I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great
theverge.com
theverge.com
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
https://community.frame.work/t/fw-16-review-the-good-the-bad...
I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
“Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
This isn’t 2015… ARM Macs have been out for six years
You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.
You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.
You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.
Run Asahi Linux and tell me how it goes.
You’re holding Linux on x86 to a Mac on ARM standard.
It’s fine if Linux doesn’t meet your standards, but don’t try to act like that’s Linux‘s fault and not your standards’.
Nothing x86 meets your standards, so save the criticism.
So you're clueless about computers and your opinion can be disregarded.
Is there some subject you actually know about that you'd like to share?
This is uniformly tiring and uninteresting. I've been using 1920x1080 displays for 25 years and they're just fine. A retina display is not necessary to do anything that I need. Similarly with these requirements about particular thermals and particular battery lifetime. I can buy a battery and I can find a wall outlet.
You're comparing not having those features to having your husband assassinated during a play. But I don't think a lack of those features ruins the computing experience the way having your husband assassinated would ruin the play. The thing that ruins the play for me is when they chain me to my seat and tell me I have to watch the whole thing while they pin my eyelids open. And that's how I feel about using Windows or Mac OS.
So to turn your original comment around, Windows and Mac OS can call me when they allow me to configure my system as I see fit, and not shove ads for their auxiliary services in my face every time I try to start a program or modify a setting.
But I do wish there was a viable ARM laptop offering that supports linux.
So you can get long battery life, cool thermals, and superior performance all in the same machine, at the same time. It will take the rest of the industry years to catch up to what Apple has wrought.
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
In fact my first computer was a 1Mhz Apple //e with 128KB of RAM.
You were ahead of the curve on displays and behind the curve on phones and I guess congrats on the 2e start, I had an early Mac.
What does this have to do with the price of CPU cycles in clamshell PCs?
You abstained until ARM because you could see the future and you knew that the specs you demanded we’re gonna be available eventually?
Would you have been okay if Android phones had still been BlackBerry clones 7 years after the iPhone came out?
There’s definitely a balance between the newest of the newest bleeding edge hardware that we could only have dreamed of five years ago, and still functional hardware from five years ago.
Just like engineering is a balance between technical optimization and cost.
Seems like your mindset is one that chooses optimization at any cost, which is pitiable.
I bought an M3 when it was brand new but I also have a Dell XPS laptop that’s running an Intel 8th GEN processor. Both have their uses, and the existence of the M3 does not make the Dell worthless or unacceptable.
And a 27 inch CRT was between 70 and 100 pounds…
And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.
I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:
menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"
That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:
/EFI/debian/shimx64.efi /EFI/debian/grubx64.efi
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
My 16 inch M3 MacBook Pro runs 5 hours at 80% brightness doing development with my USB powered (video and power from one USB cord) portable monitor. The Mac battery is powering the monitor
I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.
BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.
And a 1.6Ghz RISC V CPU isn’t exactly “fast” in 2026 or even 2021.
You noted that it was 5 hours when powering a second monitor from its USB port. Not just displaying video from the USB port, the monitor is getting power from the USB port.
How long do you think your 5 hour laptop would last powering an external display - again not just video out, also supplying power?
Well, as long as you buy a Mac laptop that's at least 3 years old you'll be mostly..good. Unfortunately Apple isn't interested in helping Linux and everything has to be painfully reverse engineered and some stuff for M1 is still broken.
Still, no one is getting that kind of battery life outside apple, just the way it is. If your existence revolves around battery life there's no substitute.
But note, this thread is about replacing Windows, and Wintel does not do as well as Apple either. So this thread is off-topic.
Ubuntu but I'd change for sleep.
I'd guess that the X13s hardware support in Ubuntu is likely as good as Debian, and switching probably wouldn't help you much. I have noticed that newer kernel versions (notably 6.12 and later) and the latest firmware (as of sometime last year) really fixed a lot of little issues for the X13s. That probably makes a bigger difference than the distro. I'd check to see which versions you're using.
Personally I'd still just get a used ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 on eBay at this point if I were going to buy another one today because they're available for around $400, and I don't see anything better that's passively cooled, with great battery life, and great Linux support available at the moment. I hope there will be a better, faster alternative in the near future. I'd gladly upgrade.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
Ok, perhaps it is not niche. I don’t know. I have never had to use a laptop for 12 hours without any ability to recharge but if that’s a common use case I’m happy that folks are finding a way to satisfy.
But when I can go for days on my work Macbook without charging (and I am a developer, so I do compile stuff), I kinda wish I could have that on Linux, too.
And again, I don't need it. Just like I don't need a fast Internet connection, but well... :-).
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
I was doing this and it was great. I only had to get a smart phone for work, and I hate the stupid thing.
But this battery argument is bull shit
15 years ago it was so difficult to find charging points.
Not now. I have never ever been in a situation the I needed to be away from charging for > 6 hours. 6-10 hours is really possible.
If your working or life demands that then pity you. I have better life/work.
And again choice. You are free to use macOS or even windows.
