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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of WSL, which has kept me on Windows for years more than I otherwise would have.

But I can't stand the scammy adware infused OS Windows has become and will be moving to Apple Silicon full-time when the next gen M3 Desktop hardware is out.

As a recent M2 Macbook Air owner I'm surprised how much software supports ARM/Apple Silicon natively, where everything I use daily as a .NET developer worked OOB [1]. It's also great for running multiple OS's, e.g. you can install a headless Ubuntu with `brew install lima` or install and run latest ARM Windows 11, Ubuntu and Fedora OS's with UTM [2] which saved me a Parallels License I thought I needed to run Windows on macOS.

[1] https://servicestack.net/posts/postgres-mysql-sqlserver-on-a...

[2] https://mac.getutm.app

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I wanted to add a new user account on my new Windows 11 system. It came with Windows Home right. So when I went to add one, it told me that feature is disabled because I have poor man's Windows, go to this other program. So I go to program B. Guess what program B told me? It told me I was using poor man's Windows to go back to program A to add a new user. I had to do it via command line. After I was about to remove my Hotmail user (I just wanted offline only users) I said screw this, and installed POP_OS! instead, installed Steam, and move on with life. I even played the good 'ole Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux thanks to Proton.

I think at this point I have nothing keeping me using Windows other than the rare game that Proton doesn't support, but my old gaming rig still works and plays most games, so I can easily swap. It pisses me off though, because my Windows 10 box for some reason, at some point, any new program I install does not show up in the start menu whatsoever. I've not even been able to find anything on Google that remotely answers why its broken. At least with Steam I dont have to worry about it, but if I hit Windows Key and type anything, I dont see any programs I installed like three years ago. Freaking weird.

Anyway, I think moving forward I'll be buying Mac or Linux Systems. I'll let employers buy me Windows boxes.

Edit: Typo'd Proton as Photon ;)

I'm a big fan of PopOS after using it for over a year now. I hadn't used desktop Linux for over a decade and expected the usual hassle and obscure fiddling, but in all honesty I've found it easier to use than not just Windows (obviously, it's a shitshow these days) but even Mac too (which wouldn't let me configure my suspend settings without running obscure shell commands copied off the internet, and required me to set up homebrew to get any decent software store, and broke git on every single system update, and...)

I might switch to Fedora since I want something kind of "rolling" but not quite bleeding edge. But I've used Debian/Ubuntu based OS' for a while, and POP is definitely one of my favorites currently. I will nag about one thing though, their package manager UI has some severe bug where it halts the whole UI (probably a threading issue).

I fled to pop os after the arch devs decided that shipping a broken build of grub master branch (nightly) was totally acceptable, and if I didn't like it I should 'use an easier distro'. They left millions of users in an unbootable state and weren't the least bit apologetic about it. Easiest decision I ever made.

Thats a wild response. I left arch in 2012 and have been with debian since then because its stable. I would have lost all faith.

Unfortunately Linux is still far from ready. It's awesome that it can run Steam games quite seamlessly, and it can even run non-Steam games if you fiddle around a bit and find the magic incantations. But - I tried using it for things like GoG, and quickly found out that there is actually no way of running GOG on Linux, even with Proton/Wine, unless maybe if I go and install a bunch of other 3rd parties. Not to mention, installing the Nvidia drivers without first running an apt upgrade on my newly installed system quickly broke the whole thing to where it wouldn't even boot.

So back to Windows it is, and hoping that they respect the GDPR enough to protect me from the worse of their snooping.

Have you tried Lutris? It seems to have GOG support, and is designed to help you do all the incantations for you. I havent tried it yet, but have heard a lot of good things about it.

There's a limit to how many third parties I was willing to install to get the programs I wanted working. I also didn't read anywhere that Lutris would have helped with GOG - every reddit thread I trawled ended up saying that we need to wait for a Linux version of GOG. I tried Steam, I tried playing with a few of its options, I tried a few ways of running GOG as a steam game - decided to switch back to Windows. I do enough debugging at work, I don't want to spend too much of my free time debugging there either.

