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Comment by ht85 | Hacker News Reader

The win11 / Edge bullshit finally pushed me to migrate my last win machine to linux. I used to love Windows, nowadays it just makes me bitter. Do you know typing "torrent" in the start menu doesn't find "qbittorrent"? In 2022. It sums it all.

And the acquisitions...

I've had countless minecraft sessions ruined because of microsoft account / store issues. Don't even get me started on realms and the chat policing bullshit.

Github new PR review UI is great on paper yet completely useless to review large PR because of performance issues.

It took me one month to upgrade a zoom account to pro because the checkout would just show a blank page. Oh and I can't stay signed in on zoom.us because I disable "Functional Cookies", yet that's the only website that's ever had an issue, and I'm not using a hardened setup, just vanilla FF.

So much for the modern, developer and open source-friendly narrative.

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> Do you know typing "torrent" in the start menu doesn't find "qbittorrent"? In 2022. It sums it all.

It's even worse. I want to open Notepad++ and begin to type

N -> notepad.exe

No -> notepad.exe

Not -> Notepad++

Note -> notepad.exe

Notep -> Notepad++

Notepa -> Notepad++

Notepad -> notepad.exe

The times I actually wanted to open notepad.exe is exactly 0 but the stupid algorithm sees me mistakenly opening notepad.exe because of the aforementioned stupid algorithm and recommends it even more often. It's like it's designed to create the most annoying search experience possible.

Ugh, Apple is guilty of this too in spotlight search. Actually worse, because it randomly changes after maybe 500ms, randomly, after typing a character, sometimes.

  N    -> OneNote.app
       -> Then (maybe) quickly changes to Notes
  No   -> Notes.app
       -> Then (maybe) changes to OneNote
  Not  -> OneNote.app
  Note -> Notes.app

etc

That one is at least malleable. Suffer through invalid suggestions, wait, select the one you need, and after 10 or so attempts it finally learns that you always want that particular app as your first choice.

At least that's how it was before. I wouldn't be surprised if they broke it.

I'd say the way around it is to install Alfred [0] and be done with it. Just have to disable the web search option. Because no, I did not want to open a browser and search for "norepad", I just fat fingered it. Luckily once disabled it works just right.

[0] https://www.alfredapp.com/

There's also Raycast [1], which is a f-r-e-e VC-funded alternative to Alfred that was mentioned by a sibling comment.

1: https://www.raycast.com/

I think that's down to the way it has remembered/saved your search as I get a similar behaviour with "Camera" and "Turn off camera access systemwide" -- "c", "ca", and "came" suggest the Camera app and "cam", "camer", and "camera" suggest the system setting.

I use both of these, and it looks like Windows has remembered I select one or the other at a given point, so is saving that suggestion.

It also likely has built in associations for the default applications (notepad, camera, etc.) that you've overridden by selecting notepad++ at those points. If you select/locate notepad++ at the other positions, I wonder if it will start suggesting that instead.

It's also slow[0], or not properly cached. Half the time I bang out 'c-m-d-<enter>' to open a command prompt and I either get nothing or a program that doesn't contain any of 'c' 'm' or 'd' in its name. Which is aggravating because the 'Win then type the first 3ish letters of the program you want then hit enter to open it' workflow is so good[0] but MS makes it hard to be smooth and repeatable with it.

[0]Honestly how? I have 32GB of ram, the name and directory of every program I've ever run probably fits in 100kB. You could even presort the list by the first two possible letters (26^2) at a tolerable memory usage.

[1]To my tastes anyway.

"everything" by voidtools could be to your liking.

At least you guys have software conflicts. I try to run "runemacs.exe" (I have no idea how you're supposed to run Emacs on Windows, but that's what I do), and it's:

R -> "R, the project for statistical computing" (fair I suppose)

Ru -> Run (what is "run"? It's that little dialog box from Windows 3.1 where you can type in an executable to run)

Run -> Run

Rune -> RuneScape (not something I have installed)

Runem -> Some Hearthstone game file

Runemac -> Search results for "run amok".

Runemacs -> Hey the thing!

It gets a lot better when you turn of web searches for the start menu search. Perhaps some people like having a single place to search for applications to run, documents on their PC, and things on the web. But I'm not one of them, and it slows down the search as well.

Apparently Powertoys Run does all of this correctly. It's also made by MS and its a QuickSilver/Alfred/KRunnrr/etc. style launcer.

This makes it even more inexcusable for the default Windows behaviour to be stupid.

> Ru -> Run (what is "run"? It's that little dialog box from Windows 3.1 where you can type in an executable to run)

This is the best. It opens immediately, no animations, ads, etc. I have a .bin folder in my home dir with full off shortcuts, this folder added to the $PATH so I just need to type my shortcuts to open any app.

Solid protip. Been doing the same since Windows 98.

