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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.

I suspect this is less about when Windows declined and more about individual computing journeys. Early exposure (home, school, work) tends to set a baseline that’s hard to shake.

Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.

>This was me in 2005.

Ha, same. Windows XP for me had a horrible habit of booting into a blue screen randomly after updating video card drivers (happened with both ATI and Nvidia). Trying to do a repair install wouldn't work. The only option was a full reinstall.

Installation from the disk took an hour. Then (if you were going about this the legal way) you'd have to call the microsoft number to register your install, but be on hold for another 30 minutes. Then it was multiple hours of install your favorite video player, reboot. Install video codecs, reboot. Install firefox, reboot. Apply all of your registry tweaks, reboot. Install all your games from CD-ROM, more rebooting. And multiple hours of that.

I moved to linux back in 2006 or so and never looked back. Documented part of the journey here https://net153.net/ubuntu_vs_debian.html

I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this day. Windows just bloats all hardware.

Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus. Support has always sucked!

Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.

> I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue.

Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.

I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.

It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well. Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have seen the performance bumps at the cost of software compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the random game that _needs_ it.

Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.

Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.

>Most people had never even heard of Linux.

My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.

I don't know, man. In my experience, people make no difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".

So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite successful. It has gotten better over the past decade, but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to touch a CLI.

This was me in 2006 as well. Long live Edgy Eft!

My first distro I booted from was Ubuntu 4.04.

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