All I know is Lutris is meant to handle every windows game client: GOG, Steam, Origin, and so on.

Researching a bit more, it seems that Lutris can download and perhaps run these games, but it doesn't offer other integrations. It's not clear to me whether it downloads updates automatically for them, but it certainly doesn't handle things like cloud saves (I game from multiple systems) or achievements.

"GoG" what is that?

> Unfortunately Linux is still far from ready.

Depends on person. I use it for over decade, exclusively for few years since my Windows install bricked itself and recovery partition few years ago (and I discovered that I have no idea how I should reinstall Windows)

Good Old Games. It's a game store, like Steam. Used to be for old games hence the name.

> quickly found out that there is actually no way of running GOG on Linux

But GoG is a website, not an application. The games they've ported/adapted to Linux work great, at least for me. I've never had the slightest trouble.

Clarified in another reply, I was referring to GOG Galaxy, the launcher that you would use to keep those games up to date, sync saves across systems etc.

Ah, OK. I've actually never heard of GoG Galaxy before, and so haven't ever used it.

It's obviously not required, but I do find it nice, especially for newer games that still receive regular patches. And of course, achievements are sometimes fun to have as well.

I'm referring to GOG Galaxy, the Good Old Games game launcher. It's an app similar to Steam, which allows you to install and update your GOG games, get achievements, sync saves etc.

Heroic Launcher does a great job of getting GoG products working on Linux with minimal effort.

It's called heroicgameslauncher, runs on Linux and works with GoG.

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher

I hadn't heard about this one when I was researching options. I'll give it a go next time I feel inclined to play with Linux, it sounds like it supports most of the features I'd like.

To be fair/transparent, I hadn't heard about it either until my 16 year old pointed it out a couple of months ago, LOL.

Can also be used on the Steam Deck to run games from GoG (since the Steam Deck uses Linux).

Saying Linux is far from ready [for desktop usage] is like saying bicycle is far from ready for off road. What do you mean by “bicycle”?? Who made it? What features were priorities?

People run third party software all day every day. Third party software runs your browser, inside and out. Many commercial products leverage open source projects. Bottom line is you start Windows and you’re running third party programs. If you want Windows apps to run on Linux you need wine/proton/bottles etc. If you want it to be easy, you run Lutris or Steam or Heroic. Sure you can do it yourself too, but that’s harder.

I switched off windows easily, and play 90% of the games I want and have very few problems with productivity software. I use PopOS but I could have gone with half a dozen other distros just as simply.

I admit that I am not daunted by computer problems, but the worst case scenario is you choose a different distro with different priorities. Get yourself a couple memory sticks.

If your heart is set on a cheese sandwich, there is likely no non-dairy alternative that is going be good enough for you. But if you can stand Gimp instead of Photoshop and Libre office instead of MS Office, you’ll do fine.

I use linux as a daily driver since probably around 2006, but to say it’s a replacement for windows, it’s just not the case, your example for “readiness” is video games, a lot don’t care about that but rather other productivity software, Adobe suite and Adobe acrobat, MS suite, some CAD/3D software, a lot of engineering software like simulators and what not, and you either have crappy alternatives (like anything to replace adobe) or none in the case of other software. That’s why I still have Win10 on a non-upgradable CPU, and as long as I can run these software there, will not update.

I can run Discord, I can run Firefox, Chrome, the only thing I can't run is Visual Studio natively, but I can run VS Code. I can run Rider and .NET natively though, so there is that, and a lot of things I like work better on Linux (specifically Postgres and a few Linux first type of projects, gnu utils arguably because it is OOTB on Linux).

> But I can't stand the scammy adware infused OS Windows has become

Set up the drivers for a professional level ASUS motherboard last night, during the installation of the drivers, which was essential because LAN and Wifi didn't work without them. It showed me ads for Norton 360 and WinRar over and over during the installation that seemed to take way longer than it should.

