[HN Gopher] Using Windows after 15 years on Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Using Windows after 15 years on Linux
Author : dflock
Score : 206 points
Date : 2022-04-07 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duncanlock.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (duncanlock.net)
| keb_ wrote:
| I use Windows as my main OS on my personal computer. The only way
| I find Windows usable is with an LTSB/LTSC iso. One thing I
| appreciate about Windows over any Linux DE is that it is
| relatively _stable_ in comparison. I have had weird UI bugs
| /quirks with every Linux distro I have ever tried, usually after
| an update. Currently I use Linux Mint XFCE on my work PC, and I'm
| afraid to change to anything else at this point.
| sergius wrote:
| If you install git for windows, https://gitforwindows.org/, you
| get a ready to go Cygwin installation of most tools you need,
| including bash.
|
| But probably WSL is you best bet for a saner environment.
| adzm wrote:
| This is actually mingw-based, not cygwin. Regardless it still
| works very well.
| DHowett wrote:
| Funny enough, it's a bit of both. The msys2 runtime is a fork
| of the Cygwin runtime, and they keep parity pretty well.
|
| https://github.com/msys2/msys2-runtime
| rossy wrote:
| To be even more pedantic, the Unix tools that come with Git
| for Windows are MSYS2-based, not MinGW-based, and MSYS2 is
| more like Cygwin than it's like MinGW (it's Cygwin with a few
| patches.)
| ntauthority wrote:
| MSYS2, rather, which often seems to be bundled with a hybrid
| mingw install, but itself is based on a patchset to the main
| cygwin DLL and generally is a 'saner cygwin'.
| Jedd wrote:
| git bash is definitely one of the first things I install on any
| Microsoft Windows build -- gives me a half-way decent terminal,
| vim, and of course a complete and modern git.
| bsuvc wrote:
| If the way to make Windows better is to install things that
| make it more like Linux, then I have to ask, why not just use
| Linux instead?
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| For the person who wrote the original article, then the
| answer would be "because that's not an option at their
| employer."
|
| For me, personally, the answer is that I feel Windows
| provides a better desktop experience, but Linux provides a
| better command-line experience.
|
| For more opinions on that topic, see https://www.reddit.com/r
| /bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/s0m8...
| eMSF wrote:
| I guess that would be a no-brainer if someone considered
| anything that made Windows more like Linux an improvement,
| but they probably don't. People in general feel most
| comfortable with the Desktop shell they are used to (the
| little differences feel jarring) and people who are used to
| using Windows probably also use some Windows-exclusive
| software.
|
| Also, it's not like Windows has no upsides to it. Relatively
| recently, I bought a laptop that came with Windows 10 (as
| they often do), and I noticed that it boots up pretty quickly
| to login screen; I think a fair bit faster than it takes for
| another OS to boot up to just the full-disk encryption
| prompt. It's certainly not enough to make me consider using
| Windows, but it's not nothing, either.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Because the way to make Linux better is to install things
| that make it more like Windows. Unfortunately for Linux, the
| one thing you can't install is software compatibility with
| Windows apps (unless you count Wine, which even after all
| these years you really can't). So if you want to run Windows
| apps the way to go is Windows augmented with Linux features
| rather than Linux augmented with Windows features.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Plug in 2 random external monitors that may or may not be the
| same resolution
| professoretc wrote:
| Heh, the point about multi-monitor setups breaking window layouts
| really resonated with me... on Linux. I move my laptop between a
| dock in the office and a dock at home, and it basically _never_
| docks with the correct monitor layout. Sometimes only the laptop
| screen is recognized, and I have to physically unplug /replug one
| of the monitors. Sometimes one of the monitors is on, and the
| other is not. My windows are never in the right place, and
| _always_ have to be moved to where they should be. I have scripts
| that try to configure the monitor layout, but they randomly don
| 't work. At home, my machine always hard freezes when connected
| to the dock (same model as in my office!) and has to be rebooted.
|
| Now, the lesson here is not "Linux sucks" but rather, avoid
| Nvidia.
| nickduggets wrote:
| I moved to debian testing on my home machine after Windows 11
| left the worst taste in my mouth, and I can confirm the multi-
| monitor support (at least out of the box) is shockingly bad
| even without Nvidia. I've been pleased with some things,
| irritated by others. As far as I'm concerned, macOS is still
| the closest to a great desktop environment, but just like
| politicians ALL operating systems suck.
|
| Of course, I didn't write a rant article about switching to
| Linux because I'm sure a lot of problems stem from my own lack
| of experience. I wish this author had recognised the same
| thing.
| dsego wrote:
| I remember trying ubuntu for the first time in cca 2007. Then few
| years after that, I bought my first mac. Both linux and mac os
| felt like the UI was a veneer on top of the actual system. I grew
| up with windows, old version like 95 or 98, they never felt like
| a veneer or facade, the user interface was the OS for me. Well,
| windows 11 feels like a facade, cheap toy interface bolted onto
| an ageing platform.
| jaboutboul wrote:
| I think most of the issues he brings up can be pretty easily
| addressed with WSL.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Addressing issues by installing a complete different OS sounds
| very similar to just giving up.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Then we read different articles. Window arrangement, multi-
| monitor mode, depth of the Windows Store, and automatic
| rebooting are still bothersome after tuning a perfect WSL.
| Ourgon wrote:
| Before I started using Linux I used OS/2. The system had many
| idiosyncrasies and was quite ramshackle in a lot of ways but it
| did multitask quite a bit better than Windows. Its main problem
| was the dearth of good software, a problem which was "solved"
| by the addition of WinOS/2 which enabled you to run Windows 3.1
| applications in OS/2. It ran most Windows software quite well,
| often better and faster than "real Windows". Did this solve
| OS/2's problems, though?
|
| It did not. All it did was tell OS/2 users about the world of
| Windows software. When Microsoft finally launched a slightly
| less horrid version of Windows most users migrated to it,
| leaving OS/2 but a footnote in history where it concerns
| desktop use.
|
| Enter the current situation: Windows is a horrid mess, it
| consists of layers of plaster upon plaster upon jury-rigged
| interfaces built on quicksand. For those who are used to the
| way things work on Linux it feels like an enormous step back,
| like having leaden shoes and gloves fitted for no good reason.
| This problem is supposedly "solved" by the addition of WSL
| which enables you to run Linux applications in Windows. It runs
| most Linux applications quite well even though performance is
| lacking in many ways. Does this solve Windows' problems,
| though?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Windows is mostly fine for Windows development, as long as one
| doesn't try to bring their UNIX habits.
|
| After all, someone is writing software for all those 80% market
| share desktops and Xbox games consoles.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| It baffles my mind the length companies who run Linux in PROD
| will go to NOT provide Linux to their devs and how much effort is
| put into making Windows and macOS to LOOK LIKE Linux.
|
| Common put half as much effort to make Linux work with whatever
| is so important on the other OSes (what is it? AD/kerberos? Anti-
| virus? Some spying software?), and let the devs who want to use
| Linux and be productive!
| Kuinox wrote:
| Laughable. There was 0 research, most of the claims can be proven
| wrong with a simple web search.
|
| I find it always amazing how Linux users claim you can't
| customize or tinker Windows, which is plain wrong. Basic search
| in Windows docs shows it:
|
| > You can't customize anything!
|
| You can customize a lot of things, and even, make your own
| Windows "distribution": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/manufactur...
|
| > It's a commercial OS, aimed at users of Word, Excel & Outlook,
| pretty much.
|
| The dev-tools are not included, yes, because most of the users
| doesn't need it. The windows devtools are excellent. Take a look
| at Event Tracing for Windows as an example.
|
| > Non-composable Software ... The command line tools
|
| Yeah and Powershell exists ? You can pipe objects with
| Powershell.
|
| > Paths
|
| _Sigh_ : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/deployment/usmt/usm...
|
| > Installing Software
|
| chocolatey.
|
| > multiple clipboards
|
| win+v
|
| > to match my Linux workflow
|
| Exactly, stop, don't, you will scream at a Windows user if they
| try to use their Windows workflow on Linux, why are you doing the
| same thing ?
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| You can tinker a lot with windows but your changes will likely
| be undone with one of the next few updates.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Except the edge redirect debacle, windows update at worse
| will reset a few registry entries.
|
| It can't "just undone" all your changes. It doesn't work like
| this.
|
| And there is official docs thats explain how to do it
| properly: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/deployment/update/w...
| majkinetor wrote:
| There are few thing that IT WILL change, like if I disable
| windows update, it will reenable it, the same goes with
| Defender. But those are sporadic cases and solvable. It not
| like it never happened on Linux side either, contrary. You
| can rolling release your stuff just up to the point, and
| then good luck.
| Kuinox wrote:
| You likely changed the wrong settings, like disabled it
| in the windows services, check the comment you reply to,
| I edited it with the official windows documentation
| explaining you how to disable windows update.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Image creation tool? Don't be ridiculous now after you
| said so many good things...
|
| Automatic updates via single click/CLI call to turn it
| off is the only solution. You don't need to know about
| "Windows distributions" to turn off updates, that's
| ridiculous and insulting. I have script but need to
| change it from time to time. OOSU10 also does it for now.
| Some hosts tinkering also...
| Kuinox wrote:
| I said the comment replied to, this is the doc I linked:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/deployment/update/w...
| majkinetor wrote:
| Oh, sorry, my bad for the link.
|
| It says to set on this key:
|
| HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Wi
| ndowsUpdate\AU
|
| I already have there NoAutoUpdate = 1 now (looks like
| ShutUp10 that I use set that, and I get error if I want
| to update, after restarting). Not sure if I hallucinate
| or so, but this is so trivial to set that it doesn't
| explain why entire Internet has a problem. I set this up
| after initial Windows install as concept of automatic
| update without your say in it (what and when) is
| nonsense, but Windows still managed to skip it somehow
| later...
|
| Actually, I checked my notes now, and found 5 different
| ways to do it since obviously people had problems with
| "universal solutions": task scheduler, hosts, mettered
| connection, registry, debloater scripts etc.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| There is only one way to consistently prevent Windows
| Update from rebooting your machine. You must use regedit
| to override the process execution for the executable that
| triggers the reboot.
|
| You can find instructions here[0]. This method has been
| flawless for three years, through multiple feature
| updates. No longer to my long-running processes get
| interrupted.
|
| It does not disable updates, just makes the reboots be on
| your schedule.
|
| 0: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-
| win-10...
| majkinetor wrote:
| You can prevent Windows updating on its own.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yes, its total nonsense. I use both and ANY THING CAN BE DONE
| ON BOTH OS. To claim differently shows only that one sucks and
| didn't RTFM or experiment enough.
|
| > The dev-tools are not included
|
| PowerShell is excellent dev tool OTB. Anything else is
| cinst/winget install away in seconds. While winget is new
| thing, Choco is there for around decade and it has everything
| and most up to date, on par with Arch.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Oh yes, PowerShell is an excellent tool, but I was thinking
| on the more of tools like ETW, Sysinternals, Visual Studio...
| majkinetor wrote:
| And Linux has Visual Studio equivalent included? Is that
| even a question given the number of distros? If it does,
| its disaster IMO, I don't want it on Windows either when
| vocode is perfectly capable to do any of that stuff and not
| being 27GB in size with obscure install script but one
| cinst and 10s away with all my settings synced. Why would
| anybody impose such a bloated burden on me by default...
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > > Paths
|
| > Sigh: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/deployment/usmt/usm...
|
| Can you explain this a bit more? If I type cd
| CSIDL_DEFAULT_DOWNLOADS does that take me to the Downloads
| directory of $USER? And does that mean I can script against
| that envvar path?
|
| I think part of the issue is these kinds of Windows
| accessibility improvements are not as discoverable as the
| ArchWiki. You mentioned spinning your own distro of Windows but
| where are the Medium articles or distro respins out there?
|
| > > Installing Software
|
| > chocolatey.
|
| To be fair to the author, they did conclude scoop was the best
| choice (with examples of use aplenty) and I agree. I much
| prefer scoop to choco but I'd like to hear why you prefer it.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Sadly not all the variables here works as it's for something
| unrelated to the command line.
|
| You can list all the working variables with `Get-ChildItem
| Env:`
|
| To use the variable, put '%' around it. (Sadly no variable
| point to the Download directory, but that's far easier to do
| it with a real programming language).
|
| > think part of the issue is these kinds of Windows
| accessibility improvements are not as discoverable as the
| ArchWiki.
|
| That's true for these variable in particular
|
| > You mentioned spinning your own distro of Windows but where
| are the Medium articles or distro respins out there?
|
| Heh, there is no article of it, but the msdoc is extensive
| enough on the subject you shouldn't have an issue if you
| follow it.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| If you have any other power user insights (or good blogs to
| follow) I'd love to hear them! To be honest, I got real
| comfy with WSL2 and Windows 11 at my last job but only felt
| like I was scratching the surface. I keep hearing about
| black magic like WinRM which I understand you can use to
| Infrastructure-as-Code your Windows.