My personal life involves month long stints of me working outside the home and even at home, I am sometimes working on the patio enjoying 80 degree weather in the middle of winter in Florida…
That's why pity
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
> UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
Arm (and Risc-V and other arches) Linux has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devicetree instead of ACPI, which is better in that it declaratively documents the hardware in a system and how to access it. However, the hardware support which can be found in the Arm ecosystem is in no way better than that for x86 laptops. Many SoC manufacturers still don't put any effort into upstreaming drivers or device trees, many devices are still only supported by tossing a single release of a heavily patched kernel over the corporate wall and then forgetting about them.
When I looked up Dell Pro Max 16, I found a thread complaining that its camera doesn't work: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=307529
And there are numerous other reports of how various modern laptops have various problems under linux.
So no, "any modern laptop" is not a good recommendation. It should be specific models.
I had to try about 10 distros before I settled on linux mint. Everything else had some problem but the driver manager on linux mint made setting up the RTX so flawless.
After 8 months of use, it is the best machine I have ever used. If I had just stuck with my old favorite KDE neon though I would have been posting on how not to get MSI if you want to use linux.
For me the battery is good enough when it can last two back-to-back meetings without me getting worried, so about 2.5 hours. Otherwise it stays plugged to USB-C.
And this stand
Metal Tablet Stand, a Portable... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3
The monitor is both powered and the video comes from one USB cord. My MacBook Pro can run 5-6 hours while powering the monitor. I couldn’t do that if the laptop by itself only last 3 hours.
Every now and then I use my iPad as a third monitor.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
And if this was the strategy, I'd have expected to see that consumer product by now. It has been almost two years.
Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do. Everybody was running after VR/AR headsets, now everybody is running after AI.
They see the others run somewhere, they run in that direction. Just in case.
Monopolies so scared of the competition?
That is how Kodak lost digital photography, Microsoft tablets and phones even though it had them for a decade before the competition, and so on.
Monopolies double down on what they know that prints money, and are averse to taking any risks.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.
I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.
Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.
Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.
I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.
It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.
Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."
Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.
I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.
I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.
I turned it off and the keypad buttons for screen time passcode became white on white.
I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.
I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.
The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".
I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
Anecdote time.
I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.
If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.
> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.
I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.
Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.
I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
https://superuser.com/questions/267303/no-option-to-hibernat...
It's nice that it might suit newcomers or average people but I'm neither and I know what I want.
I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)
This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.
So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.
Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.
But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.
I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.
I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.
I used xfce since Unity came out. Switched to KDE Plasma about 2 years ago.
Plasma is the most "sane" out of the DEs right no IMO. Not perfect by any means but good enough.
by the way, on macOS the global menu is searchable, too. Shortcut is Command+Shift+/
KDE has such a feature, and yes "Global Menu" is the term for the application menu being pulled into system dock
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...
I think it has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the motherboard chipset.
People tease mint as being a distro for normies and grandmas, but it has worked flawlessly for me and really all I want is an environment which just works.
Edit:
seriously guys, can we design product pages so they actually give you a sense of how the product actually works? That page sucks.
I found a video and honestly while I love the idea it seems that the implementation is the worst of both worlds. Who thought that this pull down menu style was a reasonable idea....
I had a Dell Precision from 2020 that never woke from S3 sleep properly, because Dell didn't care about S3 because they expected AoAc (which Windows now defaults to) to actually work. Except A) people don't want laptops that act like phones, and B) it was terrible and munched so much battery it was way better to just hibernate all the time.
Switched to ThinkPad from 2020 and it has a BIOS setting for "classic sleep" and S3 sleep works perfectly.
And Fedora gets 3-4x the battery life than Windows did for general use on both, with much less heat and fan usage, right out of the box. Not to mention bullshit like Windows taking literal seconds to show a directory's contents in the file manager... I'm completely done with Windows for anything beyond gaming (but Valve is changing that rapidly), and dual-booting to a bare Windows install for corporate remote access apps or such, on everything in my house.
> It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025.
What device is giving you the most trouble with sleep mode?
I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.
I loved Unity in the desktop too (I had installed Ubuntu on an old Mac mini). I was disappointed when it was killed and then I switched to XFCE.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
That is garbage ? Changing the UI of settings ? MacOS navigation has been the same for a decade. Who uses the settings daily ? I don’t even open settings once a month. Every single piece of UI evolve and must evolve. The ones that don’t are stuck in the past and belongs to a museum. I don’t see what complex and thus garbage.
On linux, if I get a kernel panic, I can dig into the kernel, add debug logs, understand what's going on, and potentially fix it. If I want to swap to a scrolling window manager like niri, I can.
On macOS, it's a black box and any radar I file with apple vanishes in a black hole never to be seen again. There's hardly any customization, and the default UX is horribly undiscoverable and can't easily be driven with just a keyboard.
As a hacker, the above makes macOS garbage, and I'd assume anyone on hacker news would understand that desire to be able to understand and hack on the software you use.
