Hacker News Reader

> I've been daily driving Linux since March 2020 however recently purchased a Valve Index and decided to pop Win 10 on a completely empty secondary M.2. The setup kept failing because it just could not handle the fact that the primary M.2 had a Linux boot loader on it. It just refused to install.

That's better than what has happened to me with prior versions of Windows: the Windows installer just deleted the Linux bootloader, even though it was on a completely different drive.

Nowadays I always disconnect all other drives when installing Windows. But it's a pain.

Even doing it the opposite way around still doesn't work (installing Windows first, and then replacing the Windows bootloader). Every time there is a Windows update that is "major" enough, it will wipe the existing Linux bootloader.

I lived like that for about a year, but eventually just gave up and stuck to Windows. I like Linux a lot, but I've found that I save more time using Windows then trying to get Linux to work on whatever piece of hardware I have (driver issues, bugs, some remaining software that still doesn't work with Linux).

You can remove most of the crap via a debloater, but Windows 11 is just overall worse than Windows 10. The UI updates just took all the negatives of using a Mac, but without any the parts that make it actually useful. I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

My favorite pet theory about Microsoft is that no one that works there actually uses any of their products and are just on Macs lol

> The UI updates just took all the negatives of using a Mac, but without any the parts that make it actually useful.

then

> I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

You can't do that on a mac either.

Ah my bad, that was unrelated. Windows 10 had an option to show the Window titles of items on your taskbar if there was enough room.

Most of the time I end up having 2-3 VSCode windows open which you can't switch between unless you hover over the icon first.

I have a close relative who works for the beast, and he claims that everyone there "eats the dogfood".

Knowing what I know of him, I believe it and he certainly lives the company life. He even used to have (and claimed to like) a Windows phone. ;)

Having owned multiple Windows Phones, they were awesome. Anyone that "claims" to like them is probably telling the truth.

I still miss the tiled home screen and the excellent keyboard.

>My favorite pet theory about Microsoft is that no one that works there actually uses any of their products and are just on Macs lol

There have been multiple comments on HN from Microsofters (Microsoftarians?) about how the Windows UI/Design team uses Macs exclusively, which explains a lot. I believe the Visual Studio team is still dogfooding, but can't believe that about anyone else, given how actively user hostile the OS has been.

I find that really difficult to believe.

> Every time there is a Windows update that is "major" enough, it will wipe the existing Linux bootloader.

I think that has not been true for a long time. At least if you are using UEFI. Windows respects UEFI enough to just change own stuff in the EFI partition. Windows will change the default boot entry to itself at installation time, but so every Linux distro do. Notice that nowadays you can install Windows *after* Linux and you just need to change the default OS back to Linux if you want so.

I'm a Linux user myself, but this is one of those myths that should end. I have had a Windows partition for almost three years that I only use to update Windows (all Windows 10 versions up until now and Windows 11 in the last update). Not once the update has affected my boot options.

I had Windows 10's installer try to install its bootloader into a Windows dynamic disk volume, which trashed the volume

rather than trust the quality of Microsoft's software: the general rule is to unplug anything other than the drive you're installing onto

Linux Mint has started changing the UEFI boot order every time GRUB updates. Which seems to be quite often recently. It's incredibly rude!

>I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

To be fair, that dumbass trend started with Windows 7.

I just install StartAllBack these days to be done with it (and it fixes the problems that 10's Start Menu has- that search will probably never work again). Yeah, you have to pay for that extension, but you also have to pay if you want window-snapping on macOS- thus they stopped being better, but they haven't really become worse.

THANK YOU!!! The link if anyone is else is interested: https://www.startallback.com/

I gave up on duel boot a long time ago, Each operating system gets it's own drive. Like you said duel boot was always breaking.

Sadly it seems that the issues they're talking about persist even with each OS getting its own drive. I know I've had issues with that. It seems insane that Windows should overreach onto drives its not even installed on, but here we are.

I've been daily driving Linux for maybe around 5 years, and I only ever need to be boot into Windows when I need to use an android custom ROM tool. This is generally a flurry of activity over a day or few, and then nothing for months.

I've just (re)obtained a desktop PC with a GPU, which I'm using as a Linux gaming prototype box with ubuntu 20.04 LTS running Steam, and I'm reliving some youth in playing through Deus Ex (properly, stealthily). Enjoying the fact that Linux is doing it pretty smoothly (with some initial setup headaches now overcome).

If youean Obsidian, Heimdall on Linux is a pretty excellent alternative, you just need to be specific about which partitions you're flashing

Install GMDX on top of Deus Ex.

Yes, that was something that, for some reason, helped compatibility - there's a launcher that's bundled with it.

My plan is to complete it, slowly, then go from the start again with the Revision mod.

The Revision mod it's really bad. GMDX gives consistency and it doesn't have nonsensic Chinese characters in Hong Kong.

Also, it doesn't crap out the lightning, neither makes superficial changes because of "look, shiny!!!".

The setup tools, and boot management are inexcusable.

BCD (and its associated tools) are a steaming mess when anything goes wrong. The learning curve for GRUB et al. is the shortest curve ever - what its doing is really transparent. Fixing anything in the windows recovery environment is a total nightmare. Linux, worst case you use something like ReFind and can happily boot anything. Windows goes wrong, you're at the behest of of the practically useless "Startup Repair", which gives little or no practical output.

Don't get me onto the drive selection on setup too... Why can't they indicate which drive is which model / serial number? Do I have to guess from the exact size? Also why do I need to turn other drives off in UEFI to ensure they're not touched.

If "Linux" could ever fix the consistent sound mixer / bluetooth issues, it could really be the de facto OS. I don't know how but across multiple people and distributions sound issues always start surfacing after 2-3 months.

Would recommend trying out PipeWire[0] if you haven't already. I don't know what your sound issues are but I've had no problems since switching ~15 months ago.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

Thanks a lot for this. The problems I personally had and seen others have/had are static when no sound is played, and intermittently bluetooth audio playback issues (no sound). Also in one instance heavily distorted sound was reproducibly played when the discord notification came on.

What's wrong with PulseAudio? It's not great for pro use-cases with an unfortunately high latency (not that Windows's audio server is better in this regard), but it kinda has always just worked for me.

> What's wrong with PulseAudio?

What's wrong is that a lot of audio hardware is Windows hardware, i.e. subtly broken.

Excel is the big one. The web version is really, really good on its own terms, but desktop excel really is in a class of its own both in terms of capability and penetration.

Yes, it does give people regular reasons to point and laugh at it, and it's probably dangerous how much of the modern world depends on it, but you only have to use a competitor for a very short period of time to realise that displacing it would be a very, very tall order.

Except for compatibility (which will always be questionable with proprietary formats), I don't think most folks actually need Word or Excel. Most folks aren't delving into VBA and such, they just need a bunch of interlinked cells with a little math.

Compatibility is 90% of the problem, though. While it might be tempting to think that most people might not need Excel, the important thing to realise is that they think they do, the people who are sending them spreadsheets to look at think they do, and your beliefs aren't going to change that.

Yep. But the first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging

Step zero is to realise you're in a hole in the first place.

Any luck getting the Index to work on linux? I hacked away at it for about 3 months w/ Fedora but kept running into issues, random stuff like making sure the names weren't capitalized in files, etc.

It works but it's a buggy mess and the newest AMD GPU driver actually regressed and broke it. The most recent build of [Nobara](https://nobaraproject.org/) (a Fedora based gaming distro) works out of the box but if you update it ... You'll break compatibility.

I was able to get VRChat working but when I entered a world with too many avatars I'd see major issues with sound and GPU problems.