Recall going back into Windows

I would second the recommendation for Mint, or really any distribution that includes Cinnamon as its default DE (as long as it’s not a bleeding edge distro like Arch). Cinnamon is probably the closest out of the box approximation to a traditional Windows desktop out there, leaning more towards Windows 7 than 8 and beyond.

I’m sure there’s a KDE fan writing up a reply right now, and while it’s also Windows-like, it’s considerably more indiosyncratic than Cinnamon is and has a bunch of bells and whistles that while great for power users have a decent chance of tripping up novices. Cinnamon doesn’t rock the boat at all which is exactly what makes it appealing here.

That is true up to a point, but getting it to do actual work gets easier with experience. Most power users just jump to MacOS, or adapt to a Linux flavor.

Windows can't help screwing with users, and has been an IT security liability for years. When Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility for much of their installed base in Win11... they also removed 99.9% of the reason IT puts up with their BS. =3

Steam supports a lot more titles on Linux, but some will never work right (Cuphead takes some effort to get working etc.)

Best to check your favorites are functional before nuking Windows, or do the dual ssd OS boot option. =)

This is true, there are a select few that use a particular anti-cheat that doesn't work on Linux and that's unfortunately unavoidable. That said, as others have stated, several of them do work like Easy Anti-Cheat, which means I can happily play those online without getting kicked.

I wont pretend to downplay these issues, I do however absolutely share screenshare in the zoom web page thing.

This is why I chose a thinkpad for my laptop: I knew I wanted to switch to linux eventuality, and lenovo is very linux friendly. Many of these issues exist (or are exacerbated) because the hardware drivers don't support linux the way they support windows.

I absolutely agree, linux advocates must be honest about the shortcomings. In my case even on the thinkpad I experience the multi display scaling issue you mentioned, and bluetooth can be a little finnicky for my headphone (though this is much better than a couple years back! Usually simoly restarting the headphone solves everything).

I think it's very much worth it, and other than some of those minor issues I think current linux distributions are good enough to wholeheartedly recommend them over windows. That is if you're not held hostage by some windows only software.

E: about screensharing, I can't screenshare from teams on firefox, but from chrome it works fine, maybe that's the same for zoom?

As a linux user since linux's entire life: Yeah.

Simply facts that are true.

There are problems on Windows too, but they are not these problems, and the problems I mostly have are only problems I have and not problems the usual Windows user has.

The normal windows user doesn't even try to login without a microsoft account, or even try to remove cortana/bing/copilot/whatever-this-week, remove edge, prevent the "HP Smart" driver bundle that installs for every HP printer or scanner these days and find the old style drivers without all the cloud shit, etc.

But I have not found scaling to be especially good on windows either, even with a simple single monitor. My mother in law can't run viber in her desktop because the app scales so bizarrely that some buttons are moved under other things or out of the window or even off the screen, but on top of that, the active areawhere a click is registered does not overlay where the buttons are displayed on screen. Maybe it's just an especially crappy app but she only uses like 3 things and two of those are firefox and libreoffice (which are because I set them up of coursae she never asked for that).

Fonts look ridiculously comically bad in browsers for some reason.

And of course the ads and notifications and onedrive nagging...

I agree with all of these broadly, though I've never run into a case where sleep doesn't work fwiw, but people are also really blind to how many warts windows has. Multi monitor stuff is a shitshow there too for instance, or Windows Update, or... I haven't personally used Windows for well over a decade but I have loved ones who do and I would say as of recent years we really have crossed over to where Windows has more shit like this than Linux I reckon.

I wish X supported mixed DPI per monitor, ugh.

I will say one notable difference is that Linux issues as a rule at least are debuggable, whereas Windows issues can just be utterly intractible. It's not that rare for me to watch friends with computer science degrees frustratedly embark on the long misadventure that is "reinstalling Windows".

I agree that laptop hardware compatibility on Linux is not the best but it can work if you buy the right device. Thinkpads are particularly well supported. You might also want to try a more up to date Linux distribution like Fedora. I never had problems with Fedora on my laptops but for example OpenSUSE Thumbleweed wouldn’t sleep properly for me and had broken Thunderbolt support.

Try EndeavourOS. I've had less issues with a "riskier" distro like this than the recommended safer distros.

Does 5. mean that I can't join a virtual meeting with a bluetooth headset and use the headset mic? That would actually be a major barrier to switching to linux, this is a required feature for any laptop I use. So much so I am shocked that it could be broken in ubuntu.

For the battery life is your CPU scaling set to ondemand or performance? One can write an alias or function to switch from ondemand to performance for gaming then switch back to save power. One can also cap the max CPU frequency but that takes some experimentation to see what the lowest frequency usable with Zoom would be. When switching from Zoom to actually getting work done one can use an alias or function to switch back to max frequency options.

    sudo cpupower frequency-info
    # or
    cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
    cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
    cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies

Also take a look at powertop you will probably have to install this. One can set any devices they are not using to optimal settings. I avoid touching USB used by keyboard/mice and network interfaces I am using to minimize lag. Powertop can output to a file and that can be used in a startup script to automate the optimizations one has chosen.

