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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

It must be hard for Windows users to imagine that on Linux there are is no activation, no Microsoft account, no cloud backup, and no pop-up requesting that you install crapware when you plug in a peripheral.[0] You also own your disk encryption keys and are not assigned an identifier that can be used against you.[1]

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-hackers-arrest-reveals-microsof...

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Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.

I've had a pretty good track record with Fedora Atomic / Silverblue. The thing I like best about it is that I can have updates safely staged in the background invisibily. And next time I reboot my computer, I boot into that new version. No waiting around or anything.

That's not to say it's perfect. There was a pretty bad bug maybe around 2 years ago where upgrades just stopped working and without any warnings. You had a notice the issue and run a special command to fix the issue. I've also had quite a few AMD/kernel regressions recently that resulted in artifacts in the desktop and AV1 video decode.

I wish there was like a Debian but atomic that has broad support like Fedora does. Though I did see that openSUSE leap 16.1 introduced an immutable option.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take from when you noticed that regression to when it was fixed?

And how often do you run into the software you want not being built for your distro?

> how often do you run into the software you want not being built for your distro?

Is this even the right question? The whole reason humans create software is to accomplish something. If software a is not available, but software b is and does the same thing nearly as well, why not spend 5 minutes to learn the thing?

Because in practice it's never 5 minutes nor "nearly as well". And because you got some software you need to build and it expects xyz library on that platform as a dependency, not abc library, despite your wishes.

Free as in puppy?

In the age of nix + LLMs, other distros through distrobox, brew on Linux, and virtual machines as a last resort its pretty hard to not be able to get the software you need.

not all atomic distros allow an easy nix install.

Do you happen to be running Ubuntu? They have made updates terrible in their effort to try and make snaps a thing. I experience far less grief on other distros.

Yeah, though this was always the case for me, not just since snaps came along. I've had breakages on other distros too, just (like you say) not as massive, but still more than on Windows.

> Do you happen to be running Ubuntu?

This. Ubuntu is the closest distro to Windows. Stick to base community-developed distros like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

>Stick to base community-developed distros like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

Since when is Fedora community developed? It's basically the testing arm of Red Hat and implements their corporate policies that will be added to Red Had in the near future. It's as corporate as it gets, just like Ubuntu.

As much as I love how fast and efficient it is to update every single package on my linux machines, I can count in double figures the number of times there's been a package conflict and I've had to google how to fix it.

For better or worse that doesn't happen in windows update

Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.

My impression was that these days a printer is more likely to just work on Linux than on Windows. And without the bloatware.

Ubuntu 26.04 regularly, automatically adds a duplicate of our HP network printers, using a slightly different driver and defaulting to Letter (the printer default is A4 and my locale is Ireland). If I try to print a label into a specific quadrant using Document Viewer, it slaps it in the top-left. At least once per week, jobs just disappear without reaching the printer. If you want to print images, you'd better learn ImageMagick incantations or accept whatever scaling and positioning lands on the paper. It's far easier to use the cloud services than to set up network scanning.

The Windows process isn't necessarily better (unless your only concern is reliability and you don't have a Brother) but it is certainly different.

I have the same issue, and it's complete pot luck which of the printer drivers will work on a given day

Over time it’s becoming this way.

Have you subscribed to Mozilla VPN?!

How about your Canonical Pro subscription?

Mozilla is not a Linux distribution or DE. Canonical is on my deny list.

which browser is most commonly bundled with Linux desktop distro’s?

if we bundle it- its as Linux to people as edge is to Windows. It’s “the same” perceptually.

The average user doesn't notice activation because most PCs come with windows preinstalled

......? Windows 95 to Vista all had similar installation workflows to Linux sans an extra step to enter the install key. 7 and 10 made it easier since the hardware ID would make having to enter the key manually on hardware unnecessary. Until 11, there was no need for MS account, cloud, etc.

If anything Linux gave me more grief.

Windows 10 definitely begged you to use a Microsoft account to log in. IIRC you couldn't even set it up with a local account unless you told the install process you didn't have internet. I believe it also moved your home folder to onedrive without asking with no way to fully undo that

And to continue to get Windows 10 security updates right now, I had to sign in to a Microsoft Account to do it, so it’s even pushier.

I get updates for 10 without having signed into an account (I refuse to).

You sign in to enroll your device in the update scheme then just log out again.

Not sure about the one drive stuff, but I always clicked the button and it was smooth bypass so to me it's not really an impediment, especially since it didn't matter if the system was internet hooked up or not. And for people that were tied into the Microsoft account eco system it did have it's benefits; AFAIK there are people using One Drive and Office 365 for personal stuff. So at least to me I didn't begrudge them for putting in a prompt that says, "Please use a microsoft account." It's a legitimate use case.

Windows 11 crossed the line big time though. Having the option right there to bypass is fine; Having to enter in an obscure key stroke sequence and rebooting while making sure your system is not hooked to the internet basically soured me off 11 so far. Especially now they're trying to rip it out that workflow.

Yes but every program you run can do anything you can do with your user account, which is catastrophic.

I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.

This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.

It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.

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