Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny, I feel quite the opposite. Using windows is a form of asceticism, and Linux is the easy way. Everything just works under Linux, but under Windows, things go wrong for no apparent reason, the system installs updates and reboots without me telling it to, there is massive network traffic that I didn’t initiate, none of my tools work properly, there are ads on the start menu, and software I know I installed is nowhere to be found. Talk about mortification of the flesh! Nothing humbles you like being subject to Windows.

View on HN

Using Windows when you're accustomed to Linux is masochism, which is not the opposite of asceticism. I had to install Windows recently, and for all the few hours I used it I had Marie Kondo's voice in my head saying this does not spark joy.

Masochism is related to gratification and pleasure; you get none of this with Windows.

Self-flaggelation? Although I get the idea that's also a kind of self-gratification, martyrdom, whichever.

Fair enough. Joy returned when I was done and I ran `blkdiscard` to nuke the entire SSD I installed it in. Excised in one fell swoop.

Bill "2^(Year-1984) MIPS" Joy?

https://donhopkins.medium.com/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mill...

Navigating from HackerNews to Medium is exactly the kind of downgrade we're talking about. A bloated ad-filled horror-show of openly hostile design.

Firefox tells me it had to download 1.9MB, despite that the only graphic in the article weighs just 60kB.

Thankfully modern browsers have 'reader mode'. There's no such simple solution for Windows.

Sure, hate on medium, I’m certainly not here to defend it, but I think you may have missed the joke.

I love the image of Bill Joy as a masked superhero, who returns from out of nowhere and deletes your Windows partition.

Windows+WSL (1 and 2) is a viable route these days. Whenever you feel exhausted from Windows, just continue in a nice and clean Linux shell. Sometimes, there are still very good windows oss apps, like np++, sumatrapdf, typora, keypirinha. I enjoy these on windows and ignore the rest, thanks to WSL.

Linux in a VM is better than no Linux at all, but 60% of my complaints about Windows still apply so long as windows is the host. Network load, fans spinning up for no reason, the start menu ads, arbitrary reboot policies, plus the fact that I can’t bind Hyper. It’s weak tea compared to the real thing.

I have to use MS-Windows at work. It feels as if I'm in an abusive relationship with an partner who gaslights me at very turn but I can't leave him because we have kids and I feel I have an obligation to care for them. The partner (i.e. Microsoft) is the sado-masochist.

Isn't it Microsoft that's the sadist but that you're a masochist for staying after your realization?

I never said I was there by choice ...

Using Windows is unnecessary suffering. You suffer only because someone decided that you should suffer.

Using Linux, you suffer for better reasons that may even be worth it in some cases.

Linux only hurts you in ways that make you stronger.

Exactly! You suffer regardless of what you choose, but how you suffer and what for differs.

You suffer for a corporation when you use Windows, and they get richer and greedier.

When you use Linux, your suffering might push you to break and waste a weekend fixing an upstream bug, from which the entire world benefits for free. When you use Linux, your suffering builds positive karma, and next life you get to reincarnate as a cat, released from the hell that is software engineering.

Yep, exact opposite for me too. I enjoy using Linux the way I have it setup and it brings me joy. I've practically removed/automated all my annoyances over the years and now things just work the way _I_ want them to work. Rather than changing the way I work to fit the my tools.

I just started a new job that has forced me to use OSX. It truly feels like a form of asceticism to me. Can't change anything, accept what Apple gives you and suffer quietly.

Having to relearn how to do things less efficiently (and being mostly powerless to improve it) was very humbling for me.

I use the latest Fedora KDE on my laptop and I find it to be a better Windows desktop than Windows itself. I cannot even say it is ascetic - everything just works really really well.

I have been evangelizing this message to my close circle of friends and colleagues lately. None of us are devs. I switched my laptop to Fedora this summer. All my windows problems evaporated. Search works, and is a button away. File organization works and my file manager doesn't freeze if it can't access a remote share for whatever reason (usually work VPN inefficiency on Windows). What is installed and uninstalled is genuinely under my control (not Microsoft's). And once I learned my way around the fifteen software installation methods (AppImages, repositories, flatpaks etc.) I even enjoy having the choices. My battery life is under my control, as is all interface with hardware on my terms (speaker/webcam behaviour/drivers).

I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.