Then it told me an update was required and preselected in the update was install WinRar and Norton360.

Like ASUS, please I'm begging you, just charge me the $0.20 to $1 more that these ads earned you direct to me. Please just charge what you need to make a quality professional product and have some self respect for what you're shipping.

This only happens because it's become normal all across windows software and tools.

Why not Linux (depending on your line of work). Wider hardware choice, easier to upgrade, and no corporate oversight. Doesn't cover all use cases but it's a good option these days.

With computers like framework and system76, the community for hardware support is solid too now. Seriously considering a switch from M1. I feel like macOS is half baked development environment. I only stay because I never bought a Linux supported computer and I got the M1 air very cheap. But I am considering getting a framework as I just damaged a usb-c port and I am not entering apple’s repairability problem.

I've had excellent support from Linux across a variety of machines for 2 decades. Dell, Lenovo and HP.

While Framework and Sys76 are the two major players in the Linux laptop space, if you are looking to save money I would recommend picking up a Dell/Lenovo/HP "business" laptop, those run Linux really well and a good chunk are even certified to run Ubuntu.

In my experience though I stopped buying laptops for personal use and started buying desktops. Easier to upgrade, usually cheaper and better support for Linux just by virtue of not having things like a Wifi or BT card.

Why is Framework considered a player in that space? What does that company actively do to improve Linux support? Do they offer free BIOSes like coreboot? Are any of their peripheral firmwares open-source? What kind of Linux compatibility do they guarantee for their hardware prior to launch?

Afaik they're exactly the same as Lenovo: a Windows PC manufacturer that happens to be popular with Linux users, and which doesn't go out of their way to break things for Linux users. But they've shipped laptops that had broken power management on Linux on launch day, for example. They're not a Linux hardware vendor.

Lenovo Thinkpads have explicit Linux support, but they still tend to have issues with Bluetooth audio at the very least.

That's a welcome development. In the past, every time I've been in the market for a laptop, they had few or no explicitly supported models.

(The Bluetooth thing sucks though.)

The Starfighter also seems quite interesting: https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter (Although I love the Framework concept)

As for Linux support for your M1, did you check out Asahi Linux? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHoZK4FoIo Its development is progressing rapidly, so be sure to check out the latest development status at their site: https://asahilinux.org/

Have a work mate that has just bought a 2nd hand apple lappy with the M2 and has Asahi installed on it.

it is blazingly fast. No kidding around... everything just snaps on when clicked.

If this is the future I may have to start buying apple hardware

Not the person you responded to, but I'm in the same boat; I went from grudgingly using it due to being the 'best' in practice, to seeing it as something I need to move away from.

I've used the 'big three' (windows/macos/linux) desktop OSs at work and home in recent years. Here's my ranking:

1) Linux 2) MacOS 3) Windows

Where I have control to use what I want, linux is my choice. At work though, I need to jump through endpoint management and security theater nonsense, so I am stuck choosing between MacOS and Windows.

I do all my deployment to Linux Servers, but I want my main Desktop to just work and plan on sticking to the primary OS the hardware was built for. Don't need broad hardware support, it just needs to support M3 hardware when it comes out. I'm also running macOS software like Pixelmator Pro and Affinity software suite.

I'm already running multiple Docker Linux containers, headless Ubuntu on lima and GUI Ubuntu and Fedora VMs in UTM, so don't feel like I'm missing out on the Desktop Linux experience.

I could definitely do most of my development on Linux given .NET SDK and JetBrains products supports it, but I'll be waiting a few years at least for Asahi Linux to get feature parity before running it natively.

The frustrating thing about shopping for x86 laptops (as you probably will be if you’re wanting to run Linux) is how few models come even a little close to comparing to MacBooks in terms of battery life even with tools like tlp running and CPU throttled down as far as it’ll go, and that’s to say nothing about heat and fan noise.

