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Comment by foxylad | Hacker News Reader

Sad you didn't see Linux as a better alternative to OSX. I credit it with making me at least 10% more productive over the twenty years I've used it, partly because it is stable and fast, but mostly because it isn't trying to sell me stuff while I work.

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My experience is the opposite. I spent 15 years on Linux desktops until finally switching to Windows for the sake of my producivity.

I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it.

Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something.

I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers.

Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?

I believe it. I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis. Ive also used Windows and agree that it just fades into background. Windows 10/11 definitely less paiinful on the desktop. These days with better integration with and tools for Linux cli, Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment. Many Linux fans don't know better or won't admit it because hate tends to blind.

I just set up Windows and spent an entire week googling how to tame it. Turns out dism.exe at the CLI is required to make it free up 20 to 30GB! of disk space it was wasting.

Many, many hours and late nights figuring out how to turn off telemetry, Edge and more. Multiple Group policy editor settings to force it to do what is asked and no more. For some reason updates and uninstalls take forever and uninstalls can’t be batched. (A powsh I found didn’t work) I could go on…

“Fades in the background” my ass. :-P

> spent an entire week googling how to tame it

Part of the reason Windows doesn't fade into the background for you is that you insist on fighting it, you're tweaking stuff you should just leave alone... according to Microsoft.

Physically it's not possible for me to use Windows, my hand cramps up, not completely sure why that happens, but it provides a constant physical reminder that I'm using Windows.

2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs are $61. 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs are $63.

Why are you worried about 20-30 GB again??

Bandwidth - was building a VM. A 10GB VM is much more convenient than 40GB one, to move copy, share, run from network drive etc.

And yes, a few older drives are kinda small here. Laptop vendors overcharge on storage so most of ours have a half TB, which goes fast.

We could buy a number of new drives, or we could look up an esoteric CLI and free up 30g.

Ahhh yes, now that makes sense.

Point taken!

Nonsense. They've moved so much stuff about all my windows knowledge from 7 is useless. You'll be in the same spot when 12 comes out.

I'm generally onboard with hating on windows, but windows 7 was 14 years ago. (Almost) everything software realted has changed in that time, not just Windows.

Well it's hardly my fault that I've not had to use windows in the past 10 years.

And no, not every UI has made needless changes since then.

Could it be because you're more comfortable with the CLI than any GUI alternative? E.g. I wouldn't go clicking about for installing packages when it's just one line away.

I know many power users of Windows that bring up their terminal frequently as well.

>I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis.

What were you using if I may ask? I use manjaro with plasma and.... idk I really don't have to use the commandline much if at all when i'm not coding. Last time I was forced to was a few months ago in fact with an old niche wifi dongle that didn't work without some tinkering but this now works out of the box as well.

> Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment

lmao, not because I don't believe you really think what you write, but because how user hostile everything in Windows seems to me, if you only want to change a single setting. It will be hidden behind 3 level deep settings dialogs and a "material design" flat links connecting those setting dialogs, so almost no visual indication, to make things stand out. It is horrible UI design. Basically any modern GNU/Linux DE will offer more feedback and visibility in their settings dialogs and windows.

Whenever I have to change any settings on Windows, I get a feeling of dread, because I know I will be searching for that setting. And never is the search any help, because they will name things different than I expect or it simply will not find the settings dialog I need to change that setting.

It is almost like they intentionally hide the settings ... Windows feels like a system that protects clueless users from themselves.

The main problem with Windows' terrible settings is that they are constantly changing. So when you search for how to change something all the instructions are obsolete.

There's a frustrating trend across the software industry-- chasing that hypothetical "next billion" users by removing customization, complicating discovery, and nerfing advanced features.

I'm sure Windows 11 works perfectly if you teleported in from a dimension without computers and never had to unlearn any prior experiences. You'll use the defaults, which of course expose you to the most possible Microsoft revenue streams, and not notice the friction points. It's probably a net positive for that user if they make customization limited and frustrating-- don't give him any paint and he can't paint himself into a corner, resulting in an expensive support session.

The most cynical take on this is that the advanced users, who are suffering from the constant abuse from the software undermining attempts at personalization and breaking workflows, are not a priority. They've already paid, and are unlikely to suddenly turn into a new revenue centre.

It's 2023 and I still can't get a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed to sleep properly without crashing without editing things in the terminal and mucking about in the bios.

Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-...

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-di...

It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently².

And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³.

So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows.

----

[1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced

[2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky

[3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!

> We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty

I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag.

I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.

I sometimes use windows on my work laptop and usually keep it up to date, meaning I won't let the installed updates wait around for a reboot. It still ends up hot for no reason while I carry it around, and the battery half empty.

Hell, while asleep on the desk (so plugged-in, grated) it tends to be hotter than while under active use. Under Linux, the fan basically never spins as long as I don't compile stuff and the PC is cool to the touch.

