Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

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BatteryMountain

The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It felt good so see & use it again.

With Windows 11, although I mostly like the UI (rounded corners on a high dpi tablet also with rounded screen is amazing), it feels absolutely gross, in the corporate soulless sense. It feels mentally heavy top operate. I constantly had to battle it to get it to work the way I want it.

These days all my devices are running Fedora with KDE, which is just the best. You basically set it up once the way you like it, and it won't change by itself for months. It is a buttery smooth experience and have had zero need to go back to Windows yet.

If anyone want the same level one-ness with your computer like back in Windows XP & Windows 7 days, give KDE a try. Fedora is pretty simple distro to get used to if you want a good starting point.

> It feels mentally heavy

I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.

nostalgia is pretty powerful.

I get the same feelings whenever I am near an interface that looks anything like NT4.0.

> and it won't change by itself for months

That’s… not a good sell at all

Promise me a decade and I’ll bite. (Joke’s on me, I’ll need to get out of this windows shithole asap)

If you want years, just choose Debian.

In my experience the problem with Debian is that sooner or later you're bound to want to use something that is only 5 years old and therefore not included yet, so you end up having to install it from source or something else, but something doesn't quite work right so you have to hack it one way or another, and over time all this cruft adds up and you end up with a broken system caused precisely because the base distro refused to change fast enough.

I no longer use Debian, but when I did, I always used Debian Testing, never had any major issues that weren't my own fault, and packages are way more up-to-date. Worth trying if you're in that ecosystem still, and you want later stuff than 1-2 years old softwrae.

When I used Debian on desktop, I never used anything but unstable. It was never unstable except maybe in a very relative sense.

brew is a decent compromise between "breaking debian" and running newer stuff and newer versions of things for desktop use at least.

For servers, we just use containers.

Lots of Linux software these days are also distributed as flatpack or appimage, and appimage in particular is dead simple if what you want has it available: place the file wherever on the path, make it executable, and done.

I've been on XFCE for about a decade and it's mostly the same as it was.

Very nice environment, even me with my C rants, am quite pleased with XFCE desktop experience and available extensions.

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