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Comment by binkHN | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly, I'm not sad at all. I've been using Windows for a long time and recently purchased a new computer with Windows 11. It's such an abomination that it forced me to try Linux for the very first time on my production machine, and I'm very pleased with the results. A thank you to Microsoft for giving me a reason to look somewhere else, and a sincere thank you to the open source community for all the work they've put into Linux on the desktop.

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I'm currently in a phase where I'm deciding if I switch to Linux or MacOS. But it has become clear that staying on Windows is no longer an option.

I've been a Windows user since version 3.0. Maybe even earlier versions since I was using DOS initially.

It's sad to see into what they've turned it. Well, they'd just have to stop the spying and it would be somewhat tolerable, but that's not an option for them.

As someone who’s been on Linux on and off for close to a decade (full time last few years) I’ve noticed something interesting.

Now that so many apps have a browser version and prioritize the mobile version, the isolation caused by being on Linux keeps decreasing.

Between your phone and your browser, that’s not quite 100% coverage, but it’s very good and improving all the time.

You use your phone when you need a work app you can’t get on Linux, and if you can, the browser version of the app. And of course if it natively supports Linux there’s no problem at all.

A decade ago, being all Linux was basically untenable. Now I barely have to mention it to people. It’s been a dramatic change in a short time span.

I've been on linux for the better part of the last 6 years. Legitimately the only times I can recall _not_ being able to do something on Linux were a handful of use cases:

- Multiplayer games: Steam Proton largely solves compatibility for a lot of games now, but the included DRM and anti-cheat for some multiplayer games made them unplayable.

- Certain specialist tools like Photoshop, some CAD software, etc. Open source in this space is better in compatibility.

For the rest of the time I'd do the same as you say: stick to web apps, use the mobile version, etc.

I switched to Mac this year because the M1+ battery life is best-in-class for the price, and I sorely needed a cheaper solution for work than an inverter + batteries to survive South Africa's loadshedding. That, and that some Laravel tooling is smoother on macOS than anywhere else these days.

I tried multiple times to use Linux as primary desktop. I gave up. Windows hardware support for consumer devices is just better. And games, especially old games.

Linux is amazing , but for a everyday machine. I've given up on Linux, I don't have time to configure it. Also every desktop ui Ive used on it isn't quite as polished as windows.

> Windows hardware support for consumer devices is just better.

YMMV. My run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's webcam was unsupported under Windows for approx. a year after I bought it. Worked OOB on Linux since day one.

Ditto for my other run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's intel iGPU: it had a tough time outputting 4k@60Hz over the hp dock. Had to do a weird dance of unplugging and replugging the monitor at just the right time to make it work. Fixed after some Windows update half a year in. 0 issues since day one on Linux. Also, on this particular machine, you better have an external mouse for installing Windows, since it doesn't recognize the touchpad. Ditto for the integrated intel wifi card. Bonus points for Windows insisting on connecting to the internet (the pc doesn't have any onboard wired network). Last I tried, it was win11 22h2. The computer is a 2020 model.

Hardware is hit or miss. Had very good experience with ThinkPads.

I don't get the old games part. This is something where Linux absolutely shines, a lot of old Win9x games run perfectly fine on Wine, but fail on modern Windows for weird reasons. The biggest hurdle is usually DRM and Anti-Cheat, but I guess I'm lucky here because I don't play any competitive multiplayer games but more casual stuff. Also I don't use Nvidia. ;)

I just switched completely about a decade ago. Don't even remember what the final straw was. I guess what "helped" was that at the time I was very busy with life and really only had the most basic demands for my computing needs outside of work, so any shortcomings in areas like gaming didn't matter. Basically needed a browser and a text editor. When things got better two or three years down the line, well, it has already been a while since I used Windows, so any shortcomings were just part of life I guess, but also I just figured more and more stuff out over the years. I guess, and that comes down to personal preference, another thing that greatly helped was that I'm just not focused on convenience and somewhat of a minimalist, so I use i3 as the window manager and no further desktop environment. I don't use any file manager but just the terminal. No gvfs, every USB drive gets mounted and unmounted via terminal. I do use NetworkManager but only via nmcli. I guess having grown up on DOS left some impact. It just means less moving parts, so no stupid surprises after an update like "my KDE/gnome file manager suddenly doesn't show any thumb drive I plug in anymore".

I don't pretend Linux is ready for the average Joe. More and more people seem to think so, but I wouldn't even give it to my mom even though her only use case really is browsing the web and writing a letter about twice a year.