I’ve been looking around and the only two 12-14” options I can find that match that description are the HP Dragonfly G4 and ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD), and those still fall several hours short of the M2 Air, and the M3 Air will likely widen that gap with its SoC being on a smaller process node.

Battery is indeed best on macbooks.

> ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD)

I went for the asus proart studio book. high screen resolution, high refresh rate, the oled display is gorgeous (although the touch screen overlay is slightly visible, not an issue once used to it) and it feels more robust than a macbook. also trivially upgrade-able short of cpu and gpu. had to patch my acpi tables for sound support, and no asus dial compat yet. every now and then i get my hands dirty and i might be able to hack something to get it working. thus got a new hobby as well :-)

The problem with PC hardware is that yes, there's more choice, but it's all mostly bad. Nobody other than Apple manages to put a decent and reliable trackpad on their machines for example, and all PC laptops I've used have at times gotten really loud. If you're okay with non-Windows OSes, hardware choice is the main reason to pick Apple machines.

Also, Linux is coming along rather well on Apple Silicon machines.

FWIW, I find current gen (starting with 8th) HP EliteBooks decent enough. They work perfectly in Linux (actually better than Windows, since for a while some bits weren't recognized...). They're quiet unless I'm compiling something (if I don't use Windows, which for some reasons gets the fan spinning even when it's supposed to be asleep). The trackpad is good, even though it's worse than my 2013 MBP's. The main issue I have with them is the absurdly bad displays. Even the top-of-the-line display is ridiculously bad.

> Even the top-of-the-line display is ridiculously bad.

To me, that’s far from “decent enough”, not even taking into account the other (more minor) differences you name.

The reason I mention it is because some people don't really care about display quality. I know basically none of my colleagues do. They'll see a MBP and go "yeah, it looks better. so?". But they do care if half the things don't work (think borked wifi or no webcam). So, for people like this, I find it's a good data point. And even though I do care about display quality, given my usage pattern, this isn't much of an issue in practice, since 99% of this PC's usage is tethered to a high-quality external screen. If I had a gorgeous MBP, I'd still be looking at the same monitor.

The battery doesn't last as long as an M mac, either. But then again, I rarely use it away from a desk. I could technically use one of those mini pcs that I'd cart around, but for the 1% of the time when I do use while out and about, it's a good compromise.

I daily drive a Gen 9 on Linux, it works fairly well, it even gets BIOS updates through fwupd now! However I cannot state how bad the display is, it's dragging-a-window-leaves-a-visible-trail bad.

Every single LCD display technology right now has serious flaws. I don't understand it.

As far as I remember, the "best" displays on the Elitebooks sport a whopping 72%... NTSC coverage. Some are worse, at around 48% or something.

I don't understand why they cheap out so much on displays. These could be very nice little laptops... My 10 yo MBP's display is running circles around them...

Just to add a data point, the HP ElitBooks have been my replacement for ThinkPads. I find the to be a good replacement. I've been running Redhat on an HP elitebook 840 g6, which Ive had for about a year now, and I've been very happy with it. The trackpad is mostly good, not great, but I'm more of a nub guy and that works perfectly.

> I'm more of a nub guy and that works perfectly

I'd never had a PC with a trackpoint before the hp, but I can't get used to it. How do you configure it? I find it's either uncontrollably quick, or slow as molasses. I like the idea of being able to drive it without moving my hand to the trackpad.

One of the first things I do with a new Fedora install is turn down the speed in the control panel. It takes a little tweaking to get right for my tastes, but I find it a small price to pay. But I've also been using a trackpoint for years, and I don't think I remember how awkward it felt at first. It m8ght not be your thing, but I've found them to be very convenient and intuitive.

> Nobody other than Apple manages to put a decent and reliable trackpad on their machines for example

Not my experience at all. High end Windows laptops have plenty good trackpads nowadays.

When was the last time you used a Mac trackpad?