There is also a sysctl setting called "vm.laptop_mode" which defaults to 0. On a laptop it can be set to 5 to combine writes and minimize storage wake-up. The caveat is that if the OS crashes one can lose up to 10 minutes of work. Most developers should avoid this setting unless their code editor autosaves frequently and syncs / flushes storage write caches. If unsure don't use it.

Another small gain is to ensure all daemons, desktop services and widgets not required are disabled or even removed. Some of them are power-hogs, some especially more than others. Powertop can sometimes expose this if left running for a while.

Another small gain can sometimes be installing "tlp" but different laptops and usage will see different amounts of power saving.

Oh and keeping the laptop off the lap can sometimes save power. More heat means more fan usage and thus more power usage. When at a dedicated desk using a laptop cooling stand multiple fans can extend battery life.

If one is feeling very adventurous they can install the latest bleeding edge kernel to net some small power savings but it may not be worth it if the laptop is used for anything critical.

Hello,

long time Ubuntu user here, had been bulletproof on an i5 Panasonic toughbook until 24.04 and now it’s not so stable. Sleep also stopped working correctly on an i5 Lenovo yoga and I downgraded that one back to 22.04.

However that same distro runs smoothly (and the UI isn’t constantly glitching out) on an i7 thinkpad that I don’t enjoy using because it runs red hot and the fan is always going…. FWIW that’s also the only system I have that’s even capable of running win11 smoothly… but up until now, Linux was great on castaways that windows had forgotten.

I have acpi and charging issues on the stock 24.04 kernel tree with the Panasonic , which is a laptop that supports two batteries. If either battery gets pulled on that platform it stops charging on AC.

This issue isn’t present after putting Ubuntu packages for kernel 6.14 on it , which only came out two weeks ago.

It still wanders all over the place as far as whether I can get 8 hours on a charge (or two hours), swapping the batteries confuses the system still and I haven’t had the free time recently to nail down whether this is acpi, kernel, or Ubuntu specifically. I’ve mumbled a little bit about that one on launchpad and ordered a second battery for a different laptop that has that capability but don’t have answers yet.

Would need to know your Bluetooth chipset to speculate too much because some bleeding combo cards with wifi6 are also better supported by recent kernels. For example my Intel BE200 worked fine for WiFi but the Bluetooth didn’t work at all until either 24.04 or applying 6.14 to it. Not sure which, I just noticed it was there in the menu about a week ago.

with that said my laptop still has a resource conflict I haven’t pinned down where, when WiFi and wwan card are both powered on and active my WiFi speed is clipped down to about 2mb/s. I’m just powering the wwan off when I don’t need it and I’m inclined to think it’s still a driver issue or the two cards don’t get along or are conflicting for resources somehow… I don’t have a solid enough theory to report it as a “bug” or know for sure whether it’s just my hardware yet.

Ubuntu and Wayland were the first distro where I went “hey, using Linux on the desktop finally isn’t *ss” so I’ll give them that. But 24.04 has been the one that had me wondering if it’s time to get acquainted with another. Many are mentioned ITT, I just haven’t “distro hopped” and “tried them all” in almost two decades and it may be time again.

Re: Bluetooth, that's just how Bluetooth is. I've never seen any device that supports simultaneous HFP and ADP. You typically get either microphone and shitty mono audio or high quality ADP audio, but not both at once.

I like Pop_OS! from System76 quite a lot. They also peddle their own hardware (I use a custom desktop), so you can be reasonably sure their stuff will work with it. Quite excited about the new DE they're building too.

these are privacy issues of application programs, not the OS.

Let me clarify: This is Recall, a Microsoft product, installed and working across a large number of machines. While Microsoft claims all Recall snapshots and processing are local to the machine, it's a all but given that all those Windows machines are using some kind of Microsoft cloud, Azure, Office 365, or OneDrive storage.

Not a bunch of independent, disorganized one-offs.

Consider this: your boss or another senior person at work has Recall and brings up information related to your employment, performance, and compensation. A friend has Recall, and reads some email from you in which you confide something sensitive. That customer support agent at the company you do frequent business with has Recall, because their employer wants to monitor their minute-to-minute activities, and brings up your account history.

Independently and uncoordinated, maybe not so bad. Together, tied back to Microsoft, it's easy to imagine constructing a profile of you from your interactions with these seemingly independent but in really collective third parties.

So is Recall.

> Perhaps Microsoft should redirect their efforts toward features people do want to buy.

Or fixing bugs...

Siri can be disabled on iOS and MacOS by Apple Configurator MDM, which generates an XML policy file that can also be generated by any text editor or shell script.

> So now we must summon the combined power of HN to find the simplest way to hobble this behavior on Mac and Windows without entirely breaking the OS itself

Hopefully the combined power of HN can figure out how to not enable this opt-in feature.

I'm pretty sure the combined power of HN can figure out how to put an Ubuntu installer on a thumb drive and reboot.

Can you please elaborate on "episodic memory and contextual awareness"? Those words sound like a confusion of ideas with about as much substance as marketing copy for a vaporware.

Or assuming having it installed everywhere increases the chance of it becoming enabled

You'll be opted in against your will by people who have it on their machines, any time you electronically interact with them.