Hacker News Reader

> Had zero problems, uptime of months, if not longer, ...

That's the thing with Linux: most updates, including security updates, do not require a reboot. And the thing is rock stable solid.

> No random pauses, and everything, including search, just work.

One detail I really love about Linux, since forever, it's that when you ask it to turn off, it turns off. Not in minutes. Not in a minute. No: it's turns off nearly instantly.

When you ask to turn Windows off, for oh-so-many people, "stuff" happens. You don't know what exactly: it's probably sending your whole life as "telemetry" to "enhance your user experience" back to M$FT. Yup, it maybe childish to write M$FT like that, with a '$', but it doesn't change the fact that stuff happens when you turn Windows off and you don't know exactly what. And it's by now certainly related to '$' going somewhere to Microsoft seen how much that thing is spying on people.

> Windows 11 - used it $day job$ and it's ok. That's as charitable as I can be.

I only use Windows at work and was recently forced to switch to Win 11. That's pretty much my review as well. There are UI changes that I hate quite a lot, but I could find utilities and settings that mitigate much of that.

I didn't find anything (yet) that I consider an actual improvement.

> I didn't find anything (yet) that I consider an actual improvement.

Serious question: has there (ever?) been any, since say, Windows 2000?

Some progress has been made with regards to stability, but other than that? Usability hasn't improved and i'd consider Windows 10 and especially 11 extremely user hostile and full of spying.

> Serious question: has there (ever?) been any, since say, Windows 2000?

Start menu search in Vista (of course then we had to wait for 7 for a semi-decent Windows)

Past that... WSL? But it sort of says something that the biggest improvement to Windows is adding Linux.

Yes and yes on search.

Although i actually prefer Spotlight (both on macOS and iOS) - it just works that good (imho, haven't seen any better desktop search).

Have you tried "everything" by void tools on Windows, or "Find Any File (FAF)" on Mac?

Any 3rd party search app on Windows 11 works better than Windows11 search. What a time to be alive :(

Aside from stability and security improvements, most of which happened years ago, not really. In terms of usability, Win 7 remains the best version of Windows in my opinion. It's all been downhill from there.

> Office, Outlook, and the odd bit of software that's Windows only

You can use Office apps in the browser now. I've only really used Outlook and Teams there, so YMMV.

Browser based MS Office is crap. Half the documents produced in desktop MS Office are broken there, worse than simply using LibreOffice to open them.

Last I checked you couldn’t even use absolute positioning to place elements in Word docs. I was trying to make a lost pet poster, and that was the first and last time I tried Office365.

There's still a lot of Office functionality in the desktop versions, such as automation of other desktop apps, and also Excel plugins (so many finance companies use that), so there's still "lock in".

Blew my mind that I could install Teams in Ubuntu. Was both amazed (MS compiling for Linux) and disgusted (MS compiling for Linux).

Though it unfortunately broke with Wayland, so had to move my work machine to Windows using WSL.

Also Office and Outlook are available on Mac of course.