Linux is ok nowadays, but why? The Mac hardware is already better, and Apple isn't too annoying. You'll have more random nonsense to deal with on Linux, some of it not their fault.

Mac is more annoying than it seems. I went full Linux around three years ago. The annoyance for me peaked with Mac phoning home file data every time I tried to open a file and apps breaking upon major updates.

My main issue was with the hardware though. I would spend $3,400-$4500 on a nice machine only to have the keyboard break and be told they would replace the entire motherboard, etc. Then to have a screen break due to a poor cable connection and be told I would have to replace everything again.

I said fuck it and bought a decent machine with open hardware and a good-enough screen. It's no mac display, but damn... I haven't had to fight with hardware or software in about three years. The kicker? My machine only cost me $1,100 and battery isn't half bad. I get 9 hours with it.. which I never believed was possible with Linux before.

> Apple isn't too annoying

I find Apple to be too annoying for my tastes. Less annoying than Microsoft, but that doesn't mean much.

It's that vs the annoyance of using Linux. Which is worse? I've been there, diagnosing bluetooth and wifi issues, dealing with free vs non-free drivers, finding out Netflix won't run in 1080p/4K, going down the Flash rabbit hole back then, dealing with sleep issues, having sound not work, jumping ship to whatever DE is best supported, messing with WINE for the plethora of non-Linux-supported apps, it never ends. A "how to do X in Linux" article exists for so many things that you'd never search for on Mac (or even Windows), but Linux users tend to make it sound like everything works out of the box.

As a Linux user, everything does tend to work out of the box for me, and Linux is far less annoying to me than Apple's stuff. YMMV, of course.

I'm thinking that a lot of this depends on what you're doing with your machines. Linux isn't ideal for certain things (that happen to be things that don't matter to me), for certain. Just as other OSes aren't ideal for other things. Your experience, I suspect, largely depends on what your use case is.

I just switched to a 6 year old laptop I had from Mac and installed Linux on it. Everything worked great for my use case. I think this depends so much on the hardware you use.

>Wider hardware choice

You're joking right? Sure, something built in 2002 will probably still work well in Linux, but that's often the case for Windows, and on a Windows system, the hardware AND the proprietary software it came with will probably still work.

Meanwhile, in Linux land, if you don't buy very very very specific hardware you can never hope to have functional sleep.

You're joking right?

Not as much as you.

Windows 11 won't (officially) install on any system lacking a TPM v2.0. The only reason that Windows 11 can be installed without hassle on modern hardware is because every motherboard manufacturer started scrambling to outfit their systems with such a TPM by default. Also, for Windows Vista they completely rewrote their driver model for many devices, which means that no printer/scanner/sound card/graphics card from the year you mention has functioning drivers for any current Windows version.

So no, something built in 2002 will most definitely not run current Windows. Even most systems built in 2018 will not run Windows 11.

I became a new MacOS user when the M1 was released.

One thing I really like is that it's so much more similar to Linux than Windows. Many of my favourite Linux server tools also run on Mac. They're either included or are a "brew install x" away.

Everything from cron to nginx (for local web dev) works like a charm. Combine this with the extreme ease of doing office-type work on a Macbook: Excel works, printing / scanning works. Add in multi-day battery life and a kickass CPU. Price this the same or lower than the equivalent Windows machine. It's a learning curve to go from Windows to MacOS, but well worth it, and a total no-brainer for most non-gamers.

people can't manage to block "malware" on a Windows system but somehow manage to use a dev tools? and the idea that a Mac costs the same or less as a dell/hp is ludicrous. the cheapest MacBook air is $1000, while a Windows laptop is $500. sorry to destroy your ideology but at least be honest and say I prefer a Mac and can afford it suck windows can pound sand.

Equivalent hardware. $500 does not buy you a Mac Air level laptop.

And I am talking about power users, not the hypothetical grandma. Although grandma is ALSO better served by a Macbook.

Regarding hardware for grandma, you misspelled iPad.