Windows 11, and to a lesser extent 10, is indefensible garbage.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
Windows 8 is fundamentally just Windows 7 with a full screen start menu. This is a dumb usability downgrade, but unless you went out of your way to install Metro apps, it wasn't such a big change. Your apps worked the same way they always had.
Indeed, it does run like crap on older phones. You made the right choice. I don't feel forced to upgrade my phone but the new OS definitely drains the battery faster and feels slightly sluggish, making me regret the "upgrade."
Agree that iOS 26 is trash and it empty my iPhone 13 mini battery in less time than I need to write it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
(No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)
The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros.
Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.
What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?
Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.
Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).
BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.
Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
That's "what then".
Then the .NET team asks why there isn't more uptake outside Windows, in spite of all open sourcing efforts, this is why.
"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
Hopefully GrapheneOS will soon be supported by a non-US phone...
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
The problem is that people don't want to change, because it takes some effort. Why would people use WhatsApp instead of Signal otherwise?
Just look to the federal United States government using it for communicating military strikes, and including journalists.
At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.
Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.
Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
Simplex is quite well designed. Even if it doesn't succeed, I think we'll see its forks and similar implementations.
I was saying that non-US office suites are good enough in terms of features, but people don't like to adapt to new things. WhatsApp vs Signal was an example where people don't want to use the better alternative, for no other reason than they can't be bothered to try it.
But even when talking about not depending on US tech, it is relevant: depending on open source US tech is a step towards not depending on US tech. The goal is not racism ("it's made by US people so I don't want it"). The goal is sovereignty ("if I depend on this, the US government can screw me").
Perhaps we'll see a return of apps like Pidgin soon.
If I talk to someone on Signal today, I know that they are probably using the official Signal on the other side. With the guarantees that I know from Signal. Now what if half of the users of Signal were using a third-party app? How much can I trust this app?
Say Matrix has a bridge to Signal. I talk to someone over what looks like Signal from my end, but it goes to some third-party server that pretends to be Signal and then relays those messages to my friend on their Matrix client. As a Signal user, I cannot know it, but my conversation is not E2EE anymore. And it kind of defeats the point of using Signal entirely, doesn't it?
I guess my point is that in terms of security, there is value in making it possible to verify that both ends are using the official Signal app, by locking it as much as possible (e.g. with DRM-like technology). But of course it's annoying to be locked in. Even though I don't feel personally super locked into Signal: I could move to another similar app in a minute. But again people tend to be lazy and don't want to switch apps. It's a hard problem, I guess.
We've been working on our next major release for a long time now to better support modern protocols. But as an unfunded Open Source project it's hard to get things done quickly when it's a "free time" only project.
A huge part of this is fonts. Users prefer proprietary fonts, and when you open files using them in the alternatives it tends to look like terrible. You will not convince users that this is on them to fix, and to be honest they're right, it's not their problem.
America has a monopoly on software essentially.
the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
sure but a nation state that takes digital sovereignty seriously could easily devote some resources towards maintaining their own fork. Thats the point. Hell, north korea has their own special linux distro
Some improvement is far better than no improvement.
This thinking is part of the reason for the momentum behind RISC-V and LoongArch.
RISC-V is a lot like Linux in that it benefits from International cooperation and innovation while offereing the ability to seize control if needed.
But you are correct that even an open ISA does not protect you from a proprietary hardware implementation at the chip or firmware level that you still do not control. This requires additional open standards.
Bigger picture, it means "domestic" chip design and fabrication capabilities. The world is just starting to wrap its mind around this. But again, RISC-V is really helping here. There are emerging RISC-V chip capabilities in Europe and even in places like India for example. It is easy to laugh off these efforts as non-competitive. But not only will many of them find niches where they will be economically pheasible but they offer an important backstop to geopolitical risk and the flexibility to at least of enough domestic capability to keep the lights on if needed. Building and rolling out a RISC-V ecosystem will take years or decades. But once there, it can be pivotied to or maintained on any RISC-V chip. As long as you have the ability to produce some kind of RISC-V chip, this ecosystem can never really be taken away from you.
And RISC-V offers the same kind of international collaboration that allows both pooling of efforts and protection from reliance on any one actor or region that could become a political threat.
RISC-V understands its role in this regard. It too was an "American" technology but Linux International was setup in Switzerland for a reason.
No it's not, it's all made in China. Maybe you mean the IP is American, but the IP can just be ignored. If the USA can ignore trade agreements, and defence pacts, then its newfound adversaries can ignore American IP laws too.
Also, RISC-V also started at Berkeley but it is based out of Switzerland now.
OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.
That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.
The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.
You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.
I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.
The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.
Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.
While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
I mean I can write a kernel right now with all the computer systems theory implemented, but without the architecture specs, the firmware, etc, this is completely useless.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
They've already fumbled it.
> the way they did with mobile.
It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.
Also could never name things—they named it Wince.
It has always been.
Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.
They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.
For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:
The Acer Predator Helios 300 Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 Memory: 16 GB RAM Storage: 512 GB SSD Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.
I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.
This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.
Did that with the HP Dev One a few years ago, just did it again with a replacement sans memory that I already have.