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| That was surprisingly balanced and reasonable. Even as long time
| Windows user I have to agree with everything he wrote and don't
| really have any real quibbles.
| IshKebab wrote:
| _Really?_ It 's balanced even though the only advantage he gave
| to Windows is that firmware updates happen automatically?
|
| It's about the most biased thing I've ever read. He even lists
| some advantages (it doesn't have two different copy/paste
| buffers) as a disadvantage.
|
| What happened to:
|
| * Hardware all works mostly without issue.
|
| * Software is easy to install even if it isn't in the official
| store (e.g. apt).
|
| * Power management (sleep etc.) works reliably.
|
| * Settings are almost all GUI-accessible. You rarely have to
| fiddle on the command line etc.
| hanselot wrote:
| dagw wrote:
| I'm guessing those things didn't apply to him or his use
| case. Yes, hardware support is better, but if your needs are
| simple you buy smartly, Linux also works pretty well.
|
| Yes, installing third party and closed source software is
| much easier on Windows and there is much more of it to chose
| from. This is in fact my main reason for using Windows.
| However if you're a developer and your entire job can be done
| using open source dev tools then this doesn't matter.
|
| Power management is better on Windows, but I wouldn't say it
| works "reliably". I've pulled many a hot, dead laptop from my
| backpack after it decided to wake up and kill itself after I
| thought it had gone to sleep. Apple is the only company that
| really be said to have solved this in my opinion.
|
| Settings being GUI-accessible is at best questionable
| advantage. It's nice for people who don't want to use the
| command line and don't see its point, but if you're used to
| and comfortable with the command line (like the author seems
| to be) it is far from a selling point. Plus just because the
| setting exists in GUI, that doesn't in any way solve the
| problem of actually locating where and how the set that
| setting.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| > * Software is easy to install even if it isn't in the
| official store (e.g. apt).
|
| You can install any .deb package not in the "official store"
| simply by typing: `dpkg -i package.deb`.
|
| This has essentially never failed in my decade+ of using
| Debian-based Linux OSes.
|
| It's pretty dang easy to install anything nowadays.
| ntauthority wrote:
| That is, assuming something is even packaged as a .deb for
| your distro's age in the first place.
|
| Trying to get something written using new, say, C++ runtime
| libraries shipped as a binary working on even a two year
| old Linux distro is a struggle in itself, meanwhile on
| Windows, the VC CRT bundled with VS2022 with C++22 support
| even runs fine as a bundled portable .dll down to Windows 7
| (2009) and probably even before.
|
| Running modern libstdc++ (as a binary, mind you) on an
| otherwise 2009 distro on the other hand - unlikely. Even
| more so if you stray out of the GNU libc option, or want to
| deal with libc++ for some reason (such as cross-platform
| parity, as it is better behaved on Windows/Mac than
| libstdc++), or any other edge cases out of the usual /lib,
| especially for GUI apps or worse, GPU apps.
| jenscow wrote:
| I get all 4 of those points with Linux.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > * Hardware all works mostly without issue.
|
| > * Power management (sleep etc.) works reliably.
|
| Man, I don't know. I just got a new HP work laptop at the end
| of last year. Some HP "enterprise" model, nothing fancy,
| which only officially supports Windows. It came preloaded
| with win 10 pro, even though "HP recommends Windows 11".
| Whatever. (The pc was manufactured in November 2021, so Win11
| was already out).
|
| When I turn it on, my first impression was "damn, that's a
| dim screen". Even turned all the way up, with auto-dim
| disabled, it would still be just "meh". I rebooted in the
| BIOS, and it burned my eyes off.
|
| Install Linux: I get the full brightness. Brightness keys
| work out of the box, light sensor, sound / mic mute leds
| light up as needed, Wi-Fi, BT, IR camera, fingerprint reader,
| everything just works.
|
| I figure I should install a Win 11, just in case (I daily
| drive Linux, but work for a windows shop). What a freaking
| shitshow. Mostly nothing works out of the box. No brightness
| keys, not brightness sensor, no volume keys, the touchpad is
| barely usable. I have to go through multiple Windows update
| reboots (on a freshly created Windows install USB stick), and
| then start going through all the HP drivers, complete with
| reboots. For some reason, after the updates, the USB Ethernet
| adapter (from HP) doesn't work reliably anymore. And after
| all this song and dance, there's some USB controller that has
| an exclamation mark in device manager, and the webcam isn't
| detected. "Update the driver" doesn't find anything. There's
| also some weird lag with the audio LEDs. It has no idea
| there's an ambient light sensor. And if I tell it to sleep,
| it'll go to sleep and wake up after a while for no reason
| ("Wake up for updates" is of course disabled).
|
| > * Settings are almost all GUI-accessible. You rarely have
| to fiddle on the command line etc.
|
| But you have to fiddle with the registry. I wouldn't say
| that's that much better. Also, bonus points for whatever
| settings you do being undone on an update.
| bsuvc wrote:
| All those points are true for me using Ubuntu on a Dell XPS
| 13.
|
| * Every piece of hardware has worked flawlessly: Ultrawide
| monitor, printer, wireless keyboard and mouse, Bluetooth
| mouse, Bluetooth headset, usb drives.
|
| * I am able to install most things I want using the software
| installer GUI or using command line apt, but sometimes I
| download a deb file directly, to install something that is
| not in apt. Other times I just download the executable and I
| am done (kubectl for example).
|
| * Never had a problem with sleep, it works fine for me every
| time, and I use it daily.
|
| * Settings are GUI accessible. It would be rare to be
| _required_ to do something command line. I do a lot of
| command line work for development, but it is not really
| needed just to configure the OS or desktop environment.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| And in turn, your proposed advantages are easy to call
| disadvantages;
|
| * Hardware mostly works, using the manufacture's drivers and
| all their bundled bloatware.
|
| * The official store is so bad that you _have_ to go get
| software a different way.
|
| * Sleep I'll grant with the caveat that it's also mostly
| flawless on Linux these days so that's not really an
| _advantage_.
|
| * Settings are all in GUIs. Want to script your
| configuration? Good luck!
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| I've heard plenty of arguments for why Windows sucks and plenty
| for why Linux sucks too. And anytime I read those arguments,
| there's a distinct lack of care taken to understanding the
| other's perspective. Pick your poison basically; for most normal
| users, Windows/Mac has fewer annoyances than Linux and for devs,
| Linux has fewer annoyances than Windows/Mac. Yes, most normal
| users would prefer not to use a terminal, which any
| troubleshooting in Linux basically requires. Yes, most devs would
| prefer to be able to manually or programmatically update
| settings, which Windows tries to actively avoid. There's not a
| lot of discussion to be had here other than advice that can be
| taken from one to another and try and accommodate as many
| workflows as possible.
| donatj wrote:
| I had a similar experience coming from 10 years of exclusive Mac
| usage. I had been a Windows guy in the 90s/early aughts before I
| was given a Mac Mini as a thank you after finishing an
| internship. I bought a gaming PC at the start of the pandemic as
| something to do. My general feelings were "This is it? This is
| Windows 7 with a coat of paint"
|
| The single thing that the author didn't touch on that I do love
| is WSL. My guess is it would have been a cop out for them, but
| it's where I spend most of my time these days. I even have it set
| up so I can ssh into my PC from Windows, which curiously takes me
| to a C:\ prompt, but typing WSL and hitting enter brings me to
| the good stuff. It has some weird limitations though, I can't
| access network mounts, namely my NAS from while ssh'd into
| Windows for instance.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > . My general feelings were "This is it? This is Windows 7
| with a coat of paint"
|
| My general feeling is if Windows 7 still receive free secure
| updates, I'd be using it. I have no real need for anything more
| than Windows 7 but more secure, and don't see how any computer
| OS has improved in the past decade.
| p1peridine wrote:
| > My general feeling is if Windows 7 still receive free
| secure updates, I'd be using it.
|
| For security, you can Micropatch it.
|
| I tried W7 recently and it was even better, more polished
| than I remembered. USB3 drivers could be an issue though.
| Depends on the motherboard.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| What's Micropatch?
| p1peridine wrote:
| Check out 0patch by ACROS Security. They do support
| Windows 7.
|
| > A patch (also called a micropatch) is a small package
| with a few code instructions that replace a vulnerable
| section of code in a running application. A patch
| therefore fixes a vulnerability.
|
| > A licensed patch can get applied to a module(usually, a
| DLL-dynamic-link library) inside a running process in
| order to eliminate a vulnerability in that process. This
| means that the vulnerable code section in the module
| inside the process is replaced with corrected code from
| the patch.
|
| > 0patch does not change executable files on the file
| system. It only modifies code in memory of running
| processes, which allows it to easily and quickly apply
| and remove patches without even relaunching applications,
| much less restarting your computer.
|
| https://0patch.com/
|
| User Manual: https://0patch.com/files/0patch_Agent_User_M
| anual_21.05.05.1...
|
| Windows Central article:
| https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-7-approaches-end-
| life...
| prewett wrote:
| My feeling about WSL is that if you have to install another
| operating system into your main operating system, clearly the
| main operating system has problems.
| donatj wrote:
| 100%. Windows is the problem to solve, not the destination.
| If you're stuck on Windows though, it can make it somewhat
| usable.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| This neatly sums up the issues I have with Windows, but it also
| misses the most important point. That is, the increasing contempt
| for user choice. On the few occasions I start Windows, it almost
| always demands that I enable their privacy invading options using
| a full screen prompt that I can't swiftly dismiss. It also
| bombards me with ads. It installs software I didn't ask for. It
| won't even respect my choice of browsers.
|
| No other OS that I'm aware of shows this much hostility and
| contempt towards its users. It's the single most issue that turns
| me off from Windows in recent years.
| ktpsns wrote:
| Don't forget there is still Cygwin. I recently had to work on
| Windows, and Cygwin was actually the rescue, with a terminal
| which just works and proper bash commands that put PowerShell at
| shame.
|
| I guess WSL is similar but still painful/impossible to install if
| you don't have BIOS access for enabling CPU virtualization.
| criddell wrote:
| What can you do in bash that can't be done in PowerShell? To
| me, it always felt like there is a lot more stuff you can do in
| PowerShell. For example, it's easy to read the registry, create
| COM objects, etc...
| satya71 wrote:
| Never bothered learning powershell, it's just too verbose for
| my taste. bash has been my shell for two decades, not going
| to change anyone soon.
| xxs wrote:
| why bother learning powershell, as it's extremely unlikely to
| run in production (or any other linux box) environment. Bash
| works well and it's ubiquitous with tons of documentation.
| wink wrote:
| Very much disagreeing with the putty comment, otherwise it's spot
| on (for the things I care about).
|
| It's not that putty is better than using ssh in my terminal of
| choice on Linux, it's more that it has the only decent terminal
| implementation on Windows that I know of. I am a daily user of
| Linux and Windows and the copy/paste workflow in cmd.exe and
| powershell is just broken for me, in putty it's reliable enough
| that I am fine.
|
| The only way I can stomach development on Windows is a) VS Code +
| Remote extension and have a terminal in VS Code open and before
| that worked b) QtCreator for C++ or anything Javabased where I
| simply don't need a CLI. Well ok, I still need a CLI for git, but
| not the usual stuff. I am a heave user of cut/sed/awk/grep etc.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| WSL + Windows Terminal is enough for 90% of what I need to do. I
| say this as someone who uses Linux on all my personal machines.
| You'll even get WSL automatically these days if you install
| Docker Desktop for Windows.
|
| The most annoying part, for me, is having to double-install
| certain tools both inside and outside of WSL (e.g. having to
| install git or openjdk twice). But it's a comparatively minor
| irritation, given how much _better_ WSL2 works in general than
| previous solutions.
| nullc wrote:
| > Did it Just... Restart Itself and Lose All My Terminals!?
|
| Even better when it ruins a $1000 piece of billet by rebooting
| the computer controlling a CNC mill in the middle of an
| operation.
|
| But Linux is working on catching up. For example, Fedora now
| ships this "systemd-oomd" that will randomly kill very large
| processes on system with >64GB ram even when there are terabytes
| of memory free and which won't stay disabled if you disable it
| with conventional tools.
| huqedato wrote:
| This is a article of a Windows hater. Period.
| deadcore wrote:
| May be the wrong place to ask this - but would be interested to
| know what peoples experiences are and the advantages of using
| Windows in a commercial environment over say your distro flavour
| of choice or Mac?
|
| Be interested in hearing both sides of the coin, from laptop to
| server. Everyone seems to love bashing on Windows (including me)
| but someone must like it...
|
| (except for the obvious DirectX & games reason)
| throw10920 wrote:
| The author is coming from Linux. Given that, I'm surprised that
| they don't have more complaints about the blatantly user-hostile
| stuff that Windows does, as opposed to user interface
| experience/patterns.
|
| They don't mention the Windows 11 forced-cloud-account
| requirement, but that's because they got a Windows 10 laptop.
| Lots of their other complaints (GUI tools instead of command-
| line, environment variables, software installation) are
| incidental or the result of different design paths. They mention
| the forced restarts, but that's about it.
|
| I'm surprised they don't mention the stuff that Linux users (and
| power users who actually care about controlling their device)
| usually get upset about. Why not talk about the awful, slow start
| menu rework with its web-search-by-default? Cortana? Installation
| process full of dark patterns? Telemetry? Windows Hello? Dark
| patterns meant to trick you into using Edge? Windows Defender
| automatically turning itself on after you disable it?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Your last paragraph is getting my blood pressure up.
|
| I use Linux for myself but support a number of Windows
| computers, and use Windows at my (non-tech) job.
|
| The Edge dark patterns and the start menu are two particularly
| sore points with me. I've wrestled with both of those several
| times.
|
| Another new pain point is that at work there's a piece of
| software on the intranet that needs Internet Explorer, and Edge
| keeps forgetting that it's supposed to use IE mode for it. Oh,
| and as far as I can tell, Edge just ignores some group
| policies.
| mrozbarry wrote:
| I appreciate everyone's taste and opinions on UI, but this seems
| a lot like confirmation bias. Windows has warts. Linux has warts.
| OSX has warts.
|
| I'd say in terms of consistent UI, OSX probably is the biggest
| winner. Both Linux and Windows are the losers in UI consistency.
| Yeah, you can customize it, but customization, in my opinion, can
| be a real time-suck and it doesn't make you any more or less
| productive, it's just visual enhancement.
|
| Unix is the real commandline winner, because piping and good
| underlying tools, and as a result, OSX and Linux do very well
| here. I'm not familiar with the powershell equivalent, but at the
| very least, it's just a copy of how unix works.
|
| Application installs is a very mixed bag across the board. Every
| distro of linux has their flavor of installs in commandline, and
| some have graphical. I've never had a lot of success mixing the
| two, it always puts some package database in a corrupted out-of-
| sync state. OSX is primarily graphical installs, but there are
| cli tools like homebrew - neither seem to fight each other,
| though. Windows is download/installer based. There is a store,
| but the store is mostly paid applications, and the Windows
| ecosystem has a large amount of free installer tools that will
| almost certainly never be on the store.
|
| The article doesn't even talk about hardware. My typical
| experience is hardware "just works" in OSX and Windows, and will
| often/mostly "just work" in Linux, but also there can is usually
| is some tinkering (as well as do I want the free/open source
| drivers vs the binary blobs in cases like graphics cards).
|
| So I guess in summary, Windows doesn't suck, in the same way that
| Linux and OSX don't suck. Every OS has a mess in some capacity,
| and I would say Linux's biggest mess is there is too much room
| for customization that will always lead to rabbit holes. For
| context, I use a company-given OSX laptop for work, and use Linux
| for my personal computer/daily driver, but have a Windows
| partition for gaming.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Lets not customize it then.
|
| What OS vendors should do is give as bare bone version of SO -
| kernel + package manager. We can take it from there with
| scripts. With simple strategy to keep those scripts online like
| vscode keeps your settings would be definite solution but even
| without it you are one git clone away from your repo that
| contains all customizations. We could have option in Windows to
| export system settings as PowerShell script.
|
| Its really not that hard, its just that nobody relevant wants
| to do it.
|
| Microsoft, if you are listening, I would even do it for free
| (because ultimately it would save me time). Just gimme
| jurisdiction/authority and we can have that.
