PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
theregister.com
theregister.com
Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
Please, don't give them any ideas.
Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
Every operating system (or DE) does that. Hell, every piece of software does that. They're all just a bunch of opinions wrapped in a user interface.
Some may provide more opportunities to change the defaults, but those defaults still remain.
If you like it, just keep the behavior enabled.
Vim 9.0 default changes required a 6 line vimrc to undo the damage.
Useful, as the wheel button is usually first to die in cheap mice.
Not useful, because it made it impossible to play Death Stranding on Linux :(
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
Sometimes more is more.
(No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
Year of the windows cli
Some desktop PCs have a physical power switch on the power supply, usually next to where the power cord plugs in. But it is becoming more rare. Every $0.50 they can save in costs is added to the bottom line.
Also try pressing power button for 5-10 seconds on a laptop instead
This always annoys me because you're really handicapping yourself by ignoring the CLI on any OS. Sure I use it more heavily on GNU/Linux than I did on Windows as a kid, but that's because it's so good. If I'm ever in front of a Windows machine now I still like to have a terminal handy (and it's even better/more-familiar on macOS, of course), and I've learned things like "type is like cat", "robocopy is like rsync", "tasklist is kinda like ps and taskkill like kill/pkill" which help me to do things better on Windows than when I used it fulltime. I'm glad Microsoft invested more in the CLI with Windows Terminal, OpenSSH in the default install, winget, PowerShell, etc. I think it's better for everyone. I fear the CLI hate is spreading anti-intellectualism. Some people seem annoyed when they even have to use their keyboard instead of their mouse for something.
Automation/scripting is when CLIs really come into their own as otherwise you end up becoming a GUI click monkey. The best is when there's both a GUI and CLI (as long as they work the same way).
That's what the man page is supposed to be (and most do contain example) and why GNU wanted to split it into info (tutorials and exhausting documentation) and man (reference and examples).
On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?
Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.
Small added benefit, presumably it's harder to accidentally run a multi-line multi-stage command because you had the wrong thing in your clipboard (I don't have my windows PC handy, but if you paste multiple lines into Win+R it doesn't execute anything, correct?)
Windows + R
(type) shutdown /s /t 0
Enter
The /t is a time flag and you can abort scheduled shutdowns with the /a flag. Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave - just set a timer for 1800 seconds and Kazaa will be done with its download ;).
That might maybe work most times, but when your network speed suddenly changes or the downloads is aborted it fails. Far better is just telling your computer that you want it to shutdown after the download finished:
wget ... && shutdown now
As such I usually set my timer 3x what it needs to be (e.g 1800 for a 10 minute) and it's always had a high chance of working.
Regarding Linux, I dont think most people need command line for normal work. Obviously the guy that runs an obscure dist in RAID-6 on his toaster would be different, but for most normal people just install Ubuntu and use it.
The average Windows user literally has no concept of a terminal. The average Linux user does indeed have to copy and paste terminal commands off the internet to fix issues or do seemingly ordinary customization frequently.
Edit - it's Alt+F4.
As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.
Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
Presumably people who never read the Halloween documents?
And Apple computers are incredibly affordable, rumored to get a budget laptop which will be even cheaper. Computers in general are dirt cheap, including Apple. And paid software is not expensive on Apple either. There are tons of quality pro software for $50 - $100 per license. And affordable subscription models of pro creative software for those who are just getting started.
If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.
Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.
> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.
I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.
That isn't how you compare things. Server is separate from "Cloud" which is separate from Office 365 which is separate from Windows.
And Windows still makes them ~$28 billion a year, Azure makes then 3x that, but $28 billion is nothing to take for granted. It wouldn't matter if Azure made $150 billion/year, it doesn't make $28 billion look like pocket change.
I compared once segment of the business to others. Several other websites had various estimates on what percentage of the business Windows took up. Most of them said 6-10%, so I took 10%. Other websites group server and cloud, A rough guesstimate for a comment on a discussion thread is good enough. I was't aware I would need to go through the 10Q filings to satisfy you.
The point being communicated (even with your ridiculous nitpicks about the stats) is that Windows isn't a cash cow it once was. Microsoft Strategy is not Windows focused like it was under Ballmer.
> The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft
My second to you:
> Windows isn't a cash cow it once was
You really need to learn how to read or all you are doing is arguing about semantics.
In the 1990s Windows brought in $1.2 billion. In the 2010s, it brought in about $14 billion. In 2022 it was $24.8 billion, and in 2024, it was $29.1 billion.
So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
Windows definitely is still very much a "cash cow" for Microsoft. And they can have more than one "cash cow", they can have as many as they want and it wouldn't make Windows any less of a "cash cow".
No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery.
> So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
What don't you understand about being a smaller percentage of their business as a whole?
