Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

https://www.himthe.dev/blog/microsoft-to-linux

by bobsterlobster • 6 months ago

1871 1502 6 months ago

himthe.dev

ColinWright2• 6 months ago

Still reading the article, but early on it says:

"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.

That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Nah, I think it's awesome. Great computer by the way. With all that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.

xxs3• 6 months ago

22 years back is still this century, nothing weird about. As for remembering stuff 6502/48KB RAM (along with call -151) seems boring, I guess.

iso1631• 6 months ago

Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years ago.

First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".

11235813212• 6 months ago

They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)

Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)

Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.

xxs3• 6 months ago

an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.

32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.

32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).

crumpled• 6 months ago

TigerDirect? Wow. How did I forget the first place I used and instantly maxxed a credit card? I would look through that catalog right now if I had it.

rglullis• 6 months ago

Mine was an Intel 386 DX 40MHZ with 2MB RAM and 80MB HD, bought in late 1993.

heywire• 6 months ago

IBM PC XT 5150 4.77MHz, 640KB, no, not weird at all :)

drivers992• 6 months ago

The 5150 was just an "IBM PC" not an XT, but still... I think we're talking about the same thing.

I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA graphics card, 5.25" floppy (360K, double-sided, double-density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so you don't have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own controller cards so there's almost no more room for expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it out anyway.

justin66• 6 months ago

There is no reason you would have forgotten.

SanjayMehta• 6 months ago

ZX-81 with 1Kb RAM

WillAdams2• 6 months ago

Radio Shack PC-1 w/ the printer and cassette tape player --- really should have waited until the Model 100 was available....

godzillabrennus2• 6 months ago

I documented all of my early computers throughout early college, and I'm glad I did. I remember the first computers well, but without those notes, I wouldn't remember the first ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was crushed when sat on by sibling)

zabzonk2• 6 months ago

My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger). These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.

consp2• 6 months ago

First PC: 8088 with 640K, then a 286 with 2MB! The memory!

First own "PC": Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation from a family member.

tracker116• 6 months ago

First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb ram and an EGA card and display.

First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.

aidenn0• 6 months ago

36 years ago: A Wyse branded AT clone 12.5MHz 286 with 1MB of ram, a 10MB hard drive and a Hercules graphics card (it was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work).

ikidd2• 6 months ago

I was late to the party with an Apple IIe. I've never managed to catch up since.

arkensaw• 6 months ago

Amstrad 2286 PC, 4Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive, 3.5" floppy.

40 Megabytes. I have photos that size these days.

doodlebugging• 6 months ago

I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.

Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.

reconnecting8• 6 months ago

Apple forced me to switch to Linux!

Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!

stuartjohnson12• 6 months ago

It's only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for their software to Microsoft in exchange

jasoneckert• 6 months ago

If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.

jhickok3• 6 months ago

I am good laptop hardware away from making the move.

SomeHacker443• 6 months ago

HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily driver with a UGreen GAN charger.

aljgz• 6 months ago

I'm on frame.work with AMD, 96GB RAM. Using it with fedora+KDE Absolutely love it

gregors3• 6 months ago

thinkpad

neop1x• 6 months ago

I can also recommend HP Zbook Ultra G1a. It's probably the closest thing to Macbooks at the moment. It has lower battery life and latest M chips are still faster but it's fast enough for me. The hardware is solid and sw support is great.

rafaelmn2• 6 months ago

As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).

So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.

miyuru• 6 months ago

There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux

reconnecting8• 6 months ago

So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.

barrkel• 6 months ago

I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

wraptile• 6 months ago

Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming

and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.

ecshafer5• 6 months ago

As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.

reconnecting8• 6 months ago

Man, we didn't have this all along.

Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.

manuelmoreale• 6 months ago

and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use Mac.

Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.

Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.

AdamN• 6 months ago

Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want ...

al_borland7• 6 months ago

mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.

I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.

juuular2• 6 months ago

Windows is such garbage, I can't understand how you think MacOS is worse lol. It's just Unix. Linux is definitely better than both though

kaydub3• 6 months ago

I have no idea how people use mac.

Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It's worth putting up with MacOS for the hardware.

8bitsrule2• 6 months ago

Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive) Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My 'never again' still in effect 15 years later.

My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.

zabzonk2• 6 months ago

Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple

Who or what is the "Linux" entity in this context?

avaer• 6 months ago

Also who is paying "Linux" and for what?

Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.

breezykoi4• 6 months ago

Joking aside, I often hear people say "they should" when talking about GNU/Linux (for example: "they should just standardize on one audio stack"), as if there were a central authority making those decisions. What many don't realize is that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an abundance of choice. That diversity isn't a flaw, it's a consequence of how the ecosystem works.

morshu900110• 6 months ago

I guess Linus Torvalds and co? First they'd need to standardize a Linux desktop OS.

kaydub3• 6 months ago

If there was an easy and supported way to put linux on a macbook I'd be back on linux but I can't give up the hardware.

geophile2• 6 months ago

For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).

And then:

    - Butterfly keyboard
    - Touchbar
    - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.

So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.

reconnecting8• 6 months ago

- No esc

progforlyfe2• 6 months ago

Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.

You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!

petcat• 6 months ago

Every month more and more people switch to Linux

We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.

dralley• 6 months ago

I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is growing, it's bigger than it has ever been even without including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with desktop linux than ever before (Valve's suite of devices, multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a few SteamDeck competitors)

vikramkr• 6 months ago

I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of desktop linux's single biggest barriers to adoption.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.

fundatus• 6 months ago

Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.

On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.

deaux6• 6 months ago

Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r/gaming. Relative frequency graph of Linux mentions. You'll see a magnitude increase over the last 12 months compared to years before. It's real.

Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.

ManlyBread• 6 months ago

According to the Steam Hardware Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.

HendrikHensen3• 6 months ago

More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just Work on Linux without any tinkering.

While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.

GoatInGrey• 6 months ago

As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users, leaving a concentration of "skilled" users, my suspicion is that the pattern will resemble the quote "Slowly, then all at once."

tempaccsoz52• 6 months ago

Have a look at the Steam Hardware [and software] Survey [0] results. Linux has been trending upwards whist Windows has been trending down for a wee while. And the population this looks at is primarily interested in gaming, which means that this is despite a compatibility layer being needed for a large amount of the software used. I imagine in other communities (software, old people) it's trending much faster.

E.g. I recently installed Linux Mint for my grandma so she could use email and an up-to-date web browser on her old laptop that can't run (secure) Windows anymore. The UI differences are marginal for her, and she can do everything she needs to much better than she could before (which was not at all).

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

jillesvangurp• 6 months ago

It's a form of Stockholm Syndrome for most people. They'll have some bit of software they imagine is irreplaceable because they have some special use case that means that they just have to tolerate the relentless abuse. Or some other excuse. Whatever. It all boils down to people being afraid of change.

Most of that fear is not all that rational. It's not unlike kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your mind just tries to make the most of what fundamentally is a really messed up situation. You'll tell yourself it isn't that bad or that the next update will fix it or that you can get some magic software thingy that makes it go faster. Whatever.

Once you realize you are being abused, you can make some choices and do something about it. Most tools can be replaced if you look around a bit and do a bit of research. And virtual machines on Linux can run Windows just fine if you have one or two things that just really need it (been there done that). There's also wine and proton which aren't half bad these days. And they work for lots of things other than games. You can dual boot. Etc. Try it and find out. The absolute worst case is that you have to go back to being a lame abuse victim here. You'll feel extra bad because now you know. The best case gets you out of that abusive relation ship for the rest of your life. Life is too short to get subjected to this kind of abuse.

neogodless10• 6 months ago

This might have some merit for some people.

But the talk of abuse is also heavy-handed.

I've spent months testing and trying out RAW photo editors, and months trying out Linux gaming.

Linux is incredible, but my experience with Windows is still better. As many that still use it can attest, you can disable almost any annoyance. It's extremely stable. Things just work including brightness controls, fractional scaling, high refresh rates and high FPS gaming, and my favorite RAW photo editing. I could switch to a less enjoyable experience with Linux but I choose not to after extensive evaluation. I don't spend any money on Microsoft services, no Office or OneDrive subscription.

But my decision isn't permanent. My hobbies, software use, gaming selection, etc. can change over time, and Linux is getting better while Windows is getting worse. If it's ever "abuse" and I can have a better experience with Linux, I won't hesitate to change. But it's also a lot of effort to try out alternatives, and dual booting is slow and annoying. Plus when I dual boot to Linux Mint the kernel fails to boot every other time and I have to select an older one, reboot, select a newer one, reboot. It's a huge waste of time. A bad experience and I have chosen to avoid it and try again in another year or two.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

I don't think it's Stockholm Syndrome, rather it's a classic case of sunken cost fallacy. For me at least, that's what it was. I had invested so much time in Ableton (~14 years) and didn't feel like starting from scratch with another DAW. And let's be real, no one likes that kind of friction.

It had to get worse to finally break the inertia and also make me realize that it's only going downhill.

zamadatix3• 6 months ago

I've dual booted for over a decade at this point and I still need to switch back and forth for different things.

throwforfeds• 6 months ago

Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.

jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.

cies• 6 months ago

And you got Bitwig :)

drumttocs8• 6 months ago

Yep, Ableton is why I have a Mac Mini on my KVM.

bigyabai6• 6 months ago

Ableton Live works fine on Wine, at least for me. Every once in a while I boot it up to bounce stems from an older project to Bitwig.

fibers• 6 months ago

Microsoft forced me to switch to Apple AND Linux.

bobsmooth• 6 months ago

Maybe it's stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?

marginalia_nu3• 6 months ago

Haven't really ever had much issues with nvidia drivers on Linux tbh, and I've been using it since the early 2000s.

nusl5• 6 months ago

Drivers are generally fine, but there's more to it than just switching. If you're not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for your current use cases and see if it's at all attractive.

jabroni_salad• 6 months ago

Depends on why they are bad.

If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.

forbiddenlake• 6 months ago

What do you mean by bad?

Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.

Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.

Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.

bee_rider3• 6 months ago

Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.

parineum• 6 months ago

Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.

That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.

You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.

keyringlight2• 6 months ago

One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.

Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.

baby_souffle• 6 months ago

Are nvidia drivers still bad?

Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.

You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article. They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.

aeroevan• 6 months ago

nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install now that all of AI is trained on nvidia drivers on linux

chuckadams• 6 months ago

The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but thanks to Microsoft's recent efforts, Windows has reached the same level of reliability as well.

1970-01-013• 6 months ago

Wow gun to head and everything. Glad he survived the transition.

More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

lol! Sorry about the clickbait. Everyone's doing it nowadays, and I wanted to follow. Gonna think of a better title next time

NobodyNada• 6 months ago

For what it's worth, personally I thought your writing style and sense of humor was excellent, and my favorite part of the post.

I also appreciate you giving me an updated copy of the "Microsoft is a corporation" meme, as the one I have downloaded seems to become outdated each time a new Windows update comes out.

nusl5• 6 months ago

I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.

"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."

Fair point though :P

nazgulsenpai• 6 months ago

I made the decision to just play a different game when I switched back in 2022 or so. Thankfully, the game in question supported Linux shortly after the switch even though I got used to not playing it and just don't anymore :) I still try any anti-cheat games I come across to see if they work and it's surprising how many actually do.

Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.

b1temy3• 6 months ago

A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such a level of anticheat that makes wine/proton unable to play it (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you _shouldn't_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also because if they had a bug in their code, you're just opening up your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin. Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was enough, since malware can just "Bring your own Driver" (BYOD) and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)

Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...

nusl5• 6 months ago

This sort of anticheat exists because cheat developers ruin the experience for players, and for games that intend to be competitive in a real sense, the integrity of the game. Cheat developers keep getting smarter, so anticheat developers need to do the same. I guess the kernel is sorta as deep as you can go, at least with software.

I don't like it personally but I do understand why they do it. It just means I can't play those games on Linux, and some studios just don't care.

It's a shame that they don't care, though supporting such a minuscule percentage of the gaming market doesn't make a lot of sense unless out of principle/just do to it.

dimitrisscript2• 6 months ago

It's probably the toxicity that bothers you, so if you just switch chat to private mode you'll be golden.

Ever since I did that, League of Legends is great honestly, and able to be played daily with no toxicity or rage.

nusl5• 6 months ago

That quote is from the article rather than myself, though turning chat off does help

snarfy2• 6 months ago

It's not going to get any better. Microsoft's problem is tech debt. Copilot doesn't pay tech debt it creates it. It will only get worse faster.

fuzzy2• 6 months ago

Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.

coffeebeqn5• 6 months ago

Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out

somenameforme• 6 months ago

Nah, they have a good strategy. In fact, they have all the strategies.

snarfy2• 6 months ago

This is true. The constantly changing strategy is what left the wave of debt behind it.

bdbdbdb• 6 months ago

I've never heard of CachyOS. I'm amazed at how many Linux versions there are and how good they seem and it makes me wish I could try them all.

RIMR2• 6 months ago

Oh, you can try them all. That's pretty much an entire hobby itself.

xacky• 6 months ago

Gnome comes with built in virtual machine support with the Boxes app, just download an ISO and try as many as you want.

bittumenEntity• 6 months ago

Like the author says:

Linux is the preferred platform for development

Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge

troupo4• 6 months ago

Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for development. Especially MacOS.

There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.

pluralmonad• 6 months ago

This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow. MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers. If you don't mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I wonder how long before you have to enable a scary "developer mode" to install software outside the app store.

horsawlarway• 6 months ago

I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by development".

For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.

For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.

The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.

yndoendo• 6 months ago

I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing development environments. Solution A might need a different environment than Solution B.

Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.

72deluxe5• 6 months ago

I would have to agree with this. I don't understand people how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can't say one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of the package management system that makes installing a compiler "easier" than downloading Xcode or downloading/running the Visual Studio installer??

I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.

I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.

morshu900110• 6 months ago

and iTerm on Mac is better than any of the Linux terminals

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

I was using WSL for the longest time.

wongarsu• 6 months ago

I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.

This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently

condensedcrab2• 6 months ago

That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.

qiine• 6 months ago

somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land

Hu... use Dolphin?

iberator• 6 months ago

Citation needed. It's not. Linux is only good for hosting. Only very very few large companies gives laptops with Linux to developers.

Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486

physicles• 6 months ago

Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.

I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.

On Linux: pip install, done.

tracker116• 6 months ago

Before MS really started mucking things up the past few years, I was referring to WSL as my favorite Linux distro... MS took a LOT of the rough edges off in terms of development.

barelysapient• 6 months ago

I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.

Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.

This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.

koe123• 6 months ago

I also think LLMs are well suited to find niche strange bugs way quicker. User posts esoteric error on the issues page. LLM with proper context may converge quickly, allowing the programmer to implement a fix.

RIMR2• 6 months ago

1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.

2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.

People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.

robinei• 6 months ago

My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux installs.

deaux6• 6 months ago

1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I'm not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far".

It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.

or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares

Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.

jfyi• 6 months ago

The one thing holding me to M$ Windows is visual studio.

Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.

nailer• 6 months ago

Windows 11 was bad before AI. Press the Start menu? Wait. That much latency was never acceptable and Windows should die like desktop Java did.

72deluxe5• 6 months ago

I don't understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you knew that pressing Windows > P > across right > N would open Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just worked and responded.

Today it's utter garbage.

marginalia_nu3• 6 months ago

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:

* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.

* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.

* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

amelius2• 6 months ago

UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.

At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.

It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.

LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.

tracker116• 6 months ago

They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky.

I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.

tomnipotent• 6 months ago

KDE & Gnome are both guilty of the same.

bsimpson3• 6 months ago

Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs.

They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.

whateverboat• 6 months ago

- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step.

- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.

- You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.

- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.

int_19h11• 6 months ago

It would help if Gnome wasn't so hostile towards proper cross-DE interop. A famous quote by a Gnome dev goes, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an Xfce app unfortunately"

They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right way and everyone else is "holding it wrong" so there's no need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even possible).

unyttigfjelltol• 6 months ago

I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

pixl972• 6 months ago

poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.

tracker116• 6 months ago

Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.