| mrozbarry wrote:
| The thing you are proposing sounds like absolute
| customization, unless I horribly misunderstand. "Take it from
| there with scripts" means not only is it fully customized,
| but you don't even have a trusted vendor to provide the
| scripts, which sounds like a nightmare to me.
| majkinetor wrote:
| You create customization scripts or take parts of system
| behavior from some trusted repository.
|
| Customization is not about "trusted vendors", its about
| you.
| mrozbarry wrote:
| I guess my confusion is your initial statement "Lets not
| customize it then" followed by you proposing fully
| customized installs, and I'm not sure if I missed your
| point.
|
| I only brought up trusted vendors because it seemed that
| you also want repositories of customization scripts, and
| I don't disagree, but it shifts the trust from the people
| making your operating system to you reviewing a bunch of
| scripts to get the system you want.
|
| I'm making a point that people don't want that at all.
| That will absolutely cause analysis paralysis, there
| would be too many possibilities, and it would continue
| this idea that Linux is hard and elitist when it really
| shouldn't have to be that way.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Powershell is not "just a copy of how unix works". Powershell
| lets you work with objects instead of wrangling text. You call
| real functions with real objects as real parameters and get
| real objects returned back to you. You can pipe those objects,
| iterate over them, etc. You can call into .NET and even Win32.
| In bash, all you have is 1) executing binaries and 2) hacks
| emulating real variables and functions and control flow but
| that are really just parsing and passing strings around.
| shmerl wrote:
| If you are stuck in such job, set up openssh server on the
| Windows laptop, then get a Linux laptop and use Windows laptop as
| an annoying but necessary network router. That reduces the need
| of dealing with Windows.
|
| I wouldn't want to deal with Windows as a daily driver by any
| means.
| [deleted]
| jmmv wrote:
| From a quick look at the article, I can see a few subtle
| "omissions" or "rants that have easy fixes". I can't tell how
| long the author has spent on Windows (it's not in the article) so
| it's hard to know how much effort they have put in getting
| adjusted. It takes a really long time to switch platforms and
| feel comfortable in them, and without spending a long time
| adjusting, it's too easy to complain and quite hard to provide a
| fair review...
|
| For a more positive spin, I'll leave here my own review of
| Windows after being off the platform for 25 years, spending 15 of
| those on macOS, and then spending the last year primarily on
| Windows. TL;DR: I'm quite happy with the switch, but obviously
| there are many things that could be different/better and some of
| the issues that the OP highlights are valid.
|
| The intro and index: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-
| intro.html
|
| [edit: wording]
| duxup wrote:
| >It takes a really long time to switch platforms and feel
| comfortable in them, and without spending a long time
| adjusting, it's too easy to complain and quite hard to provide
| a fair review...
|
| I agree.
|
| Some of the fixes for his complaints are effectively
| customizations, not unlike the customizations I'd make in
| Linux. I'm not sure some of these differences are really that
| different.
| dflock wrote:
| > I can't tell how long the author has spent on Windows
|
| About 3 1\2 months so far. I tried to be fair - but my article
| is not as comprehensive as your series!
|
| I've read some of your series and I didn't see anything, but
| you don't happen to know if you can get primary selection
| middle click paste on Windows? That's the only thing so far
| that I've got no kind of solution to at all.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| This worked for me in Windows XP and 7, but no idea if it
| still works in Windows 10 since it hasn't been updated since
| 2005: http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/
| jmmv wrote:
| The Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center (optional install)
| supports remapping the middle button to paste text, but I
| don't know if that works for arbitrary keyboards and mice. (I
| have a Sculpt keyboard.)
|
| Also, I had forgotten about the common use of the middle
| button for pasting as I have not used Linux desktops for a
| while. Maybe I should remap this now :)
| dflock wrote:
| It's not really making middle-click be paste, it's
| automatically storing the last text selection somewhere
| that's the problem.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Funny, I've read the "finale" part and the PowerShell part.
| When I read you, my fealing is that PowerShell is not there yet
| and telemetry and Defender have big issues (telemetry 'cos it
| allow MSFT to remove feature, spy on me) and Defender ('cos
| sometimes it just eats my time)...
|
| As a dev/data scientist/netflix/websurfer/photo-sorter/privacy-
| aware dude, well, my Linux box just rocks and Windows is not
| fun (although it does the job).
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Powershell works fine for me. Not sure what the complaining
| is about.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| As someone who works with AD, Azure, and Windows servers
| all day (I'm so uncool), Powershell is wonderful.
| aerique wrote:
| Perhaps PowerShell will be ready in the same year as Linux
| for the Desktop?
| majkinetor wrote:
| guessbest wrote:
| This is basically required software for windows10 : O&O
| ShutUp10++ https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
|
| I will say in windows defense that the linux kernel seems to
| need updates almost every week requiring a reboot.
| sph wrote:
| The linux kernel updates every day, yes, but unless there's
| a security issue, you don't _have to_ reboot into every new
| kernel your distribution pushes. Certainly no one forces
| you to.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Why does it nag me so often, then?
| [deleted]
| icedchai wrote:
| "Need" is a bit much. I know companies that haven't updated
| or rebooted servers in years. A few weeks ago I logged into
| a server with a 1400 day uptime.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I am told, every time someone claims *nix isn't a good desktop,
| that having to fix things is unacceptable; if a problem can be
| fixed by editing a config file/setting or installing an
| additional program, that proves the platform will never be good
| enough for desktop use. I am perfectly happy to watch NT
| failing by the same standard.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It was interesting to me to see Linus, of YouTube's LTT, mess
| up unzipping and then last into the distro he was using
| because - even though there was on screen feedback (obscured
| by his massive screen) - a folder needed updating to see
| changes. But, for me, across dozens of machines and many
| years MS Windows' file explorer has failed to do live
| updates, egg when making a new folder from the right-click
| menu (even pressing F5) the folder doesn't show, folders
| occasionally get littered with New Folder subfolders. Same
| happens with unzipping, the exact thing that apparently made
| Linux unusable and "not ready for the desktop" ... except for
| me Ubuntu at least always shows a notification for unzipping
| (and new folders just work).
|
| Mostly these things are familiarity, using Windows just boils
| my blood though, it feels so hostile to me,
|
| Buying and installing Minecraft client on Linux was super
| easy and straight forward (I did that pre-MS), buying and
| installing on MS Windows was a total trauma, the account
| process was so convoluted. Their greed just wrecks all their
| awesomeness.
| cmehdy wrote:
| Mostly the same experience having had 10+ years on Mac before a
| switch to Windows. Powertoys[0] are great although some are
| slow (especially the one acting like Mac's Spotlight). UI is
| different but not a bad experience once you've used it for a
| couple weeks. I didn't see any mention of file explorers (i.e.
| Explorer vs Finder) in your articles but it's fascinating how
| those two concepts are the same thing yet so different in their
| strengths and weaknesses - and to be honest, my explorer
| experience improved once I started using QTTabbar[1] to
| customize everything to my liking.
|
| I'm surprised your WSL article is so short, because WSL2 is so
| incredibly convenient for Linux and keeps on improving
| steadily. I've been able to set up and practice on virtual
| kubernetes cluster using KinD[2] (Kubernetes in Docker) thanks
| to the seamless integration of Docker for Windows into the WSL
| subsystem. VSCode can tap into Linux VMs with pretty much no
| delays too. Shutting down the whole thing to free up resources
| takes one line in Powershell and happens within a few seconds.
| The terminal app despite having a bit of a clunky UI is highly
| configurable and just works, etc.
|
| There are things that scare me about Windows though, for
| example the mandatory real-time "defender" file scanning that
| you have to disable either manually at every boot or disable
| entirely through registry thus losing the virus scanning
| functionality. The amount of clunky Cortana stuff that really
| took a while to remove. The store app that feels flimsy, the
| games dependency on Xbox apps and subsystems which can lead to
| annoying bugs, and certain UI delays that make the system
| sometimes feel not so fast compared to the tricks Macs can pull
| to make you feel at ease. Consequently I'm not very likely to
| touch Windows 11 as Microsoft is seemingly trying to enforce
| more things in configurations and UI.
|
| [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
|
| [1] https://github.com/indiff/qttabbar
|
| [2] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/05/21/wsl-docker-
| kubernetes-...
| prrar wrote:
| I'm halfway through it, awesome review!
| jmmv wrote:
| Thanks!
| runjake wrote:
| Very well-done. This should be the OP article.
| jmmv wrote:
| Thanks. My original article made its way as a separate
| submission a while ago but barely got any votes :) My
| conclusion is that a single (very long) post might have
| worked out better from an engagement perspective as opposed
| to the series, but would also have been much harder to make
| coherent. Thanks for reading!
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > Speaking of keyboard shortcuts provides the right segue to
| the clipboard behavior. I don't know who had the brilliant idea
| of making copy and paste preserve the formatting of the source
| text. This is almost never ever what you want.
|
| +1
| etataetaet wrote:
| Holding shift while pasting will remove all the formatting
| for most programs! Still annoying but _usually_ an easy fix.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'd never heard of this, thanks for the tip. I just tried
| it in Word and had no luck, but it worked in Chrome. Any
| other programs you're aware of that respect this?
| wanderer_ wrote:
| This might be because Word overrides system shortcuts
| (i.e. the 'paste without formatting' in this case).
| Google Docs tries to do this in the browser as well, but
| it happens to support this particular shortcut.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Most people who aren't programmers expect formatting to be
| copied and pasted.
| dataflow wrote:
| I think it depends on what you're copying. If you're
| copying text only, then no. But if you're copying text with
| images or other non-text elements, then possibly yes.
| jmmv wrote:
| I think it also depends on where you are copying from and
| pasting into. If it's within the same document, you
| likely want to maintain everything. If it is within the
| same app (different docs), you may want to maintain
| everything. If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the
| use case for maintaining formatting.
|
| But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the
| like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.
|
| Anyhow... so many options that a single feature doesn't
| fit all. The problem with Windows is the lack of a
| uniform solution to paste without formatting (my
| complaint) as opposed to macOS.
| dataflow wrote:
| > But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the
| like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts.
|
| Oh, to clarify: I meant: "if you're copying text along
| with images, you probably want to keep the text
| formatting [fonts etc.] too, whereas if you're only
| copying text, you probably don't want the formatting
| either." It's not a perfect heuristic by any means, but I
| think it'd be better than the current situation.
| iso1210 wrote:
| > If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case
| for maintaining formatting
|
| You have some formatted text (maybe some bold or italic
| in a line) on a webpage, you want to copy it into an
| email (lets set aside the argument that email should be
| text only).
| uuyi wrote:
| Having watched my mother swearing at this on numerous
| occasions I would not make that assumption.
| minimaul wrote:
| I've actually done kind of the opposite recently.
|
| I've used Linux a lot in the past, and especially on servers
| pretty much exclusively - but I've always had a Windows PC for
| gaming and a Mac for everything else for personal use.
|
| In the last few months I put together a tiny low power AMD PC
| (the 35W 8 core 5750GE!) - and I am massively impressed by how
| well everything works.
|
| Proton/Wine and the OSS AMD graphics stack run older Windows
| games better than Windows 10 or 11 does. The DP MST setup I have
| just works (unlike on Windows + NVIDIA where it loves to break).
| Using KDE as a desktop is more consistent as a UI than Windows 11
| is.
|
| It's come a long way, and the user experience (as someone who was
| _expecting_ to dislike it) is seriously improved & seriously
| impressive.
|
| edit: a lot of the niggles I used to hit have just gone away - I
| don't get tearing, multimonitor just worked. I haven't tried
| disparate DPIs and I expect that would be an issue, but even
| so... I'm impressed.
| greenail wrote:
| I just realized I've been using windows for 30 years... wow!
|
| The main problem here is that this is a work machine. Generally
| you can't do what ever you want on those. I imagine Linux is
| harder to lock down in a corp environment and the complaints are
| rooted in that notion. WSL fixes many issues, I don't think I'd
| be spending much time in power shell if I had the option to use
| WSL.
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| Got you beat by ... 1 year ;-)
|
| It was a pretty big change when our (already outdated at that
| time) lab in college scrapped the PDP11-44 and replaced it with
| 20 Windows 3.0 machines and 10 Macs.
|
| Been using Linux since I picked up a Yggdrasil CD in 1993.
|
| Sorry to hear you can't use WSL ... it's great IMO.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > There's a new shell now, called PowerShell, to run inside your
| terrible 1980s terminal window, but the terminal it's running
| inside, still sucks.
|
| Well no, PS and pwsh has their own terminals.
| DHowett wrote:
| All console subsystem executables on Windows are hosted by the
| same application (today known as "conhost"[2],) which provides
| the UI and terminal emulation facilities and implements the
| Win32 console APIs.
|
| PowerShell, therefore, uses the same console host as the legacy
| Command Prompt does[1]. It just styles it differently.
|
| [1]: The version of PowerShell that comes with windows also
| ships with something called the "PowerShell ISE," which is a
| different UI for PowerShell that offers no terminal emulation
| capabilities and bears only a passing resemblance to a console
| window.
|
| [2]: it used to be part of CSRSS, but in Windows 7 it became a
| standalone application.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > technically correct, the best kind of correct
|
| While this is true, the UX of PS/pwsh and default cmd differs
| enough what to me their behaviour is differs enough to treat
| them differently.
| kup0 wrote:
| I'm about to embark on a journey myself of abandoning Windows(11)
| completely on my primary/gaming PC. The way I use the PC I'm
| prepared to deal with the trade-offs (and I'm making a backup,
| but trying to make it not super "easy" to run back to Windows,
| that way I commit to Linux for a while). Might document this
| whole process.
|
| Proton/etc isn't 100% there yet- but it's doing so well at this
| point, I want to experience the trade-offs and see if I can live
| with them. Always can go back to Windows as a last resort.
|
| I do know some trade-offs already, from my test-runs (done via
| dual-booting). Proton + controller vibration issues might be the
| top issue for me. In Rocket League vibrations happen- but like
| 2-3 seconds after the feedback should have happened- making
| vibration useless as a feedback mechanism.
|
| I have tons and tons of games installed- many I've tried work
| flawlessly on Linux so far (or with easy adjustments from
| suggestions on ProtonDB).
|
| I'm sure there are games I may completely lose out on- and that's
| what I want to experience for myself- if those gaps are fine- or
| maybe if committing will actually help prod me to be part of the
| feedback/dev/etc communities trying to improve gaming on Linux
| for everyone.
|
| Either way, this is all personal hardware- work laptops are
| separate- so this should be a fun experiment with very little
| downside- I don't do anything _critical_ on my primary home PC
| that requires Windows
| nightski wrote:
| I upgraded to 11 on my laptop and I hate it. I am so glad I
| still have 10 on my desktop. I'll hold off as long as possible.
