Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-windows-move-towards-surveillance/

by trinsic2 • 9 months ago

550 492 9 months ago

trinsic213• 9 months ago

I am a IT solutions provider for the public and small business. I think the changes to Windows 11 is gearing up to work with organizations to create a surveillance state.

So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.

potsandpans• 9 months ago

How could they create something that already exists?

rolph4• 9 months ago

you should look into the idea that you are a business, using linux installs in a way that may be subject to license.

if you promote, facillitate, provide resources for installation free of charge, thats probably fine. providing a system for sale, with linux pre-installed, may require, at least some attribution.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

Ok thanks for that reminder. I'll look into that.

Loughla• 9 months ago

Choose the right distro and automate updates of possible. Mint is the softest landing for Windows users. But they never ever ever ever update anything on their own.

Ever.

Forever.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

Yea I need to think of a good way to automate updates..

dralley• 9 months ago

Or use Fedora with kickstart/modified atomic base image/bootable containers.

morshu90014• 9 months ago

Mint still being on Xorg sounds like a rough ride when it inevitably goes to Wayland, which seems to be the more common default elsewhere.

PostOnce• 9 months ago

Make sure libreoffice is included, and ublock origin. Show them how much faster it is, with fewer ads, and no subscription to Microsoft required just to write a document.

The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business.

Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets near 10GB or we'll have to pay Microsoft".

Plus there's no license cost for linux itself either.

This stuff might not be viable for hundreds of employees in a business where MS is already entrenched, but for a small business it absolutely is a better deal.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

Yeah. I just tried LibreWolf recently and it comes with Ublock preinstalled. I think I am going to install that with some relaxed privacy settings. Libreoffice by default for sure.

gerdesj3• 9 months ago

You have sqlite, mariadb/mysql, postgres and more just for mostly traditional SQL. Then you have the others ... 8)

It's time for change. VMware have tossed themselves off into limbo and MS seem hell bent on alienating a vast swathe of humanity with W11's requirements - weirdest A/B test ever.

I'm working on some bigger clients ...

zrobotics5• 9 months ago

I wouldn't recommend deploying ublock on customer machines. Or at least ask what their workflow is first. There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled.

I run firefox+UBO+privacy badger on my machines, and the only sites I've had to disable my privacy extensions in the last few years for were work related, B2B SaaS apps. A few years ago I pushed UBO to user machines (Chrome on win10) at work, and had a ton of user issues. I finally had to disable it, it wasn't a net benefit to us. It's not just a 'turn it on and leave it alone' thing, and people don't always think or remember to try toggling it off and reloading the page when they encounter issues.

That said, it's insane to me to be paying MS for a database with a 10GB limit, but I've seen their price lists. I've also worked with small businesses that don't have in-house IT, and they just end up overpaying for crappy service for many of those things.

I hope this win11 migration causes more MSPs and consultants to move small businesses over to linux though, MS has been predatory on pricing for business customers for far too long and with as much work has migrated to a browser there will be way less issues switching than there were years ago.

Aurornis2• 9 months ago

Make sure libreoffice is included

Probably an unpopular thing to say here, but in my experience pushing non-tech people to use libreoffice as part of a Linux transition is a fast track to getting them to hate Linux.

Using Google Docs has been much more welcoming in my experience. Something about libreoffice doesn’t resonate with a lot of non-tech people.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

I'd also try using OnlyOffice, FreeOffice/Softmaker, Collabora and WPS to see what has the best compatibility with Office documents.

IMO, if they need Office, they should just use Windows.

AlotOfReading2• 9 months ago

I can't imagine trying to replace MS word with libreoffice for businesses. I respect the project and the complexity of the task, but it's just not there for even light professional use.

As an example, I recently submitted a manuscript following standard format [0] with libreoffice. Nothing difficult, just basic professional functionality.

The only way to do it involved editing global default page styles (because custom page styles can't be used for title pages?) and other advanced features. Fair enough, at least it was possible. It's a shame the export process didn't preserve the formatting and screwed up page numbering.

I had to fix the manuscript in gdocs instead, where it was easy.

[0] https://www.shunn.net/format/story/1/

skopje2• 9 months ago

I switched from Google Docs to Libre Office a few months ago. I'm surprised how buggy LO is, because I tried it a decade ago and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. I don't plan on going back to MS or Google, but I am very frustrated with the number of bugs in LO's spreadsheets, so I try to keep my sheets simple and CTRL-S a LOT!

Examples: [1] I selected a range of cells recently, by clicking and dragging, and when I let go of the mouse button, all of the selected cells shifted up and to the right by one cell, and CTRL-Z didn't undo it! [2] I have a workbook and when i duplicate a sheet with a chart, the chart is blank, so i have to delete it and re-insert a new one. [3] Sometimes the left-hand X-axis is cut in half, and I have no idea why, but if I create a new doc it goes away. I really, really want to promote LO, but it is very buggy. I can deal with it but I don't think others would.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

If you're going to do this, set them up with something they can get commercial support for.

IMO, if a user's needs can be met with a Chromebook, Linux + a browser + email + Zoom/or whatever would suit them well.

I think you're going to have a hard sell if they rely on Office or other Windows-only software, and although well meaning, it might be doing them a disservice if they can't run the software they're accustomed to.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

Yeah I was thinking of ZoroOS. The have a pro package.

tharmas• 9 months ago

Wine to run Office on Linux?

weq2• 9 months ago

something something Chromebook something something

Why wait for mass survellience and remote attesention when u can have it today!!! :D

somenameforme2• 9 months ago

What are the arguments for Office at the small business or individual level, as opposed to Libre Office? For most users, they'll be able to reacclimate in a matter of hours to near 100% competence. And they now are in an ecosystem that won't constantly try to squeeze you for rent.

I think this is even more true in the era of LLMs, because on the rare difference somebody might get hung up on - there's no longer real need for support. LLMs absolutely excel at questions like 'In MS Office I can do [x] to achieve [y]. How do I do that in Libre Office?'

jmholla• 9 months ago

I thought I heard that TurboTax is moving to web only, but maybe that's only for personal use and not corporate?

edg50005• 9 months ago

The Snap store on Ubuntu is quite good. Has Spotify, VS code, Blender, Chromium. LibreOffice has a tabbed UI setting that mimics Office (easy to enable). Personally I love LibreOffice, something about it resonates with me. Everybody who liked office 2003 and could never get used to the newer weird ribbon UI in Office will love the default LibreOffice. Those who love the ribbon can enable the tabbed UI bar in LibreOffice. Only complaint is that performance is not as fluid as it could be.

I avoid snap myself because I use apt, but apt is a hard sell and arguably not ideal as well. E.g. I added Spotify repos which in theory could break other packages. In practice this doesn't happen (probably due to Ubuntu essentially freezing major versions for packages in their releases).

morshu90014• 9 months ago

The article lists 4 Linux distros. I think the most important thing is to recommend just one distro, DE, window server combo, don't know which one but it has to be carefully thought out. They're all coming from the same thing.

The Linux choice matrix is confusing even for programmers. Like I can understand the pieces in theory, but in practice with hardware, user-installed software, varying degrees of compatibility between components, and updates...

hn111• 9 months ago

Perhaps https://zorin.com/os/ might be a nice distro for your customers. It has 2 UI options: one that is close to macOS and one that looks more like Windows.

cess11• 9 months ago

If it makes their decision makers fuzzy in the stomach to pay for a suite of office software, consider SoftMaker.

Create a 'showroom', virtual through network screen sharing or physical if possible. Demo machines where you can let customers get a bit of immediate experience with GNOME, Xfce and possibly something more. You can walk them through checking their email, creating a document and doing a bit of web browsing.

Don't front 'Linux', it's a tainted word that is of no use to typical public sector and small to medium business people, preferably don't mention it. Instead talk about your solutions being secure, cheap, enterprise grade, customisable, long term supported, things like that.

npteljes6• 9 months ago

For office software, consider ONLYOFFICE. Free software, and it uses Microsoft file formats by default, and has a pretty good compatibility with it.

ivraatiems• 9 months ago

I think describing TPM and Secure Boot as "artificial limitations" is unfair. Many Linux distros have no problem working with both of these and they serve a valuable purpose.

The problem is not that they exist or that Windows 11 supports them. It's that Microsoft pretends they are required, when they are not.

ericol• 9 months ago

It's that Microsoft pretends they are required

I think that's what "artificial limitations" mean. Microsoft pretending they are required when they are not.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

I hear you, but I don't really think its needed. IMHO, those features are being used to take away control of hardware you bought and paid for.

If you want to add better security to a computer make it opt-in and not expect people to use it who don't need it.

ants_everywhere• 9 months ago

I don't use Windows and actually find it kind of insane when I use someone else's computer to see what Windows is like...

But it's kind of MSFT's choice whether TPM and secure boot are requirements for their software. If their software makes security assumptions that the OS has access to trusted hardware then it's a requirement. One could argue that they should create secure and less secure versions of Windows, but I don't think anyone is really going to take that seriously beyond rhetoric.

There are a lot of advantages to assuming the hardware is mildly trustworthy. The downside is you may not want Microsoft to be controlling what counts as trusted on your machine. If so, then you probably don't want MSFT to have root in your machine either and you're better off with a different OS.

sciencejerk• 9 months ago

I'm no MS fanboy, but don't you think Content Platforms like Netflix or Steam might be applying DRM pressure to Microsoft? And perhaps IP owners also apply pressure to the Content Providers to lock down their platforms, which may include hardware that has access to protected IP

aleph_minus_one4• 9 months ago

There are a lot of advantages to assuming the hardware is mildly trustworthy. The downside is you may not want Microsoft to be controlling what counts as trusted on your machine.

In an IT security context, "trusted" (example: "trusted computing") means distrusting the users.

Nursie• 9 months ago

Yup, they can give you a secure boot chain that's otherwise hard to prove, and I've worked at places where (for example) disk encryption keys were protected by TPM encryption, using TrouSrS.

They can also often be used as a (slow) source of hardware randomness.

Most modern intel (seris 8 onwards) and AMD Zen onwards have fTPM too. Often these can be enabled in the bios during upgrade then disabled again.

Personally I upgraded to Win11 the moment it became available, but that's because I want to continue my run of free MS windows forever and I only ever boot into it to play games, with even that becoming less common.

WorldMaker6• 9 months ago

They have good reasons to be required, though: Secure Boot reduces the ability of malware to infect the bootloader. TPM gives a strong foundation for things like Passkeys.

TPM also enables things that average users care less about like DRM, but Passkeys are a good idea and having them more-secure-by-default is good for the average user (even with accidental vendor lock-in implications).

array_key_first4• 9 months ago

The reason they are required is that, so far, every platform that has widespread TPM use is completely locked down. Microsoft would very much love for you to essentially rent your computer from them like you do with Apple and Google.

