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Comment by HlessClaudesman | Hacker News Reader

Not being able to customise my environment is a dealbreaker for me. I will be converting my day to day machine to Linux rather than being nagged into a user hostile OS upgrade.

Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.

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I am not sure if the apps mentioned here really target power users. It seems that they are actually blocking apps by name (!) that reached some popularity in bringing back the old windows style interface. Those apps are bypassing Microsofts efforts to place ads all over the place and monetize the start menu. Those new featured content and AI stuff seems all very hacked into the interface and breaks easily. My taskbar even gets stuck from time to time (missed meetings because of the stuck clock). So this seems all just collateral damage in using windows to sell cloud stuff.

Annoying how previous abilities are also being removed e.g. docking the windows start bar vertically on the side of the screen is no longer allowed in Windows 11, but is possible on Windows Server and Windows 10

Choose KDE if you want the most options to customise the user interface, while retaining something fairly similar to Windows.

Indeed. I moved to Linux back in the WinXP/Win7 days, and KDE's been my pretty much "go-to" desktop environment of choice since pretty much day one. I've tried and used many others for various purposes over the years, but always end up back on KDE for the most overall "familiar" (most like the Windows I had spent many years on), "integrated" (KDE apps tend to "play nice" together), and customizable interface.

I've been considering this more and more lately.

The Steam Deck is actually what's pushed me closer to adopting Linux on my desktop. I usually run Windows just because it's the easiest OS to run games on, but the Steam Deck has really shown that with Proton you can run... basically anything!

Every tool that I use is cross-platform these days, anyway. VS Code, Blender, Inkscape, Godot, etc.

There is 1 game stopping me from making the switch and its battlefield 2042. Every other game I play has a linux equivalent. Even some games with EAC.

EA just simply will not allow it

How good is running Windows in a VM with a Linux host nowadays? Does it work well for office users who want to run Office? How about people who want to run Adobe or Autodesk software? These use cases seem to be causing the most friction for the transition in my circles (apart from gaming, which is a different story).

VMWare works really well for me, as do Proton and Lutris for Linux gaming. That said, I'm a software developer so not a typical user.

If you have the hardware for it, VFIO setups can be amazing. I've been running graphics accelerated Windows inside a VM for a few months now, and apart for some random crashes, it's perfect.

I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.

Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.

How exactly does graphic acceleration work when you run a VM? Do you need two graphic cards (one for the host, another for the guest)?

Edit: to contribute a little to the grandparent question - I have Windows on QEMU for the Office suite and it works pretty smoothly. I had to make some config changes, most of them outlined in these reddit threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/qemu_kvm/comments/18z8609/qemu_wind...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromeOSFlex/comments/ucno4b/qemukv...

I also disabled animations in Windows settings because everything felt clunky.

No crashes, clipboard and shared folders work fine after installing guest tools.

Very good info, I am also planning to set something up over QEMU.

Depends on how powerful your machine is

Steam/Valve made a point of running Windows games under Linux as good or better as under.Windows. that is, Wine and Proton are really good these days.

Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.

They asked about Office, Adobe, and Autodesk. I’d say the situation is still the opposite there. In the early 00s, you could run Microsoft Office etc. pretty well with CrossOver Office and the likes. But these applications barely work anymore if at all, most likely because their complexity increased a lot over the years.

Using a Windows VM is a pretty good solution. Though last time I tried only commercial solutions like VMWare work very well, because KVM-based solutions didn’t have great graphics support. Maybe VirtualBox is better, but Oracle.

These days they tend to work very well, and if you're rich you can even redirect a spare GPU with a screen directly.

Interesting about KVM limitations, because I am constrained to use that. VirtualBox... yes indeed, Oracle.

I'm not a professional Office user, but I personally found OnlyOffice to be a very suitable replacement (you can get the FOSS version on Flathub)

As a 20 year full-time Linux desktop user doing Enterprise IT consulting, running a windoze VM has never NOT been an entirely functional experience for me.

I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.

I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.

Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.

What kept you on their platform this long if you don’t mind my asking?