There is a reason so many European operators have contract offers for TV or Internet packages, where customers get Apple gear "for free", naturally with a several years bound contracts.
What measures do you take to insulate yourself from desktop Linux's really bad security?
Out of the box, I've experienced less spyware-related issues with Linux. I have enabled UFW, installed ClamAV, closed or blocked communication with some ports. But for the most part, I've not had the same problems that had caused system and browser infections. If anything, the badly designed hardware of the machines and systems that I've built tend to cause the problems, for the most part, not to mention my own stupidity. If I do begin to experience, spy or adware-related issues, I suppose I could look into something like this: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:
-Keep system and software updated. -Enable firewall (e.g., UFW). -Use strong passwords and MFA. -Install from trusted sources only. -Encrypt disks (e.g., LUKS). -Use SELinux or AppArmor. -Sandbox apps with Flatpak/Wayland. -Install antivirus like ClamAV. -Disable unnecessary services. -Monitor logs and use tools like OpenSnitch. -Switch to CubesOS (qubes-os.org) but I'm not that paranoid, yet :)
I'm just not too tech savvy, but honestly if anyone had enough knowledge, they'd probably could get into my system. That being said, though I consider Linux to be more secure than Windows, no system is 100% secure, in my view.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
I miss my Linux work machine with Libre office..
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/mi...
Oh wow, that's pretty evil. No technical reason, "would be a shame if something happened to your unsaved changes"...
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
(*) Aluminum is more about perceived than actual quality - I wouldn't mind touching something with lower heat conduction, especially in winter. The only thing that I really like about it, compared to a Thinkpad, is the stiffness of the screen part.
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
On random laptop regular people buy at computer stores and needs to be reversed engineered by volunteers, it will be business as usual.
I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.
It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.
The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.
It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
Please run Kate/Kwrite as root and then we will talk on the topic. Or pipe password to ssh
For ssh - sshpass.
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
100% this!
I wrote this in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46120975
> Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change. Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME
I eventually got it working on this Intel Mac by using one HDMI and one specific DisplayPort output on the dock so it wouldn't try to multistream it internally in the dock or whatever (can't remember what exactly it was doing). It might have involved an HDMI to DP converter. I honestly tried to purge my memory of it once I got it working.
Note that all setups worked fine with Linux without modifications. Would have likely worked fine on Windows, too, since it supports MST. Only one specific setup worked with Mac.
So no, it's not a problem of the dock, it's a problem with Apple refusing to support a standard so they can make people buy the expensive $400 docks they hawk in Apple stores. Or because they are lazy and think because they don't care, their users shouldn't either.
You will find many people complaining about Mac's multi monitor support (or lack thereof) online. They are choosing to ignore user feedback.
When it's macOS/Windows, it's someone else's fault; when it's Linux, it's Linux fault.
When you have to tinker on macOS/Windows that's just what has to be done, no biggie; when you have to tinker on Linux, it's a burden nobody should be subjected to.
People are blind to the work they've grown accustomed to. There are many things that are much, much easier on Linux than macOS or Windows.
My comment was specifically about the HP dock. I have nothing for or against Linux as I have never used it, don't know anybody who uses it, and I have no plans to use it. I am simply not qualified to comment on Linux.
I am running this Fedora installation for a few years, now. No clean install in-between, just super stable and pleasant upgrades. Everything just works for me. Zero tinkering. If there is a bug, it's usually tracked and gone in a few weeks, at most the next release 6 months off. If a HP dock doesn't work, it's HP's fault for not using open standards, certainly not a problem of Linux.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I think that it's a pretty good heuristic that if permissions exist in the filesystem, they matter and shouldn't be ignored.
But I agree with you, they do have a use and to some use cases matter, and we shouldn't arbitrarily decide to ignore them.
(For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).
I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could have been a distro bug.
> but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I'm a 90% Windows- 9.5% Linux- 0.5% Mac-Admin at day job: Don't tell me Windows has no problems poping up. ;-)
If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.
And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
https://i.postimg.cc/VLgkWpy7/image.png
This feature exists since 2022.
That definitely seems like a feature that could/should be added to some (most? all?) linux file managers. In fact, it doesn't even sound like that difficult to implement with standard system calls[0].
It's not really an issue for me (I prefer the command line -- heck, I still use octal when setting permissions instead of 'rwx'), but it sounds like it bugs you a lot.
You don't mention which Desktop Environment (DE) you're using, but I imagine the file manager in your DE is open source. As such, I'm sure you could make yourself and the (I'm sure) many others who'd like to be able to modify file/dir/filesystem permissions/ownership via their GUI file manager much happier.
Try doing that with Windows Explorer or Finder. I think not.
Good luck!
[0] https://www.tutorialpedia.org/blog/how-to-change-show-permis...
Edit: Clarified prose.
Your distro should have been set up so that you can mount USB drives indirectly through the options your DE exposes.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
---
Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.
What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?
The upciming Intel and Qualcomm CPUs are even better. They really caught up with Apple.