There are security boons, sure, but these are a side effects. They are not what TPM is for.

grebc• 9 months ago

I switched my at home setup to MX Linux just in the last 2 months for dissatisfaction with even Win10.

Win11 is a hard no, I’m keeping a laptop with Win10 for the small amount of games I play. I will likely even try WINE for them soon but just haven’t got around to it.

IlikeKitties3• 9 months ago

Try proton from valve. Every game that's not bound by kernel level anticheat pretty much works. ProtonDB is the place to get the required magic incantations for edge cases.

linuxftw2• 9 months ago

Steam Flatpak works great if your games are on Steam.

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

I think it's a good plan, though there might be some pain.

I have a bog standard AMD graphics card that does not work in Linux. I've tried multiple distributions and version in those distributions and both the Linux and AMD drivers. It just randomly flashes. Where do I go to get help? Who knows?

trenchpilgrim• 9 months ago

What card is it? If it's older than Volcanic Islands (2015), yeah, those old cards aren't well supported by the current amdgpu driver, so you'd need to use a distribution that still supports the old ati driver. The linked article recommends MX Linux for old machines. I think you can get it working with Arch Linux but that would require a higher level of effort.

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

I got it last year. It's a Radeon RX 6600.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

upgrade your graphics card or try another? is it old with limited support?

I hear you though, I still have printing problems with my Epson WF printer.

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

I just got it last year! Should totally still be supported.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

I wouldn't expect users to do this, but have you filed a bug on kernel.org for the amdgpu driver?

AMD's kernel developers are incredibly responsive there, I've worked with them to fix a bunch of bugs I've run into.

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

I have not. I wasn't sure where to go. Thanks I'll try that.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

Try the forums or Discord chat for the distro you're trying. LinuxQuestions.org and the "Linux for All" discord are good places to ask distro-agnostic questions.

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

This happened with a new AMD chipset with a Framework. One firmware update improved it and then kernel 6.8? I think fixed it. Was about perfect, then kernel 6.13 AMD driver broke it again. ;-)

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

I've since learned that 6.13+ has a different brightness scale. Adjust to that and things should work well.

amatecha4• 9 months ago

I'd be curious how well it runs NetBSD or OpenBSD.. have you checked?

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

Hmmm that's a good point. I have not tried that!

unixhero4• 9 months ago

Yes low end chips that no one bothered to write drivers for has issues

account4210• 9 months ago

Sounds fishy. What card is this?

apple4ever6• 9 months ago

Its a Radeon RX 6600

npteljes6• 9 months ago

Where would you get help with Microsoft Windows? Same support story as Linux, in my experience. If it's a PC, I'd consider selling the card and getting a different one that looks good from a cursory research, if it's a laptop, similar story, but I'd get a 2-3 year old one so that the drivers etc situation is sorted.

Terr_2• 9 months ago

I know this isn't Stackoverflow, but... Does anyone have a good mental model for disentangling the issues of full-disk encryption versus secure-boot? I've been badly procrastinating with my desktop's new SSD because of it.

Use-case is:

* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.

* I don't need unattended boot at all, I'd rather enter a passphrase every time.

* Resistance to evil-maid attacks is nice but not top-priority compared to theft.

* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.

* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?

cyberax• 9 months ago

You can turn the secure boot on/off at any time. The only effect from this is the loss of encryption keys that you might have bound to the measured values.

So for it to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it. But you can do that _and_ set a strong PIN for your LUKS key.

Terr_2• 9 months ago

Thanks, here's my current model:

1. Your data on the drive/partition is encrypted by $BIGKEY, which basically never changes because that would require redoing everything.

2. The LUKS header stores one-or-more encrypted versions of $BIGKEY, generally encrypted using a more convenient $SMALLKEY that a human could memorize. Optionally, $PIN can also be part of the encryption step.

3. Unlike $BIGKEY, the $SMALLKEY and/or $PIN can be changed over time. This changes the ciphertext of $BIGKEY and rewrites the LUKS header.

4. Optionally, secure boot is capable of storing and retrieving $SMALLKEY into system chips in such a way that most tampering ought to destroy $SMALLKEY.

So for [Secure Boot] to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it.

If my $SMALLKEY is not stored inside the secure-boot chips, I can see how that would be inconvenient, but I'm not sure how that is safer.

Is it because the route $SMALLKEY automatically travels bypasses tricks like a hardware keylogger?

slicktux• 9 months ago

Being that it’s an SSD it’s already encrypting by default. You just have to set the User and Admin password and you’ll have full disk encryption!

You can set HDD/SSD password via the BIOS/UEFI or (my preferred method) using HDPARM —SECURITY commands.

Then if you take the drive out you can unlock it from another computer so as long as you plug it in directly and the UEFI supports HDD/SSD unlocking during post; if not you can install a Pre-Boot authentication on the drive that runs Linux to unlock the drive and then once unlocked it with the PBA it re-boots and it works as a normal un-encrypted drive.

Look into HDPARM and OPAL standard for full disk encryption.

Arnavion2• 9 months ago

I can't say anything about dual-booting Windows. I have heard that Windows Updates will frequently overwrite your custom EFI vars setup and reinstate the Windows bootloader etc.

Other than that, FDE and Secure Boot are unrelated.

The board's UEFI will boot the EFI binary that is either your kernel + initramfs (UKI binary), or a bootloader of your choice that then boots your kernel + initramfs. Depending on your distro, you may have a bootloader like grub or systemd-boot that is already signed by the MS third-party CA and your board may already allow the third-party CA, in which case you don't need to generate and sign with your own keys. Otherwise generate your own keys, set up Secure Boot with them, and then figure out how to sign your UKI binary / bootloader binary with those keys.

This initramfs will then be responsible for locating and mounting your root etc partitions. For a systemd distro using the UAPI Discoverable Partitions spec (use a specific type ID for the root partition), systemd has a builtin cryptsetup target that will prompt you on tty to enter the LUKS password for that partition. Otherwise investigate your distro's initramfs options for doing that.

* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.

grub and systemd-boot both show menus to select one of the available EFI binaries to chain to. Otherwise your UEFI might give you a similar menu.

* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.

Any other PC can mount and decrypt the drive with cryptsetup just like your original PC could, as long as you specify the same password.

* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?

Yes. You will launch board's UEFI, set the SB status to "Setup mode", boot your OS, then generate and enroll new keys which will set the SB to "User mode" and start enforcing signatures on next boot. And if it breaks you can set it back to "Setup mode" in board's UEFI, boot the OS and troubleshoot / re-enroll keys. The OS wouldn't care that you had previously enabled SB but are now booting with SB disabled.

Note that Secure Boot != Measured Boot. With a standard Measured Boot setup the disk encryption key is protected by secure element on the board (eg TPM) measuring the boot chain, so your disk will automatically decrypt when the boot chain matches the previous measurement and automatically fail to decrypt when it doesn't match. Your concerns about failing to decrypt the disk apply to this setup, not to SB. But also LUKS-encrypted partitions can have multiple keys to unlock them, so you can have both a Measured Boot-guarded encryption key and an emergency fallback password to unlock the disk manually.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

I second slicktux's suggestion: look into OPAL, it's much more easier to setup and use compared to LUKS. The best part is, the encryption is transparent to the OS, so you could multi-boot between multiple OSes and not worry about encryption or compatibility with partitioning tools etc.

Your drive does need to support OPAL though, check out sedcli for managing SEDs.

p_ing2• 9 months ago

Microsoft abandoned OPAL/SED support due to vendor's just f-ing it up making the encryption worthless. YMMV.

beeflet6• 9 months ago

they are not incompatible. You can have secure boot and FDE for both linux and windows on the same system.

Just put linux's boot drive on a removable USB that has boot priority over the builtin drive. Then configure UEFI secure boot so that it works for both windows and your custom keys.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sakaki/Sakaki%27s_EFI_Inst...

This setup has the added benefit of making it so that windows can't overwrite your linux boot drive, but from linux you can still access your disk from disklocker

st3fan• 9 months ago

Huge opportunity for Apple too.

SoftTalker3• 9 months ago

Apple has never really tried to compete for the corporate desktop. It’s too low margin for them.

bigyabai2• 9 months ago

This. Google and Microsoft are the two juggernauts in this arena, Apple products live on the periphery of the corporate cloud ecosystem.

WheatMillington• 9 months ago

If the issue is the OS vendor having too much say in what hardware you can use, it's hard to understand what the opportunity is for Apple.

NexRebular• 9 months ago

for *BSD and illumos too

linuxftw2• 9 months ago

Thanks for fighting the good fight. My chief concern is that you will alienate some of your customers because normies think privacy is for crackpots. I don't have any experience being in small business computer repair, but just my feeling as a neutral 3rd party.

Try to identify the problems the customers have. If privacy isn't one of their concerns, convincing them to switch PC OS is not a great fit on that basis.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

Good point. Thanks. Your right I think I will create some eval questions and make sure I am putting the customers needs first.

I feel like there needs to be some way to explain the changes to Windows 11 as hostile from a longevity perspective with the ads and the lock-in.. With one-drive being activated and moving customer data to the cloud without consent, the LLM that gets in the way of the user experience, recall, ect. It would still be their choice but at least they would know what they were getting into..

I feel like id be doing some justice by letting customers who qualify (who don't have use-cases that Linux cannot handle) know that its a better experience because Microsoft is creating friction in the desktop experience now..

pessimizer• 9 months ago

Normies don't think privacy is for crackpots, that's a meme among techies who are trying to justify surveilling their users.

Normies desperately want privacy, but think it is too hard to do, they're too dumb to figure it out, even if they figure it out it still won't really work, and that they won't be able to use stuff that they don't want to live without. They are often right, because they are smarter than they think and the industry is working against them full-time. A lot of people's incomes (on this very site) depend on keeping normies ignorant.

tartoran• 9 months ago

I have Win10 on a laptop that I use and am thinking of either taking it an offline completely (and keep on win10 forever on it) or upgrade it to Linux but am not sure if it's worth the hassle upgrading a $200 Thinkpad Carbon x1, I may as well get another one and leave this one as is. I still own a laptop with Windows 7 that when I turn on, that is quite rarely, but when I do I am hit by wave of nostalgia. This win10 machine, I wish I could extend its operation as I am pleased with how it operates in its current form but I guess it's not possible. One thing I'm certain of, I will not upgrade it to Windows 11 and Microsoft and I as a user will part ways.

xarope• 9 months ago

go for it (upgrade to linux). My T480s is still my goto laptop when I'm travelling (if I lose it, no biggie - encrypted home dir, meanwhile it can last for 5-7 hours playing videos, running webapps etc), versus my work laptop on windows 11 dying after 2+ hours.

amatecha4• 9 months ago

Install Linux or BSD on that thinkpad and you're good to go. I still use ThinkPad X230's and T480/A485's every day, with Linux and BSD.

taspeotis• 9 months ago

I'm recomming my customers switch to Linux rather that Upgrade to Windows 11 (scottrlarson.com)

But of a bait and switch from that to the actual article title…

Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

If nothing else adhering to HN’s guideline on titles would have saved me having to suffer through reading “recomming.”

trinsic213• 9 months ago

sorry about that. was trying to clarify the reason for the switch for hacker-news audience.

neilv2• 9 months ago

In addition to the good distro options mentioned, there's also Debian Stable:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...