WillAdams2• 6 months ago

Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....

tliltocatl2• 6 months ago

* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous me

I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".

It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.

Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.

marginalia_nu3• 6 months ago

This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration" issue.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 6 months ago

I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".

The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).

The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.

The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.

jsheard12• 6 months ago

Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.

delta_p_delta_x7• 6 months ago

I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly

Windows is the only one that does this properly.

Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]

Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.

Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.

And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.

On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.

On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...

tracker116• 6 months ago

That's roughly what I did for my ANSI console/viewer... I started with EGA resolution, and each ega pixel renders 3x4 in its' buffer then a minor blur, then scaled to fit the render area. The effect is really good down to about 960px wide, which is a bit bigger in terms of real pixels than the original... at 640px wide, it's a little hard to make out the actual pixels... but it's the best way I could think of to handle the non-square pixels of original EGA or VGA... I went with EGA because the ratio is slightly cleaner IMO. It's also what OG RIPterm used.

amluto• 6 months ago

I have precisely one Windows thing I use regularly, and it has a giant window that needs lots of pixels, and I use it over Remote Desktop. The results are erratic and frequently awful.

helterskelter• 6 months ago

* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).

jhasse• 6 months ago

I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Mint/cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry. It’s FUD.

simoncion14• 6 months ago

FWIW, I can do the same with KDE on Xorg with Gentoo Linux.

Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003 or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to communicate system settings, the absence of "non-integer" scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI toolkits.

I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.

When doesn't GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland's problems have been because a project that expects protocol implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was required.

tracker116• 6 months ago

On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don't scale right.

I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse.

For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux.

On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.

jraph• 6 months ago

Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry

Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.

pimeys3• 6 months ago

KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right on Linux.

craftkiller3• 6 months ago

I've also been running fractional scaling on Sway for many years now and native wayland applications are not blurry. X11 apps run through XWayland will be blurry, but I don't have any legacy X11 apps remaining on my system.

Orygin3• 6 months ago

UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess

I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.

At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.

I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.

reddalo3• 6 months ago

many apps now just use CSD

If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).

If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.

wackget• 6 months ago

If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.

Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

vladvasiliu14• 6 months ago

UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.

Amen.

But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel.

Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI.

So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).

Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi].

Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn't do this.

IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size).

Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.

KerrAvon• 6 months ago

macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS. Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship divergent KDE and Gnome apps.

If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They'll notice that.

But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.

colordrops• 6 months ago

Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.

jdc0589• 6 months ago

the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.

This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu desktop

craftkiller3• 6 months ago

Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial to set up: https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice

insane_dreamer2• 6 months ago

I use Linux as my daily driver, with a Mac laptop. I only use Windows when I absolutely have to (i.e., testing), and usually through a VM.

Some other rough edges in Linux I've encountered:

- a/v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can't just use something else) and a/v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that's mostly Slack's fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it's probably low on their priority list.

- sleep / hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won't wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that's not an issue)

- power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks.

- occasional X/Wayland issues, as mentioned

bsimpson3• 6 months ago

I'm a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows.

On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works.

On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work.

It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work.

(Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)

Aldipower5• 6 months ago

"Like digital herpes, I just couldn't get rid of it."

Made my day! :-D

senko3• 6 months ago

Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.

Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.

levkk• 6 months ago

Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.

Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall

senko3• 6 months ago

Possibly. If the installer happy path fails (which has happened to me), Arch is "here's root shell, figure it out", Ubuntu is slightly more user-friendly :)

I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you're not using it. I'm on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random obscure hardware setup details.

khat2• 6 months ago

Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.

cozzyd• 6 months ago

Or ... like me, switch to Fedora full time 20 years ago and still use it (ok, I use AlmaLinux on my workstation and servers)...

megous2• 6 months ago

I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.

What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.

Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.

Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.

That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.

senko3• 6 months ago

Yeah agree completely. Started with Slack at around 2.x, took a long time to switch to Debian and occasionally Ubuntu.

That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running ./configure && make && make install

Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.

floxy2• 6 months ago

Ah yes, Slackware. I remember downloading something like 15 floppy disks over the 56k modem for my first install. Maybe a v1.1 kernel?

1970-01-013• 6 months ago

The author tried everything except switching graphics drivers?! That's like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and declaring all new music is terrible.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back. But it wasn't the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D

1970-01-013• 6 months ago

You didn't use a non Nvidia driver then. Sounds exactly like you were always using beta drivers.

chad_strategic2• 6 months ago

Ubuntu since 2012

fnoef• 6 months ago

I'd be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth, headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don't see myself switching to Linux.

zteppenwolf• 6 months ago

This post is so 2001

raincole• 6 months ago

Every year is the year of linux desktop.

chad_strategic2• 6 months ago

Ubuntu since 2011

Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.

ircop420• 6 months ago

FSF is trying! https://librephone.org/

Zambyte5• 6 months ago

Android.

Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.

AHTERIX5000• 6 months ago

My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any "tweaking" scripts or apps.

I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.

VirgilShelton2• 6 months ago

Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.

duffyjp2• 6 months ago

Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.

I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(

72deluxe5• 6 months ago

I think the UI was reasonable and easily understood in 2000. After that it seems links and buttons became interchangeable, and now we end up in the mess where scrollbars may or may not be visible until you try fiddling with the UI etc.

_fat_santa• 6 months ago

I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it's fair share of bugs but I'll take having to deal with those over running Windows or MacOS any day.

For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.

Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.

I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.

sovietmudkipz• 6 months ago

I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?

It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.

newsoftheday7• 6 months ago

I agree with the sentiment but I keep Snap disabled because I like Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for its rock solid stability.

kevinrineer2• 6 months ago

Do they still do that?

Yes. I know its more than firefox, but I don't have the full list. On 24.04:

  me@comp:~$ apt info firefox | head -n 5
  
  WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
  
  Package: firefox
  Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu7
  Priority: optional
  Section: web
  Origin: Ubuntu
  me@comp:~$

cosmic_cheese4• 6 months ago

The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).

It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.

debo_• 6 months ago

This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.

I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.

bigyabai6• 6 months ago

There's several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.

8bitsrule2• 6 months ago

It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired.

'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.

Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).

globular-toast• 6 months ago

You do have to know what you're doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.

Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).

stuff4ben2• 6 months ago

Meh, I don't care much about control, I care more about getting my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a daily GUI driver.

timbit423• 6 months ago

I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux still has it's fair share of bugs...
I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...

I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.

simgoh9• 6 months ago

I'm curious, can you elaborate on why you believe that changing to Gnome meant they were giving up on being the best desktop distro?

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

Let me recommend Fedora to you Timbit.

Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.

I too was corrupted by Ubuntu's marketing strategy of being popular and using the misleading word 'Stable'.

everybodyknows• 6 months ago

switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro.

Mint is also based on GNOME.

https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

Linux still has it's fair share of bugs
Linux, for all it's issues

You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.

Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.

Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.

giancarlostoro8• 6 months ago

This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.

I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.

Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

W3zzy2• 6 months ago

''By the way, I use Arch''

bee_rider3• 6 months ago

The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but

1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.

dgritsko2• 6 months ago

What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.

condensedcrab2• 6 months ago

Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.

giancarlostoro8• 6 months ago

There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.

I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.

hamdingers2• 6 months ago

Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.

the_arun• 6 months ago

I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.

tremarley• 6 months ago

You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux

gambiting• 6 months ago

What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I've never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and years.

pimeys3• 6 months ago

I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).

Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.

The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.

newsoftheday7• 6 months ago

Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.

nout4• 6 months ago

If you have older Mac (based on the Intel CPUs), then it may actually already work out of the box for you to run linux. I'm running Debian on Macbook Pro 2015, fully replaced the original system and I haven't looked back.

mrln• 6 months ago

Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.

fsmv• 6 months ago

I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had this problem.

edflsafoiewq• 6 months ago

You can download a precompiled yay/paru from their Github pages btw.

Zambyte5• 6 months ago

if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.

nightski3• 6 months ago

I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.

techpression2• 6 months ago

Most of the games I play would work fine, but it’s the damn anti cheat and multiplayer games that forces Windows down my throat, and I’m not happy about it. I only use my gaming rig for gaming so I have no other requirements, which kind of makes it even worse.

PunchyHamster2• 6 months ago

They don't mean all games thru all times, they mean "the latest $70 release" that still can have problem if it is multiplayer DRM/anticheat ridden one.

I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers

thewebguyd8• 6 months ago

oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming

People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.

My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.

pksebben• 6 months ago

The only pain point I've found is VR. I've bounced off trying to get it working multiple times with the best results getting about 10% functional (video working on one or two games, input broken on all).

That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.

ukuina• 6 months ago

Do the top sellers from the past year work on Linux?

I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.

zeta0134• 6 months ago

The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer. That's because almost all of the big players in that space currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.

If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

Well I used to game a lot when I was younger.

Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.

Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).

greener_grass2• 6 months ago

Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity? 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A few graphical effects? Multiplayer?

When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.

But I'm still gaming on Linux!

jama21122• 6 months ago

There it is, the classic “just change what you enjoy then!!”. Linux will take off when the community stops trying to force new users to conform to the Linux way of life and instead respect that other people have other needs and wants that are valid, and not a moment before.

cesarb• 6 months ago

More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console.

Not for long. The Steam Machine aka "GabeCube" is also a gaming console, and will run all these games.

johnnyanmac10• 6 months ago

Games are more and more consolidating towards services, so it really only takes one game for the lions share of gamers. You can bet GTA V is a big draw away from Linux and that GTA VI will eventually be the same when it hits PC.

As for me, I'm still stuck for professional reasons. I do intend to develop natively on Linux when time comes to make my own game.

some_random5• 6 months ago

You and most of the other people in this thread clearly do not understand what's going on here. I and everyone else you're griping about do not give a shit about Slop Spoogers 7 from 1998 running great on Linux, we care about the games that we play with our friends being playable.

https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount

This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.

mvdtnz• 6 months ago

Many of us play with friends and don't dictate every game in the rotation. My time with my friends is more important to me than operating system purity.

Muromec• 6 months ago

This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.

chris_wot2• 6 months ago

Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.

Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.

giancarlostoro8• 6 months ago

I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this day. Windows just bloats all hardware.

dvergeylen• 6 months ago

This was me in 2006 as well. Long live Edgy Eft!

zikduruqe2• 6 months ago

My first distro I booted from was Ubuntu 4.04.

M4R5H4LL• 6 months ago

I suspect this is less about when Windows declined and more about individual computing journeys. Early exposure (home, school, work) tends to set a baseline that’s hard to shake.

esaym• 6 months ago

This was me in 2005.

Ha, same. Windows XP for me had a horrible habit of booting into a blue screen randomly after updating video card drivers (happened with both ATI and Nvidia). Trying to do a repair install wouldn't work. The only option was a full reinstall.

Installation from the disk took an hour. Then (if you were going about this the legal way) you'd have to call the microsoft number to register your install, but be on hold for another 30 minutes. Then it was multiple hours of install your favorite video player, reboot. Install video codecs, reboot. Install firefox, reboot. Apply all of your registry tweaks, reboot. Install all your games from CD-ROM, more rebooting. And multiple hours of that.

I moved to linux back in 2006 or so and never looked back. Documented part of the journey here https://net153.net/ubuntu_vs_debian.html

thewebguyd8• 6 months ago

idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

They largely have now, archinstall.

It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.

simgoh9• 6 months ago

anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.

To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.

morserer6• 6 months ago

Came here to say this. Archinstall rocks.

Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.

The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.

Levitating8• 6 months ago

idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.

ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.

BoxOfRain• 6 months ago

Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.

muthuh• 6 months ago

There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.

Levitating8• 6 months ago

Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:

* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption

* The limine bootloader

* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks

* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved

* sway with my custom ruby based bar

* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0

If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.

kuerbel• 6 months ago

I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.

byronic• 6 months ago

[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]

I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.

In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/

Iolaum• 6 months ago

Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*).

(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p

zamadatix3• 6 months ago

I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it

I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.

mock-possum• 6 months ago

You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?

I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.

manuelabeledo5• 6 months ago

The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of the OS.

And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?

7bit• 6 months ago

idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.

Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.

DrBazza5• 6 months ago

I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.

Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.

For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.

scoodah• 6 months ago

Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to login to icloud.

cogman107• 6 months ago

Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately.

No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.

torstenvl• 6 months ago

Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well

This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?

a_vanderbilt3• 6 months ago

At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it, but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember, macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.

giancarlostoro8• 6 months ago

I only use KDE, though it has weird instability from time to time. They just changed which gcc version I'm on so I am not sure if I've noticed the same instability or not. Overall though KDE is the perfect DE for me.

iwisjwudjqjdw• 6 months ago

The Mac 100% does not require you to sign in to an Apple Account to use it. You can go about with a local account only just fine and you can easily do it right from the OOBE setup UI — no tricks involved whatsoever.

xattt• 6 months ago

idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.

cogman107• 6 months ago

The arch advantage is that your system gets setup exactly how you want it and you have to consciously choose the software set you want to work with.

That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.

grepfru_it4• 6 months ago

Steam and Proton work perfectly

I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.

So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice

[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build

Zekio• 6 months ago

this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really play games on linux with the least friction possible

Mond_• 6 months ago

Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.

tapoxi5• 6 months ago

This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine.

I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.

Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.

everdrive3• 6 months ago

Isn't call of duty the game where Nikki Minaj shoots the cat from the Simpsons? I think I'll pass.

simgoh9• 6 months ago

Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to.

[0] https://massgrave.dev/

godzillabrennus2• 6 months ago

Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...

tyjen• 6 months ago

The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming days are probably over.

runjake• 6 months ago

I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore.

Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.

unclad5968• 6 months ago

Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.

newsoftheday7• 6 months ago

if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.

The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.

I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).

PS I keep Snap disabled.

drillsteps56• 6 months ago

While you _can_ use their launcher, you don't _have_ to. Once you buy the game, you can just download the installer and run it to install on your box. If you want you can save the install package somewhere if you think you'll enjoy the game for years to come and don't want to be dependent on GOG.

I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more recent.

godelski15• 6 months ago

  > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy.

There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.

But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB

Jnr• 6 months ago

I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it.

I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.

Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.

morshu900110• 6 months ago

My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.

Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.

cyberpunk• 6 months ago

What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I’m considering building one soon.

simoncion14• 6 months ago

With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer.

Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.

commandersaki• 6 months ago

If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.

bastardoperator• 6 months ago

How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?

Der_Einzige2• 6 months ago

Pacman -syyu

One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.

MSFT_Edging2• 6 months ago

(idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro)

Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it.

The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system.

The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.

giancarlostoro8• 6 months ago

My first distro was Slackware, which I setup all myself. I just don't see any true value in what could be a simple GUI.

timw4mail2• 6 months ago

I'm too invested into Gentoo at this point to really consider Arch, but hey, arch-chroot does make modern Gentoo installs just a bit quicker.

Wojtkie• 6 months ago

I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?

ziml77• 6 months ago

There actually is an installer for arch. I haven't tried it myself, but there should be an application included on the ISO called archinstall which helps with basically everything that's part of the install guide on the Arch wiki.

amputect• 6 months ago

I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos.

Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.

ActorNightly• 6 months ago

gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig,

If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense.

Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.

xtracto2• 6 months ago

Mu gaming needs are more than fulfilled with Steam/Proton and Xbox Live. Both of them work in Linux (Mint is my flavour of choice) and Mac.

rekabis3• 6 months ago

I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account

You quit without even trying.

Windows 10 and 11 can have all local accounts by using RUFUS to create the install media. And if your PC comes with Windows already installed, there are still commands - even with 25H2 - that allow you to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement during setup and configure a local account.

And this is with both Home and Pro.

washadjeffmad• 6 months ago

It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again.

btreecat• 6 months ago

idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Because in reality, you should be able to use the wiki for installing. Because if you can't, you might not be able to use the wiki to support yourself in the future.

