Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news | Hacker News Reader

Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

tomshardware.com

1,725 pointstaubek850 comments

I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job. Maybe, as an option or optional add-on, but not the way MS does it.

I use 10 now, as locked down and 'fixed' as I was able to make it (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).

The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I'm so in love with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize and program every part of my UI, allowing me to have something absolutely perfect and tailor made.

>I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job.

Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. If it's shoveling annoying ads to users, that's its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of annoying ads. If you don't like the product your vendor has sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS that doesn't come from a company with a profit motive won't have this same problem.

The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases.

There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.

Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes.

I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.

I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.

That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues.

Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.

It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits).

Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart):

#1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090

#2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620

#3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250

And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead

#1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470

#2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290

#3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730

Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).

Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games.

I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.

As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.

By number of copies sold or hours played even just those six are a huge chunk of "PC gaming". Including say the top 15 of the last 3 years, you can pretty much call all the rest of PC gaming a long tail roundoff error in terms of copies sold or hours played. It doen't really matter if for these 45 titles there are 4500 titles that work perfectly on Linux.

Depends how you look at it. If 95% of games play fine on Linux, and if a significant percentage of those play better on Linux than they do on Windows, then it's clearly not as far behind as you are trying to argue it is.

I think all it comes down to is: how bad is bad? To me, if 9/10 work equally well and 1/10 doesn't work at all, then that's way worse than unacceptable. I.e. not even close to acceptable.

Others might shrug and say "hey 9/10 that's great, and if 3 of those run even better then I love it!"

Yup. I'm in the latter group I suppose, since I don't really want to deal with any title that has intrusive DRM or anti-cheat as it is. I do security research and they don't tend to like some of the stuff I have on my system as it is.

I do gaming livestreams from a Linux setup. Out of the last dozen of games that I played, most worked perfectly right out the box. One had a minor texture glitch on the start screen (though not in-game), one had rather bad (though playable) performance. The only issue that I've seen across multiple games is that they seem to get confused when screens are on different resolutions, but I can usually fix that by flipping between windowed and fullscreen.

So yeah, it's not all sunshine and butterflies, but "extremely low number of games that work out of the box" is not true in my experience.

(Important side-note: I don't play online multiplayer stuff, so the whole anti-cheat software topic does not apply to me.)

Yeah and I consider "PC gaming" to basically be "AAA multiplayer gaming" so you can see there are different niches here.

Protondb is not great way to get a summary across many titles. It's effectively closer to a bug tracker. If some people have an issue, you'll see it on protondb - it may not be a real issue or may be due to some weird old config though.

Few people think to visit it and report that a specific game works great for them.

I've never had any issues with CS:GO. It's native to Linux. Also, I get better performance in CS:GO on Linux than Windows.

Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find the configs that would stop games from crashing or what not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain games working.

I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop.

The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.

okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. Of course some bought multiple harddrives and had several installations concurrent.

Which is worse? :)

> Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games.

I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits.

The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.

there was

When? What release of Windows, and what games? I’ve been PC gaming and consuming video game media since before Win 3.1 at a level where it wouldn’t be under the radar if it was an ‘era’ where this was the regular thing to do. Are you absolutely sure this is unrelated to banking rootkits in certain countries/regions?

Probably the problem that persists in the modern day, because it remains relevant.

The other thing people could do is stop buying software that only works on Windows.

Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.

> If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint on the status of gaming on Linux

I love my steam deck, but the subset of games it can play is exactly that - a subset of games that work fine on Windows.

About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart, and from some experimentation, they’re largely not wrong.

> About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart

It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are very likely to just work in practice).

Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case most of the games work out of the box regardless of the rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks.

Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?

> most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks.

I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's possible for power users like me or you, but if it requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to google an error message or visit a forum to look for solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people.

I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do that.

My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g. visit a forum or google the occasional error would this work for.

Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's still not so frustrating when put next to the windows start menu ads frustration.

>If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases - what's missing?

By "usable" I mean "is equivalent to" in terms of performance, availability. I should have used a better term than "usable" I suppose. It's usable with some caveats if you are willing to miss some titles, miss some performance and so on. It's not usable as a complete replacement for windows if you don't accept missing any titles, any performance.

Windows itself has issues with titles that don't work, or leave performance on the table. Granted these are older titles long out of the spotlight but by your metric Windows 11 can't be a complete replacement for Windows 98 or XP.

Yes, the interesting segment imo is "online multiplayer AAA, released in the last 5 years".

Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).

Welp someone better call up Gabe and tell him to stop selling the Steam Deck, apparently Linux can't be used to play games. Poor guy must've missed the memo.

I never said linux can't be used to play games.

MS365 from Linux is at times painful but not undoable, for example sharing ppts from teams is nice. In the browser it's anyway easier to have multiple teams windows open.

For everything development related, Windows is just that layer that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.

That describes my work experience right now... Mostly just slack, browser, vs code, and code/docker/etc is in WSL.

Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this, and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).

> for some use cases

let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?

For pro use. Then AAA multiplayer online gaming for home use.

Nah. Plenty of gamers and linux users disagree.

Anticheat makes a lot of multi-player games not work on Linux.

Can't play Rust on a steam deck.

It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. Most games work, granted if you love some multiplayer game with kernel level anti-cheat it won't work. But at this point it feels like 90-95% compatible. I've run into I think one game I've tried out of probably 50-100 that I couldn't get to work just by launching or either bumping the Proton/Wine version.

> It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't.

I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable gaming platform!".

Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings.

[0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could never get their shit together enough to actually be a platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own platform.

Its a matter of perspective and what kinds of games you are interested in. Even with the relatively few games from Loki / Id / etc. you still had more than enough games to fill your time. So in that sense it was a perfectly viable gaming platform. Of course if you want to play whatever is popular then the story is different - but even there, Proton does improve things quite a bit.

Everything is a matter of perspective though so this is a pretty meaningless statement. And telling someone who stays with Windows because of gaming that 5 games is "more than enough games to fill your time" is one of the big problems with the Linux Desktop community: You seek to change the user's use case rather than make the OS better at the one they actually have.

I think this is mostly the same argument as "It's perfectly usable on the desktop" of previous decades. It's basically "yeah you will need some tweaking, but it's worth it for the benefit of being free/libre/open/hackable/..."

The opposite is basically "Yeah you pay for an OS that shows ads in your face and that you hate, but on the other hand you don't need to occasionally google error messages for that latest game you bought or worry that the anticheat doesn't work" Sadly you can't have both. But my point is if you absolutely must play all AAA online PC multiplayer games perfectly, then you must also use windows. I guess the contentious part is, is that the definition of "usable" to me it is, but clearly not to everyone.

No it's very very different. 15 years ago when I first tried gaming on Linux it was crap. A literal handful of titles worked. Most would not launch or they would be a slideshow after considerable futzing with Wine.

10 years ago things improved a bit when Valve started bringing Linux ports to Steam but still most games didn't work and needed effort in Wine to launch. Now you literally click one check box in Steam and install the game and it just works most of the time. If it doesn't work you can often use ProtonUp Qt to get the latest Proton build and that often solves it. It's about as much effort as updating a GPU driver on Windows. For non-Steam games Lutris and Heroic are pretty similar.

I'm not just talking indie games either, big AAA stuff like Marvel's Spider-man work well. Online kernel anti-cheat games are really a pretty tiny list. Obviously there's some popular, high profile stuff on there but a lot of good recent stuff that does work.

I think it's a matter of perspective, which mostly depends on your attitude to AAA online multiplayer. Those represent a huge % of copies sold and hours played for PC gaming (They are certainly the majority of titles on the most sold lists). Many of those titles also have windows-only anti-cheats (Valve obviously being a driving force for Linux here).

So if you look at "N titles of M work well" then the Linux glass is half full. If you look at "X hours of Y of the total played hours of recent popular AAA games are played on games or modes that work poorly on linux" then it's still half empty.

Out of curiosity I took the top most played games on Steam of 2022 as given here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2022?tab=3

Unfortunately it's not by hours but peak concurrent players. It's also pretty similar to the top grossing list. I checked each games Steam Deck rating and if it was verified or playable (usually means it needs text entry with a keyboard or doesn't support controllers) marked it as "works" (with the exception of TW: Warhammer III which is listed as not working because the performance isn't good on Steam Deck but it's a native linux title). If it was unsupported and the reason was given I marked as so, if it was some other reason I checked ProtonDB and noted the rating. I assumed if Valve marked it not supported it doesn't work regardless of ProtonDB rating (except again TW:Warhammer III). Out of the 90 titles there 21 are marked unsupported mainly because of anti-cheat or 23%, when weighted by player base that rises to 26%. So arguably it's 3/4 full. ;)

Of course if you demand every title MUST work and no alternatives will ever suffice I doubt you'll ever be satisfied. Anti cheat also gets rarer as you move away from big online games.

Here's the full list:

Over 240,000 Peak players:

Goose Goose Duck - works Ark Survival Evolved - works Elden Ring - Works Dota 2 - Works COD MWII (2022) - Doesn't work, anticheat PUBG Battlegrounds - Doesn't work, anticheat Yu-gi-oh Master Duel - Works Apex Legends - Works Lost Ark - Doesn't work, anticheat CS GO - Works Destiny II - Doesn't work, anticheat Dyling Light 2 - Works

Over 130,000 peak players:

Cyberpunk 2077 - Works New World - Works Monster Hunter Rise - Works Total War Warhammer III - Works WB Multiversus - Works V Rising - Works Path of Exile - Works Team Fortress II - Works Naraka: Bladepoint - Works Rust - Doesn't work, anticheat GTA 5 - Works Wallpaper Engine - Doesn't work? (is it really a game though?)

Over 75,000 Peak players: Raft The final chaper - Works Vampire Survivors - Works The Sims 4 - Works Rainbow Six Siege - Doesn't work, anticheat War Thunder - Works Fifa 23 - Doesn't work, anticheat Left 4 Dead 2 - Works Unturned - Works Witcher III - works The Forest - works Civ 6 - Works Valheim - Works Fifa 22 - works Football Manager 2023 - Works Dead by Daylight - Doesn't work, anticheat Dread Hunger - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warframe - works Terraria - works Football Manager 2022 - works NFS Heat - Works Warhammer Darktide - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warhammer Vermintide - doesn't work, anticheat Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga - Works

Over 40,000 peak players Skyrim - Works Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Works Fall Guys - Doesn't work, anticheat Don't Starve Together - works God of War - Works Gundam Evolution - Doesn't work, anticheat Cycle Frontier - Doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Stray - Works Deep Rock Galactic - Works Stellaris - Works The Scroll of Taiwu - Works Mirror 2 Project X - Doesn't work?, ProtonDB silver Conan Exiles - Doesn't work, anticheat NBA 2K22 - Works Farming Sim 22 - works Marvel's Spiderman - Works Battlefield 1 - works Battlefield V - works Risk of Rain 2 - works Crusader Kings III - works No man's sky - works Final Fantasy XIV - works Red Dead Redemption II - works Warm Snow - works Mount and Blade II Bannerlord - works World of Tanks Blitz - Works Payday 2 - works Hearts of Iron IV - works Super People 2 - doesn't work, anticheat Stardew Valley - works 7 days to die - works phasmophobia - works VR chat - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Undecember - works garry's mod - works Halo Infinite - works Stumble Guys - works Day Z - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Mir4 - doesn't work? ProtonDB borked Project Zomboid - Works Cult of the Lamb - works Victoria 3 - Works Rimworld - works

I'd strongly argue that for most people "90-95% compatible" means "not compatible" if it doesn't run the one AAA game they care about, and "could get it to work by messing with versions of other software" is incompatible with the words "perfectly usable".

If it doesn't work out of the box and requires fiddling, then it's at most "barely usable", it doesn't even meet the standard for "decently usable" much less "perfectly usable".

90-95% sounds like a good stat, but I just checked and it doesn't support at all the main game I play for most of my gaming time. So it's very incompatible from my point of view.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1938090/Call_of_Duty_Mode...

Looking back over the previous call of duty titles, it doesn't seem to support any of them. Missing giant and popular gaming franchises like this is why I would not even be comfortable calling it 90-95% compatible.

I also checked BF 2042 which I play probably 2nd most often, same, not compatible.

And 3rd most played for me, Rainbow Sig Siege, also not compatible.

These are not exactly small games or small gaming franchises and so basically steam deck or Linux doesn't support basically any of the games I play.

Just wanted to give my perspective.

so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox?

no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx, or ios, or android.

People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.

> so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox?

There are games made for xbox. On Linux, the story is sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games made for windows to work on Linux. It's not the same to the xbox vs playstation situation.

No, but if they want to play God of War or Uncharted, they get a Playstation, even if they may really dislike some aspects of the Playstation and would prefer an Xbox.

Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or use software that is either Windows-only or works much better on Windows - even if we really dislike some aspects of Windows.

Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.

> People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.

This × 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as 'facts of life'.

> Most notably: a gaming rig

You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac, and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to the operating system every other week? Maybe you don't, but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the settings that ultimately make little difference in how games actually play. I know, I know. "Mouse and keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models, there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!

I really, really wish I wasn't so terrible at using a console controller for FPS games. I would love to play COD and all the others on PS or Xbox, but I'm awful. It would be so much better.

I'm not going to lie; it took a long time to readjust, but I have, and I don't even think about it any more. The key is that everyone else is using the same thing, so it works out. I've worked my way up to maxing out the sensitivity in Battlefield 1, and I can usually place in the top 25%. To be fair, it takes a long time to really dial in your snap 180's with a mouse too. The no cheating thing helped me get over the hump. I was pretty tired of ALWAYS having at least one hacker in PC Battlefield.

If you play on a reasonable server then hackers should be a non-issue. Any reasonable server is one you can return to every day and where you know there is a sane admin on, 100% of the time. That obviously all went out the window when they trashed community servers in BF (and some multiplayer games don't have stable servers to this day - which means I'll probably never play them).

Quite a lot of recent console FPS games just let you plug in a USB mouse/keyboard and you get matched with PC players (or other console users who use the same input method) instead.

CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for example.

"... and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date..."

Honestly - has this ever been a problem on Windows ? After the initial setup, I am done. I occasionally update the Video Drivers - but thats once in 6 months. Only if you change the keyboard, mouse hardware, would you need to run through the driver update process again and that too - only if Windows did not auto-detect and install the driver.

Source: experience in maintaining a dozen family windows installs on PC/laptops.

I hear this a lot with this generation and I think its misguided. If you really want to support, or not support something, you will find a way to make it happen.

Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking.

If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep blaming the world for your choices.

Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all live in together. It's up to each individual to make right choices for this world to change.

Not sure which generation you refer to, I'm pushing 50... I really don't want to use what games I play to make a statement about where I want computing or computers to go. I'd happily use Linux if it solved my problem better than a proprietary system. But I'm sure not going to use Linux because the other system is proprietary.

I don't know if that justifies using software that restrict peoples freedom.

I mean I make proprietary software for a living (as do, I assume, a huge fraction of people commenting on HN). For a lot of use cases I prefer proprietary to open. I have zero moral questions about using my iPhone or Windows desktop and I consider anyone who tries to use open software as a moral imperative do be fooling themselves and wasting their time.

With that out of the way I think it's completely irrelevant for the original discussion. Game developers are going to make games for the biggest platforms. So if you want to play the most titles, you choose the bigger platform.

Yes, so long as people keep using windows, the games will keep coming to windows . But I'm not going to waste my time crusading against that in order to maybe see Linux be a more viable gaming platform in two decades. Life is just to short. I'm not enjoying Linux on the desktop much to begin with, so in my case the game issue isn't really the deciding factor. For a lot of gamers it probably is, though.

> Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is.

That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.

We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give feedback on what parts of the product we like/don't like.

The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the business-optimal thing to do is weird.

> I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS.

Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to their "partners"?

It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you can run applications if you are really disciplined and persistent. I don't understand how people keep up with it.

I've used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.

I used to dualboot with Slack and some version of Windows, since the early 2000s, although I stopped somewhat when VMs became a thing anf then WSL. I genuinely liked Windows 7, but 10 was a start down a bad path and 11 is just too far gone.

I’ve wondered for a bit if there’s a future where Windows turns into A Linux distribution with some extra tools and runtimes for legacy executables. Microsoft has some really expensive software it has to maintain. Office is also maintained on multiple platforms, but it feels like Windows is starting to be a drag on the company - lots of resources for not a lot of income. As wild as it would be, offloading a lot of dev to the OSS community would free up resources to differentiate their product.

Windows is Windows because of the huge API, all the legacy support, the graphics subsystem, all the DirectX stuff etc. If the somehow did switch to running a Linux kernel for some reason, it wouldn't be noticeable to the end user at all. I can't see that ever happening though.

As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near future. Here is a page which summarize Linux shortcomings on the desktop: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

One reason I think Linux (the kernel) would be a poor fit as a Windows replacement is the lack of a stable driver ABI. Linux is a monolithic kernel and all the drivers are expected to be part of it. It is a model that works because it fully embraces open source and community driven development. But not all manufacturers want that, first because they may not want to, open their code, or maybe they can't due to licensing arguments. It also means they need to invest significant resources into getting their code accepted by the community. The Windows driver model drove its rich hardware ecosystem. And if you think switching to a Linux driver model is going to be better, more free, think again, because we already have that with Android. Manufacturers fork the kernel and don't give much back to the community, just having them comply with the GPL is a struggle, and hardware support besides what is built into the phone is extremely limited, and because they don't work with the community, support for what's in the phone isn't carried on for more than a couple of years.

And Windows really strong point is backwards compatibility. For example, I still use the "free" Photoshop CS2, 20 years later, works perfectly fine as a binary, I can run stuff that dates back from the 3.11 era, though as I understand it, it is mostly emulation at this point. This is part of the reason people use Windows. Microsoft tried to start clean with Windows RT, it was a failure. Apple can get away with it because they have complete control over their ecosystem, not Microsoft.

Also, games.

My experience with drivers on Linux and Windows has been just about the exact opposite from yours somehow.

On Windows, you sometimes cannot even install the OS without hunting down the right drivers for some piece of hardware like the RAID controller, if you can even find them. Most drivers are authored by the hardware vendors whose main competency may not be writing kernel code, so driver quality tends to be extremely variable. The result is often drivers that just don't work well (which can look like a hardware issue, e.g. lack of performance) or crash the whole system.

Not all Linux drivers are bug-free or feature-complete of course, but they tend to be reasonable or high quality due to the fact that they are written by and/or reviewed by the kernel community. Since all the drivers come with the kernel, the user generally has to do nothing to make their hardware work, it just does right out of the box.

(Notable exceptions here are vendors of certain video cards and wifi chips who refuse to either write Linux drivers or supply the information needed to write them. So you do have to be somewhat careful to avoid those vendors when purchasing hardware.)

I'm not a heavy gamer but my understanding is that a surprising number of popular games run just fine on Linux, thanks in part to the WINE community and the efforts of Valve.

I've always found the same, especially with audio equipment. On Linux it's always plug and play but on Windows I have to search and search for drivers from random websites.

> On Windows, you sometimes cannot even install the OS without hunting down the right drivers for some piece of hardware like the RAID controller, if you can even find them.

This sounds like an experience from 2007.

For the past 5 years, every piece of hardware I have ever bought, even from aliexpress, either works automatically or downloads a driver from windows uodate automatically.

Coming back to linix, I want wifi 6 on my little linux server, and you have to hint down the few pieces of hardware that are compatiable.

AliExpress hardware - that seems like an adventure. Curious, how has your overall experience been with the hardware you bought?

Can't speak for GP, but for me, it's been relatively good, though delivery can take a long time. I'm using a router setup based on Ali Express purchased hardware (N6005, w/ 4x 2.5GbE intel ports running OpnSense).

I've also used a few other intel mini pcs, since the pricing for RPi went insane from limited availability... 8gb RPi 4's were going for close to or over $180, adding in a case, drive, power and the intel mini pc options were about the same price, coming with storage, ram, case, etc.

Can confirm. Even pre-deck release, Proton was already working amazingly well for almost anything I could throw at it ( I think the last issue I had was with Fallout 76, but that may have been fate saving me and for the best ). I have a dedicated VM to gaming with Windows on it, but, well, I don't have to use it as much anymore. Gaming mostly stopped being an issue for Linux ( for me, I am sure some issues persist ).

I was talking about a Linux desktop. I think Windows on the server is another story and Linux could probably take its place if it hadn't already. RAID controllers are mostly server hardware these tend to get pretty good Linux support. I know some people use them on desktops, but it is more of an oddity compared to, say, NAS for which it is the norm, and they often run some flavor of Linux.

The "notable exceptions" of video cards and WiFi (and Bluetooth) chips are huge ones. But I would also add fancy keyboards/mice, printers, RGB, VR, etc... There is a video by LinusTechTips where they try to do tasks like printing a document or streaming a video game that I find very interesting because I think it is representative of what the experience of an experienced Windows user coming to Linux would be, and it is painful. If I remember well, at one point they have to run a Windows VM to have some of their hardware work.

Sound cards tend to have pretty good support, but as often with Linux, it is all about the details. You will get sound, but maybe you won't be able to reassign your outputs, or that physical volume knob won't work. In my case, which is a somewhat complex setup, I sometimes get Pulseaudio crashes and sync issues I don't have on Windows. The setup itself was a pain on both OSes, on one side, a mess of drivers and broken Windows 10 UI, on the other, obscure text file configuration and Pulseaudio plugins.

> I'm not a heavy gamer but my understanding is that a surprising number of popular games run just fine on Linux, thanks in part to the WINE community and the efforts of Valve.

True but at a loss of performance compared to running the game natively on Windows.

But my problem wouldn't be with games, it would be with software I either use professionally or out of personal interest. Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3D Max.

Games are minor issue now, to the point I buy new games on Steam without even checking compatibility, because they just work (or have the same problems Windows does anyway).

Windows' strong point is basically some large software vendors just don't support Linux (Photoshop, finance software, etc). And of course corporate. For the day to day 'casual' user Linux is every bit as good. But, much as we all had to 'learn' Windows when we started using it, so there will be at least a little learning required for Linux.

Exactly. As someone else pointed out some AAA titles don't work, and stuff with strong DRM/anti-cheat won't, but that's a minority of stuff at this point which will only dwindle further.

Even then... with Vavle's efforts, a lot of DRM just takes a software update (mostly) to work in Proton/Linux. Not that a lot of the older AAA titles have been updated (or even recent ones). But it's consistently getting better.

Will have to see which direction things head over time.

Not Linux but you could do that with a BSD kernel perfectly. MS could implement Win32 on top of a BSD kernel in just weeks.

Did you know Win32 runs as a subsystem on top of NT, as there are several more such as a subsystem for Unix?

I know NT was designed with that in mind, but I don't think any type of unix subsystem is still maintained or would work these days. Although they could make it if they wanted it to.

Then again maybe the modern NT no longer has that capability.

Support for the POSIX subsystem was deprecated some time ago according to Wikipedia:

> Microsoft's first foray into achieving Unix-like compatibility on Windows began with the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem, superseded by Windows Services for UNIX via MKS/Interix, which was eventually deprecated with the release of Windows 8.1.

There was also the possibility to run Linux software under Windows using coLinux.

I've been thinking about something similar: wouldn't it be possible to create an OS that supports both Linux and Windows executables? (And maybe also Mac while we're at it.) Probably not based on the Linux kernel, but perhaps on a microkernel of some sort. But if it already works with BSD, that's even better.

> But not all manufacturers want that

I have a device in our work environment which runs on kernel 2.6.32, last patch 2014. Can't update the machine because they do not update the drivers for that machine's hardware. The "open" (aka diy) driver runs on 4.9 at the latest and won't be updated any further despite the EOL being only this year.

It's all about money, they just want you to buy the new hardware and cough up some extra cash for them.

> No plug-and-play support for a lot of input devices like joysticks and steering wheels. Many require editing of cryptic configuration files.

If they are USB they just work.

I imagine something that uses a serial port or the microphone jack to function as a joystick would need a special driver, yes.

> Also, games

If you're saying that games work better than windows that they do in Linux I'd have to say that this is changing very quickly.

The proton layer is really changing the game on that. And it seems like many companies like Google will be moving to running applications in that environment. I could see The day where this leads to companies developing native applications for Linux.

> As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near future.

You can with emulation, compatibility layers, stuff like Wine and DXVK and using Linux drivers. Also lots of software ends up being written in top of Electron, so it makes easier.

Will it be a great user experience? Probably not, but that's not the point. If it will win Microsoft some money, that would be enough of a reason.

A better idea would be open sourcing Windows if that is legally possible for them to do.

Eric S. Raymond had similar thoughts: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764

That is an interesting idea. I wonder if that's true because they definitely seem like it's a loss for them because they absolutely do not care anymore about what they do to the operating system other than keeping it stable to run applications.

I wouldn't wonder if Microsoft will do such a thing in the future. But I wouldn't be happy about it. It will be messy and suffer from hardware problems and performance issues.

The only reason I don't use Linux on my personal PC is that I use it for gaming.

My homeserver runs linux and at work I use Linux, shrug.

I bought a Windows gaming laptop in December, first time Windows gaming since 2010.

Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.

I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.

> Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.

> 've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc.

Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so it _did_ have some crashes).

If you don’t work in tech and you aren’t actually interested in tech which is quite a large proportion of home users then switching away is too much work.

I haven’t seen a bsod in over 15 years on any of the 4 personal or handful of work machines I’ve used in that time. Last one I can even remember seeing was in Vista and it was from legit hardware failure. Can’t remember the last time I was forced to reboot either. It’s been suggested plenty, but ignored without issue.

That is one nice thing about blue screens now. If you get them now it defiantly gets your attention. There is either a driver issue or a bad hw component (overheating, poor/broken connection) on the gp's new machine. I have not see one on my own machines in probably 4 years (bad driver). My wife gets one about every 2-3 months. They are identical hardware. I dropped her laptop on the floor one day by accident. It has not been quite right since (especially if she leaves an 360 controller plugged in). Forced reboots can happen. Usually about once a month you get a shot at it when they do their monthly update cycle. So if you happen to stay up past 3AM on the second Tuesday of the month you might get one.

