Atlas26

The only thing Android shares with Linux desktop/server Linux is the kernel, the entire rest of the OS built on top of it is completely different so it’s a pointless comparison. While it uses the Linux kernel, it’s not considered the Linux everyone is commonly talking about here ie gnu/Linux (insert copypasta here).

Mobile OS are also essentially required to be much more controlled and locked down due to FCC regulations and the strictness surrounding modems and other RF emitting devices.

This is guaranteed just to be windows reinstalling drivers it thinks the laptop needs by default for basica functionality (it is considering the Lenovo service a standard system driver like the Intel ones since sometimes those are used to enable custom key and other functionality, so it makes sense to be a default driver so everything works out of the box for non technical customers). This is easily disabled by simply setting group policy manager to not automatically install drivers.

I’ll happily shit on windows endlessly but I can’t fault them for this, I think with the windows driver model this makes sense, otherwise you’re gonna have a ton of issues cropping up for normal users, especially since power users can always disable the policy. That was always one of the first policies I set and it never gave me any issues or automatically reinstalled unwanted/standard drivers again.

That’s absolutely not a normal or expected experience whatever. A standard, normal Linux install (not any weird experimental stuff like trying to install stuff to ntfs drives or running super arcane or unusual setups), just your normal standard out of the box setup on Fedora/ubuntu/arch etc should run about 95% of your library assuming you don’t have a bunch of anticheat multiplayer games which have purposefully blacklisted Linux. I’d wipe your entire drive (including windows) and start from fresh with a standard install and you should have no issues.

Protondb is the definitive guide to what works and what doesn’t and the numbers will align with the above.

Nah, nvidia drivers on Linux 2026 is hands down just as easy as AMD. I’ve had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly. They’re 100% right at the absolutely generational improvement in nvidia drivers since they’ve released the open drivers. Linus himself straight up said anyone trying to say this stuff in current year is being super disingenuous twisting his words from ages ago and that he considers nvidia a fantastic partner nowadays. And frankly, anyone unironically trying to use X in 2026 deserves the pain, it’s been officially deprecated for a while now and they maintainers were ultra clear that the only reason to use it now is for compatibility reasons and that you should expect issues if you do. Wayland is so far ahead of X now that anyone still trying to use X is being purposefully obstinate.

Nothing about intertia means it’s ever “too late”, just that there’s a lag between a change (positive or negative) and its effect.

People said the exact same thing about Linux ever taking off on the desktop, but slowly but surely it’s increasing. The effect always comes, eventually.

This is definitely a Mac-apologia to the extreme argument. Microsoft isn’t event the one that came up with the layout, it was the IBM compatible PC keyboard layout that was specifically designed as a keyboard standard to be used across the whole industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

And then Windows gained critical market share mass long, long before macOS did, and when it did they simply adopted the already popular IBM keyboard layout, which is common sense. Common sense would be for Apple to do the same when their mass market PC OS came along later down the road, even if technically neXTSTEP Classic macOS had their own layout, that OS was essentially irrelevant in the computing industry until Apple used it as the basis for modern macOS (and thus their macOS keyboard layout was not known to basically any normal person). macOS/OSX as we know it didn’t launch until well after windows was already very popular and thus had continued the already cemented IBM PC keyboard layout.

I’m all for Apple being unique and using their own layout if that’s what they wanna do/design around, but there’s exactly zero arguments available that actually they had the standardized and popular keyboard layout first and IBM/microsoft were the weird ones. That’s simply not accurate whatsoever.

Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ?

This comment is multiple years out of date at this point…Lunar lake was considered an exceptionally successful Mobile processor platform that was extremely competitive with Apple M series chips, Panther lake is supposedly improving on that by an even greater degree, and Nova lake is supposedly an extremely promising upcoming desktop platform, and their Arc graphics are excellent for the price point. This is like writing off MacBooks during their thin and hot touchbar/butterfly keyboard era and then assuming they’re that way still in 2026 when they’re now extremely well received laptops lol

I always hear people say nothing sticks after an update but have literally only encountered that with Microsoft Edge and the default search engine. Not any of the Windows features disabled or configured by the script. Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for years.