| This is coming from a daily Windows user for almost 30 years
| now. I use Linux a lot as well but Windows has always been the
| home desktop PC OS.
| kup0 wrote:
| I forced 11 to be more like 10 to make it work for me, used
| various utilities/etc to have a custom taskbar/start menu,
| bring back normal right-click context menus, etc. So, there
| are ways to force 11 to work better for you- I agree users
| shouldn't have to go to those lengths, but the options are
| there. After those changes, it was close enough to 10 to not
| bother me.
|
| But after trialing Linux for a while, there is so much I
| enjoy about it. Things are so snappy. Built in screenshot
| tools are so much better. So many options for utilities and
| small little apps that just do one thing well.
| Theming/customizing is great. Sure it all has its quirks, but
| compared to Windows it's a breath of fresh air. Respectful OS
| update systems (no forced restarts).
|
| I feel like even the networking efficiency of the OS itself
| feels better. For instance, on Windows 11, even with 300mbps
| internet connection- if I download a large file in browser
| window A while watching a Twitch video in browser window B-
| the Twitch video will hiccup and buffer/etc. For some reason
| this never happened to me on Linux. I don't know if it's just
| doing better internal QoS-like things at an OS level, or if I
| got lucky? But it was an awesome, noticeable difference.
|
| Same with opening many tabs at once. If I want to open a
| folder of 10-20 bookmarks- on Windows, doing that while
| watching a video causes the video to stutter for a couple of
| seconds. Again, this is on a 300mbps connection, 10th gen i7,
| GTX 3070, NVME-drive system. On Linux- I can open like 50
| tabs at once with no hiccups at all. Amazing.
|
| That's why I think the time has come for me to make the full
| switchover. That, and Proton's increasing maturity (and even
| ability to quickly work for some new titles, like Elden
| Ring).
| minimaul wrote:
| > I don't know if it's just doing better internal QoS-like
| things at an OS level, or if I got lucky?
|
| Quite a few linux distros do have QoS on network interfaces
| by default - eg my current linux desktop has fq_codel on
| physical network interfaces out of the box.
| kup0 wrote:
| Wow, interesting. I had been considering building a
| pfsense/opnsense box to get fq_codel on my network to
| help solve issues like the ones I was seeing, didn't
| occur to me it would already be enabled within Linux
| distros- that def might explain my different experience
| on Linux then
| minimaul wrote:
| If you run `ip addr show`, you should be able to see. For
| me, that shows:
|
| 2: enp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500
| qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
| eunice wrote:
| How's the 3070 going on Linux? I've been away from desktop
| Linux since ~2006 or so but find myself extremely tempted
| to go back lately, just I have a 3070 too (with a mild
| undervolt so it doesn't sound like a leaf blower) and have
| always heard negative things about Nvidia drivers and
| performance over there.
| kup0 wrote:
| It worked well for me. I've heard the same stories and
| understand in some cases a the better version of a driver
| ends up being an older one, instead of the latest, so
| there are some quirks. But the games I tried all got
| great performance.
|
| Experience will vary widely by game, however. From the
| lookups I've done on ProtonDB so far, I do understand in
| some titles I may lose some fps- but it's yet to have
| been a big enough hit to bother me
| daemin wrote:
| I ended up disabling TPM on my computers (in the BIOS) so
| that they would not try to automatically upgrade me to
| Windows 11. I'm fine where I am and if Windows 12 comes out
| (or patches to Windows 11) which fix the issues I'm concerned
| about then I might switch.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I have been using Linux for 15+ years as my main desktop(via dual
| boot but I only boot into windows 3~5 times a year to do my
| annual turbotax which did not have a linux version)
|
| Recently I started to do linux development under Windows10/WSL2,
| worked very well so far except I can not do mouse select/paste
| easily. It's more responsive than running a virtualbox+linux
| inside Windows. I still do my work with Linux, Windows is just a
| host OS for that, and WSL2 is good enough to the point I no
| longer use Virtualbox+linux.
| gsich wrote:
| Middle click paste is awful and I'm glad Windows doesn't do that.
| bitwize wrote:
| > Sadly, nobody has ever really figured out how to make GUI
| software like this - general purpose & composable.
|
| Somebody _did_ figure out how to make general purpose, composable
| GUI software: Microsoft, in the 90s, with COM.
|
| COM is a superior model for software composition because it goes
| beyond the Unix metaphor of the pipe: a single communication
| channel that produces and accepts streams of unstructured bytes.
| COM objects have well-defined, strongly-typed, discoverable APIs,
| can live in- or out-of-process (with the same call semantics for
| each), and allow seamless integration between components. A
| custom control, for example, can be placed and configured in a
| visual GUI builder just the same as the controls that came with
| the builder.
|
| Unix almost faded away in the 90s, and Linux never won, because
| Windows was simply _better_. More consistent, easy to use, and a
| joy to develop for. Old Unix hands like Larry Wall looked at what
| was possible in Windows and COM and said "Wow, I wish my
| environment let me do that!"
|
| Microsoft's move away from component-based development and
| towards an "app model" is really one of the great tragedies of
| modern Windows. That and Windows turning into Bonzi Buddy tier
| spy/ad/nagware.
| gsich wrote:
| The Displayport issue is related to the GPU too. My AMD card does
| not do that, Intel GPU does it (Windows 8 though). Not sure who's
| to blame.
| recursive wrote:
| A couple of notes from a Windows user:
|
| Your powershell profile script path is also available using
| `$Profile`. You can access a clipboard history by pressing Win +
| V.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| For install and update software on Win like repos on linux, I use
| chocolatey. It is not perfect, but I don't have to download
| installers from random websites anymore. And update is just one
| command in cmd.
|
| - https://chocolatey.org/
| tentack1 wrote:
| Been using Linux for about a year now and was not aware about the
| middle click being a separate clipboard than the usual
| Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. That explains some head scratcher moments I've had
| trying to use it before.
| kleiba wrote:
| Funnily, I'm almost exactly in the same situation right now,
| having recently switched jobs. With the exception that I don't
| have admin rights, and our sys admins as a matter of principle
| refuse to install _any_ additional apps.
|
| Windows does not come with any compilers or scripting languages
| installed out of the box (or so I thought. Thanks to HN - see
| below - I've now learned that there are some for .NET). But
| luckily, I discovered HTAs, and so now I'm happily implementing a
| small Emacs clone in it to get out of Notepad hell and back onto
| a path of sanity.
|
| Also, I'm looking for a new job.
| password4321 wrote:
| > _sys admins as a matter of principle refuse to install any
| additional apps_
|
| This is one reason why Excel is a popular programming
| environment!
| kleiba wrote:
| +1.
|
| The funniest part (in a shocking kind of way) was my
| conversation with them on the first day where I asked whether
| they could install Emacs for me, and the guy's reply was:
| "What is that?"
| uuyi wrote:
| I used excel macros to run stuff that was banned on corporate
| PCs for many years. Never used it as a spreadsheet in that
| time!
| MarkSweep wrote:
| For what it's worth, there are a small number of interpreters
| and compilers included in Windows. They are for older versions
| of languages, so you will not be able to use the latest
| features.
|
| wscript.exe can run JScript and VBScript.
|
| PowerShell can run scripts. It has access the whole .NET
| runtime, so you can even make GUIs if you are determined
| enough.
|
| There is a C# (csc.exe) compiler under c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET
| . There is also MSBuild.exe to run build scripts. If you want
| to get more off the beaten path there are also VB.NET (vbc.exe)
| and JScript.NET (jsc.exe) compilers.
|
| If you can try typing "python.exe" in a command prompt on newer
| versions of Windows 10 and 11. It should open the Microsoft
| Store to install a modern Python interpreter.
| kleiba wrote:
| Cool! Happy to hear there is a C# compiler, that should
| definitely come in handy.
|
| I cannot install anything, but if the compiler is
| preinstalled, that will be a godsend.
|
| Fortunately, an Emacs clone doesn't really have high
| requirements for a GUI, but if I end up finding HTAs too
| limiting, it shouldn't be too hard to port it to JScript.NET
| (I hope). For now, I find the ability to just use HTML/CSS
| for what is needed quite comfortable.
| oblio wrote:
| You don't need to "install" anything. There are portable
| apps out there.
|
| Also a friend told me that base64 encoded zip archives
| copy-pasted through pastebins and the like aren't generally
| blocked by most scanners out there.
| kleiba wrote:
| You don't understand. This is not about (circumventing)
| technical limitations, it's about the _policy_ of not
| installing third-party apps. And I mean "install" in the
| general sense of "adding to your OS" - it's irrelevant
| whether that means downloading an .exe file, unpacking a
| zip folder, or running an installer. It's not a technical
| question.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Doesn't compiling your own exes violate that policy?
| jmrm wrote:
| Wow, HTAs. I didn't remember the last time I heard that.
| kleiba wrote:
| Frankly, I had never heard of them until a couple of weeks
| ago. :-)
| carlosrg wrote:
| AFAIK you don't need to _install_ emacs on Windows, you just
| can unzip the binaries you can download on the official website
| on any folder, even your desktop, and run the EXE file on the
| \bin folder, without the need of admin privileges.
| kleiba wrote:
| True, but that would certainly be against the "spirit" of
| their policy. It crossed my mind, though.
| larntz wrote:
| I think powershell is considered a scripting language. Even
| though the version that is included with windows is outdated
| you can still do quite a bit with it.
|
| And if you can use WSL you basically have all the linux cli
| stuff available to you.
|
| And if they don't blacklist all executables you can probably
| just download and run zipped packages -- powershell core,
| python, go, vim/neovim, and probably emacs can all be run as if
| they were portable apps and for most things you won't need
| admin rights.
| kleiba wrote:
| Technically, yes, I could do that - but they made it pretty
| clear what the company policy is, so I will certainly not
| download and install third-party software even where admin
| rights aren't necessary. But of course, the thought crossed
| my mind, too...
|
| WSL would be a dream, but they said to me that they basically
| want all machines that they're responsible for to be the
| same. You see, there are two kinds of sysadmins: those who
| take their job to be enablers for the rest of the staff
| (within certain constraints) and there are some that want to
| make it as easy as possible to themselves, nevermind if that
| restricts the actual users.
| mpfundstein wrote:
| putting an exe in a folder on your desktop counts as
| installation? is creating a word document also an
| installation?
| gigel82 wrote:
| You don't need administrative permissions to install many
| tools, including Visual Studio Code, or even xcopy-able emacs
| clones if that's more your jam.
|
| If you mean you're not allowed to run any executables at all
| unless in a whitelist then WTH, what kind of company expects
| developers to use such an environment, and what for?
| vmoore wrote:
| I use Ubuntu & Mint as my daily driver. I have relegated Windows
| to a VM (Windows 8.1) and need it for iTunes (which has no Linux
| alternative). I also have an old version of Photoshop installed
| in the VM which I use a lot. I don't connect the VM to the
| Internet for security (what if I get a rogue .DOCX or Excel macro
| script trying to download malware?).
| zeagle wrote:
| I don't think linux is ready for prime time. My latest experience
| trying this on a framework laptop was not pleasant and involved 3
| installs in short succession.
|
| So I installed Fedora. I find it doesn't have a tray to minimize
| icons into due to a conscious design decision going forward.
| Unfortunately two obscure pieces of software that I use require
| this: steam and seadrive. Well shit. I find some tweaks that
| enable this, most don't, and after half an hour I can get it to
| show a tray. I install keepassxc from their app store and it
| can't open my database or key file because the file browse window
| doesn't seem to open. I also have issues with seadrive but
| plugging in a external usb mouse solves it and I realize I can't
| right click wit the touchpad.
|
| So I wipe it and try Manjuro. Taking care not to destroy my
| windows partition which is the default option it boots fine. I
| update everything and the wifi card no longer shows up in
| settings. I mean I can lsusb, find it with dmesg but it has
| errors.. After an evening of tinkering and trying suggestions
| online ranging from changing windows power settings to editing
| config files to installing older drivers nothing can get it to
| work. No reasonable consumer would be into this.
|
| So I wipe it and install Manjuro again. Everything the same and
| it works after updating so I chalk it up to a failed update. This
| is on a laptop basically designed to run linux with a small set
| of possible hardware.
|
| Plus to boot, I am happy I printed my bitlocker key because
| windows refused to initially boot with secure boot now disabled.
| gtf21 wrote:
| > I don't think linux is ready for prime time.
|
| I still don't really understand why people say this, but it
| made me a little worried when making the switch from macOS two
| years ago. My experience has been incredibly smooth. I run arch
| on a System76 Lemur Pro and, for the most part, this has been
| the most problem-free system I've ever used. I had some kernel
| issues at some point which were solved by just keeping the
| kernel version back until the bug was fixed. By contrast, I
| never had that option on macOS when something stopped working
| or became annoying.
|
| I have a number of colleagues who use various flavours of
| ubuntu on different machines (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) and do almost
| no configuration and they seem to be perfectly happy (with a
| small exception: compositor issues when sharing screens on
| zoom, but that seems to be it).
| zeagle wrote:
| I am happy to use linux and run a VPS and a basement server
| with some of my posting history describing my projects. The
| reality is it needs constant tinkering and I think most of us
| don't realize it the same way someone that has a hobby of
| fixing up their old car doesn't realize they spend many hours
| in the garage.
| gtf21 wrote:
| I've thought about why this has been the most stable system
| experience for me, and I think it comes down to simplicity:
| my linux system just has far fewer moving parts than my mac
| did (I can read the process list and mostly understand
| everything that's running at any given time).
|
| I think the main problem is that the simplicity of my system
| comes from the fact that I have set up each part of it, by
| hand, to do exactly what I want it to do, which is definitely
| _not_ realistic for the majority of users (for whom a mac is
| considerably easier to set up, even if less stable).
| zeagle wrote:
| I think you have answered your own first post's question
| with the second paragraph of this post. I also gave pretty
| concrete examples in my original, downvoted post of how a
| using a laptop that was designed to run well with linux
| more or less out of the box based on hardware choices still
| falls short. I'm happy your transition was smoother than
| mine!