You are not into any form of overclocking I gather.

I literally can't remember seeing a BSOD in Windows in as long as I can remember, at least 5 years or more.

I haven't rebooted this particular machine since the time it said it was required for an update, which was weeks ago.

I use it as my primary dev machine for my day job and it's a gaming machine that I use for gaming daily.

Something else is wrong. It's installed on billions of devices, noone would accept constant BSODs, crashes and forced reboots if this was the normal experience.

did you do a memory test? grab a linux usb stick and select memtest86+ on boot and let it run overnight or for how long as you can

Do you seriously think those of us running Windows deal with reboots and BSODs constantly and that you didn't happen to buy bad ram or some other hardware problem?

It's very likely that there's a hardware issue. While it could be a driver bug, that's the kind of thing you would be able to easily find others with similar systems complaining about.

As others have said, this is not normal. Your laptop appears to be broken or misconfigured and you should probably make a warranty claim. If you bought a used laptop someone ripped you off with a lemon device.

Having had several gaming laptops and basically every single laptop in the past 15years had a dedicated GPU, gaming laptops are a gimmick, if you emphasize on gaming.

They do make pretty decent machines for work, due to spec., large battery, and generous cooling. While many find them too heavy or bulking, but I do not mind that bit at all. However, the amount of heat needed to be dissipated, and GPUs having very low power envelop, makes them quite pitiful for the price paid.

Pretty good chance it's either a bad driver for some hardware you are running, or a physical device fault. If the fault is different devices each time, likely ram. I can't stand Windows at this point, but the experiences you are seeing definitely aren't normal. What do the temperatures look like? It's possibly just a bad thermal design or fan curve for your model.

> Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use a

You don't honestly think that's what everyone else experiences, do you?

I'm a gamer running Win10. In the past 5 years, I've had 4 BSoDs, 3 of them caused by Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat (Which I've uninstalled since I don't play Valorant anymore).

It sounds to me that you got a faulty laptop, and rather than consider that possibility, you decided that Windows is to blame.

Linux gaming is almost in a state where I'd find it quite tolerable, except that VR on the platform is still a sitshow (yes, even on Valve's own hardware) and, unfortunately for me, I've become quite attached to a few VR games.

As it is though, I'll just give up on VR and whatever else I like that doesn't work on Linux before I go to 11.

I've been playing games on Linux daily for years now (even AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077) and this is why I am still holding out on VR. I just don't want to be forced to go back to Windows just to play the games I want to play.

I'm waiting for Valve to maybe make a successor to Index with proper Linux support, but I'm not holding my breath.

Have you ever compared in-game performances between Windows and Linux?

> Linux gaming is almost in a state where I'd find it quite tolerable

Definitely agree. It's almost there. But some things are still holding me back.

1) As you mentioned, VR is shit. I don't use VR a lot, but a couple of times per year I just want to try it again.

2) There's definitely a performance hit. Some games are very jittery on Linux, while running smoothly on windows. I spend a lot of money on my gaming PC because it's one of my oldest and favorite hobbies, and if an OS just tanks the performance it's kind of annoying.

3) Some games just don't work. Mostly multiplayer games. Normally I exclusively play offline, singleplayer games. But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day with debugging.

3.1) My work-life consists of debugging linux servers and fixing them, or setting them up. After work I just want to turn on my PC and game a bit. With Windows, that's 99.9% doable. With Linux, I have to debug and fix things during my free time as well, because the chance that a game just works out-of-the-box is pretty slim for me, even though Steam Proton is quite awesome.

4) A smaller hobby of mine is video editing, which is also not optimal on Linux. Aka., I would have to find a different tool, which I've tried unsuccessfully.

Basically, I use windows on my daily, free-time PC because gaming "just works" and sometimes I like to use VR or video editing softwares. If all I'd do in my free-time was browse the web etc., I'd just use a cheap laptop with Linux on it. After all, I really dislike Windows for anything else because it's such a bloated piece of shit OS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same here. I can't stand windows 11 feels like someone's taking over my OS. I was so upset that I wrote an article about it[1].

I was a Windows user for a long time until Windows 11 came out that was the last straw for me.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

> But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day with debugging.

Man I havent played at a lan event in a long time. So many games now don't seem to support that. All my friends I use to play with have moved away. I would be nice to attend a LAN event again someday :D

Well, maybe I have to clarify what I mean with these parties :D Me and three friends meet from time to time, and each of us takes their PC to a friends home, where we game and watch movies from friday evening to sunday afternoon. Sometimes we play local games but a lot of times we'll also play global multiplayer games. It's just about being physically together for a couple of nights :)

A selection of games is Minecraft, Valorant, Left for Dead 2, CS:GO, Age of Empires, Stronghold, The Forest/Sons of the Forest, Valheim and some others.

It is really odd how little Valve care about their VR implementation on Linux compared to their Linux gaming efforts in general. Perhaps the VR and Linux people at Valve just dont overlap that much?

I just dual-boot, altought I usually try the game via Proton and it often "just works" on Linux.

Way too many of my hobby stuff is better dealt with on Linux

> dual-boot

Don't know why I never considered this... Should try it :D

Then I could use Windows for video editing and windows-only games and Linux for everything else.

what's wrong with kdenlive?

I could try it out again. Tried to use it like 5 years ago and wasn't that happy, but don't remember why. I think the video playback was very laggy and I had more crashes than tolerable.

Saw that it's even usable on Windows, so I could try the workflow before having to switch the OS completely. Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve but I'm not really a power-user anyways.

Thanks for the tip!

> video editing

Yes I recently switched from windows to PopOS[1] and this is one thing that I haven't found a solution for. There doesn't seem to be any good video editing software for Linux other than blender and in my experience video editing on blender isn't that great.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

Most seem to prefer KdenlLive or Davinci Resolve (which has a free version, but many pony up for the paid version, get the hardware key). A lot of the YouTubers I follow have started using Davinci, even those sticking to Mac and Windows.

> or Davinci Resolve

AFAIK Proprietary codecs(H.264/265, AAC) are not supported on Davinci Resolve on Linux. Maybe they fixed it since I last checked.

I guess not, which is surprising... maybe Davinci uses OS provided codecs in Windows and Mac? From a thread I looked at...

------

Did you try the Linux appimage of "Shutter Encoder" shutterencoder.com/en/, it works fine for me to convert H.265 to DNxHD or DNxHR (a better format than h.@265 for editing in Davinci) and I can use these files in the free version of Davinci Resolve 17 & 18. But I'm just a hobbyist and I'm using Davinci only for basic things, I'm at the beginning of my learning path... So I hope I'm not giving you a bad advice !

I'm on Arch Linux with ffmpeg4.4

WINE is pretty good, and Proton is basically pre-polished WINE. Works basically just out of the box, and anything that doesn't work perfectly can usually be addressed with posts in the WineDB or ProtonDB

Unfortunately Gaming on Windows is "basically flawless", compared to Proton being "pretty good". I just got sick of debugging games because I didn't want to do the same thing during my free-time which I'm doing during the day at work.

Now, I love Linux and don't really like Windows that much, but when I want to game I just want the experience to be as smooth and easy as possible. And if I spend thousands of dollars on hardware I want it to be used as effectively as possible.

Maybe the problem with gaming on Linux is my own laziness...

When's the last time you gamed on Linux?

In the past few years protons come a long way in my humble opinion.

Beginning of last year. But then I wanted to 1) game in VR again and 2) play games with friends which contained anti-cheat software which wasn't compatible with Windows, so I spontaneously went back to Windows for these two things.

I'm someone who switches games pretty fast, I'm not one to play the same multiplayer game for a long time. So each time I started a new game, I had to debug in Linux to get it working.

Since January I've played Planet Crafter, Steep, Back 4 Blood, Bioshock Infinite, Atomic Heart, Hogwarts Legacy and now Elden Ring. No idea what percentage of these games "just work" on Linux, but I doubt that the experience would be the same as on Windows.

Gaming on Windows is quite broken for ultrawide screen, or dual/triple screens. Other than that shader compilation is the bane of many (depends on the CPU) - resulting into 'random' stutters. The latter issues are a poster child of the fact most games are just console ports. So calling 'flawless' is an overstatement.

> ultrawide screen, or dual/triple screens

Well, you know, if you have to take an edge-case which doesn't apply to my situation to tell me that windows isn't flawless for gaming...

Does ultrawide/triple screen work better on Linux?

I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in windows".

Only if game is on Steam, got no patience to fuck with wine/proton manually

> I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in windows".

Yeah, I think the best tip I got is to try dual booting to make it easier.

It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something actually productive.

Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life has been good.

I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.

My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say, sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a kernel upgrade and so on.

Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.

Mine's also almost stock, the only changes being tracking and startup menu/taskbar garbage disabled.

For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though.

GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files).

@LorenD: "For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though.

GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files)."

How dare you not have a problem in a discussion on Linux. (Not just there yet :)

MacOS doesn't have the issues that you've described while giving you many of the same tools Linux has, in addition to support for most mainstream windows software.

And while macOS isn't as free as Linux, it's certainly less "spyware" than windows.

Growing up in a developing country, until recently Apple devices (laptops/desktops especially) have been a bit out of price range for me. Although I can afford one now, my current laptop is nowhere near its end of life, and something in my soviet-scarcity-mentality-influenced mind doesn't feel right about upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. That said, Apple laptops look very convincing at the moment, and when the time comes they will probably be my first choice.

One thing that helped me is realising that I should be selling ild electronics, so it goes to people that need it most. Instead of having it collect dust in the drawerr untill it becomes c dead and obsolete

One thing that more than balances it out for me - my Mac's have a lot longer of a lifespan than my Windows machines. I have a larger up front cost, but get far more out of them over time. I average at least 7 years without having to do anything with my Mac's (and used my last two for just under 10 years) - Windows has improved dramatically since the 2000's, but I seem to either need to reload Windows from scratch on the same hardware to maintain decent performance, or upgrade hardware a lot more frequently than I have with my Mac's. Also when setting up a new machine I have found Apple's migration assistant to be flawless in moving everything from my old machine to my new one. I only deviated with my current M1 MacBook Pro because of the CPU architecture change - and friends overwhelmingly positive experiences with using migration assistant to move from Intel to AS Mac's indicate I probably wasted a bunch of time needlessly in setting everything up fresh.

Have you noticed Apple news notifications on a loved ones Mac in recent years? Happens even without a paid subscription if I recall correctly.

I’ve never seen this and if I did, I would just turn it off.

I've not seen this and I set up new Macs every year. Can you expand? You'd have to open the news app to see this AFAIK. Unless it was part of some iCloud on-boarding process which I haven't done in years.

I don't recall the details. Possibly may appear as an onboarding process.

I think in the same way we now see advertising on school buses and display-covered vending machines (even inside a state office), were going to end up with forms of outreach / ads in our tools unless there's more robust forms of support (could be paying, could be a more multicapital flow of support).

That only happens if the loved one opens the Apple News app, and grants permission for notifications. If they never open Apple News, or if they open it and deny permission, no notification.

Yes on iOS - but you can turn that off easily but installing News.app or removing it's notifications.

Microsoft makes it much more difficult, then wipes out your preferences a few patches later.

One of the reasons I went with AMD for my new GPU was Linux support. Nvidia has been abhorrent of Linux before Torvalds did the famous gesture and that was over 10 years ago! My old workstation had an Nvidia and performance has been all over the place, and that's on lucky days!

I have found that more recent cards from both vendors are a lot better on Linux than their older gear. My 10 year old GPU had huge issues on Linux (running fine on Windows), but when I got a more recent GPU for my Linux box, it ran fine.

That's one of the main issues that is solved with open drivers.

A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards: the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon 9600 with a built-in capture card.

This was also around the time I was really getting into Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008.

As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support. I lived it.

At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good. I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager", and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of virtual desktops.

This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future of Linux was bright and close.

A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering). Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for whose benefit?

A few more years passed, and fglrx became the best driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful card for ~$30, so the point was moot.

When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a major hardware company found the value in making a full-featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the first place: proprietary video drivers.

Had a 5700 XT at launch... drivers were effectively broken in mainline Ubuntu for nearly 6 months. I had to use a beta Kernel, which broke other things. I sold that and managed to get a 3080 via newegg shuffle, went back to Linux after various Windows issues following.

Pop OS seens to be the best one for me at the moment. Definitely recommend a try.

When Windows breaks, it stays broken. I had a W10 install unable to update, running the update would break windows and be unable to log in at all. It required rolling back the upgrade. Best part? It would automatically try to install that update every time I forgot to click the dead mans switch. I'd regularly try to unlock to a useless machine. No online support was helpful, just had to re-install.

Linux is the opposite, nearly everything has a documented fix. It can be fixed in less time than it takes to backup, reimage, and reconfigure your machine.

It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches.

In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my problems were...definitely me problems.

At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes sense.

Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them.

Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.

> It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches.

Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking the board I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily driver a decade later. And though there have been issues I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.

Was that machine a laptop? In my experience, power-oriented laptops and Windows mix like oil and water.

I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it had to be running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it wasn’t it’d perform 20-30% worse while running just as hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia driver is split up into several pieces which then resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all sorts of things.

I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a custom built tower instead, which has had none of these issues.

That’s all very well, but my end of the day take is that if you want more Windows/Mac adopters, you need zero friction. So often you get these handwavey (snobby?) attitudes of “why don’t you just insert hard to do thing for average user” and in the meantime nobody is the wiser.

Also not saying that things aren’t getting better, but it’s a snail’s pace.

Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

> Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

It wins because it's less friction, not zero friction. There's a reason, other than old applications, that there are still Windows 7 installations. Many people don't want to upgrade their Windows until they upgrade their hardware because it's a hassle getting the interface back to the way you want it.

Anecdotally I'm not a programmer and I switched to Ubuntu when I bought this laptop in 2013, with about 3 or 4 years of dual booting for software purposes before I stayed on Ubuntu. I'll switch away from Ubuntu to a more user friendly distribution with my next computer because it's pushing features I really don't like, and deleting features I really do like. My wife is also not a programmer and with the upgrade to Windows 10 we had to do a bunch of searching and tinkering to make the user interface satisfactory. She's avoiding Windows 11 for as long as possible.

I was having a conversation with my mother today about changing her bank. She ultimately decided against it because she doesn't want to change her bank account number.

People are creatures of habit. Microsoft learned this when they removed the start button in 8.

Cellphone number portability was forced on that industry here in NZ, I wish bank account portability could be made a thing.

Part of the IBAN is the bank branch. So for that it won't work. The other banking numbers are bank specific anyway.

It is, but that’s a little meaningless when I haven’t been to a bank in maybe 20 years. I see stories here about banking infrastructure and suspect it might be very hard to get changes made.

The difference isn't even less friction. It's more familiar friction.

Here's the most crucial point: windows has the most thoroughly documented friction. If you ever have a problem, chances are 1,000 or more other people have had that problem, or a closely related one, and 1 or 2 of them even wrote about it somewhere. Life is way harder than it needs to be, but you are not even remotely alone.

Apple takes the opposite approach: walls instead of friction. If you can't figure it out, it's because you computer can't do it. That implies your computer shouldn't be able to do it. You would be surprised at how comfortable people are with this conclusion. It doesn't get them what they want, but it saves them time and energy by providing early and confident rejection.

Linux maximizes the ability to manage friction. There is always a way to actually resolve it with constructive effort. That's an unfamiliar strategy, and it requires some level of education that the average user refuses to accommodate, even if it will definitely save them time and effort.

> “while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them”

Microsoft are often taking the blame for, and working around, other vendor’s bugs. Just because they fixed it didn’t mean they broke it.

e.g. https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/13632662289708113...

This is why NixOS has been so great for me: it factors out an entire class of "me" problems.

If I decide to go down a rabbit hole that involves totally messing up my system, I can undo all of that by simply rebooting into an older generation. NixOS never diverges from "fresh install".

Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be incredible.

> Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be incredible.

The crux of the NixOS issue right here. I tried NixOS a few times, even this past weekend, and it was such a pain that I gave up each time!

I am planning to integrate Nix (the package manager) into my recent fresh OS install if I have some time this week. I want to use Nix to have, at the very least, a controllable way to install and remove toolchains of different versions in a reproducible manner; if I can swing it I am going to use it to install pretty much anything that requires any sort of configuration care (the rest I'll just use apt). I also want to integrate more tools like asdf or pyenv which help with that, but I prefer if I could do it all through one package manager like Nix. I finally separated my /home into another drive this time, so that'll be nice for future re-installs.

The fact that Nix's user experience can be so bad is the greatest evidence of its inherent usefulness. If you are able to get it working for you, it's somehow worth it.

NixOS is pain without scars.

> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience.

It was more stable, that's why I used it. Then starting with a certain Windows 10 update I had to reinstall the system multiple times because automatic updates kept breaking it overnight, it started crashing the USB driver, suddenly it kept randomly switching keyboard layouts by itself, and somewhere around the third ruined weekend due to an unbootable system I had enough. Switched to an Arch-based distro for 3 years in which I only had one update-related issue and it took me a whole 5 minutes and one reboot to fix. Now I partially use Mac OS and while I'm disappointed by some of its aspects I can at least be certain it will boot tomorrow and it won't install a system update without my confirmation.

Oh, how the turntables.

I had similar issues... especially after Win11. Admittedly, I was running Insiders builds, because I wanted new WSLg features, etc. Then one day I was on Windows 11... okay, got the app bar pinned back on the left... a month later, oh, you don't have secure boot enabled, you'll need to reinstall... enabled secure boot, still had to reinstall... a few months later, the nvidia drivers kept borking out and blanking my screen. The Windows release kept overriding the newer NVidia drivers for w11. Figured out how to pin them... another couple months, start seeing adverts in the damned start menu search. That's it, I'm out. I reinstalled Win10 in case I needed it, disabled secure boot and tpm... and haven't booted back to my windows drive since. I've had two small issues in Ubuntu, both relatively easily fixed.

I don't think I'm going back. I use Win10 at work, and fortunately most of my actual day is in VS Code under WSL. And that's about all I can stand.

> I was running Insiders builds

In fairness, you can't take your experience with insider builds as an indicator of the stability of the OS. Insider builds are expected to be unstable.

When I reinstalled after the insiders build first nuked itself, I switched to stable/mainline. Still had issues after that. I had run insiders on Win10 about 3 years without issue before that.

>> and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot

I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.

>> reduced laptop battery life

??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something.

>> general UI clunkiness,

For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.

> I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well.

The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups of any kind.

> Linux and windows will never share a drive well.

Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager.

The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop doing stupid shit that worked with legacy BIOS and is not necessary anymore. Grub breaking itself randomly is mostly self-inflicted problem.

It's funny because I've had a lot of people share this exact same experience with me, since they know I've been a Linux user since the late 90s. But this is my experience with Windows! Especially the shortened laptop battery life. Windows runs so much in the background that performance feels 10x slower on the same machine and the battery drains much faster ... in my experience anyway. But I also have issues with Windows drivers and applications crashing often. Whereas on Linux things "just work" for me the vast majority of the time.

To be fair, though, there was a short-lived period a couple of years ago where a lot of laptop trackpads wouldn't work, and I had a work-issued laptop that didn't seem to want to play nicely with an external monitor.

So I wonder if this is largely what you're used to. I run Linux on all of my devices, which are hardware I've chosen myself and had high confidence would have good Linux support. It's only been the work-issued machines that I've had issues with... so I probably just have a sense of how to get things to play nicely because it's what I've used primarily for so long.

> the vast majority of the time

It's the times when it breaks that make the difference for me. One Windows, most breakage is an annoyance. On Linux it can grind my day to a halt. Here's something I did on an Ubuntu install recently.

    apt install python3

Oops. That's not what I wanted.

   apt autoremove python3

OMG! What have I done! IIRC that stripped out so much stuff I didn't even have networking. Lol.

I dual booted Windows on my desktop and laptop for a few years and also noticed lots of weird issues - reduced battery life on my laptop, sleep/hibernate being broken, GRUB occasionally just dying on me. I eventually got rid of Windows all together and now just run Manjaro. I was surprised that suspend issues and battery life on my laptop, for instance, completely went away.

The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games, but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due to anti-cheat software like Battleye.

I’ve experienced the same. In fact, I recently tried migrating to Ubuntu. The user experience is a lot better than it once was, but it’s still not great. For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome, I need to install a weather app. There are several, and amongst them, the Ubuntu software installer says they’re not verifiable because a 3rd party developed them. Ok, fine, I just want the one most people are using, because I assume that is the one that is best maintained and has the best features. I’m not sure which one that is. Oh well, install the first one after a brief search to determine which is considered most “native” to gnome and Ubuntu. After installation, I don’t see the weather on my top bar. I open the weather app, look around the settings, but there’s no option to see the weather displayed on the bar. I give up. Later, my machine seems to be stuttering a bit (64 GB RAM, AMD 5970, RTX 3060), so I reboot and it’s back to normal. I try to play a game, and get an error stating that Vulkan isn’t installed (it is). I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again.

I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works. I don’t mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It’s pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they’re able to make strides on the experience.

The issue with the taskbar, is there are a couple different implemetation APIs, your shell probably only supports gnome out of the box. I don't recall the name, but there's an extension that will add support for the KDE api for taskbar extensions. I'm running Budgie, with a relatively customized setup, and that was a long while ago, so not as immediately familiar with all that I did.

Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes out though.

I think KDE would serve users coming from Windows much better. You'd have much better experience out of the box. I have used Ubuntu, Fedor, and Arch Linux with gnome-shell and have rigorously kept my extensions for a few years up and working but eventually got tiered of them breaking with every gnome update and desktop crashing every few days. I switched to tiling windows managers since then such as i3/sway for work and to KDE for personal use (for example with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

> For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome,

In the amount of time you took to do that, you could have opened a browser and typed weather.com to see the weather.

I think this is the grandparent OP's point: Showing you news or showing you the weather is not the job of an operating system. The operating system is there to manage system memory, the filesystem, networking, security and permissions, drive peripherals and accessories, maybe provide a desktop environment.

That said, I would expect my operating system's vendor to also ship high quality applications that I can optionally install after I install my operating system. Ubuntu should have a weather application, or at least a strong opinion about which third party one is the best and that new users should use. So, you're not wrong. The whole "search through 40,000 half-assed weather applications and hope user reviews are accurate" situation is also bad.

I've never understood the obsession of "weather" apps with some people.

Heck, if a linux user wants to know the weather, all they have to do is lok at their windows. (might have to go up the stairs though :-)

I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

it only happened once - but WTF - and I havent seen it since, and I couldnt find anything on google about it. WTF is that?

> I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

When I run Windows these days, I assume every single part of it is compromised, either by scummy third party software running in the background or by Microsoft's scummy software running in the background. This includes cameras, microphones, any radio, the networking stack, any drives (local or network) the machine can so much as ping, everything. I have a special vlan prison I put my Windows machines in because I treat them like the hostile attackers they are.

Say what you will about Apple's "walled gardens" but every time a frustrated 3rd party developer complains online that they can't do X, Y, or Z on Macs because of permissions or security, I get a little more comforted that my Mac's software is not constantly attacking me.

>Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

I'm guessing that was probably Windows Hello attempting to use your camera for face recognition.

Looking out my window doesn’t tell me how hot is actually is. It certainly won’t tell me how hot it will be in 2 hours or when the sun will set. :)

And likewise cold. And humidity. And how it might change in eight hours.

Keep the window open for real-time updates streaming in (during wet season)

You gotta open the window to find out how hot it is. After noon, stand facing West and see how many hand-widths between the horizon and the sun… each hand-width is an hour until sunset. Source: Boy Scouts

at the extreme risk of being put on a list, what is the standard boyscout hand-width?

I have too many Monty Python jokes in mind for HN's taste

Given that the Boy Scouts of America kicked off the modern scouting movement in 1910, the answer to African or European, is American.

That depends on the age of the boy scout, of course. But so does arm length.

As a data point with tape, depending upon the type you might need more than 1 later.

Saying that because I've used black electrical tape for years, including over the camera lens of my iPhone SE.

But it turns out the iPhone SE can take pictures right through that (at least in daylight), and they're not terrible quality.

Showed a friend photography inclined friend and he was as surprised as I was. eg very

When you say "black electrical tape" do you mean from, say, Harbor Freight, or from 3M? Since the 3M stuff blocks UV fairly well, i can't really see light getting through it, although i'd have to find some to test.

years and years ago we'd buy a roll of film, pull it out in the sun, and then get it developed but not printed. You could use that as an IR-passthrough filter on a camera lens - this is if my memory isn't faulty.

Good question. I don't remember, though it was probably cheap stuff rather than good quality.

> Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

"Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - "1984", Orwell.

Does the news you get depend on who you are?

My office does not have windows (the hole in the wall, not the OS). Also, I usually don't want to know the weather right now, but in the next couple of hours or rest of day. It's not a obsession, it's a handy piece of information which is nice when I'm able to check it at a glance and not have to open some app/website.

Why shouldn't Ubuntu take the next step and pre-install the weather application if that's what Ubuntu thinks most of its users will want?

Because even if Ubuntu knows that, users often want conflicting things.

User A may want a weather app preinstalled; user B may not want their computer knowing their location. User A and user B might even be the same person.

And that's assuming Ubuntu knows it, which let's be real, Ubuntu isn't great at knowing what its users want.

And all of that is assuming it's even true that most people do want a weather app.

Sounds like they don't want to turn Ubuntu into what the Windows users above are complaining about.

It shouldn't be preinstalled, but it should be easy to find professionally reviewed applications for the most common user application categories. Android's Google Play Store has "editor's choice" for example. If Ubuntu is trying to be THE desktop linux, this is something they should be doing.

>I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again. I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows.

Thanks, I needed that laugh this morning.

Just upgraded to Windows 11 (for its HDR features) and weather is now part of the "Widgets" bombarding me with ads and poor news sources. I genuinely tried to customize my "feed" but it's all junk -no reputable sources whatsoever- and I didn't find a way to remove them.

So the only sane course of action was to disable widgets altogether while I still can. And now I don't have the weather anymore.