The issue most people have with slapping some paint on arch then riding the coat tails is the eternal September effect. Arch community prefers folks who try to help themselves _first_ and reading an install wiki is a good indicator you're going to do that.

sylware• 6 months ago

Don't worry, microsoft is putting its rust all over open source.

teekert2• 6 months ago

I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.

I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.

I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.

coffeebeqn5• 6 months ago

Every company I’ve worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the experience for me is the same on Linux. What’s so appealing about the classic Office suite?

teekert2• 6 months ago

Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux). Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become significantly better over the last year, before that I avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference management. That just really annoying if people use those features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.

mring33621• 6 months ago

Worth clicking for the "Microslop" logo alone!

Shortcut: https://www.himthe.dev/img/blog/microslop/4.png

scalemaxx2• 6 months ago

Curious to see how the Favicon will change too!

andyferris• 6 months ago

Apparently it moved (at least for me): https://m0u9gezmt0.ufs.sh/f/5F1wx5BYZG1wbDc8WftgL2Nrvz9BolE3...

mrbluecoat• 6 months ago

my first computer was a Windows 98 machine

The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.

jmarcher• 6 months ago

The most puzzling part is why someone would run Windows 98 on a machine built around 2002/2003 (according to the specs).

bhewes2• 6 months ago

Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux. And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux. Agree otherwise good to see another join.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Awesome, good to know that, and glad to be here

bhewes2• 6 months ago

Houdini,3dcoat,Nuke are the three things we pay for, will use Maya when we work with Maya artists, but dcc is mostly 3dcoat-blender-houndini workflow.

coffeebeqn5• 6 months ago

Unity works fine for example. I used it for a bit over a year on a project we did for multiple platforms

a_e_k• 6 months ago

I spent over a decade developing rendering software used in VFX, and ran CentOS Linux as my development platform at work.

We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became a thing back in 2014.

https://vfxplatform.com/

bilekas• 6 months ago

Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.

The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.

Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.

But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.

mixedbit• 6 months ago

I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without major issues.

sporedro• 6 months ago

It’s sort of crazy how much changed in the past few years. The only things that don’t run well under wine/proton now I feel like are online games with kernel anticheat and products like Autodesk or Adobe.

Joel_Mckay• 6 months ago

There are some commercial Applications that just won't work on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained development software.

Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.

I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3

consp2• 6 months ago

Ah, the Microsoft "updates".

After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).

The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.

Markoff• 6 months ago

My experience is more like:

"I'll switch when Linux supports X."

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Okay, but how about my X?"

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Well, X is still missing..."

Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.

Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.

So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows

I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).

I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.

eYrKEC2• 6 months ago

If the activities are distinct, dual boot. I do all my dev in linux and boot into windows for gaming.

Dev in linux is so much nicer for me than dev in Windows.

iotapi322• 6 months ago

You know what's funny about this article.... Back in 2012 I had the same problems with Windows Update and that is what forced me to go to a mac. I've never looked back.

pier252• 6 months ago

You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent.

This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.

Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.

kavalg2• 6 months ago

Not just a couple of times. It happened to me countless times.

boxed• 6 months ago

Meanwhile on macOS, modern apps will not lose data if the power is janked out at any point.

DanOpcode• 6 months ago

Happened to me just a few days ago. Woke up, turned on PC, all my open programs were gone due to a Windows Update...

nashashmi• 6 months ago

Happens to me way too often. And it is frustrating if backup auto save is not included in the system. I have disabled auto update because of this.

IG_Semmelweiss• 6 months ago

I installed Windows Update Blocker (AKA "WUB") and i've stopped the nonsense shutdowns late at night.

That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...

causalscience• 6 months ago

The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part.

HendrikHensen3• 6 months ago

Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10 years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And Microsoft just doesn't care.

This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.

chimprich• 6 months ago

There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.

Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.

I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.

pier252• 6 months ago

Personally it's rare that I leave something unsaved. That said it has never been an issue on macOS in 20 years.

aenis• 6 months ago

Huh?

I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.

simgoh9• 6 months ago

I aspire to have your level of confidence in anything that amounts to leaving unsaved work in any sort of shape or form.

ebbi• 6 months ago

The point is, the user shouldn't have to work around the OS. The OS should work around the user. If there are unsaved files, the OS should not be installing an update and removing unsaved work.

Telaneo6• 6 months ago

While my instinctual reaction is the same, that's only because I've been hurt by losing work the same way presumable everybody else has. But that's all because Windows hasn't elected to solve this problem.

Macs (largely) don't have this problem, so it's clearly solvable. There isn't any inherent law of computing or the universe that says it should be this way.

I still press CMD+S on Macs every time I'm done typing in something, but that's only because I've been hurt and live with the trauma, so to speak. There's no reason to hurt others to learn a lesson that doesn't actually have any value.

anon2917• 6 months ago

Correct. Windows is not a serious operating system. It really never has been. I've been on desktop linux for decades now. Linux is a serious operating system. Nothing happens without you asking it too. My linux computers are never turned off, since they day I turn them on, except for the occasional kernel upgrade. Otherwise, all upgrades are live. Even most kernel upgrades can be avoided if you use one of the modern patch frameworks

mminer237• 6 months ago

I literally cannot count the number of times I put my Linux computer to sleep and it just doesn't wake up, and I have to hard reset the power to get it to do anything. I would never leave anything unsaved open for an extended period of time on a graphical Linux system.

maccard5• 6 months ago

the flip side of this is I can't count the number of times that cropping a screenshot in paint and leaving it in the background has partially stopped my PC from rebooting, and I've discovered the following morning that "you have unsaved work" on paint interrupted the shutdown and i need to do the shutdown _again_.

schlch• 6 months ago

I have been using Linux as a desktop operating system for what I believe is almost two decades. Recently(?) I see distro named like CashyOS and Bazzite being thrown around. Am I missing out on something?

3abiton• 6 months ago

If you don't want the "hassle" of flag optimization when compiling binaries, CachyOS is basically Arch but with optimized binaries. Otherwise, Gentoo all the way, you just need a good machine.

coffeebeqn5• 6 months ago

There are many really good ones these days that will have a much better experience than windows. I’ve used Ubuntu, Pop, Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend to run that on my machines now.

Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck

mythz• 6 months ago

EOL of Windows 10 forced me to, but I'm not mad - Desktop Linux is Great!

It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.

jojohack• 6 months ago

Timing of your post is spot on. I just emptied a drive to prep for a Linux switch this morning ( for the same reasons ) :D

breezykoi4• 6 months ago

Audio latency on Linux was already very low long before PipeWire, thanks to JACK.

scalemaxx2• 6 months ago

Love that the Favicon for the blog is the Internet Explorer logo. Will that change?

stuff4ben2• 6 months ago

I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work, but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100% satisfied.

72deluxe5• 6 months ago

How do you find macOS Tahoe? I have deliberately avoided installing it on my M3 MacBook Air that I use for work mainly due to the lack of attention to detail they seem to have dumped on the UI.

I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.

I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the house, but do I hate using Windows 11.

PunchyHamster2• 6 months ago

Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-consensual updates

MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.

Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams

fainpul• 6 months ago

Same on macOS — pestering me with the Tahoe update notification and the buttons are basically "now" or "later".

chris_wot2• 6 months ago

I’ve been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).

I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.

I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.

kavalg2• 6 months ago

It was a very entertaining read. I am just wondering if this one may be actionable:

"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."

burningChrome2• 6 months ago

Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.

Only to see this article today. lol

I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.

Eric_WVGG3• 6 months ago

I’m kind of curious why Adobe hasn’t gone all-in on Linux by now. IIRC Adobe apps were built on cross-platform tooling like Java (InDesign) and AIR (all the CS UI, and then the underpinnings in C++).

I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.

burningChrome2• 6 months ago

Every few years someone posts the same thing in the Adobe forums which then piss off the moderators and Adobe "experts". They continue to say the same thing which makes zero sense.

I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of: "Linux users are open source people and expect everything for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no need to port them for Linux users because so few of them would be willing to pay for our products."

A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-

And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I hold out hope they will be one day.

gortok• 6 months ago

I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.

al_borland7• 6 months ago

I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway

This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.

Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.

I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.

thewebguyd8• 6 months ago

I doubt the dual boot issue was due to UEFI. It's more likely, Windows was clobbering over GRUB and overwriting your bootloader, as it likes to do. Windows really wants to be the only OS on your drive.

Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.

As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments

Toutouxc• 6 months ago

My desktop is a gaming-only machine, it’s still on Windows 10 and it will probably stay on Windows 10 until Steam stops working.

Cyph0n• 6 months ago

Similar journey, different distro! I wanted a Linux gaming machine, but given my recent admission into the cult of NixOS, I went with Jovian.

Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)

jimbo808• 6 months ago

Forced? It's been a delight. I'd say if anything, I've only ever felt forced to use MacOS or Windows, never forced to use Linux.

domo__knows• 6 months ago

Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).

LorenDB• 6 months ago

I'll copy my comment on another article here:

2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:

- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11

- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux

- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting

- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month

- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months

- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was

- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them

In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.

habitable5• 6 months ago

Windows 10 went EOL

Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.

Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.

Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dmix• 6 months ago

My parents paying for One Drive when they didn't need it is why I finally moved them off Windows as well.

I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.

jajuuka2• 6 months ago

Another day another "hey guys I switched Linux" post gets pushed to the top of the heap. These add nothing except create an echo chamber about great Linux is and Windows is the worst.

hereme888• 6 months ago

It's worth noting that if someone has the skill to install and run Linux with games, they probably have the skill to use massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts and ask AI to help bypass to install a local Windows account. And that probable takes less time.

alexambarch• 6 months ago

As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.

morserer6• 6 months ago

Bitwig was developed by ex-Ableton devs, and the layout is incredibly similar. It's a very easy transition compared to coming from a DAW like FL or Logic.

It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.

Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.

bichiliad• 6 months ago

I came in here looking for this thread specifically (I can't imagine moving off of Ableton). Thanks for taking a sec to write this up! I might give it a try, just for the synth alone.

SomeHacker443• 6 months ago

My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too) is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...

publicdebates2• 6 months ago

How likely is a future where Microsoft

(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,

(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)

spikej• 6 months ago

I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.

bootsmann• 6 months ago

(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again

Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.

drillsteps56• 6 months ago

Give me back the proper search which last worked Windows 7-ish (or XP?). And traditional Office interface (not stupid "context-specific" tiles).

accrual2• 6 months ago

I still find myself doing "dir /s *myfile*" on modern Windows sometimes because it's less unpredictable than searching Explorer.

cogman107• 6 months ago

I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.

And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.

Andrex2• 6 months ago

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

I would say 2009. Vista's troubled driver era was necessary, and Windows 7 was pretty awesome.

AlienRobot• 6 months ago

How likely is a future where Microsoft
(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

I actually laughed out loud when I read this, so I think extremely unlikely.

publicdebates2• 6 months ago

They're definitely going to do it at some point in the near future, mark my words.

nalekberov• 6 months ago

Microsoft is its own worst enemy.

Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.

Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.

I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.

I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.

QuadrupleA• 6 months ago

I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.

I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.

Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.

stdbrouw• 6 months ago

One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.

The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.

Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.

fguerraz• 6 months ago

They lost me at Vista lol

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)

khat2• 6 months ago

Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.

Aperocky• 6 months ago

macOS has been quite popular in the United States for a long time now (and I suspect it's not so popular in other region not due to product, but price), showing that things can exist without those "features".

I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.

radicalethics• 6 months ago

I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.

tracker116• 6 months ago

I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...

I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...

I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.

Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.

I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.

Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.

otikik• 6 months ago

Yeah. The ads in he start menu are a sign that you are no longer the customer, you are the product. Windows has other similar “features”.

blackcatsec7• 6 months ago

I do not have ads in my start menu, and no, I didn't "debloat" my PC. This is a base install where I flipped a couple of settings in the start menu options.

jimbokun2• 6 months ago

It's really hard to maintain a product team where the mandate is just "don't break anything and keep the quality high". Especially something with as big of an installed base as Windows.

The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product is pretty much "done".

jayd163• 6 months ago

The mandate seams to be "squeeze everything for a subscription fee and keep the quality... actually just the first thing".

cogman107• 6 months ago

I disagree, I think companies mostly just don't want to spend development money on existing "finished" products. That's the smell I'm getting from microsoft.

There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with performance in windows 11. There should be people in the windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete it.

tracker116• 6 months ago

No, it really shouldn't be... You can reduce headcount a lot, which they did, and concentrate on bugs (including security reports), while working with hardware vendors for if/when new features need to be integrated for better usability.

If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old menu that has what you are actually looking for because the old extension interface was broken.

Want a real exercise in fun ... just for fun, because I know it's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it... that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in there, but every third update will disable it all again. I get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.

k6hkUZtLUM• 6 months ago

I want to chime in here. It's advertisements on my desktop that repels me. There is something deeply personal about ads in my desktop that feels like being violated. This is a computer that I paid for, with software that I pay for, that includes all my most personal files and data. Seeing ads on the OS completely eroded my trust.

Of course, I still use Windows for various things, but I have too much "ick" for it to be the system where I check my email, manage my business, keep my important files, etc.

Windows is really great for lots of things, but I don't trust it.

ajross3• 6 months ago

I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution

Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.

The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"

For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.

Now? CachyOS. Yikes.

coffeebeqn5• 6 months ago

There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.

ajross3• 6 months ago

There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros

Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.

Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.

I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.

ajross3• 6 months ago

It's not anything about CachyOS in particular, frankly I don't know it and I'm sure it's fine. It's that the culture of "I'll grab this known-good base and tweak it, then advertise it to the world as the next best thing" is just toxic for Regular People wanting to learn about stuff.

Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?

People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works, where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for experimental kernel scheduler implementations!

ReptileMan• 6 months ago

I use it for a month as daily driver. For Linux it is ok.

throw7• 6 months ago

I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).

It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).

Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.

blackcatsec7• 6 months ago

I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues. And I still stand by this even as I've had issues over the years here or there.

I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.

My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.

I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).

I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.

The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.

phkahler• 6 months ago

> I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues.

And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.

brockers• 6 months ago

It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer, music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control, easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage. There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.

Archelaos• 6 months ago

If you were primarily targeting a Windows market for a desktop application, but want to develop under Linux, what tech stack would you choose?

dz0ny• 6 months ago

I just want to mention that most apps that would be laggy on Wine just work via https://flathub.org/en/apps/ru.linux_gaming.PortProton. Install PortProton double click .exe install app and off you go.

- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station

ryukoposting8• 6 months ago

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.

Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

willk• 6 months ago

Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".

AnonC• 6 months ago

On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or Crowdstrike). I don’t download files or get files from other sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every couple of weeks or so.

It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.

vladvasiliu14• 6 months ago

I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has similar issues, and it only has the included windows defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a halt.

At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.

The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.

zerd2• 6 months ago

If it's DLP then using alternative file browsers should also be affected, right? Which at least in my case it isn't.

buckle8017• 6 months ago

I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.

throwway1203852• 6 months ago

It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors.

HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.

bambax• 6 months ago

Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault; companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.

(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)

bunderbunder5• 6 months ago

It seems industry-wide these days.

What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.

CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.

jjordan• 6 months ago

Microsoft is progressively making everything an instance of Chrome. They've seemingly altogether given up the notion of native platform rendering. The win32 api for native ui elements hasn't been touched in two decades. There have been a few failed attempts to move on from it like Siverlight, WinForms, UWP, LightSwitch, etc, but they never bothered to revisit their native UI library. So now everything is a Chrome instance.

chwtutha• 6 months ago

I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible

g8oz2• 6 months ago

An i3 is a damn near OSHA violation.

curiousmindz• 6 months ago

Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your laptop?

By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.

Romario77• 6 months ago

I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.

AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.

They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.

ryukoposting8• 6 months ago

This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?

yoyohello132• 6 months ago

My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.

It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.

The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.

Telaneo6• 6 months ago

a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core

Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.

Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.

TrackerFF• 6 months ago

Me and my fiancé both bought Lenovo laptops with 16GB RAM and 5000-series Ryzen, 500 GB SSD. They were on sale, and the price seemed nice.

Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The result window will just be blank. If I press enter after having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so laggy.

And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a defective screen - nope, only certain apps.

TacticalCoder• 6 months ago

I may just try to load ChromeOS on it.

If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers, hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.

People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).

It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is today.

b1temy3• 6 months ago

Similar story here.

Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64 GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work / school.)

Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just isn't a nice environment to use.

At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements, GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming for my shell, and several other things.

But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux, but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can only think of one reason...

DrBazza5• 6 months ago

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.

And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.

And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.

And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.

Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.

benhurmarcel• 6 months ago

version of explorer that's so fast

https://filepilot.tech/

AuthAuth2• 6 months ago

The problem is on windows you're competing directly against the guys who own the operating system. So even when there is a gap for a better file manager the one that microsoft makes is so entrenched and microsoft can make sure they always win. It sucks.

hn_acc12• 6 months ago

I found chrome was putting itself into "eco mode" on my Lenovo (work) laptop all of a sudden. Meant that waking up took FOREVER, and accessing a web page (required as part of a daily login) took 15+ seconds to load when first logging in, as opposed to a few seconds, which caused our password app to timeout at times, etc. Who the heck comes up with these ideas? "Eco mode" by default? And no way to disable it easily? I had to add an obscure switch to the chrome startup to make it run normally again.

vee-kay3• 6 months ago

A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as (portable) freeware since 15+ years.

Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.

mjevans• 6 months ago

It was VERY common in the spinning rust era to already open (office, etc) applications in the background. I think the launch operation only allocated window resources and finished the job; all the hit the disk work was already precached in memory while the OS was doing the slow computer starting up / logging into the network steps and the user was off getting a coffee or something.

n4bz0r• 6 months ago

If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent reason.

I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that happens.

dole• 6 months ago

Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.

varispeed• 6 months ago

If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11. The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones, Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a netbook in early 2010s.

I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from fan noise).

pimeys3• 6 months ago

The Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms are finally really good again, comparable to AMD. Fast and power efficient. Before Lunar Lake they were pretty much crap, I agree.

notenlish• 6 months ago

Panther Lake and Lunar Lake are pretty good I'd say. Intel has been improving.

Der_Einzige2• 6 months ago

KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce, bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling WMs.

demilicious2• 6 months ago

KDE has been great for me on Fedora. What problems have you encountered?

jaimex2• 6 months ago

KDE is the best. Everything they make is awesome, Im a big fan.

So much so I donate to them monthly.

jofla_net2• 6 months ago

There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....

alamortsubite• 6 months ago

Possible but more likely it's an issue with focus, like the user's palm on those occasions coincidentally brushes the trackpad.

To be clear, I have no doubt Windows 11 is just as awful as GP makes it out to be. I'm luckily free to choose my OS and at this point wouldn't touch Windows with a 10' pole.

doctorpangloss• 6 months ago

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some directories.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.

If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.

I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.

It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.

I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.

mft_• 6 months ago

I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.

Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.

dannersy• 6 months ago

I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with any sort of speed.

Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.

dist-epoch3• 6 months ago

How about a right click on the desktop? I have a very fast computer with no bloatware on, yet it takes half a second for the desktop context menu to appear. When I do this repeatedly. The first time takes 1 second or more.

Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is instant.

niam2• 6 months ago

If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.

A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows' aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them turned off. But even with animations turned off on an aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux machines.

sundvor• 6 months ago

The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end.

Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of the bloat/junk).

Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had some issues getting my video to work properly across all of Teams and Zoom.

maccard5• 6 months ago

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I disagree. I've got windows defender as the only endpoint software on both my daily driver machines, and I see the same issues.

In 2019, I was working for a place that installed Carbon Black on my desktop and it went from fast to unusable overnight. I've since changed jobs, and I've seen a decay in the baseline of the OS over the last 6 years.

signal11• 6 months ago

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all
I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly.

Also re endpoint management, corporate Macs also have endpoint management and still provide better experience vs corporate Windows PCs.

Microsoft isn’t a mute participant in the corporate device market. Their recommendations and best practices carry enormous weight. Windows division can work with security vendors and customers to improve UX. But they maybe haven’t done enough. Maybe because Windows is an increasingly small fraction of Microsoft’s bottom line? Who knows.

But today you’ll see increasing numbers of Macs in even super-Windows-heavy workplaces, especially in digital/cyber/AI/leadership roles. That’s not a one-company quirk.

mbreese• 6 months ago

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.

Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.

My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.

gerdesj2• 6 months ago

"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."

You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.

The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.

You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.

There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!

analog312• 6 months ago

>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

This can also be due to OneDrive / Sharepoint / Teams etc. Which I suspect supports your point.

A hard lesson I learned was that cloning a git repository into a directory managed by OneDrive is a recipe for interesting behavior.

freeopinion• 6 months ago

I guessed the same thing. Probably the fault of employer-mandated software gumming things up. But since the only reason to run Windows is because my employer mandates it, almost all of my Windows experiences involve enterprise-managed lag in the extreme.

It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.

themaninthedark• 6 months ago

> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

It seems to be a common complaint online, dating back to the launch of 11. I see some of the blame being put on extensions but what changed in the extensions between 10 and 11 to cause this?

I know on my work computer I was experiencing this plus I almost always have to click show more and wait for that lag to finish.

I was able to edit the registry to show all at the cost of 1 lag...so I guess a step forward?

nottorp2• 6 months ago

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

Not necessarily. Every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to install a context menu item on Windows. Corporate or not. Just like every little or not so little utility deems it necessary to send you notifications on mobile.

On Windows the solution is Total Commander, on mobile the solution is to turn all notifications off :)

hbogert2• 6 months ago

Endpoint software is a blight. My company's M2 pro should have flown through the things i subject it to. But simple things like linting on many files is slower than my 8y old pc on a sata-SSD.

dietr1ch• 6 months ago

Are you sure it's the corporate tracker? Maybe it's the copilot tracker, or maybe the Recall video recording? Maybe it's the Windows anti-virus, or even the corporate anti-virus. What about the Advertisement stuff and the web search?

It's hard to tell what makes a non-stock Windows install slow.

pedro_caetano• 6 months ago

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I had the same issue with a loan machine from a client, super responsive onsite, but once I connected through a VPN from an external network, all the basic functionality in the file manager was brought to a halt. Even something as simple as right click on a folder to show a context menu would take several seconds.

The files were all local (also with Onedrive sync disabled) so I am almost positive it was whatever they were using for endpoint protection (Can't recall 100% but probably something from CrowdStrike).

zeratax• 6 months ago

on my corporate laptop as well as my own private surface laptop as well as my gaming rig does file explorer lag doing pretty much anything and the context menu can sometimes take like 10 seconds to open. this is a pretty wide spread issue you can see people mention this everywhere

mldbk• 6 months ago

Either you haven't been when context menus / explorer was blazingly fast or something odd happens there, since I can confirm that on brand new PC (128GB RAM, 9950X3D, 5090) with vanilla Windows 11 it still lags and annoys a lot after some linux distro.

etempleton2• 6 months ago

Corporate, “security software” is almost always to blame for Windows being slow on new machines. There is no reason for Windows 11 to be that slow. On my personal machine Windows runs great. My last Windows work laptop was, despite being brand new, unusable. 100 % CPU and memory usage with not a single application open was the norm.

zerd2• 6 months ago

Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay.

I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.

Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.

leptons3• 6 months ago

Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security" software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would normally without such bloated software installed that runs in the background and slows down practically every process you do with the machine.

smusamashah2• 6 months ago

Please try https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window.

Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though.

Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.

ryukoposting8• 6 months ago

I'll be trying this tomorrow, thanks.

sysworld3• 6 months ago

Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware. A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay, something else is going on there.

Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic functionality way to resource heavy.

jiggawatts2• 6 months ago

Another common issue on corporate-issued workstation laptops is that they don’t install the proper GPU drivers. The basic ones that ship with the OS are awful, but work just well enough that people don’t notice that they’re missing something important.

pplonski86• 6 months ago

I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just silent

koyote• 6 months ago

I have the same specs in my work machine.

Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes. Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load.

I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.

WheatMillington• 6 months ago

Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my home gaming machine.

nickjj2• 6 months ago

I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10 Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance.

We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing, etc..

It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only got rebooted for forced Windows patches.

With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me was over near the end of 2025.

I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No regrets, except for gaming.

ryukoposting8• 6 months ago

If you had 16 GB of RAM, yeah Windows 10 was mostly fine. The laptop I had in high school was rocking 4 GB and a first-gen i5. Windows 7 was rock solid on that machine, but 10 brought it to its knees. Sandy Bridge fared much, much better, to be fair, but the jump from "4GB is enough" to "8GB is pushing your luck" was not pleasant, as I recall it.

upcoming-sesame• 6 months ago

I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an okay experience until it just crashes and stops working.

The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they couldn't find an edge management system for Linux

hadlock• 6 months ago

I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux.

If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/

misiek08• 6 months ago

More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus. 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process. Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.

maccard5• 6 months ago

Honestly - I think it must be a laptop thing. I have a similar spec laptop [0] for work, and it's... borderline unusable. I can ignore the upsells, always online, etc but the OS is just fundamentally falling apart more and more every other release. If I unplug the power cable, it throttles itself to the point of being neutered, and if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery.

My work desktop on the other hand (i9, 64GB ram, 4080 GPU) is absolutely screaming and I have some of the same problems but they're nowhere near as bad.

I don't think I could genuinely buy another windows laptop.

[0] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/dell-xps-...

elektronika• 6 months ago

if I try to put it to sleep it _very regularly_ will just stay awake and drain its own battery

Sadly Linux isn't any better on this front because it's a hardware issue. Laptop vendors have gotten terrible at managing sleep states. S0 sleep is a joke. I changed my laptop to hibernate on lid close after the second time it nearly cooked itself in my bag.

nialv7• 6 months ago

iirc the cause of context menu delay was there is an invisible animation I think.

The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.

embedding-shape4• 6 months ago

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.

I purchased a Surface Pro at one point, with the intention of using it for sketches and using Windows on it, thinking it'll be better because the hardware and OS is from the same organization. Nope! Slow out of the box, horrible thermal management and software bugs galore. Installed Arch with Gnome on it, ran better in most aspects. However, pen usage and touchscreen even after I tried my best to adjust it was worse than Windows, I guess they won there.

I didn't use to hate Windows, because at least it wasn't utterly broken, just stupid, but they're really in a deep decline lately. Maybe it's time for one of those "stop the press" type of moments where they have to stop, take a serious look and fix what they have as it currently feels impossible to use reliably.

avadodin• 6 months ago

Windows does allow you to enter Chinese characters when you say your language is Chinese.

I have moved to Bazzite at home but it is ridiculous that you can't just use your language right away. A normal person would just bail out.

If you choose Chinese, all of the content is localized but you have to enable an input method and that doesn't even actually allow you to input Chinese characters!

It shows you a scrolling(!) pop-up that tells you you have to enable a different option in order to type in the language that you chose at the very beginning. Hope you didn't choose the wrong one out of ibus, fcitx and fcitx(wayland experimental) – whatever happened to scim, and xim, I miss editing environment variables.

Even the cheapest Android gadget can do this out of the box.

donkeylazy4562• 6 months ago

Explorer file browser is just disaster. I am forced to use third-party browsing app when the directory contains hundreds of media.

It has happened since win7 or older but still not fixed.

lunar_rover• 6 months ago

what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.

nwellinghoff• 6 months ago

A lot of these accounts seem anecdotal. I have a clean copy of win 11 iot ltsc running on my laptop and it runs well. The desktop management, included hyper V, wsl2 and awesome RDP make it a great platform to get work done. Most problems people encounter with Windows have to do with driver maturity. And in the case of a mega corp managed machine its all the “security” bs the put on there that slows you down to a crawl.Once you get stable drivers; I find Windows 11,with wsl as my shell, to be quite nice.

ryukoposting8• 6 months ago

Well yes, it is anecdotal. After all, it's my personal experience, which is, by definition, an anecdote. At what point did I suggest the exact types of bullshit Win11 exposes me to are exactly the same as everyone else experiences?

Sverigevader2• 6 months ago

About hitting the print screen button by accident. I have the same issue and like you I can sometimes get out of it by hitting ESC. I think this sometimes fails because the snipping app isn't in focus (even though it's covering the entire screen).

The trick I found to get out of it is to hit ALT+TAB. It ironically puts another app into focus and when that happens, the snipping tool exits. Snipping tool is pretty great though. I wish macOS had the same.

opan2• 6 months ago

What's snipping tool have over macOS's super-shift-5 (or 4 or 3)? I would usually put Greenshot on any Windows box I'm gonna have to use a while, and that seems to pretty much have feature parity with all my slurp+grim Sway keybinds on GNU/Linux.

EasyMark• 6 months ago

My work laptop does the same thing. Pretty maxed out for a Dell but still can be slow, especially right click context menu. Someone else said it could be endpoint software (executable scanning?) which makes sense. things improved a bit after a I turned off the eye candy under appearance settings other than font rendering and shadowing. Might be worth a try.

MonkeyClub• 6 months ago

when opening directories with more than 100-ish files

99 files should be enough for everyone.

Friedduck• 6 months ago

You can disable windows folder type detection to speed the laggy file explorer navigation. It’s a registry hack and so limited for corporate machines.

hiccuphippo• 6 months ago

I'd recommend Chris Titus' winutil to remove most of the crap. I use the recommended settings and also remove copilot and onedrive. Then from there you can open O&O Shutup10 and disable a few more "features".

It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable.

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

bratwurst3000• 6 months ago

Had similar issu. Windows 11 installed two gpu driver that run parallel. Cpu etc was on low but everything was lacking. did go to safe mode and deinstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Windows installed them again even with me doing everything it didnt... whatever now i have mac and it sucks also but doesnt lag that hard.

maybe it helps

the_lucifer• 6 months ago

Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

What I have noticed is to let it load the snipping UI first and start listening for your keystrokes. If you hit escape really quickly, right after you accidentally hit print screen, it will not go away and require you to manually mouse over and hit the X. But if you wait for a second and then hit escape, it almost always registers my keystroke. It's almost like hitting escape really quickly just quits the keyboard listener instead of the actual snipping tool.

mattdeboard• 6 months ago

My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2 for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on software like this again. Worst development experience of my life because of what a miserable dev env windows is.

I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.

karteum2• 6 months ago

All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.

Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)

jsheard12• 6 months ago

That's correct, proper open source Linux is always limited to the weakest tiers of streaming DRM (i.e. fully software based) which usually means you only get low resolution streams. Locked-down Linux derivatives like ChromeOS and Android can support the stronger DRM tiers of course but that's not the same thing.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Widevine on Linux now is 720p. I usually don’t notice, only once in a while that show is not full HD.

karteum2• 6 months ago

720p is OK for me and I also almost don't notice. 480p is really noticeable (and totally unacceptable when you pay for a subscription...).

bradley13• 6 months ago

Just do it.

I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.

a-dub• 6 months ago

it's really bad these days. even the teams web client doesn't work properly and when it does it is missing the most basic features like "test my audio." i don't understand what it is about how that company is organized that the software keeps coming out with interfaces and user experiences that look like they were created by 2023 era generative ai.

Eric_WVGG3• 6 months ago

If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face

I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.

tokai2• 6 months ago

Its not a burn. Just acknowledging the memes about cross dressing and programming/computer science that has been going around certain online circles for years.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

Eric_WVGG3• 6 months ago

o_O wow, okay. Appreciate it.

jimbokun2• 6 months ago

Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post asking people to stop calling AI-generated content "slop" and to think of AI as "bicycles for the mind."

I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.

poolnoodle2• 6 months ago

I really want to like Linux but every time I try it (and I tried a lot of distros and DEs) it is death by a thousand UX paper cuts.

larrik• 6 months ago

I went from Linux to Mac to Windows and every single one is death by a thousand UX paper cuts.

tambourine_man2• 6 months ago

Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional

That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.

Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.

For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

Andrex2• 6 months ago

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

I've heard of people doing this, do they?

