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Comment by udev4096 | Hacker News Reader

I still can't believe how people use windows as their main system with all the extremely invasive telemetry and bogus "AI" features that hogs a LOT of resources at idle

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I mainly use a computer for:

- Work (heavy usage of Microsoft office apps)

- Audio / recording studio

- Some gaming

- Software development

Unfortunately for me, that's three uses where Windows excels, versus one for Linux.

Three out of four would also work on a Mac though

I am forced to use Windows at work. Surprisingly many large enterprises use Windows, mostly because of their dependency on Microsoft Office and Exchange. I'm really happy that WSL exists so I have to deal as little with Windows as possible.

At home I still need to have a native Windows laptop because of one application that I use a lot (a backgammon analyser) that runs natively on Windows and is heavily cpu driven. I could run it in a VM but the performance penalty is just too heavy.

I play video games that require an anti-cheat, so there's that. But honestly, it's fairly easy to deal with that. You can use the Windows IoT LTSC version and use one of those trusted debloaters. I haven't seen any AI features or bloat in a very long time.

I am not that proficient, I tried it three times, first hurdle is trying to find a distro, making all that research about which ones have more pre-configuration and which ones would be less buggy for your hardware can be a pain.

The thing that attracted me to Linux is the file system and customization. I just wanted to daily drive it, not really for any work. But bugs are just a reality using most DEs available.

In my case once, it even was related to performance, I had to stay the whole day trying to find out why Kubuntu was slower than Windows on my laptop, ended up just being one line in some config file that forced battery-saving performance, I failed to find the post online after encountering the same issue months later after reinstalling the system.

Believe it or not, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, I just realized I use Windows more and more in my dual boot system, so I gave up on using Linux after that.

What AI features hogs a lot of resources on windows?

Because 90% of software run only on Windows.

As a software dev I understand that having telemetry is a good thing. I dont believe it is "extremely invasive".

And I have no idea what AI features you mean (at least on Win10).

It is definitely in win11. Might be less on win10. Maybe try using something like simplewall [0], which shows prompts for every network request that phones home

[0] - https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall

Few people know what Linux is. Most only know that there are "macs" and "pc" and haven't used a personal computer privately at all since they got their first ipad in 2016.

Some people don't know that computers can be fast. Others modify their system to remove/neutralize all this crap. There are even tools to automate that.

It’s not even that difficult to manually remove these from Windows. It’s like a handful of configs. It’s way easier to do that than make (probably) any Linux distro to work with my current and previous setups. Which btw I could never achieve even with considerable amount of tinkering.

"Some people are just stupid"

But most are just ignorant. Ignorance, not being a crime, of course.

Blunt and yet so true

i use it only for gaming. no developer i know personally uses windows. either they are on mac or linux.

And yet games run pretty fast on Windows.

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