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Manjaro.
|
| But yeah, Windows is designed like the author said for people
| that use word and outlook and excel. So if you don't need much
| but the usual buttons to click it just works.
|
| But it's so limited. It's designed to just work for the
| broadest user set, and over the iterations has been honed for
| that user set, if you're a power user of a machine it's too
| limiting. Linux is _freeing_ , but that usually means a little
| rocky start and some setup. Once that's done though, you've got
| it made. You won't be clicking through a bunch of dialogs and
| GUI stuff, unless you really want to.
|
| "Linux isn't ready for prime time" isn't exactly right, it's
| not for prime time. Like all free software, it is for people
| who can get utility out of it, no more, no less.
| zeagle wrote:
| I agree with you there! I do think the risk of an update
| breaking your setup is much more likely than with macos or a
| windows machine.
| sylens wrote:
| The points about non-composable software and paths is why I try
| to keep all of my development work when using Windows relegated
| to WSL2. I have no interest in dealing with Windows paths and
| figuring out syntax for PowerShell when I will never actually
| interact with a Windows Server in my life.
| mouzogu wrote:
| This article just comes across in bad taste, or lacking a bit of
| self awareness. Linux is not really a viable alternative for most
| mainstream non technical users.
|
| I really really don't see how you can take holier than thou view
| of installing software on Windows vs Linux when it seems half the
| packages I install on Linux never even start!
|
| Windows is built around legacy support. They're spinning a lot of
| plates, which is why it feels and looks the way it does to some
| extent.
| mhitza wrote:
| > Linux is not really a viable alternative for most mainstream
| non technical users.
|
| I would dare say that's the target audience for which Linux
| works best, because their main usecase is to fire up a web
| browser. Just like a chromebook would fit their needs.
|
| Lack of funding/alternatives/support/or interest in free/OSS
| software make it a hard switch to professionals doing video,
| photo, music, CAD, etc. work.
|
| It's a great desktop for power users, developers and tinkerers.
|
| Thanks to Valve investment in the platform gaming support on
| Linux is excellent, while not being the main target of
| developers. Excellent, in my opinion, cause I don't play AAA
| games that need ~rootkits~ kernel-level anticheat software,
| thus native+proton got me covered.
|
| Queue Linus Tech Tips videos with them having issues on Linux.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| gaming minus all of the popular multiplayer games isn't
| exactly excellent
| deadbunny wrote:
| Not all anticheat enabled games[1]. Which is pretty
| impressive when you consider anticheat has only been
| working in Proton for a couple of months officially.
|
| Once we see how well the Steam Deck does I think we'll have
| a lot more companies willing to support Linux/Proton if the
| number are there.
|
| 1. https://areweanticheatyet.com/
| GNOMES wrote:
| Can argue the intended audience is experianced users, so it's
| not meant to sway mainstream/non-technical users.
| travisathougies wrote:
| > Linux on the other hand is just better for people who don't
| value their time as much and are happy to tinker with things at
| a very low level
|
| You criticize the author for lacking self awareness, but then
| turn around and do the same.
|
| Many linux users (myself included) do not spend time
| 'tinkering'. I've had the same experience as the author. I've
| used linux almost exclusively since around 2000 and the few
| times I have to use windows, I'm completely stuck. It takes
| forever to get things done. Just helping my parents out with
| simple things like 'move these files', 'rename these photos',
| etc take hours and hours of work, whereas on linux it's like a
| minute.
|
| > Linux is not really a viable alternative for most mainstream
| non technical users.
|
| Perhaps that's true, but technical users are ... still users.
|
| > They're spinning a lot of plates, which is why it feels and
| looks the way it does to some extent.
|
| That's great, and while it may excuse their poor operating
| system, it doesn't suddenly make it a great OS.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| *>things like 'move these files' [...] take hours and hours
| of work
|
| Just how, may I ask? I never needed more than a few seconds
| to trigger the moving files action via the GUI.
| travisathougies wrote:
| If it's more complicated than 'move this one file from
| folder A to folder B' it gets very complicated very fast.
|
| On linux, the 'normal' way to move files is using the
| terminal using 'mv'. On Windows, the terminal is available,
| but the main interface is the UI. It's easy to move one
| file. It's even easy to move several files 'next to' each
| other in the window. It's not easy to move files matching a
| particular name, or across multiple folders.
|
| So usually what happens is I have to find (perhaps even
| purchase) a purpose-built utility to do exactly what I
| want. Or, sit there and move files. Like ctrl+click on them
| (that interface is terrible by the way, because one click
| makes the entire selection go away... who thought that up?)
| and then move them. What other way is there without delving
| into automation? Windows Explorer cannot even do the most
| basic selection of 'select all files with NNN in the name'.
| It's completely useless for anything but the most silly of
| operations.
|
| Also, if you have to do actual work moving files between
| different filesystems or across network filesystems, it
| becomes even worse. You have to find something compatible
| with Windows, install it. It's probably some ad-containing
| shareware non-sense, so you pay for the license so you
| don't get bombarded with ads, a browser toolbar, and
| whatever other nonsense the MSI decided to install. Then,
| after about 30 minutes of downloading, installing and
| endless clicking on the 'do you want to allow this software
| to do blah' (which I never really read and click by
| default), it may or may not work.
|
| On linux, it's just mount.
|
| I don't really get the complaints about linux being hard to
| use. Different sure. But if you're used to it; if you grew
| up with it, it's mind-numbingly easy.
| vips7L wrote:
| > It's even easy to move several files 'next to' each
| other in the window. It's not easy to move files matching
| a particular name, or across multiple folders.
|
| This is nonsense. Just embrace PowerShell.
| gci | where name -match $regex | move-item $destination
| majkinetor wrote:
| Lets do it in linux friendlier way: ls
| |? name -match $regex | mv $destination
| travisathougies wrote:
| > Just embrace PowerShell.
|
| Instead of learning a young, new language, I could just
| boot into Linux and used an established operating system?
|
| I don't understand this mentality of 'Windows must be
| better'. PowerShell is alright, but as the article
| pointed out, the Windows terminal experience is terrible.
| Even the OG terminal interface on linux is better
| (supports copy paste with mouse for one thing).
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yeah, lets go back to the stone age and use abacus, a
| well establish computing system.
|
| PowerShell is 16 years old. Your kids should know it by
| this point. Mine do.
|
| > the Windows terminal experience is terrible.
|
| Was terrible. Bash is still terrible, even the creators
| do not like it, and it has nothing to do with terminal
| experience.
| vips7L wrote:
| You do you. But don't call something inferior or say it
| can't do something because you're too lazy to learn how
| to use it.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> On linux, the 'normal' way to move files is using the
| terminal using 'mv'._
|
| And that's exactly where you loose every average user
| when trying to convince them to switch from Windows to
| Linux. I work with Linux every day too but the command
| line elitism needs to stop.
|
| _> if you have to do actual work moving files between
| different filesystems or across network filesystems_
|
| This is the classic HN paradox where your 'actual work',
| differs from everyone else's 'actual work'.
|
| _> Like ctrl+click on them (that interface is terrible
| by the way, because one click makes the entire selection
| go away... who thought that up?_
|
| In Explorer go to: View -> Show -> Item
| checkboxes
|
| _> Windows Explorer cannot even do the most basic
| selection of 'select all files with NNN in the name'.
| It's completely useless for anything but the most silly
| of operations._
|
| Type verbatim in the Explorer top-right search-bar :
| *NNN*
|
| Then Ctrl + A, and hey presto, all files containing NNN
| in your current directory are selected.
|
| The way I see it, the issue here is that you don't know
| how to use Explorer features, but instead of looking it
| up and learning how to use it, you're pushing the
| narrative that somehow it's Explorer's fault for you not
| bothering to look up such solutions. It' not like you
| were born with the Linux command line in your head. You
| had to take the time to learn all those commands and
| practice. Same with Windows and MacOS and other OS. You
| need to re-learn certain mechanics whenever you switch OS
| and it's not the OS's fault you refuse to do that and
| choose to remain stuck wanting everything to work the
| Linux way.
|
| _> moving files between different filesystems or across
| network filesystems, it becomes even worse. You have to
| find something compatible with Windows, install it._
|
| For which file systems do you have to do that? Windows
| works out of the box with the storage of any consumer
| device or external mass storage device sold today and in
| the past 20+ years, even iPhones.
|
| The way I see it from your arguments, I only get that
| Windows is the wrong OS for you and your particular use
| cases, which is fair, but that's no argument that it's a
| bad OS in general for the avenge joe, as you keep moving
| the goals posts from copying and renaming files to linux
| power user activities, which you consider 'actual work'.
| travisathougies wrote:
| > And that's exactly where you loose every average user
| when trying to convince them to switch from Windows to
| Linux. I work with Linux every day too but the command
| line elitism needs to stop.
|
| I have made no argument that everyone needs to use the
| CLI. I like it, and it is a fair criticism of Windows to
| say that it makes things harder by not having it. That
| criticism rings true for me and many others. Some other
| people with different experiences probably think CLI is
| hard. That's fine. To each their own.
|
| The comment I responded to accused the author of being
| disingenous. I pointed out that (1) technical users are
| still users and (2) there are things that if you're used
| to a unix shell are simply an absolute pain to do on
| windows.
|
| > The way I see it, the issue here is that you don't know
| how to use Explorer features, but instead of looking it
| up and learning how to use it, you're pushing the
| narrative that somehow it's Explorer's fault for you not
| bothering to look up such solutions. It' not like you
| were born with the Linux command line in your head. You
| had to take the time to learn all those commands and
| practice. Same with Windows and MacOS and other OS. You
| need to re-learn certain mechanics whenever you switch OS
| and it's not the OS's fault you refuse to do that and
| choose to remain stuck wanting everything to work the
| Linux way.
|
| Okay, now do any file with a number at the end?
| Kuinox wrote:
| > It's not easy to move files matching a particular name,
| or across multiple folders.
|
| There is a search feature. Search, select, drag&drop.
|
| > across network filesystems
|
| Windows support SMB protocol, it should just work ?
| travisathougies wrote:
| > Windows support SMB protocol, it should just work ?
|
| Not everything uses SMB? Windows compatibility for
| anything not Microsoft is sporadic.
| tonoto wrote:
| The target group of the article (and hacker news) was mostly
| directed to "mainstream non technical users"?
| ghostpepper wrote:
| > half the packages I install on Linux never even start
|
| This doesn't sound right. Are you sure you're starting them
| correctly?
| nicoburns wrote:
| For really casual users (who don't really need much beyond web
| browsing for example), Linux is actually often a lot better
| than windows. It's more consistent and changes less often.
| jug wrote:
| I agree with the maddening UI and library inconsistency on
| Windows.
|
| I disagree with the non-composable software comparison. Comparing
| Windows GUI composition with CLI composition is apples and
| oranges.
|
| Let's leave GUI tools out of this and compare the Windows apples
| to the Linux apples. Windows has PowerShell and what's even
| better: it's about robust object-oriented composition rather
| compisition by fragile text parsing. In PowerShell, you can pipe
| well-formed command output (objects) as well as tell which
| information you want to see and in which format. List, tabular,
| JSON... You can also use this shell on Linux because Powershell
| Core is cross-platform.
|
| Sure, there are strong arguments in favor of the more Unix-like
| shells too but I strongly disagree that Windows commands lack
| composition. It did for a long time, but that's many years ago
| now.
|
| Environment Variables: I honestly find I'm updating env vars mid-
| session and wanting them refreshed immediately pretty rare these
| days. But if you must have this, I hear Chocolatey installs a
| helper utility to re-read them (refreshenv) that can also be
| grabbed "stand-alone".
|
| Bad Terminal: The much improved Windows Terminal is preinstalled
| with the latest versions of Windows and can be set as the default
| terminal.
|
| Clipboards: Try Microsoft PowerToys for multiple clipboards and
| much more. No computer enthusiast should honestly be on Windows
| without PowerToys.
|
| SSH: So this is no issue as Windows has Powershell, in turn with
| a normal SSH client. I don't really understand this one. I'm
| confused over which Windows version he is comparing to.
|
| Map Win+Enter to open Windows Terminal impossible?? Interesting
| one, because the Windows key is normally off limits due to being
| reserved for system shortcuts. But that just makes for a fun
| challenge. Two tools involved to achieve this: Windows enumerates
| shortcuts via the task bar area. The first icon activates with
| Win+1, the next Win+2 and so on. The aforementioned PowerToys
| allows reassigning existing shortcuts to new shortcuts. See where
| I'm going here? Put the Windows Terminal icon somewhere in your
| task bar. Assign Win+(position) to Win+Enter in PowerToys. Done!
|
| ---
|
| This article really highlighted to me how deep the Windows
| ecosystem in fact is, and how it matters to stay on top of
| things. Especially since Satya Nadella took Windows out of its
| slumber and straightened out past misdirections since the Ballmer
| era, things have moved pretty quickly forward. Today, I find
| Windows to be a pretty strong development platform with the
| mature Powershell, as well as the smoothly integrated WSL2.
| dflock wrote:
| > Clipboards: Try Microsoft PowerToys for multiple clipboards
| and much more.
|
| I have that installed, I think? Are you talking about this:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ ?
|
| As far as I can see, there are no clipboard things in
| PowerToys, currently?
|
| Either way - I don't want multiple clipboards or history or a
| clipboard manager, though, I just want the Primary Selection
| thing from Linux. I just want any text selection anywhere to be
| automatically kept somewhere and allow me to paste it in on a
| middle mouse click. I would _love_ to be wrong, but I don't
| think that's a thing on Windows?
| majkinetor wrote:
| The choco script is called Update-SessionEnvironment (alias
| refreshenv). It works for both cmd and Powershell.
|
| > Clipboards
|
| Or use CopyQ wich is FOSS, the best and x-platform
| dflock wrote:
| Thanks! I've has a look at CopyQ and I don't think it can do
| what I want on Windows:
| https://copyq.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scripting-
| api.html#li...
|
| I don't want multiple clipboards or history or a clipboard
| manager, I just want the Primary Selection thing from Linux.
|
| I just want any text selection anywhere to be automatically
| kept somewhere and allow me to paste it in on a middle mouse
| click. I would _love_ to be wrong, but I don't think that's a
| thing on Windows?
| majkinetor wrote:
| You can do that with Auothotkey easily:
|
| This is PoC of the top of my head
| ~LButton Up:: If ( A_Cursor="IBeam")
| { Send, ^c Tooltip, Copy
| Selection`n%Clipboard%, 0, 0 } Return
|
| CopyQ will save your history and everything you select will
| go there automatically.
|
| EDIT: Found this, you might want to check it out:
| https://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/5139-auto-copy-
| select...
| rasterdog wrote:
| > PuTTY ... but it's... not good, at all.
|
| Pls explain.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I've used putty on windows at a job, and tried to use it on my
| home machines. It works, it's alright. That is, until you use
| ssh in a *nix terminal. Then you're like "why the hell have I
| been dicking around with putty?"
|
| It's good for serial stuff.