I also make a point of unplugging it before I close it because, contrary to Linux on the same machine, there's a very high probably that if I unplug the dock while the PC sleeps, the screen won't wake up again in a usable state (it's typically on, but it's either blank or it displays random colors). It gets its power via said dock.

This is a run-of-the-mill, full-Intel HP Elite book, with an HP dock running Windows 11, as recommended by HP.

Be mad at Dell, not Linux.

Pretty much every sleep issue I've encountered in the wild is due to the hardware manufacturer's shitty implementation.

The only reason some features "just work" with Windows is because they only care if it works with Windows.

Ultimately it still sucks if it happens with your hardware, but you should direct your frustration to the right party. Maybe one day people will care enough and interoperability can become the default.

Its often the case that when apps crash (on any OS) due to bugs, its the OS that gets blamed by the user. It is easy to say "blame Dell", but you'd have to be familiar with the code-base to know whose fault it was.

Either way it doesn't change the fact that you need to do this on Linux but not Windows. There's dozens of fiddly little things like this that you don't need to do on Windows.

I use each OSX, Ubuntu and Windows daily but I could never recommend my mother switch to Ubuntu or Mint because of things like this.

Come on. Linux is stable enough for anyone. So many people have done exactly what you said can't be done, and then never again had to play tech support for their relatives. I can get a flash disk with Linux and it will work for the proverbial mom for years without touching it.

What I found happens often is pure confirmation bias. People already hate Linux and love Windows/OSX, then find reasons to confirm that. I'm sure I have some of that too, but I try to see all sides.

The amount of blue screens and shitty issues my wife puts up with on Windows is astonishing. Disconnecting/reconnecting dongles so they work again. Manually searching for drivers. She re-installs Windows every few months and normalizes it.

Same goes for OSX. Apple fanboys at work having random segfaults on services, OS upgrades that sometimes takes them down a full day. A coworker of mine still runs a years old OSX version because last time he updated he had to pay hundreds of dollars for Apple care to get his MacBook working again. I still remember when I had to use OSX, wasting days searching for solutions after every OS upgrade.

My point is: there are issues with all OSes and this generalization that "Linux is the bad one" is a plain lie. Especially for basic usage, which is what normal people usually stick to.

Yes, if you pick a bad distro and sometimes gets hardware from manufacturers that intentionally fuck Linux over, you're gonna have a hard time.

But on the other side, you have a choice. You can choose a more stable distro, you can tweak it as you like. Something other OSes can't offer.

Everyone is free to choose, but this meme against Linux is plain tiring.

I think when you are such a proficient user of some technology you don't even realize how many mistakes you can make along the way. And some small annoyance that you don't even notice might be a burden and a day-long struggle for someone less experienced.

As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't make it to restart.

The problem is that they don't realize that selecting some text in the window blocks the stdout and the program won't continue until they remove the selection.

So for a more experienced user it's nothing, but for someone new to terminal behavior it's a huge obstacle.

On Linux you have much more traps like that.

GP said 15 years though, not exactly someone less experienced.

I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way…

Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.

My son got a Lenovo T16 AMD for school, wanted to go with Kubuntu and spent one week setting up hibernate. Only solution that works is still hacky, he runs a script that disables then enables some things after returning from hibernation to make networking work.

This, on a machine that you can buy with Linux.

My dad bought a Dell and reboots it almost every day because the wifi or USB drivers randomly stop working, on Windows. My own old Dell had a similar issue with the audio driver, it would just randomly stop working and every app trying to play a sound would instantly crash. Luckily in that case a generic Windows driver worked better. So two of three Dell laptops in our family were basically shipped in a broken state. My Surface Pro soft bricked itself during a normal shutdown.

I had great experiences with Windows in the past, but not anymore.

I don't think I agree with this. I left Macos for Linux a few years ago and the first month was pretty frustrating, but it got much easier after that. I think it does help to invest time in making it work though. On the upside, I've had many fewer instances where an update suddenly breaks things and causes me to stop working unexpectedly to fix them.

I work on Linux and game on Windows (for the moment). I switched to Linux around 12 years ago, after Entity Framework was the last straw developing .Net stuff.

Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause.

Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.

it seems so condescending compared to Linux

This is my experience as well. To use a power tools analogy, Windows is the DIY line of equipment: moderately powered, relatively easy to use, if it breaks/wears down you buy a new one. Linux, on the other hand, is the professional's choice: much more powerful, harder to master, but it's user servicable and infinitely better customizable for each use case.

> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.

In my personal experience it's usually random little things that technically work but not quite right, and occasionally it's stuff that's just outright broken.

There's also been a fair amount of googling for how to set up X in Linux to do Y only to find a trail of half-functional or abandoned packages. Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software. Getting everything functioning as expected with a minimal WM setup is also a surprising amount of work (e.g. laptop volume keys not working if some daemon isn't running). Admittedly it's not as bad if all your want is a Win9x-type or iPad-type desktop.

It's frustrating that you can't change DE in Windows though, and that it changes from version to version.

You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.

