I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.
There's at least a few factors:
- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late
- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc
- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly
- forced to use Windows at work
I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.
There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.
I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.
Yes it’s petty, yes it means I just don’t do something easy. Yes in the end it’s only my problem.
I’ll probably just do it on excel for the web.
One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.
If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.
This has been a nice interaction which is increasingly rare online, thanks.
I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.
I've used Linux for work (and school before that) for a long time, so I'm not intimidated by it, but it just feels like more effort than it's worth each time at home. I won't deny that Windows keeps getting more annoying though, so I'll probably give Linux an N-th try soon.
Edit: also, I'm a PC gamer, and I like having the option to play games like Fortnite or Valorant, even if I don't do so very often. But of course, I can solve that with dual booting if I really want to.
O&O Shutup: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
All the missing privacy switches you'd want. Run it after any updates.
PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
The real utilities you'll want to control your UI as a power user. Just autohide the taskbar and disable showing badges and flashing. It's a lost cause, and you can mostly just forget it exists. Use alt+space to launch things and keyboard or mouse shortcuts for window management. It's actually pretty good at mixing floating and tiling.
WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
I'm sure you know about it, but it works well even for most GUI apps these days, although it still doesn't support fractional scaling.
Some of us are in the weird spots where no OS "just works" and will require inordinate amount of setup and adjustments anyway.
I recently did an arch and Ubuntu install for two machines, and spend half a day each to get something mildly viable, and still tweak things from time to time two weeks after. Sheer hardware support was only a third of the pain.
Back in the days macos also took me about the same time to setup the local system , configure input and disable/workaround the silly stuff. Windows is on par IMHO (stuff are sillier, but disabling them takes about the same effort). For any of those I end with a fully working *nix system/subsystem, so the end setup makes very little difference to me.
The huge difference is windows having exotic[0] form factor support turned to 11, where linux will be rougher.
[0] I only care about tablets, I wonder if Bazzite could help, I'll be giving it a try in. few months I think.
I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.
I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.
The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.
And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?
At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."
Personally, I wish I'd swapped sooner.
As a Linux user since 2006/7, I totally understand. I had atleast 1 computer at home that would dual-boot to either Windows or Linux. Regardless, I had to have a Windows system.
My reasons may not be the same as yourself - but I do still get stuck and HAVE to use Windows from time-to-time. It's not just for playing games or work related. It's sometimes a simple file I have to download, fill in and email back. The file is likely a Microsoft Excel or Word file and while OpenOffice/LibreOffice is good most of the time, there is bound to be something off.
Sometimes my kids will have homework (going back a few years now) and it would only work on Internet Explorer despite the fact Chrome was dominant back then.
(I remember, back in 2008, I would ensure the websites I created had decent support for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, despite my boss telling me "everyone uses Internet Explorer" - that soon changed by 2010 with Chrome)
Thing is these problems are not the fault of Linux, or the Office suite, or the web browsers. The problem was the people using files specific to a brand, or focusing on specific web browser, etc. However, many people wont view it like that. In these scenarios.. Linux was the problem.
I always remember writing my Resumes for recruitment agencies. I would hand over it is 3 formats. ODT, PDF, and DOCX. I did this because I was not sure how the DOCX version would look on Microsoft Word. Of course, it looked great in Open/Libre Office.
I always encouraged the PDF version.
> I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
100%!
I wouldn't use a condom that broke 3 years ago.
It isn't like this is the original WinXP during the era where computers connected directly to the open internet and caught viruses just by existing, making computers groan and being very visible that something was wrong. Pretty much everyone is connected via a firewall and on top of that Windows has improved its security considerably over the years. And there are still security updates for browsers (the main vector for malware by far) that support Win8.x (e.g. Firefox ESR will be supporting Win8.x until next year and people have made Win7 and Win8 compatible builds for modern Chromium).
So it isn't surprising that for all intents and purposes it isn't broken, especially when the alternative is having to change to something that feels like downgrade in terms of UX. From a user's perspective it is a choice between the unlikely potential of something invisible perhaps happening (getting compromised) versus the absolute certainty of something very visible happening (having to get used to a worse UX). Considering Windows still tie security updates with everything else, it isn't surprising that people judge based on what they perceive the most.
