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Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.

Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.

Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.

You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)

For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.

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> Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.

I think this sentiment is often overlooked as people are used to their 'poison'.

As someone who uses Linux a their main personal machine (with dual boot to Windows every now and then) as well as W11 for work, it's amazing what you get used to.

I was almost agreeing with OP, remembering bluetooth issues I had with Linux just last month when one of my headphones couldn't connect properly and I had to spend 10-15 minutes messing about with bluetooth stacks to get it working again.

But reading your comment I just realised that my current work machine doesn't even detect my bluetooth headphone's microphone and I have not found a fix yet. That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.

I also get Windows blue screens far more often than I get Linux kernel panics.

You're just so used to the issues and inconveniences that you don't even recognise them as such anymore. Issue and inconveniences from a new piece of software you're trialing stick out like sore thumb though...

The thing I like about Linux is that if your thing doesn't work you have a way better chance of being able to wrangle it into working (odds increasing as your technical skill increases)

Meanwhile on Windows if something doesn't work you're generally SOL.

What do you mean? If i google "{Insert issue here} Windows" i get clear and easy solutions.

1. You reboot. 2. You try sfc /scannow 3. You try Dism 4. You reboot again. Doesnt work? (like 99,99999% of cases, like with a pc i had to fix yesterday) 5. Reinstall windows

Doesnt work? Have fun trying to get information from microsofts documentation where the same thing got documented 3 different ways 3 different times, and when you change from/to your native language you get another 3 different documentations. All telling you entirely different things, each screenshot showing a ui that doesnt resemble yours because it gotta change every month.

Very fun, not annoying at all :)

>That machine also does not go to sleep properly (a common, real, complaint from many linux users) and I have to hibernate it manually via command line as the option does not exist in my power menu due to corporate's rules and regulations.

Are you required to make it sleep (perhaps due to a security directive)? If so, then why are you doing this? You should simply refuse, and tell IT it doesn't work. Then let them fix the problem, since it's a security issue. It's not your job to come up with workarounds for the IT department's failures.

I manage both, alongside macOS. There are heaps of things that are trivial to do on a Windows or macOS desktop fleet that are a headache on Linux.

macOS is the easiest endpoint platform to manage. Apple’s MDM capabilities are amazing, and don’t leave me wanting for much at all other than application control, but there are plenty of commercial apps to do this.

Windows (in an Active Directory environment) is pretty good, but Group Policy has grown unwieldy over the decades. Policies can conflict in strange ways, and Microsoft has no made no effort to keep their policy language consistent. Sometimes ‘enabled’ means a feature is enabled, other times it means it is disabled, and vice versa.

Deploying hardware-bound machine certificates for 802.1x, VPN etc to Windows or macOS is extremely easy. Takes 10 minutes to set up.

On Linux, this is a very significant engineering effort that would take months, assuming you happen to have people with the skills on your payroll at all.

AFAIK the grip is because migration costs money, see Schleswig-Holstein story.

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