There are several options for desktop environment, and you can select which ones to install when you boot that installer image (and also add/subtract more later, and change your preference at login time).

One of the nicest-looking ones that should be self-explanatory to use (for anyone who's used any version of Microsoft Windows since 95) is Cinnamon. Most of other desktop environments default to similar, except for the current default Gnome one, which is a bit more creative in a way that's not intuitive.

amanzi• 9 months ago

I use Debian Stable + Gnome as my main PC. I use a handful of native apps which are all available on Linux, and most other apps are web-based. I never used to like the Gnome desktop, but modern Gnome is fast, unbloated, and it gets out of your way.

neilv2• 9 months ago

The author spoke of migrating Windows users, so I suggested what would be familiar to them.

The Cinnamon desktop will use a lot of that Gnome stuff, but things like a start menu and task bar will be more familiar than the corresponding elements of the default Gnome desktop.

aitchnyu• 9 months ago

With my last PC, I was looking at Freedesktop issues and waiting for cutting edge software for a year to get complete support for my hardware. Hence Ubuntu and Fedora.

chupasaurus• 9 months ago

Ubuntu is as good as Debian Sid for cutting edge (not really), PPAs work in both.

pizlonator• 9 months ago

I've been living on an Unbuntu variant (Pop_OS) for over a year now and it's surprisingly good. Note that I had been a Mac-and-some-Windows user as far as desktops go for about 10 years prior to that, and had lots of Linux experience before that - so I'm experiencing a 10 year before-and-after.

Things that intrigue me:

- For photos, darktable is surprisingly good. I think this was my biggest single surprise, being a Lightroom user.

- GIMP was always great and now it's even better.

- LibreOffice is good enough that I can live on it just fine. I do miss Keynote, but it's not a showstopper.

- Dia is good enough for diagrams, though I miss OmniGraffle.

- Notice how there aren't any Windows apps I miss. There are Mac apps I miss (Keynote and OmniGraffle).

- Anything involving the web just works.

- Suspend/resume on my Linux laptop works better than suspend/resume on Windows, but not as good as what you get on Apple M hardware.

- Battery life on my Linux laptop is better than on Windows, almost entirely because Windows wakes the laptop up while it's suspended, so if you close the Windows laptop and carry it around unplugged, you'll find that the battery is totally drained after some number of hours. Linux doesn't have this problem.

- Development workflow is amazing. I'd rather program on Linux than anything else.

- The lack of crapware and nagware is so amazing.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

- For diagrams, draw.io is a decent alternative

- Similarly for Photoshop users, Photopea might suit them better than GIMP. And there's also Photoshop Express/Online if they really want to stay in the Adobe ecosystem.

tombert6• 9 months ago

Draw.io is my go-to tool on any platform now. I did an entire bachelors and masters using it for all my diagrams.

I like OmniGraffle but personally I didn't think it was worth it when draw.io was free anyway. Like I don't feel it was $150-$250 better than draw.io, especially since it's not cross platform.

tcoff912• 9 months ago

If you just want to draw a simple diagram, Excalidraw is amazing.

noisy_boy• 9 months ago

GIMP was always great and now it's even better.

For adding shapes/colours/annotations etc to photos, I found krita to be more accessible than gimp. E.g. I wanted to do changes to my contractor's realistic concept drawings and I could learn krita (guided by Claude Sonnet) and make the changes in a span of couple of hours.

baobun• 9 months ago

Adding shoutout to Inkscape, also a very good piece of software for editing graphics.

wltr• 9 months ago

Pinta is the best for editing screenshots, I’d say.

zrobotics5• 9 months ago

IT & software dev for a small-midsize company. I wasn't able to finish migrating last month due to a pressing project, but we're migrating almost all of our systems at work to Linux. 90% of our user's work is done in a browser, and the other 10% is in an in-house application I wrote. That app works on Linux, since my work machine has been on Linux for years.

We'll have a few macs and 2 win11 machines, but the rest are getting migrated.

We're in the Google ecosystem for email, docs, and drive so I'll just deploy Chrome instead of a Libre chromium. I'd rather not troubleshoot user profile issues, and they have access to all our data anyway. Honestly, I fully expect I'll have more than a few users that don't even notice the OS change.

jbstack2• 9 months ago

Next step: escape the Google ecosystem. LibreOffice for docs (its far superior to Google Docs anyway). Syncthing for drive.

roboyoshi• 9 months ago

Slightly disagree - while LibreOffice might be better in features, the UI/UX of Google Docs worked so much better for me, it's not even funny.

sys_64738• 9 months ago

Can you elaborate on the decision making? Was it purely a financial design (i.e. not to buy Win11 new systems and use the legacy PCs for Linux), or was it just a decision to break free from the Windows upgrade cycle? Thanks!

thevillagechief• 9 months ago

Funny seeing this here at the exact moment my frustration has boiled over with windows. I'm just completely baffled at the hostility and disdain Microsoft is showing it's customers. These issues are on top of just the disregard that people actually use these products for work and business so force-updating and breaking them so often, just so they can re-force you to accept their surveillance bloatware. My feeling today has been that we're going to look back at this moment as the straw that broke the camel's back.

csomar• 9 months ago

The camel's back is already broken, it just so happens that changing OSs is very hard. MSFT has a leak; once they lose a customer, and that customer has figured out alternatives, they are never getting them back.

See this for all OSs/platforms: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-20...

See this for Desktop OSs: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

They are on a slow death spiral. Their solution to raise revenue when their marketshare goes down is to squeeze harder. So they lose more users and the vicious cycle continues. In 10-15 years, they'll dip below 50% of marketshare, at which point there will be various alternatives which will accelerate their downfall. This already happened in tablets/phones.

It might also happen faster since they have a stronghold in Asia and China is now looking to accelerate the building of alternatives.

elevation2• 9 months ago

A number of customers are leaving Windows for Linux ahead of Windows 11. To support them, we had to offer a linux equivalent for a bunch of C# .NET desktop apps.

After evaluating a lot of options, pyQT + nuitka gave a reliable cross-platform result (can target distros based on Debian and Enterprise Linux easily.) And we are still able to target Windows for the customers that remain there.

neonsunset2• 9 months ago

Avalonia would have been a far, far better option.

elevation2• 9 months ago

We evaluated a ton of options, I'm not sure how Avalonia didn't make the list. Thanks for the tip!

repiret4• 9 months ago

I agree with all of the articles points except for the first one: TPM and Secure Boot do not reduce user choice or promote state or corporate surveillance. If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot, and if you want to store secrets that don't need a user password to unlock and can't be stolen by taking apart the computer, you need a TPM; or you need substantially similar alternatives.

I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice: A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default. Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't. A Windows Logo compliant PC _also_ needs a way for users to install their own root of trust. Microsoft didn't need to add that requirement. Sure, there are large corporate and government buyers that would insist on that, but they could convince (without loss of generality) Dell to offer it to them. Instead, Microsoft said all PCs need it, and as a result, anybody who wants to take advantage of secure boot can do so if they go through the bother of installing their own root of trust and signing their boot image.

IlikeKitties3• 9 months ago

You are 100% correct and we can see the situation on phones where you can't boot anything not approved by the vendor.

trinsic213• 9 months ago

I think it has the potential to create that situation if those features ever change. I should probably update that language, but I still feel from a consumer choice perspective, those solutions seem vendor specific and not governed by an open organization.

AstralStorm• 9 months ago

Thing is, because the whole design is closed as well as firmware, the security of it is near zero, even for sealing firmware device images (e.g. option ROM), much less bootloaders. Multiple security holes have been found.

There's no issue booting a boot rootkit with the standard Windows bootloader unless you manually seal the image with command line or group policy, and even then it's possible to bypass by installing a fresh bootloader because the images are identical and will boot after a wipe.

hulitu2• 9 months ago

Thing is, because the whole design is closed as well as firmware, the security of it is near zero, even for sealing firmware device images (e.g. option ROM), much less bootloaders. Multiple security holes have been found.

This. It is secure only for MS, AMD or Intel.

juped• 9 months ago

These are old counterproductive FSF memes that should be retired, but stick around anyway.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice: A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default. Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't.

This was not the case with the initial rollout of Secure Boot, it was combined with locked BIOS to lock PCs so that they could only boot Windows 8 on some devices. This was the case on Windows RT ARM machines from that era.

All that has to be done today for machines to be locked down again is to flip a bit or blow an e-fuse. It's already the case on phones and tablets.

There is also a real potential for abusing TPMs or cryptographic co-processors to enforce remote attestation.

I say this as someone who agrees with your first paragraph and uses Secure Boot + TPMs on all of my machines.

IlikeKitties3• 9 months ago

There is also a real potential for abusing TPMs or cryptographic co-processors to enforce remote attestation.

People here REALLY need to start understanding this issue. Remote Attestation is the kind of tech that if abused will end free computing over night.

fujigawa2• 9 months ago

This was not the case with the initial rollout of Secure Boot, it was combined with locked BIOS to lock PCs so that they could only boot Windows 8 on some devices. This was the case on Windows RT ARM machines from that era.

Okay, but, that was like 15 years ago, on some shitty first-run computers that no one bought. A failed first attempt. I've never met a single person that owned, or has ever used, a Windows RT device.

The world has moved on. But oddly continues to buy bootloader-locked iPhones and Androids by the bucketful.

Dwelling on the past isn't going to move us forward. Anyone pushing the "Secure Boot and TPM are evil" trope in 2025 is objectively a fool and should be ignored. Most don't even realize what a TPM does, they think it's some secret chip inserted by glowies into their computers to prevent them from running free software. No.

spragl3• 9 months ago

There is also a real potential for abusing TPMs or cryptographic co-processors to enforce remote attestation.

Remote attestation can be misused, yes. But why writing it as TPM is the problem? In cases where remote attestation is used for good, TPM improves the setup, if anything.

I dont see the rationale for what you wrote, and am genuinely curious what it is.

scheeseman4862• 9 months ago

On the face of it they're just security features, and I don't deny they are, but the industry as a whole are using those features to implement device verification systems that are being used to lock down their platforms and centralize control over their software ecosystems.

