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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL.

You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

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What display servers, drivers do you need to mess with? I have a modern Dell laptop and everything worked immediately. Display, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, storage, sleep mode, good battery life, every port worked, the webcam worked. This was on Fedora. The case is the same for Debian on a different Lenovo laptop.

I know Linux has this reputation for being difficult to use, no hardware support, etc and if this were 2009 I might agree with that. However, Linux couldn’t be easier to use right now.

Wayland works fine. Pipewire? My speakers on the laptop work good and plugged into a dock with conventional speakers works fine.

I’ve seen this repeated over and over and I don’t believe people are lying, I’m sure some have had the experience recently but I’d like to know what hardware they’re using.

The only reason I can see to use Windows is software support for something proprietary.

We have Lenovo Thinkpads at work, which are actually certified for Linux but have known compatibility issues with Bluetooth audio there. I don't remember the exact details, but basically the end result is the Linux users here only have wired headphones.

And if you care about dedicated graphics, especially Nvidia, those drivers have a very different level of support for Windows.

If you care about obscure cases, I have some really cheap Asus laptop (almost a netbook) where Linux mostly works, but the fans stop spinning any time it wakes from sleep, until the next reboot. Somehow not an issue in Windows.

Bluetooth support is still a shit show if you don't buy a laptop that has been in some way developed for linux (if not for your current model, then for a model using similar components). Alternatively, buying a custom bluetooth usb adapter may work but only on a supported distro and only ever with an older bluetooth protocol.

Same goes for WiFi. Good luck trying to get WiFi6 to work properly, ignoring the fact that you have to go out of your way to find an adapter that will even work in linux.

I don't think I've ever seen a device where Bluetooth works 100% of the time. I had issues on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS.

I have a Lenovo laptop where Bluetooth works perfect. I even had a Bluetooth mouse by Logitech that could switch between BT and the logi reciever, so I was able to use it on two computers back and forth with a button press. It instant connected to laptop, took ~1 second to connect to the proprietary receiver.

Maybe a fluke, because the keyboard died on that laptop. Just like every other Lenovo I've owned.

Never buying another one even if it has the exact specs I need when I am shopping for a great price, which is how they've gotten me 3 times now.

> I have a modern Dell laptop

That's the problematic part to me personally. I want a HDPI convertible/tablet form factor, that means no DELL, and linux support is currently not an option.

I had high hopes for the 12" Framework, but again it's resolution is 1200p, which is so much less than a Surface Pro for instance.

I installed Kubuntu 24 on a generic laptop (Machreator N17) and it worked fine other than having to disable D3cold in the BIOS so Wi-Fi works when waking from sleep. I did spend hours before the BIOS setting trying alternate rtw_8821 drivers to no avail.

I quickly threw Fedora on a 6-year-old Microsoft Surface Go LTE, and the only thing that didn't work work was the sim card. Everything else was perfect, including touchscreen.

> without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

Who does that? Not Linux users at least as all drivers are usually shipped by the distro. If my memory is correct, this is on an OS built at Redmond that devices used to come shipped with a cdrom full of drivers because the OS didn't care providing them.

There’s a big asterisk that should be added, though. Windows is not a productive desktop environment for me, primarily due to its poor implementation of virtual desktops and handling of multiple monitors that feels like a bad hack (to set different wallpapers per-display, you still need to combine the picture for each display into a single gigantic image which is ridiculous). I’m sure I’m not alone in these feelings.

I use an HDTV and an HDR 2k165hz monitor. I set the desktop background to black, anything else messes with my peripheral vision if some window decoration isn't aligned with the background.

I also use a 720p60 projector as a screen sometimes on that machine, too.

It all just works. My largest complaint with Windows seems to have been fixed with the 24h2 patch - read on if you care.

I use "@" prefixes on folder names to have them sort first when sorting by name descending. Somehow for a couple years, some applications would crash if trying to stat these folders, for example, launching VLC would usually crash it if the last thing I played was something from V:\@TV\Columbo

I was keeping a list of things that crashed like this; or while opening or saving files in "@" folders. Notepad, notepad++, vlc, mplayer, windows photo viewer (any and all), and so on

I was able to guess it had something to do with internal variables in the windows API, you can see them on my system in pwsh by going to V: \ and typing @ and pressing tab key. They're even a different color than the quoted folder name that eventually appears.

I could never figure out how to report this bug in a way that would be helpful, as I barely use powershell or the windows API.

I tried WSL, but when WSL 1 was abandoned in favor of Hyper-V I was devastated because the new Hyper-V WSL is kind of shit in comparison. No longer are processes and files shared with the host system, you just get an opaque block of CPU and an opaque block of disk space being used. BTW, if at any time in the future you have to clear out part of that opaque block of disk space to make room - good luck shrinking it. I completely recognize why WSL 1 could have been unsustainable for Microsoft but that does not mean that I do not disagree with the decision to abandon it.

There is a certain attraction to the Linux being safely contained but I'm just not getting it at all. I don't want my Linux in a container, I want to live there.

So basically that's why I now use macOS, because it doesn't have to use hacks like WSL in order to be like Linux, it just already is Unix.

Also in general I tend to find that Apple is more detail-oriented than Microsoft, they are probably autistic as fuck and that is a very good thing. (in my opinion)

I'm not yet fully happy with the state of affairs on desktop Linux, although GNOME is to a degree shaping up to a decent experience (partly by copying macOS, though). Their trackpad support is far better than Windows, for example.

you can shrink it now! You're going to have to change the vhd format to sparse (this is why docker for windows doesn't run on exFAT-formatted SSDs, as I found out a couple weeks ago) and then run compaction on it once. After running compaction once, it should grow and shrink dynamically as you'd expect.

thank you!! I will keep your advice in mind if I ever try WSL again

> because it doesn't have to use hacks like WSL in order to be like Linux, it just already is Unix.

If my knowledge is up to date, you still have to run a linux VM (hidden behind whatever tool you are using) to run linux containers right?

My point is that I don't need a linux container at all because all my tools run natively on macOS. Even (and especially) the ones that wouldn't run well on Windows.

For example: I can run valgrind on macOS. Good luck running valgrind on Windows.

My read on this is that eventually microsoft flips them around and puts windows in the VM with device pass-through

This is already the case. Read up on Windows virtualization-based security - it already wraps Windows with Hyper-V.

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