My entire point that it has gone from the basically a 30% (~2010) of the revenue to less than 10%. Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Saying they make more money with that now, when the growth compared to other parts of the business is low is missing the point.
I'm not the one who first used the term "cash cow" here. It apparently doesn't mean what you think it means.
If you look up the definition, you will find this:
"a business, investment, or product that provides a steady income or profit."
>Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market. MacOS will never achieve anything close to Windows, never has, never will. Windows is Microsoft's bottom bitch, it's not going to be forgotten as you think it will.
Feel free to quit this conversation at any time.
Ram price has sky rocketed, and probably out of hand of most of the people Same with GPU, HDD price is increasing, so is SSD.
How many people can build a new PC next year? And Amazon CEO just said it out loud about cloud computers.
Even though they'll take my PC out of my cold dead hands. But as it seems they want to get rid of Desktops.
> And Amazon CEO just said it out loud about cloud computers.
And Google said Stadia would have “negative latency”
Who said they cares about consumers? There's also GeForce Now.
Why does it matter, my 15 year old laptop is still working fine. And if it goes down, there is still the hardware produced in the remaining 14 years.
The vast majority of people that don't work in IT don't ever use a laptop or a desktop computer unless it is for work. They are using a phone and/or tablet.
This is my general concern with the decline of tech quality. It’s one thing if it’s just consumer products, but it’s now affecting actual tools people including us use to do their jobs.
Their entire ecosystem is built on top of Windows. It will only "not affect the bottom line" until it becomes bad enough that people has to abandon it with all the other MS products that depend on it.
Also, no LLM product is profitable right now. "The market is AI-everything" is complete and absolute bullshit.
https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...
The free Copilot chatbot stands at about 1%: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/09/is-microsoft-losing...
The share price might go down tomorrow and wipe out the value of management's options. The userbase cannot just do that.
Linux: I give a damn about you're super critical nuclear reactor loading up, this computer is going down NOW
Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in Windows are about 90%.
They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority.
Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
How did this part go down? I'm just curious because it reeks of entitlement and security theatre on their part.
It reminds me of an incident I had once at an old job, surprise surprise security related, where a moronic decision had been made by the combined DevOps and security team (putting aside how a separate DevOps team is a bad idea).
They had decided to use some "dependency security scanner" and if it found ANY, it would immediately disable the CI/CD build pipeline for that repository.
1) This could happen at any point within minutes/hours of some CVE being published. It would frequently block deployments.
2) It could not/would not take into account developer tooling vulnerabilities. Oh, your CSS library has a string DDOS vulnerability, where if someone makes a ginormous CSS file, the library will crash?
3) The CSS library does not reach a users machine, and is run once, at build time. Either it passes and deploys, or it fails and does not deploy. Therefore, it was probably not even justifiably a CVE to begin with, but more importantly, we now cannot deploy. https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1622xia/cve2...
4) The build pipeline would be disabled for ANY type of vulnerability regardless of impact. Even low ratings.
5) Because this security ~~scam~~software did not care about nuance like that, we could not even deploy hotfixes, critical production fixes, bug fixes, or anything.
6) Because it would disable the pipeline within minutes of a CVE, there was never a fix or a newer version to upgrade a dependency to. We had to wait days or sometimes weeks for a new version to be released.
This lasted a couple of months before they were forced to remove all this crap.
I won’t make the claim that it can’t be set up and configured in a way that’s useful, but I will make the claim that I’ve never run into an instance where it was and have wasted more time than I want to remember dealing with similar issues to what you described
It has modern standby and most of its other defaults, which I know because if it goes to sleep it doesn’t: the fan stays on and it never gets cold to the touch despite the blinking power led. The other day it randomly installed the windows update and rebooted because I found it waiting for the LUKS pin.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...
> "Note: In Windows, fast startup is the default transition when a system shutdown is requested. A full shutdown (S5) occurs when a system restart is requested or when an application calls a shutdown API."
Technically it's entering a "hybrid" S4 Hibernation with S0 Standby after all users have been logged out. To bypass it you need to press Shift while clicking Shutdown, running the `shutdown /s /t 0` command, or else disabling Fast Startup. You can tell that you didn't do a true S5 shutdown because the system's uptime will not reset.
But disabling Modern Standby in your BIOS will also disable it because Window's power management logic is set during installation. With modern standby enabled, Windows tries to be always on and always connected. When you disable modern standby, Windows doesn't entirely change it's logic so much as it notices it can't send the same power state commands, so it reverts to S5 Shutdown.
I chose to disable it in BIOS because Microsoft can't really turn it back on when I do it that way. Because the thing is... I disabled Fast Startup after the second time it happened. But some Microsoft updates re-enable Fast Startup, and it's not hard to find forum posts complaining about that.
Thanks Microsoft!
