Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by wingmanjd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

wingmanjd

Nope, not enjoying this at all. We're already looking at full OS alternatives for our workloads.

View on HN

Linux + Bottles / Lutris.

I wouldn't go to Win 11, and Linux actually is good enough now.

> Linux actually is good enough now.

You say this like there is one Linux that people can use. Instead, it is fragmented to hell and back with various distros. Since it's a replacement for Windows, a GUI will be needed. There's more than one of those as well.

So now, some one needs to go down that rabbit hole of trying to decide which distro/GUI will work for them. So a generic "use Linux" is not very helpful.

I installed Pop OS with about 10 minutes research as soon as this Recall bullshit was announced, and everything I've tried so far works fine.

Having more options isn't a bad thing unless you let yourself suffer choice paralysis. You can just not do that.

I switched to Pop!_OS last year when I was doing a hardware refresh. I started reading up on all the hijinks in Windows 11 with trying to trick users into signing in to their local machine through an on-line MS ID. I had a big problem with the idea of paying someone a subscription fee to use my own machine. Showing ads and "feeds" on my desktop and in my start menu that I had no control over was already bad enough in Windows 10, but Microsoft had indeed cranked things up to... well... 11.

Since then, Microsoft has only added evidence that my decision was a good one.

Decision paralysis is just a lame excuse people use to mask their real reason for not doing something. If you don't know enough about the choices to know which one you prefer, then either you simply chose any of them and subsequently have a more informed preference next time, or you chose none of them because you don't actually want the thing in the first place.

I want ice cream and approach a vendor in the park. He has brands and flavors I've never tried before so I throw up my hands and say there is too much choice, he needs to pick one single kind of ice cream before he gets my business. Somebody who behaves like this doesn't actually want ice cream in the first place but is pretending to for some reason.

I think the fragmentation problem extends well beyond "golly, which does my little head ever pick - they're all so perfectly usable I just don't know how to pick one!" and more to "well this one has Q, G, and Y... but that one has M, G, and Y but I can get Q if I tweak... and this one has M, G, Y, A, Q, Z but switching to that means I have to take its unrelated opinions on B, O, J, and N which I don't like" kind of scenario. There are plenty of flavors which can be acceptable but the premise is finding a flavor you want to use more. Without extreme ideological grounds on the level "Microsoft did ${thing} so I'm never touching them again" that becomes difficult to weigh.

I generally get away with a lot of use cases at work just saying "It's the front facing LTS of Ubuntu" and a lot of use cases at home just saying "Since it's just for me I'll customize Arch to what I need" but there are still plenty of scenarios, in each, just going with Windows makes a lot more sense (or sometimes is the only viable option, e.g. home HDR or work vendor application support).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com