You can run the Weather app stand-alone & pin it to your Taskbar or Start Menu:

    Windows Key > weather

Ubuntu is literally just a collection of thousands of individual packages. It’s not a cohesive whole developed in the same repository like Windows.

Windows is a completely unified OS where there is a huge repo that can build the whole OS from source.

That makes Ubuntu extremely customizable. You can swap out the window manager, or just remove it, use a KDE file manager instead of gnome, do whatever the hell you want. That comes at a cost.

Windows is just Windows. You can’t replace the desktop (you used to be able to swap the shell), or file manager or task manger or installer system. That makes things integrated and easy to use. That comes at a cost also.

For me, I use Ubuntu with i3 for work, Windows for gaming and personal stuff, and macOS because i have old work laptops that are MacBooks.

They all have their pros and cons. Having all three means I always have the right tool for the job available.

>I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness

Oh boy where to begin?

>Nvidia and Intel driver issues

Not a personal dig, but this is a result of having been spoiled. I still remember the small dime novel that came with my box of WinNT 4.0 workstation, all it did was list the various hardware that was on its hardware compatibility list. You wanted to buy some piece of hardware? Better do the homework because not everything was going to be compatible or even supported at the same level. Today everyone expects everything to just work out of the box when you throw an operating system at it. They've completely forgotten the need to even check for compatibility, they've outsourced that to the operating system. They expect it to 'just work' without input.

When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing and that to get the best use of your hardware you're advised to research it before purchasing and to make sure you check compatibility with the operating system(s) you plan to use.

>package manager bugs

OK, this has hit us all eventually. Valid. But I've noticed most of the time when I've run into this it was a result of me doing things that I really shouldn't or at least which should prime me to monitor my system more carefully. Such as installing Debian packages into Ubuntu. Sure it can work, especially if you do your best to install any needed dependencies. But you'd better know what you're doing and watch for issues after doing so. I'm sure there are other ways the package manager can crap the bed. It's not all on us when it does so. But I really don't think Windows is any better in this regard. I've had stuff eat itself there too with applications and systems upgrading DLLs and leaving me up the famous creek without a paddle.

>reduced laptop battery life

Valid as well. But have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life?

>general UI clunkiness

This heavily depends on your desktop of choice. As a Mate desktop user I've been fairly happy with how my UI behaves. To the point where it is actively annoying to be in another desktop now. Different strokes for different folks though. If Windows is the UI you rely on to the point you have muscle memory, I can sympathize. I'd argue there is a desktop that can match that UI for you on Linux but you'll have to customize it a bit and you'll have to test for which one is closest to what you prefer.

But if your preferred desktop UI is indeed Windows, it's not Linux's fault that it is not Windows any more than it would be OSX's fault it is not Windows. You have to adapt and accept that things work differently in a different operating system. Not wrong. Not misconfigured. Different.

The thing is: with Windows I don't have to do any of the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc. You might have had to in the past, but you can't compare past Windows to Linux today.

I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications. Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't. I haven't had a Windows update break things in years, where my last Linux experience had the Ubuntu live USB work fine and completely fail to boot to a GUI environment after the install. I don't have time in my life to troubleshoot kernel issues anymore.

> The thing is: with Windows I don't have to do any of the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc. You might have had to in the past, but you can't compare past Windows to Linux today.

I suspect you are talking about some other Windows that the rest of us.

> I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably turn my computer on and run my applications.

Don't we all?

> Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't.

You, ok. Others? It's the other way around.

> I haven't had a Windows update break things in years,

Last time? Cumulative update 2022.12 for W19 22H2... that's not that long time ago.

I'm getting the sense of a category error here:

Windows is the standard bearer of paid OS's - yes, true.

Ubuntu is the standard bearer of free Linux OS's - not really, and (this is important) less true over time.

What's happening is that, as Windows is improving, Linux appears to be getting worse. But that's really just an Ubuntu problem.

I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly, but it seems to be performing less well over time, and is, increasingly, not the default choice. I would understand if other distros are harder to learn or simply unsupported, but that's not the case.

It feels like 90% of these issues could be resolved by saying "Start with Fedora. In 2023, that's the actual default Linux distro that fixes these problems."

>I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly

They asked for it. Red hat the former bearers of that crown dropped the ball and walked away, leaving it open for Ubuntu to step in.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031127055732/http://zdnet.com....

https://web.archive.org/web/20030812095615/http://www.linuxa...

https://web.archive.org/web/20040508195941/http://www.newsfo...

People forget now but Fedora was created because Red Hat abandoned the home desktop market in 2003. Then Fedora was spun off to be a test bed for their enterprise offerings and it was no longer possible to buy a copy of workstation in stores. So when Canonical showed up in 2004 and was focused on the desktop they were able to get a lot of people to move over fairly quickly. The fact that they were using a different type of desktop interface with Gnome that had the two panels unlike Fedora which still had the single large panel like Gnome 1.x made it stand out even more. That and the way almost every other Linux desktop at the time was KDE based...

So yeah, Ubuntu took the crown because it wanted it. It maintains that crown because outside of it and its various spinoffs and flavors no one else is really seeking to be a desktop operating system. Since Canonical has made it clear that its focus is now also Enterprise at the expense of the desktop experience, I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone else steals that crown by focusing on the desktop again. We just need one of these billionaires to fund a company to make it happen...Say what you will about Shuttleworth, he did put his money where his mouth was and I for one am grateful for the many years of good use I got from Ubuntu as a result. I will be sad for the day when inevitably the pain points out weigh the benefits and I must switch away from Ubuntu-Mate to some other system.

>When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing

It absolutely is not! I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and automatic everything was. It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual driver installation or anything. Things just worked after a reboot.

Early versions of NT (pre 2000) were not consumer oriented and that's why they were more finicky, but by the time of XP, you could expect it to just work with mostly anything again.

> I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and automatic everything was. It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual driver installation or anything.

A virtual machine you say? With a virtualized set of hardware prechosen for compatibility so that Windows would recognize it without issues? It just recognized this collection of virtual hardware selected for compatibility without further interactions? You don't say? ;)

As someone who began with Windows 95 OSR2 on real hardware you will forgive my amusement I hope?

No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows just kinda found it.

And don't make assumptions about me, our 1996 toshiba came with OSR2, including beta USB drivers and more built in driver profiles for commodity hardware than the plug and play "pick device" window actually could handle (it wasn't resizeable!)

By the time of OSR2, and then 98, if your device had been reviewed in a PC magazine, you could probably just plug it in, select it from a list, and go on your way.

>No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows just kinda found it.

~woosh!~

> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot

Well I've had the exact opposite experience. Windows was an endless source of bugs, crashes, and instability. Linux (Mint) is rock-solid, clean, fast, pretty, and stable. I've had more blue screens that I can count but I remember less than a handful of kernel panics over the last 10 years. No more fiddling around in settings, no more having to use external tools off some forum thread to accomplish something as simple as updating drivers.

The only issue I give you credit for is the battery life, which is indeed better on Windows by some ~20%.

Interesting. My experience is that Linux (Debian, anyway -- Ubuntu has never given me anything but headaches and instability) is at least an order of magnitude more reliable than Windows. It's been over a decade since I've hit a serious or crashy bug in Linux. I hit one about every other day with Windows.

I wonder why there's a difference in our experiences here?

> Nvidia and Intel driver issues

Intel is pretty good about upstreaming drivers into the kernel. The only bugs I've ever ran into are around brand new wifi cards that haven't been mainlined yet. And even then I don't think I've seen that in about ten years. Nvidia on the other hand is a huge pain on Linux, but thats deliberately done by Nvidia.

> reduced laptop battery life.

Been using Linux as a daily driver for over 15 years and laptop life has been better than windows nearly the entire time.

To be fair, I cut my teeth automating Linux environments in physical datacenters. So I've lived in a world where power consumption mattered, know how to select hardware with good driver support, and can tune the os.

That said, you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w.

> For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

Funny how you and I have the same value but wound up at opposite conclusions. I guess it's all about the tools and how we need/expect to use them.

Edit: grammar

On various hardware, over the years, I've had both the same and the opposite experiences. For example, linux doesn't decide to reboot during the day to perform updates without your consent.

Overall, when there is not some specific hardware issue, I've found linux running much smoother and more user friendly _for me_. Gnome is a lot less cluttered, things are easier to find. It is also often much better in supporting older hardware and, ironically, older windows applications.

Pretty much the same as me. Windows hardware support is really great, Linux is always a hassle for me. I've tried and tried with Linux, but I've given up on it as my primary desktop

There is a middle ground. I use Windows/Mac for gaming, entertainment, and casual browsing, and I run Mint in a VMWare for serious stuff. The added benefit is that I can easily back up, snapshot, and transfer my work OS anywhere. And Mint/Ubuntu provide much better out-of-the-box productivity tools. I map my multiple Mint desktops to numpad keys. You can't do that with the other ones without additional software.

I have been using Linux for work and my home server for around 20 years.For my personal computing I have been using windows and MacOS.

Every now and then I get my hopes up that the year of Linux is finally here and I install the latest.

I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition.

I am still using just windows and macos for my personal computing needs.

> it means that more pain is coming in the future

So you're no longer reality checking this prediction? What are the reasons for firing up the terminal? Config file editing? Or something more serious?

last time for me was the audio was glitching which never happened on pc. i think the solution had something to do with changing the audio sampling rate fixed it.

> I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition.

This is exactly my litmus test. The requirement to touch the CLI indicates little thought for the UX or care for users who don't want to use the CLI. Every year I boot up another flavour of Linux and every year it fails this test. Linux is built by developers, for developers. That's fine, but let's be honest about it.

My experience is the opposite. I use Windows at work and Linux for everything else. Linux is much more stable and when something is wrong, much easier to fix. Windows has definitely broken for me in the middle of the day.

The issue is pretty much the same as it ever was -- hardware manufacturers support Windows first. Linux is usually later if at all. Community support sometimes steps in to fill in the gap, and some manufacturers (most notably AMD) are coming around, but this is still usually the issue.

Oddly enough, this means that Linux tends to work better as the computer it's running on gets older. The reverse is true for Windows -- updates tend to make it slower and/or have more compatibility issues. A computer that worked better with Windows a few years ago will not-infrequently perform better under Ubuntu today. It's not usually suggested on new PCs unless it's spec'd specifically with Linux compatibility in mind.

Linux driver support was hell from roughly around 2010 to 2016. Both major GPU manufacturers had awful proprietary drivers (with even worse packaging), and most wifi chipsets required proprietary firmware blobs to work at all: which was very tricky to package, because of copyright bullshit.

This was also the era of major desktop environments playing fast and loose with there UX. GNOME3 was released in 2011. Ubuntu started defaulting to Unity in 2010, and started their Wayland competitor (Mir) in 2014. KDE Plasma 5 (2014) defaulted to fancy composting, and felt really bloated relative to the others. The only desktop environments that really kept true to the good old days (~2008) are XFCE4 and MATE (the GNOME2 fork). KDE5 isn't bad, either, but it's still a bit too bloated.

The other problem caused by proprietary video drivers was package versioning. It's tricky to have the right kernel version and Xorg version necessary to run a proprietary video driver blob; and keep the rest of your system up-to-date. Ubuntu found its initial success by creating a generally stable package repository roughly as up-to-date as Debian unstable. Unfortunately, Ubuntu became a bloated mess with strange things like Unity and Mir bundled in. Archlinux has been a good alternative, but it does expect a level of familiarity with shell utilities. Linux Mint (an Ubuntu or Debian fork) is still my first recommendation to casual users. One of these days, it will be NixOS, which is a giant leap in stability and package versioning.

The last change of that era that has been breaking the Linux experience is the switch from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT. This shift was slow and messy, with most hardware adoption following the release of Windows 8 in 2012. GRUB used to break in one predictable way: windows overwrites the MBR, replacing GRUB with its bootloader. Now, with UEFI, boot entries are saved directly to the motherboard, and the bootloader itself lives in the ESP partition. The windows installer will put its bootloader in the first ESP it can find, and you don't get to choose which one that is. Now you have to worry about the ESP running out of space, but that's about it: everything else has been generally resolved, and the UEFI bootloader experience is very solid (apart from the windows installer caveat).

Now that AMDGPU is mature, and NVIDIA's drivers are relatively well maintained (and packaged), the Linux desktop experience is even more stable than its heyday back in 2008. If you install a distro that targets relatively recent package versions, like Archlinux, Linux Mint, or even Fedora; and you use a solid familiar desktop environment like MATE or XFCE4; you can avoid most UI/UX clunkiness and have very little need to fiddle with your package manager. Boot issues are pretty unlikely now, so long as you install in UEFI mode (not legacy BIOS emulation), and completely avoid MBR.

All these might have been true for Windows 10, but with Windows 11 all the things you mentioned are my daily woes. W11 suddenly "upgrades" the video driver and explorer crashes; updates bios and camera borks. With Linux I have the opportunity to freeze the upgrades and go on to my work. Also due to behind the scenes shenanigans battery lives are worse all across the board - I am managing more than 100 laptops. In addition with this OS, 8gb of ram becomes a joke and most of my users are running office applications.

Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.

> Nvidia

Every time someone mentions Linux driver problems, I see that name.

For me, the strategy that has worked for the longest time is to get boring computers. The boring Thinkpad, the boring Vostros and Latitudes, the boring ThinkStation and ThinkServer boxes. Large PC makers don't want their corporate-oriented products causing support calls, and that forces them to not be overly creative with their implementations. With that powerful incentive, the hardware is usually well supported by the two boring operating systems (for generic hardware) out there. Either that, or get a machine that's designed together with its OS (and know the odds of you installing anything other than that are slim).

>For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool I hard agree on this.

I use my W11 22H2 as a daily driver because of that: it just works (TM).

Also, I don't see any kind of news or the likes on Windows, and it feels really close to Windows 7. Here are the things I've done so far:

- Bought a Windows 10 Education license from a shady website, and it's been working fine for the past 4? years. The upgrade to Windows 11 Education went smoothly as well.

- Local account only. No Sign in to Windows crap.

- (Most important imo) Installed OOSU Shutup10++ (it's for Windows 11) and turned almost everything off there.

- Bought a Start11 license for 5 USD and installed it, and switched to the Windows 7 start menu using it.

No ads anywhere in Windows, feels like Windows 7, talks much less to whatever 3rd party people MS have contracts with to get my data.

FWIW, I did try daily-driving Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the best Linux for me imho. However, there is a show-stopping bug as follows:

I have 3 monitors, with the main one being a 4K over DP. My monitors are set to turn off after 5 minutes, and in Windows, they turn back on just fine when I move the mouse (minor annoyance: display scaling is not reflected across all application windows till I minimize and open the window again but no big deal). For Linux, the DP monitor won't get detected; it behaves as if my other 2 monitors are the only ones connected. I have to turn off the monitor switch and turn it on again for it to be detected. I looked around but didn't find any good way to solve it...

*NIX is the only viable choice for mission-critical desktop stability in 2023. But that isn't to say Windows isn't feature complete. It is still king when it comes to gaming.

Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles.

The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.

> I don't understand how people keep up with it.

For gaming / work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but otherwise, Windows is the main platform.

I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.

I found Rider much more enjoyable to use than VS. It doesn't implement so many languages, tools, etc, as langd come in plugins. It's much faster than VS with Resharper, and as a bonus, it is similar in usability to the rest of Jetbrains IDEs, which I was already using it.

I only used .NET for modern Unity development, tho. I was using VS for C/C++ before using CLion and Riderfor that.

Last I used it it was unusable, but this was during the .NET 1.1.1 days, so I will have to check it out again.

Rider is definitely usable on Linux... it works on MacOS and Windows as well, and imo, better than VS for Mac. I've pretty much stuck to VS Code for pretty much everything, though the conspiracy theorist in me thinks MS intentionally gimps functionality in the VS Code extension support for .Net (they've shown this a couple times, live reload for example).

I work in .Net for a lot of backend code, mostly in WSL/Linux on VS Code. And it's not been horrible, though I'm much more efficient with Node or Deno at this point. Since .Net Core (and now .Net 5+) the space has changed a lot.

I've used a Linux desktop for decades and I'm sick of it. My Windows machine never bricks itself on updates. All my hardware works with it. Getting something as basic as Bluetooth or 3D rendering working doesn't require a PhD. I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons.

I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing.

I would pay the NSA money in addition to letting them spy on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.

> I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons.

have you used Windows in the last 20 years?

While Windows UI changes a lot, all old apps work fine in Win11. I guess the author was referring to Wayland bull…t

“Have to update” is the key here. You can still run apps from windows 95 if you want to.

I can run X applications from the 80s on Wayland

meanwhile Windows 11 has 4 or 5 different UI styles in control panel

I don't run Wayland, but a few times per year I find myself picking up some unmaintained X thing and running it with a recent OS. I'd say on average compatibility is much better on Windows.

Binary compatibility on Linux is often out of the question. Frequently this means picking up some old libs. libc5, old stdc++... For really old stuff with fewer dependencies that may not be a problem. As you get into a more modern era where software started to pile on large heaps of dependencies it becomes more challenging.

Source compatibility typically means porting, sometimes nontrivial. Likely something is written in a time capsule of that era's poor C and C++ standards compliance. (i.e. C89 or C++98 existed, but compilers of the day accepted lots of nonsense, so software of that era doesn't even conform to those.)

In contrast the Win32 API or COM is designed around binary compatibility. Maybe early 2000s dependencies (when MS started getting worse at this) are a problem. I think Win16 on modern amd64 is also a problem. But on average, compatibility is higher.

> Bluetooth

Heh, in my experience Bluetooth is actually entirely broken on Windows. I simply cannot get my headset to connect to my Windows laptop, but it works just fine on my Linux laptop out of the box.

It's amusing because, for me, Bluetooth doesn't work anywhere. Not a knock against Linux because IME the technology just doesn't work _anywhere_

Wireplumber and Pipewire is the first time it just worked for me on Linux, it was definitely hit or miss for me before but I haven't had any issues in a couple years thanks to those replacing pulseaudio

The last time I tried to get it to work on linux, I remember modifying what I believe to be pulseaudio config? And hating it. But I've also just stopped buying non-apple bluetooth products.

> I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing.

this is hackernews, not usernews

Modern computer has near infinite amout of software.

Do i want write code. Yes.

Do i want to write ALL of it. No.

But linux assumes you kinda sorta do want to do it.

> But linux assumes you kinda sorta do want to do it.

huh?

Why would OS devs bother supporting hardware drives when people can do it themselves amirite? Who doesn't know how to write a kernel module anyway...

Also bluetooth, who even needs that? It's important that we have out of the box docker support. /s

Yeah, and messing around configuring and troubleshooting my OS gets in the way of my preferred "hacking".

Have you tried ChromeOS?

Yeah. My takeaway after 20 years is that Linux is in a constant state of churn and it's always going to be. It's like if you're a mechanic and every single year someone swaps your entire toolbox for something with new tools that work completely differently. Of course there's a point where you get sick of it and rage quit.

To make it even worse, no one likes doing the last 20% of the work to make things stable and even less people like maintaining finished projects, so basically everything in Linux is about 80% done and gets replaced before it even hits the point of being reliable.

Agreed.

I've used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware).

I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip that was fixed by loading MS-NT & copying their firmware from a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS - Dell Lat 360 or 36x).

>It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system.

Mostly true, it's been a long time since Microsoft made a CONSUMER operating system.

Windows Server isn't plagued with this crap, it costs a whole lot more, but doesn't have this nonsense. Also, isn't designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get a powershell prompt, and that's it).

Came here to say same. I install Windows Server as my base OS and everything else including my "desktop" Windows, runs as a VM. This lets me hack up my desktops - both Windows and Linux - without concern, as I can rollback to a snapshot. I can't imagine not having this.

If you do Windows development you'll probably have a Visual Studio license which will include a server license for "testing". I use that license as my base OS.

I've tried for decades to enjoy Linux desktop experience but simply couldn't.

As for these news you can disable them if you find them annoying.

you can try, but you lose the weather info

> I don't understand how people keep up with it

One word: Adobe.

Once the Adobe suite goes completely online, Windows will be considered a lot less essential in the office, at least on the client end.

Most big corps are based on Office365 - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams. And all of that integrated tightly together.

I don't think most big companies will move away from Windows completely, there is simply no worthy competitor to replace the office suite and to have it all integrated from top to bottom.

You forget that it organizations are now able to install even more spyware made by Microsoft called o365 that is used to track worker productivity and a host of other tools such as netskope that make windows take 45 seconds plus to launch an approval dialog to escalate privileges.

Just checked out awesomewm. It looks really interesting. Thank you !

You're welcome! It's really cool and IMO has a leg up on alternatives like i3 because the whole thing, every aspect is entirely programmable.

Enjoy :)

Neat. Will check it out, been looking for a successor to wmii for a while, and dwm is a little too basic.

Counter-review: the level of control is unmatched, but it's a little too extreme, I feel. Even something as simple as a volume widget isn't included OoB. Yes, there are libraries of widgets out there, but not many -- and not always the best quality (memory leaks are unfortunately common, seems to be a screwy lua/GTK interaction).

More importantly: the core framework just outright omits many of the core features that I've come to expect in tiling WMs. There's no support for i3-style window stacks, for example; I've tried several community solutions, but they're all trapped on a too-high abstraction layer and inevitably end up fighting with the WM in ways that you simply never need to deal with in first-class implementations.

All in all, I'm planning on returning to i3wm. For me, it's a bigger struggle to try building up a usable environment from scratch than it is to start with a solid foundation and then replace the undesirable components (i3bar => polybar, bindsym => sxhkd). AwesomeWM is very fun to work with thanks to the great APIs and documentation, but I can only wholeheartedly recommend it if you need absolute and total power over the UI, since that's AwesomeWMs whole schtick.

I've been using it for several years at this point and haven't encountered any memory leaks (it already uses so little).

As for widgets, I've had no trouble with that, there's quite a few fantastic collections and I've found everything I've needed.

Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it is an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can also write a rule to deal with them as needed.

I'll take a completely customizable lightweight interface that I can tailor every aspect of every time, especially when it's so user friendly (for what it is).

> I've been using it for several years at this point and haven't encountered any memory leaks (it already uses so little).

It's the community widgets that tend to have memory leak problems, not the core package. As mentioned, this seems to be a quirk in how Lua and GTK interact (many community widgets use GTK).

> Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it is an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can also write a rule to deal with them as needed.

They're not. I've used all of them. It's not an issue of rules, it's an issue of the core UI framework fighting against the hacked-on stacking implementation. There are design-time assumptions baked into the AwesomeWM layout engine that cannot be worked around using the API. You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that I've tried very hard and for a very long time.

> I'll take a completely customizable lightweight interface that I can tailor every aspect of every time, especially when it's so user friendly (for what it is).

I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the ease-of-use goes.

> It's the community widgets that tend to have memory leak problems, not the core package. As mentioned, this seems to be a quirk in how Lua and GTK interact (many community widgets use GTK).

What widgets are you referring to that you found to have leaks?

> You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that I've tried very hard and for a very long time.

It's just that it seems to contradict most of the other reports I've seen, but then I don't care about stacking myself, so ok.

> I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the ease-of-use goes.

I said it was user-friendly for what it is. There is nothing else really like it that allows that level of extensibility, and given how it abstracts so much complexity, I would say they did indeed do a good job of making it user friendly. Again though, that's keeping in mind what it is. It isn't trying to be i3/xfce/etc or as user-friendly as those.

> What widgets are you referring to that you found to have leaks?

I'll cite myself here: https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-widgets/issues/11...

Here's another affected library [1]: https://github.com/deficient/volume-control

I've had similar issues wherever GTK interacts with awful.spawn. Basically: glib (GTK) + awful.spawn.easy_async + polling = extremely leak-prone. This is a very common pattern in community awesomewm widgets.

[1]: No bug under the main repo because they're considering it as a framework bug. See here for discussion: https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/3584#issuecommen...

I wouldn't mind a built-in RSS reader that I can use to display NPR, National Weather Service, or other sources. It should definitely start as a blank slate and allow the user to add sources. Build it into Edge browser. A button on the browser allows adding the source to the reader. Sites not containing feeds can invoke bing chat or some AI to wrangle the page to the feed.

This can be done in a user respecting and useful way but that doesn't make $

This, I find even trying to ignore news sources doesn't work. I continually try to prune the more tabloid papers like Daily Mail / Express / Sun but no avail.

Yeah... I like parts of Edge, and tried to train the news feed on the new tab screen, but eventually just disabled the news from showing up on that screen. I'm sure it's the same underlying service for the Windows News feeds.

Defaulting to nothing won't happen, because too many users won't know it's a feature that exists and they can tune. That said, making it RSS driven and letting any user who cares replace it would be a good idea.

Default to a placeholder that tells them how it works or a link to a microsoft blog explaining the feature.

Why bother doing that? No one is going to read an article about a feature they don't use and imagine using it and then go out of their way to sign up. People will see something in use, say "I wish it was all NPR" and go change it.

That's _sorta_ what Apple News is, but you can't add your own sources and it isn't an RSS reader. It's an app that can be deleted, and it only appears in the OS using the same APIs that other apps have access to (widgets). I also don't think they push tabloid content by default, they push the biggest news outlets (probably the ones that pay Apple the most).

I get that a company the size of Apple or Microsoft are going to want to have syndication deals. It should not be integrated so directly with the OS though, and should absolutely be removable (really, out of principle it shouldn't be installed by default).

I have always used Windows for my gaming PC, but last year when I got a new one I went for Linux. I was just tired of having to constantly reset my settings, remove ads/candy crush from the start menu.

Yeah it's ridiculous. The nerve to keep forcing something on a user after they have clearly rejected it. Honestly that kind of crap should be illegal IMO.

After a lot of GPO settings and hacks I've tamed W10 to be acceptable, but it's still crappy on principle.

Oh, I am sure I could wrestle Windows into submission if I wanted to. I just don't want to fight with my computer.

If Steam was not available on Linux then I would likely still have abandoned Windows and just limited my gaming to whatever runs on a Nintendo Switch.