Yup. From what I’ve gathered, there was once a legitimate bug that did renable features that users previously disabled, and from then on that just became canon behavior for windows, even though they fixed that issue fairly quickly and I did not see it reappear. I have a similar experience, stuff that was disabled magically becoming re-enabled is not something that’s ever happened to me either over the years with windows.

macOS has some strengths and is certainly ahead of Linux in terms of a11y but my experience working in web accessibility, it seems most visually impaired individuals have a preference for windows, seemingly because it has the most mature set of accessibility/screen reader tools around largely because of how long windows has been around and how much of a requirement it is for enterprise environments.

Eh, no. My experience working in web accessibility, it seems most visually impaired individuals have a preference for windows, seemingly because it has the most mature set of accessibility/screen reader tools around largely because of how long windows has been around and how much of a requirement it is for enterprise environments.

Gotta be something hardware specific to you like the other guy said cause I literally just did a fresh fedora install on a 4K display a few months ago with zero issues, and majority of people I know also use 4K displays for their Fedora workstations, and that has never once been brought up as an issue. Maybe search around for whatever hardware you’re running, otherwise I really have no idea what would cause that.

it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.

DHH built it, and I find it absolutely hilarious that his Linux distro is literally his insufferable personality personified in Linux form

Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI.

I’m glad everyone is dogpiling on this statement cause man people seriously have to stop parroting this years out of date claim at this point. Any big well supported distro using Wayland should be fine, at the very least KDE and GNOME are guaranteed work perfectly with HiDPI.

Daily Fedora KDE user here on 4K HiDPI monitor plus another of a different lower resolution, flawless experience using both together in a setup. Fractional scaling also there working perfectly as well and you choose how you want KDE to scale the apps if you want (forcefully or let the app decide).

That’s not a KDE issue though, blame the themes

I don’t like macOS or GNOME, but if I had to use something from that paradigm I think GNOME is way better. GNOME feels like how Mac users talk about macOS. Whereas macOS just has nonsensical stupid things like delete key behavior, apps staying open after hitting the red X, lack of window snapping, etc that make no sense in 2025. GNOME at least has a rationale and a workflow behind it, even if I don’t like it I can respect it.

the only (rather big) downside is that the web runs visually worse on it. I don't know how, but painting and font rendering feels suboptimal (compared to Windows and MacOS).

This is definitely worth investigating as that shouldn’t be the case at all…web performance is one of the best benefits of Linux. That’s why it’s often recommended as the best developer system especially for web devs, as it’s the most native web platform that most web technologies are developed for and ultimately deployed to. Font should be crisp (assuming you’re not using fractional scaling, which can cause font issues on any OS). And painting/performance should be the fastest of the three major OS. On the same system Linux and Windows feel somewhat comparable with an edge to Linux I think simply do a a more responsive system overall. And anything beats macOS, even using a brand new Mac feels like molasses sometimes. I would investigate drivers/scaling/hardware acceleration, cross chrome/chromium browsers and Firefox to see if you can narrow down your issue.

esim is maybe my favorite mobile innovation ever. As someone who also travels a ton I could not stand dealing with a bunch of physical sims and would just end up not even bothering and relying on WiFi which made everything a massive pain. Now I have one esim provider that supports every country, takes all of 30 seconds to activate it for whatever country I’m traveling to.

Also, your original point is irrelevant anyway, because every single part of validating an esim also happens with a physical sim, there is zero difference in the process on the part of the carrier, from their perspective a sim is a sim, doesn’t matter (and some might not even be able to tell) if it’s a physical sim or an esim. No idea what you’re talking about with regards to IDs, never once had to provide an ID to use an esim abroad. Thats likely some local government regulation.

My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram.

Eh, that’s a massively disingenuous take when you consider capabilities. Web browsers back then could not do even 1% of what we can do now with modern browsers, where we can run damn near full fledged desktop level apps in a browser or with frameworks like electron. With that vastly increased power comes increased requirements, which is a complete non issue given memory is dirt cheap nowadays.