I do use Nvidia in Linux, and I too get the "runs just fine experience."

Ironically, I've had problems with things like Sublime Text crashing. But Windows games from Steam (I don't run the ones that require anti-cheat root-kits), work fairly well.

My sister isn't a technical person and doesn't care for technical stuff. She dailies an Ivy Bridge HP Laptop with Ubuntu and Google Chrome for the past 10 years.

The issues she's encountered that I know of are:

- Couldn't install some specific printer drivers

- Couldn't interoperate with docx files that everyone else seems to expect

And that's it from what she's told me.

I think iforgotpassword gave a good reply to this, but I wanted to add a bit.

I agree it's not for everyone day-to-day, since I feel like inevitably you have to dive into the CLI to fix things with trying to get more obscure programs working.

As for desktop UI, IMO the tradeoff is that Linux DEs have no added cruft. I'd take that over Windows which to me seems filled with bloatware from MS before even the hardware manufacturer gets their hands on it. I've tried many DEs in my time with Linux, and I think GNOME in the last year or two is one of the best as a good mix of good visuals and highly customisable. KDE was closer to Windows but I've just never had luck with it being stable on various machines (seems to be surviving on my Steam Deck though).

Consumer device support is better I agree, though again IMO/IME that's more for certain niche hardware pieces or anything that has its own control app. Bluetooth is also something that I've still struggled with, especially when it comes to headsets.

Old games I can't agree with you on, but maybe that depends on your definition of old. I've had about the same experience getting old games (say from 2000 onwards) working, either with emulation or Wine supporting old software fairly seamlessly. And things have improved too. For example when I started using Linux around 2017, I recall Wine basically couldn't run The Sims 2 in a stable manner. Over the years since however, Lutris, Crossplay and Proton have taken the mantle and made games from that era work very nicely.

Something occasionally seems to go wrong in web services even on Linux; for example the Amazon music web application is just so laggy in my combination of Linux and Firefox.

I’m not sure where the problem is, it could be anywhere between my window manager to the extensions I have installed, but it is too much of a pain to explore all that. Instead I switched to Pandora and then buy albums if I really like them, which works fine.

The memory management on Linux is worse than in Windows and Mac.

Mac has an efficient memory compression and dynamic swap system, Windows also has one, but a little bit less efficient in my personal experience, and on Linux you have to configure zRAM or zSwap and they don’t work as well. You can’t keep memory pages as compressed data in RAM what you can do in Mac and Windows. The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system. On Mac it will spill swap to disk as much as you have disk space.

That is one anecdote for how Linux has a bit an inferior user experience.

> The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system.

Don't modern distributions come with the OOM killer? On my Arch system I didn't have to do anything to have the one from systemd.

My anecdote is this:

I had a Ubuntu 20.04 VM from university with 64 GB memory and my process needed 70 GB and it did lock my system.

And the anecdote continues: I ran a 55 GB process on a 16 GB Mac and it finished without a problem and without me having to configure anything.

I don't think Ubuntu 20.04 is considered "modern" in this discussion, though macos did, at the time, already have ram compression.

Also, as a curiosity, do you know how much swap there was? Usually, distros only create a limited amount of it. But I agree, as a user, you shouldn't have to worry about that.

You’re comparing apples and oranges here.

Independently of the operating system , your 70g process might have an actual working set of 70 g, while the 55g might have had a working set of 1 gig.

Furthermore your Vm was running most likely in a shared environment, your swap partition running on shared not super fast io, etc - you may not even have had 64g of ram ( despite your Vm claiming the contrary ). Your Mac on the contrary, has what is says it has.

> swap partition

This is the difference. Linux has a swap partition. You fill up the dedicated swap partition (which you decide when you partition your drive and is unusable for anything else, so you want to keep it small) and boom you're out of memory, OOM starts killing random stuff.

macOS uses a dynamic swap file (technically its multiple files) on your boot drive that starts at 0 bytes that grows until your main partition runs out of space.

I wrote a small program to do some image processing, I had a memory leak that leaked uncompressed bitmaps, after a couple minutes browsing HN "why is that process so slow?", I go check, it turns out it had burned up like 200 GB of RAM on my 16 GB Mac without me even noticing. But it did actually complete without me bothering to fix the bug, so problem solved.

This also means macOS has a lot more leeway to, say, swap out background tabs you haven't touched in a week in favor of live data since it can grow that swapfile full of stale garbage.