Same here, and it baffles me how people don't immediately want this when they see it on my screen.

It sounds like you're trying to run an executable that's on your PATH. The start menu search does not apply fuzzy search to locations in the PATH environment variable (reasonably so, most of it is either going to be command line tools that need additional arguments and spawn a console window that instantly disappears or just junk that most users don't care about).

If you want fuzzy searching to work, add a shortcut in the start menu for runemacs by placing the shortcut in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

I had the same dance with Google search for a while with their top result for “tsplayground”.

Can you just replace notepad.exe with a link to notepad++?

The notepad++ wiki has a trick for replacing notepad with np++. It basically installs np++ as a debugger for np.

I would be completely happy if my win10 stopped deciding I really want to search the word notepad on the internet with edge/bing

> The win11 / Edge bullshit finally pushed me to migrate my last win machine to linux. I used to love Windows, nowadays it just makes me bitter. Do you know typing "torrent" in the start menu doesn't find "qbittorrent"? In 2022. It sums it all.

Heh, try KDE's KRunner. I type 'kt' and it matches ktorrent. But if I type 'kto' it switches to matching "Desktop 8". 'ktor' once again matches ktorrent.

That sounds about like m experience trying to open intellij in windows.

Sounds like you want trabucco! https://github.com/ltworf/trabucco

That's a common autocomplete behaviour. It's trying to be helpful. If you actually wanted ktorrent, you probably would have selected ktorrent on 'kt'. By typing another letter you're hinting you might want something other than ktorrent. Not sure if I agree with the behaviour, but I understand it.

I guess I get it, but it doesn't work well for me. By the time I recognize the ktorrent icon and hit enter, my fingers have already typed the next letter. With this system I have to deliberately pause pressing enter.

That is a good explanation. The behavior is reasonable if we all type one character at a time, wait for the list of suggestions to update and stabilize, and review the list before typing the next character. Unfortunately, some of us are impatient and just type a bunch of characters at once. But I understand the type of audience the designers are going after.

Thanks, I just thought it was broken.

I hate this behaviour, as I'm usually looking as my fingers type the last bit, and if I keep adding matching letters, please don't change?

It's definitely broken, but apparently by design. It's a deliberbug.

Microsoft is full of those.

When you enter your birthday during Windows installation (yes, you have to have a Microsoft network account to log in to your own computer, and you have to supply a birthday), the button for confirming the date is a small, grey checkmark hiding below the date picker. Clicking the big, blue “Continue” button in the lower corner will discard your date choice (since it wasn’t picked) and then fail form validation because you didn’t pick a date.

There is a certain cubicle masochism associated with this kind of system. I’m convinced that computers did not get easier to use since all of them had command prompts. But you know, it’s got windows!

I login to Win11 everyday and don't have a Microsoft account.

You don’t have to use a Microsoft account if you’re installing Windows 10 and it doesn’t have an internet connection when you run the wizard.

To install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account involves bringing up a command prompt in the middle of the installation process and typing some magic incantations. It's clearly not what Microsoft wants users to be doing.

I got Windows 11 Pro on my new machine for the sole purpose of avoiding that BS (and have it running without an account), but now you can't even do that on new installs without those workarounds. It's a dark pattern akin to Amazon trying to get you to use Amazon Prime when purchasing something on Amazon.

FWIW I didn't have to do this on a Lenovo Thinkpad that I installed last month.

Here's one I'm quickly finding tedious in Fedora:

"Chery"

I'm misspelling CherryTree.

Instead of getting note taking software, VLC starts playing "11 - Pulmonary Archery (Explicit).flac"

This is annoying not just because it's not what I wanted, but also because I already have music playing, music which is now abruptly cut off.

You can turn individual krunner plugins off, like "Recent files".

Thank you, sorry my message was misleading, I was talking about the windows start menu. KDE / Gnome / Mate work as expected afaik!

So much for the modern, developer and open source-friendly narrative

That's exactly what it is: encouraging "developers", some of whom IMHO shouldn't even be writing software, to indulge in "coding" while completely ignoring and antagonising the user perspective. Countless users' workflows just broken with no recourse just because some selfish bastard wanted to use something "new and different" without considering the wider effects. When the culture only cares about promoting new and shiny tools/frameworks/etc. to developers and feeding their appetite for otherwise useless things, and in doing so, forsakes the original purpose of software, this is the result.

This is my experience as well. All I want is a solid block task bar and solid black window title bars. Since Windows 7 it's become next to impossible to do that without uxtheme.dll patchers. I'm done. Linux all the way now.

Oddly enough I can't find a better programming environment nowadays than the win, wsl, powertools combo. I noticed the same about qbittorrent tho.

I don't know... everything works so well on linux out of the box nowadays, and over time you can setup everything exactly as you want.