Anyway, My husband decided to stick with Windows for his gaming computer (same hardware as mine) and my Linux computer (with ZFS) can load every game in under half the time it takes his machine.

It did take a day to figure out the magic environment variables to better performance in games, but now that I got them I just copy paste them for new games.

> It did take a day to figure out the magic environment variables to better performance in games,

What are your main? If you don't mind sharing?

  PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 gamemoderun %command%

That the main thing I add for most games in Steam.

I've already resolved that my next gaming PC will be a docked Steam Deck. I'm through with Windows.

The Steam Deck is quite weak, it isn't really a PC replacement. You can run Steam on desktop Linux. It is quite good.

I'm sure you can run SteamOS on the desktop just as well, though in my case all the games that I want to play are either older or new-but-graphically-undemanding. And even for new and demanding games, PC games always have options to just turn the graphics down, which is fine by me.

I was seriously considering abandoning gaming on PC and just using a Nintendo Switch. These days there are so many great indie games that don't require much hardware.

It really ought to not exist, but if there has to be a news section, it needs to come with a few (like four or five) of the most respected news orgs in your locale, and be very easy to switch in or out.

But otherwise, I agree with you. Windows should not be in the business of syndicating news. That should be the job of a third party widget (maybe provided by MSN!) that you install if you're interested.

At this point I'm so used to using Feedbro with Firefox to get my news, getting it as part of the OS doesn't even occur to me. I'm not too sure how useful that would be either since I'd likely just end up clicking on a link.

I agree with you though if it exists it should optional and from credible (or from user selectable) sources.

Come over to Mint, it has the feel of windows but it’s fully customisable and works out of the box.

I'm an Ubuntu user at work and a Windows (desktop)/Arch (server) user at home. Wikipedia says that Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it doesn't really explain why I would use it over Ubuntu itself. What does Mint add?

> What does Mint add?

For you, nothing. The UI is just more Windows-esque.

It's often recommended to Windows users to make their transition to Linux desktops easier.

I have installed mint recently, dual boot with windows.

I mostly like it, but it does have one major downside.. the 4k font scaling is terrible compared to windows. When I adjust font scaling on windows it only modifies font size. When I do it in mint, it messes up a bunch of other things, and games start running at the wrong screen size etc.

So I still ended up mostly using Windows almost entirely because of this issue.. (These search ads/news can be disabled that this post is talking about, so not a problem for me).

Yeah, I really like Mint, and I wish everything worked, but there was just enough not working (for my particular configuration and use cases) that I went back to Windows 10.

https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm

Me neither. Which is why I am using Open Shell (with DLL hack on Windows 11, without on Windows 10) [1]. Although since I prefer to have the option to have my menu bar on left, which is a reason I don't want Windows 11.

..but its the popularity of Android and Google which put Microsoft to this direction. They get away with it, why not Microsoft? On my Nvidia Shield TV, I have to watch about 33% of my startup screen with commercials. Commercials which sometimes aren't meant for my children. What have we come to that we accept this behavior from a TV? And Google gets away with this. (I'm not trying to downplay Microsoft's behavior, however.)

[1] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

You can shift it back to the left, I'd still probably stick to a 3rd party menu adapter though.

Are Fortune 500 companies installing current versions of Windows? How do they disable all this junk (and how do I do it myself)?

Windows Enterprise LTSB with some GPOs

This. It doesn't stop the crap in Edge (which is easy to turn off once you know where the magic button is), but I never see any of this stuff at the OS level on my work machine. (My home machine is a Mac, so I don't see it there either.)

Downside is having to use LTSB which often hangs onto its bugs a lot longer than it ought to.

Want to say that MSN headlines have appeared in Windows for a long time. Vista had an RSS reader sidebar where the defaults were set to MSN.

Telemetry in Windows has some value for users. Specifically, Windows has a system for systematically shimming the standard library (which is the documented API for OS services) to fix problems with applications.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-t...

Telemetry returns information about applications crashes to the "mothership" and MS is pretty quick to update the application compatibility database to fix problems.

Modern telemetry is completely unnecessary for that.

In the Vista era, the OS was able to detect programs that crashed and give the user the choice to report it. It could even, with consent, check to see if there was already a known solution, which might involve an updated version or might involve changing compatibility settings.

None of that needs the MS personal info vortex and none of that requires trampling on consent.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/cfs-filesystemfile...

https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/1pca.pn...

http://s3.jasonlitka.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/bluescre...

I'd love for that to be the case if it actually translated to fixing problems. For instance, in all of Windows 10 I would frequently get an error if I used the media device system tray to eject a USB drive, as I had been taught ever since Windows 98. However, if I instead ejected by right-clicking the drive in Explorer it would work. Obviously Explorer was preventing the drive from unmounting and the systray eject should be changed to notify other apps and give them a chance to close their handles. It got to where I would intentionally do the "wrong" thing hoping that the telemetry would make its way to Microsoft and they could notice the problem.

So I was thrilled when I saw a headline saying that removing media would be fixed in Windows 11. The article informed me that Microsoft's solution was (pause for effect) to remove the system tray icon.

Apply palm directly to face.

I'll admit that modern Windows is more stable than in the past. But how much of that is simply the benefit of memory safety in C#? Also stricter oversight of third-party drivers.

That problem is fundamental to how Linux and Windows deal with a bad situation.

Back when the love letter crisis was ungoing I had a Linux machine fill the disk with log messages and deleting /var/log/messages didn't free the space because there still was a process that had the file open.

In a similar situation in Windows you can't delete the file. Either way it is a problem like looking at Cthulhu and something bad is going to happen either way you resolve the situation.

I just want MS to release a windows 7 clone with under-the-hood improvements from subsequent releases. All the consumer-facing changes since 7 have been utter crap - it’s hard to think of a single change that I like. I just want windows 7 with WSL.

If not for games I would NEVER run modern windows at all. It is explicitly anti-user. It violates my consent all the time with their Edge shenanigans, and it pushes all the MS services like Cortana that I simply do not care about. At this point it’s hard to say that windows takes less fiddling than Linux to set up, if you include the time spent fighting the OS and time spent disabling Microsoft’s crap

> For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).

This is my biggest complaint about Windows (which I no longer use), in that it had the chance to be, and once was, an opportunity to bridge the gap between MacOS and Linux. More open than the former, more opinionated than the latter.

Could you share your ISO or the process you used to make it? Was it easy or is there a bunch of esoteric stuff you have to fiddle with? I'm switching to 10 for my new PC build and I'm about to do a ton of research on decrapifying the OS

Microsoft seem to have dropped any pretense of being a software company, and Windows of being an "OS". Windows is pretty much the same old same old but with more and more and more ads. It gets a big "gee whiz" when they change the backgrounds images and the shape of app windows! Their various apps are becoming more and more simplistic, apart from throwing ads into any conceivable screen. I find Windows and MS apps extraordinarily frustrating to use.

Linking this comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 that designers at Microsoft use Mac and have been given more power than they should.

   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.

There are more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780566

The idea of Windows UI/UX designers having macbooks is so absurd to me it's hilarious

tells you everything there is to know

That Microsoft's designers don't take their jobs seriously?

How on earth could you ever pretend to do you job well without using the product you're designing?

I can't imagine anyone starting their first day at Microsoft and saying with a straight face: "Yeah, I want a Mac."

(Okay, I can imagine it; it's actually pretty funny.)

That’s...uh, surprising as hell. The idea of a designer that could actually tolerate having to use Windows full-time for design work, even at Microsoft; would be much more surprising, from my experience.

The lead designers at Ford might drive Porches on the weekends, but I'll bet they still drive Fords into the office.

The more painful it is to eat your own dogfood, the more it's necessary to do so. But it has to be mandated from the top down.

If the only people with the power to actually change the product aren't even using it, the god-awful UI/UX decisions in the latest version of Windows begin to make sense.

At Mozilla designers use iPads and don't use Firefox.

Dogfooding should be a requirement for designers.

I think Ballmer had it right, when he (fake-) stomped that iPhone.

That explains so very much about the horrible, inconsistent UX. Not the Linux is better, far worse imo, but at least it's getting better not worse.

Ironically after getting a Mac last year and expecting to hate it and put Linux on instead, I found MacOS a far more restful and pleasant desktop environment to work in than Windows has become. There's a few things I miss, like the File Manager, but OTOH I have a proper terminal environment instead.

But mainly I like that it's the same every time unless I alter something, that it's very consistent, and that it's not constantly trying to steal my attention.

Yeah, I switched from Windows over a decade ago, and I still miss Windows File Manager. Nothing I’ve seen in other OS’s can seem to match it. There are mods for Mac OS that can potentially fix it though.

It's probably been about a decade since I used Windows as well so this is probably just my memory, but I don't remember anything special about file manager.

What's so good about it?

Tree + file panel, per-folder display settings

A file picker/saver dialog that doesn't take ages to open, like it does on MacOS.

Try Path Finder

https://www.cocoatech.io/

No association, just a happy user when I had Macs.

When it comes to the realm of commercial desktops for personal compute, MacOS is the best by far. Unfortunately, the only truly usable ones are the open source ones. After years of linux usage, I simply cannot operate a windows computer. I am impressed by those who can. You seemingly have to be a mouse ninja to dismiss the various notifications that continuously pop up.

For me, the terminal experience on MacOS is uncanny valley because of the BSD implementations:

   $ ls tmp -al
   ls: -al: No such file or directory

This is the ls example, but all the utilities I would reach for on a linux behave like this. I'm told you can install gnu coreutils through brew, but my company locks that down so I get stuck with this surreal terminal experience.

MacOS doesn’t have tabloid news. I doubt the decision to push clickbait was a driven by UX designers.

It explains why Win11 feels like the UI/UX is trying to imitate MacOS.

The thing is, it means Microsoft has completely abandoned Windows users that use Windows because it's not MacOS.

IMO, Win7 with the Classic theme was peak UI. It's been downhill ever since, starting first with replacing 3D button controls with flat buttons, which reduces discoverability and relies on using too much negative space. Over time it turned into displaying less information on the screen, like Win11 eliminating the option to have task bar items show the window text, and instead merely having the application icon, which then hides how many windows an application, and making switching between windows in an app requiring two clicks instead of one.

When I eventually install Win11, I'm going to have to buy WindowBlinds and Start11 just to make it usable.

Windows 11 is the number of UI redesigns they've started and never finished. Every time you click "Advanced" or "Properties" you get a UI from Windows one version older.

From that comment:

> I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart

That change was the exact point in time that I knew sanity was gone and that Windows would get progressively worse over time. You can even end up with one window inside another where they sort of blend together. It's mind boggling and it's still the default.

Whoever is responsible for that mess should be banned from touching UI design for the rest of their life. Lol.

That is a disservice to society. Students and workers everywhere are forced to deal with stupid headlines on their OS 10 hours a day, while the people who make those machines get to opt-out. Ridiculous.

Blame the PM/PO and executives who greenlighted the tabloid filth for “engagement” metrics going up

I finally made the switch to Ubuntu Mate on Friday and WOW, color me impressed!

The only reason I stuck with Windows on my desktop machine for so long was gaming, and the last time I tried switching over was 10 years ago. Spoiler: it was a shitshow.

This time, things are MUCH better! The Mate desktop environment is simple, stable, clean, does the job and gets out of your way (kinda reminds me of Windows 2000). Steam's Proton makes running games a breeze. All of my favorites just work. I could even run battle.net as a non-steam game, USING Steam's Proton!

And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I've never before seen such sorcery.

So bye bye Windows, except when I'm running one as a VM.

Windows can be good, when its in vm-jello, frozzen in time, with no real network connection except for shared folders and the updaterapeware removed. Honestly, has anyone ever looked at these updates and though to themselves - "Yes, i need that!".

Gaming on linux has really taken off. Very few games, even with anti cheat for multiplayer, don’t work. It’s nice that running Linux is no worse than missing out on console exclusives

This will surely be the year of the Linux desktop.

has been the case for me for more than 5 years.

20 years here, going fine :) But I guess the joke never ends

No, 20 years is the fusion power joke, not the year of the linux desktop joke

I thought that fusion is 40 years away, and has been every year for the past 50 years? :)

The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" has been a thing since at least the heyday of Slashdot, which would put it at 20-ish years.

Unless that was intended as a humorous joke? Your post, I mean - not the Year Of the Linux Desktop, :)

My post was less of a joke than Windows 11 is. But probably funnier.

Once Infrastructure Week is finished ... just a little bit longer

You can even install PowerShell for your command line and you'll feel right at home!

Sure you can but what about cmdlets? Do we have an open source "coreutil" that offers reasonable compatibility with the standard powershell environment?

I can run pretty much any game out of the box, even random games that nobody would ever have optimised for linux.

The time of the desktop has come.

It sometimes does a better job than Windows at running Windows games.

Serious question: Did you play the Diablo IV open beta weekend? (It's live for 4 more hours).

I did, on my Windows 10 box. The issue isn't random games that no one would ever have optimized, the issue is bleeding edge games that most people want to play, and play right now.

If you didn't, can you? If (the royal) you can't, get started in the time remaining, download speeds allowing, the year of the Linux desktop isn't here.

From the great grandparent - they did play the Diablo 4 beta on Ubuntu.

>And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I've never before seen such sorcery.

I'm sure that's never been said before

Sadly there's still a few very heavy hitters that make Linux a no-go for some.

Genshin Impact and Fortnite are unusable.

Unreal Editor requires Windows too.

And I don't know how usable VR is on Windows.

Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that one that only works on Windows for some reason.

But at this point it's just a matter of time, I guess.

> Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that one that only works on Windows for some reason.

This!

What keeps me working on Windows (besides the fact that I somehow have completely missed the in-OS ads) is the time it would take me to replace all the random little quality of life apps that I've gotten used to. I'm sure there's a great Linux clipboard manager that does everything Ditto does on Windows but I don't have to go and find it, get used to it, figure out all the quirks (and the things it lacks that Ditto provides, and all the things that it provides that Ditto lacks, etc, etc).

You need[0] a slow migration. Like any major change really.

Get a cheap small box that can run Linux and slowly start to build the tool familiarity alongside your defaults.

That's pretty much how I did it. Went back to Windows less and less until it was only ever for Windows-only android flashing tools (which is about once every 6 months). Still annoys me how much space Windows takes up to dual-boot just for this use-case. Bloated PoS.

[0]: If you're going to do it. I'm not saying you need to do it, I'm not that guy.

> Still annoys me how much space Windows takes up to dual-boot just for this use-case. Bloated PoS

Made me chuckle, can 100% relate. I mostly reboot to Windows for some games and to one-off buy some soundtrack from iTunes.

As a long-time Linux user, I have to wonder how much better my life would be if I had access to all of these. My naive guess is about 0%.

Oh yes for sure, the fact that Genshin Impact and Fortnite don't work on Linux is actually a point in favor of Linux lol. Many don't see it that way though, sadly.

A massively multiplayer combat-waifu simulator with the typical f2p monetization traps doesn't appeal to everyone? (OTOH, I'd say Fortnite is actually pretty fun since they added a no-building mode.)

I think the Unreal Engine editor supports Linux now? This page seems to claim so: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Not that this takes away from your overall point.

Most of the games now are always online and some of them opt for home-grown, Microsoft Windows-only kernel anti-cheat detection rather than working with the bigger engines that Valve worked with to get said anti-cheat systems running on Linux.

Others refuse to support Linux thinking it’ll bring more bug reports, but there was an interview in recent years where the game company realized the Linux community knew they could submit bug reports, they submitted good bug reports (that affected all platforms too), and didn’t see software as a black box for consumption but a community effort. They ended up praising the Linux community for their bug reports even if the number of reports were higher.

Huh, what the hell?

Apparently it happened in July 2022.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/07/unreal-engine-5-editor...

These last few years have been moving way too fast, whew.

Thanks for telling me.

I know it's not the same, but both of these games can be played on cloud gaming (Geforce Now).

I have a subscription to GFN, not to play games not supported on Linux but to play on max specs without needing an expensive rig, and both Genshin Impact and Fortnite are supported there.

Anyway, it's never going to be a full drop-in replacement. Like you can't just replace your XBOX with a Playstation and play the same games. But still, Linux is a very valid option even for gaming.

Wait until you give up on mate (kinda stuck approach to copy windows 95, just like modern windows or Mac mostly does) and try actual modern desktops like Gnome, KDE or if you want to go ultra productive something tiling like 3wm

Nah, tried all of those and settled on Mate.

IMO the most important aspect of a desktop environment is that you never notice it. That's what I loved so much about Windows 2000 (and why I lamented every UI change they made since then).

That's the exact reason I am stuck with Gnome. First it might be a bit strange, but then you realize it's there, everything is one tab away yet you never actually see it.

Giving maximal screen estate to whatever I focus on while being as distraction less as a WM just can be.

However anyway, glad you found something that works for you! That's what choice is for

MATE is a fork of Gnome 2. Not everyone likes Gnome 3 and newer versions.

Gnome 2 is just a windows 95 clone with Gimmics. Only from gnome shell on to gnome 3 the whole concept was brought to a new level.

However I understand if people don't like that, it's new and maybe won't last it sure is easier to stick to a taskbar, etc when you are used to it.

That's exactly what I like about it. Windows 3.x was terrible. Win95 looked pretty but was a garbage os. But windows NT with the win95 UI on it finally convinced me to ditch my Amiga (although I was VERY tempted by NeXT). And honestly, I haven't seen any UI enhancements since then that are useful to me.

But does that mean they will be stuck forever to an ancient GTK version ?

It has supported GTK3+ for years now. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but GTK3/4 applications run fine.

The beauty is that they can do that on their own time. Possibly even never.

I use i3wm and a split ergonomic keyboard. I use a shell instead of a file manager. I am fine with 99% of people never doing that, so long as I can.

I'd like to believe that, but can't shake the feeling there is a chance of performance impact or a need for special magic dance to make something work.

The teenager me would have no problem, he had a (fairly) working Enlightenment config and tried an array of distros, and it was fun to tinker. But he had way, way more time, and didn't spend his own money on the gaming hardware.

There are warts, like it got confused into thinking that my second SSD was a removable device until I forced it in the fstab. But the level of annoyance nowadays is pretty much on par with Windows warts and annoyances (especially Windows printer drivers OMG).

But I've been using Linux desktops for years on my laptops and virtual desktops, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect before changing my PC over.

But for games I'm completely intolerant of annoyances, which is why I took so long with this step.

It definitely has a performance impact, and sometimes there are crash/other glitches in proton not present on windows.

I also have much, much less time than I did as a teenager, so I can only stomach console gaming at this point. Games need to Just Work.

For me personally performance with Linux gaming is much less of a problem than it was with teenage me's Windows gaming. Back in the day I didn't have much money, but today I can just buy a slightly beefier GPU to compensate any possible performance loss from compatibility layers.

With my 7 year old GTX 1080 and Ubuntu/Steam Proton I can still play most games at very high settings (except raytracing stuff).

Then we have different priorities, if I spend a lot of money on a gaming machine beefy GPU I want 100% of its performance at all times and no risk of problems cutting into my limited gaming time. If there is a problem on Windows you can be sure the game devs will give it a priority over a problem on Linux.

Been a Linux user for over 20 years, still use it for work, and yes Proton does look great, but I don't see using it for gaming anytime soon.

Funny thing is that there are lots of reports for games of linux outperforming Windows. So considering that you might want to checking first, you might need to run Linux to really get 100% out of your GPU.

I would sincerely recommend you give it another shot. If proton works well for the game, performance is most likely to be very close to windows, if not even exceed it.

The best part is that it's trivially easy. Most games with decent proton support will install just like a native game. No frills. No mess.

When the Linux experience is smooth, it's smooth. None of the fake Fullscreen BS. No memory paging quirks or other background processes causing stuttering. No automatically putting your game process in sleep mode. Freesync works. You get to keep your favorite window manager/desktop environment. If you are lucky, you can totally ditch windows today.

Wait for a couple of major version updates before praising prematurely.

Usually desktop Linux works great until it suddenly doesn't, and then the real fun of figuring out what's wrong begins ;)

So, people complain about Windows spyware and antifeatures, then they install Ubuntu and Steam client. What did that solve? Move your profiling data to someone else?

Steam wants to sell me video games that are similar to other video games I like and keep me on top of new releases. recommendations based on purchase history are kinda okay in my opinion.

Microsoft wants to sell me the british royalty and reasons why millions of people are excited about german hearing aids. I don't really get this at all. What is their snoopware even good for if this is the best they can come up with?

Is it though? When you run apt upgrade you are nagged to go subscribe to UBUNTU PRO. There was a problem with amazon tracking Ubuntu store purchases. (https://www.howtogeek.com/126995/how-to-disable-the-amazon-s...) You can't exactly escape telemetry and unwanted ads. Seems like it on a slippery slope to another version of Windows 10 to me.

The unity dash thing is ancient and not a thing anymore.

I would definitely recommend Linux Mint over vanilla Ubuntu. Canonical has made some really dumb moves over the last decade. Thankfully, it's trivial to avoid vanilla Ubuntu.

I left Windows in a hail of Vista bugs, over a decade ago. I've seen it get worse and worse in that time, both in UX rot and anti-consumer "features".

I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.

Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's not your friend.

That's precisely the question I keep asking: how much more anti-consumer features people need, in order to switch? At this point it's hard to understand why there is so much resistance in leaving windows, I can't imagine having to deal with this kind of things on a daily-basis while trying to actually get stuff done.

What kind of thing? That it comes with a News app that has a pre installed widget that can be removed with a single right click?

Yes, for instance. Because defaults actually matter.

Worst thing is how it slows things down compared to a clean linux install. Sticking with Windows though because it is a family shared PC, for now.

Common anti virus, weird update windows, weird scary Dialogs you learn to blindly confirm to install things. Blinking and animations in the taskbar, ... Not even a common design pattern for the annoyances.

As someone who hasn't used Windows in more than 10 years the whole desktop is full of distractions popping up unasked. IMO it's horrible for a productive environment because it doesn't allow to focus properly

Every week or so, my Windows 10 desktop pops up a dialog telling me to upgrade to Windows 11. I spend about a minute looking for the one tiny link to dismiss the dialog without upgrading. I swear it changes locations each time...

Lately I've also had it sprout similar dialogs about converting my local account to a Microsoft account. Those are even harder to thwart, requiring multiple clicks through "Are you sure?" dialogs and dark patterns.

It's easier to bear this little weekly hide-and-seek ritual when you think about it like a small child making bids for attention. "Mommy, Mommy, I hid your glasses! Play with me before you start your workday!" Kind of endearing in its own way.

Usually in your BIOS you can disable your TPM chip. That will make it stop asking as you'll fail the min requirements check.

Although it did seem to randomly announce to me just a few times that mine is not compatible with Win11. Which isn't even true, since the TPM chip thing is a completely arbitrary requirement.

Don't you think it is a strange default that users (even people that pay for the enterprise version) are bombarded with the worst of the worst clickbait that takes up 1/3 of your screen if you mousover a certain part of the screen?

Absolutely, I think it's bizarre. But I find that many users actually seem to like it. The apple news app seems pretty tabloidy too (although not as bad) so I'm cautious about projecting my taste onto others.

At this point, I wouldn't be that surprised if people working at Microsoft competitors would receive more distracting junk.

Since mid-90s I allways had Linux and Windows. But when I updated a Testnotebook from Win7 to Win10 and saw CandyCrash and XBox all over the place, it was clear form me, I don't have professional licenses to let me spam from Microsoft with such BS. Since then, I'm Linux only.

You have to remember that these issues do not apply to all users equally. Between different editions, regions, accounts, a/b testing, usage patterns etc different folks can have very different experiences.

The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently (I haven't tried it, because of the vendor lock). Linux on the other hand is great, but has abysmal quality check due to wide variety of everything. Windows is just works (until Win11, which was a marketing pushed bullshit, without half of the featured from the Win10 branch).

> The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently

I would argue against that. Just the fact alone that you can’t use Windows 11 Home without your machine being connected to a Microsoft account is proof enough that Windows is more anti consumer than macOS.

Isn't there some kind of physics law that says every 2nd Windows version sucks?

I think it fits quite well, XP was good, Vista sucked, Win 7 was good, 8 sucked, 10 was good, 11 sucks. Windows 12 is going to be the next version to try I guess.

Apple provides a clear and beneficial point of difference. They are vertically integrated and now with Apple silicon, have arguably the best productivity laptops on the market. My M2 Air, lets me do all the personal dev and admin work my XPS 17 does, but I can easily go several days without a charge. My work provided MBP will easily go all day on a single charge and have plenty of charge left.

Linux provides easily the best dev environment, is free, gives you all the control you could possible want, runs on lots of hardware and is speedy even on old hardware. Most of the internet is probably hosted on some flavour of linux, and open source frameworks so it's easy for you to do the same.

Windows is good for games and if you need to use Excel? It also has the best drivers for my printer. Am I being unfair here?

As a ~95% Mac user, the only thing that I keep a Windows partition around for is games. If Apple could just give up that Steve Jobs-era bias against games and make their platform great for gaming, I could get rid of Windows altogether.

Also, game companies share the blame. Even now in 2023, they're still not writing their games portably enough so that the macOS version is a recompile.

> Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently

I've never seen anything as abhorrent as the stuff this article is reporting on, in macOS. A lot of Apple's hardware policies and anti-consumer, I'll give you that — is there anything in macOS that you're aware of, that's in a similar ballpark?

As I said, I haven't actually used macOS because I can't without significant money investment for unclear reason. But just from the random mentions here and on Reddit over the years I've created a picture that there are issues with that OS too. Like for example there was a gigantic article a few years ago linked here by a windows switcher and pro user, who listed multiple complaints about window handling in the macOS DE. Like happens when use maximize/minimize windows, alt-tab through them, interaction with a taskbar etc. I wouldn't be able to recount all of it, but I got an idea that Win10 was miles ahead in this area (Win11 is trash though).

There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.

I guess vendor lock is the key problem. As long as everything is nailed down without options, any defect or even design choice can be effective anti-consumer. All hardware issues become a whole product issues, because OS and hardware are inseparable.