I'm so desperate for Premiere, even 6+ years after switching OSes. Resolve won't install on Fedora (???), our all-Flatpak future cannot get here soon enough...

tambourine_man2• 6 months ago

It’s possible but I’ve never used it as a daily driver.

One thing that scares me is that Adobe apps are already buggy on their own officially supported platforms. If I encountered a glitch, I’d always have in the back of my mind “is it because of my crazy set up or is it their fault?”

kaydub3• 6 months ago

I haven't even touched a Windows PC in years at this point. Don't know why you'd do that to yourself. I was hanging on to a gaming PC, but it broke during a move over 2 years ago now. I decided that was the last windows box I'd own at that point.

antonyh• 6 months ago

The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.

The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.

When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.

Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.

Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.

nisegami• 6 months ago

FYI: latest Photoshop should work on Wine as of this week, but of course that situation may be too subject to change for someone's main source of income.

Zolt• 6 months ago

I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.

Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.

Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.

jms703• 6 months ago

Yes, did the same thing for similar reasons. Everything works well. When with Arch Linux.

drillsteps56• 6 months ago

I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.

But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.

For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.

That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.

Nihilartikel• 6 months ago

My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.

mrks_hy• 6 months ago

That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.

I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).

drillsteps56• 6 months ago

That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some software I used on Windows and files it created (think Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except games I guess).

As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.

starky• 6 months ago

Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.

This is an overblown issue. For the most it is a case of installing the proprietary driver package following the instructions for your distro. One more step than AMD which just works, but not really any more difficult than installing another package.

TheRealPomax2• 6 months ago

It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".

globalnode• 6 months ago

need to pay for a pro license for gpedit - normies still get forced updates

TheRealPomax2• 6 months ago

And for those we tell them the truth: if all this bothers you, and it should, pay for the version of Windows that you can control, instead of paying nothing and having your computer (and data) be controlled by someone else.

Or, of course, pay nothing and use Linux. But as much as we want to pretend that's a solution that works for everyone, that's not a solution that works for everyone. Especially as, just like Windows, you're not done once it's installed, you still need to do that one time configure-all-the-things pass on Linux, too.

zkmon• 6 months ago

I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.

I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.

perks_12• 6 months ago

I've been using Linux on my devices for quite some time now. I was pleasantly surprised when I had to start 4k video editing work and could just use Davinci Resolve. 2026 might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it's getting better day by day.

0xbadcafebee• 6 months ago

Linux has plenty of video card driver issues too. Windows may suck, but Linux sucks in different ways. Windows suckage is solved by "buy a different machine and reinstall". Linux suckage is solved by weeks googling and trying technical fixes in consoles, installing different distributions and trying the same, then eventually buying a different machine.

Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.

29athrowaway• 6 months ago

Microsoft Windows is an entitled tenant that thinks it owns the property (your computer).

72deluxe5• 6 months ago

I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.

I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).

Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).

thetwentyone• 6 months ago

FWIW for similar reasons I nuked my Windows install and installed CauchyOS. My main reason for not doing it earlier was concerns about game compatibility but so far the games I want to play either are working without any issue or work after enabling Steam's proton compatibility layer.

arthurjj• 6 months ago

Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.

Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Honestly that's what it feels like when something breaks. Linux - you see what's wrong, you fix it, it's done

Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update

alphax3142• 6 months ago

There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)

robby_w_g• 6 months ago

If Microsoft vibe codes a Linux distro and calls it Windows 360 Copilot, I’m on board with the conspiracy theory that the Hadron Collider broke reality

morserer6• 6 months ago

This is a simultaneously insane yet deeply delightful concept. Does anyone have the link to that discussion?

alphax3142• 6 months ago

This is the discussion I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673264

tracker116• 6 months ago

Except the problem is their UX more than the kernel itself. I don't see them keeping Gnome or KDE as a desktop UI even if they did fully adopt Linux for desktop usage.

MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.

I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Unlikely but growing as profit dwindles. Previously it was unfathomable that Apple would offer RISC/Unix Workstations, or MS would jettison IE.

rawgabbit• 6 months ago

I'm gonna go full conspiracy nut here, but I bet it's because the LLM understands JavaScript better, and Microsoft can't be asked to pay actual humans to write proper native code.

Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.

Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.

tracker116• 6 months ago

It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.

In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.

My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.

juujian• 6 months ago

Windows is now also too much work.

Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.

incubo4u• 6 months ago

haha cool post btw RN not always runs on chromium/v8

morshu900110• 6 months ago

"Video playback works flawlessly, with hardware acceleration even" not really, especially on Netflix

geophile2• 6 months ago

FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.

AJ007• 6 months ago

There is a good parallel here with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace added an ad network & was hammered by spammers around the same time Facebook was opening up user registration to everyone. Facebook had no ads. Myspace was dead.

This time Linux has very good game support to the point where some games have a higher FPS on Linux. It will be so expensive for Microsoft to attempt to turn this ship around, and it will likely still fail.

This is happening at the same time AI agents have gotten really good, so users will just use local AI agents to configure and troubleshoot the rough stuff about Linux. And then they will customize it so much they will never be able to go back to Windows.

Ubuntu is just fine for 99% of non tech users. Windows has so many anti-patterns, tricks, and OneDrive rugpulls now that Ubuntu is actually much safer and simpler for non-techies to use (I can also make the case it beats iOS in that department too.)

pdntspa4• 6 months ago

I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.

I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Put that on a dedicated machine and move everything else, especially your personal files, over for privacy reasons.

pdntspa4• 6 months ago

I know, but I really like gaming on the music production speakers! Having one computer that does both is too much fun

synalx• 6 months ago

For 3D modeling (assuming you want to do CAD), Onshape is a fantastic alternative to native applications.

tipsyrobot• 6 months ago

Came here to say this too - after 10+ years with SolidWorks I switched to OnShape. A small learning curve but now I enjoy it just as much.

sedatk4• 6 months ago

My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10 and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.

So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.

Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.

But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.

There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.

stackghost3• 6 months ago

no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.

Let's be real. It's because new systems support DRM and Microsoft has been captured by the media company lobby.

realusername• 6 months ago

Of course it is, there's no real requirement to have a TPM, plenty of people made a version with that requirement patched out and the system works fine.

badc0ffee• 6 months ago

If they didn't, people might start capturing copyrighted streaming content and sharing torrents of it. We cannot allow that to happen.

donmcronald• 6 months ago

It’s way worse than that. It’s for verified identity and attestation.

WD-423• 6 months ago

We had that announcement of a new "Verifiable" Linux project from Pottering, other kernel devs, and a bunch of ex-microsoft employees yesterday. Gives me the heebie jeebies.

billfor2• 6 months ago

    .\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry Disable

hackeman300• 6 months ago

What's this?

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

Yeah, until microsoft says "Sup there lil buddy? Running an unsupported system? Oof. The next update is gonna really turn it inside-out"

1vuio0pswjnm72• 6 months ago

Where can one read the source code of setup.exe

That's, e.g., how I would determine what these commands do

I have had HN replies in the past that argued Windows is open source and thus comparable to UNIX-like OS projects where _the public_ can read the source code and make modifications, _for free_

Absent the source code, we can read Microsoft's documentation

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

It seems like WinPE is the most useful version of Windows, e.g., it allows more options to setup.exe

How does one quickly and easily download and install a copy of WinPE, preferably on removable media

Datagenerator• 6 months ago

LoL with the insane backslash crap

bjt12345• 6 months ago

It's a really bad time for Microsoft to force consumers to upgrade - even computer parts from 5 years ago are price hiking.

bunderbunder5• 6 months ago

Which Microsoft really should have been able to see coming, since it’s largely their money that’s being used to soak up all the supply of computing hardware.

ufmace3• 6 months ago

I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try. But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.

So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.

It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.

jama21122• 6 months ago

You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command. I agree though that it’s silly they don’t offer it officially.

But I get the feeling you were on the edge of transitioning anyway, which is fine! Sounds more like the straw that broke the camels back.

Gud3• 6 months ago

Linux is superlatively awesome

and I say that as a FreeBSD user.

swat535• 6 months ago

I know you've already switched but bid you try using FlyOOBE to bypass it?

https://github.com/builtbybel/FlyOOBE/

eterm• 6 months ago

I'm in a similar but more ridiculous reason. My reasonably modern hardware should support windows 11, but I get "disk not supported" because apparently I once picked the "wrong" bootloader?

I can't be arsed, if I'm going to have to fiddle around getting that working I might as well move to linux.

neocron• 6 months ago

Iike that you both started with Fedora. Same for me but almost 20 yrs ago

Haven't touched it in a long time ever since debian8 was the point in time where it was fine to run on desktop and laptop for me, not only on server. Ever since then I have it on all my 20something machines

jama21122• 6 months ago

You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to open the command window during the install and one cheeky command.

debugnik• 6 months ago

Microsoft is removing these bypasses over time though.

deathsentience• 6 months ago

A future update may restrict access to your windows or break its ability to get further updates. It’s a matter of time. They just haven’t gotten around to it.

And if you’re thinking you’ll just Google another solution then you might as well spend that time googling efforts for Linux. Windows shouldn’t require constant hacking or tinkering to function.

browningstreet3• 6 months ago

I've been using Linux for 20+ years, but I was fairly happy with Windows 11. At its core it did exactly what I needed it to do, and it allowed me to run some commercial software that is harder to install and run on Linux (Davinci Resolve).

But my Dell hardware drivers were flaky in Windows. My bluetooth had extremely variable availability. And then Windows rebooted itself, against my wishes, 3x in one week. And then there was the promise of Recall.

That's when I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. All my hardware issues went away (yes, I had to fiddle the sound driver a little so it didn't crack when it woke up from sleep, and I had to make one small change so suspend worked properly.. but both were easily solvable). My bluetooth has been flawless since and I was able to use my Logitech wireless mouse again.

I'm never going back.

I do a bit of napkin math on Apple Silicon single-threaded performance, GPU performance, and battery management against non-Macbook Air/Pro specs for same price. I follow DHH (who I otherwise object to) on his adventures with the Asus G14 machines.. but I'm not sure its GPU performance still matches the similarly priced Apple offering.

Less integrated OS, worse battery management, and weaker performance for more money? I'm not sure. But I'll probably still go that way.

The Intel/AMD laptop manufacturers need to get out from under Nvidia's hardware GPU thumb.

Trufa• 6 months ago

Say what you will about Macs, I ain't no fanboy, but from this side of the fence, I had forgotten that drivers were a thing.

slashdave• 6 months ago

I get the intent, but moving to linux for better bluetooth support is... an interesting take

brightball• 6 months ago

Yep. Similar thing forced me off of Apple. They stopped making 17 inch laptops. They started soldering parts into place. Made it so you couldn’t open your own laptop to replace the HD.

Switched to Linux 8 years ago and haven't looked back.

ryandrake2• 6 months ago

Apple does this all the time, though, and seems to get a free pass here. I have four Macs in my home, and they are cut off at Ventura (for the 2017 iMac), Monterey (for the 2014 Mac Mini and the 2015 MacBook Air), and El Capitan (for the 2014 iMac). They are all stuck at 3, 4, and 5 major OS versions back. Nobody really seems to complain about this, though.

basch2• 6 months ago

I would say its part of the promise/agreement of buying into the ecosystem, and a known caveat. Might be overly optimistic viewpoint.

b00ty4breakfast3• 6 months ago

because desktop Apple users have been domesticated for decades now and just accept whatever shows up in the feeding trough.

radium3d• 6 months ago

They don't get a free pass, I think people have spoken with their wallets and it shows with the user base counts: Windows 66–73%, macOS 14–16%, Linux 3–4%.

Apple seems to support their previous generation OS on older macs for ~8-9 years or so from what I've seen. You just don't get the latest generation features, they cut it off and move on similar to how Microsoft did.

everdrive3• 6 months ago

I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury product. For the record, even though Apple has some really impressive hardware, this is one of the reasons I'm not very big on Apple. People praise their phone's longevity all the time, but I think this is crazy. I could be running a 13 year old computer right now and it would work fine if I had Linux. Smartphones don't really have options for this due to the market capture. Apple's PC could be supported longer, but Apple isn't interested in doing it. (and apparently they change architectures every 15 years anyhow.)

ufmace3• 6 months ago

I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".

PTOB• 6 months ago

Apple only gets a free pass from folks who are invested in that particular kind of ... relationship.

cgriswald• 6 months ago

They didn’t get a pass from me. My MacPro has been running Linux longer than it ran MacOS. Apple stopped supporting it officially at Mojave but I jumped ship earlier when I was forced to do a clean install rather than an upgrade because I had a RAID.

throwawaysoxjje• 6 months ago

Because Apple been continuously doing deprecating hardware regularly since the mid 90s. And they’ll processor architecture every 10-15 years.

Microsoft was the backward compatibility king.

stalfosknight3• 6 months ago

Apple will provide software and hardware support for any given product for at least 5 years. After those 5 years, you sometimes will still get security fixes.

The reason for this is that newer software will start using hardware features and capabilities that only exist on newer hardware, not because Tim Cook is evilly cackling in his office "hahhahha! Let's force people to buy new Macs!!!"

muyuu• 6 months ago

idk what other people give passes to, but I had been a Linux desktop user since the mid 90s and Mac laptop user since ~G3 iBook years and I finally gave up on their laptops a few years ago; so it's mainly linux-linux now

i think the last straw was the added telemetry that required so much effort to get rid of, but also for years they have made clear moves to make their laptops iOS-like progressively, which I cannot stand on so many levels

javier_e06• 6 months ago

I am in the same boat. Running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 until the cows come home. I run Rocky Linux in my laptop but I am a gamer so I'll hold to Windows 10. Some Linux Distros are bringing AI. Not ready for that.

CamouflagedKiwi3• 6 months ago

I have a similar issue with Windows. The machine already dual-boots Linux, but it is simultaneously demanding Windows 11 and telling me that it doesn't support it. It's a three year old Ryzen, it plays every game I've thrown at it flawlessly - which admittedly is only just so many things, but if it could manage Oblivion Remastered at launch it should manage a bloody operating system surely.

I hear it might be some TPM thing. If so, it still seems like a bad decision to require this thing, and it's telling that I'm working on speculation here - it doesn't _tell_ me that's what it is.

dist-epoch3• 6 months ago

Something is disabled in your BIOS. Ask an LLM to guide you.

sedatk4• 6 months ago

I had an issue with TPM too, enabling PTT (Intel's on-chip TPM) on BIOS fixed that one.

gregors3• 6 months ago

I saw a vid where they installed a recent version of linux on a Pentium 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DiK5FDpBTg

stagger87• 6 months ago

Why did you want to install windows 11 anyways? I also have a PC stuck on Windows 10 and it makes me happy that it's now stable and not part of the forced rolling releases in Win11. Im going to run it on Win10 as long as I can.

sedatk4• 6 months ago

Lack of security updates is a problem for a computer that's connected to internet.

forty• 6 months ago

Microsoft asking to upgrade hardware reminds me of that old joke (from memory so excuse the bad story telling)

User: hello, my PC smokes and I would like to purchase an anti smoke software

Computer service: sorry it's not possible, you have to replace the hardware

User: no I really want an anti smoke software

(Later)

User: hello I would like to purchase a new computer

Service: see, I told you that an anti smoke software is not possible

User: wrong! I have purchased one from Microsoft. But apparently it's not compatible with my current hardware

xnx• 6 months ago

This was very useful for me. Force install Windows 11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853012

Snild2• 6 months ago

“you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU”

To be fair, I recently had to switch distros for my little Atom-based server because of a similar deal:

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:X86-64-Architecture-Levels#...

Granted, I only had to convert to Tumbleweed (not trivial, but easier than reinstalling), and the open source nature means there will always be lots of other alternatives, too.

sedatk4• 6 months ago

How old is the Atom? My CPU was about 10 years old at the time.

canibal• 6 months ago

I'm sure there's a million reasons not to, but they could even just open-source Windows 10. Leave you alone with the hardware that you rightfully purchased, and let the community police the security gaps that arise. It's beyond me how planned obsolescence especially on perfectly sufficient hardware is even legal.

loloquwowndueo• 6 months ago

That’s not what open source means / how it works.