> The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Intel lasted for more than 21 hours in our Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² brightness). This device will easily last more than ten hours in everyday use.
Also, tested on Windows not Linux. Still, if I could get 10 hours of regular usage on Linux, I'd be ecstatic.
In any case, I don't think the battery time is an issue anyone with 2025+ devices.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.
26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.
So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.
I've been on Linux since Ubuntu 8.04 or longer and I literally never had OS install problems with any of it at all. Except for Arch, but what did you expect? Hands-on is the point of Arch Linux.
On the other hand, I remember installing a lot of drivers by hand on windows. Most people never (re-)installed Windows or macOS to begin with.
Probably depends on your hardware, but that's a matter of vendor support, not operating system. It's not like Microsoft or Apple are writing all those drivers. With a Thinkpad or Brother, you likely never had problems with Linux for the last 20 years. People don't complain they can't install macOS on a Chromebook, and Windows has been the absolute OS monopoly everyone had to support. However, with tinkering, you can install Linux on a washing machine.
What has drastically changed is the user space software side. First off some FOSS alternatives like Blender, OBS, Krita... are becoming equal or better than the competition, but Valve also basically solved gaming on Linux, now. Virtualization and software development is and always has been better.
To be fair, Linux also shines now due to enshitification of everything else.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
Maybe not as a developer, but as a user I still think WSL is only kind of superficially a solution. You still are stuck with an update process that happens automatically and can brick your computer and recovery tools that, as far as I can tell, have never actually worked for anyone in history. You're still stuck with NTFS, which was a perfectly fine filesystem thirty years ago but now is missing basic features, like competent snapshotting/backups, and instead you have to rely on System Restore, which again doesn't actually work.
I mean, yeah, you can do `sudo apt install neovim`, and that's kind of cool I guess, but the problems with Windows, to me are far deeper and cannot be solved with a virtualization layer on top.
Steam performs exceptionally well. Initially there were issues, but I haven't face any for really long time now.
I don't play mp games though. So that part I can't say much.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).
Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.
Thanks, I will be awaiting your test result!
They might open the list (with the cursor resting on one of the items, or use the keyboard to navigate out of comfort or for accessibility reasons), then notice "oh wait, I haven't actually enabled my phone's Wifi hotspot yet", enable that, and wait forever for it to appear.
That's why I'm thinking something should visually (and non-visually) change so the user can notice.
Maybe even cleaner would be to add a tooltip to the currently-hovered entry? That might work for both mouse and non-mouse use cases, and might even work for screenreaders.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/rickyb/network-manager-applet/-/com...
Thank you very much!
Now Linux is a good amount better on the desktop.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
Mate there are bugs in windows and macos that have been unfixed for years. This is not a good argument in my opinion.
*macOS26 excepted
Well, see sibling thread: Looks like you just need to post your bounty in HN and somebody will do within a few hours. Somebody to that for Windows or macos.
Sometimes I feel the bounty topic isn't well served yet. On the GNOME bug tracker it doesn't seem to be very discoverable. Are there current good platforms to advertise bounties where people actually look?
I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".
If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
Not only that, but in the past I've cooked hacky bash scripts to work around issues while waiting for upstream fixes. I'd imagine that'd be harder with other OSs.
On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.
People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows
The ways Windows breaks are different from the ways Linux breaks, but there are still ways to fix it. Most of the rest are solved with one or two commands, and it's usually the same two: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-the-system-fil...
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over
Blaming a new user like this is one of the cultural reasons why the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ has always been n+1.
So, out of curiosity, if I tried installing MacOS on any of the 15+ computers I have at home, what are the likely chances that this "operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"
I can tell you that my success rate with Linux is 100%.
Anyway, my point wasn’t that Linux should be perfect; but that if it can’t be, maybe give some help why, and more experienced users shouldn’t just jump to blaming the struggling newbie.
The key is this: if you want Linux to win with non-experts, it needs to target being a better experience for non-experts than the alternatives, to justify the effort of changing.
I agree in broad terms, but let me re-capitulate this. Which OS do you think would offer a better experience for non-experts when installing on bare-metal? By my reckoning, Windows is a nightmare to install afresh on random hardware, and MacOS wont work on most-all random hardware. Users think that Windows is easier because they almost never have to install it from scratch.
Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
[0]https://au.pcmag.com/migrated-15175-windows-10/104927/micros... [1]https://www.techradar.com/news/is-windows-11-spying-on-you-n... [2]https://www.itnews.com.au/news/apple-delays-image-scanning-f... [4]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microslop-infuriat...
I've done multiple installs of every Windows (except 8) Windows since the NT4 era, and multiple installs of OS X over the last decade. They have almost always been straightforward and successful, unless I've complicated things with weird partition/dual boot requirements. (OS X isn't really a fair comparison, as the target hardware is so hugely restricted.)
----
Aside from the initial installation 'just working' (which I accept might not be dramatically different with Linux, these days, and indeed, I accept that Windows often needs additional drivers downloading, depending on your system.) there's another big factor to consider.
