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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux.

But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is.

The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days.

But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.

The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.

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This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.

Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in

None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article.

There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.

I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...

Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?

Yes, your MDM lets you do almost everything you want to Windows. You can really tell that it is a commercial first offering, or at least used to be. And given that as a company you are also paying them I guess they don't care that much that there are fewer ads.

On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.

I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again.

Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all.

And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications.

You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?

Yes; as a home user you have to use some 3rd party script or software to achieve the same outcome, but there are examples that are well-regarded and open-source.

e.g. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

This looks less sketchy than what I used. Surprised I found so much sketchy stuff and not simply that.

Guess that's like adblock these days. You need domain specific knowledge or you get not what you expect.

Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10.

I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.

I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.

Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.

Not that hard to get rid of windows bloat.

When you have no windows experience? Barely anyone to ask for expertise and only depend on Google, Chatgpt and sketchy third party tools and does feel hard tho. And it doesn't end, it just keeps coming up with new bloat.

Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat

I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.

You mean that the menues that look from 2-5 Windows versions back are hacky and not an Hommage to their older releases?

These days it is really visible in Windows 11 as well.

The main thing that has changed isn't that Linux has got much better but that most corporations deliver their internal applications through a web browser. The days of companies being anchored to win32 are long gone.

Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.

> Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.

Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.

Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.

And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.

That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.

Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.

I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?

Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?

That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.

Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.

My 73yo mom actually runs RHEL 10 on her laptop, uses one of my 16 free developer licenses.

But it would never work without my help. On the other hand, Windows wasn't working too well either and I just couldn't help with that.

RHEL was the most stable alternative I could think of when her Windows computer stopped being reliable.

I have setup rustdesk on it for remote support.

What kind of issue would you expect that the OS she currently uses does not have?

Anything she buys won’t have specific drivers, e.g. Webcams or mice or keyboards or etc.

First, is that so? My neighbors just got their 80-year old parents a Thinkpad. All works. They bought a mouse the week after. Worked right away.

Second, they don't buy this kind of thing every week.

It's actually not really that bad. If you have to split your job likev you said, then you have to do it when she's using Windows too.

Linux has made a lot of progress since 2010.

If low tech ppl in family get phones, I want them to be apple, less work for me (not an Apple user). If they get a PC, I want them to use Ubuntu. Less work for me.

And if there's some work, I'd rather ssh into their PC and fix it using a shell with bash, then get annoyed with Windows and it's quirks.

You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.

Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.

Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).

I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.

> But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me.

I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...

Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.

The average person (e.g. my Mom) only needs office software, email, and a web browser. Linux has all of that out of the box.

Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.

Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.

Windows is too at this point; it’s just a little less obvious.

Lifetime Linux user here also. Well said. Agree exactly.

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