Hasn’t been true for years now as a 10+ year mac and windows user

Of course then there is also that one guy who fidgets around on stage for 10 solid minutes, before we are treated to a tiling window manager with eleventynine terminal windows and a hundred nervously fat-fingered xrandr command lines. Everyone in the audience chuckles and shakes their head "Linux people, typical...", and the guy on stage, already sweating blood begins the presentation.

Lol exactly. These people cause everyone else to think that's what Linux is like in 2024...just because you can doesn't mean you should, especially with the OP. Why use some arcane commands instead of the easily, single glance solution? We're not talking about advanced power user cases, just a simple day to day check...

But the caveat was that some of the features were not translated via wine. For example some type of lightning or shading (as in shadows) technique... like you would just not have shadows. So back then it was said that games ran faster because the GPU did less work cause of the missing "features" when doing the translation.

Do you have a source or example vid or something to link to showing this? I ask cause I've seen this claim pop up a number of times here and on reddit but never have been able to find concrete examples of it actually happening, in addition to the Wine docs saying (IIRC) that if Wine runs into something that isn't/can't be translated, that the program will crash, not just omit it. The idea that it would just not appear at all seems less probable to me than the game crashing.

This isn't accurate. Only ~30% of Fedora contributions come from Red Hatters, they specifically changed the council structure so much more appointments can be selected by the community rather than Red Hat:

"Historical Note The previous previous governance structure (Fedora Board) had five members directly appointed by Red Hat and five elected at large. The current structure is more complicated but has a much greater proportion of members selected by the community by election or merit. In the previous board structure, the Fedora Project leader had a special veto power; in the current model, all voting members can block on issues, with a valid reason. The FPL does not have a special veto, but does have a limited power to “unstick” things if consensus genuinely can’t be reached and a decision needs to be made."

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/#_historical_no...

Note that the community can and does select Red Hatters willingly if they are the best fit for the position. It doesn't change the fact that the community is still in full control of the project, Red Hat just sponsors it. Fedora could go off in whatever direction they want, and assuming the community supports it, Red Hat can't do anything about this, many community members have made this very clear over the years, and they also lay it out in the docs: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/fedora-and-r...

That's (one of the reasons) why Red Hat forks Fedora and then makes whatever changes they need to make.

From the individual perspective, staying too long slows down your rate of learning because you aren’t coming into contact with new people and technology at the same rate. Anecdotal, but lately I’ve interviewed some 8+ year tenured candidates that I wouldn’t rate above SWE II because it was literally a “one year of experience 10 times” situation. I try to change things up every 4 years or so to avoid ending up this way myself.

Should be noted, this is applicable to the same position specifically, not any one company. Some of the best engineers in the world have only ever worked at places like Google, Microsoft, an academic institution, etc, but they make sure they're constantly learning, working with new teams, switching to new positions once they've mastered their previous one, etc. In many cases these folks actually have a big leg up vs new external hires due to product and institutional knowledge, while also constantly learning new technologies.

Value of work definitely is a major part of it depending on priorities, but also everything else you said. It’s not a black and white thing as some make out, all revolving around one element.

(and borderline divorced from understanding how business works)

This describes 90+% of HN posters these days, to be fair. You’re absolutely completely right in your argument.

They cut off contact for a separate reason - 2000 (IIRC) supermicro boards which did have issues.

Basic internet and computer hygiene makes it incredibly easy, even inherent, in avoidng spyware/adware/malware and crappy software. Now some people who don’t do that might find nuking it all to be easier than trying to uninstall everything, that’s valid, but Unless you corrupted something on a system wide scale, clean installs are a relic from when they were a blanket solution way back in the day when all software was a lot more unstable, many years ago. I’ve been running the same install of Windows, upgraded numerous times, with nary and issue nowadays just thanks the the above best practices. Same with MacOS.

This tends to be the general sentiment in both communities (outside of people who recommend that cause it’s all they know, but I wouldn’t listen to them regardless) if you keep good computer/internet hygiene practices and barring any widespread corruption/systemic malware/other external factors.

Aside from that, I’m always a huge advocate for the polished UX. As long as the options aren’t removed, the users who need them will be able to use them perfectly fine, everyone else won’t be offput by them, especially when the need for clean installs is only necessary for specific use cases as I mentioned before and doesn’t come up often at all.