Some day maybe I'll try it, even just to see what's all the fuss is about, but vendor lock makes is just hard enough that I simply upgrade my Windows box every time.

> multiple complaints about window handling

Gotcha. macOS has its own paradigm and does certain things differently, that's for sure, but I don't think it's anything a reasonably experienced user couldn't get used to. It's added things like full-screen in recent years — not as good as a maximised window, IMO, but there are utilities that can handle that.

> There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.

I've never run into an upgrade issue, and the fact that they're free is a big bonus. I've had one or two issues with my macbook pro, hardware-wise, but the general quality of the hardware is second-to-none, as far as I'm aware.

> everything is nailed down without options

This is typically why I, and many others, prefer macOS. I actually don't want to be endlessly tinkering with my OS — I quite enjoyed doing that in the early days, but now I just want to get my work done in the most pleasant environment possible. However, I haven't used any recent Windows versions, so I can't really compare.

> I can't imagine having to deal with this kind of things on a daily-basis while trying to actually get stuff done.

I switched from Windows to Arch Linux on Thinkpads for about 15 years and had a great time and learned a lot, but dealing with things on a daily basis was why I switched back to Windows 10 a few years ago, along with a new gaming habit during the pandemic. Gaming on Linux with Steam is wonderful these days, but the daily overhead of random stuff to deal with was too much when sometimes I just want to play games.

You specifically chose a high maintenance distro?

I'm running linux mint and I haven't had to fiddle with anything for years

> You specifically chose a high maintenance distro?

I guess so? Overall Arch was pretty easy to maintain, I just got tired of bailing on friends because I needed to spend hours figuring out some random issue.

yeah... bad choice :) if you wanted the Arch ecossystem without all the manual work you could have picked Manjaro or other arch-based distro

I did try Manjaro, it was definitely more user-friendly. Still not what I was looking for, unfortunately.

Thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck, all games that I care about now run on Linux.

I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months later, I can say that it's been a bliss :)

PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it's hard to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...

> I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes

Any reason for not using Google sheets or similar?

Sometimes it’s not up to the user if the company they work/contract for requires it.

It is woefully behind if you have real number crunching to do.

If you need to be doing 'real number crunching', you probably shouldn't be using any spreadsheet. Excel is not MySQL or Jupyter.

I think the Google Sheets devs would agree with you that spreadsheets shouldn't be used for anything serious. That's why it's missing such basic features as an X/Y scatter plot with a line - which is trivial in any other spreadsheet program.

Personally when I have a few dozen data points and I want an X/Y plot with a line, I find a spreadsheet is a better tool than MySQL.

Gnuplot.

Yup, I pretty much guarantee that Google Sheets is not intended for people who need X/Y scatter plots. I would theorise that 99% of Excel users don't require that feature either.

MySQL and Jupyter don't have data visualization. Or are you saying the options are a) use google sheets, or b) learn to program

Jupyter absolutely includes data visualization, or rather all the major languages it supports do. But honestly, yes. Complicated work in excel is programming, it's just completely undebuggable since the logic is spread out invisibly in multiple grid dimensions, sheets, and macros.

Give me a Jupyter notebook written in a language I don't yet know any day before you give me a complicated excel monstrosity.

Not a Python guy at all, but a couple of my coworkers use Jupyter notebooks a lot, and it's definitely very cool.

I need to send out Excel files to clients and they need to display 100% perfect when the client opens them with their Microsoft Excel. So using Google Sheets or LibreOffice is a risk, because while they work 99% of the time, they tend to break with power-user Excel features like integrated resource links.

> I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the text import crashes in Wine.

Wouldn't Excel Online be enough to do the trick? It's supposedly feature complete.

It's far from feature-complete. If Excel Online is good enough for you, the faster, more stable LibreOffice Calc is good enough for you.

People use Microsoft Excel for the stuff that just nothing else does.

Or the stuff that no other software wants to do. Macros that can upload your financial records to a Latvian server after a single click in an email? Nobody else wants to do that.

It's supposedly feature complete.

It is not. For one thing it is missing macros, power pivot, many solvers and support for third-party add-ons. It also screws up some visual things like text placement and the like.

Don't try to understand the mind of a chronic Excel user: Their minds are as unknowable as an octopus' mind.

I think it's more that Excel is incredibly capable. People who reach the status of Excel Power User are akin to F1 Drivers who need every seemingly absurd capability found on their steering wheels.

Oh for sure, people use Excel to make the world go round. But for plebs like me, trying to understand it is just a path to madness.

Excel is not tremendously capable, but near-infinitely flexible.

It's a strange amorphous organism that can be coaxed into doing almost anything, if poorly.

Games were the main reason I came back to Windows after trying Ubuntu with Wine over 15 years ago, then quickly switched to Mac, and when I was unhappy with Apples direction, Windows the unfortunate but obvious place to come back to. Should have gone to Linux instead.

I still need to check whether all my favourite games are supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution. My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.

But I really think the time is right for something better. An OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn't make sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple's lunch. There's System76 of course, but they're small. I want something that's for everybody. A new standard to draw everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple and Microsoft.

In case you don't know the site: ProtonDB offers crowd sourced reports on how well games run with Proton/Wine. With some playing around, you can run GoG games using Proton.

Nowadays you don't need to mess with Wine manually, there are a lot of tools to install Windows binaries just like they were Linux binary. You'll even forget you're using Windows versions.

You can check ProtonDB for compatibility. The information is valid even if you have the GOG version of the game. For games that are not on Steam there is WineDB but I find that the UI isn't as nice as ProtonDB.

Steam has a Linux launcher and let you install Windows binaries directly. For GOG or Epic games there is Heroic launcher which is very easy to use.

Don't overthink your distribution choice, just go for one of the major general purpose distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc) and you'll be fine no matter what you pick.

Will the GOG version of the game work as well as the Steam version even if GOG doesn't list it as a Linux game while Steam does?

Also, I think the choice of window manager might matter more to my experience than the choice of distribution. I find some Linux wms too clunky, too Win95.

> capable of running all games

My solution for this is to have 2 computers.

I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents, study, etc.

And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only. I treat this pc as a console, it’s only for gaming. Any OS annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it’s still more flexible than a console.

I just use virtualized Windows from macOS to play games that don’t run on mac. Worst case scenario I have to dual boot into Windows.

There’s a weirdly long thread of dorky gaming infighting happening in the top comment where people don’t seem to know that you can just use Windows for a few games and otherwise use a main OS for the rest of your time.

This would be my setup if I cared for Windows gaming at all. As it is, I use a Switch for that outlet. Why do you need the PC to be "more flexible than a console" — are you talking about hardware upgrades? Are Xboxes not very upgradable?

Consoles tend to have very limited controllers. Nothing beats mouse+keyboard.

Ah, true — if you're talking those kinds of games! It's a real shame consoles don't have better keyboard + mouse support. Then again, I guess game developers would be wary to rely on them since they wouldn't be guaranteed.

I used to have that back when I had a Macbook, but now my son as confiscated the gaming PC because it's more powerful than his laptop.

I've tried to set my laptop to dual boot Windows/PopOS, but it refuses to boot to PopOS.

If you don't want to tinker with your UI, would suggest PopOS (System76 distro). If you like to tinker, I really like Ubuntu Budgie, which lets me have some bits of config based on Windows, Mac and just different from either. I took a few days to get it how I liked, and over a year since without much issue. Alternatively, there's always Mint or other Ubuntu or Fedora options out there.

All said, I really liked PopOS, it has some very sane defaults, good out of the box support for hardware as well. Most of the support is upstream via Ubuntu, but a lot of UI tweaks and custom additions are coming from System76, and they have been doing very well. Will likely switch back for the next LTS release.

PopOS doesn't let me tinker with the UI? That's a shame. It was a big contender for me. But if it's Ubuntu-based, shouldn't it be just as configurable?

It's just Linux. PopOS uses Gnome which is less tinker friendly but you can still tweak some things or just install KDE or any other DE.

You can absolutely tinker, or replace the DE if you like... it's just less configurable out of the box than Ubuntu Budgie, generally speaking.

It took me 10 minutes to run w10privacy to remove all the telemetry and spyware from Windows. It took me hours fiddling with adb to partially remove some of evilness from my android phone. Dont know much about iOS, but I've heard they dont even have an adb equivalent.

I've unrecoverably bricked a couple of android phones through not having the precisely correct model variant for the instructions I was following, or for the specific ROM I was installing. Sucks, but I generally don't faff with a device that's worth more than throw-away.

The risk is worth it for the life that LineageOS really breathes into an older device.

GrapheneOS is extremely easy to install, the installer is literally a website where you click "Install now" while the phone is connected via USB. It is also one of the most usable custom OSes I've used and it is not only more privacy oriented but also more secure!

Would love to go back to a flashed device, but last time I did (3-4 years ago) my banking and e-id apps refused to run in rooted environments. 2nd-factoring payments and the like is a main use case of a phone now. Are these kinds of issues still around?

For LineageOS? Yes. For GrapheneOS? Maybe.

Essentialy banking apps hate unlocked bootloaders. GOS (GrapheneOS) avoids this relocking the bootloader (the key is theirs, if you want to build your own GOS you'll have to sign with your own key). However GOS still fails Play Integrity checks: it fails CTS Profile Match.

So, Banking Apps probably work but Google Wallet won't.

Additionally, they run Google Apps as non-privileged apps, using a compatibility layer called `gmscompat`. It's cool because it's easy to Degoogle your phone in an instant if you wish to. But certain niche features, for example, using your camera to help Google Maps match your surrounding with Street View data crash Maps.

Otherwise all runs mostly well. Waze a few weeks ago was wonky but I assume the bug they fixed in Wifi-location allowed Waze to behave -- haven't tested though.

Magisk can hide root from apps, but I don't know how effective it is against all possible methods an app might have of detecting root. I'm not sure if detecting an unlocked bootloader is treated in the same way or not - I haven't run into that one as a problem so far.

I refuse to use my phone for banking due to trust issues in putting all my eggs into such a stealable, forgettable-in-a-taxi, and heavily monitored device basket.

I like GOS as well -- and use it -- but most people won't have Pixel phones.

> As to the Linux, I tried to use it every so often, but it takes forever to learn all the command line switches to accomplish even the simplest tasks.

I rather spend time on getting some weird hardware to work (yes this is still occasionally a thing in Linux land), that getting my system "reasonably spyware free" (as we have no clue what actually happens since it's closed source).

I'm not sure you can compare fresh installs of Windows to OEM installs of Android. A relative once got a low end Asus laptop that was so entirely bogged down with bundled crap it couldn't get past the firstrun setup. I had to do a fresh install.

Android OEMs do the same. Some are worse (looking at you, Samsung) and do horrible things to stock images in the interest of service integration and capturing long tail software sales. You could argue Google does the same over a AOSP-level base image with Google Search/Play.

Things like LineageOS give a clean android experience, but it's hardware dependant.

And call me old fashioned, but scrombling onto Google to find w10privacy, download it, unzip and run it as an admin kinda sounds like the hell the Windows XP era community got into with adware removers just installing more adware. You can buy the first spot on Google. Much rather see a Github page, source, releases, etc.

I share the same sentiment.

The other day I was frustrated with several Linux quirks my laptop was experiencing and decided to give Windows 11 + WSL2 a try.

The sheer amount of bloat, sneaky privacy settings, ads, clunky UI etc. literally make Windows unusable. I was willing to put up with the switch (leveraging WSL2), but the entire operating system feels like a browser with toolbars from the 2000s.

Except that you pay for windows. It’s madness.

It's even worse: you become a product (spyware, telemetry, etc) but don't get a free product in return.

WSL is an "embrace-extend-extinguish" feature.[1] It isn't good enough to be Linux, but it's good enough to draw people to make the change that you did.

An operating system should boot my computer and give me access to my hardware on my terms. Full stop.

Any exfiltration of telemetry about my use of the OS without my uncoerced consent is a much worse quirk than any bug I have ever encountered in Linux.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I see it as the opposite in practice... I've now worked at 3 different companies (Windows/.Net shops) since WSL has been available where most dev work is actually in WSL, and deployed to Linux servers. And even grumblings about wanting to switch full dev to Linux and abandoning Windows altogether for at least dev work. Current job, the IT security guys are already dogfooding Linux...

It's an exfiltration path in practice, from what I've seen far more than an ingratiation path, despite what MS's intentions may have been. Once you get devs able to spin up a DB via Docker in under a minute vs. the desktop installs, refresh/update, etc... it's a path away from MS.

Microsoft built WSL because software development and SaaS servers were moving inexorably towards *nix, and Windows was bleeding developers and MSDN subscribers. It was a 'stop the bleeding' move, not an EEE play. They needed to keep corporate developers on Windows, and give IT departments a good answer for "we need Linux support" that didn't involve a MS license count drop. Windows-oriented IT departments also appreciate being able to support developers who need Linux without having to add support for another OS.

There may even be some developers who prefer WSL on Windows over Linux, especially at work. When Group Policy turns off all the adware/spyware and annoyances in Windows 11 Enterprise, it isn't quite as horrible of an experience as it is at home.

I completely switched to Linux the first time since 2006 because Windows is just way to slow or distracting now. Windows 10 worked okay for a while, but I don't want the random crashes, tabloid news and slow file navigation of Windows 11. Fedora Workstation GUI sometimes crashes, but productivity wise it is so much better and everything works. Software wise I only miss the google drive client, which is still not here after almost 11 years[0]. There is rclone, but I sometimes get logged out.

[0] https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go...

None of the operating systems are your friends. They are all very imperfect tools with different problems and tradeoffs. In many cases the devil you know can still be reasonable choice

If you consider OSs potential friends, you may like the movie "Her".

OSs are offers organizations, some may be friendlier than others. MS has shown not to care for your privacy the least bit. Apple at least tries to uphold the facade of respecting your privacy: so they probably will go to greater lengths.

Linux (+ desktop packages) otoh are closest to what I consider a does-not-skrew-me-over OS-friend. Al east they do not have a public history of sneaky deals with 3-letter agencies and/or a business model that involves me being the product.

It's not about technology but the people who create the technology. There seems to be a complete breakdown of ethics and responsibility at Microsoft (and also other large tech companies) for the sake of 'shareholder value' (or whatever the Golden Calf is they're dancing around at the moment).

I only boot Windows these days in order to flash things onto mobiles to get rid of Google :)

I was later to the Linux Desktop party, and it was the default ads, bloat, and telemetry included in a base Windows install that was the final nail in its coffin.

I still use Windows for work, but that's outside of my control.

Another vote for PopOS here as acknowledging nod to fxtentacle.

> I still use Windows for work, but that's outside of my control.

I quit my job to avoid using it and I would do it again.

People don't choose Windows, their company or OEM does.

This part sucks. I would rather save my $100 and not give a dime of that money to Microsoft, but in this country I was not allowed to order a laptop without it despite wasting more than $100 in folks’ time trying to reach someone who would let my protest.

Windows 7 was genuinely good. It was stable, it just worked, it shipped with Powershell, and I could launch anything with very few keystrokes.

The downsides I will acknowledge are the modal dialogues (which are worse on macos) and the fact that many system tasks require diving into the win32 api, although I've at least always found that to be well documented.

At the time of 7, Linux desktop options were not great

Windows went downhill from 7. Although I still prefer it over macos.

I have high hopes for Asahi, which I'm hoping will save my despicable work macbook

It's funny that even thinking for a sec, I don't know if there are any things that I'd miss from Windows 10 if I hypothetically were to jump back to Windows 7.

Windows Terminal?

Multiple desktops is a big one for me.

I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management (though less than I like Spectacle on Mac) and search-to-launch. Both of which could probably be provided by add-ons.

I can't think of any other user-facing features I'd miss if the UI otherwise reverted to Win98. Several things, I'd like better in their Win98 versions.

Under the hood, it's nice that it doesn't crash nearly as often, and the driver situation is better. NTFS support is nice (consumer Windowses didn't used to have that) when the alternative is FAT32. Beyond that, not much I care about.

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management

Ughhh: good idea, terribly implemented. Last time I used Windows 10, it seemed like every time I tried to drag my window around, Windows would guess that I wanted to also full-screen it, or pin it to one side, or close all other windows, or anything else besides just repositioning it. I feel I need to have a surgeon's precision in order to just drag a window around my desktop now.

This is why Spectacle (loads of similar tools are available) is so good — all that happens via keyboard shortcuts. Does Windows offer the same, plus the ability to turn off the dragging behaviour?

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management

Couldn't you do this in Windows 7 with WinKey+Left or WinKey+Right? I guess I am kind of keyboard oriented in my usage though, I mostly get frustrated with the edge of screen mouse features because I mostly enable them by accident.

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management (though less than I like Spectacle on Mac) and search-to-launch.

Aquasnap can do the snapping, and more. If any of the 'more' bothers you — like "shake for always-on-top" activating too easily, you can adjust or disable that bit. Hmm, I should add that to my current Win10 machine. I did eventually get a license, so it won't complain about having more than one monitor.

Voidtools Everything can be configured as a search-to-launch tool, but I mainly use it for its blindingly fast NTFS searching. Where Windows Search typic'ly excludes large sections of your drives, eats CPU cycles while it 'indexes', and then still either gives you "Please wait…" or simply claims that it can't find anything, VE just works. Even does NTFS drives across the network (though it has to rebuild a local index of the remote media periodic'ly).

> I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management and search-to-launch.

FWIW, KDE had both of these out of the box long before Windows 10. Sucks when you have to rely on some company that doesn't care about you for your desktop UX.

linux desktop was far far ahead of even current windows back in the days of windows 7. for something called "windows", it certainly had, and still continue to have pretty lousy window management

I use my PC infrequently, just for video games when I get time. It feels like every time I turn it one, maybe once a month, it's done an update to somehow look worse and worse. One of the latest changes is the search bar in the menu bar now has scroll icons and is double height despite being empty. It's like they don't do visual QA.

I live in France, but usually use an English UI. So when I updated my gaming PC, I just saw a "search" or something, figured "wth?! start menu already does that", and kicked it off the taskbar.

Then a few days later, a colleague shared his screen, with the French UI. The text was cut off mid-sentence. Something like "type here to". The remainder would have actually fit if not for the random icon displayed at the right of the search field.

> I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.

I had, in a sense, the opposite experience.

I was discussing in a social circle of mine the reasons why one should avoid as much as possible the upgrade to Windows 11... and I completely failed to persuade anybody.

Non-power users use a very limited subset of O/S functionalities (I'd say that as long as device and applicative support is sufficient, the O/S is essentially transparent to them), so, from their perspective, all those ideological and "weakly concrete" motivations are essentially pointless.

I definitely bothers me ideologically because this is a large scale covert assault (and it will have long term effects), but sadly, to non-power users, it's completely irrelevant.

Non-power users operate entirely in browser these days. You can switch them over to arch and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The problem is switchover of the OS is a complicated, techie thing to do. Try convincing someone to switch to Win 10/12/whatever isn't current one and requires more than ticking "yes I agree to automagical update on next reboot". It's not an aversion to Linux, it's laziness.

What we need is Linux laptops being sold in supermarkets. 99% of people won't even notice they aren't running Windows anymore.

I think you're talking about Chromebooks.

Unfortunately they are also proprietary, spyware-laden devices, that cease to be updated for no good reason after 5 years.

As a power user, upgrading to Windows 11 is great if your hardware meets sysreqs.

Why? Because of all the numerous and significant backend improvements, a relatively less schizophrenic UI, and more.

Certain things that affect power users and common users alike, such as proper Intel 12th+ Gen CPU support and variable refresh rates, are Windows 11 exclusive, not being backported to Windows 10 (let alone 7).

To be clear, I have my fair share of gripes with Windows 11 that I've worked around. But overall it's an easy upgrade over Windows 10.

Thanks! This is the first I've read of any Win11 features that aren't just 'features'. All the articles and marketing stuffs make it seem the same as the last to major versions of macOS:

"Look at all these new features we have! (…that are so minor or quizzically irrelevant that you'll wonder why this is a whole version number upgrade instead of a .1 release).

Oh, and we rearranged a bunch of stuff into weird, often obscure, places with no justification, but we're calling those features, too!".

So, now at least I have some things to look up, even if I intend to skip Win11 for other reasons.

To be fair, Windows 11 internally identifies as NT10.0, the same as Windows 10's internal identification.

So officially, Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with new icing on top, but there are nonetheless significant changes and improvements behind-the-scenes that may or may not merit a marketing version number increase.

Every non-power user I've seen actively really likes 11. It's baffling to me, I don't see how it doesn't get in the way more.

I prefer it. One reason is simply that MS haven't been fixing bugs in Win10 for a long time now, so Win11 is meaningfully less buggy and more consistent.

Everything I've heard makes 11 sound worse, from the new start bar, from things being rewritten but not everything so it's a horrible mix of old and new, features missing for no reason, telemetry, all kinds of horrible things.

10 at least with the way I customized it is entirely stable and I'm not aware of any bugs that affect my workflow at all.

"Eulogise" has connotations of praising someone or something after its death.

If you mean "trying to talk others round to it", you might mean "evangelise" :-)

Unfortunately, for PC gaming Windows still has sort of a monopoly, it's not as bad as in the past thanks to Proton though.

Also under the hood Windows is pretty good technology for the most part, letting this solid technology base being vandalized by anti-social middle management assholes is almost a criminal offense by whoever oversees this stuff (but I guess the fish rots from the head).

What's the alternative though?

I don't want to buy the overpriced hardware that comes with Apple.

For Linux, I'd like something that provides some kind of stability without me having to search for obscure shell commands for fixing new issues every 2 weeks, which unfortunately has been my experience with using it on my laptop in the past. Maybe it has gotten better, I'm open for recommendations.

I've been using Arch Linux for the past 6 years and I have rarely had anything break. In between I had to use Ubuntu for 6 months due to some software that would only run on Ubuntu, which I found horrible. Arch Linux might be difficult to set up for someone new to Linux but once it's installed I found it a breeze to use. There are distributions based on Arch that are easier to install, e.g. Manjaro.

This has been my experience as well. The simpler you keep your Linux install, the less likely it'll be that something breaks - and if something does break, then you'll have a much easier time finding the culprit.

For laptops you need to do a bit of research to make sure they have good Linux support. There are websites to help with this. You'll also gain an intuition for which manufacturers to avoid.

For the software side, you need to learn it, just like anything else. You've spent years, perhaps the majority of your life, learning Windows. Of course there are going to be things you'll have to learn again. But you'll be better for it. I'd rather learn to use a system that respects me than one that treats me like a commodity.

> For laptops you need to do a bit of research to make sure they have good Linux support.

Or, you know, you could buy it preinstalled, with support, form a vendor that actually supports Linux on the hardware.

When someone complains about problems with Linux, I have a hard time to think of anything like that in my experience with Linux in the last 10 years. But when I put my experience in a wider context, I notice one important aspect:

When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer widespread and quality over new or cheap.

That is probably (next to using a enduser-friendly distro like Ubuntu) the most important point to circumvent nasty bugs and digging deep into the OS.

What is left are problems, that are mostly easily solved with a quick internet search and maybe copy pasting something in your command line.

That will probably happen at some point, but not every two weeks. More like in the first month after setting up your system and then once a year or when you add new hardware to your stack.

> When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer widespread and quality over new or cheap.

I did that once. Every single component had an OSS in-kernel drivers.

Compositing wouldn't work with an external display connected. After about 10 years of Linux on the desktop that was the last Linux desktop machine I ever used.

Ubuntu

The best recommendation is to buy hardware that's well supported. Every piece of hardware on my ThinkPad X1C (including the fingerprint reader) worked with no extra config or messing around.

When it comes to laptops, I don't see how apple is overpriced. I'm currently in search of a well-built CPU-performant laptop with a decent bettery, and the likes of XPS and Thinkpads cost about the same or more than a similarly decked Macbook m2 pro. Only the GPU and upgradeability could be considered limiting factors.

The main thing that makes Macs overpriced is the lack of 15" MacBook Air, so to get a large screen you need to buy a CPU/GPU you don't need.

And the hardware is too good for the software longevity. A 10 year old Windows machine works fine if you have decent hardware (so, desktop, not laptop) but Apple EOLs and rots the software compatibility of your perfectly functional hardware after 7 years

The most user friendly Linux distro I've come across that provides what you're describing would be ZorinOS, it's awesome.

https://zorin.com/os/

The alternative is to buy Windows and spend 10 minutes turning all this off.

You've probably already got a monitor; if so, I'd recommend a Mac mini. Very powerful, slightly affordable, all the great Mac experience.

I said I wasn't here to eulogise but most of the problems I've had with Linux have been temporary and I have gained transferable skills in fixing them. I have earned a fair chunk of money with those skills.

It's absolutely not perfect, and part of that is there's too much choice, but if you're willing and able, you can make it work for you and yours most of the time.

And yes, I do think it's much better than it was.

> I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.

So true! We are pushed around for the sake of pretetious crap.

Last Windoze I used was XP. Back then most geeks reinstalled the OS from scratch every few months or so. This was necessary to combat the inevitable rot that happened to every installation. There was always a number of things that were necessary to install to make the system usable every time. We worked out how to streamline some things by building custom installation discs. But there was still a load of effort and accumulated knowledge applied to just using the damn thing.

I'd been playing with Linux for a while but hadn't got beyond the dual-booting phase. Then at some point I realised that if I put as much effort into Linux to learn how things worked etc. it would probably be just as good in practice. Why did I continue to put up with Windows? Turns out I was right. I haven't had Windoze in my house for well over a decade at this point. I never had to use Vista. One of the best choices I ever made.

We come from similar eras. I never made the transition to 7, permanently moving to ubuntu 5.10 thanks to the CDs they sent out in the mail. Ubuntu for over a decade until late 2020, then arch and arch-likes since

Just a couple weeks ago I was backing up some scripts and adding some arcane linux lore to my obsidian database when it occurred to me that I haven't re-installed my OS in 2.5 years. That felt pretty wild to think about, especially when I consider all the scripts, packages and late night pamac hammering I occasionally do when I find a curious piece of software. While I tinkere with my linux installs far more than windows, they seem to have held up over time far better. Whether this is a consequence of the software itself, my behavior changing, or whatever, I cannot say for sure. But it's been a far more pleasurable experience using and maintaining my linux systems than windows installs.