Being able to install another OS isn't much good if critical applications and websites refuse to run on it.

gruez3• 9 months ago

Being able to install another OS isn't much good if critical applications and websites refuse to run on it.

The battle has already been lost on this. Just look at all the companies that are app-only and don't offer a web version.

josephcsible• 9 months ago

TPM and Secure Boot would be good things if there were no way to prove to third parties that you're using them, or have them configured a certain way (i.e., remote attestation). It's the fact that that is possible that makes them reduce user choice and promote state and corporate surveillance.

aleph_minus_one4• 9 months ago

TPM and Secure Boot would be good things if there were no way to prove to third parties that you're using them, or have them configured a certain way (i.e., remote attestation).

This is exactly what a TPM was made for, so your statement is a little bit paradoxical.

actsasbuffoon• 9 months ago

Maybe. This assumes I trust Microsoft to have part of my computer where I have no ability to interrogate it to see what they’re doing in there.

If it’s on my computer, I should be allowed to read and write to it. End of story. I don’t care if that makes it vulnerable. So far as I’m concerned, letting Microsoft keep secrets from me on my own computer is similarly catastrophic to losing my HD to a crypto-locker virus.

ivolimmen2• 9 months ago

https://www.welivesecurity.com/2023/03/01/blacklotus-uefi-bo...

matheusmoreira• 9 months ago

TPM and Secure Boot do not reduce user choice or promote state or corporate surveillance

Now with remote attestation they do.

installing their own root of trust and signing their boot image

Won't matter. They can tell we did this. They won't trust our keys. Only their own.

edg50005• 9 months ago

if you want to store secrets that don't need a user password to unlock and can't be stolen by taking apart the computer, you need a TPM

I had a Win 7 system and just entered a password on boot, this decrypted the disk. It was supported without mods or TPM (maybe some registry tweaks though). On Ubuntu I do the same, no need for TPM. Am I missing something? My disk is encrypted. If they take it apart, they need my password to crack the encryption.

Cu3PO42• 9 months ago

The important part in the parent is "that don't need a user password". You just said you had to supply a (user) password.

With a TPM you can set it up that your disk is unlocked automatically, but only if no-one changed anything in the signed boot chain. This is the default with Bitlocker on Windows and is also possible on Linux, though somewhat more finicky.

bpye• 9 months ago

Am I missing something? My disk is encrypted. If they take it apart, they need my password to crack the encryption.

You’re not protected from an evil maid attack. An attacker with physical access could make your device boot their own payload to capture your encryption key and install a rootkit.

isodev• 9 months ago

Microsoft actually promoted user choice

Let’s not give Microsoft too much credit here…

Between 2011 and 2013, multiple Linux / free software organisations raised the issue with the EC. There was an actual antitrust investigation which at the time was seen as what motivated Microsoft to open the solution to third parties by 2013.

So in a way, thank you EU for making it so we have choices at all.

With that said, I think the technology still does more to promote vendor lock-in and as others have said, it’s one windows update away from a dystopian hellscape where all your bits have been pre-approved by someone else.

terabyterex• 9 months ago

a lot of what he says is straight lies or stupidity. I love linux but disagree with everything he says.

bob1029• 9 months ago

I am starting to see the benefits to secure boot and TPM from a gaming perspective. I realize this can still be tampered with but it eliminates so many casual cheaters that the edge case is practically irrelevant.

I don't see how my TPM module will prevent me from using the machine the way I want. The offer of a cryptographic assurance to a 3rd party is something I happily provide in order to gain access to a competitive gaming resource. Cheaters really fucking suck and if this is what it takes to ruin their day, then fantastic. I'm looking forward to TPM3.0 now after seeing how ruinous this has been to their schemes. These tools are effective.

Battlefield 6 is especially problematic for malcontents because its developers also enjoy using statistical methods to detect cheaters. TPM2.0 + statistical methods + $69.99 per try = probably can't afford to play this game unfairly for very long. Even if you can afford it, the in game progression takes an eternity. You're gonna need that 8x scope if you want your "undetectable" frame scanning aimbot to be of any use.

realusername2• 9 months ago

I don't think it helps for cheaters, you have cheaters on console and it's even more locked down than that.

tpxl2• 9 months ago

I don't see how my TPM module will prevent me from using the machine the way I want.

"Your version of TPM is unsupported. Please update your hardware to enjoy playing Battlefield 7". Your 69.99 per try just went up to 769.99 _for legitimate users_ because you need a new CPU with updated TPM for every new version. I'm being hyperbolic, but only slightly.

If you want a real example of this, Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 to run. Hardware predating wide TPM2 adoption can be powerful enough to run Windows 11, except the company decided you need a new computer to do that.

AnthonyMouse7• 9 months ago

I don't see how my TPM module will prevent me from using the machine the way I want.

I guess people don't know this particular dystopia is implemented.

First a platform gets third parties (games, banks, etc.) to impose their attestation system on customers. Congrats, you're locked in! This is the gun they point at you but the bullet comes after.

Now you can't leave the platform or you lose all your games, have to get a new bank, etc. The more stuff they can get to require that, the more stuck you are. This also prevents any new competitors from building a network effect. But competition -- the ability to switch to a competitor -- is the only thing stopping them from being the worst people in the world. Ads in the start menu. Censoring whatever they don't like. If you want to buy something -- anything -- they want a 30% cut. They'll hide it from you but take it anyway. All your local files get uploaded to their cloud and the terms let them use it for AI training, or whatever else they want. And soon you have to pay a monthly fee if you don't want them to be deleted. Why would not paying also delete them from your local machine? Because screw you, you don't have a choice anymore.

account4210• 9 months ago

Entertainment is the last thing you should give up your freedoms for.

netdevphoenix7• 9 months ago

I am starting to see the benefits to secure boot and TPM from a gaming perspective. I realize this can still be tampered with but it eliminates so many casual cheaters that the edge case is practically irrelevant.

This is overkill for a feature that is only relevant to one specific usage of PCs. Imagine if your PC got crippled because farmer IT admin benefits from it

weightedreply• 9 months ago

Many OEM's don't allow changing keys and Microsoft doesn't even enforce their own certification requirements. See:

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1610033-hp-charges-for-warra...

naasking2• 9 months ago

If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot

I think this is very misleading. Secure boot was a response to the poor security of commodity operating systems which allowed programs easy access to make low-level system modifications. In other words, the poor security models of commodity operating systems was the actual cause that allowed rootkits to spread and become a major threat that required mitigation.

In an alternate world in which operating systems enforced least privilege on all programs, the likelihood of a rootkit spreading would be orders of magnitude smaller, almost not even worth mentioning. The motivation for secure boot in this world is really only to prevent supply chain attacks, which can also be solved by just buying hardware from reputable companies. Secure boot arguably would not have been created in this world, thus avoiding the new dangers inherent to it.

hollerith2• 9 months ago

Yes, but when an individual hacker needs a secure computer and is deciding which computer to buy, it does him no good to tell him that if the whole industry had evolved in a more convenient way over the last 4 decades, he would have been able to avoid secure boot: in the actual world, the only user-facing computers on the market with decent security use secure boot to help deliver that decent security where "user-facing" means "used to browse the web and maybe other things".

Also remote attestation has pro-social uses. Without it, photographs will soon become useless as evidence because soon there will be no way to distinguish a photo of a real scene from the output of generative AI.

dogleash• 9 months ago

Microsoft didn't need to add that requirement.

Yes, they did. It was written by the specter of the US Department Of Justice.

hulitu2• 9 months ago

If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot

Secure boot is a rootkit.

1over1373• 9 months ago

Where I work, I'd love to move our remaining Windows boxes to linux, but there's often software that only works on Windows. How well does Wine work these days? Can they run CAD software for example?

SoftTalker3• 9 months ago

It’s often more a question of “will the vendor support it” than “can it run.”

1over1373• 9 months ago

Vendor support is mostly useless at the best of times. I'm more interested in 'can it run'.

zrobotics5• 9 months ago

CAD machines are some of the few in our company that are staying windows instead of going to Linux. We're an autodesk shop, I tested fusion under Debian 6 months ago and it didn't work very well. I tried proton and wine, couldn't get either to work great and had issues. It would launch, but opening a medium complexity assembly was laggy, and the CAM module would crash fairly often. I can't speak for other programs from personal experience though.

That said, for home use freecad has gotten a lot better after the ondsel changes were merged, I was using the free liscence of fusion360 for personal projects, and moved over to freecad 6 months ago. I'd originally tried it 7 or 8 years ago, and it was just absolutely awful to use, but modern versions are really very good. There wasn't a huge learning curve, and I haven't run into anything that the program can't do. For hobby CAD, I'm using it for 3d printing, a Cnc mill, and making prints for manual machining. Honestly, I've been less frustrated with freecad than fusion360, it does a better job of getting out of my way and letting me design things. That said, I'm a software dev and IT guy, I don't know if it would work for commercial use. I certainly didn't push for the engineers to change, but their workstations are already running win11 that I had to debloat.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

Here's a list of CAD application and their ratings on AppDB: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...

grogenaut2• 9 months ago

Just run it in a windows vm for just that use, there's great ways to make this almost seamless in linux. works better than win/etc.

fainpul• 9 months ago

CAD applications usually require graphics acceleration. I've tried to make Fusion 360 work on linux using VMware, VirtualBox and GNOME Boxes – performance was unacceptably bad.

1over1373• 9 months ago

What's the point of putting it in a VM? That doesn't get rid of Windows, which was the whole point.

beeflet6• 9 months ago

Not really.

On linux, you have OpenSCAD (which is okay for some applications) and you have FreeCAD (which sucks imo). Right now, I just use OnShape which works in my web browser and is similar to SOLIDWORKS (and it's $0 for students).

In the future I will try running windows CAD under linux using kvm and this: https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary

phendrenad2• 9 months ago

Just use Windows lol

donatj• 9 months ago

They want to try to force me to buy a new PC? In this economy?

I'm using Ubuntu as my daily driver for the first time since ~2010, and I'm solidly not hating it.

Thinking about other desktop environments and what not, but this was easy and familiar. Everything literally just worked... Which is the first for me with Linux.

billy99k2• 9 months ago

I've been using Linux since the early 2000s. I've never been able to completely switch over from Windows or Mac.

One issue I've always had is when updating applications you use every day, one bad library could make the application unusable. Most are a dependency nightmares and there just aren't enough people paid to work on Linux apps to offer good support.

When I was young and poor, I had all the time in the world to tinker with my Linux machine to figure to get everything working again. I just want an operating system to work. If not Windows, I would recommend a Mac.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

One issue I've always had is when updating applications you use every day, one bad library could make the application unusable. Most are a dependency nightmares and there just aren't enough people paid to work on Linux apps to offer good support.