| thefz wrote:
| I use Linux at home and Windows at work, because I have to;
| however this is just one of those "it's cool to shit on Windows"
| posts. Most of the points are half-assed semi-criticisms.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Well this is a tragedy. People should use what they like. If I
| started a new job and they mandated Linux, I would be equally
| upset. Windows isn't for everyone, as evidenced by the same
| complaints over and over.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Both Windows and OS X have become utterly unreliable for my
| professional and increasingly personal use.
|
| Here's the smell test:
|
| If I stop working on something and go to the shop, or to sleep,
| or say "It's 8pm on Friday, I can pick this back up on Monday",
| can I reliably walk away and have my stuff (apps, sessions, etc.)
| where I left it when I come back?
|
| Not. A. Hope.
|
| I've done all the regedit hacks, the group policy changes, the
| mouse jiggler, but it's never enough.
|
| Your computer shouldn't fight you. Homeservers have uptimes
| measured in weeks or months, that's what I need my desktop to be
| like.
| [deleted]
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| ive not had this problem, my windows desktop currently has an
| uptime of 33 days
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I haven't personally experienced that issue on a Mac accept for
| one with some awful corporate software that prevented sleep
| from working.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yeah, same here. There's been several occasions where I've
| left both desktop and laptop macs sleeping for weeks and they
| sprang back to life right where I left them with no problems.
| xxs wrote:
| Ok: - enable sleep after 20mins -
| enable hibernate, after 50mins - disable all timers
| interrupts
|
| That would make your machine hibernate itself w/o dumb
| restarts, activity. Ugly as ugly goes, but it appears to be
| better
| ink_13 wrote:
| Windows, sure, but OS X? Not in my experience. It's been rock
| solid and utterly reliable.
| bombcar wrote:
| MacOS does better, but it still does the "restart by default
| if an update appears" usually, and it is pretty darn good
| about opening everything where you had it, but it's not
| perfect by a long shot.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Atm: "....About 4 minutes remaining...."
|
| My third Macbook (company provided) doing an unexpected
| update. That takes 10(!) minutes. After the download.
|
| My ElementaryOS on a 6 year old thinkpad downloads and
| installs 3GB+ updates weekly, without rebooting, in 2
| minutes!
|
| Mac and Windows are ages and miles behind Linux.
| taylodl wrote:
| Your company-provided Mac is being managed by your
| company - they have the ability to force updates and re-
| boots on you. If this were your personal Mac then you
| would not have enabled automatic updates. The fact that
| companies can manage their fleet of Macs in this manner
| is why they use Macs and not Linux. So no, Linux is not
| miles ahead of Windows or Mac OS when looking at managing
| a fleet of company-owned laptops and desktops.
|
| BTW - I have a company-owned and managed Mac and my own
| personal Mac. World of difference in experience between
| the two. My company forces updates on a frequent basis,
| and not just to Mac OS. There's a lot of software they
| manage and license on the machine and force updates.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| I do auto updates in Linux. Because they just work. And
| take < 2 minutes. And do not need a reboot.
|
| Regardless if I manage a Mac or not, the time it takes to
| apply the update is the same.
| goosedragons wrote:
| MacOS updates are ridiculous. Doing a point update (like
| 12.1 to 12.2) on my 2018 MBP would literally take no joke
| over 20 minutes. In that time I can completely reinstall
| Ubuntu and have already set basically everything up.
| mikestew wrote:
| Oh, it'll open everything alright. Perhaps it's asking too
| much, but could macOS open everything in the correct
| virtual desktop so that I don't have to spend five minutes
| after a restart dragging-and-dropping windows?
|
| It's odd that it remembers that there were four virtual
| desktops, but then forgets which window goes where. And I'd
| swear that it remembers _some_ , but the majority get
| dumped into Desktop1. Not the end of the world, and I don't
| restart all that often, but it's enough to make me hesitate
| come update time ("do I _really_ want to be rearranging my
| desktops right now?")
| pram wrote:
| Yes this seems like a total crapshoot. I have an
| application that always lives on my second monitor, and
| it's seemingly completely random if it will start there
| or not. Just like this for a decade!
| fnordsensei wrote:
| I have three machines: Linux, Windows and a Mac.
|
| The uptime of my Linux machine (general server/media machine)
| is... A few months at least. Probably half a year at this
| stage.
|
| The Mac (main work machine) has an uptime of at least 1-2
| weeks.
|
| The Windows (gaming) machine. Haha, no. Turn off in the
| evening, start up in the morning. Loads Steam UI in full
| screen, and nothing else. Given its purpose, I feel a mixture
| of love and loathing towards it.
|
| So, my personal experience agrees with yours, with the
| exception of MacOS. It'll definitely be where I left it.
| ihattendorf wrote:
| If you haven't restarted your Linux machine in 6 months,
| you're most likely leaving it open to vulnerabilities. 65
| CVEs for just the kernel published in 2022:
| https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
| list/vendor_id-33/p...
|
| I'm assuming you're not using ksplice, which has its own
| issues and should really only be used for critical updates
| when you're unable to reboot.
| fnordsensei wrote:
| Thanks for the information. I've been lazy with updates,
| maybe it's time.
|
| On the other hand, it's very, very locked down. It barely
| has access to the internet at all.
| xemdetia wrote:
| I find this funny because this feels like the opposite of my
| experience: my Linux laptop, Windows laptop, and Windows
| desktop usually have an uptime of a month+ with a sleep and
| resume schedule. Mac on the other hand is the one that is
| most unreliable and most flakey for me. I have to hard reset
| it regularly after it becomes completely unusable. At least
| when I am deciding to restart Windows/Linux it's because I
| want to pick up an update instead of it just being unusable.
| prewett wrote:
| My Mac laptops typically have uptimes of months (85 days,
| currently). However, I am still on Mojave, and I do have 32
| GB of RAM. I do routinely encounter two problems. When
| switching desktops while have full-screen video the cursor
| frequently disappears; the solution is to move up a ways
| until the cursor is surely at the menubar and then click,
| which will restore the cursor to visibility. The other
| problem is that audio occasionally stops working (one
| symptom is that pressing play seems to work but the play
| time never advances, and of course there is no sound). The
| solution here is `sudo killall -9 coreaudiod`.
|
| My Windows NUC, on the other other hand, seems to reboot
| itself within a week, but usually is unusable long before
| that because it won't wake the monitor up after sleep. And
| even though I disabled sleep, it still seems to not be able
| to wake the monitor up.
| gigaflop wrote:
| True nirvana for me would be to have a functioning Linux
| desktop, with which I can send a startup command to a windows
| PC when I want to run some Windows-only games, that also
| switches my monitor input and peripherals.
|
| Instead of dual-booting, I could give Windows a 1tb SSD that
| it thinks it owns, and let it live on in its little bubble.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Have you looked into KVM/Qemu and GPU passthrough?
|
| It works really well when/if it works, but I found it to be
| a rabbit hole of constant tinkering.
|
| There is some software that can pass the framebuffer back
| to your Linux desktop without a huge performance hit.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Current uptime 33 days :)
|
| I have disabled updates and defender among other things tho.
| naikrovek wrote:
| the complaints in the beginning about theme and style are
| accurate, but there is a _good reason_ for those things:
| backwards compatibility.
|
| Those control panel applets still exist because of COM
| interoperability with other things. Those deep-down dialogs that
| still use WinForms are there because some feature that MS is
| supporting relies on the library that produces that dialog to be
| present and unchanged for compatibility reasons.
|
| Apple DGAF about backwards compatibility, which definitely has
| advantages when it comes to keeping things up to date, but I'd
| like to see someone on Apple run a game or application released
| for OS9. I can run games released for Windows 95 all day long,
| and they run well.
|
| Those hard corners in Windows are there for good reasons. They're
| ugly, they give a bad impression, and the customers who rely on
| them are extremely grateful for them.
| kkfx wrote:
| Windows is made as a product to be sold, that's means that any
| part of it is designed to maximize Microsoft and it's partners
| revenue, not for users. That's why anything is not integrated,
| incoherent etc.
|
| And that's why GNU/Linux itself is far less integrated than
| classic desktops (Xerox, LispM), after Xerox starting from IBM,
| desktops was devastated to the point that from end-users
| desktops, flexible power tools in users hand are evolved into
| rigid and limited tools that try to conquer users absurdly
| mimicking physical desktops/classic office works (see General
| Magick UIs as a good example) instead of pushing a new far
| superior model.
|
| The common ground is that most users do not want/fear changes, so
| they are easy conquered by those who sell miracles without
| paradigm changes, of course they regularly fails but since they
| captured users it's too late for them to escape. People who know
| something better for a reason or another suffer from the actual
| state of things, but that's is...
|
| A social change is needed to change actual IT, it's not just a
| matter of code.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I can see where OP is coming from but it sounds like he hasn't
| allowed him/herself to learn to do things the windows way.
|
| You maybe used to coreutils/binutils and piecing together things
| in bash like a lego but Powershell in many ways allows you to
| build powerful scripts or compose one liners like with bash
| except you have access to .NET and any .NET assembly you can
| load! Don't even get me started on WMI or GPO.
|
| "Windows wasn't made for me" right... it isn't made for anyone
| that wants to use it like a unix system, it is an entirely
| different OS. Just like you shouldn't expect Linux to work like
| windows.
|
| It really isn't a competition. Windows is messy in its own way
| and that affects its performance as well. If you want to feel
| like you are in control, windows isn't for you. If you want to
| get things done, windows is a mediocre but acceptable platform.
|
| The very things that make Linux powerful and controllable like
| shared library all over the place, package managers, and more
| make it more fragile and time consuming to administer.
|
| I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on
| Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade. The
| weeks I didn't do this, it was because I did nothing outside of
| browsing the web. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed most of that
| time, and I did feel like I was in control up until distro
| maintainers decide things for me and my only choice is to beg and
| plead and be told to fork it if I disagreed.
|
| All I am saying is every platform exists for a reason and has
| issues.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on
| Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade.
|
| What did you spend that time on? I never need to look at
| anything; it's a big reason I use Linux: my system today is the
| same as it was yesterday, and last year. And will be the same
| tomorrow, and next year. Of course Firefox and the Linux kernel
| and all these tools get updates, but overall it's pretty stable
| from my user-visible perspective. I certainly don't have
| upgrades which completely change the UI like Windows 8/10/11
| "forced" on me, and if something does go wrong (which it rarely
| does), I can usually figure things out - Windows: not so much.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Not who you asked, but here's my answer:
|
| - Webcam on MacBook Pro (some dude reverse engineered it but
| I packaged it into dkms .deb so I didn't have to compile
| every time I updated the kernel)
|
| - vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux,
| and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it
| working)
|
| - getting the thing to properly sleep, wake and not chew the
| battery
|
| - fuck Nvidia and Lenovo (different laptop)
|
| I still prefer Linux and use it as my daily driver.
| vondur wrote:
| I use Linux on a self built desktop using parts I know are
| well supported. I can see if you use it on a laptop which may
| not have the best hardware support could be frustating.
| tdubhro1 wrote:
| I used Linux as my daily for 10 years and every time there
| was a major update either sound or networking or both broke.
| I love Linux, I still use it regularly, but my experience was
| that basic stuff kept getting broken. I was using very
| standard Thinkpad laptops throughout.
| sli wrote:
| I guess I got fairly lucky when I was using Linux as a
| daily driver. The only thing that I would need to fix after
| a major update was my Nvidia drivers, and I ended up
| writing a Bash script to do it for me since 99% of the time
| it was just installing the latest version.
| badrabbit wrote:
| If I don't tinker with things, it stays somewhat stable until
| the next update. It could be anything from a -dev package
| distro update conflicts with but I need for something else to
| needing to install a package from source or out of repo that
| in turn needs more conflicting deps which I somehow manage to
| get working until something else goes crazy because I hurt
| its feelings by using a foreign repo or built from source.
|
| It was a passionate love/hate relationship.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Interesting, because my experience has always been the
| exact opposite: stuff kept breaking on Windows, but Linux
| (and FreeBSD before that) has proven to be quite stable and
| reliable for me. I hear so many conflicting accounts on
| this (in this thread, and before) that I wonder what the
| cause of that is.
|
| To be clear: I consider your (and other people's similar)
| experiences completely valid; I just wonder where the
| differences are. You see something similar with people
| reporting experiences with Debian/Ubuntu vs. Arch/Void etc,
| where some say one worked horribly for them and kept
| breaking and the other was very stable, and others report
| exactly the opposite!
|
| The only serious issue I can recall was on my very budget
| HP laptop I got in a bind where the WiFi didn't work as
| Realtek didn't upstream the drivers for that when I got it
| (they did after a while), so I had to manually compile and
| load them: not something I would expect someone without
| Linux experience being able to do. Other than that,
| everything (Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi, sound) has worked fine
| on two Dell XPS's, that HP, and four ThinkPads for about 15
| years now (although there were undoubtedly issues that I
| have forgotten about, none of these machines stood out as
| "problematic on Linux").
| trhoad wrote:
| WSL + Windows Terminal could be great, but if your organisation
| uses Windows Secure Channel, you can't use Git on it. Which
| pretty much renders it useless for me. I endure Powershell, but
| even after six months on Windows, for a professional software
| developer it still feels like coding with boxing gloves on. It's
| a second rate experience vs. Mac/Linux in almost every way.
|
| I don't think I'll ever understand why there are about 8 versions
| of System Preferences in Windows 10. And they all look different.
| Can anyone tell me what the difference is between Control Panel,
| Settings, Computer Management, Systems Configuration?
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| Yes, that secure channel thing was a bummer. I saw your Stack
| Overflow question a couple of days ago (I seem to be your sole
| upvote on it) and tried to come up with some kind of
| workaround, but no dice. Not a problem for me personally, but I
| was hoping I could get you _some_ idea. It 's still bugging me.
|
| Question - Does secure channel come into play on _every_ git
| operation? I would expect that it only comes into play when
| dealing with a remote repository (e.g. clone, push), right?
|
| If so, what's the breakdown of your git operations that
| requires remote repo access? Would it help if you pushed using
| Git for Windows but did most of your other operations in WSL?
|
| > I'll ever understand why there are about 8 versions of System
| Preferences in Windows 10
|
| There's no _good_ excuse for it; just legacy cruft. Same as
| with the different window styles.
| aquanext wrote:
| I have had the same complaints for a while. I switched to Mac OS
| X around 2004 because it was just massively better in terms of
| quality of life for the user. The OS has continued to improve
| while Windows has been epically stagnant. Even with major pushes
| to modernize things, it still feels like it's been bolted
| together with duct tape and bailing wire. It's just horrible.
|
| It seems like virtually any linux distribution you can pick at
| random with a dart and it would have overall better quality of
| life on things like a basic terminal app. Microsoft has even
| tried to improve their terminal a few times and it still totally
| feels terrible. If I didn't have to use windows for a few work
| things, I would never go near it again. And in future jobs, me
| using it at all for work is definitely off the table.