I didn't know that, thanks for mentioning. It's apparently called shells in Windows lingo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...

>Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software.

And is one click and works with all apps in Windows ?

No, but there’s no chance of Windows becoming my primary platform — I use it almost exclusively for games (some of which don’t play nice with Proton) — and so I don’t need as much from it.

Additionally, Windows isn’t usually sold on its flexibility to anywhere near the extent that desktop Linux is. As such I don’t think it’s strange to expect that taking advantage of said flexibility is relatively painless, regardless of what the user is trying to do — there’s no point in flexibility if e.g. there’s actually only a small handful of options that are practical.

But you realize that getting all possible apps to look the same and have same behavior is very hard, you have GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 with their limited customization, then you have Qt apps, KDE apps, Java with their different GUI frameworks, node apps, Wine apps, other smaller toolkits used in Python etc.

But as you admit in Linux you have infinite more power to attempt setting up a global menu, but this feature is not something a mainstream distro offers by default so IMO is not a fair complaint.

I don't think Linux is as bad as people claim, but it isn't as good/easy to use as people claim either. One problem I see is that the distribution of software is tied to the package manager. If you install any complex (esp stuff that uses web+database+python,etc) app outside of this system, I've seen dependencies break when updating software. MariaDB/Laravel upgrades have been painful.

> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background

I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.

Windows key+E opens explorer. Or do you mean that it's so slow that it takes several seconds?

On my work machine (approx 4 years old, Win10) and home machine (mostly 2 years old, graphics card, a 1060/6GB is more elderly, Win10) both take most of a second to bring up a fresh Explorer window, timing by eye from Win+E to the whole UI being present. It seems far more variable (sometimes feeling quicker, sometimes taking a couple of seconds) on my laptop (<1 year old, i5 CPU 16G RAM, Win11). All are using decently speedy SSD drives.

Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me.

One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.

Several seconds is not an exaggeration. The window appears quickly enough, but then spins for several seconds (there's a progress bar in the path field) before showing any file. Win11 personal, on a brand new, middle-of-the-road desktop.

Have you tried opening some files over the network, then coming back to the explorer? It'll insist on showing those files in the Recents screen. Except it actually tries to touch them or something. Which, when I'm not at work anymore, takes forever waiting for a timeout. Hell, even at work it sometimes takes a while, while doing the AD handshake or whatever it is that it does instead of letting me use the freaking explorer.

I don't use Windows often enough to go out of my way to customize it, plus I know that the next update will probably undo everything anyway, but now I have to wait around multiple seconds for it to realize the files are not there. And it won't even remember it from one instance of explorer to the next, or try to check on those files without blocking the entire app's UI.

This shitshow also happens in the open / save as dialogs when called from other apps.

Yes, this matches my experience -- I assumed it was something to do with waiting for cloud stuff, but haven't dug too deep.

Just took me 0.5 seconds to bring up an explorer window.

I've mostly used OS X and Linux the last 25 years, but have been forced to use Windows at work and recently on my gaming computer, so I'm not really defending Windows here. But honestly, I don't have any big problems with it. It works OK for the most part.

super+e, clicking the explorer button? I think you're being purposefully difficult here.

I cannot list any of the bugs I have had with Windows off the top of my head, but I can with linux. Driver issues, Pulse audio randomly playing static, updates breaking my system, fractional scaling not working, I could go on.

Certainly some of the behavior I am complaining about is the intended behavior (ads in menus etc), but yes explorer takes several seconds to initialize for me, after the window appears. Not an exaggeration.

I've had the same experience. Linux just requires too much babysitting for me, while Windows 11 just works. I haven't had any major problems nor any issues with my productivity.

My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentless hatred for all things MS.

When a company uses dirty tactics against your project, forcing its (at the time) inferior product by strong arming pc vendors, call your project a Cancer and tries to undermine java and the Web and has been found guilty on court, some animosity is in order. Yeah its been a long time. Seeing current practices, not so much it seems.

What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox?

I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).

I guess the "best viewed with" and "please use the last version of chrome" banners preventing you from logging in some services could be seen as a bug from normal users.

This is the reason. Too often I will go to a site and find that it's unusable with Firefox.

Some anti virus software will impede site loading times in firefox or even normal operation. Windows will protect edge and other microsoft software from AV. But depending on how bad the AV is, other software will have less luck.

Sure, nobody can say you "can't do" something with Linux. But the "can't" is more meant as "can't easily do".

To give you an example - I have a small+fast SSD for my OS and a large+slow spinning disk for data storage. When I install software on Windows I sometimes point to the other drive. This task is easier to do on Windows. The last I looked at it, Linux had a solution, but it was very convoluted. I see computer hardware and software products as purely a means to an end, I will use whatever that gets the job done.

Each person only has a limited quota of things that they can give a lot of energy to, and for me F/OSS is not something that I particularly go out of my way to support. My 'things that I give a shit about' quota is filled to the brim with the work I'm doing in healthcare.

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