I think there is a distinct difference between people who compute for the sake of computing versus people who compute as the means to an end. One is a person who uses tools at least partially for the joy of tool usage itself, while the other a person who uses tools to complete tasks, the other . I cannot fault the latter for just using whatever works, if they are happy in doing so. But I think those of us who fit into the former category are far more likely to engage with linux and its brethren. My computer is a machine which, largely, I demand does what I instruct it to do. I prefer an OS that will do so and then get out of my way and I will accept idiosyncracies in exchange for this. So long as a laundry list of dependencies doesn't explode overnight from a goofball update or my nvidia drivers don't just disappear because they feel like it, linux meets those needs very well.

I got my first MacBook around the time Vista came out and thereby was able to skip Vista on my own machine. My employers continued to use XP for several years, and (after a long period of unemployment during the Great Recession) I couldn't afford a Mac next time I needed a new machine. Now after a couple of years with a ho-hum Dell Latitude 13 that cost $1200, I'm using a MacBook Air M1 that cost less and performs far, far better and has none of the glitches and issues Windows and Intel are famous for.

This is the correct way to make people think.. Not: YOU NEED TO GO TO [OS.NAME], but asking them: "why are you putting up with this?"

"Have you looked at _any_ other alternative?"

Windows innovation seems to have stalled, lacking notable improvements in productivity, accessibility, or utility in recent years.

Despite its generally good quality (particularly regarding software and hardware compatibility, which is important for an OS), Microsoft's potential to innovate and monetize Windows further appears limited.

This plateau is common among operating systems, with hardware breakthroughs in the 90s and 00s sparking innovation in PCs and later in mobile devices. The same could be said about business computing OS innovations in the 80s and 90s. But now the OSes for all this hardware and purposes roughly meet customer and consumer requirements. So what more innovation could there be?

In response to this stagnation, Microsoft has to resort to adware and spyware to profit from the Windows franchise to extract further financial growth from the platform. They could probably earn a stable income from Windows for many years by just maintaining the OS in an ethical way, but "stable income" is not what tech companies are looking for, they are looking for infinite growth.

The average HN user seems to be a fervent Linux fan, so maybe I can give some perspective as someone who isn't.

I used Linux for around 5 years, with Arch as my distro of choice, after which I switched to Windows 11. Most of the time, I didn't face any problems - but the problems I did face sometimes took me hours and hours to solve.

And there were always issues that were basically unfixable: hibernate, battery life, security, CPU drivers, hardware acceleration etc. I say basically here, because I could have spend hundreds of hours to address some of these things, but I'd still end up with something very brittle and maintenance intensive.

Some people will immediately point out that I should have been using a more "User friendly" distro like Ubuntu, but Arch has been the most stable and easiest to maintain distro of any that I tried. With Ubuntu and its ilk, the inevitable issue would take me ages to track down, because I had to first fight my way through a dozen layers of abstraction and figure out which of the hundreds of packages was the culprit. No, a simple and minimal install has always served me best with Linux.

And yes, I tried other distros - every single major one - and I faced the same (or similar) issues in all of them.

And outside of the OS, the entire Linux philosophy seems to be as user-unfriendly as possible. Packages, because they're maintained by someone in their free time, are very barebones and need extensive configuration to function. Which is especially annoying because I constantly needed to edit config files, each one with it's own unique syntax that required multiple Google searches to discover (and rediscover if some time had passed).

With Windows, the only true issue I faced was with the telemetry. I bought an enterprise license, disabled it all, validated it with some external tools - and the problem was solved. I never saw ads, slowness or any UI/UX problems.

And the benefits were numerous, I now had access to high-quality, powerful software for free. And these programs were easily configurable and usable - no googling necessary! On Linux, I sometimes wondered how so many people could quickly create graphics and audio, because that was always an incredible chore on Linux. Now it feels like a breeze, almost as if I've been catapulted a century forward.

In fact, the reason why I switched was because there was a very insidious hardware problem that I couldn't track down on Linux, even after spending months on it. When I installed Windows on my secondary drive (to update my BIOS), I found the problem in one minute using ThrottleStop.

And security wise, Windows is also far superior. Aside from the obvious Linux vulnerabilities, Windows allowed me to spin up lightweight sandboxes with system integration to isolate browser tabs or files I downloaded. As someone that used QubesOS for some time, this really impressed me.

All in all I see no reason to go back, the only thing I miss is i3, and how it made using a single screen feel just as productive as using three.

Can you elaborate on your "CPU drivers" issue?

Sure, the standard Intel drivers would randomly throttle my CPU into unusability or completely disable turbo boost for hours. I switched to the acpi driver and used the performance and powersave governors when appropriate. This, however, resulted in even worse battery life and somewhat subpar performance.

Oh, and to be clear. The Intel driver would disable turbo boost even when the laptop was plugged in and the CPU wasn't running hot.

I had other issues when the CPU would run hot, but that turned out to be a faulty sensor triggering BD_PROCHOT. In fact, this was the issue that ThrottleStop allowed me to find and solve.

EDIT: The reason why I knew that this was a faulty sensor and not BD_PROCHOT doing its job was because I manually measured the temps on various components, each of which was completely within its normal operating temperature.

Interesting. I'm having trouble with my amd laptop stuttering a lot. It is worse under load of course, but even without any I can see random input/output lag.

I wonder if it the root cause could be the same.

I've found that random stuttering is often an indication of a drive about to go bad, especially if you have a spinning drive attached.

That said, I saw a lot of fan curve, temp issues in the later Intel macbooks... I had a $4000 macbook pro i9 that was effectively unusable with background services or Docker containers running at all.

Amd is developing a new governor (amd_pstate) for their cpu, you may have better luck with it ? On my laptop it works well and helped reduce the number of spikes. It requires a recent cpu and kernel though.

Here the Archlinux wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling

if someone says 'that I should have been using a more "User friendly" distro like Ubuntu' then reply to them "Then stop advocating Linux and explicitly say what when you say 'Linux' you actually mean Ubuntu".

But on topic - the latest Gnome on Rocky 9: if you open Settings then the first... tab? is WiFi settings. For some reasons when the Gnome builds the list of available networks it demands sudo password prompt. But with or without entring it you would be prompted the same password again. And again. And again. No, you can't navigate to some other tab while the prompt is open. No, you shouldn't be asked for sudo/UAC/whatever elevation to display the list of WiFi networks.

'User friendly', my ass.

> The average HN user seems to be a fervent Linux fan

maybe at one time, and it might be cool if that were true...but I would say HN is probably 90% fully committed to the Apple ecosystem at this point

no different than the general public for their age cohort...we are slowly running out of people...even "technical" people, who understand systems under the hood

Unfortunately people are still free to use what they see fit.

You’ll have to live with it. Some people prefer Windows, no matter how wrong you think they are, how horrible you think the experience is, or how evil you think Microsoft is. I guess you don’t use it anyway. Just continue.

You don’t have to be condescending. What kind of validation does hating on Windows bring to software devs?

Vista was shit, but Win 7 was generally accepted as a very good version of Windows, with 8 being bad, and then 10 being eh.

But 10 can be made pretty acceptable if you bring out the group policy editor.

Unfortunately, I fear what Apple is doing and will do to macOS. The trend seems to be that they are making it into another walled garden, ala iOS. I can still run Linux, but I hate that Apple's main competitor on the desktop is lowering the bar so, so low, and exerting so little effort to keep them on their toes to make something that people continue to want.

There's a rule for Windows versions: you should skip every second one. So the right sequence is:

install Windows 95

skip Windows 98

install Windows 2000

skip Windows ME

install Windows XP

skip Windows Vista

install Windows 7

skip Windows 8

install Windows 10

skip Windows 11

This is so consistent that I beleive there are two teams inside MS alternately developing next version.

They say, though, that Windows 11 is the last version and there will be only updates since. I really hope this is not the case.

They say, though, that Windows 11 is the last version and there will be only updates since. I really hope this is not the case.

It was actually Windows 10 they said that about, so...

right, because apple said Mac OS X (1998 or so) was the last version they were going to release.

from new era Macs it went 7, 8, 9, X. Then intel macs, still macos X.

I do know they're up to version 16 or something of whatever the OS is called these days. probably just MacOS.

I didn't believe either of them!

The ads are baked into Windows 10 too, although might be worse in 11.

Win95 was widely regarded as being shit prior to the C version IIRC (I had A, though, and always really liked it...)

Win98se was considered damn good, compared to what had come before. Disruption for little benefit, at launch, though.

2K was only for businesses, bad driver support and lacking in some software support on account of using the NT kernel before hardware & software vendors were expecting home users to have it.

ME was a pointless refresh of 98. Buggier and with system menus subtly messed-with to no purpose. The first miss-step of the Vista/8 variety.

XP was good by SP3. Not so much at launch.

Vista, yeah, slow as hell while adding nothing.

7 was still slow as hell, but wasn't as ugly and our hardware had gotten better so it was less-noticeable. Not much to recommend it aside from "XP's going out of support, and it's less-ugly than Vista".

8 was pointless and ugly, like Vista.

10 was another 7: de-uglified 8, but not much else going for it. Adware and shitware and spyware galore. This leaves 7 as the last "good" Windows.

11's 10 on steroids, so, two scoops of shit instead of one.

The GP list misses 8.1 which I consider the last actually good Windows, and the support has dwindled, esp. with the push of DX12... and AMD outright no supporting it at all, when it comes to GPUs.

Windows Vista was good by SP1 but required 2GB of RAM. WinSxS disk usage was only fixed on Win7, though.

I actually miss all those transparent windows :)

> Windows Vista was good by SP1 but required 2GB of RAM. WinSxS disk usage was only fixed on Win7, though.

Was it? I remember they added a tool that claimed it would clean it up but in practice it didn't seem to do much.

I thought Windows 10 just papered over the whole mess by doing an in place upgrade of the whole OS every 6-12 months.

What's the alternative? The joke that is macOS?

I use Linux daily, but its not ready for everyone, creative apps for example are nonexistent, And games aren't exactly plug and play.

In addition to not having a distro that combines gnome + zero hassle driver installs + friendly defaults, it was Ubuntu till they ruined it with snap, and now there is still nothing like it.

I just hope canonical gives up on snap.

I'm still on Windows because I'm a gamer, and while the gaming on Linux situation is improving, it's still not there yet. Games on Windows just work. I never have to do any fiddling. Download, install, play.

And maybe it's because I opt for the Pro version of Windows, but I don't have the advertisements people complain about. No Candy Crush, no news/tabloids, just my list of apps and a few shortcuts to things I've used.

The Linux desktop left me. Somehow the community just doesn’t get that it is possible for text labels to fit in the space that is allocated to them. Contrast that to the refinement of the command line interface experienced through ssh. It’s taken Linux what, 15 years, to not make the same transition that Microsoft did with WDDM in Vista?

I’m annoyed by the “thoroughly pizzled” features in Windows such as the OneDrive file shredding system, attempts to stuff ads up your nose, etc. The thing is I can turn that crap off with a finite amount of effort, whereas Linux desktop enthusiasts can spend forever tweaking their desktop and it “just doesn’t work” no matter what you do. My satisfaction with a new Windows 11 machine I just built is about as high as my satisfaction with my Ubuntu server, the difference is that the Win11 machine has a GUI and the Ubuntu server doesn’t.

Microsoft has a funny way of selling us ‘productivity’ with Windows 11. On one side of the screen, they promise us a sleek and smooth user experience that will make our work easier and faster. On the other side, they bombard us with widgets full of celebrity gossip and sports trivia that have nothing to do with our lives. What’s the point of that? Are they trying to distract us from our work or from their work? Maybe if Windows 11 were free, we could forgive them for their sneaky attempts to get us hooked on Bing. But no, they want us to pay 200 dollars for this dubious privilege. How are we supposed to feel about that? Grateful? Impressed? Satisfied? I don’t think so.

Presumably, the teams who develop the OS do want to give us a smooth user experience and help us to be productive and efficient. But between us and them are other teams tasked with extracting the maximum value from Windows users and increasing engagement with Microsoft's shittier services.

The same thing happens in web development. The developers and designers of news sites don't want to create an unusable mess of ads and auto-playing videos, but the business development guys love that shit.

The microsoft org chart comes to mind: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

There is a viral clip of Lebron James saying he doesn't pay for spotify premium. If a multi millionaire can justify going through the friction of the free software, you can argue masses feel the same way. An app/service with frictionless UX that requires subscription/fees is just going have a very small percentage of users. A developer/small team may be content with that, but VC funded outfits are advised and need to have a massive growth of user to justify further rounds. So the app/service has to be free with ads/other dark patterns to boost engagement/revenue. (exceptions that come to mind are netflix but even they have an ad tier now)

Recently switch to Windows, and my feeling is the "Pro" moniker in the OS title has as much weight as in "iPhone Pro".

Under the hood there's price discrimination on the Hypervisor and other services that regular users wouldn't use, but there seems fundamentally to be no difference in the interface between the two versions of the OS.

I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive. So Microsoft doesn't have to care at all about "productivity", and is free to bombard users with all the crapware of the worlds as long as there's some remote way to disable it.

Enterprises have their own edition which leaves Pro to be just prosumer.

I have Enterprise 11 on a non managed device and I can't really recognise many of the comments here. No news or pre-loaded spam apps. It's actually a pretty good experience.

I have a Microsoft Surface device and I recognise all of them.

Literally would pay more (kind of feel like I already have) to avoid advertising. If they sold Surfaces with Enterprise by default I'd be happy.

Same for me. I have been using Windows 10 Pro on various laptops and I have never seen any ads or other kinds of bullshit. I always thought that these were only a thing in Windows home editions?

Thanks, so it's really their segmentation of the market. I saw the Enterprise version of the Surface when buying mine, but didn't expect the internal OS was also different.

The price was pretty stiff, so it looks like I got priced out of the reasonable default experience.

> I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have their IT department deal with removing all the crap and adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat productive.

Ha ha ha. You know what happens when you "assume," right? I work for a Fortune 250 with 30K employees. We just "upgraded" the fleet at the start of the year. We're getting all the crap by default. It takes about 10 seconds for Edge to start and show the landing page with all of the stupid garbage. At least they NO LONGER prevent us from changing the start page on our browsers, and you can turn off the start menu crap. The only thing I can figure is that they got a discount on the licensing for leaving this stuff enabled. Like the general public, I assume that most people inside the company just live it.

Home lacks the group policy editor that's key to fixing so many Windows troubles. That's the only UI difference I know of.

A win 11 pro license isn't 200$.

Also, I've never seen an ad in my win 11 installation, on win 10 it was trivial to remove them from start.

A win 11 pro license isn't 200$.

A non-OEM Windows pro license bought from a legit reseller is actually quite a bit more than $200, at least here in Europe.

Officially it is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...

Wow, this link shows $326 for my country. Even more expensive than most legit resellers.

After having been on Linux for years (Debian server and Arch desktop), and MacOS for work. Having to use Windows is downright jarring. Every time I have to fix something, or do regular tasks it become apparent how little windows is suited by itself for power users.

As mentioned in the article, it can't get used to ads or tabloid news everywhere, it just feels wrong. I could spend some time removing them, but I'd rather not have to fight with Microsoft every time the product updates, I'd rather just avoid using it entirely. It is insane that you pay for a product, but is still served ads or tabloid news.

When I use debian for my server usage, I have most of the essential tools available, but when I use windows I either have to install a whole bunch of tools, or make do with the lackluster experience. I dread having to fix a windows server installation.

MacOS as well feels overrated, the UX has gotten noticeably worse over the years, unnecessary notifications that doesn't go away themselves, lackluster window management out of the box. MacOS is best for me when it exposes its unix roots so I can just get to work, the native stuff feels half baked at best. It does feel fast at least (m1 is a beast, by far the best laptop I've ever owned)

Linux (Arch) feels like it puts the user in control, I've had less errors for my arch home-server (which does see quite a bit of traffic), it does have sharp edges but I always feel in control of what is going on, or at least have the tools to fix it.

The desktop side is not quite as reliable, I've had to tinker with the bluetooth settings more than I'd like, that and audio (which may be a kde issue). Steam has been great, and I rarely have to jump into windows anymore.

Linux (Debian) feels solid, it has been super reliable over the years.

I may have become too used to the Linux way, which is why I am shitting a bit on Windows and MacOS, and those product definitely aren't for me. So take my rant with a grain of salt.

Windows + WSL works pretty well. I have all kinds of distros installed using Lxrunoffline, e.g. Debian Bullseye, Ubuntu etc. and WSL1 + WSL2 in parallel. I also start most of my Windows programs through WSL these days.

It really is a blessing. I feel like I can in good conscience publish my tools as *Nix only these days, because I know that my windows users can just launch it through wsl without problems. Now I don't have to deal with msvc and so on. Super nice.

That said I don't even know if it is a viable option for windows server, but probably not =D

I had been using Linux and macOS for many years mostly because as a developer, you were not supposed to use Windows.

In late 2019, when I got my new work computer, I decided to try it out.

The Windows 10 experience was surprising. Imagine never having problems with wireless bluetooth, WiFi, graphics card etc. Imagine everything always working and never having to worry about updates breaking anything. That is what I got with Windows coming from Linux.

Thankfully, I had given up on macOS a long time ago after a few years of use, because it is deliberately developer-hostile. Added bonus is the fact that I don't have to take the label of an Apple user... and it is not based on what non-Apple users think of Apple users. I couldn't care about it less had the devices worked for me. It is entirely based on how other Apple users talk to you when they think you are an Apple user. It always made me wonder how otherwise intelligent people can be like that about a brand. They act like they are "different" in a way that they should feel better about themselves because they bought this product. It somehow feels disgusting to be associated with them.

I agree. Window especially was nice compared to the previous version (7 was great too). Wsl2 is a blessing.

The drivers often just work. The sad thing is for desktop usage you often have to choose the drivers preferred way of updating. I.e. downloading graphics card updates, as opposed to through the package manager. I haven't investigated whether it is possible via. chocolatey yet.

Linux desktop still feels quite grassroots. Especially as it is community effort to bring a lot of drivers to it. It is still quite sad that the Nvidia support is as poor as it is.

I have only experienced the elitism or whatever you want to call it from non-tech friends and family. Apple's marketing definitely worked. Also the entire Intel saga was quite bad for their brand in regards to developers. At work some of us have been upgraded to m1, and others are still on intel the last few generations before m1 was published. It really is apparent how different those machines are. Intel macs are loud, overheat and unstable as all hell, while m1s are super solid for the most part. I wish I could buy a Linux laptop with the same specs and quality, I would pay a pretty penny for it, I have to give asahi a shot one of these days, if the company allows =D

>Imagine never having problems with wireless bluetooth, WiFi, graphics card etc. Imagine everything always working and never having to worry about updates breaking anything.

That's exactly how I felt when I started using MacOS after many years on Windows laptops!

Not sure how old you are but this is really just an indictment of Linux.

Both Mac OS and Windows have had this stuff sorted out for decades. Windows was not as good at it 20 years ago but it was still very good at it. Mac has been phenomenal at it even longer, largely because of the limited number of hardware configurations.

It has always been a chore in Linux. Always. It's a hard problem to solve with the extreme diversity of PC hardware, and Microsoft really started doing a good job with it around Win 95 and later. Prior to that Dos & Windows 3.x you did have to jump through a lot of the same hoops linux is famous for.

Linux has gotten better but is still relatively terrible about this. Users are not supposed to have to search compatibility lists and tweak config files to the degree they still are.

And Linux is different? Do you have ANY IDEEA how hard it is to prevent the installation of dbus or systemd?

It's also pretty hard to prevent installation of libc. It's part of the OS, like dbus and systemd. There are distros of Linux that don't use systemd.

And I'm a power user who loves systemd. :)

Except when you say "Linux", it's just a kernel. Everything else is... not linux. It may be GNU, or a specific computer program that uses that kernel.

The original post I replied to argued that Linux puts the user in control, unlike Windows or OSX/Apple.

My point is that for the last 10 years or so, it has become increasingly difficult to avoid certain parts of a linux-based OS, such as systemd and dbus, that reduces user's control over the system in the name of convenience.

I would like a Windows without scheduled tasks - no longer possible. In the same way as Windows does things on it's own, I would feel less in control if a NON-ROOT app could open a connection to a wireless network, or auto-mount a block device, or start a service/daemon, or change audio settings. It's less about how dbus or systemd is set up, but more about capabilities. I can't say much about how a Linux with those things installed could again be made secure, private and obedient to root user, because I never had them installed. That's not the point. I simply don't like what it CAN do.

PS: I have 3 Linux systems. 2 of them run musl. It's actually A LOT easier to change glibc with something else than have a desktop without dbus.

To be fair I don't mention those because I've never hard problems with them. That said there are definitely some architectural thing I don't agree with in regards to systems, but overall I am fine with it. I will also take the ini format over xml anyday. Though scripting may be more intuitive.

The different libc backend is a bit of mess though and it can be quite cumbersome to get good compatibility of programs between libc variants.

Every last update is adding just a little bit more intrusion, from the news articles, the required user accounts, the updates without asking any form of permission from the user, and more.

The only reason, and I mean the only reason, that I continue running it on any of my machines is that software often won't support Linux for edge case situations like VR games.

Also performance is just trash. If you've tried to run windows on a non ssd in the last decade, it's an absolute slog.

I'm slowly but surely trying to cut this windows software out of my life.

This is also making me strongly consider moving off of .net and looking into any alternative I can find for it, which the only real option at this point is probably Kotlin.

What I hate about this is that it pretends to be something else - "light rain starting soon" with a cloud icon. But the result is the weather taking up very little real estate. And on top of that you _can't_ make the weather take up more space. It's always the smallest tile on the page.

What I don't understand is how _file explorer_ can be so slow. It's visibly lagging between directories, first-opening etc. That's a fundamental part of the OS. I believe there is so much phone-home going on that nothing on Windows is slick anymore.

This is often a sign of a problem with your file system, or worse, your drive.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

It's not necessarily or often a huge problem, but it's still enough to cause this. I've never had chkdsk fail to fix these little issues.

>This is also making me strongly consider moving off of .net and looking into any alternative I can find for it, which the only real option at this point is probably Kotlin.

Even MS themselves moved from their proprietary .NET implementation to .NET Core, which works just fine in Linux. But I'd give a +1 to Kotlin anyway, its a great language. I'm also fond of using Python with Pydantic to enforce type checking.

I am not crazy prone to trust the open source dotnet core. Even if it's open source, it's still Microsoft.

I feel like people give open source way too much credit in general when it comes to how it can be abused. There is still a very very large barrier to control over the ecosystem when it comes to core, so if Microsoft decides to start getting to 4E the project I fully believe they'll succeed.

I will 100 percent look into that python option though. The main reason I've ruled it out is performance. JVM and Core just thrash python in terms of out of the box speed.

There was a time when operating systems were pretty good and the future was full of hope. Windows was capable and felt modern, Mac felt powerful and had neat things like "delete an app to fully uninstall an app".

It feels like both of the major desktop/laptop operating systems have been on a downward spiral for a good long while. I'd left Windows about 15-20 years ago for Linux, and then made it to Mac — but to my surprise I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to be and definitely not stable.

That's what I feel now — which is least worse?

That is hard, because they're both pretty damn bad especially if you don't want to use an Apple account or Microsoft account.

Linux is least worst, but let's be clear that to say that you're already accepting terrible power management on a laptop and fun with audio visual things and having to hope your job doesn't require some piece of proprietary software.

Least worse if you do need proprietary software? It's all bad, may as well use Windows with a Mac wallpaper or vice versa just to signal general disdain at the hellscape we've collectively incentivised.

To be fair the power management issue is pretty much a niche issue at this point. Sure if you run closed down hardware like a Mac book don't except your drivers to work from day 1.

If you go for a ThinkPad however there are usually no issues. Plus you can usually fix the power issues by just installing the right drivers or disable one or two well documented settings

The secret trick for flawless power management and sleep on Linux is to buy a Chromebook and put Linux on it.

They're natively Linux machines to begin with. All the manufacturer-coded power management stuff is upstream in the mainline kernel already.

thinkpads do have issues...

S3 was disabled on some models which meant for the first 6 months of release you couldn't go to sleep.

The new thinkpad yoga x gen 10 uses a intel webcam which uses a special binary blob and doesn't work out of the box, but only if you buy it with windows installed, which makes for a fun game of "does-this-laptop-support-linux-out-of-the-box"

The thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 has problems when waking up:

* Sometimes not waking up until you plug in a power problem

* Sometimes having to disable/enable the trackpad to make all buttons work again.

I'm quite happy with using linux on my devices, but many modern thinkpads have issues.

Edit: didn't want to sound aggressive

True, I should have specified the T series and even then the most recent models don't have perfect driver support

My linux ThinkPad has a roughly 25% chance of failing to sleep when I close the lid, causing it to go from 100% battery to completely dead the next day when I take it out of my bag. I've caught it not even turning off the screen sometimes (you can see the glow through the crack).

When was this? People have been moaning about Windows for over 30 years. If you just go by headlines, Windows has been getting worse and less capable with absolutely no improvement, and there are people who (probably on this site) unironically think Windows is worse now than it was in the Windows 3.1 days.

I don't think anyone compares it to 3.1, but XP and 7 did reasonably well. I think those two are considered the acceptable versions of Windows.

> I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to be and definitely not stable.

Can you clarify this comment? I haven't seen any stability problems in macOS for years.

Yeah likewise. In ten years of macbook use the only change that really threw me a bit was stopping 32 bit apps working.

Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrocious, I didn't know about the built in keylogger until I ran a declutter tool.

Unpopular opinion but to stop Microsoft's shenanigans = legislation. Opt-in by default would be a good start. Transparency tools to show what's being exported to MS. How about stopping forced major updates too.

User needs protective legislation fast.

Windows doesn't have a keylogger, and irresponsible 'declutter' tools can do more hard than good.

