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Comment by accrual | Hacker News Reader

This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).

My favorite "joke" from this site:

> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe

FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.

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"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.

Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.

Imagine they just made the browser actually better so that people would want to use it, rather than doubling down on the reasons people don't want to use it

Nonsense. Users don’t think and it’s absurd that you suggest it. These are important revenue streams for the company!

/s if you need it

Welcome to Fedora! I've missed literally nothing about Windows since switching to it about a decade ago now (around the time they announced Win7 EOL), and every time I had to use it for work (thankfully never these days), I grew more and more confident that I never will need to return and that Windows is only getting worse.

I tried installing fedora on mac m1 vmware recently, and enabled 3d acceleration separately. Llm seemed to think 3d acceleration would work better on fusion.

Performance sucked bad, particularly on games. Tux games were unplayable. I am confused what the bubble is on hn or on my end. Before that, on utm I think i tried ubuntu. After decades, linux is still hard to try out.

There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.

Are you sure that you installed the virtualized GPU drivers in fedora? Did you check if fedora was still using llvmpipe (i.e CPU rendering). Did you try the x86 or ARM version of fedora?

> After decades, linux is still hard to try out.

It's not, you just need to get a proper computer to try it where the CPU/GPU company actually support linux.

Comparing system in a VM with a bare metal installation is a very unfair statement. Especially without the details of the VM configuration.

A few years ago I installed MacOS in a VM on linux host in virtualbox and it was slow as hell. I don't claim that MacOS is not ready to be used though.

I did not compare those. To get a shot at getting a partition on my machine, it needs to show promise in vm first.

MacOS comes ready installed, like it or not.

Just stating what needs to be done to gain user trust. I am talking from user perspective: i am not judging linux or its makers.

If it doesn’t work for some purpose on something, set the expectations accordingly on e.g distro website before letting me down after I already invested my time in it. That is okay too.

Thanks for the advice. To me, the responses here reflect well the reason the scattered linux landscape is so hard to approach for the uninitiated tho.

There could be reasonable vm conf defaults already defined for something as well defined as an m1 mbp.

Yes, I considered asahi. Decided to try vms first. The number of hurdles did not increase my confidence to try to set up a dualboot.

It also reflects that llm help is apparently useless in this area, if one is to trust the responses here. Does the landscape move too fast for them?

It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.

Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.

Things are pretty dire.

Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.

Lmfao. What are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exfiltrate your sharepoint data? That is not at all how that works.

Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.

JumpCloud seems to support:

Amazon Linux

Debian

Fedora

Linux Mint

Oracle Linux

PopOS

RHEL

Rocky Linux

Ubuntu

(May work on others)

https://jumpcloud.com/support/agent-compatibility-system-req...

Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop

One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.

Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.

Hey, Johnny Apple! Fix this!

What WM/DE do you use? As much as I find Windows annoying sometimes, I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished.

The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.

[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them

[1] that is, they require the command line

IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.

That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.

But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.

I kind of disagree that it is done easily in Windows, network drives are pretty cursed everywhere in my experience.

But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.

It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.

Dolphin can mount network drives just fine?

Yes, but I don't believe it can do so permanently. And by that I mean, solely through the UI, connect to a network drive and have it persist across reboots. You can do that in the Windows or Mac file explorers.

My initial comment muddied that complaint. You can do it transiently in the UI in Dophin.

Works for me, I have my nextcloud webdav saved there since I didn't want to deal with any client bloat. It's not only persisted across reboots, but persisted across platform upgrades (I run fedora KDE)

> The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%.

Lol! You should try being a comedian.

I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.

I've been on KDE for the past 2 years and it's been a great experience. I wiped Windows everywhere (impractical before).

I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.

"I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished."

Really? In my experience you can go for pretty much anything and it will be more coherent and less buggy than the Windows shell.

Try Gnome or XFCE. As a bonus you'll be able to remap Caps Lock with ease.

This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.

Why do you think that? Have you ever done it?

Not OP, but yes it works. I've used the 'Keyboard manager' tool from Powertoys to remap CapsLock to Esc. Never had a problem with it.

OK, so I did this recently and it depends a lot on what software you're then running whether it works or not, and whether the keyboard will actually flip some Caps Lock switch somewhere regardless of being remapped.

ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.

This being Windows 11.

I use the KDE Plasma Fedora. It feels basically like Windows 10.

Do you still have to download things called GNOME Hacks to change things that should have regularly accessible settings?

Huh ? TWM has features that Windows doesn't. Window management in Windows ended in Windows 10.

My favorite is "Defender scanned your computer 8 times. Nothing was found."

CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.

Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.

Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.

> Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.

I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.

I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.

Popups right in my way is peak on point here.

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