Of course the best solution would be to switch to an OS where such choices are not necessary in the first place. I've been using Window Maker since early 2000s and the UI has remained the same since 1997 when WM was first made, aside from the occasional theme change (which is done only whenever i personally feel like it, i.e. is not forced on me) while at the same time i'm using the latest Linux kernel, C library, drivers, etc with all security fixes. I do not have any choice between having security fixes or using a GUI that i am comfortable with - i get to have both.
The state of security is /awful/ for general users.
But they also can't figure out how somebody keeps getting into their email account, why they get text messages that quickly disappear from history, or what these weird charges that keep showing up on their bank statement are...
Software is "broken" even before it gets updated.
If what you said were true, there would be no such thing as a zero-day.
ok surely that firewall and home lab and ability to not download and run garbage is enough for someone on the supposed "hacker news" to handle. but no, we got heaps of people using "out of support" as some sort of argument whatsoever to upgrade to absolutely dogshit versions of windows. make it make sense
Having oldass OS and application versions make that a thousand times easier when you have so, so, so many CVEs you can exploit. And LLMs have been show to make this very trivial now.
All you need to do is click on the wrong pop-up, or the wrong link in your email, or tap something on your phone screen, or have a poorly configured (often from the factory) router, and the initial intrusion takes place. After that, an outbound encrypted session quickly gets setup, and congrats, now your network is acting as a residential proxy that can be sold to criminals that want to download CSAM from your IP, AI companies that will use your connection for scraping, and other elements that will either mine the data on your systems (your PII, logins, etc) and scrape your screens.
But if you don't care about your life becoming a living hell, then I can't make you.
This happens all the time, every day.
If you have a car, you maintain it. If you have a bike, you maintain it. Power tools? You maintain them. Your electronic devices also need to be maintained. They have access to your most sensitive data, and potentially private conversations.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access
Did you know that a lot of current home router NAT implementations are currently broken, in particular for UDP traffic handling, and you can therefore spoof your way into the network?
https://www.armis.com/research/nat-slipstreaming-v2-0/
A lot of router vulnerabilities floating around out there.
Ever hear of UPnP/UPnP2? Did you know that applications can trigger your router to open inbound ports for you?
There have also been some 0 click exploits lately, those are fun. You don't have to do anything at all!
https://github.com/Defense-Intelligence-Agency/Zero-Click-Ex...
Yeah, you're still at risk, and moreso because you're not aware of how open you are.
They're fine.
https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Unicode
It's also happened with code pushes on GitHub, which didn't get caught in code review, and has compromised build processes by introducing a malicious domain that is visually identical.
Sounds like a HN-type problem.
https://www.knostic.ai/blog/zero-width-unicode-characters-ri...
Everybody feels confident until a slip happens. It's really just a function of probability and time acting against you as well as anybody, just like companies shouldn't ask themselves whether they'll be hacked, but when.
It also seems to me that phishing has become vastly more sophisticated in recent years, IMHO mainly due to 3 issues:
1. A growing number of huge data leaks that enable scammers to profile and target possible victims to an unprecedented degree and attack them using unexpected vectors. I remember my feelings sinking the day I received the first phish that contained basically all my personal data to address me. Once it's out there and traded, there ain't no getting back. As a consequence, spear phishing has become much more automated and widespread.
2. Proliferation of 2FA, often via email, as a supposed remedy-for-all which leads to a false sense of security.
3. The sheer ignorance of some actors that continue to undermine all the best awareness efforts and normalize insecure practices. For god's sake, I've received unsolicited emails from my bank as well as from globally acting online retailers telling me to click on a link and log in to solve some issue. To my great astonishment, both turned out to be legit. What the hell were they thinking?
Really, I wish all of us good luck. But I don't feel so confident anymore, rather like an unwilling participant in a lopsided arms race, where the adversaries have great resources at their disposal, and I have nothing more to rely on than my wits. ... Actually, put this way, it sounds like a classic cyberpunk tale. There's some appeal to it, I admit, but still.