Correct, grandma should use an iPad. Big screen, big fonts, plays Wordle, does Facetime, doesn't even have a terminal.

I love my iPad for video and games like chess. Even some people who draw like theirs for that.

+1 and it's very hard for Grandma's iPad to accrue malware, which is a welcome change.

> people can't manage to block "malware" on a Windows system but somehow manage to use a dev tools?

Yes, cause maybe it's a work machine and they don't want to (or aren't allowed to) screw with the system, whether it's by messing with the registry or especially installing some debloater.

Every time I click the play button on my keyboard, Apple Music launches and asks if I want to start a subscription. There's no (normal) way to make it so that play will launch, or even reliably play, Spotify.

MacOS is covered in non-removable Apple adware like this but somehow always gets a pass.

... yes apparently I can install an app that force quits Music every time it launches, or I can modify system permissions, but...why can't I just uninstall it?

That's odd, I just tried mine and it controls VLC just fine.

Mine plays whatever was playing last, including youtube in Chrome. Brutal! Now I just click on the play icon in the top menu instead - that shows a list of all play button targets and you can pick which one should play.

Mine usually works great, controlling whatever program or video I'm watching, but 10% of the time it just decides to go control a completely different AV program in the background, for no discernible reason.

I don't have that issue with play buttons on Windows. Never tried media keys on linux.

If a video is already open in VLC, yes. It's a little annoying how the button will launch Music if there's nothing to play. I don't give them a pass for this, it's just still a lottt less annoying than Windows.

Apple is full of weird choices that are off-putting to newcomers, intrusive ads, bugs. For some reason in German, they use a non-standard keyboard layout and they don't sell a standard one.

But it's still better than Windows.

I just wish Apple would fix their idiosyncrasies, I may have gone into the eco-system more fully. I guess they don't need the business of undecided people.

I want so badly be a big fan of WSL, but I just can't, I'm hitting too many issues for it to be productive and I had to jump back into a proper Linux environment...

> But they make it really hard to rely on. From random shutdowns, GPU unreliability to data corruption and performance differences with just using Linux directly, I had to move away from it and back to Linux because I felt like I slowly losing my mind troubleshooting these issues.

> Latest issue was that the virtual disk file continued to grow beyond 500GB large while Linux still reported that it was just 20% full from the inside. So, reading about things, I gave optimize-vhd a try and boom, full disk file was corrupted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308850

I wish it was working properly, because I have to use Windows for other things anyways and I don't really care about ads because I don't feel like they're getting in the way when I use the OS. But that WSL basically doesn't work properly is such a showstopper.

Yeah I don't understand the love for WSL. Within the first couple weeks of using it, I've run into

* Time doesn't stay in sync after sleeping, which breaks package updating.

* It doesn't get the DNS servers it should from DHCP, so you have to go manually edit /etc/resolv.conf

* The filesystem is super slow, and git commands take multiple seconds.

All stuff that can be worked around, but I don't have to deal with this crap when just running Linux, and all Windows gets me is a clunky UI and ads. It's mystifying to me that everyone is somehow capable of managing fleets of Linux servers just fine, but for some reason managing developer Linux workstations is impossible, so we end up with these Rube Goldberg machines.

The problem I see most often is that WSL causes processor stalls in my other VMs, I'm not sure if it's intentional to force you to use WSL or the Hyper-V VM subsystem exclusively, if it is I can't see how it's a wise move.

Enabling Hyper-V also meant that virtualbox completely lost the ability to have a clock that ran properly - each VM was seeing the hardware timer out by 3 seconds every minute, and thus the only fix there was to run ntp every minute. vmware wasn't affected somehow.

> The filesystem is super slow, and git commands take multiple seconds.

Ugh, this is a known issue in WSL if you try to use git on the host operating system (/mnt/c/Users/path/to/repo)... there are cross-system file system virtualization issues in WSL2 when reading from the Windows hosts.