With Windows and OS X there's a long-established concept (at least, prior to the app store era) that if you want to install something, you download a file and run it. This applies whether it's drivers or software, and >95% of the time also provides a simple uninstall path. Even my elderly mother can grok this.
With Linux, this is my recent journey: Must I use APT or APT-GET? Flatpack? Snap? Or can I use the built-in Software Manager (FWIW, I really like the one in Mint, except when stuff isn't available on it.) Oh, so some software (Mullvad, Blender, etc.) I need to download manually? I've installed Mint; am I on a Debian system? Okay, I'll download the DEB, but then how to install that? (Oh, it failed - open-whispr). For other things, we must download an Appimage and make it executable - great, that works, but it doesn't have an install feature, so how to install it somewhere so that it's not forever sitting in Downloads? Huh, okay, I can figure that out, but it's a pain. Oh, wait, some of those self-contained files I've downloaded will run directly from file manager, but for some reason fail silently via the start menu link I've just made. Okay, better trouble-shoot that tomorrow...
(For brevity, I've left out that at every stage, there were multiple web searches to find instructions for the correct approach, diving into all manner of forums, Stack Overflow posts, and Github repositories. And I've left out the more esoteric stuff, like slowing down touchpad scrolling via obscure command-line incantations.)
This is the reality of setting up a simple Linux system with (what is reputed to be) one of the most user-friendly distros there is.
And which is why, if the goal is Linux 'winning' on the desktop (beyond committed nerds) there's still quite some way to go on UX.
> Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
Totally with you, 100% - that's why I'm experimenting with a full shift to Linux myself. But this only applies to relative nerds. Many/most non-expert users don't know or care about such things.
I think this (built-in Software Manager) is probably the right track for most normal users. Last time I checked, the Debian software repo had over 120,000 packages, so for most normal users, the bulk of what they need is likely there and thus likely easier to install than apps on MacOS or Windows. My usual track record for installing a new desktop for family members, including the top 100 apps they likely need, is under 30 minutes for Linux. The last time I tried this with Windows, it took days of effort and frustration and to some extent opened the computer up to security risks because of the multitude of binary sources I had to trust.
But yes, once you start needing specialist software, then your-mileage-may-vary. Having said that, apps like Blender are already in the Ubuntu repo, which should mean they are also in the Mint Software Manager, and thus a single-click away from installation.
In general, I would consider Linux to be the easiest platform to install software on for the most common 80% of the software that normal users need. It's certainly the easiest to maintain and update that commonly used software of any of the mainstream desktop OSes.
Again, I think a lot of the mismatch of norms & experiences comes down to what someone becomes accustomed to. If you're accustomed to downloading an installation binary (EXE/MSI) and double-clicking that to install on Windows, then you can become accustomed to downloading an installation binary (DEB/RPM) and double-clicking that to install on Linux (viz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOPQPrzmnw0).
Cheers.
It's just not feasible to have 100% out of the box hardware compatibility.
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
What will you do then?
In the end, it's in your best interests that Linux and open platforms improve in the direction you want them to, and the best way to achieve that is by joining the effort now.
https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/?2
The only safe and sane path for humanity is community built software. All other roads lead to serfdom.
Another issue is they advertise "Linux support," which actually translates to: minimally working driver source available for very out-of-date kernel. Good luck if you want to rely on upstreamed drivers or even run a recent kernel.
You should give KDE a go.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033
What are you talking about?
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim.
I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.
Regardless of how much learning you did you still had to learn how to use it.
Just trying to short-circuit that logic and show you that it cuts both ways and that we should be willing to learn new tools.
The other part is that they're not necessarily wrong not to want to learn about Linux! Learning is great, when it's something interesting or valuable. But if I'm not interested in the thing, and my time and mental resources are limited, and I have a good enough alternative, I think it's absolutely fine to avoid it.
Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering. Maybe you're into cars, I don't know, but I bet you take this attitude to at least some of the useful objects in your life.
You can also bring your Linux machine to the mechanic. The only difference is that we linux users are also the mechanics.
My mother only wants a browser and a mail client, maybe a word processor from time to time. I installed Fedora, and the thing is still working after 5 years or so. I ssh into the thing once a month to do a "dnf update", she doesn't even notice. After initial setup, no more tinkering ever needed.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
In Windows it does not recognize it, so I pluged it in Linux and just worked directly, no need to scan for drivers or shit like that, so I run the "lsusb" command in Linux, found the chip ID , searched the internet for a Windows driver from Linux, put it on a USB stick and install it on Windows.
Also I am 100% sure that when I bought my desktop the box had CDs for everything from motherboard, sound, network and video card, I am remember for sure that if I would install the drivers in the wrong order in Windows the OS willb e confused and not detect my sound card)because some cofusion between the Realteck network and sound card I think)
Would be an interesting experiment to get N random PCs and N random non tech people and have them install Windows and Linux on them, have them setup the random hardware in the PC, setup a printer and scanner, connect the phone to it and download photos etc the Linux distro must be a distro targeted for normal people not the extreme dev/game/nerd targetd distros so IMO Kubuntu LTS would be a good choice.
edit: or another scenario, i go out and buy a new lenovo or dell or whatever laptop, format the disk, install retail windows, and now windows just has the drivers for all this?
or another scenario, I go and buy motherboard, ram, cpu, gpu, install windows, and it just magically has drivers for all the hardware?
the answer is: it does not, absolutely not.