Edit: It very much feels like being on a Symbian phone in 2005 or 2006. They were horrifically broken, couldn't load a web page, had no path forward towards even basic note taking, calendar organization, social media, or anything. But the iPhone hadn't shown up yet, so a majority of the world still used Symbian.

> I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.

It's not just the laptop market. Windows used to be a tool that allowed you to easily use your computer and programs. It no longer does this and is now mostly a vehicle to sell Microsoft's services.

KDE is solid but I think is just different enough to throw off less technically oriented would-be switchers. I think a fork of KDE that changes it to be more of a 1:1 match to Windows would be highly beneficial here, especially if this fork has a dropdown menu that can switch which version of Windows it mimics (lots of people miss 7 and XP and would find a zero effort way to get that experience back tempting).

There are countless Windows themes for KDE. You can make KDE look like anything with a theme.

Themes are great, but they're surface level and don't change the numerous little behavioral/UX differences between KDE and whichever version of Windows. They also require the user to have gotten as far as to discover that KDE supports themes and downloading, installing, and enabling the theme.

That's why I think a fork that implements the requisite changes would be of value.

KDE global themes can get you a long way though.

What exactly would change ? Only thing I can think of 'normal' users using is ctrl-c/ctrl-v which already work in KDE (even ctrl-win-arrow for virtual desktops could be configured without a fork.)? Different icons/shortcuts wouldn't require forking KDE...Not sure what else you'd change?

If I sat down to compose the list, it'd be full of lots of small things. Think how under KDE, the file copy progress UI is a semi-persistent notification banner instead of a normal dialog like it's always been on Windows. While each of these differences on their own aren't likely to pose issues, in aggregate they can give an impression of the DE being more unfamiliar/alien (and thus, daunting) than it actually is.

I would probably also overhaul the settings app. For example, the whole Appearance & Style group and its two drill-down sections could be pretty easily reworked into a single panel that directly surfaces the most pertinent settings while tucking away the rest under an "Advanced…" button that opens a modal — with themes for example the average user will at most be interested in changing the global theme. Only advanced users even know the difference between window decorations, application styles, etc much less want to be able to change any of those individually.

Hmm - I'm not sure those sorts of things would require a fork per se, but I can see making it more familiar to windows/mac users could be a good thing. I was just curious as I was a big KDE fan back when I used Linux full time, and wondered what had changed.

The two biggest issues I'd have with Linux full time would be audio and video. I haven't even attempted to run Linux audio in like 5-10 years - it was always so titchy with multiple 'standards' to configure. Video was not quite as bad, as I don't game much so I just needed basic functionality. But now I have multiple 4k monitors, high dpi, and all that jazz, I don't know how big a pain it would be. I just run linux in VMs (standard device drivers and setup) or ssh into a linux server for now.

A fork wouldn't be explicitly required, but generally in established FOSS projects, when attempting to make changes that are either large or widely peppered throughout the project you're going to be fighting against headwinds from people who are happy with project as it is, which is understandable. You're likely going to find yourself spending more time on negotiating and politicking to get changes committed than actually making changes.

Audio/video has more to do the distribution being used than it does one's desktop environment, though the DEs can do things to smartly design configuration UI and surface the most commonly used A/V settings in the right places.

Well, at it's at least one order of magnitude less broken than just-installed Windows...

But I've never had a computer where everything just works, I guess that's because I expect too much, but I could never say this.

It depends a lot on what hardware one has and what software one uses, in my experience. A laptop that’s a generation or two behind built without discrete graphics, Intel networking, and a display that’s usable at 1x UI scaling? Smooth sailing. A bleeding edge tower with off-brand integrated networking and an Nvidia card hooked up to a monitor that requires fractional scaling on the other hand might be more trouble.

> Everything just works under Linux

If you mean a Linux desktop PC, then no. I have been using a Linux desktop for many years, but not exclusively. I have tried, but I always have had at least a dual-boot with Windows. Yes, you have more control under Linux, but the reason I still use Windows sometimes is that many things just don't work properly.

Just look at here for a list:

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

Or, from a less technical perspective, look at the LinusTechTips video series where he tries to use Linux as a daily driver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M

And I love linux, I have a Linux desktop at home, which is pretty minimal by the way (Debian mini.iso), and that that it doesn't do weird things behind my back is appreciable. But it absolutely doesn't "just work".

re: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

super tangential but am I the only one who has an undying love for the Tahoma font?