Not OP, but in my case it's Visual Studio. It's just the best IDE for me, and I have literally decades of muscle memory using it.

I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.

You can use Visual Studio on Linux, I would assume you can configure it to use the same hotkeys as on Windows but I'm not sure.

Isn't that just vscode, that ugly abomination that I've given up trying to configure in a reasonable fashion after like 5 minutes every time I tried it out again?

Anyways, I'm on jetbrains these days and never looked back.

Yes, you're right, it's VS Code they're referring to and it's not the same thing.

I tried JetBrains Rider and stopped using it after the console window didn't auto scroll as I logged stuff into it - I don't know how something so basic doesn't work properly.

I should probably try again, as so many people recommend it that I can only assume I did something wrong to mess up the console.

(Edited, I originally misunderstood your comment)

> I tried JetBrains Rider and stopped using it after the console window didn't auto scroll as I logged stuff into it - I don't know how something so basic doesn't work properly.

I use JetBrains IDEs as my daily drivers, nowadays they're pretty good and feel more responsive than the previous versions (you can even choose between the older type of UI and something more minimalist).

As for the console, is it possible that you weren't scrolled all the way to the bottom? For example, if you scoll up a bit and want to look at specific lines, the console will append the text to the bottom but won't move your viewport, whereas if you scroll back down to the bottom (or use the button for that), it'll start scrolling automatically again.

Are you maybe thinking of VS Code? I'm talking about its parent: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

Yes, my bad.

In my case not just visual studio but the work it would require to figure out all I figured out on windows. Creating VMs, websites, interacting with system features, lots of trivial and not so trivial things to learn. I have tons of home scripts in C#, would probably need to rewrite most of them, likely using different libraries, I am still stuck on .net 4.8 because of that. I would love to switch though. I just don't have the bandwidth.

Not OP, but compatibility, familiarity and inertia.

also my initial choice for a Linux os that I daily drove back in uni, became infested with snap packages which I've had numerous issues with.

(This is not an invite for anyone to tell me about Arch or "$x distro is clearly best", I've settled with pop_os for trials)

For me it's the hardware support in windows. I've been using Linux on and off for 15 years, but every time I've tried to switch my home desktop I've always run in to issues. I used mint Linux for quite a while and it makes a very good stab at competing with windows.

Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getting a dock and ditching my desktop atx tower. The tracking and telemetry in windows has really put me off it.

It's been fine for me over the last decade, but I took the easy route and ran it on thinkpad T series mostly.

I've cobbled together a random ryzen system with an A380 half a year ago and didn't even check for Linux compat before buying, and steam with proton works pretty well on debian 13.

Deal breakers are usually those games that bundle the EA or Epic launcher, those two are fucking dumpster fires when it comes to proton. Like, you fiddle for an hour to get a stupid fucking launcher going that wants an additional account signup and then the whole AAA Windows game runs perfectly fine.

Makes you appreciate Steam/Proton/Valve even more every time.

Why doesn't someone make a paid distro that doesn't have these problems? The market is absolutely there. Oh wait, that's mac, sort of.

"Sort of" is doing Atlas levels of heavy lifting here given the atrocious performance of x86 PC games on ARM Macs

Design software, games and lazyness.

I have a linux running as my home server, so I have tried out various distros, currently using Mint Xfce.

It's not always you who picks the platform. In an enterprise usually choices are limited or it's not worth your time invested.

Judging by replies here should really be a "why are you still on windows" askHN.

Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew.

Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.

I think I would miss how seamless is RDP too. I have a lots of VMs at home (simplifies backups, or allows to have a machine behind a VPN without affecting connectivity of the main machines).

RDP is excellent, but xrdp[1] works pretty well (although most of the time I stick to SSH sessions and don't bother with remote GUI)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xrdp

For me it's the games. Granted, I've been glancing more and more at the compatibility chart lately...

Given the hard time I am having installing Linux on a Gigabyte NUC that was given to me, due to UEFI issues, I am quite close to either get rid of it, or install Windows 11, make use of WSL if needed, and call it a day.

Congratulations! You baited the rage in the headline.

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