It's likely a large percentage of that code is also used in win 10 - it’s not like 11 was a complete rewrite.

themafia• 6 months ago

because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.

And yet Nadella writes this:

"For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact. The choices we make about where we apply our scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter."

Apparently resources are only "scarce" when Microsoft needs them. When it comes to your consumer outcomes you have to throw away working equipment and buy new.

vee-kay3• 6 months ago

There is a marketing lesson there somewhere. Microsoft once had the IT world at its feet, because not only was its Windows 9x OSes ubiquitous everywhere, but it had many millions of programmers who had become experts at Visual Basic and Visual C++, so almost all corporates used programs written in these easy to learn, not too difficult to master, fun to program in (yay for Intellisense and Drag-n-drop ActiveX controls), and versatile despite some limitations. This was also the era where many corporates had complicated databases set up in MS Access or MS SQL Server, because they were easily accessible and usable from front-end applications written in VC or VC++.

Microsoft even evolved it all to adapt to and compete with new ideas from rivals, such as COM+ as alternative to CORBA, ASP.Net as alternative to JSP, etc.

Then Microsoft did the unthinkable. It inexplicably threw away all these IT dependencies away, that it had spent decades to build across the worlr.

Microsoft unleashed .Net on an unsuspecting IT world.

And M$ arrogantly expected the world to also throw all their years of efforts of building applications and databases revolving around VB/VC++.

To save their careers, millions of VB/VC++ programmers tried hard to scramble and learn these new technologies, but Microsoft just kept updating and upgrading the .Net landscape with increasing frequency and leading to more chaos and confusions. And as the learning curve steeper and the .Net scope became too hard for sane people to master in a short time, it became apparent that to the entire IT world (except Microsoft) that it had become too difficult and cumbersome to build applications for corporations using Microsoft's new-age tools. Thus, the interest and ambitions of the programmers and corporations quickly waned towards Microsoft tools, especially when they realised that .Net was a mess for installations, and it called expensive licenses to build and ship.

So programmers and SOHO/medium-scale companies, pivoted to alternatives to Microsoft imposed nightmares. Python, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, JSP, etc. took centre stage, even as the IT world moved away from .Net.

The worldwide chaos caused by Windows Vista and Windows 8, did nothing to improve upon IT people's disdain for all things Microsoft.

And Microsoft's rivals pounced at such golden opportunities, and they slowly ate away at Microsoft's dominance in corporate world.

Yes, there is indeed some lessons for Micro$oft to be learnt from these debacles.

"Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started." ~ Mary Midgley

"And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

ngold• 6 months ago

It's been wild watching Ms shoot itself in the foot every year for the past 20 years.

caycep• 6 months ago

is there a good windows rdp client for Linux? I went looking for one a few months back but didn't find anything definitely

vladvasiliu14• 6 months ago

I use remmina, which uses xfreerdp under the hood. It works well, but I haven't managed to get smartcard authentication working, if that matters for your environment.

saturnite• 6 months ago

My story is even simpler. I have a friend who wanted to upgrade to Windows 11 because 10 is losing support. I wrote the Windows 11 installer to my flash drive using Rufus. It worked perfectly. I'm not expecting a man who has no interest in learning Linux to change.

wsve4• 6 months ago

I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...

I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?

But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.

Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

No such thing as brick when you have a “live drive” available. Reinstall and be up again in a half hour.

The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them, not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec movie or install from the “store” GUI.

wsve4• 6 months ago

You're slightly missing the point. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me, the end user, whose fault it is that my OS doesn't have codecs.

The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work, and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.

throwa356262• 6 months ago

I think the steam thing was solved some years ago after being featured on LTT.

upboundspiral• 6 months ago

I can echo problems with Mint.

Currently using https://getaurora.dev which is basically fedora + kde but curated by people that actually care. So codecs are preinstalled, and other sensible defaults out of the box which makes sense as its in the same family as bazzite (without the gaming focus).

wsve4• 6 months ago

I might actually check that out, that sounds right up my alley

ColinWright2• 6 months ago

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

-- Napoleon.

Aldipower5• 6 months ago

Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.

Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D

Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.

I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.

One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.

Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.

simgoh9• 6 months ago

Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there by default?

Aldipower5• 6 months ago

The kernel compilation had a configuration UI where you could select all the drivers you wanted to literally build in. So I selected just what I needed, to save memory, recompiled, waited an hour et voila. Kernel modules came later.

acuozzo• 6 months ago

Memory and storage were far more expensive and limited in 1996 than they are today.

Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to select which *drivers* to load because, if you weren't careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the game you were trying to run.

jermberj• 6 months ago

You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.

nenadg• 6 months ago

I did exactly the same some 16-17 years ago, when they forced windows 8 square design bullshit and announced that they'll ditch 7. Never looked back.

Windows servers are still pretty good imho.

exterior4052• 6 months ago

For a creative, why not macOS?

kstrauser• 6 months ago

I’ve asked before but the answer keeps changing before I get around to implementing it:

My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.

I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Recommend making a live drive with Ventoy. Copy over latest .iso’s of Mint, Fedora, Bazzite? for gaming.

Give them all a test drive, see what you like before committing. After install try new things in VMs.

3form5• 6 months ago

Depends on the games. If your kid wants to play anything with kernel level anticheat, it will not work on Linux, period - these anticheats don't support Linux, and either prevent the game from running altogether or disable certain online modes.

Otherwise, CachyOS is extremely popular these days, and I suppose a valid choice.

4k93n2• 6 months ago

if theyre not that technical i would say just stick with something simple like zorinOS, which is ubuntu based so there is a bigger community behind it if they run into issues. zorin has an option to install nvidia drivers during the initial setup. popOS would be another option along the same lines

Todd• 6 months ago

The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.

elias1233• 6 months ago

You could say they broke the window(s)

pronik• 6 months ago

For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.

3form5• 6 months ago

On a modern laptop without S3 sleep, it works better for me on Linux than on Windows currently. So at least there's that.

chang1• 6 months ago

I think shortly we may see "Apple forced me to switch to Linux" because of Tahoe and subsequent releases.

havblue2• 6 months ago

I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process will ever help achieve that.

pyrophane• 6 months ago

I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.

wowczarek• 6 months ago

Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.

Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.

kalap_ur• 6 months ago

Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

LibreOffice does fine, though you’ll probably be unhappy. What is more important to you? Freedom, privacy, consent, or spreadsheet features?

VMs are an option to partition your life as well.

_dain_• 6 months ago

There are many features of Excel that LibreOffice Calc doesn't support. Most importantly: structured references, VBA, PowerQuery. Not to mention its UI is very laggy even on powerful machines.

For real financial/business work, Calc is just not a serious player.

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

Fedora + Google's Office Suite is the best way.

Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.

curtisblaine2• 6 months ago

He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind, many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.

Aldipower5• 6 months ago

NI recently filed for bankruptcy! This means that the licence server will probably be shut down at some point. Take the opportunity now. :-P I've been using Bitwig for two years now. And already produced a complete album with success. Next album is already following. :-) Many of Bitwig's own plugins are very good, and there are now top-notch native VSTs for Linux! Alternatively, there is yabridge for running Win VSTs.

Great Linux VST manufacturers: U-he, DDMF, Toneboosters, TAL, Bluelabs, etc.

And more, more, more native plugins: https://linuxmusic.rocks/

curtisblaine2• 6 months ago

If the license server goes down I'll just pirate them, I guess. The point is that I can't really throw aways years of investment because Windows sucks. The other important lesson is: if they have a licensing server, it's OK to pirate them from the start.

cmxch• 6 months ago

Between all the telemetry and them separating workstation and server duties, Windows is a no go aside from a generic gaming console here.

rwyinuse• 6 months ago

Ironically for me Linux has become the obvious default for casual use - web browsing, entertainment, paying my bills etc. I only boot Windows when I need to do some weird nerdy stuff, like checking updating SSD firmware with some proprietary software available only for Windows.

random_duck• 6 months ago

Just run arch. (+1 for terrible advice)

reddalo3• 6 months ago

Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.

You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...

I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.

speedylight• 6 months ago

I’ve been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become, using it feels I’m dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for how they do things, but no one can deny that once you’re properly established in their ecosystem, it’s a phenomenal experience.

magicbuzz• 6 months ago

I love the poem at the end

ChicagoDave• 6 months ago

I’m getting closer and closer to making the same decision.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.

But the copilot business is AAF.

And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.

Not sure what’s left.

Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.

0dayz• 6 months ago

I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).

Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.

Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.

Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.

DonThomasitos• 6 months ago

Since most application run in the browser nowadays, the OS becomes less meaningful and more of a layer between browser and hardware.

If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.

hilbert42• 6 months ago

Marvellous, spot on. 10+ fucking points.

whompyjaw• 6 months ago

Keep these posts coming! More the merrier! :))

OhMeadhbh2• 6 months ago

Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

OhMeadhbh2• 6 months ago

Fwiw... I've been doing Leenucks since '92. Back when you had to install BSD first, compile the kernel and reverse engineer how to boot into the new kernel you just built with gcc. But it was cheaper than SunOS, and the developers mailing list was more active than the BSD lists. I still miss my 3B1.

Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.

mythrwy• 6 months ago

I'm in the opposite position. Been a Linux user exclusively for 16+ years.

But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in nearly 2 decades.

This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But I'm going to soon maybe!

thenoblesunfish• 6 months ago

He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).

bigyabai6• 6 months ago

But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux.

For all of macOS' gaming advantages, it still can't keep an SBF-tier addict off The Rift.

carodgers• 6 months ago

I take tremendous umbrage at "femboy Thinkpad enjoyer."

A wonderful writeup.

jama21122• 6 months ago

There’s a lot of odd things said in this article. Like “no more file explorer hanging”, “no more waiting for the start menu to open” - is this something that actually happens to people? Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it’s not my experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts to this article.

But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.

MattRix• 6 months ago

Of course those are things that happen to people, why would they make them up?! If anything, your reaction seems like an emotional and biased one, refusing to acknowledge the experiences of others when they conflict with your beliefs.

(and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to move to Linux).

jama21122• 6 months ago

I take your criticism on board. Just because I haven’t experienced them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I only took issue with the way it was worded, like it was a universal experience rather than just one that happens to some people.

xboxnolifes• 6 months ago

These are real things and they happen on very good hardware. They are even acknowledge by Microsoft. The explorer issue is from waiting on for a response from network drives that the explorer thinks exists or tries to find. The start menu I'm not sure, but I get the issue from time to time and I think its because of some background process hanging the UI or something.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Waiting to download ads to improve your experience.

jama21122• 6 months ago

Ok cool

shams93• 6 months ago

For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS forever (except at work).

drivers992• 6 months ago

Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even really game very much. I had originally built it with all new parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The linked article also pointed this out.)

So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:

64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)

AMD Radeon graphics.

NVMe SSD primary boot drive.

UEFI BIOS support

Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.

If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.

So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.

shmeeed10• 6 months ago

What's your experience with MSFS2020 under SteamOS?

k__• 6 months ago

I switched to Arch last Summer and I'm quite happy.

Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.

YesThatTom2• 6 months ago

Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.

Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.

That all changed with Azure.

MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.

They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).

Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.

Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.

Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.

Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

sambf• 6 months ago

I agree, at this point it seems clear that Windows is not their priority anymore and they're trying to scare its users away. But Windows is so penetrated into everyone's office, industry and home that they shouldn't be allowed by law to just leave it like this.

chungusman2• 6 months ago

You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an even bigger headache than using windows?

FlossyBean• 6 months ago

Ubuntu with the Gnome Desktop works well as a family PC. Very easy installer with a GUI that walks you through everything.

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Linux Mint is nice, but it's been a few years since I installed it. Back in 2018ish we had a lot of machines with old dual cores and 2-4GB of RAM that chugged on Windows. But after installing Linux Mint, they were given new life and ran very well.

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...

I have been daily driving Ubuntu Cinnamon at work for ~3 years and it works pretty well. Some minor bugs here and there, but I can't imagine going back to Windows for a work machine.

https://ubuntucinnamon.org

There is a bit of a learning curve for Linux, so might be worth dipping your toes in to start before you go 100%.

chungusman2• 6 months ago

I use linux all the time for work - i just haven't acutally ever installed it myself haha. Thanks for the links.

elric• 6 months ago

Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998 and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the occasional brief interaction.

I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).

Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.

kaiokendev• 6 months ago

I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would be spending configuring Linux.

I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.

Nekorosu• 6 months ago

Regarding high-quality commercial Linux software: SideFX Houdini offers a relatively affordable Indie license and is fantastic for most kinds of 3D work, compositing, and post-processing tasks. It’s also fully procedural and scriptable, which really makes my brain buzz.

anon2917• 6 months ago

Once again, I don't really understand people who say Windows is easier. Take printer drivers. In windows you have a 'simple' wizard to install a printer driver. Except in my experience... it never works the first time and you have to fiddle. On Linux... I just bought a new printer, and it worked out of the box. My experience with most hardware today on Linux is out-of-the-box support while windows requires endless 'driver' installs. Even driver installs on linux are easier. Usually just drop a binary blob somewhere if you really need it and modprobe...

Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2

roba62• 6 months ago

I have a ricoh postscript printer that just won't work on Linux, I also have a Canon 6020 that works well in Linux. The Ricoh works well on Windows. So my experience with CUPS is mixed.

moron4hire2• 6 months ago

Anyone have a recommendation on a decent cloud-based file sync tool ala OneDrive? I use OneDrive extensively but there is no official client for Linux and the unofficial one has some major stability issues. I'm willing to change providers but not willing to put in the effort to roll-my-own.

duffyjp2• 6 months ago

I would also love to hear any success stories here. I converted my wife's Macbook over to Linux Mint somewhat recently and the best I could do was setup a shortcut to the Web version of her iCloud.

moron4hire2• 6 months ago

Google Drive also does not have a Linux client, which is a little surprising. It looks like maybe Box.com supports WebDAV and Dropbox has a first-party Linux client. I haven't tried either and I haven't found anything else yet.

senfiaj• 6 months ago

I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.

manuelabeledo5• 6 months ago

I have to disagree here.

There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.

To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time, I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time, the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.

So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer versions of the OS with ads.

pregnenolone• 6 months ago

My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.

artingent• 6 months ago

Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.

I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.

andai2• 6 months ago

No more waiting for the Start menu to decide it wants to open. No more File Explorer hanging when you need it the most.

I ran XP in a VM on Windows 10.

The start menu opens instantly. After one video frame.

Windows explorer opens instantly. One video frame.

If they had literally done nothing for 20 years, it would be like 50x faster now.

mcswell5• 6 months ago

I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November, mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-ava....)

Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.

Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?

I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)

I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.

So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.

pamcake2• 6 months ago

Can't help you with AV but otherwise your issues and confusions are all Ubuntu and Canonical and nothing on there is representative of other Linux dists.

Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.

Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what you want) or get the key for archive.

Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you know.

mcswell5• 6 months ago

Ok, I may try Mint.

You're right that I mixed up the Vivaldi repo (maybe you are the one who pointed that out on the thread I linked). But even after fixing that, it's still not working---slightly different warning message, but still about gpg.

fragmede3• 6 months ago

I've spent a long career getting good at Linux. Real good. But I'm only human. Over the decades, the number of how-tos, wiki pages, Linux distros, Linux kernel source, other programs documentation and source; all of that which I've ingested and used in practice and gotten good at, doesn't hold a candle to AI having been trained on every single last one of them. The solution to your apt/Vivaldi problem is easy: install Claude code, and paste in the error. Hit ctrl-o to gain insight on how it fixes it.

You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it, there's no market for that anymore.

(for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for .../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )

fragmede3• 6 months ago

particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks

If you're on Linux and have a firewall, so there are no listening ports, there is no threat from using public wifi. TLS encrypts your connection on ~all websites these days.

mcswell5• 6 months ago

I'll just point out that while Ubuntu ships with a firewall, it's not enabled by default, and at least in Windows the firewall is enabled by default. I have since enabled it in Ubuntu.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist there.

