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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

The Penguin is calling.

Not being battered by upsells nobody asked for every time you turn the laptop on is so refreshing.

This reminds me of the situation with online ads.

Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.

Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.

Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...

When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.

Yes. It's a slow boiling frog thing. Kinda like a bad relation ship. You get used to the toxicity. But when you get out of it, it's soooo refreshing. Thank you everybody who made Linux on the desktop possible.

The SEO/Stochastic Parrot Tag Team has entered the chat

Windows used to be like that too, when MS was more focused on being hostile to the competition than its own customers.

My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well.

Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.

> Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.

Quote: very little bloat over the years

You should try Haiku, and read about its package virtual file system, Linux in comparison will forever after that look like a bloated hog.

Linux has plenty of bloat. But it's your bloat. You get the power to slice through it how you want and nobody will stop you.

Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.

In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.

In linux most stuff is opt in.

The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.

Any Linux distribution comes with a lot of bloat, which is why it requires 30GB or so, rather than 30MB or so. Even the kernel is much bigger than it once was.

Nobody is yelling at you not to remove it, or trying to prevent you from removing it, or obscuring where it is and cross-linking everything to make it harder to remove, but it's still there and requires substantial work to remove, just like in Windows.

Instead, you get battered by proselytes every time you go online! :D

Exactly.

Upgrade, to Linux.

2026 year of the linux desktop

To be honest Linux desktop has been ready for the past 4-5 years or so. Long gone are the days where Bluetooth suddenly stopped, external monitors crashing and when closing the lid only put the laptop to sleep every fifth time. Heck, even Wayland, wireless printers and usb-c docking stations work these days, even with nvidia. You might even find some games.

It’s become a boring appliance that just works every time. Just they way I want it. I even forgot how to use grub.

Especially having ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini available nowadays. It’s a godsend when troubleshooting any Linux issues, and you can learn so much in the process.

I just upgraded my PC’s motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card and used Claude as a build buddy to help me lay out steps to follow. I also used it after installing CachyOS for the second time, but on this new hardware. It had me double checking to make sure I had all the proper drivers set up by running commands, but everything was already setup correctly by CachyOS. It even helped me figure out that I had a fan wire half plugged in, which was causing a fan not to throttle. I would alternate between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2. But it’s so much easier and quicker than the old days of sifting through the manuals and forums, if you could get online to a forum that is.

chatpgt has sent me wrong instructions on just as many occasions it has given the right instructions on how to fix things on linux. It's frustrating when it sends me a 'fix' on something that doesn't even need it (steps on installing a particular flavour of Proton to bypass Rockstar's launcher, when it was already done by default). And because I'm not terribly adept I only appreciate it's the wrong instructions after implementing it and it not working.

If you want error prone scripts and out of date instructions, LLMs are very useful.

Any year now!

I don't know... Two people around me recently switched to Linux because they could not stand how bad Windows 11 got. I did not encourage either of them (I've got my share of frustrations after running a Linux desktop exclusively for 25 years, and will not consent to be the object of their ire when they inevitably get frustrated - I'd rather help them on neutral ground instead).

I ran Linux on my laptop in college over a decade ago and it worked great.

It just depends on application compatibility and to a smaller extent driver support, though that shouldn’t be a problem for an older laptop.

I've always dual booted windows with some Linux and used it like 90/10.

I haven't even tried windows 11 even though my PC is compatible.

Went full Linux and I'm not sure what I was missing at this point that I needed from Windows.

Ran Pop OS (cosmic) which is the new Wayland based one but unfortunately it's still buggy and then I switched to a gaming focused Linux called Bazzite which has been perfect.

Tiny learning curve because it's an "immutable" OS but have everything I need running on it plus everything gaming related works out of the box.

I’m really hoping Steam Deck keeps on pushing game makers to support Linux. It’s really gotten a lot better, except for competitive games that need most types of anti-cheat.

If Linux supported all the games I wanted to play, I would ditch Windows on my home PC.

It was 2019 for me. I haven't daily-driven a Windows or Mac machine in almost 5 years now.

Me either.

But Firefox on Ubuntu is not very good. It can expand to fill the whole machine and get killed by the OOM killer. Sometimes during long text input it hangs and has to be killed and restarted. 8 GB isn't enough any more.

Yep, I use a tab suspender to keep Firefox in check, and use zram/swap on my laptop. Works like a charm for me.

Why bother with Linux when there is MacOS? You get decent hardware to go with it too

Actual control over my computer? Apple might have less ads, but they really go out of their way to make you feel uncomfortable doing anything they deem not the happy path. And they're still plenty willing to push subscriptions and their software.

Because some of us would rather not have to buy new hardware just because Apple says no more updates for your machine.

Because MacOS is just as insidious? Recent versions will bring up the iCloud pop-up on every boot. Won't go away until you comply.

Both Mac and Windows are for suckers.

You're only delaying the inevitable.

IMO Mac eco is good hardware plus meh software. Some built ins are really in bad shape — but I guess people have different opinions, although I think calling Finder a beta version is an insult to “beta”.

I sure like seeing

    Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
    
    0 updates can be applied immediately.
    
    108 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Apps.
    Learn more about enabling ESM Apps service at https://ubuntu.com/esm

every time I log in. Or

> You do not have a valid subscription for this server. Please visit www.proxmox.com to get a list of available options.

every time I log in.

Ubuntu broke new ground when it came out but around the time they switched to the Gnome desktop, they stopped focusing on a great desktop experience and it was surpassed by other, better distributions. I'd recommend trying Linux Mint instead as it has all the greatness of Linux without the crap from Canonical (eg. SNAPs).

I haven't recommended Ubuntu to anyone for years but there are still people recommending it because it was great years ago and they don't seem to know it's now lagging other distributions.

Believe it or not, Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution.

That’s if you run a OS version older than 5 years. You can still update to a newer Ubuntu version for free and get another 5 years if you pick an LTS version.

So disable it?

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