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| I am truly curious what terminal app in Linux you feel is
| better than Windows Terminal at this point. While the terminal
| experience in Windows languished for many years, Windows
| Terminal has quickly evolved to be one of the (if not the) best
| there is on any platform.
|
| But I certainly could be missing out on a great Linux terminal.
| If there's one that is better than Windows Terminal, I could
| switch to it under WSL/WSLg on Windows 11.
|
| Bonus: Windows Terminal's release notes occasionally include
| some fun nuggets like:
|
| > You spoke up about the scroll bars being WAY TOO THIN, so we
| chonked them up
|
| > Our confidence in the settings UI's Save button has led to us
| no longer backing up the settings JSON file. We won't be
| deleting the 61,000 backups we did leave on your hard drive,
| but what's a couple thousand kilobytes between friends?
|
| > The breadcrumbs have been picked up and will no longer
| navigate you to strange cottages
|
| > No longer will dropdown menus and combo boxes fly wildly off
| the screen if you scroll or drag the window! Rejoice!
|
| :-)
| kappattack wrote:
| I use Konsole. Yakuake for quick access. Yakuake just runs
| Konsole in a drop-down application made with Qt. I like Qt
| and KDE a lot, so I'm probably biased in that sense.
|
| Ive been using tmux with these two for years. It's everything
| I need and more. Ive never tried windows terminal, i usually
| only boot up the windows PC for gaming, and honestly once EAC
| and Proton work together I won't even need to do that
| anymore. I'll have to check out windows terminal next time im
| on that PC though, thanks for sharing. Always curious to hear
| what others are using.
| marlowe221 wrote:
| Oh man, Windows Terminal is a wonderful thing! I've used
| Konsole extensively; I've been a filthy dual booter for
| many years now.
|
| But I never did much development on Windows until a
| particular job I had about a year ago. It was a Windows
| shop and we did everything between WSL2, VSCode, and
| Windows Terminal. It was actually... a really nice
| developer experience. I was very pleasantly surprised by
| how well things worked. WSL2 isn't perfect by any stretch
| of the imagination, but the newer WSLg on Windows 11 solves
| some of those problems.
|
| If I could have the Windows Terminal in a Linux desktop
| distro, I would take it in a heartbeat. I think you're in
| for a treat if you give it a try!
|
| From a slightly broader view, Windows + WSL2/WSLg + Windows
| Terminal is a pretty great experience that manages to
| combine a lot of the best of both Windows and Linux worlds,
| IMHO.
| antiframe wrote:
| Last I used Windows was Windows 7 and the terminal was
| serviceable but not as useful as kitty. It wasn't as fast for
| sure. I also don't think it used a text-based configurtion
| file I could edit and check into my configs repo.
| brimble wrote:
| I guess it's got something to do with repeat rates or
| animations or something, but Windows' cmd prompt (or just DOS
| itself) has always felt better to type in, to me, than any
| other terminal I've ever used.
|
| I don't like it otherwise, but that part's nice for some
| reason.
| LarryDarrell wrote:
| It seems his complaints boil down to:
|
| 1) You don't have the choice of multiple Desktop Environments
| (When was the last time this was not true? Litestep?)
|
| 2) Windows applications and utilities tend to be GUI based. (I
| thought that was the whole point of Windows...)
|
| 2a) Stuff is stored in the registry (I thought linux people loved
| digging into and tweaking settings)
|
| 2b) Paths are different. (No kidding. But we've known this since
| DOS vs Unix)
|
| 3) Windows sometimes restarts itself (Again, there are settings
| that help, but Windows has done this for quite some time now.)
|
| 4) No apt-get|zypper|etc, must install exe or msi from the
| internet. Or use the awful Windows Store. (No debate there, the
| Windows store is awful. But installing the latest Firefox is a
| lot easier on Windows than Debian Stable. I rather like not
| having to fight with a central repository of applications.)
|
| Those have been the complaints of linux users for over 20 years.
| I feel like I'm arguing on Arstechnica circa 1998.
|
| Use the tool that's best for your job. I don't bitch about my
| socket set being metric when I need SAE. At this point the
| differences are known and well understood.
| guessbest wrote:
| At least linux doesn't restart itself by default.
| daemin wrote:
| Having Windows restart itself is a pet peeve of mine, but as
| long as you have Windows 10 Pro there are some local admin
| policies you can set to make sure it never restarts while
| you're logged in. This is the one key thing I do and it
| prevents Windows from restarting and losing your work.
| hguant wrote:
| Yeah, I used to get very pissy about everything in windows
| being stashed in the registry but...how is that different from
| everything being hidden inside systemd, or in a /etc/config
| file that is silently changed by services?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The big difference is that stuff in /etc/, ~/.config, etc.
| are discoverable and something that can be made sense of. The
| Windows registry is something I never really could make sense
| of. For example to change Caps Lock to be Ctrl you need to
| change
| "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard
| Layout\Scancode Map" to "hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00
| ,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00". To disable that stupid
| Thumbs.db generation you change "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\M
| icrosoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoThumbnail
| Cache" to "dword:00000001".
|
| These are for Windows 7, from my old files - may be different
| now. But how is anyone ever going to figure that out? xmodmap
| can be somewhat hard to use, but a least it's documented, and
| you can play around with it to discover stuff. Some random
| hex values in some registry thing? Yeah ... good luck with
| that.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| For thumbs.db isn't there just a UI option for it in the
| file explorer settings?
|
| But I think you're confusing "discoverable" with "I'm
| already familiar with one of them." There's really nothing
| discoverable about '/etc'. There's no consistency in
| structure or even what type of configuration files are
| used. And that isn't even the only configuration path!
| There's also the smattering of random hidden folder crap in
| your home directory and then _also_ the Linux registry.
| Sorry I mean dconf.
|
| Meanwhile the windows registry is quite structured and
| strictly typed.
| ayushnix wrote:
| > in a /etc/config file that is silently changed by services?
|
| I'm not really invested in the Windows vs Linux thing but
| config files in /etc never get silently changed or removed.
| If they are, it's a critical bug, although I've never really
| seen it happen.
|
| If there are any updates to the service files, they'll be
| installed alongside the original file. For example, on Arch
| Linux, it'll be /etc/systemd/journald.conf.pacnew while the
| original journald.conf file will never be touched.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Debian based systems will change some config files on
| updates; I had a systemd customization that was overwritten
| out from under me, and I evntually found there was one
| place for apt to manage and a different for me to manage.
| oauea wrote:
| apt will tell you the file was changed and ask you what
| to do (keep current, use new, show diff & merge). so you
| must've chosen to replace it, or used some gui updater
| that made the choice for you.
| floren wrote:
| You mean the scary prompts that I just mash "Y" on???
|
| (can you tell that I've shipped Debian packages before?)
| ayushnix wrote:
| > Debian based systems will change some config files on
| updates; I had a systemd customization that was
| overwritten out from under me, and I evntually found
| there was one place for apt to manage and a different for
| me to manage.
|
| The only place where a package manager should overwrite
| changes is /usr. If you made any changes inside /usr,
| then yes, it'll be overwritten. A user isn't supposed to
| mess around inside /usr, unless there's a very good
| reason for it. There's /usr/local but it's better to just
| use $HOME/.local instead.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's entirely possible it wasn't in /etc but somewhere
| else. This was a case of "I need to fix this urgently"
| and the first workaround I could find on stackoverflow
| suggested changing it in one place. After the problem
| came up again after an update I did a bit more digging to
| figure out where I could change it and apt would not
| overwrite it.
| goodpoint wrote:
| No, Debian always asks before overwriting anything in
| /etc and provides convenient options like showing a diff
| during the process.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Only if you've changed from the default config file, and
| it's not anything in /etc, it's anything specified in the
| conffiles file in the .deb, which I believe should
| include things in /etc according to policy, but can
| include others (and doesn't have to include things in
| /etc if you ignore policy)
|
| And of course you can do anything you want in a postinst
| script (again setting aside policy)
| ulkesh wrote:
| > Use the tool that's best for your job. I don't bitch about my
| socket set being metric when I need SAE. At this point the
| differences are known and well understood.
|
| Completely agreed, and clearly the author of the article did
| not understand the differences before their endeavor, or they
| are trying to make a point -- one in which we all already know.
|
| One real strong opinion about Windows I have is the registry,
| which is at its core a flawed and archaic system. It tries to
| bring every setting and registered library into one single
| infrastructure and it has been the bane of developer existence
| for far too long. The registry needs to die. There is nothing
| the registry provides that can't be done simply within the
| sandbox of the application. And applications should be
| sandboxed.
|
| And don't get me started about NTFS. I find it odd, that the
| author, who claims they are coming from Linux doesn't complain
| about just how godawful slow NTFS is. To me this is the most
| egregious Windows issue. Sure, NTFS works, but when it takes
| 3-4 minutes to compile the same code on the same
| language/compiler in Windows that takes 30 seconds or less to
| compile in Linux, clearly something is wrong. I simply cannot
| develop on Windows -- efficiency is completely lost.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm sorry but you seem to be misplacing a lot of your
| judgments. NTFS is awesome. What's not so awesome is the
| performance of Windows's I/O subsystem when opening files,
| and this doesn't really have much to do with NTFS. Also I
| don't know how you're compiling files, but if you're using
| GCC and observing it to be much slower than on Linux, you
| should be aware that that's a GCC issue and not an OS issue;
| it neither happens with Clang, nor with MinGW versions of
| GCC. As for the whole "registry is flawed" thing, I've never
| heard _one_ good argument for that assertion. It 's a meme
| people keep repeating without even bothering to make good
| arguments for it. "Trying to bring every setting and
| registered library into one single infrastructure" is
| literally what the filesystem does too. Except if you're on
| Linux it drags in random stuff like /proc and /dev in for the
| ride. All the registry is is a _very_ fast and well-
| implemented hierarchical key-value store for small bits of
| data. Either you want such a thing, in which case the
| registry is a great implementation, or you don 't, in which
| case the problem isn't the registry. I haven't experienced
| greater joy dealing with ~/.config or dconf than the
| registry, but if you want those you can always use %AppData%.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| It's funny that with the registry being SO AWFUL and BAD,
| every other platform basically has the same thing.
|
| MacOS has the /Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences
| hierarchies, with plist files inside of them representing
| individual keys and being accessible by a programmatic
| interface that abstracts the files away. This is the same as
| the Windows Registry aside from implementation details.
|
| On Linux, at least in the Gnome side of things, there's
| dconf, which is again exactly the same thing as the Windows
| Registry, and it even has a similar implementation: a binary
| database file. Amusingly, the dconf wikipedia article has a
| whole little section full of misleading and downright
| inaccurate ("Most Windows applications still store their user
| settings in individual .ini files spread across the disk")
| copes to obscure the fact that dconf is the same thing as the
| registry.
|
| All of this Windows hate is so tiresome. Bitter Slashdot-tier
| commentary from people who don't actually know anything about
| operating systems.
|
| I've noticed in particular that hobbyist Linux users think
| that they have a profound understanding of the OS because
| they used a command line and text editor to do system
| configuration instead of a GUI, and have to type arcane
| incantations from Google to fix their broken systems
| periodically. But in reality, they know very little. See, for
| example, any thread with hysterical complaints about systemd.
| They can't even explain what systemd is, what problems it
| solves, and why almost everyone who actually does linux
| system development for a living is pretty happy with it. But
| they're sure it's an evil conspiracy to steal the innocence
| of their precious OS. They think they know a lot, but they
| actually know nothing.
| windowsworkstoo wrote:
| Yeh this is bang on - I find that type of person tends to
| say they know something, where in fact they know the name
| of something and thats's about it - there's nothing below
| the surface.
| [deleted]
| zeagle wrote:
| Does anyone know of a recent fork for evolution for windows? It
| is one of the few things that I miss when dual booting back to
| win10.
|
| Similarly I love the gnome spotlight search and wish it was also
| useful in windows.
| jonatron wrote:
| No mention of WSL?
| strawhatguy wrote:
| yeah, surprised by this, as this answers some of OP's issues.
| Windows is still a mess, and WSL kind of adds a third
| inconsistent UI, but being able to essentially have two
| platforms in one is the nice part.
| glitchc wrote:
| Addendum: It is impossible to turn Windows Update off unless one
| is running an Enterprise License.
| CreatedAccount wrote:
| I'm fairly certain you can accomplish it with a pro license as
| well.
| vetinari wrote:
| You can, by pointing your windows to a WSUS for updates. That
| WSUS doesn't have to really exist.
| cortic wrote:
| I'm on Enterprise, and you can't actually turn it off
| permanently, after a time (maybe a reboot, or scheduled that i
| can't find) it just turns itself back on, and usually knackers
| my nvidia drives, even though i have it set to _not_ update
| drivers, and even though i killed the medic service as well
| ffs.
|
| Found a trick where you basically remove windows access rights
| to wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll, causing an error code 5
| whenever it tries to run its update service.. so far its been
| stable. Not sure if this would work for other versions.
| homerhomer wrote:
| The thing about Windows is it doesn't get out of way and let you
| work. It constantly badgers you like some bad 90's shareware. And
| this doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me, is people accept
| it.
|
| I guess it no different that eating crappy fast food everyday for
| lunch or dinner.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Right! Some people still watch TV which is interrupted by
| commercials, too.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Windows is such a mess!
|
| My thoughts everytime using Windows.
|
| >Sadly, nobody has ever really figured out how to make GUI
| software like this - general purpose & composable.
|
| Sounds like an interesting concept.
|
| >which means that it doesn't have this foundation of composable
| software tools
|
| They instead have an object-focused environment (PowerShell) with
| a foundation of composable commands (cmdlets).
|
| >It turns out that answer to this is to install Windows Terminal.
|
| I prefer Cmder (basically preconfigured ConEmu bundling some
| other programs).
|
| >No Middle-Click Paste
|
| There used to be True X-Mouse Gizmo but idk if it works in recent
| Windows versions.
| kingaillas wrote:
| I use Linux and Windows at work and home, and both have
| advantages and disadvantages. I've been migrating more and more
| to Linux as my daily driver, so my Windows home machine is
| basically all games at this point, with a Visual Studio install
| for occasional software development or things that have to be
| done on Windows. I used scoop (https://scoop.sh) for software
| installs and it was almost as nice as any Linux distro's package
| management.
|
| UI issues aside, which I'm not that sensitive too, my biggest
| complaint with Windows is... I can't easily swap CTRL and CAPS
| LOCK. Every solution I can find involves becoming an
| Administrator to edit the registry, or install the SysInternals
| device driver (!!!) - madness!
