I like that first comment:
"Microsoft continues to have a terrible abusive relationship with its customers. It's what Microsoft wants, not what the customer wants."
Yup, that pretty much sums up why I left for Linux.
"Microsoft continues to have a terrible abusive relationship with its customers. It's what Microsoft wants, not what the customer wants."
Yup, that pretty much sums up why I left for Linux.
I got Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour, Mx Linux, Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo galore. Desktop Linux has come a long way, and if you like true unix here let me tell you some more. I got GhostBSD (https://www.ghostbsd.org/) rocking MATE IDE, if you want lightweight Linux desktop I got LXDE, LXFC, Gnome, KDE, and a whole lot more.
If you want true freedom, ditch the spyware and head on over to desktop Linux where we'll welcome you with open arms.
The excuse of 'But this... and that...' let me stop you right there.
You don't need to configure anything. Download Kubuntu and have fun with customizing everything in the settings.
When it comes to Windows and Microsoft products the answer is 'No.'
Keep it that way. Freedom matters.
Or are you just trying them all out to let us know? Because you've named a few that are all the same family.
People who are unfamiliar with Linux will look at this list and just ignore it as too complicated. When in reality it's much simpler.
I just love linux.
The same pretty much goes for any of its many derivatives. Redhat is no longer open. Arch and alpine based have hardware issues.
The choices you once had with Linux are far less today than they have been in the past. You almost need to know how to build a distro from scratch to get comparable features and privacy to yesteryear.
Dig into tracker-miner-fs, d-bus activation re-parenting, as well as the snap callbacks that can trigger arbitrary local code execution. Usually found in a directory under /usr/libexec in addition to its regular install location, not touching on the spiderweb of cross-connections.
If you try to remove or pull out parts of those distro integrations in Ubuntu, you will find that it keeps launching, despite making a clear choice for not wanting those features. There is a spiderweb of cross connections where if you shut down various parts, it fixes and regenerates its capabilities... like malware.
They clearly aren't giving people the choice to do what they want on their own hardware.
tracker-miner-fs collects metadata, and Recall is just an accessible interface to metadata that is already collected. The underlying metadata is for the most part similar.
You will find this also in the package repository where they have named packages, that those packages have been corrupted in a way that makes the corrupt packages indistinct from their legitimate counterparts (to the package manager), the manager launches fixup scripts without notification, and which are embedded to force and regenerate your use of snap.
Debian is certainly not immune since tracker-miner-fs is embedded in Gnome.
As for hardware, that is also incorrect. There are very few manufacturers that meet full compatibility requirements, they may allow you to boot into a shell (only as a result of the linux kernel devs), but compatibility for standard desktop or server use is not guaranteed.
The manufacturers that dominate the market are those who use proprietary firmware blobs through an embedded intermediate firmware based controller. The ideapad lines of Lenovo, and their many off-name rebrandings attest to the hardware compatibility issues even after significant re-engineering effort done to make it compatible still leaves features lacking.
When your thermal subsystem cannot expose temperature, power management, or has severe hysteresis gaps, lack of proper enumeration and lack of control of fans/advanced features, its hard to believe it doesn't cause trouble.
That's like saying a flaming pile of brick in your lap doesn't cause trouble. Research fails in the absence of source of truth information.
Manufacturers regularly omit, misadvertise/misinform, or don't provide documentation at all (i.e. WD with SMR), or correct technical specs to evaluate it prior to a buy, test, return strategy (which isn't research) and a risky approach.
I think you should take more than a cursory look around at the current market. Its pretty bad, expensive (for the circuitry involved) and with few choices.
My Google Pixel continuously asks me if I want to enable photo backup.
Uber Eats continuously asks me to enable notifications.
I tell the software no, again and again, day after day, and it keeps prompting me.
Most software I use is like this, it seems to be inescapable.
Google Photos does this on non-Pixel android phones too. Many times when I open the gallery app I'm confronted with a dialog where the backup checkbox is enabled and there's a continue button. It's like Google is trying to trick me into enabling it. This is an incredibly user hostile design. One day I will do it by mistake.
I mentioned this to a friend once and he said his kid got ahold of his phone for a few minutes and did enable it, causing a massive upload that put his Google account over quota. Of course it's a huge hassle to go through and unsync the photos without deleting them from the device.
The iOS app as well
Only other hurdle to open source nirvana is OsmAnd is not as slick and smooth as Google Maps. I spent a few days acclimating to it and once downloading the gigabytes of address-data-to-GPS-coords I could start enjoying offline navigation, but when it comes to finding local restaurants' and whether they're open its hard to beat the Goog.
Google itself has one such alternative gallery app called Gallery:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
FOSS software does not have these misfeatures.
Telemetry by default is unacceptable as well, but not to that degree.
Then Wine and especially Steam and Proton started to get to work, and Windows started to turn anti-consumer to a degree. At that point, I was kinda on the fence. Actively switching seemed somewhat scary, but if I had to setup something new, it was kinda... meh either way.
Then my Windows-OS SSD died. So I had to reinstall my OS anyway. Then I made the choice to install Fedora and switch back to Windows when it grows annoying. That was... two or three or more years ago? And the thing is, games work. Apps work. Funny enough, old games work better with DosBox and Wine than on windows. I have like two old games I can't get to run, but that's mostly because I don't have the energy to figure out QEMU with Direct3D support, which VirtualBox dropped some time ago for security reasons.
And now I'm looking at stuff like this.
I managed Linux and BSD on servers all over the place. I worked pretty much exclusively using a Linux VM ... under Windows. Keeps most of the gremlins at bay. Hardware stuff's all handled by Windows, so it generally just works. Trying to play a game? Just run it in Windows and don't worry about it.
Every year or so I'd grab a live image and boot it and see what happened. But always ended up at "okay, too much hassle still".
Then a few things happened:
1. Valve invested heavily in Proton. They released the Steam Deck so suddenly developers _wanted_ their games to work in Proton.
2. One day I booted up a linux live image and stuff like my webcam just worked out of the box.
3. Microsoft released Windows 11.
Upgraded my computer at one point and I just went ahead and threw Debian on it and haven't really run Windows since. (Though I still have it installed. I still haven't found a good alternative to Adobe Lightroom.)
I too am really glad I got off of that ride when I did.
They got lucky once, as WinRT ERA didn't took off as Microsoft expected.
Next time maybe not.
And a world were you provision apps only through the Windows Store is pure hell. Perhaps it was a strategic decision to not support "legacy" apps. If so, Windows RT was killed by just that.
That world is still coming, see ongoing changes to Windows sandboxing model, now in Win32.
And that is the thing, Valve depending on Windows APIs translation, will only work until Microsoft feels like it.
Instead they could actually foster a GNU/Linux ecosystem, but not even studios targeting POSIX OSes care to port their stuff into GNU/Linux.