That's not really a problem anymore with immutable/atomic distros. Your entire system is upgraded in one go as a single image, any dependency issues are handled on the server (basically the image won't get built if there are issues). And most of your user apps will be installed via Flatpak or other means (homebrew/Nix etc) so you won't ever have to suffer from dependency issues unlike regular distros.

So if you want to get a distro that "just works", get an immutable+atomic distro (eg Aurora, Bazzite etc). Assuming of course, you've got compatible hardware.

billy99k2• 9 months ago

It's not with Windows or Mac.

orionblastar• 9 months ago

I had a small business in 1995. We offered Slackware Linux for free and provided free training and installation for clients who wanted to try it. When Windows 95 came out, I had a 486DX 50Mhz system that booted Windows 95 and Linux, and Linux was more stable than Windows 95. Linux was also better than OS/2, but it didn't run DOS and Windows programs in Linux yet.

Those who chose Linux were happy with the choice. But they were only a minority.

Now, Windows 11 requirements make a lot of PCs obsolete unless they install Linux on them.

__MatrixMan__• 9 months ago

I may recommended the same for my parents.

20 years ago Ubuntu was the go-to for baby's first Linux. Is that still the case?

reassess_blind• 9 months ago

Probably Linux Mint these days.

theflyinghorse• 9 months ago

Mint is great! I've been using it for years, everything just works out of the box

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

Ubuntu has unfortunately become the Windows of the Linux world - and I don't mean that in a good way.

Unless you want to be the perpetual IT support for your parents, I would recommend getting a user-friendly immutable/atomic distro, like Aurora[1]. Aurora uses KDE, which most Windows users would find familiar. It is immutable, which makes it very hard to break, and it uses atomic updates (basically updates either apply or don't: there's no partial state which can break the system). And in the rare event that something does break, you can boot directly to the previous version right from the boot menu, no need to run any manual rollback commands. My 70yr old mother also uses Aurora and has zero issues.

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

In my experience, if you aren't dealing with power users, normal people won't be able to break their Linux install. The standard permissions model stops them from doing anything stupid, and they don't know enough to be dangerous.

magarnicle• 9 months ago

The Windows of 15 years ago, maybe. Using Ubuntu now does not feel anywhere near as bad as using current Windows.

treesknees• 9 months ago

I wouldn't rule out a distro like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux (or anything else based on RHEL) with Gnome or KDE installed. They will receive 10 years of kernel and OS security updates, and you can either use Firefox from their repos or use something like Flatpak or Snap to get newer software packages if necessary.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

Canonical keeps packaging things like Firefox as Snaps and that leads to weird issues sometimes. If it were up to me, I'd avoid anything using Snap because of the potential for headaches.

DarkCrusader2• 9 months ago

Would highly recommend Mint. Very stable, sensible defaults. Updates never broke anything in the past several years I have been using it on desktop and laptop. Just install the latest LTS version, turn on automatic updates and forget about it.

excalibur• 9 months ago

I used to run Office in Wine back in the day. Is that not a thing anymore?

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

You can still run older versions, but anything from 2019 onwards will struggle - and you can completely forget about the latest M365 versions.

Luckily OnlyOffice is a pretty decent alternative with excellent compatibility with MSO formats. And there's also the web versions of office, which is now a decent alternative (unless you're a power user who needs macros/VBA etc).

lutusp3• 9 months ago

This is an excellent article as well as a sign of the times. I wish the list of Linux choices had included Mint, which is essentially Ubuntu without Snaps. Snaps are a partly closed-source Ubuntu project that contradicts the open nature of Linux.

Linux users can install the free software suite LibreOffice, which not only replaces Office but reads and writes the same file formats. Many similar choices exist, this is just one.

Gamers can install the free Steam game compatibility layer on Linux, then play many of the same games they play on Windows.

Meanwhile, Redmond's recent requirement that everyone sign up for a Microsoft account, and its pushing the Recall eavesdropping-to-cloud feature with no user opt-out provisions, clearly signals Microsoft's belief that their customers should't be allowed to choose.

Here is a list of current Windows traits that should be options, but are out of an end-user's control:

* Required Microsoft account.

* User tracking and telemetry without knowledge or consent.

* OneDrive, which is cloud storage and tracking, requires technical skill to disable.

* Desktop-recall images to the cloud, essentially Microsoft mass surveillance.

* Edge browser, cannot disable or remove.

* Unintuitive user interface, out of user's control.

* Advertising everywhere.

All these frequently heard complaints are addressed by Linux, and Linux is free.

I've been a Linux user for 30 years. I maintain one Windows dual-boot system, partly to help friends deal with Windows issues, partly to entertain myself with what most people believe constitutes a normal end-user computer experience.

A bit of context -- my first computer was an Apple II in 1977, so my definition of personal computing might seem out of touch with modern times (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...).

throwaway20372• 9 months ago

    > contradicts the open nature of Linux

How do you feel about binary blobs required to run most WiFi cards in Linux? And, I am pretty sure that both NVidia and AMD have similar (binary blobs).

lutusp3• 9 months ago

It's a matter of choice. We have no choice about firmware drivers, but we do about which Linux distribution to install. Since there is a choice, we can exercise it and send a signal that open-source is preferred.

And, I am pretty sure that both NVidia and AMD have similar (binary blobs).

Yes, all true, and as more powerful GPUs appear, this is likely to become a more contentious issue.

So I say, choose where we have a choice.

heavyset_go14• 9 months ago

Almost all hardware that requires firmware has firmware that isn't open source.

TiredOfLife• 9 months ago

pushing the Recall eavesdropping-to-cloud feature with no user opt-out provisions

That's not what Recall is and not how it works.

lutusp3• 9 months ago

That's not what Recall is and not how it works.

You're right, I overstated how Recall works, right now. At the moment, it's opt-in and the images are only stored locally. I was wrong -- my claims were several months out of date.

Recall's current form results from a heated online debate about its original form, which was neither encrypted nor opt-in.

At the time I write this, Microsoft won't allow users to uninstall Recall, a demand made by security professionals who see serious risks for non-technical end users in the event of a compromised system.

Having said that, let's revisit this feature some years from now. Let's see whether Microsoft's perennial corporate death-by-a thousand-cuts strategy has changed anything.

ChrisArchitect2• 9 months ago

Title is: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

Can you fix?

ChrisArchitect2• 9 months ago

Nobody thinks this is a weird reaction to an OS update that's been out for years at this point and barely makes a difference over the previous version?

There's no 'Recall'. Co-pilot isn't all over in your face so removing it isn't really a priority. Edge isn't forced on you, it's just part of the bundled software just like a bunch of other items as in every Windows for decades. Not saying it doesn't get hairy if you're going out of your way to remove them or not be in the ecosystem, but consumers don't care, and for the most part stuff isn't being forced in front of them.

browningstreet• 9 months ago

If you’re not on the corporate managed version of Windows 11, Microsoft frequently resets the default apps related to browsing, svg, pdf etc. I had it done twice in a week recently. That’s what flipped the trigger for me and I finally abandoned Microsoft.

If you’re measuring “Windows isn’t annoying” from the corporate perch, that’s not a fair comparison to what consumers and home users put up with.

Not to mention the forced upgrade and reboots that can’t easily be disabled for same.

jimbob452• 9 months ago

Every other OS from MS is garbage. XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 so bad no one remembers it, 10 goodish, 11 horrific.

The hate is hardly unprecedented and indeed well-deserved. MS has shown in the past that they’ll respond to poor OS reception with attempts to win back customers and that’s what I’m hoping for in this case.

aleph_minus_one4• 9 months ago

Every other OS from MS is garbage. XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 so bad no one remembers it, 10 goodish, 11 horrific.

Rather:

2000: good

XP: decent (after a long series of patches)

Vista: bad

7: good

8: horrific

10: bad (basically all the people hated it because of the surveillance stuff)

11: horrific

Dylan16807• 9 months ago

been out for years

Because now is the real push to get everyone off 10.

toast02• 9 months ago

I've started running windows 11 lately because I've gotten some laptops that had it, and after removing all the microsoft pushed apps including removing OneDrive at least twice... It just doesn't feel very good.

a) the lock screen gets stuck from time to time if you hit enter to get to the password entry, until you turn off all the pushed content on the lock screen. Which ok, I'm happy I turned that off... but then I had to log out and back in for that setting to take effect. Now that I know about that setting, I turned it off on my windows 10 machines, and it takes effect instantly.

b) I like my windows round on the top and square on the bottom. It's cutting off the bottom left character in my putty windows; you used to be able to undo that in the registry, but now you need to force load dlls (maybe putty can fix it?)

c) I don't want notepad to have tabs or autosaving

d) it feels like keyboard focus gets lost to the ether a lot more. I had this happen in new style apps on 10 (like the new calc), but it happens at the desktop from time to time on 11.

I had been using linux as my main desktop at home for years, and went back to windows 7 when gnome2 ended. 7 was very good, but it's been downhill since then, especially since Microsoft killed off SDET roles. I'll probably keep windows on the laptops (useful for FRC), but when support for 10 runs out, the desktops are going to move to FreeBSD and I dunno, fvwm maybe?

johnnienaked2• 9 months ago

Almost nobody thinks that. You sound like you don't use or are not very familiar with your OS very much tbh

whycome• 9 months ago

“Upgrade to Linux”

vivzkestrel2• 9 months ago

I have said this 10 times on HN and i ll say it again. Release a version of Windows 11 called "Windows Optinmal" that has 0 telemetry, 0 trackers, 0 bloatware that runs faster than Windows 7 on modern hardware. Charge 4x the prices if you want, I ll pay happily

fsflover3• 9 months ago

What if 4x is too low? How much more would you agree to pay?

vivzkestrel2• 9 months ago

good question, answer is we need to find out how much value they are getting currently and only slightly incentivize them

socalgal2• 9 months ago

I'm sure I will regret this, something will change and I'll be "F.U. Win11!". But, I'm on Windows 11 Pro (upgraded from Windows 10 Pro) and I have barely noticed a difference.

Maybe because it's Windows Pro, not Home? Maybe because I have 2 profiles. The one I used to install it which required a microsoft account, and a separate, local only account which is the one I use always. I can't remember the last time I had to use the other account. Maybe when I upgraded to Windows 11. I don't remember.

I'm not trying to excuse Microsoft. I had to go into settings and turn off everything I could find. I had to futs around to get it to stop trying to get me to install Exchange every time I pressed Win-E (or was it Win-W) which I press often because I use the same keyboard on Mac and Win-W is Cmd-W (open new Window) (A: Powertoys). So yea, I cursed that. But, I found a solution.

Other than that, so far, it stays mostly out of my way and just works. I'm hard pressed to notice too many differences. Is it because I'm on Pro? Is it because it's a local account? Is it just luck? I don't know. It only suggests that it's at least possible, so far, to use it.