Microsoft's Fast Startup is also known as Hybrid Shutdown. When Modern Standby is enabled, a system shutdown will log the user off, then use a combination of S4 Hibernation and S0 Standby.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...
When a device is already able to be connected to a WiFi network, I would consider it to be on.
Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess.
(Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
Gets me every time. I have even started turning the mouse upside down to avoid this :(
> My Mac Mini M4 is on its way.
Hate to tell you, but my Mac does the same stupid thing. I have to physically yank the HDMI cable.
Exits: N W
It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.
it was many patches ago when I refused to even start my PC after Microsoft's patches (when they made it so you couldn't reject their telemetry), at least not till I had linux installed (which I had anyhow been running all along via Xwindows, before the Microsoft-mind-virus-infected systemd, wayland, and btrfs crowds decided to ruin linux too.)
are the BSDs still safe?
i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.
Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.
My two cents...
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?
Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.
I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.
Wonder if Chromebooks have taken over since.
The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.
You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.
Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
Otherwise I think we’re in completely agreement.
The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).
I mean, for starters just walk into any law firm.
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
> conversion to Word 2003 format
That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.
> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.
Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?
> not until office for Mac reached feature parity
It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.
And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.
None of this seems off to me.
I assume its an old story as recent version of MS Office can read ODF formats.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.
Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Geek Squad: 'Sorry, we don't support that.'
Grandma: 'Well, what can you do to help me then?'
Geek Squad: 'We can set you up with a new computer. That'll be $Cost-of-new-computer plus $Cost-of-X-hours-of-setup.'
Grandma (possibility number 1): 'Alright, guess I don't have much choice, and you're the expert.'
Grandma (possibility number 2): 'No thanks. I'll use my phone instead.'
Man, they've really screwed up all the settings. I've never seen Windows 11 look like this. A clean reinstall ought to fix it.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.
I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.
For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.
As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
It's wayland support is utterly broken right now and getting very little attention. The major distros are about to put X11 in the grave and then XFCE will die (or more likely it'll live on in some weird offshoot distro).
That's not really an acceptable situation for a consumer product.
now obviously xfce is not one of the main DEs pushed by the distros, but it's plight is a symptom of a couple of problems that plague linux
Compatibility is important. MSFT, for all their faults, puts a shitload of effort into making sure that even old ass software keeps working. They're not perfect (especially in the last few years) but they're miles ahead of linux here. As a user, I shouldn't ever have to know or care about wayland or pipewire or whatever other nonsense, but that's not the case. I have to know just so I can find software that works with my system.
XFCE just has not updated.
If this is a "linux problem", then what about android and ios? its a million times worse, but somehow thats a perfectly good situation for a consumer product?
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
The slop articles you get are the result of the natural SEO competition.
The real problem is that anyone is propagandizing the concept of a "gaming distro" in the first place.
(My current gripe is with KDE on Wayland - i decided to move from Gnome on X11 for $reasons and it's so hard to get a thing as simple as clipboard, multiple monitors to work consistently. Apparently devs have very strong opinions on workflows...)
Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.
It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.
Then yeah.
Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)
I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)
The combination of
- a programmer's text editor
- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)
- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files
- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)
- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)
...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.
So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
SFTP is an interesting one, I am not sure how the interaction with filezilla goes. I tend to just use scp or edit files in nano over ssh.
> "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
You really haven't given desktop linux a chance in the last two to four years have you? I will agree its not "ergonomic" enough _yet_ for many casual and intermediary users but I assure you a competent intermediary user or advanced user can do all those tasks without much fuss nowadays. I've been using desktop linux for almost 20 years now and its so much easier nowadays to throw random programs (flatpaks, snaps, appimages, distroboxes and whatnot helps a ton) and have them work correctly, build up a generalist linux workstation that does just about anything you want.
> Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I wish this could be communicated more clearly to prospective desktop linux users but usually what you want is to be using the bleeding edge. Arch is too bloody and complicated for most users, Fedora strikes a nice balance but will leave you with some cuts and Ubuntu is usually the safest choice, but can be a bit stale.
> Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Try a gnome based distro (without all the prejudice like "eww it looks like a tablet ui") and tell me if it isn't a damn good, modern and intuitive UI. It has it's faults and own goals I wished the knucklehead gnome devs would fix but its a far cry from anemic linux desktop environments of yore.
As far as linux supporting everything under the sun... I just don't think thats a prerequesite for it to be a good windows alternative and amass a critical mass of users. Maybe once it has 20% market share being everything to everyone will be a goal but for now the best you can do is give it an honest try every few years and see for yourself if it's good enough for your use case. See if existing FOSS software is adequate for your needs or weather it's possible or you are willing to run some of the niche windows apps in wine.
There is no chance of linux becoming more popular if even the crowd here at hacker news isn't willing to give it chance once in a while.
Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.
I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)