It’s true, I have the luxury of using Linux on older laptops with mature hardware support. I’m sure it’s frustrating to discover that a $600 gpu has poor support. I have the absolute privilege of not needing to run the kind of software that requires this kind of equipment. It’s also fair to critique my position as one of shifting the blame around. I would never have chosen to spend good money on the Canon printer in my living room, but there it is, and its driver support is abysmal. Personally, I regard this as case of Linux working just fine, and Canon making defective hardware, but I can see how one would disagree.

I feel the same way about Windows. But that's only because I've already paid the initial cost of adapting to a Linux environment. Ascetic actions can increase your overall comfort as you get better at them.

Think about it from a 5-year-old person's perspective, or an average computer user. Which one do you think is more comfortable to use, Windows, or Linux?

You need to be more specific when you say "Linux". I use Debian Unstable and stuff breaks all the time. Which is to be expected, so I'm not complaining, it's on me. My understanding is that Microsoft has shifted QA to the users quite a bit in recent years, not unlike Debian Unstable. And I am part of the QA process I guess.

we're not talking bugs or stability here - we're talking about the objective suffering experienced when forced to use the highly polished spyware & ad delivery platform that is win10/11

Debian is for kids, RHEL is for men

Maybe all forms of asceticism work that way - what’s initially a challenge, eventually brings comfort.

Agreed. With Linux and open source, if there's a problem, you can fix it or file a quality bug report that'll often lead to the issue getting fixed. With Windows you deny yourself this comfort and suffer with what Microsoft provides.

Reminded me of this Stallman quote "People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance". (I use (Neo)Vi(m) BTW)

Windows is great except when it does something unpredictable. It will be amazing for months at a time before it decides it's update time.

But they get a lot of things right, like their backwards compatibility via statically linked packages and a large "standard library".

Unfortunately it's all proprietary and doesn't work if you can't live with the random updates, or if you need to support small cheap embedded things well...

Have you tried any of the BSDs?

I’ve been considering it. I have some older x86 hardware that I think would be a better fit for a BSD at this point.

Years ago DragonFlyBSD seemed by far the coolest, anybody know how it's doing these days?

Perhaps we have different definitions of ascetism. It's about having less, not more. Less guis, less random traffic, etc..

That said, linux is in a way like processed foods, and windows is organic.

Linux is distilled down to the essential components through chemistry, it's like sugar or table salt, or maltodextrine.

Windows is just a thing that is alive, but not even a single thing, it has a flora that the manufacturer can't even tell you what it is in the ingredient list (can't share source code, they don't have it) they can't put all of the natural bacteria that coats an apple in an ingredient list.

> Less guis, less random traffic,

I don’t become less ascetic by wearing fewer hair shirts.

> That said, linux is in a way like processed foods, and windows is organic.

I would have said the opposite.

Linux is organic - you get the bare essentials (whatever grew from the ground), and little more.

Windows is highly processed - you get the food, but also the chemicals and sugars and additives (AI in your taskbar! Candy Crush and political clickbait in your start menu!) designed to keep you addicted and coming back for more.

I can see how you would think that. The concept of purity is double edged, on the one hand it can seem pure to eat an apple from a tree, but on the other hand, raw sugar has a very high purity!

So windows is pure in the first sense, but linux is pure in the second sense.

You say that with linux you get the bare essentials, whatever grew from the ground, but take a look at the size of a linux distro, linux is actually very distilled, Windows is RAW. You get a binary in there that nobody knows how it got there and there is no source code.

There is source code/recipe/ingredient list/dependency manifest for a vanilla and fudge pastrie, but there is no source code for an apple/windows, you get what it is. For the most part windows didn't have source code in the early stages themselves, it's not like they kept the source code hidden under lock, rather they discarded it or lost it to the ages. It's like compilers, it's just something that grows over a couple of generations from the previous version.

I don't know where you got the idea that MS doesn't have copies of their own source code. They aren't just blindly shipping binaries from decades ago with unknown provenance. They keep meticulous archives, and even employ full-time digital archivists. Some of their source has leaked in fact*, spanning all the way from the 1980s to the 2020s, so you can see for yourself if you really want to. If you can download a torrent, you can bet MS has a copy too. And if you search on YT, you'll find people who have built working copies of the OS with these leaks. It's all there.

* https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41873

That green thing on the moldy slice of bread you forgot somewhere is also alive... =)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com