BLKNSLVR2• 9 months ago

It just sounds as if you haven't reached whatever your capacity is for "having to setup the OS to get out of your way". And that's a personal choice for everyone.

Windows 10 eventually breached my capacity due to the number of defaults I had to change post installation, and then often, again, post-patch/update. This was very soon after Windows 10 was released, and I already didn't like Windows 8's hybrid monstrosity following on from the sublime Windows 7, which I consider to be peak Windows.

I moved to Pop! OS and have been enjoying it on both desktop and laptop for over 5 years.

danparsonson2• 9 months ago

Forced updates were the last straw for me - after several iterations of using my machine until late, then being forced to let it update itself for another 30-60 minutes when I just wanted to switch everything off and go to bed, and noting that Proton made almost every game playable on Linux (thanks Valve).... the switch was a no-brainer.

koyote• 9 months ago

Some things that any semi-power user will notice and get angry at:

* Needing internet and a microsoft account to install the OS

* Start menu now requiring two clicks to get to programs list

* Right-click requiring two clicks to get to the options you most likely want to use (e.g. 7z unzip or opening in a specific program)

* Task manager being slow and laggy

* Random ads asking you to install a game pop up in the notification area

* ...

And then there's little bugs everywhere that just grind away at you on a daily basis:

* A tab in explorer will sometimes randomly stop accepting clicks (keyboard select works). So I have to close the tab and re-open

* The keyboard layout setting gets corrupted and there's no proper way to reset it (nevermind the fact tha this setting is now burried twenty levels deep in the new settings app)

* The settings app search does not work

* ...

It is by far the worst Windows version (beating Vista and ME to that title) in my opinion. I use linux as my daily but am forced to use Windows at work and they have of course been forced to upgrade us to Windows 11...

3eb7988a16633• 9 months ago

  Right-click requiring two clicks to get to the options you most likely want to use (e.g. 7z unzip or opening in a specific program)

This one you can still change. It is some hidden registry tweak, but there is the capacity to always "show more options".

erentz• 9 months ago

And then there's little bugs everywhere that just grind away at you on a daily basis:

When I create a new folder or file in a directory in explorer it hangs for a bit and doesn’t show up unless I click refresh. Ditto if I save a file to a directory that is open in explorer.

Thinking about trying to get a copy of Win 10 IoT LTSC instead at this point.

jpk2f24• 9 months ago

I largely agree with your points, but in this context -

* A microsoft account is only needed for Windows 11 Home. A "semi-power user" is hopefully not using that edition of Windows...

* I'm also greatly annoyed by the right click - but holding shift when right-clicking opens the expected menu, removing the extra click requirement.

Some of my own annoyances though:

* The taskbar/windows button seems to just...crash...sometimes. It'll eventually restart, but extremely annoying. Left clicking taskbar icons still works, but right clicks or the start button don't work as expected.

* Additional clicks to change audio devices...drives me crazy on my main system.

* I like the autosaving aspect of notepad, but they've killed the main reason I used it - an instantaneous, lightweight text app. It's still quick, but is noticeably slower.

* Settings and Control Panel is still a mess, and even less usable than Windows 10 was.

silisili• 9 months ago

Oh goodness yes. I was forced from Linux to W11 Pro for my new job. Use wsl2 they said, it'll be fine.

And wsl2 is mostly fine. But that doesn't stop the rest of the OS from being a dumpster fire. Why is it asking me to install or play Xbox games constantly? It feels like I have malware...

morshu90014• 9 months ago

Might have to wait and see. I recently installed Win10 on my spare PC that previously had Ubuntu. Thought it was remarkably clean, but then the nagging about backups etc started coming.

The PC also had Win10 before Ubuntu, and I remember that being way worse because of the constant updates which always triggered more nags and resetting my default browser.

jokoon• 9 months ago

So I can use windows 11 without an account?

I thought that was not possible

pjc50• 9 months ago

The "Microsoft account" requirement is a weird one, because when I got a Win 11 PC after the death of my Win 10 one, I tried to set it up with my Microsoft account .. and it told me that this was unsupported on this account, and then it just fell back to creating a local one anyway. Which was what I wanted. No idea how I got into that state, other than the account being very old.

cornichon622• 9 months ago

The difference for me is how much time do I need to spend to tweak the system, and how much frustration will I still experience after tweaking everything I could. I found a Linux distro which suits my needs and desires out of the box, that I can just install and immediately get started doing whatever I need to do. It makes using a computer much more enjoyable.

weq2• 9 months ago

Upgrade from windows 10 to Windows XP or Windows 7. All the holes have been found already.

glaucon3• 9 months ago

It seems to me that he's missed Teams off his list of "where this might not work for you" situations. A lot more than half my money comes from clients who know of nothing else. I'm not pleased about this, but it's another part of their grip on their more-or-less monopoly.

throwaway20372• 9 months ago

I would also say that the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook is much better than the web app. Can you even drag and drop emails to attach them from the web app? I never tried it. (It always bothers me that I cannot do it in Gmail. Attached emails are so common in the business world.)

Also: Almost all replacements for Excel are much worse, and incompatible with existing VBA macros that run a lot of HR, accounting, budgets, and other support functions.

Regarding Teams desktop app vs web app: Is there a big difference? I don't have experience with the web app.

glaucon3• 9 months ago

| Regarding Teams desktop app vs web app: Is there a big difference? I don't have experience with the web app.

I seem to recall : it would only work on Edge; and you couldn't share your screen in the web environment.

I say "only work on Edge" but, to be fair, it's possible I may not have tried Chrome as I never use it. It didn't work on Firefox.

wazoox3• 9 months ago

Teams works in Firefox on Linux perfectly fine for me.

glaucon3• 9 months ago

Sorry, I've only just seen your response. Are you able to share your screen using FF on Linux? It's been about eighteen months since I tried so perhaps things have changed since my experience.

tombert6• 9 months ago

Even if I didn't give a shit about the privacy stuff, I would like to just reiterate something I said a few days ago.

My mom got an automatic update to Windows 11, and it bricked her computer. It wouldn't boot; it would spin and then say it needed to go into repair mode, and then doing repair mode didn't do anything.

My initial thought was that the disk was hosed, but of course my parents had a bunch of priceless documents that were never backed up anywhere else, so I talked my dad through flashing a USB of Ubuntu so I could boot into it [1], mounted the NTFS partition, and ran smartctl and the disk wasn't reporting any errors. I found and ran a few other diagnostic commands and again, no errors. I was able to rsync the files to my home server, so nothing was loss. My initial assumption is that the Windows Update team didn't properly check to see if the CPU was compatible, and that maybe they were calling a newer instruction that wasn't on my mom's relatively old laptop.

After unsuccessfully trying to convince my parents to move to Linux, I talked them through flashing a USB drive with Windows 11 with an official image from Microsoft and using Microsoft's official disk flashing software, and we were able to install Windows 11, and as far as we can tell, it worked completely fine.

My hypothesis now is that whomever built Windows Update fucked up some kind of boot key and it was failing as a result. That or they just decided my mom should buy a new computer.

I was actually more annoyed after Windows 11 worked perfectly fine, not just because that means my parents aren't going to move to Linux, but also because that means that there's no technical reason that the computer should have been bricked, it was just the utter incompetence of Windows Update. Just to reiterate, this wasn't some hacked version of Windows 11, this was directly downloaded from Microsoft, flashed with their tools, with no adulteration on our end, meaning regular Windows 11 works fine. I highly doubt that my mom is the only person who has gone through or will go through this, and a lot of the people that will go through this won't have kids who are software engineers and probably be forced to buy a new computer.

Genuinely, how much e-waste is going to be generated by this forced update?

[1] Why the hell isn't there any kind of "Live USB" version of Windows? I mean officially, not some hacked thing? Why is the best way to fix Windows to use Linux?

somerandomqaguy• 9 months ago

There was a live USB version of windows; Windows to Go. Microsoft stopped supporting it about 6 years ago for some reason.

tombert6• 9 months ago

Huh, well that’s odd. I cannot be the only person who would have wanted such a thing; live Linux USBs are extremely useful for these particular things, it seems like Windows should have it too. And be maintained

toast02• 9 months ago

Why the hell isn't there any kind of "Live USB" version of Windows? I mean officially, not some hacked thing? Why is the best way to fix Windows to use Linux?

The windows installer image includes repair tools (which probably wouldn't work much better than the automatic repair), and you can get a command prompt in there and do whatever.

amatecha4• 9 months ago

Yeah, I just got a msg the other day from someone who's saying "Windows 11 won't work on my computer, what should I do?" .. I'm suggesting they try Linux. All they do is browse the web and play card games. Linux has way the hell more games than Windows comes with, and it doesn't bundle ads with its games either!

tombert6• 9 months ago

It's kind of primitive but AisleRiot is my favorite solitaire application. It's simple, it's lightweight, it's either included with or easy to install into any distro. I play FreeCell on there all the time.

amatecha4• 9 months ago

nice, thanks, I'll take a look!

Oh, yeah, this is absolutely perfect. Thanks again, that's amazing! It was really the only thing I wasn't sure about upfront for the person I'm thinking of. So awesome :D

wazoox3• 9 months ago

I prefer Pysol but both are free anyway ;)

wackget• 9 months ago

This will only work if the customers have a considerable amount of experience with computers already. For the vast majority of people, Linux is going to present insurmountable challenges which will only lead to serious frustration.

I say this as someone who uses Linux daily. It's simply not ready for mass exposure. The second a layman wants to do anything remotely custom with it, they are going to struggle.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

I think the vast majority of people use a PC for only basic functionality, like browsing the web and editing documents/spreadsheets, and for these users, Linux works fine. My 70yr old mum is a classic example of this - she used all versions of Windows from 3.1 to 7, and she switched to Linux about a decade ago and has zero issues. If my mum can use Linux, so can the average Joe.

It's the power users, or users who've got specific proprietary software/hardware requirements that usually run into issues: gamers who play games with kernel-level anti-cheat, professionals who're dependent on Adobe/AutoCAD etc.

abdullahkhalids3• 9 months ago

I will hazard that the modal computer user in 2025 has never installed anything on their desktop computer. Almost everything is done through the browser these days - unfortunately.

dangus• 9 months ago

I really don’t like articles like these because there’s so much FUD in a well-intentioned direction but it takes it too far.

Like, secure boot is not a bad feature, and I use it with Linux to enhance my security posture. It is a good thing. TPM is rather useful for encrypting your disks. Stop telling non-technical people stuff like this. The hypotheticals of a future of corporate control via TPM are completely outweighed by the importance of encrypting your data today. As of right now TPM isn’t enabling some kind of horrendous dystopian present. Maybe it will in the future but I dunno, I haven’t see it yet.