That’s not what OP is saying. If your program gets shot by the oom killer your machine doesn’t lock up. OP is complaining that their machine locks up. What you’re describing is a reasonable scenario on Linux too that I’ve seen many times. On a mac things will go wrong when you run out of disk in general instead of running out of swap , but your process will fail eventually. Computing resources are finite. Sure there’s a bit more leeway ( assuming you’re not short on disk space … ) but given how the problem is described it’s very not clear that’s the issue.

I ´m an hpc engineer , specialize in performance work, have been using Linux since 1996, and also have a Mac. I like both. I understand these are not technical arguments, but my point is there are no easy answers when it comes to performance work. You need to measure, know exactly what’s going on, compare apples with apples, and then you can draw conclusions. In that particular case, there simply isn’t enough details to prove anything.

I guess I've just been unlucky because the OOM killer has always made bizarre decisions on my machines and killed something more critical than the runaway process (or just not worked at all, not sure what the deal was is that, I never get logs). Every time I looked it up online the replies were just "you need to enough RAM to run your process, idiot, you should never need swap, swap is bad"

If the normal case is that the OOM killer just kills the out-of-control process, then I forfeit my argument.

Yes that’s how it’s supposed to work. Supposed to, because as you’ve noticed there’s a long list of oom related patches in the kernel because it’s doesn’t always kill what it should kill !

Theory and practice unfortunately…

There are some downsides to Linux, though. For example if you are made to use Windows at work you will feel sad, having seen what else is possible.

Fair. I still have a Windows VM that I keep around; looking forward to the day that I can delete it.

Amber OS.. Unchanging, fossilized, windows 7, without internet, one restore point..

you can access windows rdp from linux so there is that. i have a work machine that is w10 but i have neon. i use krdc/remina to rdp into it and everything just works.

there is vm you can do but yeah, there are options

If you don't like the tools you're given at your job, look for a better job. Having to put up with a less-than-ideal work environment is part of the job, and it's your job to evaluate the job offer and how it compares to other offers (salary, benefits, location, work quality/type of work, work environment). I use Linux at work, and have for many years, but of course not everything is ideal: I'd like to have more control over the HVAC for instance. It's not enough to make me look for a new job, though, but perhaps for some people it could be. Having to use Windows for development, however, would be a hard no for me. But for some Windows haters, other factors might be enough to make them put up with it: high salary, convenient location, etc.

note that ubuntu is trending towards the bad behavior that windows and macos are trying to normalize.

it talks to the mothership behind the scenes, it forces updates, and although the package manager should be your friend, they have sort of weaponized it so you can't uninstall their packages easily.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ub...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/135540/what-is-the-whoopsie-...

the problem is that many many companies have standardised on windows as desktop. you as an Employee do not really have a choice. At first you still try to use windows at work and linux at home but the little differences in muscle memory become too much so sooner or later you cave and use windows at home too.

> sooner or later you cave and use windows at home too

No way in hell.

If my employer wants to reduce my productivity (by enforcing Windows), so be it, he'll have to deal with the consequences.

But using Windows is from a data-privacy and security standpoint (ironically, the same reason I'm supposed to use Windows at work) an absolute no-go.

Just look at how the new outlook handles your email credentials.

Absolutely. No. Way.

> But using Windows is from a data-privacy and security standpoint (ironically, the same reason I'm supposed to use Windows at work) an absolute no-go.

I agree but the real reason they use Windows is not security, but security theater. 99% of the companies only care about the checklists in their auditing and compliance forms not for the real security. The market of said checklists and compliance forms is cornered by Windows Consultancy groups. The only real OS actor here was RedHat and this is the main reason why they became successful imo.

Having recently started a job and being forced to use Windows for the first time in ... 20 years, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

It's been some month and I now start emojis with "(" instead of ":" ...

... also I am surprised what a shitstorm "finding a place to save a file" is. I was amused by a former student of mine who claimed that she "only had the files in Excel!", but now I can understand that the file dialogs in Windows literally have "folders" for different programs.

With OneDrive folders, other OneDrive Folders, local folders, Application folders, Network drives I completely understand how people get confused ...

Not really. I've been using Windows for work and Linux on my home desktop for 2-3 years now, and there's no friction at all.

Exactly, and this is why I'm not really happy about this news from the EU. It's just going to help MS cement its position instead of pushing people to look for alternatives.

Isn't there a Sun Tzu saying about not interfering when your enemies are shooting themselves in the foot?

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