We are at the point where windows is irresponsible and those declutter tools are what the responsible user makes use of. You are irresponsible for not using them.

What clutter? I removed the preinstalled news widget, turned off the telemetry options in the installer (I personally am ok with some light telemetry because I know from experience how useful it is as a developer but I agree it shouldn't be on by default). My NextDNS probably blocks it anyway. There are probably still a few preinstalled apps that I don't use, like candy crush, but they are mostly just stubs that don't download unless you use them - I wouldn't know as I never browse the start menu, I just type the first few characters and press enter. I check Autoruns occasionally and everything seems reasonably well-behaved, and I haven't had a BSOD in several years except for a few caused by crappy third party 'security' kernel drivers.

Which declutter tools specifically?

I think you are right. Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don't see any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.

If not for GDPR, my email and phone would be still vacuumed up by every e-shop and sold in bulk to some shady data aggregator. If not for the upcoming USB-C charger law, Apple would be putting their Lightning holes in all devices. Sometimes the invisible hand of the market has to be forced I guess.

Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed, and hard to change. But it's better then the current state of things, where the users are constantly screwed with no viable alternative for their OS.

> Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed, and hard to change.

Often EU regulations, especially tech-related ones (e.g. the USB C one) come with baked in provisions for how it will be updated to stay relevant in the future.

The upcoming DMA and DSA will hopefully enable a lot more interoperability and interchangeable software and standards.

Microsoft's Windows bullshit (the EU already established they can't force you to use their browser, why are they allowed to do it once again) will need a heavy slap down too.

> Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don't see any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.

The only people who sneer generically at regulation are people who either misunderstanding or are just oblivious to how much their lives are shaped (in probably 90% of the cases, even in the US), for the better by existing regulations. One can argue on the merits of a specific proposal or law, but otherwise it's just absurdity like a house cat.

Sorry, “built in keylogger?” Which one is that?

No idea which of the builtin keyloggers they're referring to, but the one with the most public outrage was the inking and typing personalization feature.

What are the other ones?

Presumably "Inking and typing personalization". Microsoft collects all the words you type, presumably filters out the ones that match the dictionary, and collects things like names in your Microsoft account. This can be used for spell check and turning stylus-drawn shapes into text more accurately.

So yes, Windows does collect some information akin to a keylogger.

Ohhhh. Yeah I mean - it specifically gives you the option to opt out of that during windows install… you don’t need to run a ‘declutter tool’ to do so. But maybe we shouldn’t expect users to have the presence of mind to pick through install options, in all fairness, maybe the most secure least permissive configuration should be the default. Then power users can enable things they understand the risks of.

> Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrocious

It is pathetic how they promote (push like madman) telemetry as a tool for improving user experience while all it is used for is ruining it and exploit their paying users for their own benefit only (marketing).

Doesn’t group policy editor fix all of this?

Immediately on a new Windows install, I always rush to group policy to disable certain creepy and distracting features: Cortana, Widgets, OneDrive (I pay for a different cloud service), Xbox Game Bar, etc. Hopping on other machines I'm oftern struck by how janky and unusable Windows is by default. Lately I've noticed that the "new features" for feature updates tend to focus on add-ons like widgets rather than core functionality or stability, in other words Windows is more stagnant for me. Increasingly I'm considering linux despite using Windows for work (Adobe apps) and gaming... for the latter I recently purchased MS Flight Simulator without realizing an MS account is required. I'm not sure if I will try to play it or not.

I find it funny that it took them the entire lifespan of Windows 10 to finish moving everything from Control Panel to the 'Settings' app.

There are still things only in Control Panel though!

Notably, the ability to set a default (and enable/disable) audio device. Inevitably, windows will decide to make HDMI/DP the default output. And the ability to change the gain on your mic: cheap mics are way too quiet in windows, especially in discord.

Yep plenty! You go to Network & internet > Related > More network adapter options and it might as well be Vista. Go to Mouse settings and want to turn off pointer precision or hide while typing? That's only in the Win32 panel. Plenty more. It's almost bizarre how much fwature parity wasn't a goal for UX and power users get the worst of both experience.

There are many things still not there, all the admin tools for example.

idk, i think 'tomshardware.com' needs a reality check. there's like 100 disgusting taboola and google ads on their own website that look identical to these awful microsoft ads. its hard to take a rant about trashy ads seriously coming from a page that is littered with them.

One has reason to expect ads on a website, but not on their OS.

> The stories come courtesy of Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company, Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of its sites, including Tom’s Hardware, occasionally have articles appear on the network. What’s problematic here, though, is not that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to avoid.

The difference is: I paid for Windows, but I didn't pay for tomshardware.com.

i tried turning off my adblocker and yeahhhh the ads-to-content ratio is a bit out of control https://i.imgur.com/Dre5HJw.jpeg

Worth noticing.. the site also still works fine with ad block enabled and there was no nag screen or paywall around it.

Every time I see the unfiltered web, it is a glimpse into how the 'other side' must live. It is surreal to imagine how anyone accepts this as 'normal' but somehow they manage to survive.

Unfortunately about the same ratio on that imgur link as well.

Story time : A couple of years ago, i got a message from Mozilla about a survey/competition for Indian users to find websites which had the most number of trackers. The top winners would get a coupon worth a couple of bucks.

I immediately embarked on my search with safeties off - Noscript, Ublock, disabled

I surfed through various Indian websites - times of india, yellow journalism websites, local language tabloids, desi xxx sites - I expanded my search globally- dailymail, cnet, piratebay - my cpu fans whining in protest as i trawled through the darkest, most malware-infested, crypto-miner-laden, chumbox-ridden corners of the web. The average number of trackers was now in the triple digits but still i felt i could do better. That i had seen worse. Suddenly,it clicked. I could almost feel time stop and spacetime warp around me as my dsl connection struggled to load up tomshardware.com. Ding Ding, My quest had ended by a healthy margin.

So thanks for the coffee, tomshardware.com

What is this childish 'he does bad things so it is ok others do bad things too' dumbness please? Are you really trying to protect a bad practice you know is bad because this is a common bad things so bad thing should be accepted? Really? Because this is what sounds like.

Also, analogy between a sometimes visited scoped web page and the operating system that you use 100% of time when your computer is on and is the foundation of any activity? Are you mad?

Are you perhaps distracted from the message by those awful annoyances, ironicaly demonstrating the harmful nature of those in Windows too inadvertently?

The irony of this article being posted on a website so littered with garbage ads that I can't reasonably scroll through it without waiting for several seconds at a time for the actual content to load is rich. And then, at the bottom of the article is something called a taboola feed, which looks eerily similar to a tabloid news feed.

The author is likely aware of the irony. That doesn't negate the content of the article. Which is about a product you pay real money for.

>The author is likely aware of the irony.

Citation needed.

Ironically, all those videos that start playing and are hard to escape from as you read this very post are quite distracting, too.

In view of this, it's hard to read this article as "why is Windows showing their stories and not mine?".

The invisible elephant in the room is how modifying your hosts file is no longer deemed acceptable.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...

What do windows developers do now when they need to test multiple domains on their local machine?

Never knew that. This genuinely surprised me. That's a basic networking feature what the hell.

I just went down a rabbit hole to remove the "Discover" button in Edge (top-right corner):

    - `regedit`
    - go to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft`
    - add a key (folder) `Edge` (ignore the folder `MicrosoftEdge` if it exists)
    - in `Edge` folder, add a `DWORD` with name `HubsSidebarEnabled` and a value of `0`.
    - in Edge, go to `edge://policy` and click on `Reload Policies`
    - it should list the policy and the 'Discover' button should disappear

Aren't these kinds of hacks breaking every few months with new upgrades?

Currently, there was no other way to disable the button - I tested all. In the future, I hope there's an official option or policy directly available without the registry. I just couldn't see the button anymore.

I guess this is one good thing about being blind and using a screen reader. It never has to focus on those ads, so I never see them. Of course, MS folks probably come here oh dear God they're gonna turn them into notifications so I have to hear them now I'm sure. Can't wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to Linux.

> Can't wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to Linux

I'm curious (as a KDE user myself), why KDE and how do you know it's the one you want given it's not accessible? Why not any other desktop environment?

By the way, your testimony to the KDE team could matter!

What features would you need out of KDE to make it accessible to you?

It was having Nigel Farrage's tweets show up in the start menu on a box at work that did it for me. And no, there's no free speech on my or my company's desktop machines. I'm here to get work done - not be subjected to any political crap.

Farrage has a cockwomble level that transcends politics, his content delivery is axiomatically objectional regardless of whatever side he takes.

And to elaborate - it's not really that he, or any other of his ilk, exist. Or the content of what they were saying (not that I care at all for it); The bit that made me angry the most was that, some PM at Microsoft actually thought "Yes, we will show divisive politics to a user who has paid for this software." Of course, they probably sold it as, "Let's _delight_ the user with treding twitter topics in $their_locale" - but if they didn't figure out what that would mean in the actual real world, then good heavens...

I have the same problem, but to a much, much lesser extent, with Reddit.

When I click in the search box, it converts into a drop-down list of news headlines.

If I want news, I'll click on news. Don't force it on me : I avoid news normally, because I find it's almost all unpleasant click-bait. I do not appreciate being forced to look at it, even for a few moments.

Old reddit is still available. Just type old.reddit.com or change it in the settings.

Not for long I expect. Compact mobile reddit just got disabled last week.

https://i.reddit.com/r/worldnews

Seems to still work.

Google too. There's an awesome swipe right screen on android that shows travel related information and upcoming events. But then they decided to add news articles to it and it's impossible to turn them off! You can only disable the entire feature.

Looks like you can disable the news part by going to the Google Now feed > Settings > General. Unselect "Discover"

AFAICT, this just renders the entire pane "useless", with nothing but a message,

> Turn Discover back on to see your feed. You can always turn it off in Settings. Turn on Discover

This is insane indeed, on my work laptop I'm forced into Windows, what a mess! (Oh the glory of my clean KDE 5.27 on EndeavorOS at home, what a contrast, such beauty, such wobbly windows, such snappy tiling.)

At some point I saw something about the Kardashians from my taskbar! Wtf, I though that with all this analytics Windows would at least show me something about Cardasians.

I mean MS365 is nice, VSCode is nice, GitHub is nice... I gladly pay for all of it (not VSCode atm of course). But I really prefer them all from my clean KDE (or sometimes Gnome) environment. It's like Windows is the cheap part of the ecosystem, if you want to go full premium you replace that part of the chain with something else.

The first thing I remove, disable or brain damage when I get a new device is anything that pumps news into notification. I had a day where I had been cruising along on a new mac, and then the news feed sent me three really gristly rape/murder stories in a row. I went from being on a cloud, getting stuff done to depressed.

Incidentally, Apple News is not uninstallable (fortunately, you can disable it) on Mac and it needs to be for mental health reasons.

I have an Apple News app, but I don't think I've ever used it. I don't ever see notifications from it, though — where would these appear? Maybe I've disabled it and/or maybe it's more insidious in later version of the OS (I'm on Big Sur). If macOS ever forces news onto me like that, I'll be moving to Linux.

It was a later version, and it just started sending notifications (that popped up in the corner) after an update. Not sure what version it was.

I've never had something unexpected like that actually get to me the way those news notifications did, and as a result, I've become almost militant about managing notifications. Life is too short to have your day ruined by some product manager/growth manager trying to get clicks to earn an extra $2,000 bonus.

It's to the point that it's embarrassing to use in a professional setting.

You are sharing your screen and suddenly you access the stupid "news" menu, popping up with tabloid and perhaps the weather at best.

I try my best to use this software and disable what I can, but after an update to the OS or Edge you have to reconfigure stuff, and suddenly it has added back some horrible defaults.

Okay, it's "free" I guess.

Seeing this makes me really sad for the countless people who are forced to use Windows, most of them because they simply do not know better.

I have a Windows installation that I boot sometimes and pretty much every time I do something despicable happens, though I understand I am not the target audience.

Same here. I even have WMs wake up after a year of not using them just to watch them instantly break themselfs.

It's not fun, it's 2022 and fixing OS level issues shouldn't be what we spend our time on

As proven by Android, and Netbooks before it, having OEMs shipping Linux distributions won't change it.

Of course, because linux targeted at non-tech users allows greedy publishers to do the same things as microsoft.

I used to think educating people was a solution, which it might be to some extent... truth is without regulations brought and enforced by people who understand the modern digital world and have the end users best interest in mind (lol), the cat will never go back to the box.

Yes, I keep an old laptop around with Windows 10, which sometimes goes months without powering on. When I do boot it again, it potentially takes hours of non-deterministically finding and downloading and installing updates over multiple reboots.

Compare to powering on a Linux machine and bringing it up-to-date in one shot with "sudo dnf upgrade."

I always thought it was quite funny how there was this dichotomy between Windows and macOS, with often the former being seen as more reliable or better for "getting work done". Then it seems that people remained in their camps to some degree, and over the last 5 to 10 years Windows has absolutely tanked in quality and appropriateness and a lot of those who use it barely seem to have noticed. Can you even imagine Apple putting Daily Mail articles in your dock for example? There would be vast backlash, but somehow this absolutely egregious, OS-destroying stuff that Windows is doing recently has been largely brushed off.

Sorry to sound like the trope of an annoying mac fanboy, but Windows is grosser than ever, and I want nothing to do with it.

>Can you even imagine Apple putting Daily Mail articles in your dock for example?

Currently the notification center on my mac has stories from USA Today and The Washington Post. It's not that different.

Dosen't macOS put an undismissable red notification in your dock if you are not logged in to iCloud?

Not for me

Author should have led with how to get rid of them. This article is padded with example headlines, has little analysis and no tutorial.

With the amount of money that MS makes, it is hard to imagine they do this for revenue. Are they trying to be "useful"?

At very least, since many of us have enough to concentrate on as Developers, the install should either ask you "do you want loads of crap to read from the news?" or it should be a simple global switch.

I think probably as a big company, Microsoft have lost the Bill Gates character who could decide everything in a holistic way and not random groups of people with their own objectives slinging mud at the OS to see what sticks and annoying everyone in the process. How much has been tried and dropped in the last 10-15 years of Windows?

They're still beholden to shareholders, anything that'll get them more money they'll do, and I'm sure showing ads on 1.4 billion active devices isn't just chump change to them.

I couldn’t get through the article because the website crashed twice when I tried to get rid of one of several modular ad windows covering the article’s content. The modern internet is a dumpster fire, even in articles covering the ways in which the modern internet is a dumpster fire.

Indeed. To be honest, if I didn’t have reader mode on by default, I don’t think I’d use the web at all unless I had to (aside from sites known to not suck, like this one.) Ad blockers simply aren’t enough any more, reader view is the only way the web works for me at this point. It’s truly sad.

I gave up when the auto-playing video started following me down the page.

I don’t understand how they think such hostility is a good idea. It only makes me despise the site and note never to return. But presumably some people go for it?

>> How can we get more people to watch our videos?

> Autoplay it!

>> Oh no, they are scrolling away from it now, how do we get them to keep watching it?

> literally make it always present on the screen no matter where they have scrolled to!

The road to hell, these days, is often paved with marketing OKRs.

It's not just the search windows, Windows 11 also introduced a new sidebar feature with customisable widgets but there was no way to turn off these crappy articles completely. From memory you could customise them somewhat by providing some preferred interests, but no way to turn them off. I no longer use Windows at home - that was the last straw and am now completely on Pop_OS.

That sounds like an attack vector for malware, like the old windows desktop widgets they finally had to shutdown and turned off by default.

I feel that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall when it comes to Windows. The world is going increasingly mobile, and people are doing more and more via their phones (iOS and Android) and ditching the desktop. Your average person isn't computer literate nearly to the degree of the average HN poster, and I think we sometimes forget this. The average person does not care about operating systems. They want something that works and is intuitive. Microsoft is pivoting to a services company for this reason. They have been unable to kill win32, their mobile aspirations have failed, and ARM is coming around the corner for desktop. Windows will not be killed by the competition. It will remain dominant in an ever-diminishing niche, just as the IBM mainframe gave way to PCs.

> their mobile aspirations have failed

Their mobile aspirations were a walled garden because they wanted in on one of the ecosystems that was good for them at the expense of developers and users. I'm convinced that Microsoft would have a large share of the mobile market today if they would have tried to create a product that was good for users and developers instead of a product that was good for Microsoft.

I can agree with that perspective. There is also the cultural element. In America at least, having a Windows Phone was about as uncool as you could get. Capability or price didn't matter, it'd get you socially snubbed. We see something similar playing out now with Android and iOS among under-25s in the U.S.

In couple of years Windows 10 will get eol'd and stop receiving security updates. It'll be interesting time certainly to see what the people who are contently now using Windows 10 without MS accont or Cortana or other online craziness, will do. I'm in that boat, but I have always been dualbooting Linux so to me changing it to be primary desktop won't be that big of a pain. But I do expect to see additional influx of new Linux users from the eventual eol. Of course some users probably will continue to use Windows 10 well beyond the eol date (there probably are still even some Windows 7 users around); heck, it might take good while until major vulns are found in Windows 10 after eol as the general security level certainly has improved.

Yep. It’s also just plain noise. eg it announces earnings are out and there is an accident on the highway.

I don’t have a car and no idea which company’s earnings they think I care about. Nobody takes a step back and wonders whether it makes sense

Feels like a real design by committee decision

They took a nice feature (showing the weather unobtrusively on your taskbar) and turned it into a nightmare where if your mouse accidentally passes through its space a giant popup shows up filled with the worst kind of junk news. Oh and on many (especially lower end systems) it causes terrible stuttering while its opening.

Every time I get a new windows device, I have to go hunting for the arcane registry settings to disable the start bar ads. It is really jarring when I use a relative’s computer with the default ad vomit.

I stopped using Windows after 7 and every time I have to briefly dip back in or work with a modern Windows machine it just completely floors me that Microsoft does this advertising. It is the most cheap and tacky nonsense, and I agree it's always trashy tabloid news. I honestly think far worse about the Microsoft product teams because deep in the company multiple teams and people all greenlit this idea and decided that yes it's very good and should be shipped. It's god awful and no one stopped it.

Windows is making so many and more small but frequent annoyances and barricades I have to navigate in the daily work - not to forget trivial mistakes like reminders in the background and alike - that I am in the process of moving towards Linux.

Meanwhile, despite being more experienced in what I do than 20 years ago my productivity is not increasing much, mostly due to the barricades introduced (when I am not distracted and able to work I am more performant than before). And the biggest component in it are the tools and 'services' that forgot how to support users instead of asking users to support the whims and needs of software, making the life of software vendors not the life of the users easier. Which is especially true for Windows which is in an eternal and constant incomplete reshuffling of concepts while previously working easy matters got ruined and confusing to use. Taskbar, notifications, navigation, positioning of frequently used features, behaviour and reaction to actions are altered, with less benefit than the mere change disrupting the user workflow.

The software highjacks and intentionally diverts the attention of the user instead of helping them work. Having higher and higher maintenance level instead of being helpful.

Never ever asked marginal but broadly advertised things pushed through without choice generating noise and nuisance in daily, hourly work! Focusing on experimental AI matters while a simple switch between windows and similar elementary things are more difficult than 20 years ago is maddening. Shortly: I am increasingly dissatisfied with what and how MS is doing (while not having a bright history to begin with). I feel increasing disgust trying to do anything with Windows. This will not end well in our relationship.

I just want to be able to pay once and not get annoyed by any crappy news or adds.

I am super annoyed about my Sony Android TV which for weeks shows me a huge "Audi" add that fills half the home screen. I am not going to buy that car ffs!

I actually reported them several times to the Australian TGA (our "FDA") as they were illegally promoting unapproved medical devices. The TGA could not find out any Australian entity to go after so they gave up :/

That's quite pathetic on the part of the TGA.

Yeah, I'm sure microsoft (the entity showing the ads) has some presence in Australia. Or better yet, sue microsoft proper, get a judgement, and secure and injunction until they comply.

If all goes well, the entire government will be forced to switch off from microsoft and use something more reasonable.

I hate Windows for this, thankfully there's the LTSC version which has none of the nonsense. I'm using it for gaming, and it works well.

They've been doing this for almost decade. The last straw for me was when they decided to put the smiling face of a murdered woman in my start menu. It was just so bizarre.

https://ibb.co/M8Y7gvj

What is the best way to go about creating a sane - meaning adware turned off as much as possible defaults for Windows 10?

What I mean is preparing a custom ISO for installation.

I realize that technically it should be possible: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

I have to handle relatives Windows machines quite often and have to reinstall Windows quite often.

I like how Rufus adds a default local user to standard Windows ISO. So something like this with more customization would be fantastic.

It's gets easier and easier every year to want an alternative to Windows, but it remains impossible to actually switch, at least for me.

What's this year's lock-in / excuse... games?

I’ve given up on a one computer solution. I am currently on multiple computers. One thinkpad and an old dell optiplex run Fedora. Main desktop runs Windows. I can still ssh into my old dell optiplex from my windows desktop with its nice windows 11 power shell terminal. I can switch over to my thinkpad t490s and use Fedora with gnome (and still ssh into my dell optiplex because all of them are on the same home Internet connection and router (and same switch other than the thinkpad).

One thing I’ve noticed is remmina isn’t quite the same as mstsc windows Remote Desktop but I think it is high praise that I could even get to the point of someday expecting it…

Honestly there is absolutely no reason to not switch to something else. Mac's have Office and Photoshop, and I haven't personally ran into any games I can't play on Linux.

Shame that Microsoft haven't given Linux Office 365, because Microsoft ♥ Linux. Right?

> Shame that Microsoft haven't given Linux Office 365, because Microsoft ♥ Linux. Right?

For my basic needs, I've found that the office web apps actually work much better than the classic ones. Outlook, in particular, is much snappier. I use it daily on Firefox on Linux for work, since they're married to MS.

I use Office via the web and it suits 99% of my cases.

I think the only issues have been some formatting options are hidden, I honestly don't remember them because it mostly works.

It was more a cheap jab that they don't want to actually support Linux.

I think that with the move to the web and web app everything, there are fewer and fewer reasons for people to use Windows as a client OS outside of specialty software.

Hell, my last two HP laptops, nothing fancy, had worse hardware support on Windows than on Linux (where they were working 100% since day one), even with all the HP drivers installed. Took them about a year to fix this. So even "don't need to futz around with drivers" is no longer a reason.

And I think MS realizes this, seeing that recent .net things work on Linux, MSSQL Server now works on Linux (but not the studio, though). So, I guess they're just trying their damnedest to stay at least somewhat relevant. Companies are usually a bit slower to change user-facing things, so I guess MS won't go out of their way to help with the switch.

I use Ubuntu (as stock as possible) for my media center PC, here are some reasons off the top of my head that prevent me from using desktop Linux for anything more serious:

Bluetooth connection to my headset sometimes causes the entire system to hard lock, requiring physical reset.

Sound sometimes goes static-y, have to reboot to fix.

I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a sound output device that I didn't want to use.

Tearing of full screen video, I don't even remember how I fixed it.

A notification about something called "snap store" keeps coming up and needs a command line fix to dismiss.

The built-in app store keeps notifying me about a firmware update for my wireless keyboard. I'm not interested, and there is no way to dismiss it.

Firefox on Linux has an obnoxious habit of refusing to open a new tab until I restart it for updates (that were installed automatically, not through the system updates app). Sure, I want my browser up-to-date, but this is not an issue on Windows where it will never force you to restart the application. I looked around why this is the way it is, and the answers were that it had to do with how Linux works.

And, yeah, games.

I get that staticy sound problem from time to time on linux mint. `sudo killall pulseaudiod` seems to reset it without needing a reboot.

All my audio problems (including this) were fixed by switching to pipewire

This little thread already has like five different versions of "Linux works great for me, you just need to fizzbang the wagglesprocket"

I'm always surprised whenever these Bluetooth issues come up. The best Bluetooth experience I've had is with Linux, by far.

I have a BT keyboard (keychron), mouse (mx master 3s) and two headphones. They've all always connected instantly under Linux.

The headsets can use LDAC and aptx HD, which are both unsupported under Windows but work perfectly under Linux.

The mouse has noticeable lag under Windows, while under Linux it's indistinguishable from its wireless (non-BT) dongle. Installing the Logitech app and drivers doesn't change anything.

The keyboard and headphones usually take a while to connect under windows.

Except for the mouse, I've had these same peripherals on multiple PCs, all with Intel wireless cards, and all have exhibited the same difference in behavior between Windows and Linux.

> I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a sound output device that I didn't want to use.

This is weird, I can disable any and all sound peripherals from the pulse audio control panel. I don't use ubuntu, though, so not sure what its default apps are.

Switch to Debian and install the Mozilla Firefox package rather than the distro's version. The bullshit will disappear.

For bluetooth issues pipewire may be a magic bullet. It was for me.

I decided to switch back to analog headphones that don’t require firmware updates from proprietary apps only available on Android/iOS with tracking built in. You can’t get much simpler than inserting a wire into a jack—and as a bonus with detachable cables they can last over a decade & don’t have batteries I’d have to repair in two years but can’t because of how they’re designed to be e-waste.

Ubuntu is well known for blowing their operating systems up. It's not unusual to disable a few things on a fresh Ubuntu.

One thing I vaguely remember is bluetooth being started with more options that you generally need. Can't remember what options I removed but using a more bare Bluetooth driver often fixes things.

You can control your sound output via alsa, usually a alsa control is shipped with Ubuntu.

Annoying you with snap is one of those typical Ubuntu things why people stopped recommending it.

So yeah, try using not Ubuntu

MacOS requires that I purchase apple hardware at absurd brand markup, so that’s out.

I use Linux at work because I have good IT support and I don’t rely on any windows only software. Neither are the case at home.

Use a simple distro and look at WINE or OSS alternatives? What program do you really need that is Windows only?

With great effort you can achieve a partial solution. I'm not interested in a new hobby, I want my computer to actually work without me fucking with it incessantly.

It doesn't require 'great effort' at all. Maybe 10 years ago.

There's a reason numerous governments and industries have switched over. I suspect you are vastly overestimating the complexity and trouble you would face in switching.