Workaround is to have your git repos within WSL itself (~/my-git-repo) to have native performance.

All of these workarounds unfortunately adds up, and after a while it's just too much to having to deal with, when you could have just gone straight up for a Linux/Windows dual boot setup and not having to deal with any of those issues at all.

It really is a shame. I've wanted to build a gaming pc for years now, but the dev experience is compromised on windows, and the gaming experience is compromised on linux. People on windows will tell me to 'just use WSL', and people on linux will tell me to 'just use proton'. Both are decent, neither are great. I currently have a linux laptop, and a ps5 and both excel at their respective roles

Good ol' dual-booting still works, and I'm currently using it to switch between Windows, Arch Linux and NixOS.

Yes, but ideally I'd like a robust fs that I can use for storage and have r/w interop between linux and windows. I hear you can do that with the btrfs windows driver, but I've never tested it

Don't dual boot, it's not worth it. Just use Windows VM and GPU passtrough, honestly recent Ryzen CPUs are so fast you are not loosing much performance running games in VM (just buy faster RAM).

> I want so badly be a big fan of WSL, but I just can't

I'm the same. I use WSL daily at work, but it's more of a "better than nothing" sort of thing for me. Every time I use it, I wish I had a real Linux system instead.

Modern hardware can power VMs within 1-5% of native and passthrough PCI-e devices... there's virtually no excuse to risk your machine's health and security by exposing it to Windows on bare metal in 2023.

Stay smart, stay protected.

Doesn't nvidia limit gpu pass through to vms?

Not with their latest cards afaik, and the older ones have workarounds.

Darn, no GPU support for UTM. I'm using solidworks on Parallels/ARM windows 11 on my 14" M1 macbook pro and it works well, slightly faster than on my 2019 intel 13" macbook pro with bootcamp. I would love to move away from parallels and stop repurchasing it every time MacOS is updated and it stops working.

How well does the file system perform when it writes through the hypervisor on those VMs?

I’ve tried running Docker for development environments on macOS but gave up because writing and reading files from macOS host was 2 orders of magnitude slower than native performance.

I use one Windows desktop for a LLM & Stable Diffusion server (among others). I like to conserve power, so I have remote power switch (just a smart plug) and configured wake on Lan with very short time to sleep. I have been very happy with it working, until it suddenly stops responding.

I walk back to it and 5 out of 6 times it's Windows update blue full screen that essentially reads "we're changing settings for browser". That one time is BSOD

Younger kids are getting used to Linux via Steam and the Steam Deck, and support for games on Linux are increasing constantly. I'd wager that the upcoming generation will be less kept to Windows, which will be a good thing.

Microsoft stuff is a whole separate world that I've never explored, so I was surprised to learn that .NET isn't just for developing Windows applications. What's your workflow with that, and is it compromised in any way by developing outside of Microsoft's platform?

.NETs (fka .NET Core) is cross platform since inception and now runs fast and flawlessly on Linux and macOS. I only use it to build server (i.e. non GUI) Apps.

The tooling and workflow is just as good on Windows as I’m able to use Jet Brains Rider / VS Code to develop .NET projects on both.

Having a full native Unix Terminal and using tools like Docker is nicer on macOS, installing and building OSS projects is better supported but Finder is worse than Explorer which is IMO the biggest drawback.

> Finder is worse than Explorer which is IMO the biggest drawback.

As a longtime Mac user, I agree. Quicklook is nice, but that's about it.

Apple is so user hostile in so many ways. I don’t understand what people see in it.

can't you just install the enterprise version or whatever it's called. The real 'Pro'

Enterprise version is not available for purchase in single-license; FAFAIK, you need a licensing agreement first.

No Nvidia though. That is what you are paying for with Windows.

But hn worships the Microsoft ceo. That tall praiseworthy man who has taught us all what we should aspire to. He is a brave, glorious man

See also: fake search results when looking for chrome in bing

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/6/23736289/microsoft-bing-ch...

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