Sure, sure , so all hardware that does not autoinstall on Windows directly without a driver or internet is junk. AFAIK Windows can't install the correct nvidia or AMD drivers and you need to use special steps to prepare a windows install USB since the installer for some reason starts from the stick but doe's not have the drivers to complete the installation from the stick
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
Unfortunately there are few good ways to narrow down intermittent hardware failures (which is what you are experiencing) beyond these common steps.
However much Windows 11 sucks, BsoDs are vanishingly unlikely to be caused by Windows itself. They haven't managed to degrade it to that extent. At least not yet.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
Fedora is 4th, Ubuntu is 5th.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
Go around, and ask people if they want a free secretary, see if someone doesn't want one.
They will not ask a computer program to do stuff. They will talk to the secretary, and the secretary will do any computer stuff necessary. For the moment the secretary cannot click buttons and menus as well as manipulate language. The secretary will have realistic skin and lips, and a dress as short as required by the job description.
Language AI is the king of AIs, and the gap will only get bigger. Everything will be tied to language going forward, driving, surgeries and so on.
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.
GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.
Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.
Also there are silly things that windows does, like hide file extensions.
In my opinion, in the best case scenario Linux is equal to windows in usability, but in every other scenario it just isn’t. Yes, windows is shit these days. But the average person would rather be annoyed at copilot than deal with driver issues.
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
And this is where I stop reading
The issue is that he was using an obscure gaming mouse, and the solution was to use a different mouse.
Or make a small edit to a config file, to work around that nonstandard mouse vendor's mistake.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
But to me it seems like in the long run emulating Linux on Windows is easier than the other way around.
I have a PC with Windows 10 and so does my dad that I’ll be converting to some kind of Linux soon. Windows 11 isn’t even an option due to the TPM chip requirement. The computers are still quite good and it makes no sense to abandon them. With Linux their performance will probably improve.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
Out of curiosity, which game?
I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.
I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.
I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.
Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
I knew a guy that wanted to play a Japanese version of a JRPG on Linux and he figured out he needed some weird libraries there to properly render the font, which was causing the game to not start.
Anyway, for older games and emulators, playing on Linux has been a magnificent experience for the most part.
shrugs
Maybe I’ll try switching to KDE and see if it works better under X11 there.
It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.
Guess I'm switching to KDE.
This makes me wonder if this would be a preferable setup for Proton.
EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
What distro / wm / de is good with external monitors, in your opinion? After going through some of the comments on some threads, it feels like external displays are a common pain point across all linux systems.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
And no, I don’t think Framework is good enough.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
I do a decent amount of GTK and occasionaly Qt, and wonder if there's any extra friction for that
I am mostly over in web application and Python ML land.
The whole immutable distro felt like a hinder for my workflow (running docker containers, etc.), so that's why I went for CachyOS.
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
It is a fools errand. =3
Their upcoming CPUs are even better. Also Qualcomm might actually finally offer good support on Linux and their new X2 is amazing.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss... [1]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
You know what's fun? Being able to change system fonts, which you can't do on Windows.
I'm using the IBM Plex fonts and they are so good looking.
What are peoples' thoughts on which style of distro is best to hand over to a non-techie user for the least amount of hand-holding?
I re-install so much that I don't know how easy it is, or how the distros prompt, when something like Debian Stable or Fedora need to update to the next version. With Arch, you constantly get the "updates ready" and it is always fresh.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I then moved my main server that runs the VMs from Windows to Linux Mint, and that went far better than expected, basically no problems at all. I had two LSI x8 SAS RAID cards, each running an 8 disk RAID 10 array. Moving over to Linux there was nothing to do except plug them in, and they just worked. No drivers to install. I did have to find a copy of the management software, but that runs exactly the same as it did on Windows.
The last VM I have is running a somewhat complex IIS web server setup that I have to move over to Linux, and I haven't had the time to dig in on that yet, but I will do it this year.
The last system I have on Windows is my laptop/workstation. It doesn't behave that well on Linux with my 3 displayport monitors, and a few other things. I have it dual-booting to Mint, so I will keep trying. There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
This is the main barrier for most people, I reckon.
I mostly play on consoles nowadays, but I recognize that games are important as they bring the masses. If gaming on Linux becomes important, the rest will follow.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
On the plus side, AI works great!
Mint does everything I need it to, so there's no need for me to hop.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
And I've stuck with it ever since while trying Fedora, Arch and a few others along the way.
I guess it just works for me, know my way around the tooling and can use that knowledge on my Debian servers.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
The way to make Linux easy to use is basically just to pre-install it and ensure the hardware is compatible.
System 76 does this, and charges 3x as much as other OEMs.
At this point if I'm a consumer ohh Linux is 3x the price.