And then a lot of other parts of this article are gross exaggerations of reality, and a lot of those complaints already existed with Windows 10 users anyway. Some of these were actually worse at previous points in time (e.g., it used to be way more difficult to remove OneDrive and now it just uninstalls cleanly).

Windows Recall and Copoilot are entirely optional features that are very easy to disable entirely.

The author is straight up lying about windows recall and the “surveillance state,” Microsoft has directly stated that it is 100% local (doesn’t even work on hardware that lacks AI processing optimizations) and no information from the feature leaves your device. It also comes with a rather extensive list of security controls and sensible defaults if you actually read the documentation. Sure, a pre-release beta version had a security issue, but that was pre-release. If we want to start claiming that Microsoft is just directly lying about things they document very specifically and directly about Windows Recall that’s a really big accusation.

Windows 11 prevents complete uninstallation of features…yeah it’s an operating system, no shit. No they’re not going to let me uninstall File Explorer. Yes I know Linux lets you do that.

And the complaints about edge, sure, it’s true and all, but it is again a one-time issue that goes away once you change your default browser to some other browser that also begs you to make it default. It’s a minor annoyance at worst and judging by the marketshare of chrome everyone pretty much ignored Microsoft’s pathetic pleading. Everyone pretty much sleepwalks into installing chrome anyway.

Look, I say all this as a Linux user myself. There’s no need to exaggerate and lie about Windows just because we prefer Linux. I would still not recommend to most average joe windows 10 users that they should switch over to Linux, but I am recommending to more people than ever before.

netdevphoenix7• 9 months ago

Windows Recall and Copoilot are entirely optional features that are very easy to disable entirely.

And very easy for Microsoft to enable silently. Missing the point here. The fact that they are enabled by default is the concerning bit. You shouldn't need to fight against your OS or worry if the next update will do something to your system that you don't like. This is the crux of it all

scythe• 9 months ago

Alternative for Microsoft Office: LibreOffice,

This would seem to require a little elaboration. LibreOffice Calc is supposed to be decent, but I practically never hear about it being used in the professional contexts where Excel typically appears. I'd be willing to bet that it will handle all of the spreadsheets currently used at our firm, but that's a convenient case where only a small number of spreadsheets matter and I know how they all work. For anyone managing a larger ecosystem the switching cost is daunting. Some links to case studies or analyses of when Calc can take over for Excel would probably be pretty helpful, since as far as I can tell Excel is the reason people stick to Microsoft, while Outlook, Teams and Word are mostly just tolerated.

m463• 9 months ago

I should mention that ubuntu phones home a lot.

I like the fact that it has done a lot for the linux ecosystem, but there are a few things:

- it has a privacy policy

- it forces updates

- their hardwired package ubuntu-advantage-tools cannot be uninstalled without breaking the os

- motd has telemetry and nags

- can't disable snaps

- whoopsie uploads crashes to canonical

now, this is different from windows because the os is mostly open source, but it is important to know not all linux distros are the same

(note that because the source is generally open, you can probably figure out how to "fix" most of these problems, but not easily and they are moving targets)

spaghetti_king• 9 months ago

I'm curious what you recommend? I've used Ubuntu mostly because of it's larger community and assumed it was less painful then others but am open to switching. I have to say the endless amount of distros and small differences between them has always been daunting and something I think holds some non-technical people back.

npteljes6• 9 months ago

I started with Ubuntu back in the day, and later distro-hopped a lot, but honestly, I find the apt package manager the nicest. So I went back to Ubuntu's source: Debian. I use it with KDE.

I also have a good out of the box experience with Zorin (an Ubuntu-based distro). Their goal is to be an alternative to Windows, to make the transition smoother for people coming from Windows. I wanted to test that and just installed it, never used the command line, etc. It feels nice and did everything via a graphical interface I wanted out of a desktop system.

I think holds some non-technical people back.

That might seem like an issue, but what matters for adoption is what is packaged with hardware, and what gets support later. Microsoft realized this and capitalized on it big time, and that's why the de facto default PC is Windows. Microsoft took care that governments, schools use Windows and Office, that Windows comes bundled with PCs and laptops, meanwhile they took care that it all interacts at least on a basic level, but at least somewhat reliably.

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

Mint/Cinnamon is based on Ubuntu and better. No snaps and probably less telemetry. I've got opensnitch and haven't noticed anything sent to Mint.

Joel_Mckay• 9 months ago

In general, the Ubuntu cinnamon desktop is a good starter system.

That being said, make sure to install printer, camera, and GPU drivers for new users before leaving your care (note iphone PhotoSync app also works with ssh.) Additionally, loading a suite of common Applications to replace web/email/CAD/publishing/media/gthumb/zoom tools will ease new users experience looking to complete some task.

Linux workstations are easier now given most services are web or App based. MacOS also tends to be easier for the people locked into Adobe =3

pumanoir• 9 months ago

For office I'd recommend Softmaker's FreeOffice or Pro 2024. They've worked great in my linux and macs

AdeptusAquinas• 9 months ago

I've been using Windows 11 since it came out. Seems fine, no real difference over 10. Maybe a little bit faster.

Some of the more annoying stuff like ads in the start menu and the like only really affect americans, as far as I know. I've never seen it. Had a brief battle turning copilot off everywhere when that became a thing - including in notepad! - but thats hardly just a microsoft thing.

Don't really understand all this drama over the TPM chip, especially since you can bypass that requirement with a little effort if you can't upgrade your hardware.

wvenable• 9 months ago

I ran a few shut-up scripts and installed StartAllBack and my machine is almost indistinguishable from Windows 7 on first glance. And it was certainly no more work than configuring Linux to my liking.

unixhero4• 9 months ago

How about this, you don't need Windows. My mum runs Linux and has been for 10 years! No more support phonecalls!

theandrewbailey• 9 months ago

Agreed! I replaced XP with Xubuntu (my preferred distro at the time) on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)

[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.

scaglio• 9 months ago

Luckily, to replace most of the Office applications, their respective online web applications work very well. That wouldn't be a major issue in migrating to Linux.

BatteryMountain2• 9 months ago

The best path forward for home users and small business for non-technical users:

Install Fedora with KDE.

Install Firefox, Thunderbird and Chrome.

Install uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger.

Install LibreOffice & bookmark Google Docs.

Install multimedia support, h264/h265, VLC/mpv/ffmpeg, enable DRM in browser.

Install Steam if applicable.

If they have a printer, connect it and show them how to print a page.

Configure & tweak KDE to be cleaner & more user friendly (its already near perfect out of the box). Show them how to manage wifi/lan connections.

Stick with Intel & AMD hardware, Nvidia drivers breaks on most kernel updates (and it messes with luks/secureboot/dracut). Intel & AMD, Just Works.

Educate the user on how to do Software Updates, install/remove software, how the file explorer works, maybe some terminal stuff if they seem inclined. Give them a high level overview of the benefits of linux.

With Fedora and KDE you can accomplish 95% of your computering needs, including software development. Only a handful of games & creative softwares don't work.

It will only take 6 months to have them permanently converted.

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

I would take this a step further and recommend a Fedora-based immutable distro like Bazzite (for gamers) or Aurora (for everyone else). These come with codecs and even proprietary drivers (nVidia), so you don't need to install anything manually.

Immutable/atomic distros are rock solid and extremely hard to break, the automatic updates/upgrades are a godsend for newbies, and in the rare event something does break, you can boot directly into the previous version right from the boot menu - no command line wizardry required. Immutables also don't suffer from the dependency issues that can sometimes plague regular distros, so I would highly recommend them over a regular distro for most newbies.

Aardwolf• 9 months ago

I don't have issues with Nvidia drivers in Archlinux (using cinnamon and X) after pacman updates that sometimes update kernel and/or Nvidia drivers, I'm curious what's different in your setup to get these issues

Also, how are the graphics drivers affecting LUKS for you? They are two independent and unrelated things for me, Nvidia drivers aren't doing anything disk or pam related

If they have a printer, connect it and show them how to print a page.

This however is the thing that doesn't "just work" for me, even with a common hp printer. The one time in a year you need to use the printer, something will have broken about its drivers again in Linux. I just transfer the pdf to the printer with a USB stick now

ykonstant• 9 months ago

Same here; I have had crazy hardware work out of the box in linux, but printers remain a mystery.

Furthermore, last time I tried printing, it was a surreal non-deterministic process. It wouldn't print, then it would, then it would get stuck in a handshake or something, rebooting wouldn't fix it, but rebooting twice would, then turning off the printer would break it again, and so on. No system update in between attempts. I genuinely want to know what the fuck the engineers for those machines are doing.

[Disclaimer: in the above process there was the extra hurdle that the printer was one of several on a local university network that may also have had cooky configuration]

Havoc2• 9 months ago

FYI last guidance is saw said privacy badger provides no additional benefit if already using ublock

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

Ublock doesn't rewrite search engine tracking links, PB does.

BatteryMountain2• 9 months ago

Yet Privacy Badger blocks disqus from loading where ublock doesn't.

netdevphoenix7• 9 months ago

Educate the user on how to do Software Updates

Sorry to tell you that, manual updates are not a thing your average user is familiar with. In Windows land, updates install themselves

17186274402• 9 months ago

Then activate the automatic updates in your Linux distro? In contrast to Windows programs also won't block on startup and you need to wait for updating, because updates work in the background.

WhereIsTheTruth• 9 months ago

Microsoft is an oligopoly that monetizes mediocrity:

-unable to execute a clean chip-architecture transition (while Apple shipped three clean ones)

-unable to modernize its operating system consistently (5 layers of different UI/UX and 30 years old DLLs spread all over the place)

-unable to harden its own software

-unable to design its own hardware

-unable to keep users's data secure

I could continue, but the pattern is clear

I will never store personal or government issued documents on a Windows device and I will never use any form of digital ID to login on infrastructure that depends on Azure AD

TPM, Secure Boot, Windows Update stories are the evidence that the more you entrust Microsoft, the worse it gets

gethly6• 9 months ago

I have been using windows since version 95. I even liked the Millennium version, that was most hated before Vista. I tried Linux several times, but Windows just always worked and Linux usually had always some issues(mostly drivers, lack of good programs and no gaming).

But now, after more than two decades, I am certain Windows 10 is my last Windows.

Nothing lasts for ever, not even Microsoft's domination on personal computers. It took them decades, but now they finally f'd up so bad that there is just no going back.

I think, like many people, it will take me few years to need to reinstall my computer(or get a new one). So I will still be a Windows user and that will skew the numbers for upcoming years. But I think that also means that in 1-5 years, Microsoft will see a massive double digit percentage drop of users, almost over night, and nobody will have a clue what is going on.

By then, I bet the distributions will be even better. The gaming will be event better. The drivers will be even better. The saturation will be even better. So the transition will be even more seamless than it is today.