And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.

This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.

mcswell5• 6 months ago

I have moved to Mint, but see my post above in this thread.

nothrows• 6 months ago

My wife was complaining about her Windows 11 laptop crashing. I tried everything and even did fresh installs. Still crashing (and honestly pretty slow). I gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu and Chromium for her. She can instagram, facebook, save her memes, and its all fast. No crashes. She's a happy camper now. I think a lot of (even) non technical people would like Linux a lot more than they realize if they gave it a shot.

asveikau• 6 months ago

my first computer was a Windows 98 machine, with an Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino core)

Off topic, anyone else think Windows 98 is too old for this machine? At a similar era I built an athlon t-bird 1.0GHz, I was mostly using Linux by then but if I did Windows then it would have been Win2k, maybe by the time of Athlon "XP", Windows XP would have been a thing too.

abetaha• 6 months ago

It is quiet sad to see Windows deteriorate that much over the years because of the decreased investment and lack of care and craftsmanship for the quality of the software being pushed out.

Thankfully unless you're running a few specific applications that only run on Windows, you can use any other operating system. It will do the job, with much less frustrations.

thatjoeoverthr• 6 months ago

Incredible moment when you have to ward off Windows, macOS and iPhone updates like a bouncer.

I’ve gone over the years from Visual Studio fanboy to writing everything in vi, entirely due to software decay.

Our culture and economy can no longer maintain complex GUIs.

TheGRS• 6 months ago

I think I'm pretty much there and just haven't made the switch yet. I'm going to give Mint a shot on my old PC soon and if its a good experience I'll switch on my desktop as well. Every time I have a bad experience in Windows lately I wonder why I'm sticking with it. Everything has been solved, its only momentum keeping me going.

system2• 6 months ago

"If you're always finding the next reason not to switch, you're not looking for solutions, you're looking for excuses to stay complacent."

No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).

The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises. Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another. We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.

callamdelaney• 6 months ago

Microslop must be stopped, absolute cancer of a company

Night_Thastus2• 6 months ago

It's still not quite there yet, for me. A lot of older games (which I'm a big fan of) won't run well or at all - and support for Nvidia is still not great.

If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.

barbs• 6 months ago

Which games?

Night_Thastus2• 6 months ago

For older games: MechWarrior 3 and 4 (plus expansions). Thief 1+2. Freespace 2. Gothic 1+2. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

But in general, I play a lot of weirder, niche games that just don't get a lot of traction for community fixes and so on.

klooney• 6 months ago

You can tell all the Microsoft executives use Macs at work.

matltc• 6 months ago

I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless they've never even tried it

That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.

projektfu• 6 months ago

Another problem with Windows, that has been going on for quite some time now, is that they do not have a real support channel for non-enterprise users that produces useful knowledge for the future. Almost any issue you google now has a thousand "answers" on microsoft.com that do not fix the problem because the people answering have not reproduced it and have not confirmed their solution.

In Linux forums, generally speaking, there is either a way it works or agreement that it hasn't been fixed yet. The main source of spam now is actually StackExchange, that prioritizes discussions from 10 years ago on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than up-to-date questions and answers.

ark296• 6 months ago

I switched after running basic dev tools became genuinely unusable (randomly freezing for minutes, start menu just didn't work, crashes all the time) despite being on good, new hardware.

I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps. But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.

flaburgan• 6 months ago

I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.

BLKNSLVR2• 6 months ago

I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

ninjagoo6• 6 months ago

I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

The first couple of months are high touch after the switch. After that it's usually just smooth sailing for years. Much less work support-wise.

Been that way for my family and friends.

pzo• 6 months ago

Its was a good read until at the end ...

For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.

I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8 engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.

The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http requests to downloads those ads.

85392_school• 6 months ago

React Native doesn't even use v8 engine

Are you saying you would use React Native with a language other than JS?

tempaccsoz52• 6 months ago

Engines other than v8 exist. React Native uses Hermes or JavaScriptCore (Apple/Safari). [0]

Other engines include SpiderMonkey (Mozilla/Firefox) [1] and QuickJS [2]

[0] https://reactnative.dev/docs/javascript-environment

[1] https://spidermonkey.dev/

[2] https://bellard.org/quickjs/

thefz2• 6 months ago

I'm a little tired of "hey I installed Linux!" posts. Ok, you installed Linux. Great. Wow! Now what, wanna show a screenshot of your desktop with an anime girl as the baackground and neofetch in a terminal window?

MrDrMcCoy2• 6 months ago

This comment seems fully detached from both the main linked article and the comment it replies to.

junga• 6 months ago

neofetch is outdated. fastfetch is the new neofetch now.

CamouflagedKiwi3• 6 months ago

I remember reading an article many years ago about product management being like being a parent, and there being a latter point where you need to let the product go and admit it's done. Windows is clearly there, and Microsoft are doing a terrible job of it. Yes, it's less relevant than it's ever been, but it's still vastly widely deployed, earns money, and delivers other cash cows (like Office) - all they have to do is do the basic stuff to keep it going and not mess it up, but somehow that is not what's happening. Wild.

mirekrusin• 6 months ago

I'm so glad ditching it 20 years ago, didn't look back once since.

YVoyiatzis• 6 months ago

That is exactly why I ditched Microsoft for Mac thirty years ago. I’ve never looked back or regretted leaving MSFT during my "formative" years; in fact, I’m glad I did. That said, it’s great to see Linux stay the course and build a real alternative for PC users.

I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...

LowLevelBasket• 6 months ago

I switched during windows 10 and I had several friends switch after win7 wasn't supported. In hindsight I should have spent the few weeks to learn linux and switched back then too

tacker2000• 6 months ago

Why is opening the taskbar right click menu slower on Win11 than on Win95?

Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?

I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick taskbar -> leftclick “close” but this stopped working. Why??

roba62• 6 months ago

I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux. Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to lead me into servitude.

cess11• 6 months ago

"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."

This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.

Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.

Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.

And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.

mbowcut2• 6 months ago

If you thought we were getting bad bugs before, just wait until the 90% agent-coded PRs start landing. We're gonna have multiple crowdstrike-level blowups.

hnsmhthrow• 6 months ago

That Ableton Flicker: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ev3vENli7wQ

tomsiw• 6 months ago

Would be great to switch except I need Visual Studio Pro

mrandish2• 6 months ago

I'm still surviving on Windows but only because over the last four years, as each new annoyance and regression arose, I made the mistake of very gradually, in tiny increments, sinking the time into invoking the arcane incantations necessary to tame each one.

15 minutes to deactivate an entire branch of notification pathways, 20 minutes to (mostly) restore the Right-Ctrl key they hijacked into a CoPilot key. 10 minutes to restore Win10 functionality to the Win11 taskbar with the wonderful ExplorerPatcher. $5 spent on Start11 to sidestep the whole start menu train wreck. And little 3 to 5 minute fixes with WindHawk (an amazing store-like platform to discover, install and manage open source Windows GUI patches).

I'm the stupid frog who didn't leap from the gradually heating pot. I acclimated to the boiling. And it's... okay. At least for now. But I know someday soon, the thousand faceless product managers at MSFT will break something unfixable. Somehow exceed the considerable abilities of the large community finding clever hacks and patches to keep the harsh Win wasteland livable for hardy souls.

While I greatly appreciate Linux philosophically and deeply respect it architecturally, I still really liked what Windows got so close to being - right before MSFT shifted biz models, simultaneously de-investing and turning it into a promotional platform for their other business. When that day comes, it'll suck to leave behind the wonderful third-party tools like Everything search, Ditto clipboard and AHK automation that streamline my day.

The thing I don't understand is why MSFT refuses to just make a version of Windows that's a Product again. I'd gladly pay them $100/yr for an upgraded "Windows Ti Super+" that just wants to be a good operating system for advanced users, instead of a strategic moat or monetization flywheel.

thr1owaway9621• 6 months ago

I never realized Windows tuning was a thing (WindHawk, Start11). Thank you for mentioning those.

I recently had to install Windows 11 to play a video game that runs janky on Linux, and I am encountering all the annoying problems people are describing in this thread (forced updates, full-screen ads, etc). It does not bother me too much, since I effectively use Windows only to play that one game. But maybe I can tune Windows 11 into something less obtrusive with the custom hacks. Thanks.

mrandish2• 6 months ago

You're welcome. One of the best things I did once I realized I was reluctantly on this journey, was start keeping notes in a cloud backed-up file of every registry setting I tweaked or little utility I installed. Just a quick cut and paste to remind me.

Of course some of the notes become stale or irrelevant as things evolve but it's still invaluable insurance if this Windows install eventually gets crufty and needs to be hosed out for a fresh start (which eventually happens even with diligent hygiene). Also, don't forget ExplorerPatcher which restores some essential Win10 taskbar and explorer functionality MSFT removed from Win11 (promising to eventually replace with new code but now, years later, obviously never will). It's clear at this point MSFT isn't devoting any serious effort toward re-implementing previous functionality or creating new features for power users.

AFAICT, the only things getting meaningful funding now are fixing critical 0days / bugs, reworking the interface to create "more exposure vectors to support corporate initiatives" and a couple under-resourced teams clearing only the most critical technical debt threatening the whole edifice. Meanwhile, every PM or UX designer who suggests "Hey, it'd be easier to just decide that new feature or unrestored functionality will just confuse 'our average user'" gets promoted. I just feel sorry for the engineers still there who joined the Windows team wanting to build toward a state-of-the-art operating system supporting a powerful, flexible, extensible, customizable user interface. Now it's "If it ain't broken, there's no funding to fix it" and "If it just broke, see if we can just remove it instead of fixing it", "if it's there but incomplete, remove what's there, patch over the hole and we'll pretend it was never there." And finally, "You seem ambitious and diligent, we just wish you'd align your interests with current strategic priorities (ie sticking AI where it doesn't belong or pushing Office, cloud, etc subs)."

ilvez• 6 months ago

Everyone are very unhappy with Windows 11. They kind of were OK with Windows 10. It's continuing the same old cycle. Windows 12 they will make hopefully things tolerable again..

I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".

vanillax2• 6 months ago

I made the same switch but all linux always feels slightly jank. I think Macos is the best premium decoupling from Winblows, but that comes with its own ecosystem lock in. I use all three equally daily and it just drives me insane. Lots of games on Windows ONLY work on windows due to anti cheat. Ie BattleField 6.... MacOs Gaming is non existent and any attempt with say wine/parallels or whatever brings you back to windows.... Linux / PopOS / Cosmic is so close to being there but the gaming restrictions takes you back to Windows.. I tried the whole WSL2 but lots of apps need so much tuning to work properly.. Ie android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2 paths and it gets broken fast.

bigyabai6• 6 months ago

Which would almost be unfortunate, but Battlefield 6 is the same slop as 2042 with a fanservice texture pack on top. You can play BF4, BF2, Bad Company, Arma 2/3/Reforger, and even DCS World without issue on Linux - why are you spending $70 to install a rootkit for a game you'll put 20 hours into, tops?

Giving up Windows pushed me to play better games and stay off the unhealthy AAA release cycle that has strangled innovation for years. If I was still playing Rainbow Six Siege then I wouldn't know how to cold-start an F-16 blk. 50.

vanillax2• 6 months ago

I mean next on list is Escape From Tarkov.. the list goes on. its more than just Battlefield 6, theres tons of games that require a anti cheat solution for linux..

rf15• 6 months ago

Over the years I feel they're all janky in different ways. That being said, especially lately the Windows and MacOS UX changes are getting less thoughtful and the design vs usability scale is going all the way to the design end.

ingohelpinger3• 6 months ago

Give it a few more years and Linux will complete its inevitable evolution into Microsoft, same consolidation, same gatekeeping, just with better slogans and a smug sense of moral superiority.

leptons3• 6 months ago

That is highly unlikely.

ingohelpinger3• 6 months ago

Well, look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

procone3• 6 months ago

How is this possible? I don't think you quite understand what "Linux" is.

There is no corporation, board, or CEO to force unwanted changes. Pretty much every piece of the operating system is free and open source.

If you don't like your "Linux", you can swap it out for another distribution or "distro".

heliumtera• 6 months ago

thanks for the clarification on how the kernel development works. do you mind expanding on what is the benefit for companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Red Hat, Meta, Oracle, SUSE, Canonical, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcom, Samsumg, Broadcom, Cisco, arm to spend an enormous amount of capital, both employing individuals to work full time on the kernel and making donations to cncf/linux foundation? Certainly all of the big players behind linux have our best interest in mind and certainly NONE of this companies have some history of making decisions in detriment of consumer agency and freedom. I would love to hear more about how linux is driven by passion and generosity if you don`t mind, please share!

liendolucas• 6 months ago

I just hope that more people are forced into this! I understand that the transition, learning path can be daunting but once someone's head gets the mindset on a Unix OS there is basically no turning back.

cepcode• 6 months ago

As time goes on, I get closer and closer for Linux to be my daily driver. The ads, the Microsoft account login, the OneDrive in the explorer window, the 'recommendations' to change my default browser, etc make me more angry by the day. However, when I install Linux on an old machine, I initially have driver issues like wifi. And after fighting with that for an hour, I decide it's not worth the risk to blow away my main machine. So I accept the slop from MS and continue on.

Animats• 6 months ago

I did that years ago, at the end of Windows 7 and the beginning of the need for a Microsoft account.

I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Purely because they became annoying.

Toorkit• 6 months ago

My CPU can run Windows 11 fine, but what I don't tolerate is full-screen ad pop-ups on my desktop.

When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the next day.

vimwizard• 6 months ago

I finally installed Windows 11 last year so I could use Wifi 6E. Other than that, it is certainly a downgrade. With some debloating and ExplorerPatcher, its mostly the same as Windows 10 now, but I'm praying that an update wont brick my install. Thankfully the latest forced feature update didn't affect me.

fasterik2• 6 months ago

With Windows 10 EOL, I had to decide whether to upgrade my laptop to Windows 11 or Linux. I've been a Windows user for decades, but with all the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft and the degradation of performance on Windows 11, I decided to go with Ubuntu instead.

I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for professional video editing and music production, with no comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily abandon all Microsoft products at this point.

mixmastamyk18• 6 months ago

Recommend to split your music workstation from your personal files machine to get some privacy back. Then run cleanup scripts to pare Windows down to the bone. Also Mint over Ubuntu.

fasterik2• 6 months ago

Why Mint over Ubuntu? I like the Ubuntu experience out of the box. It seems to handle high-DPI and per-display UI scaling well, due to Wayland. From what I've read, Mint still uses X11.

j45• 6 months ago

This seems to historically have been a pattern. There was a period where Windows Vista was forced on everyone and downgrading to Windows XP until Vista was better was forbidden.

Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so intel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

stewartjarod• 6 months ago

AI bubble pop, when???

hn_acc12• 6 months ago

I'm not sure that "multi-compose" chrome bug is a windows-only thing though. I use chrome on Linux (slackware) with an nvidia card, and I get that issue all the time if I try to open more than one chrome WINDOW. Multiple tabs are ok, and SOMETIMES multiple windows are ok, but more often than not, I can only have one chrome window.

floxy2• 6 months ago

Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?

Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77 MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded to v5.0.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 months ago

Going to switch my non technical gf to Linux she is pissed at Windows 11 lately

qwertox• 6 months ago

Past week I got to know about InputActions [0] so I installed Kubuntu 25.10 to test it, and it is very promising. Linux never had a proper mouse gesture support, and I won't go into details, but this was one of the three dealbreakers for me. The other one was a Windows-only app which ran so sluggishly on all previous tests I've made over the years, but with Wine 11 the app is just as good and fast as on Windows. Though I first need to populate the registry with an icon set. But now with AI this can be easily automated (letting it write a script I then run). The third is some custom electron-based launcher which is heavily Windows-customized, which I will need to migrate to Linux, but also this should be easy with AI.

For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!