If you install Linux on a refurbished Thinkpad, most of the time you can get something very nice for 500$ or less.
I often dream, if I had money, of buying and refurbishing hundreds of laptops per year. Installing Linux and giving them out.
Would be better than cities handing out Chromebooks.
The vast vast majority of Thinkpads on the US Lenovo website don't even offer Linux.
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
The money's paw curls.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
You use the platform you use ... until it doesn't work for you. I did that for Windows and now I'm on MacOS. Maybe one day Linux, maybe I pick a flavor there that doesn't work for me eventually.
100% this. Recent macOS releases really feel like this. For me it was the notification popup UI downgrade, they literally introduced a perfect UI and then botched it in a following release.
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
Which I never got to work properly on the laptop/netbook I owned until 2024.
Being generous with Steam hardware survey numbers for GNU/Linux.
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
libva is usually installed these days but you can install it manually. For Netflix you'll need to install widevine.
At least for Intel and AMD graphics, the Arch wiki's guide should work.
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right. Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
The only place I've actually seen RHEL on the desktop, also the only large instutition besides Google I've seen Linux desktop rollout, was in government labs; and for those the government can commission arbitrarily bespoke security systems. In the real world, the CISO of your organization is going to go with one of the industry standards, like Cisco Secure Endpoint, which—again—only exist on Windows and Mac. In the real world, you might be issued a Mac if you're a developer, otherwise a Windows machine, and that's what you'll use, end of story.
Edit: that's probably a bad thing, lol
But after a while I switched back to Windows 2000 on my notebook, because of hardware support. So it would be interesting if they do the same after a while.
Since over 20 years I‘m now on mac, which has great hardware and a Unix underneath. Don’t let that stop you from going Linux desktop.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.
* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.
* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.
* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.
There are two major hurdles I see:
* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).
* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Install Steam in Linux and notice you can play the vast majority of your library. There are some online multiplayer games that won't work due to anticheat[1] though that seems to be improving over time as well.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2888221/check-out-pcworlds-n...
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
That's not so much a Linux issue as an Arch issue.
If a Minecraft Java server has the special Geyser plugin ( https://geysermc.org/ ), Minecraft Bedrock clients can connect to it, so you can stick to Minecraft Java on Linux and still play together with your kids who are on Minecraft Bedrock on their iPads.
Then i replaced linux with mac os.
Cook, keep in mind that if you keep dumbing down Mac OS I can switch back to linux in 24 hours.
I picked manjaro because rolling updates + being more noob friendly than arch sounded good and gnome because i wanted something completely fresh than a windows layout i'm used to. Now i'm eyeing after hyprland as the next step but couldn't fimd guts to disrupt my workflow in order to get used to it
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
Some advice for Linux newcomers - use AMD, avoid Nvidia. Use something like KDE Plasma for best experience.
If tied to MS, Office online is an option, if you must.
In think MacBook Air + Microsoft365 may be the cheapest startup IT setup that doesn’t require windows itself.
I still have to restart it from time to time, though.
Everything just works. Snappy. Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
iOS sftp:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home
Android sftp:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
https://www.linuxmint.com/ or https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop is a great starter OS.
If you already use a posix system like MacOS, than the workflow will seem more familiar. =3
Although I was trying to shift to Linux slowly at the time, I honestly wish I'd switched sooner.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
I have seen so many ”anyone can switch to Linux” articles, and none of them seem to mention ”all of your files are going to be utterly lost”
* If you have a separate partition, you can replace your OS and your file remain untouched.
* If you don't have a separate partition, your OS and your files will be replaced by the Linux installation. The only way to preserve your files is to copy to some external media before installation. Even if the Linux installer could retain files while reformatting a partition (which might be technically feasible), it would have no way of knowing which files to retain: the user could easily keep important files in arbitrary directories, not just in their designated C:\User\Patrick directory, and they would be understandably irate if the installer promised to keep files but didn't. To say nothing of adding complications of copying files that Windows has pushed to OneDrive.
That is one of the biggest ifs of 2026. I don't think any major PC laptop vendor has ever sold consumer laptops with anything but one-big-partition layout. For the average user, their files are not stored in any partition, they are stored "right there on my desktop, with a separate folder for photos and bills"
But yes, been using a /data partition since it was called D:\ under DOS.
Like it or not, Aunt Clara is going to expect the same when she "upgrades" to Ubuntu.
Well ...
On servers I prefer Debian, but my experience on Debian hasn't been as smooth as Ubuntu for gaming, even when activating Debian nonfree repositories with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I've had some trouble with the Wayland transition, but now everything works fine.
Also, the Steam client is officially supported only on Ubuntu. Probably SteamOS too, implicitly.
I hope we can standardize on Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server.
But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)
Examples: binary log files, binary configuration, .ini files, hidden options.
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
I'd advise against it on Linux these days. Intel made their recent WiFi chips incompatible with AMD systems (yes, that's not a joke). So Mediatek or Qualcomm are the only decent WiFi options for AMD users, but obviously, do some research about what works anyway, before buying.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.