I already said I use Linux at work, I know exactly what I'm talking about.

With your comments referring to how hard or complex you think switching would be, it doesn't seem like it. But OK.

> at absurd brand markup

The markup for Apple hardware is really not big at all. They just don't have a budget option. If you compare macbooks to really any competing device the prices are similar (and the competing device will be much worse). Same situation when comparing iPhone to flagship Android. In fact, new iPhones are often cheaper than new flagship Android phones.

There was once a time where what you said is true, where a truly great Windows laptop could be had for half the price or less than a mac, and a flagship Android phone could be had for half the price or less than an iPhone, but that was in the past. Now, there is almost price parity.

I run mid to high end desktops. It's not even close.

I don't know about desktop mac pricing, I'm referring to laptops. Desktops can surely be built for cheaper. Desktops with screens as good as the iMacs? Not sure. Laptops? No way

For me, it's Visual Studio. I'm thinking about trying a windows 8 vm with VS2019 though.

Well, yeah. It's less of a hassle to run games on Windows. Also, in my case, photoshop and Lightroom.

So, as another poster said, my solution is to have two pcs. A laptop with Linux I use basically all the time, and a desktop with an actual GPU for when I want to play or mess around with my photography.

This arrangement works well enough, since for my everyday needs the iGPU is more than enough, and I would rather not lug around a 10-pound brick with a dedicated GPU. And, in my particular situation, it's actually cheaper since my desktop is a hand-me-down from work which only required a new GPU, which at the time was beefier and cheaper than what I could have had in a laptop.

I have recently put Fedora with KDE on my work laptop and here are a couple of reasons off the top of my head (I believe I have come across more, but can't remember them right now) why I'm currently not considering switching from W10 on my home stuff:

- I don't game that much anymore, but yeah, I hear games are still far from 100% on Linux.

- There are various graphical issues linked to fractional scaling (I think), such as random lines appearing near the edges of windows or windows leaving behind lines when being dragged around, etc.

- My external monitor doesn't appear to be affected by energy management settings (dimming/sleeping after some time, etc.) whatsoever.

- There is no option to disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected.

- Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it (I wonder who came up with THAT genius bit of UX).

- A lot of things can still only be achieved via the terminal.

Pasting with middle-mouse button was a thing even before auto-scroll existed! And yes, for us who grew with it, its a damn good feature, I couldn't care less for auto-scroll, but I love my middle-mouse paste :)

When I use Windows I'm always annoyed by the lack of advanced WM features: focus-follow-mouse, windows always on top, etc. But the thing I miss the most is the transparent copy on select and paste on mid-button. I always have to end up doing it twice.

focus-follow-mouse, windows always on top

For what it's worth Windows has (had? don't know about Windows 11) both of these, but they're either buried in the registry or need Microsoft PowerToys to enable.

The only place I really use windows is at work, so I'm not at liberty to install additional applications unfortunately.

I did manage to enable follow focus a while ago, but it didn't behave as I was used to (I don't remember the details), so I disabled it.

Your hand never leaves the position where you can just Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Scrolling through a long document requires either a ton of mouse-wheeling, fiddling around with the scrollbar or letting go of the mouse and using PgUp/Dn, and out of those, only the scrollbar can be faster than autoscroll.

Either way, it should be a configurable option, not hardcoded deep inside the bowels of the system, which appears to be the case as far as I have been able to determine.

Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it

Unix was the first to start using 3 button mice as standard, almost a decade before they really showed up in Windows world, and paste on middle mouse click has always been the standard behaviour in the Unix world, so changing it now would be very weird for *nix users. Whether Linux should follow the common Unix defaults or Windows defaults for their UI/UX has been a long running debate in the community.

I would personally be really confused and annoyed if I sat down at a Linux machine and middle click didn't paste, because that is the behaviour I've been seeing for literally 25 years.

Well, sticking with outdated 30-year-old defaults seems to be par for the course when it comes to Linux. I just wish there was an OPTION to change them (especially when Linux fans keep pushing the narrative about how much more customizable it is).

Why outdated? The Linux way of copy paste (or better select and middle click) is so much better than using ctrl+c/v, if you want to stick to your inferior behaviour that's fine (I have a mouse wheel for scrolling) a quick Google brought up this https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-mouse-m...

Just don't force us to use the same behaviour by default.

Outdated because it has been replaced by a better feature which has no equivalent anywhere else on the keyboard or mouse on other systems - as far as I can tell, not even Mac with its Unix heritage uses MMB paste.

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V is superior. The shortcuts are easily accessible and you can use it to select and replace a specific part in the middle of text. If you try that with MMB-pasting, you will just overwrite your clipboard with the part of the text you want to replace, due to the selection-to-clipboard feature.

The answers from your "quick Google" only provided solutions for specific programs, solutions with self-admitted performance issues and a solution for X11 when I'm on Wayland. At a glance, the latter two look pretty hacky too.

Lastly, stop putting words in my mouth. I have said my issue was that the "Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with seemingly no global way to change it" and "I just wish there was an OPTION to change them". It is YOU who is forcing your defaults on me, without even a consideration that my preference may also be valid.

While I don't agree the parent posters view on the middle mouse, if you actually read the link you posted you would find that none of the answers suggested there actually solve the problem and in fact offer pretty convincing evidence that reproducing the desired behaviour cannot be reasonably done in Linux. Dismissively saying "you're holding it wrong" or posting links to irrelevant forum posts while telling people to RTFM isn't a winning argument for Linux. If you're going to tell someone to RTFM at least make sure you're pointing them to the correct M that contains the answer they're looking for.

I installed Fedora recently and 30s in the first bug: dnfdragora missing the update button

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/dnfdragora-missing-up...

dnfdragora is terrible. Either you use GNOME Software/Discover, or dnf from the command line.

Just don't use dnfdragora, and it is not an official GUI anyway.

Even though I've been using Linux desktops for 20 years, for me it's mostly CAD, BIM and 3D design apps still keeping me at least partially 'stuck' on windows

I have a NUC with KDE Neon on it as a second desktop. It's been pretty good so been thinking it might be time soon to switch my main over.

However for years the main thing holding me back is the lack of a proper RDP alternative. And yes I've tried them all, nothing comes close to RDP on Windows.

I use it all the time to connect home from work, so I can separate work from personal stuff, as well as from my laptop when I'm away. I just have Firefox installed on my laptop, RDP takes care of the rest.

I held the same belief until I made the switch. First on my work laptop, then at some point I realized I'm not using my Windows machine at all, now I only have Windows VMs for the rare occasion that I need to run something on it.

Slightly ironic that this page shows me ads like "Stop Buying Lottery Tickets & Start Doing This Instead - Yukon Gold Casino"

I have the same in Chrome on my Android phone.

Click on open a new tab and tabloid news are shown below the shortcuts of often used domains / links. Same when swiping left on the start screen (don't know what that screen does as I never used it due to the SHOCKING content..)

There cannot be any good in this and it should stop. I see this as a notch to getting people accept more cookies etc so Google can present more relevant content (it's not like I browse any gossip page besides HN). But somehow I doubt that better content will be shown in those ad spaces if I allow for more cookies.

It’s trivial to use a different default browser like Bromite or Fennec instead of the adware default you were given

Note that this is the case elsewhere, we just learned to ignore or block that ad space.

This article itself on my mobile has in its body:

> Sponsored Links / The 5 Books To Read To Transform Your Life / Blinkist Magazine

I’ve tried moving to Linux but the simple task of using my laptop closed with a second screen was impossible so I went back to Windows 10. I will give Linux a try next year again…or but a Macbook

I'm sorry this doesn't work for you. It has worked fine for me for years.

Change the setting for what happens when you close the laptop.

You need to do the same on Windows and MacOS. I remember finding the latter very confusing the first time I tried to play a movie with a projector connected and the lid closed. It would sleep, unless I first connected an external keyboard.

I do that everyday, works fine

Works for me, with 2 external screens and a Thunderbolt docking station.

I am trying to do this with HDMI connected but once I close the laptop the external screen is reduced to a 1 FPS laggy mess. I have a laptop with 2 GPUs (1 in the CPU and a discrete one) and tried everything...no luck

Dual GPUs is asking for trouble on Linux. Mine is just regular Intel integrated graphics.

I have also tried my work laptop on the same docking station setup though, and it uses an Nvidia GPU. It seemed to work fine too. I suspect the dual GPU is not well supported on Linux.

They also need to stop overriding settings each update. I’m tired of removing search from the taskbar.

Just disable that menu. I have the setting in Windows 11 Workstation. I assume it is in the free version as well. There are no ads in the start menu, all that junk is contained.

Is there a script for windows 11 that disables all these ads and news and gives us no bs experience of windows 7?

You need a script to automate two mouse clicks?

There are a lot of settings in Windows that need to be changed. If you look at any one in isolation, it doesn't make much sense to script it, but when you look at all of them at once, two clicks each start to add up.

First thing after install: disable all this sh.t.

If i want entertainment, i open entertainmap apps or websites.

I was wondering, that Microsoft is not in able to reduce all these things when you select a "work profile" at installation.

They use windows too (i hope, or did their employees switch to apple or linux?), they must know, what productivity killer such "Features" are.

Pro tip:

Disable search & news, install Microsoft PowerToys and use PowerToys Run. Never open the start menu again

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

It's truly unbelievable that Microsoft has allowed low quality garbage news to proliferate the Windows UI, including generating notifications.

It's really quite embarrassing to see the low quality content and to imagine that somewhere within Microsoft a human actually made the decision to allow this content to flourish within the OS.

My guess is that there is some product manager at Microsoft who has a bunch of friends who are creating the interfaces and garbage content generation "news" feeds and they are simply milking this for profit before it gets turned off.

If windows had an ad-riddled OEM version, and a Standard “clean” version that you could buy directly from Microsoft, I would consider windows again.

Not like there’s actually an incentive for them to do that, but I can dream.

I would pay 4 figures for a properly un-fucked version of Windows.

I don't think its ridiculous to consider a hacker/developer edition in 2023.

Four figures for an operating system license? > $1000? Really? Per computer, for just that version of Windows? Can you explain how that could be worth it?

>I would pay 4 figures for a properly un-fucked version of Windows.

You can buy a Visual Studio (formerly Technet/MSDN) subscription[0] which includes not just Windows clients but servers as well for ~USD$1200.

>I don't think its ridiculous to consider a hacker/developer edition in 2023.

Which (unless things have changed dramatically in the past few years) is exactly what such a subscription provides.

Such a subscription enables access for all current (and many old ones) products and, IIRC, these versions (unless changed from Technet/MSDN) are not consumer versions that allow you to "un-fuck" Windows and you'll have access (need to download ISOs, so storage will be necessary) to just about all of Microsoft's offerings.

Which, of course, can be used forever, although I'm guessing that a new subscription every five-ten years or so will update everything you may need.

[0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/

Edit: Fixed typo.

The advances Steam has made to linux gaming has really brought alot of people over to permanent linux - including myself. Before I used to still have a dual boot system but for the last 3 years there hasn't been a Windows computer in my residence and I can honestly say I don't miss a thing. Even things like Microsoft Teams or Visual Code, skype, which are good utility products from Microsoft have Linux versions or are accessible from the browser. The only use for Windows I can see is in Enterprise corporate settings.

I think gaming + adobe suite are the biggest for me also. Listening if anyone has recommendations for the latter (I use darktable already, but Premiere is tough to replace)

Yeah it's crazy, I used to work on PCs for a living and saw what a lot of people see when they use their PC and it was so clear how much they were throwing biased, not even remotely balanced, news articles at people's faces everyday. Maybe if the articles made an attempt to breakdown each sides arguments or something it'd be OK.. I guess.. maybe. But it was just tabloid style articles written about important current events as if only one side exists to every argument.

Contrast the distracting tabloid news by default with Microsoft’s mission statement:

> Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Seems like a fail to me…

This is why using for me, using Windows is a non-starter. My operating system should not be showing me random crap from the Internet that I can’t turn off, period.

The search bar just magically showing up in my version of Windows 11 was annoying enough. I haven't actually ever clicked on it. But to know clicking on it would bring me the type of news that attacks my peace of mind is just too far.

I did notice some dark pattern bs in the Windows menu with the search bar looking like a system search, but it providing web search results. Does Microsoft think this is endearing them to anyone as a product?

Microsoft has a long history of abusing their market dominance within their Windows platform, coincidentally each case having something to do with online services. Microsoft has, would and will always do anything to make money and choke any competitive threats to death one way or the other. They won't even bother trying to be "less evil" like Google once tried and failed.

It needs to stop showing a lot of things, including its own ass.

The "Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so" is drastic in its understatement, and MSFT cant even make anything these days without adding telemetry on one side and "content" noise on the other straight out of a Philip K Dick fever dream.

So 2 hours to figure out there is no way to disable the news other than turn off the whole widget thing.... my computer is rebooing constantly with intrusive unauthorized updates and even firmware updates... everything is broken. Windows just disappear everywhere... oh there was a glitch sign in again... You know, Windows 7 worked pretty good. I think I'll go back.

If you 're working , taking a break with trash news is all you need.

In any case, i am sure you can remove those things because i have done so ages ago

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/how-...

We really need to stop letting ads destroy everything, even tabloid-style clickbait news seems to be spreading to sell more of them.

There could be (and probably is) some little app that sets good defaults in Windows and turns off all the abuseware. But who would trust such an app? At some level, the problem is that any company big enough to build a trusted brand is going to follow its incentives to just stick a few ads on your screen. We see it also with VPNs and adblockers.

There are a couple well-followed free utilities that turn off all the Windows telemetry and clean up the junk from a fresh Windows install. They're trusted by communities that would instantly abandon them if they showed signs of "selling out". They manage to stay free and trustworthy as passion projects, mostly.

https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer

It's ironic that tomshardware.com has their site full of same news that they are complaining about. (At least for me).

Apple News is not quite as bad, but does have a similar problem. I very rarely use it just because of the sheer amount of clickbait that it wants me to read. There seems to be no way to say "just show me actual news only, please".

At least it is silo'd away into its own app, and not part of the OS UI, unlike Windows.

I ignored it by not using the “Search” bar, I simply just never used it. Until recently, when they started showing a colorful drawing on my taskbar that changed depending the current holiday. It was so annoying and distracting, thankfully I had the option to hide the search bar I also hided the useless widget bar.

The dichotomy of Microsoft focusing on productivity tools, yet putting this garbage in their operating system.

I hate constant news. Cutting the news in large part out of my life has definitely improved my wellbeing.

Now, I only check the news on Saturday morning, to know what's going on in the world. It leaves breaking news time to get the facts straight, and to filter out the non-news of the week.

Windows needs to stop pushing news. FTFY

It's that age old business model repeating itself again:

1. Service provider provides good service, but charges for it

2. Service provided becomes commoditized; cheap, easy to get

3. Service provider bottom line decreases

4. Service provider supplements service revenue with ad revenue

Cable TV was a notable example of this pattern. Now it's happening to MS Windows.

Windows 11 Pro retails for $200, but behaves as if it were free and makes you a product.

MacOS is locked in to vendor's hardware.

Linux's support for closed source drivers is not that great.

I wish there was an open source OS with stable driver ABI, so even closed source driver blobs would work for decades.

I blame companies like taboola just as much as Microsoft for pushing trash like this... "do this to your android phone before friday", showing a picture of a microphone hole and a paperclip... I hope people don't actually fall for this shit.

> Did you know that pigs eat humans (opens in new tab) “far more often than people expect?”

straight outta snatch

I switched my main desktop to Linux a bit over a year ago now. I got so sick of the Win11 issues and the advertising just irked me to no end. It's less than perfect, but I'm far more lenient when it comes to a free OS that I can do what I want with.

Retaliate: if someone is known as MS middle management, invest a short 20 minutes reading MDN news to them, before answering any questions or requests. (This shouldn't cause any annoyance, are they apparently deem this fine behavior.) ;-)

Windows can only display the news that microsoft is willing to purchase. Since they don't have a subscription service for news like apple+ you get what is basically free or places that just want to 'work for exposure'.

Do they purchase it, or is it a small revenue stream for them from the “news” outlets paying to get eyeballs passed their way? That would explain much of it being tacky lowest common-denominator click-bait crap (better reporting wouldn't get much traction in those spots as the target audience are more likely to ignore it or find a way to turn it off).

I honestly sometimes wonder if msft execs use windows at all in their personal lives...

You can be your bottom dollar that every such tabloid news is about getting eyeballs generating impressions on chumbox ads.

Can we not outlaw deceptive chumbox ads and make this cancer of poor quality gossip "news" for-profit disappear?

Desktop: Windows 10 LTSC (honestly people should use this if Windows, it's perfect)

Laptop: Debian

I've tried getting LTSC copies but they seem to be very difficult to source.

As always, Archive.org https://archive.org/details/en-us_windows_10_enterprise_ltsc...

LTSC is awesome, everything removed it's just an official vanilla Windows 10. I use it as a daily drive without any problems.

Can't recommend it enough: O&O ShutUp10++

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Not open but free of charge and effective!

I have Power Toys installed and start everything via PT. <cmd>spacebar "application name", just like the old quicksilver which was amazing (for mac). PT is great...but crashes an FT.

Windows 10 LTSC for the win

This is your scheduled friendly reminder to try out Fedora Linux if you haven't tried Linux seriously yet. Its a great first Linux experience and comes with stock GNOME, which is a treat.

It also has a KDE version, which is similarly a fantastic GUI and actually influenced a lot of the design patterns people today associate as "windows-y" (I forgot where I read that one though, so I can't cite that particular tidbit)

>This is your scheduled friendly reminder to try out Fedora Linux if you haven't tried Linux seriously yet. Its a great first Linux experience and comes with stock GNOME, which is a treat.

Absolutely! I've been using Fedora for a long time and have been very pleased with it for my home systems.

Although I prefer XFCE[0][1] over Gnome or KDE, and would definitely recommend it to recovering Windows users.

[0] https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/

[1] Note that I don't use the "spin" I linked, rather I have multiple Kickstart[2] configs (including a 'desktop' config), but XFCE is XFCE.

[2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-guid...

Would be cool if you could replace the news source with an rss feed

That would be handy. Designing your own front page to the internet was the height of web 2.0 AJAX & RSS but the idea is still valid and haven't seen a better replacement for what was easy back then despite Reddit's catchphrase.

it may be possible for someone to hack this functionality into windows 11

I dunno maybe the author of this article needs to stop googling for taylor swift.

non-snark reply: we're once again going to have the "what is fake news" argument again I suppose.

A Windows PC… isn’t really your Personal Computer. Same for Android, iOS, Macs… it’s just that Microsoft (and some Android manufacturers) are abusing the power more than most.

same for Google News... I hate having news customized based on what you assume my interests are and considering a bunch of shitty sources as relevant. Like you figured out I like marvel movies, way to go... hard pass on rumors and theories about plots. Hey I watched some youtube videos about the economy... guess it's time for the news to gaslight me for a few months and show anything that might spark fear of things outside my control.

This has also been bothering me on my work machine. I can’t believe Microsoft is getting away with peddling this tabloid news spam during work hours on corporate machines

Any OS that shoves ads in my face should be free with a no add upgrade option.

Just the other day I had to get some bloat ware off a friend's computer since it was making it unusable.

Everything that's not "space aliens abducted my dog" is too politically charged in 2023, so they have to push tabloid content to avoid being cancelled.

I make a conscious effort not to read any generic news and this would drive me insane. Even reading something like hackernews, there is a time and a place for that.

The path of least resistance for middle of the road Internet users is to become dumb as fuck. Our society has no standards for critical thinking or epistemology.

I use windows when I work in the emergency department. These ads drive me bonkers when I’m trying to use the software to take care of patients.

Switched to PopOS 4 years ago before that was using Ubuntu. Haven't found a need to use windows ever since. Do yourself a favor and switch.

Windows is an OS. It shouldn't display ANY news.

Firefox is guilty of the same thing. I was spinnign some VM in the cloud and I was WTF Firefox showing me all this crap on the homepage.

MSN also needs to actually moderate their comment sections. Too many tinfoil hats, trolls and far right extremists on the German version.

That would probably reduce the success ratio of their pageview and ad impression metrics. There probably is not a metric tracking quality or societal benefit.

The German version of every US website seems to greatly lack moderation.

People that comment on news websites tend to be kooks, trolls and those old people that love posting terrible memes on Facebook.

They need to stop showing tabloid on bing as well.

This will never end. Just move to Linux. Wine (and proton) are very good these days. For everything else there’s Virtual Box.

The ironic thing is, the first thing I had to do on this webpage was click "No Thanks" on a notifications request.

I work at Microsoft. This shit, along with “shopping toolbars” and “BNPL” in the Edge browser, is frankly embarrassing.

In the latest Windows 11 Home update - Right click task bar, task bar settings, Widgets OFF. Solved the problem for me.

pigs eat humans (opens in new tab) “far more often than people expect?”

Sounds like something I would see on hacker news.

That's a very long article for

> right clicking on the search box and unchecking Search -> Show Search Highlights.

I dont use windows search anymore, it's way too slow and imprecise. I use wox and everything instead.

Microsoft needs to declutter. Windows and Edge are starting to feel like a very disorganized junk drawer.

paraphrasing

>It's ok for windows to push sponsored content because Tom's hardware is sponsored content, but its not ok to push bad sponsored content.

I dont understand how you could arrive at this claim. Surely the only reasonable diagnosis of the problem is that Windows is pushing content at all.

This is like some old school prank developers would program in should the software detect it was pirated.

There is more than that to this. Remember that news corporations are owned by billionaires and they show you the world through a lens that benefit them. They want you to be outraged at things they want, they want you to have blind spots, they want you to be distracted while they pick your pockets.

True journalism no longer exists and the reason is that nobody wants to get killed for uncovering the truth.

They really want Windows to become a tablet OS, and someone misheard and turned it into a tabloid instead

I agree on all counts. Funny though how the same types of ads being complained about litter this page.

It’s even more distasteful when it’s the OS doing it.

On Windows 11. Taskbar Settings -> Personalization -> Turn Widgets off. Problem solved.

Don't waste your breath complaining about Windows. Microsoft isn't listening.

Microsoft has been trying this for a long time and getting slapped back numerous times.

Hey with Windows integrating GPT-4, they can generate those articles themselves!

I don't get it. You can just turn off the news and ads, even uninstall MS News.

This is the way skype died, sure appears like they haven't learned their lesson.

That's why I switched to MX. I don't want to see this garbage pushed on me.

MX?

Linux. It is actually quite nice.

That was big enough reason for me to completely abandon Windows in favor of Debian

Indeed this kind of trash helped me get back to my senses and switch to Mac...

Most of my feed is sourced from one of our wretched right-wing daily newspapers (Briton here) - despite diligence in not reading any of these articles, rather instead selecting to hide from this particular source, which I've attempted numerous times, their occurrence only increases. I'd like to understand the algorithmic genius behind this behaviour.

"Engagement"

Ok, switched to Linux.

What's the best way to help improve the Linux Desktop experience?

MSN should not exist. It's a clear-cut case of vertical integration.

This is why I moved to Mac.

Does Classic Start Menu solve this? (It has its own search box)

Yeah it’s showing classic click bait it makes them look like fb

Using KDE is a breeze.

News of any kind should not be pushed by an OS.

They are still so tasteless it's insane

i've had multiple issues where graphic photographs appeared on my news pop-up thing during meetings.

it really pisses me off.

Windows needs to stop. Period.

Use linux. Its free.

I think people should stop trying to use the windows malware as an OS.

The following program which someone recommended to me here in HN has been a godsend in this regard since it allows me to configure my taskbar the way it was in Windows 10: https://www.startallback.com/

Related and open source: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

You can tell it's open source since it doesn't sell itself very well - not a single screenshot anywhere!

> 100% C

Noice

HN, literally "Hacker News" where people will spend (not an exaggeration) a decade complaining about Windows and macOS issues, with all sorts of workarounds, homebrew, homebrew workarounds and more, and yet still offer up their Ubuntu 18.04 experiences as if they're indicative of where Desktop Linux is today.

I have auto ZFS snapshots, the choice of 5+ competent desktop environments, every piece of software I need and use (including Halo, emulators, etc), an immutable OS, rollbacks to nearly any point in time, have never, ever, ever had anything "break", and have never remotely seen an advertisement or nagware, ever. Not to mention that my NixOS skills directly translate to running servers the way they're meant to be run. With my recently setup zrepl, I also have an exact replica of all of my data on a portable SSD. I can travel with a single laptop and know that I can literally get it back to its identical state in about 15 minutes, should it ever be broken or stolen. Entire classes of anxieties eliminated in a way that other OSes can't even dream of, on top of complete control, and again no nagware.

It's about tradeoffs and I'd much rather put up some up front investment and then never think about it again. Go re-install Windows and watch how long it takes to disable all the telemetry, un-privacy features, default browsers, application and desktop configuration, etc. And then realize for maybe 3x that cost, you could learn something new and move past all of this nonsense. Or just keep dealing with Windows Updates and Bing shoved everywhere it doesn't belong.

I SO AGREE

From the article: "Windows is the most popular operating system in the world"

Therein lies the rub, or lies the lie to be exact, a 38-year old+ lie: Windows was never an operating system (neither is MacOS for that matter). The system worthy of that name, operating system, is only a type 1 hypervisor (such as Xen because open source), where you truly operate over the system(s): any issue with some weird quirk in a machine? nuke it from orbit and spin another one.

Your Adobe Photoshop application has nothing to do with your Fortnite game, and both of them have nothing to do with your browser and your propensity for tabloids: they should have never been and should never be on and under the same "operating system", perhaps not even on the same disk. Isn't it insane that we must sometime restart the operating system with all the apps because some single app crashed? How could this system design ever use the name "operating system"?

The only benefit of cohesion is the corporate benefit: the system, and hence you, your data, your consumption patterns, are easier to manage if they are under one "operating system". And you, the faceless, nameless, general you, because you don't actually care about your data, about your attention, and perhaps not even about your life, oppressed as you are into being choiceless, hence powerless, deserve "operating systems" such as Windows, MacOS, and companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and nowadays "Open"AI.

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