I am looking forward to it. I think Linux, or open source and free OS, should have been the norm. But we took a bad turn in the past and got hijacked by few smart people. That will come to a natural end, finally.

OvbiousError• 9 months ago

Gaming on linux has been awesome for years. With the advent of systems like bazzite, the transition is only getting easier.

4ggr04• 9 months ago

+1, switched to Bazzite about three weeks ago. I did have to dualboot a Windows after a couple of days, unfortunately. Mostly related to Anti-Cheat and other shitty measures. Dark Souls II did not want to recognize my Controller, even though it works fine in every other game. Skate can't be played on Linux because of Anti-Cheat, but fuck EA anyways. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Dishonored 2 and Death to the Outsider and Bioshock worked fine. Did have to tinker with the graphics settings a bit and the experience is definitely buggier than on Windows, but the huge upside is that I don't have to use Windows anymore, or at least just as a fallback-option. I know care 0 about the Windows, it's on a separate SSD, haven't even set a Wallpaper or other things, which is rare for me.

entropie2• 9 months ago

As far as I know almost all (if not all) anti cheat software just does not work on linux therefore "gaming on linux has been awesome for years" is not true if you play games online or competitive.

robin_reala• 9 months ago

If you’re this engaged already I’d just make the jump. Be part of the future you want to have rather than watching from the sidelines.

gethly6• 9 months ago

I could but I do not need to, so i'd rather make better use of the time it would take me to move at this time.

Biggest pain point actually are not programs, but the need to format all hard drives to some linux file system. I cannot just replace windows with linux and that is it. No, I have to migrate all my data somehow to reformat all my drives and then move the data back. That was always huge pain in the ass.

wartywhoa23• 9 months ago

I switched to Ubuntu 3 years ago and never looked back for a daily driver.

The reason Windows (and Microsoft itself) is not 6' deep yet is a relatively small number of commercial creative software like DAWs, graphics suits and CAD modellers. Yes, there's a huge amount of legacy software in CAM, plant control and whatnot, but that can run alright on all those Windows XP and 7 machines like forever.

All major software vendors who think that Windows has too much inertial following and that its users will embrace whatever fascist surveillance machine their computers become under this abomination of OS, and refuse to port their products to Linux, will be in trouble soon.

Out of all DAW developers, only Bitwig got this trend right yet.

Intermernet• 9 months ago

Annoyingly, Ableton Push 3 Standalone runs on Linux. This means that Ableton have a working Linux version of, at least the core, of Ableton Live working on Linux. I sincerely hope they release a true Linux version soon. It's the last thing tying me to Windows.

subjectivationx2• 9 months ago

I have used linux for 10 years now but I think you just have to view a mac mini as the cost of a hardware synth or a guitar. Then all your problems are solved.

At this point, I need a nice gpu on a linux machine and a mac mini. It is a dream setup. I think I booted windows once on my most recent laptop because I messed up booting from the thumb drive to blow it away.

Reaper runs incredible on linux for DAW software but you always run into something that is not available with creative software. Then it is really nice keeping the mac only for creative pursuits.

netdevphoenix7• 9 months ago

The reason Windows (and Microsoft itself) is not 6' deep yet is a relatively small number of commercial creative software like DAWs, graphics suits and CAD modellers.

Google is likely actively working towards a future where all of those programs run on a browser.

unixhero4• 9 months ago

Just use Linux Mint

gethly6• 9 months ago

i'll be looking at fedora kde, cachy os, arch, maybe omarchy. either way i am definitely going for KDE. i always run ubuntu servers, but i tested few distros this year, i was mostly looking at fedora and suse, which are not rpm distros, but i was not happy, still, with some things. so i will have to do proper testing when time comes. i see fedora as "big" distro with good backing. arch as configurable distro. cachy supposedly has good performance tweaks in kernel and is good for gaming(whatever that means). and so on. each has its own ups and downs.

hdjfvsjdb• 9 months ago

Glad you are trying Linux again!

But on WinME that was complete trash.. Never has an is crashed so much on me... I went to Win2k after that ... Win2k was the last windows I ran in a PC and was IMO peak windows.

gethly6• 9 months ago

Haha, true. But not from my experience. Not sure why. Either i just ignored any issues and simply don't remember them or i got lucky with hardware and drivers? Who knows. Either way, I never had issues with Windows. For me, it just always worked. Even now, I am on W10 and after i ripped out all the guts of the Defender out of the system, I'm quite happy with it. I have a TinyWall firewall so there are no background updates or any traffic without me knowing. I am in mostly full control and have no issues.

npteljes6• 9 months ago

Stop daydreaming and just make the jump. The possibility of things being different down the road, and the fantasy you acting on it properly just serves to make you feel better, without needing actual action, or commitment on your part. Do something now, and get a taste of the real thing.

My way of switching over was to set up my system as a dual-boot, and then to set up my Linux in a way that enabled as much of my needs as possible. I got overwhelmed at first multiple times, but realized later that I'm just resistant to change. After a few tries, it stuck, and instead of feeling overwhelmed with change, I felt relief that I don't have to deal with Windows, and all the corporate bullshit that comes with it. Instead I have the vibrant culture of free software, and all the bullshit that comes with that, hehe. And I take that anytime over the former.

I'm also using KDE btw. I think it's by far the best DE, for me anyways. Fun fact, Valve's Steam Deck also uses it.

linhns• 9 months ago

KDE is the best DE for Windows to Linux user. Personally going from Windows -> Linux -> Mac then GNOME feels much better for me.

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

I'd put Linux on a second machine and start learning. Forcing yourself to use it for a few days a week, etc. Needs to become a habit. Need to find solutions to all the expected issues. Can use an old machine if you need.

You don't want the migration to be harder than it should be, and doing everything at once is way too hard.

mixmastamyk6• 9 months ago

First step I forgot, move to open software on windows first.

pjmlp• 9 months ago

Another "everyone will migrate in droves to Linux" article that keeps poping up a Windows version ends, since Windows XP days, yet even Valve was forced to translate Win32 APIs to actually have games for the Steam Deck, after how Steam Machines went down.

General public won't care until they can buy laptops with GNU/Linux on their favourite shopping mall PC store.

As it stands today they are more likely to buy an iPad or Android tablet than such alternative, which aren't much better than Microsoft in user tracking, and much worse in user freedom allowed by the OS.

bigyabai2• 9 months ago

yet even Valve was forced to translate Win32 APIs to actually have games for the Steam Deck

Yeh, and it works great. Your point?

The Steam Deck hardware itself can run the original 32-bit libraries if your distro supports it, Valve wasn't "forced" to do anything. They chose WoW64 because it's the mature and functional solution.

dcanelhas• 9 months ago

I wish there was an active dev community that could patch win10 going forward, but without access to source code for the kernel, perhaps that isn't really viable.

Ideally I would want to use Linux but I also want to play games that are only supported on windows.

Does using WSL help or is an outdated windows base still going to be the weakest link in the security onion?

d3Xt3r15• 9 months ago

WSL is unfortunately is less than ideal, not only is it rubbish (it has its own set of issues like weird networking bugs), it also doesn't mitigate any of the security vulnerabilities/bloatware/telemetry/bugs etc present in Windows.

But you can always dual-boot between Windows and Linux. Just uninstall all your browsers (to mitigate risk) and other non-essential app in your Windows install, configure the firewall to block everything except games. And boot into Linux for everything else.

WorldMaker6• 9 months ago

(it has its own set of issues like weird networking bugs)

WSL2 is mostly just a virtual machine. All of its networking bugs aren't that weird, they are pretty common networking issues you'd see from any other virtual machine configuration. Depending on what you are trying to do, switching WSL2's networking mode to "Mirrored" can be a useful way to fix networking issues by more closely aligning the VM network stack with the host network stack. This is often the fix for VM networking issues in other environments, too. Things like the host's VPN get reused directly instead of the VM needing to run its own VPN copy, for instance.

WorldMaker6• 9 months ago

WSL is effectively a virtual machine. The weakest link is still going to be the virtual machine host (Windows).

npteljes6• 9 months ago

In case you want to hold on to Win 10, you can use their LTSC version + validate with massgrave / your own activation emulator. Win 10 21H2 IoT (LTS) end of life is 13 Jan 2032. You would have 7 years to figure out where to go from there, maybe straight to Windows 12.

jeisc• 9 months ago

Will a person without a personal device still be considered a person?

npteljes6• 9 months ago

I don't know what Microsoft considers me, but it definitely felt bad.

2d8a875f-39a2-4• 9 months ago

Echoing a lot of users ITT, Windows has been good to me but the enshittification has reached what feels like the end point.

Windows value to me was "everything just worked". But that's no longer the case now, unless you are willing to walk down Microsoft's centralized rails. Need an MS Account and OneDrive... need expensive modern hardware... get ads and crapware... get telemetry and data exfiltration. The effort of working around all that is non trivial. EDIT: and if I was ok with all that stuff I'd already by captured by Apple.

If I have to fuck around with something in my home OS, that OS might as well be Linux. So now I am compiling wifi and printer drivers from github (FFS Linux!) instead of disabling telemetry and hacking an install with local accounts only.

The challenge, as always, is going to be taking the family with me.

realaaa• 9 months ago

maybe 2026 is finally going to be that long awaited Year of Linux :) long overdue!

buyucu• 9 months ago

Just use Linux. It is easy.

johnnienaked2• 9 months ago

The fact Linux has like a zillion iterations and is all open source and free just proves companies like Microsoft are gangsters. They got to the hill first and now they sit on top with a gun.

Havoc2• 9 months ago

A switch is viable for technical users but I’d still not be comfortable recommending it for family members.

It’s still a bridge too far for most

The hardware landfill issue is real though. My 70 year old dad announced he’s getting a new laptop out of the blue. Reason…this

tmaly• 9 months ago

I am still on Windows 10. The secure book on my bios doesn't seem to work and so I can't upgrade to Windows 11 yet.

mikewarot• 9 months ago

I just wish Genode was ready to be my daily driver. 8(

Linux isn't going to be any more secure than Windows was if everyone switches to it.

HeavyStorm• 9 months ago

There's a lot of conspiracy in the article subtext.

It's my own opinion that windows enforcement of TPM while retiring Windows 10 is a rough direction, but I also get the executive decision. Support for old software is costly, and Windows 10 is very old at this point. Add that to how many security issues Microsoft has been having, and this seems like the only sensible decision.

BeachGuy007• 9 months ago

You didn't mention Linux Mint which is the number 1 alternative. I think the whole Microsoft/Google etc. hype is way overblown.

JamesAdir• 9 months ago

The AI tool Co-pilot is installed and enabled without consent. Removal is difficult or nonexistent.

As much as I agree with the article's general tone, uninstalling Copilot is actually quite straightforward and easy.

Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

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