It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a desktop, and wasn't a clone of the mobile UI. No ads. Didn't phone home too much, and you could turn off auto-update. No issues with installing your own software.
Then Microsoft tried to make desktop look like mobile and tablet. Desktop began to look like a big phone, optimized for content consumption and fat finger selection. The result was something that was neither a good desktop nor a good content consumption device.
Bash running in wsl does not have these bindings.
WSL makes sense in the context that Microsoft was too dumb to keep improving Windows NT UNIX subsystem, and to throw away SUA as well.
Regarding WSL, it can't be used to admnister Windows systems anyway.
While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration.
The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
I think that you're being a bit uncharitable here. The issue wasn't "purists who hate mobile". The issue is that what makes a good mobile UI is worlds apart from what makes a good desktop UI. You can't combine the two without making one or both use cases worse.
The pushback was due to Windows 8 being terrible on the desktop.
Microsoft's mistake was in trying to make One UI To Rule Them All rather than having different UIs for different form factors.
The biggest regression in 8 was the Control Panel disaster that continues to this day and is less related to mobile friendliness and more a mismanaged attempt to try break free of some very ugly legacy components that were already behaving inconsistently in 7. Setting up a custom DNS still requires diving deep into multiple layers of ipv4 settings and popups, exactly as it did in Windows NT, I believe. It's a nightmare.
The Start menu at least since 8.1 was toggleable from full screen to corner mode, so I don't think that's really a worthy area of complaint. In every other respect, 8 behaved more or less like 7. Keyboard shortcuts worked the same. Double click worked the same. Explorer was still Explorer.
Edit to add: I just checked and Start menu was still full screen only in Windows 8.1. I guess it never bothered me because Ctrl+Esc still popped it, you could still type the name of the shortcut to find it, Win+X was there for admin menu and you could still hit Win+R to run binaries directly. Having a two-dimensional arrow key navigation felt faster than tree-based to get where I wanted too. Maybe for keyboard-centric users it didn't feel much different, while for touchscreen it was clearly better.
It's Windows 10 where they actually started actively removing features, and Windows 11 has taken that to the extreme by replacing the entire start menu and task bar philosophy that's been a core part of Windows since 95 and replacing it with some hideous MacOS dock like thing. Don't even get me started on the messing up of right click in Explorer. It's like Microsoft got taken over by Apple developers who never used a Windows PC in their lives. Awful.
I use (and love) a Mac at home, and spent years in Ubuntu/Gnome.
I would not mess with that bit these days
This is a post about Microsoft ruining their software. That software is distributed through automatic updates. Do you recall the campaign to get everyone on 10? That and the telemetry (spying) they added around the same time convinced me to disable updates. I eventually landed on a linux with only manual updates.
My initial comment was to be understood in general, though, not in the specific context of obnoxious update strategies.
1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha.
2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later.
Windows is #1. Linux is #2.
Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)
If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Windows 10 / 11 always ask you when you want to apply the update.
Or they just know their users.
At our company,the policy is set up to request reboot during the next 30 days (so basically till the next patch Tuesday). Who complains the most about updates all the time or every day? Those, who didn't bother to reboot during the last 30 days.
So at some point, you have to force it.
At home I have plenty of times where rebooting isn't disruptive, at work that's never true.
They will learn when they have been hacked often enough. We should stop treating everyone as children. Oh no, children are now treated like adults.
I always found it hilarious how the spectre mitigations were breaking AV software.
That's alright also in Windows 10 or 11 when ransomware commes, so it must be something else. /s
For next few years, I was running updates inside screen, just to be sure.
Forcefully rolling out the update is the only way it may ever get updated, in a lot of cases.
My MiL (early 70's), happily runs Xubuntu on her machine. After getting the printer/scanner to work, it just fucking works. She agreed to schedule the updates in the early morning, so its just done.
She wanted a password manager, and showed her how to install software. That's done now, since we've had an app store longer than Apple.
The only thing she couldnt figure out was how to open an Access database made in 2003. That took me some time to figure out. Finally did and got them exported to LibreOffice spreadsheets.
Except when the update makes the product worse.
I've legit had windows shutdown in the middle of an online p2p gaming session before.
absolutely ridiculous.
I was just noting that I've had it happen, it hasn't been recent though.
Anybody who could not figure that out is probably not capable of managing Linux properly either.
It is a useful ability to be able to deal with something that isn't as you would wish.
But that is orthoganol to another fact which is that in the entire history of the world, not one thing ever got better by accepting things as they are.
security updates should stand alone from vanity, and shit updates.
There’s a nice UI under all of the offensive promos and news they force onto you.
My kid just got a new school laptop, preloaded by the school.
He opens up Edge and Boom! It’s spamming him with fake Ads and horror news stories about war.
Thanks for that MS. It’s like they really do not understand what made Google Search so popular back in the say.
FWIW, I do think macOS is a lot better :-)
Also, the world of Linux GUIs really needs to pick up its game. They just never seem very good; accomplished, reliable, feature competitive.
Today’s Ubuntu UI/UX isn’t even competitive with macOS from a decade ago IMHO and for my use cases :-)
I can't even believe I'm saying this: but all joking aside, I MIGHT be inclined to buy a cosmetic skin for smiley if they offered it.
It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not well supported. Knowing which is which before buying requires reading extensive documentation. Even Dell on their XPS 9310 fucked up Linux support so bad they dediced to quietly remove the option to buy Ubuntu laptop and communication about supporting Linux.
My personal laptop recovers all screen when waking up from sleep, my work laptop doesn't and I need to unplug and plug them again.
One thing that works awesomely well for me is Printer supports (scanners are another pair of hands though). Anywhere I tried, discovery works great out of the box, even for USB printers it works without having to download a driver from a strange website.
