The Best Windows is Linux | Hacker News Reader

The Best Windows is Linux

lunduke.substack.com

30 pointsgargan14 comments

One should turn this into a distro – Free10/FreeXP[1]-like base for the UI, with solid Wine integration for Windows compatibility.

Wonder if anyone's ever tried to run linux with only windows apps.

[1] https://xpq4.sourceforge.io

There are those images based on Fedora:

https://blues.win/

If I may, I doubt current Windows users aim for Windows 95 as a graphical interface :p That's more for hardcore linux users that had good memories on Windows back then.

Adding my vote to "win2000 is peak UI" pile. I would genuinely use it today.

There is one hickup though: the Win95 theme relies heavily on the pixel grid for its readability and aesthetics. Displays with very small pixels will either render it too small, or require some kind of upscaling with unpredictable results. 1920x1080 on a 17 inch display is probably as far as it will comfortably go.

I genuinely think windows peaked at Win2K including the GUI.

It was stable, it was fast, the debugger couldn’t take out the entire OS, it had the classic windows 98/NT look but was polished and above all was self-consistent.

Everything since then has been a step back in consistency and polish (with the possible exception of XP/SP2).

It was the last time windows got out the way and actually let me compute.

Now Windows 11 (by default) has inconsistent UX/UI, it nags constantly, updates are still painful and slow and they seem utterly determined to shoehorn things in I do not want, OneDrive and AI been the two primary but not only suspects.

I’ve only used windows for gaming since 2003 and my primary get stuff done OS since ~2000 has been Linux, one has dramatically improved and the other has regressed.

Even when I had to do some .Net stuff at work a few years ago I shoved Windows into a VM and did it inside that so I didn’t have to deal with native windows.

The current backlash is the end result of all that accumulating over time, it’s not one thing, it’s dozens of little things and different users hit a different subset.

Also if you do use windows and haven’t seen it, win11debloat is a time saver.

Installing Linux is adding things I do want after install, Installing Windows 11 is removing things I don’t want, I know which one is respecting the user.

I pretty much skipped XP entirely when I was a kid. I had 98se on my first (handmedown) computer, and when I built my first machine I put win2k pro on it, because it had a debloated UI and none of that fancy animation crap. I used that until I got a 64bit machine years later and had to suffer through XP (64bit) which was way buggier than regular XP SP2.

Windows XP 64 Bit is almost like the dark horse of operating systems. Everyone knows it exists, no one wants to admit to having had to use it.

The video is very repetitive. The tweet shown in the video is essentialy what the 12 minute video says.

It has been years since i experimented with linux distros - i am a Windows user. If there is a noob guide to setting this up -- even as a VM on Ec2, I would like to give it a shot.

Is there such a guide? I was hoping the video has a accompanying "how to" but couldn't find one.

And the best Linux is WSL.

Crashes too frequently for me. Needs a reboot to fix only to be crashed again few hours later. I never found a solution; likely related to docker/podman being memory hungry.

Port handling requires constant Powershell maintenance too.

I completely agree, even if it’s an unpopular opinion.

It's unpopular because it probably only serves hardcore Windows users who happen to need Linux for work - which is a very valid but likely relatively niche cohort.

I'm personally glad they (you?) are served but I suspect for pretty much anyone outside of that cohort, WSL is the worse of both worlds.

One thing is Linux for servers, where it has no real rival, and another is Linux Desktop, which I’ve been using for more than 20 years. But despite Windows’ reputation, I honestly think that no Linux distribution — whether with KDE, GNOME, or Hyprland — comes close to Windows in terms of stability and cohesion when managing windows, even though Windows still has a lot of room for improvement.

So Windows + WSL for anything you want to develop on Linux seems to me like one of the best solutions. I’d say you get the best of both worlds.

And that's fair.

I think you fall very much into the cohort I was talking about. Maybe the way I phrased it was not the best, but this is what I mean.

I don't find Windows ergonomic at all, and I don't care much about window management. Hell I'm on macOS at the moment which has atrocious window management and I wouldn't touch Windows with a 10 foot pole even if it may (and probably does) have better wm.

Add on top of that all the other terrible things with Windows (I'm not going to list them because I don't think it's necessary), plus how the WSL VM hinders the usage of Linux on it (as all VMs do), the overhead, etc. make it a much worse experience.

I personally like KDE but would happily use one of the alternatives. Window management is mostly to display GUIs on the screen and as long as it can do that (they all do), it's fine.

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