As an engineer I feel like it's a great investment and loving my setup has a big impact on the enjoyment I get from work.

If you spend the time, can all the annoying stuff be turned off in Windows?

I loved my Linux setups so much I automated them with some Ansible and a bunch of scripts and config files in a git repo to set up my user profile too.

I can't seem to get two Windows installs to be functionally identical the same way. I also can't believe winget is a relatively new invention.

You can turn off most of the annoying stuff, for a time. I'm convinced that sometimes settings just change on their own.

A couple of days ago, I give a very brief workshop of Arduino. All the students with Linux boxes have some kind of problems, like the user was not a member of the dialout group or the group does not exist at all. I still prefer Linux, but no everything works "out of the box".

> All the students with Linux boxes have some kind of problems, like the user was not a member of the dialout group or the group does not exist at all. I still prefer Linux, but no everything works "out of the box".

This (requiring elevated privileges) is a very niche thing, though (raw access to the serial port).

But the students with Windows laptops did not have these kind of problems. Although I can think of a lot of issues, in this "very niche thing" Windows worked "out of the box" and Linux didn't.

> But the students with Windows laptops did not have these kind of problems. Although I can think of a lot of issues, in this "very niche thing" Windows worked "out of the box" and Linux didn't.

Yes, for this very niche thing Windows works out the box. For other not so niche things, Linux works out the box. For the not so niche thing of "set up a LAMP stack" and similar, Windows is pretty poor at it, compared to using apt-get.

Also, for this very niche thing, I'm pretty certain that the arduino IDE I installed from the repository worked out the box for serial port access.

I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?

> I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?

Yes, that was a mistake. But it was not as simple as saying "install from apt-get" because some where using Arch-based distros (pacman), a few were using Fedora (yum) and others Ubuntu. Even so, not always that the user is added to the right group. Also, we wanted to show the new 2.0 IDE.

I hardly remember doing any kind of special fighting or annoying stuff. What's your pain points here?

Had some issues after Win10->Win11 beta Insider build updates, but that's other story.

I don't really notice the annoying stuff.

Win + WSL gives you both Linux and Windows tools at your disposal.

I'm one of those weird people that genuinely enjoys using windows as my main OS. vc++ and c# stuff is very nice on that OS, but I still feel like wsl is a bit like shoving a square peg into a round hole. too often, things that "just work" on a full-fledged linux install fail on wsl for some obscure reason.

my solution is to use windows for GUI things, and a remote linux instance for actual building/running/deploying services. vs code server is really nice for this, you can essentially run it as a GUI thin client locally that controls a headless remote that does all the heavy lifting. it's pretty seamless if you're willing to accept that you need a network connection to get any work done.

Is running a VirtualBox and sharing the work folder too slow?

probably not for most use cases, but I build some fairly large projects. it's nice to interact with a 16C/32T xeon node through an ultrabook. downloading tools/assets runs at the speed of the datacenter link rather than coffeeshop wifi. if nothing else, my battery lasts longer this way.

Ubuntu + VSCode?

Not sure where powertools come in, but I’m personally agnostic wrt. shell scripting flavours.

PowerToys may be? I'm using it with couple of plug-ins

1) find my mouse

2) search through windows titles (I tend to have 15-30 terminals with ssh)

I moved away from Windows for the same reason. Edge is a highly anti-competitive and privacy invasive browser. I'm surprised people don't care as long as the data exploitation is not directly visible to them.

Not to mention their new loan scams. Edge is a spyware/adware first and browser second.

I don't get the hate on Edge. I use it daily and am very happy. Not the least, it includes some cool security features, i.e., sandboxing at the OS-level https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...

Perhaps because it's being forced down people's throats, rather than people being able to make their own choice?

As far as Chrome and its myriad knockoffs go, I'd say Edge is probably the least bad. It at least works as a browser, and it's among the few that has an option for a vertical tab bar instead of shoving all the tabs into the top and squishing them together into teeny tiny slivers like an absolute fucking maniac.

I still prefer Firefox, though.

All those security features with 0 privacy. Refer: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

The research concluded that Microsoft Edge is the most invasive, along with Yandex.

I used to solve this by just installing another launcher. there were some good ones around, they should still work I hope.

Yeah, for those interested PolyMC works well on linux. It's a bit rough around the edges, but a diamond nonetheless compared to the official launcher.

Another anecdote is that minecraft 1.19 doesn't work on Ubuntu 18, as it uses glibc 2.29. D:

Weird, I am on Fedora and have none of the issues.

Yea before I switched to PopOS due to the Windows 11 online account/edge browser fiasco I used the launcher "Executor[0]". Exectuor is by far the most powerful launcher I have ever used, to bad there isn't a launcher in Linux that has all of the features.

[0]: https://executor.dk/

If you want to read the specifics of my transition to Linux: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

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