatory real-time "defender" file scanning that you have to disable either manually at every boot or disable entirely through registry thus losing the virus scanning functionality. The amount of clunky Cortana stuff that really took a while to remove. The store app that feels flimsy, the games dependency on Xbox apps and subsystems which can lead to annoying bugs, and certain UI delays that make the system sometimes feel not so fast compared to the tricks Macs can pull to make you feel at ease. Consequently I'm not very likely to touch Windows 11 as Microsoft is seemingly trying to enforce more things in configurations and UI.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

[1] https://github.com/indiff/qttabbar

[2] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/05/21/wsl-docker-kubernetes-...

Since you mentioned that the tool that act's like Mac's Spotlight was very slow. I have found two better alternative which works wonders:

1. FluentSearch: https://www.fluentsearch.net/. I highly recommend trying this out. It's magically and amazing, and I think this is the closest a tool has got to Spotlight on windows and also has amazing amounts of customizability. I recommend using Everything as the Search Provider, which is tried and tested solution for searching on windows.

2. Keypirinha: https://keypirinha.com/. This is another amazing tool. I believe it's would be a bit faster compared to FluentSearch with my initial tryout, but it is customized using a text file.

Fluent is great, thanks for that!

Ah, but I did write about WSL a while back in a rather controversial post ;) https://jmmv.dev/2020/11/wsl-lost-potential.html

Yeah, I'm also concerned about some of the things you mention, as I described in the finale. But about Defender, it cannot be disabled at all? I didn't know that. I have just whitelisted the few directories where I do builds to keep things speedy...

Thanks for reading.

I had missed that part, thanks for linking me to it. Also great blog and writing! Thank you for putting in all that work.

The Spotlight-esque tool in PowerToys - PowerToys Run - is unbelieeeeeeeevably slow compared to other things I've used. I've been trying it for a couple months now and it feels really clunky and awkward. Previously I was using the excellent (and open source) Launchy[0] which I simply loved but it hasn't been updated for a while and isn't so great on high DPI monitors and has a few quirks (there are some forks which are more recently updated).

I know there are other alternatives that are apparently much better (another poster mentioned Keypirinha and Fluent Search, both of which look great but not OSS), but I really hope they keep tweaking PowerToys Run to try to make it a little nicer.

0. https://www.launchy.net/

>It takes a really long time to switch platforms and feel comfortable in them, and without spending a long time adjusting, it's too easy to complain and quite hard to provide a fair review...

I agree.

Some of the fixes for his complaints are effectively customizations, not unlike the customizations I'd make in Linux. I'm not sure some of these differences are really that different.

Yeah from reading the article that's the impression I'm left with is someone who is just baffled by new things and generally not very good at computery stuff. /s

I learned a lot of Windows tricks from this one article written by someone who supposedly hasn't spent enough "effort getting adjusted".

I'm halfway through it, awesome review!

Thanks!

Very well-done. This should be the OP article.

Thanks. My original article made its way as a separate submission a while ago but barely got any votes :) My conclusion is that a single (very long) post might have worked out better from an engagement perspective as opposed to the series, but would also have been much harder to make coherent. Thanks for reading!

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