[0] https://github.com/taj-ny/InputActions

tgtweak• 6 months ago

Literally just hit the MPO bug yesterday - what a shitshow that things like display scaling can fail with a mainstream gpu/cpu and windows 11 - like do they not have testing rigs for this in microsoft? if insiders preview is fine but production windows gets all these bugs... what are they inside previewing? The most stable build of windows I ever had (hell it's still chugging along with 1050 days of uptime...) was a windows 10 enterprise edition added to domain controller with update GPO set to basically never install windows updates automatically.

There is some serious work needed inside microsoft camp to continue with a 6 month release cycle.

quijoteuniv• 6 months ago

Windows was the robbery of the century.

riccardomc• 6 months ago

I just came here to say that is ackchyually GNU/Linux.

dev_l1x_be• 6 months ago

* thirteen years ago. The lost me with win7->win8 migration. I thought the cannot go lower that that, and here we are.

dimitrisscript2• 6 months ago

If only league of legends was playable in Linux. And a few other games.

shnpln• 6 months ago

I just switched to Linux as well on my Windows laptop. 10 was getting so hard to run and I had no clear/stable path to 11. Ubuntu runs great for me!

mihaic• 6 months ago

I've had a similar path, and I always recommend KDE with its taskbar on Ubuntu, it made the transition smoother for me in terms of preserving workflows.

linza• 6 months ago

i also vividly remember the specs of my first machine but weirdly nothing else after. i386SX with 4MiB RAM and a 10MB hard drive

aa_is_op• 6 months ago

I'm keeping an eye on SteamOS. I love how it's much better at running games than Windows, the platform those games were designed for.

dismalaf• 6 months ago

I switched to Linux circa 2010 when I needed a word processor but didn't want to go to the store to buy Office (was pretty young and poor at the time). After some Googling I found LibreOffice and Ubuntu. I had used Suse Linux years earlier when I was a kid but it definitely wasn't ready for use (2003) so I was also curious about Ubuntu and the current state at the time. I installed Ubuntu, used LibreOffice for the thing I needed, and never looked back. Linux was a breath of fresh air and it did all the things I needed. I went to university using only Linux (2012-2016), opened businesses, did all sorts of things, all 100% on Linux. Nice to see everyone else finally catching up.

Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and 16 years.

ddtaylor• 6 months ago

So happy to see so many new Linux users as a long time user and developer for the platform. I want to welcome anyone and PLEASE feel free to use AI to make awesome stuff or solve problems. The FOSS community is still adapting to the new influx of developers and tools, vibe coders, etc.

Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.

My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.

purpleredrose• 6 months ago

've used Windows for as long as I've been alive. At 6 years old, my first computer was a Windows 98 machine,

this sounds like child abuse.

mrsssnake• 6 months ago

I could talk about things better in Linux whole day. But besides popularity (so being preinstalled, proprietary software availability, being presented from childhood) is there a single reason to use Windows? Backwards compatibility, accessibility? Maybe?

nout4• 6 months ago

For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth, etc.

jairuhme• 6 months ago

I'm an Apple guy through and through, but I am in Georgia Techs OMSCS program. For some of the classes, you need to use a VM that doesn't play nicely with Apple Silicon. So I went over to Microcenter and picked up a cheap PC with Windows. I loathe using it, even if I am in the VM the whole time. I'm amazed at the amount of ads that pop up and for a while, sound just didn't work. Like not with headphones or just out of the normal speakers until eventually a random update fixed it. I get not wanting to be in the Apple ecosystem, but at this point in time I don't know why you would want Windows and not go for Linux.

geoffbp2• 6 months ago

My main reason for getting into Linux, forget the version or distribution maybe Slackware or RH at the time (later loved Debian the most) was that windows in that era was horribly unstable, BSOD etc

geoffbp2• 6 months ago

Obligatory:

It’s the year of the Linux desktop!

Desafinado• 6 months ago

I did the same on my laptop and PC. Unfortunately, my sound system receiver doesn't support Linux but I'll survive. And the speed of my machines more than makes up for it.

j0057• 6 months ago

I used https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat on a family member's new Win11 install and it actually works reasonably snappy. I wouldn't be want to caught dead with it, but I couldn't convince this one to go for macOS.

jxdxbx• 6 months ago

The only thing keeping my secondary / gaming / file-server computer on Windows is Backblaze. The main obstacle to me switching from macOS to Linux is Office 365 (doesn't work on Wine).

banku_brougham• 6 months ago

Any suggestions for photo-editing, sharing, album management process for linux?

Its really the only thing on macOS + iOS that I use. Otherwise I am so over the mac lifestyle.

jdboyd• 6 months ago

I think Windows 11 would have had much more consumer buy-in in the early days if they would have at least extended non-OEM support back to the Skylake generation, if not further, which it looks like it would have be easy to do, since it ran just fine on much older machines. I didn't object to them making TPM 2.0 mandatory for new OEM builds, just to the making it mandatory for people wanting to upgrade to it.

Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.

h4kunamata• 6 months ago

Btw, my first computer was an Intel Pentium MMX 166Mhz IIRC, massive 64MB of SIMM ram, and impressive 8GB of disk. Trident "graphic card", Creative sound card and the ultra fast Motorola 56k modem haha

"I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact, sleep mode was broken from the start"

This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow hype instead of installing a stable distro.

As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming, video editing and 3D design, it just works.

It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.

If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having problems. They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao

rbc• 6 months ago

At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.

insane_dreamer2• 6 months ago

No to mention that the cloud-based user system that they are forcing on us instead of local accounts. So much trouble.

And Copilot crap being shoved down our throats at every turn.

Don't even get me started on Teams.

randomNumber7• 6 months ago

I'll switch to emacs if things go on like this.

cerved• 6 months ago

If only the streaming giants would let us stream in decent quality..

tedk-42• 6 months ago

Without knowing anything internally about how microsoft builds:

Product driven development and too many managers with MBAs led to this problem.

BLKNSLVR2• 6 months ago

Basic operations are so much faster on Linux. Opening directories,

The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.

If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.

rekabis3• 6 months ago

I take an adversarial approach to Windows. Which started with Windows XP and its supremely annoying zip-files-as-folders approach. Sorry, but I didn’t want that, and I still gleefully rip it out of every Windows install I touch.

And then things started snowballing with every version.

Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.

But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.

And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.

Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?

shmeeed10• 6 months ago

anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?

I'm not, MS already lost me. But I would bet there's a market for such an app, if done right.

LandenLove• 6 months ago

At this point, the only thing holding me back is Adobe Lightroom. Which even that can technically run in a browser.

zamadatix3• 6 months ago

It's hard to square their complaints about Microsoft's delivering AI crap when the top work project reference they have is:

DesignVerse
AI website builder startup.
- Tech Stack: Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra AI Framework
- Role: Full Stack Developer
- Built core features (full stack) and helped implement the AI-powered editing system.

lawgimenez• 6 months ago

Yeah my 70 year old father purchased for the first time a Macbook after being a Windows user his entire life.

highmastdon• 6 months ago

Still to this day I don't understand how people manage to do software development on a Windows PC. I started with my first secondhand MacBook which was one before the unibody, and then upgraded to unibody and never have left ever. The only reason I was forced to use Windows was for clients that didn't have support for MacOS or Linux. The only thing I need Windows for is rootkit enabled games... which pains me, otherwise I'd have Linux on my desktop

nipperkinfeet• 6 months ago

Windows 11 isn't terrible, as long as you go back to how it was in Windows 10. Disable everything introduced in 11.

vermaden2• 6 months ago

LOL :D

1500+ points for a switch from Windows to Linux :)

starkeeper2• 6 months ago

To Protect yourself, this is what I did and experienced:

I set windows update service to manual, and so far the updates have not reset it, and I have been able to choose to install when I want. I feel safer, but I KNOW microsoft will fuck this over probably on their next update.

Another trick is as a super-super admin you can make executables UNEXECUTABLE by anyone. Things like Edge, etc. They do not let us remove their TRASH, but we still can lock them out, at least for now.

Another thing I had to do with Windows 11 when I had to rebuild my system because of Microsoft's SSD bug they would not cop too... They got rid of the magic trick to disable to OOBE which forces you to login with a microsoft account.... I could not find a way to work around it, but as soon as I was in I created a local admin user and it works well, they only force logged me in when I had to run FUCKING TEAMS for a job interview.

I'm heading down the linux path very soon, I almost did last year. Dual boot for a while, to see if how well my Steam library plays (literally it's the only thing keeping me on Windows 11).... Looking at Bazzite for this but we'll see.

We must UNITE to fight this tryany!

starkeeper2• 6 months ago

Also, just to DISH hard on Microsoft's engineers - How could they make it throught the job interview the loser who wrote add / remove programs it takes so long to load and they are not even embarrased.

** Embracing the Dark Side here **

nsoonhui• 6 months ago

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device [0], so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again. You might think that in 2026 you shouldn't get BSOD, but here we are.

So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether the Out of Band Update will solve mine, I'm very hesitant to update.

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

ninjagoo6• 6 months ago

Windows has always been a bit of a high-maintenance OS. To keep it running well used to consume a lot of time on a weekly/monthly basis. That went down to almost nothing after I switched to Ubuntu LTS a couple of decades ago. Heard it had gotten a bit better in Winland in the recent past but it appears things are going downhill again.

accrual2• 6 months ago

I also recently switched to Debian + KDE after decades on Windows. I cloned my previous workflows in a few days and now have a very smoothly working desktop that I can still game on. High DPI and refresh are also working OK.

_aaandrew• 6 months ago

Upvote for Arc Raiders :D

I was running win11 up until three weeks ago. Just a gaming rig, a steam launcher. A used behemoth tower I got for a song via CL. Installed Bazzite and have been incredibly impressed.

Also ty to the author for the link to the nvidia sleep fix. That’s been the only hiccup, and it sounds like I’ll have it sorted before bedtime.

cheema33• 6 months ago

"Oh you're doing work? That's so cute... we're gonna close whatever apps you had open, because we're updating now. We own your computer. You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent."

This, a 1,000 times. I hate, hate, hate this "feature". My Macs don't do that. My Linux systems don't do that. The whole, "screw you, we don't care" attitude of Microsoft is quite appalling.

Microsoft now makes it very difficult to disable this feature. After a few registry edits, I thought I was able to put a stop to the madness. But, then it went to rebooting on its own again.

netsharc• 6 months ago

I keep telling Windows 10 to delay these updates by 1 week each time...

Curiously, Office apps have auto-save, so does IntelliJ, VSCode, and even Notepad nowadays.. "restore my work environment after a reboot" almost works, but some things do disappear (e.g. unsaved web input forms) that it's aggravating enough. I wonder if they'll make it mandatory for apps to persist more across restarts.

Ok, that requires them to be competent, if they're competent we won't even have what we have now.

Arainach• 6 months ago

"requiring apps to do X" means blocking running every app written prior to you instituting the requirement, bricking everyone's workflows, so that would be the least competent thing imaginable.

twodave3• 6 months ago

I understand the frustration when things don’t just work. Also I find it kind of funny when people act like Linux just solved all their problems, despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc. These all get hand-waved somehow because it’s not Linux’s “fault” I suppose? Good for the author but the opportunity cost of moving to Linux alone is prohibitive based on the comments I see here, my own experience notwithstanding…

bobsterlobster15• 6 months ago

I agree with you that there's some friction involved and a bunch of trade-offs.

The thing is that I absolutely lost it, because of the bugs and the ads, and just wanted something reliable that doesn't nag me all the time.

I know that other people's linux experience may be radically different due to different hardware, so I'll consider myself lucky it all worked out.

ninjagoo6• 6 months ago

despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc

Citation needed.

Uncited, I would posit that those complaints haven't really been a thing for at least a couple of decades. And any issues have been far less than in Winland :)

twodave3• 6 months ago

Just read the other comments in this thread, all the evidence you need is in plain sight.

Conversely, I’ve been on windows 11 for work for a few years now with zero issues.

code_duck• 6 months ago

The whole upgrade to Windows 11 was forced on me by Microsoft, basically using trickery. I opened windows update and it said there were some updates… Did not make it clear at all that it would be taking my system from Windows 10 to 11. I thought it was just installing security updates. I would’ve had to change it anyway when 10 support ended, but I still had about four months and wanted to wait.

rednafi• 6 months ago

Similar sentiment but I think opting for a debian based intro would have solved some of the hurdles.

bfrog• 6 months ago

It's bad it really is, I got fed up and rolled back to windows 10 when I tried downloading a file and the whole UI locked up until the file finished. On my own personal high performance desktop with tons of memory, cpus, etc etc. Never saw this in Windows 10. Certainly never saw it in modern Linux.

eb0la• 6 months ago

For me the only reason to keep windows 11 is Clip Studio Paint doesn't work yet in Linux... I use it mostly on my Android tablet BUT I want to have an alternative in case something is easier on a computer

fraaancis• 6 months ago

If you can handle Linux, you should try Reaper as a DAW. It's really great.

tekfen• 6 months ago

I was a big fan of windows and I am still currently using it but recently, I am getting weird problems, crashes, frozen laptop etc. So right now, after 23 years later, I decided to switch MacOS. I've used it before but couldn't adapt because I was efficiently using windows with no-alternatives tools in MacOS. But anymore, Windows is no longer usable, it's unbearable.

unnouinceput• 6 months ago

I feel Windows 11 is in the initial phase of Windows 10. Remember beginning of years for 10? Sluggy, clunky, full of bugs? And everybody and their cat was holding to 7? I was the same, I was holding down the fort with 7. This year 7, next year 7 and so on until at one time I, like countless times before, spun a new virtual machine for a client and as usual I had to put 10 in there. Except this time 10 felt faster. No more clumsiness, no more slop. 2 months later I fully switched to 10 as my host OS.

I am currently on 10 so much that I installed the LTSC version that has support until 2032. Keep hammering Microslop, they deserve it. We need to keep bugging them, throw dirt on their face until they actually fix it. Seems that's the way with them nowadays. So I don't feel any shame to call them names at every corner.

But I am still not switching to Linux. Maybe in '32 when LTSC stop being supported and they still didn't fix 11. Oh, and from my experience, Debian will be the way to go. I like a proven distribution even if their repository is not the greatest and the latest.

mizuki_akiyama• 6 months ago

It’s been so long since I’ve used Windows I practically forgot it even exists as a “thing”. @_@

arthurfirst• 6 months ago

Windows 98 did the same for me

arendtio• 6 months ago

One of my favorite recent KDE features: Press Meta+t to design a custom window layout, and later hold Shift while you drag a window to place it in a slot in that layout.

tsoukase• 6 months ago

There is a negative Moore's law for software, valid when the one for hardware stopped: with constant CPU speed, the speed of software decreases as its version increments.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 6 months ago

Many years ago before I stopped using Windows and switched back to NetBSD (I had originally used it on the VAX), I used Cygwin and later MSYS on Windows in the process of moving back to UNIX

I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities

I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1

I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way

NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most

1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM

stevefan1999• 6 months ago

Right now I'm running a setup with Fedora on my work machine, CachyOS on my laptop, Windows on my home battlestation gaming rig and a Mac Mini M4 I bought for a educational discount. I basically run 3 different kernels, and I feel the same with the author here.

Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.

Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.

I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)

But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.

TimJRobinson• 6 months ago

Honestly Linux has been so much easier to use since Claude / codex came out. Now I don't need to remember esoteric commands or scroll old forums to fix issues, Claude does it all for me.

Been using ubuntu + regolith as my daily driver for over a year now and haven't needed to use windows for anything. Almost all games all work well on Linux now too.

etempleton2• 6 months ago

I had a different issue with Windows on my old daily driver but similar experience. The whole system began crashing randomly, but only occasionally, and only when not under load. It never once crashed while being taxed. I tried everything. Reinstalling the OS, reseating everything, tweaking memory timing, frequency, voltage, installing new firmware. Nothing fixed it. What did fix it? Installing Linux.

I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.

aagha• 6 months ago

1. Install Win 11 Pro

2. Install O&O Shut Up

The behavior you're describing is not normal

Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

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