When using snap (default on Ubuntu) Firefox crashes often if it updates in background. Libre office is far from the Office experience, which I tend to forget as I use Google Workspace apps instead.
Having tried working on Windows, Linux and MacOS, I wouldn't move to another environment. The pros greatly outweigh the cons for my own use-case. But I will still keep a Windows for gaming and cannot recommend it to relatives.
However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to re-install), I'm thinking more than twice before booting into Windows these days. I don't have much time for gaming anyway, and will probably just give up my audio plugins at some point.
Can't comment on the problems you have had. My own experience has been almost without issue for many years now, using Fedora. YMMV.
I lack the patience to try and troubleshoot it most of the time and primarily use another machine. Usefulness is limited when I can't count on "simple" things like waking from sleep in working state, IME.
Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.
Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.
Speak for yourself. That condescending attitude is disgustingly lame, and everyone is welcome to use linux, even the haters. It is free and open source, not free and open source (except for people that emptysongglass doesn't approve of)
Everything deserves criticism. Everything is imperfect. Calling out imperfections is not an insult to imperfect systems but a hope that the systems which can change in a way that we humans cannot would change for the better.
And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
And that's a good thing. Trying to convince people to use Linux has been likely the worst sort of thing to happen to its adoption. Chromebooks and Steam Deck promote Linux without arguing its virtues.
> It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux.
Grandparent explicitly stated that getting more users might actually be a worse thing for Linux. I agree. Parent going out of their way to criticize unsupported hardware makes their case.
> And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
No, I don't believe that to be the case, especially when it comes to bring-up on Nvidia. That blame sits squarely with Nvidia the corporation. And the people who can do something about it are the engineers sitting at Nvidia who haven't done anything about it for at least a decade. Rolling out the same old arguments for why Linux sucks because Nvidia is not productive.
For Snaps, there's a constellation of other distros available that don't ship Snaps. Shuttleworth doesn't want to listen to critique. He's been going his own way since the earliest days of Canonical. Have you seen their interview process? When he was called out publicly for the poor predictive power of screening using aptitude tests, he doubled down. That's been his way from the beginning. Critizing Snaps on Ubuntu as part of a broader argument on why Linux sucks is also not productive because the one person in charge of that decision does not want to make that decision.
gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.
currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.
the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.
The out of the box experience on Ubuntu doesn’t even come close to modern macOS or Windows 11.
Sure, if all you need to do is use a web browser then you’d be fine with a Linux GUI most of the time.
But then a Chrome Book is better at that point.
P.S. Chromebook is Linux under the hood.
And I agree, you cant really have a back and forth about it, trying to score points. The requirements are too myriad these days.
Hence my Chromebook comment - because for someone that just needs a device that gives them access to a web browser environment and some apps, it's a good choice.
I was aware Chromebooks are Linux, which is good :-)
I do like Linux - and do use it as my desktop dev environment from time to time. When I feel like a change from macOS.
There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me.
Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.
/me shakes head in disbelief. How can one persons experience be so different to mine? Everything is faster / small under Linux - the file system, the graphics, the size of a base OS install with GUI and brower is literally 1/10th of Windows. Windows taking seconds to respond to a click on the start button (I presume so it can fetch the ads) was the final straw for me.
As for stability, I watched co-workers come in in the morning and find their dev environment was broken due an overnight Microsoft update, and just accept the 30 delay while they fixed it as routine, unavoidable, "it's just how things are". But for one, an update that broke things so badly he needed an OS reinstall to drive him to having a "fuck it, I'm going to Debian" moment. That is rare though.
Meanwhile, I've never experienced unwanted downtime from any Debian security patch. OS upgrades are a different matter, but they only happen once in two years, and you have at least another 2 years to get around to it. Or you can do it once every 4 years. Which isn't surprising. Debian is used by a lot of servers around the globe. Stable is the name of the game, uptimes in years aren't uncommon.
The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.
Linux (and BSDs) are important to people who want to do things that are hard to do in a tightly integrated office suite.
Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary.
What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries.
Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old printer configuration dialog.
Really, even setting up a firewall or hardening your Linux PC is much simpler than Windows.
Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.
It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now.
> Or Bluetooth?
Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both.
> In Linux… ???? Where do you even go?
If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually.
Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.
As for me, I've only used laptops since 2000 or so (a variety of Dell's and Lenovo's), I've only run Debian on them, and at worst I've had to do is use a kernel from Debian testing.
I think it's safe to say the current version of Linux runs on more laptop and desktop hardware than the current version of Windows now. Windows may run on some bleeding edge hardware Linux doesn't because the laptop manufacturer "made it happen" with specialised drivers, but as a rule manufacturers don't give a rats about older hardware they shipped and Windows has been deliberately breaking compatibility with old hardware, so there is no comparison. Linux runs on everything older, Windows only the latest.
Every instance of a person throwing up their hands in disgust and moving to Windows has been because of that. They had some solid "well worn sock" of a laptop they adored as their daily driver, a Windows update broke it once too many times and they rage quit their Microsoft addiction.
CUPS has come a long way over the years.
But have they lost by doing that? They have not lost desktop users to any great extent, especially in the business market Windows is still dominant. They have lost some home desktop share to MacOS and ChomeOS, but they have gained a lot more access to user data.
Managers have to justify their role... so they add stuff and come up with new money-making schemes...
[citation needed]
I'd argue they should have changed things more.
With all the built in advertising Windows reminds me of Frito's TV in Idiocracy. What an augural movie, btw.
> Linux is still crap software
Ubuntu is rock solid and easier to use than Windows. Linux Mint, Fedora and Pop!_OS too.
Any examples to why macOS isn't much better?