|
| I used to have a Mac, and it was a toggle setting. Linux as well,
| if gnome-tweak or the equivalent for whatever desktop is
| installed. And at home, I can become Administrator to do this.
| But at work I can't, the systems are very locked down. However on
| Linux even as a lowly regular user I can setxkbmap and do it.
|
| This annoys me a ridiculous amount every time I have to work on a
| Windows machine.
| rodelrod wrote:
| > my biggest complaint with Windows is... I can't easily swap
| CTRL and CAPS LOCK.
|
| If your laptop is not _too_ locked down, maybe you can try the
| AutoHotKey portable version. Unfortunately in one particular
| corporate laptop I couldn 't even run non-whitelisted
| executables so that was out.
| vips7L wrote:
| You don't need coreutils on Windows if you just embrace
| PowerShell. It has everything you need built in. Grep, wget,
| curl, jq, you name it and PowerShell already has it.
|
| For environment variables you only have to set them via the
| environment variable: $env:SOMETHING =
| 'something'
| ComradePhil wrote:
| I did the same around 2 years ago after 15+ years of Linux
| Desktop as primary OS but I had completely different experience
| and have not gone back to Linux and see little reason to do so.
|
| > when you install a Linux distribution, it'll start off either
| all KDE or all GTK,
|
| Yes, you definitely start off with that... and you may even be
| able to maintain that with GTK to some extent... but if you want
| to use KDE, you will most definitely end up with a few GTK apps
| which will look out of place. And don't even get me started with
| other DEs.
|
| Windows, with all the 10 vs 11 and old style vs new style apps,
| feels much more coherent.
|
| > You can't customize anything
|
| You don't need to because things actually work.
|
| > I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full
| of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software
| developers, for software developers.
|
| Huh? I do all my development on Windows + WSL2 and run all my
| software on Linux servers. There is exactly ZERO tools I miss.
|
| > Non-composable Software
|
| Absolute nonsense. Not only does PowerShell is extremely
| powerful, you can also pipe output from a PowerShell command to a
| Linux command. The following shows an example of grepping through
| PowerShell history. cat (Get-
| PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | wsl grep "ssh .*ubuntu@"
|
| > Environment Variables look like this: %PROFILE%, instead of
| this: $HOME; which is fine, just different; although PowerShell
| seems to accept either form, which is nice.
|
| Unless you want to run legacy batch files, there is absolutely no
| reason to use legacy cmd.exe over PowerShell on a Windows
| terminal. Environment variables are accessed differently with
| $Env:VAR_NAME, which will take some getting used to, but it's
| fine.
|
| > No Middle-Click Paste
|
| There are 3rd party applications to do that and more.
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| > you can also pipe output from a PowerShell command to a Linux
| command.
|
| Agreed - PowerShell <-> WSL integration is pretty nice. Just
| remember (mostly for others reading) that PowerShell has a
| nasty habit of automatically appending a trailing newline when
| piping to external commands like WSL. So you often need a "tr
| -d '\n'" in the WSL part of your pipeline.
| tored wrote:
| PowerShell also has a weird default encoding when piping.
| majkinetor wrote:
| > You don't need to because things actually work.
|
| Customization is not about things working but about user
| experience.
|
| > There is exactly ZERO tools I miss.
|
| Yeah, because even if you do, WLS or not, you can have them on
| Windows in single line: cinst curl wget less jq vim grep gnupg
| whatever
|
| > Non-composable Software
|
| Not only PowerShell which is amazing but you had few more
| different composing technologies all the time such as COM.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There's a bug in your sidebar's CSS on large screens
|
| https://imgur.com/a/eSMPtiR
| dflock wrote:
| Thank you, I'll look into it!
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >Half of it is "new" UI and half of it is old Win32/GDI type U
| copperx wrote:
| > Installing things is still, mostly, going to random websites,
| downloading an .exe (or a .msi if you're lucky) [...] This is
| slightly terrifying and pretty mind-blowing in 2022!
|
| You must be kidding me. I wouldn't want to be in charge of
| distributing proprietary software on Linux. That would be a
| nightmare. Downloading an .exe might be prehistoric, but it is a
| piece of cake for the developer.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Maybe I just don't understand The Linux Way but I've truly never
| actually seen the point in the package manager debate. There
| exists some website that is the authoritative source for the
| software. That may be a normal website or it may be a GitHub but
| it is there. A package manager associates it with some slug, but
| so does the browser, the latter just has more dots in it. A
| package manager pulls it from some centralized archive, but you
| weren't manually inputting the URL to begin with. It does in fact
| centralize the update flow, but that's only beneficial when you
| update everything at once, which I don't have any reason to be
| doing: either I want it on latest, with the only interruption
| being not _quite_ yet, or I don 't want it updating at all. The
| primary _meaningful_ value-add of a package manager is the
| package archive being manually checked for compatibility, which
| is actually bogus if you scratch the surface and regardless not
| really necessary on Windows where everything just works.
| Downloading and executing an MSI does not seem to be a
| meaningfully different operation than writing the apt-get
| command; I think it is a lot more to do with the visual effect of
| it not happening in a web browser and showing up in the downloads
| list.
| dflock wrote:
| Aside from a centralized, trusted packge archives, with signed
| packages and vetting, and secure downloads and verification,
| one difference is that with individual install.exe's - that
| installer can do whatever it wants. Windows package managers
| are just a facade over this and just run the installer for you.
|
| An actual Package Manager _is_ the installer - they are part of
| the OS and know how to correctly install and fully uninstall
| things. Someone else in this thread wrote a nice summary of
| this aspect here: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-
| winget.html#unins... This part is mostly true with MSI's,
| they're just a package format like .deb or .rpm - they just
| don't have any of the other infrastructure around them.
|
| > It does in fact centralize the update flow, but that's only
| beneficial when you update everything at once, which I don't
| have any reason to be doing: either I want it on latest, with
| the only interruption being not quite yet, or I don't want it
| updating at all
|
| Having this all centralized is actually really nice, so I
| wouldn't discount that. If you want to pin a package at a
| particular version, you can and the package manager will leave
| it alone. If you don't want things updated yet, just don't run
| the update yet.
| ayushnix wrote:
| > Downloading and executing an MSI does not seem to be a
| meaningfully different operation than writing the apt-get
| command
|
| If nothing else, unlike downloading and executing a MSI, apt
| will download the package, verify its checksum, and verify the
| signature of the package itself.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Downloading and executing an MSI does not seem to be a
| meaningfully different operation than writing the apt-get
| command;
|
| For fetching development libraries, it's huge.
|
| If I run `make` and it turns out I need libfrobnicate-dev, I
| can just quickly `sudo apt install libfrobnicate-dev`. I don't
| need to pull up a browser, Google it, find the MSI, make sure
| I'm grabbing the right version (Seriously why the hell does
| 32-bit Windows still exist?), download, and run it.
|
| Oh, and what about when that dev library gets a new version?
| `sudo apt upgrade`. Done. All my libraries get updated, no need
| to track down 20 MSIs.
| rossy wrote:
| I'm always uneasy when I install software in Windows because it
| means I have to trust another third-party. If I have 100
| programs on my Windows PC, I've had to trust 100 third-party
| organisations with my computer and all the data on it. Not only
| that, but I've also had to trust my own judgement to find the
| correct website for all those programs, and not copycats that
| wrap the program in malware. Sometimes I check Wikipedia to
| find the official site and sometimes I find an official-looking
| GitHub repo with a lot of stars and work back to find the
| official site, but sometimes it doesn't matter anyway because
| the program itself becomes malware (eg. CCleaner.)
|
| With a package manager I have to trust one organisation, which
| is the same that I get my operating system from. I don't even
| have to trust the website that hosts the packages, since the
| packages are signed. It's true that someone might try to sneak
| malware under the package mantainer's nose with obfuscated
| source code, but that's much harder than sneaking it in a
| binary. You're practically guaranteed that the software running
| on your PC matches the publicly available source code, and it's
| built with the latest compilers and hardening flags. (7-Zip
| used to build without any hardening flags because they made the
| binary larger.[1])
|
| It's not even just security issues I'm concerned about when it
| comes to trusting software. I also have to trust the software
| not to make global, permanent changes to my system, which isn't
| uncommon with Windows software[2], but basically unheard of
| with Linux packages - and when it does happen, it's Microsoft
| doing it[3]. So I'd say the primary meaningful value-add of a
| package manager is trust.
|
| [1]: https://landave.io/2018/01/7-zip-multiple-memory-
| corruptions... [2]:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081211-00/?p=19...
| [3]: https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/06/microsofts-failed-
| att...
| majkinetor wrote:
| This is classical case of comfort zone. Nothing to see here.
| Every single thing said is wrong and embarrassing (I mean, even
| $HOME works ffs).
| duxup wrote:
| The whole multiple design languages in the UI is insane and I
| can't believe they didn't fix it by Windows 11... rather they're
| poking at it slowly / poorly.
|
| But aside from that Windows is fine for me... I don't find
| there's anything I can't do easily.
|
| "I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full
| of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software
| developers, for software developers. Windows is... not that. It's
| a commercial OS, aimed at users of Word, Excel & Outlook, pretty
| much. You can feel this difference all the time that you're using
| it - it pervades everything."
|
| Isn't this just familiarity?
|
| When I use Linux I hardly imagine it to be some magic developer
| playland, at least not without a lot of my own work put into it
| to make it so... just like my experience in Windows.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > The whole multiple design languages in the UI is insane and I
| can't believe they didn't fix it by Windows 11... rather
| they're poking at it slowly / poorly.
|
| That's because MS's basic selling point is that nothing gets
| removed. I mean, obviously over time some things do get
| removed, but they're deprecation timeline is measured in
| decades.
|
| Some of the things they deprecated in Vista they notified
| people they were going to deprecate when they released the new
| versions at the launch of XP. That's how long they gave people
| to shift over.
| duxup wrote:
| I think the poking / changes they're doing in Windows 11
| indicates that they are happy to change things. But they're
| just really bad at it / should have done it all or not at all
| until they were ready.
|
| They seem to have finally picked some UI overlords to make
| decisions, but sadly they're bad decisions... and doing it
| bit by bit.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| Are they actually updating some of the old UI this time?
| Usually they just add a new version of some UI, with less
| features than the original, so you often have to dig back
| through layers of Windows versions to find the option you
| want.
| Arrath wrote:
| I feel like an archeologist, digging through a Win10
| setting panel, to get to a Win7 style, that links down to
| an XP style dialog where I can actually change what I
| want.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| You don't happen to have that chain documented, do you?
| Arrath wrote:
| Usually, in the 'modern' panels, either scroll to the
| bottom or look for 'related settings' on the far right
| and go from there.
|
| I am most familiar with the sound panel, as I keep having
| to tweak my inputs and outputs cause windows likes to
| forget I don't want sound coming out of the speakers, for
| example.
|
| Right click on the volume widget in the tray next to the
| clock -> sound settings -> related settings pane, "Sound
| Control Panel". This gets you the tried and true sound
| control panel we know and love.
|
| You can also short circuit this, by selecting "sounds"
| from the right click menu on the volume widget, as this
| brings you to the same XP era sound control panel, just
| on the sounds tab rather than playback or recording. Its
| all such a mess.
| saratogacx wrote:
| There are many. Here are a couple.
|
| To Windows XP style
|
| Settings -> Searching Windows -> Indexer Options ->
| Advanced Options -> Index Location [Select new]
|
| To Windows 2k/9x holdovers.
|
| Settings -> Network and Internet -> Ethernet =>
| Networking and Sharing Center -> Network Connections ->
| *Any connection
| duxup wrote:
| At least from what I've seen I get the feeling they're
| trying to go towards a unified UI / eliminate as much of
| the X types of UI... sorta. Unfortunately it doesn't seem
| like they're making better choices.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| This week I got a new MacBook that was setup clean. I spent 45
| minutes trying to figure out how to use literally anything other
| than Vi to make a Mercurial commit. It was extremely difficult to
| specify what text editor to use. And no, don't you god damn dare
| reply with any sentence containing the word "just".
|
| I'm a life long Windows user (game dev). I'm fully convinced that
| Linux and macOS are both garbage dumpster fires for development.
| Linux and Mac users are fully convinced that Windows is a
| dumpster fire for development. I'm not sure who's right and whose
| wrong.
|
| There's a lot to be said for the devil you know.
| tempfs wrote:
| Windows is for:
|
| - People who know nothing about computers and don't want to.
|
| - People who are being held hostage by some third party software
| that isn't built for ARM/Mac/Linux.
|
| One can argue that Mac's satisfy the first condition as well.
|
| Linux is for people who either don't mind learning how certain
| things work or outright require an understanding of how they
| work. Or who just want more choice in how they interact with a
| computer. Freedom from corporate data-mining and the privacy
| nightmare that is Windows...and coming soon to MacOS/iOS...is
| another big reason to seek alternatives.
|
| The modern truth is that, for people with relatively simple
| needs, there are plenty of Linux flavors that _just work_ as long
| as your hardware is not from Apple.[ >=M1] These flavors have app
| stores that help even the freshest of newbies find media players,
| games, office apps, browsers, whatever. The fact that so many
| contemporary apps run either in a browser or use things like
| electron also further diminishes the requirement of Windows.
|
| Even Microsoft realizes that Windows OS as a thing isn't
| something to explicitly sell to people anymore. They have been
| taking a page from Apple and trying to market how lovely it
| integrates with Xbox, Teams, the CloudPC versions, whatever.
| They've also hilariously made Windows 11 look like MacOS/various
| Linux DEs by transforming the taskbar into a dock and making the
| start menu look incredibly like Whisker/KDE's menu setup. They
| are also introducing stuff like virtual desktops, etc like they
| are some sort of revolution despite being on Linux DE's for eons.
|
| Truth is that there's never been a better time to re-evaluate
| your computing needs and make some thoughtful choices about your
| workflows, your privacy, what you actually need vs what's
| actually on offer in these platforms.
| tomrod wrote:
| There is a third category: "People who may become or currently
| are my clients or others I want to maintain positive
| relationships with."
|
| There are plenty of reasons to use Windows. There are more
| compelling reasons to use Linux for my personal tooling, but I
| am not the other person. In this case, its a choice of good,
| better, and best. Personally, I don't care if my car mechanic
| is a Windows user so long as they can do their job.
|
| If you think Linux protects from viruses, corporate data
| mining, or more privacy, I suspect you either only use a
| command-line based browser, are a white-lister with pihole, or
| are unaware just how actively many utilities are collecting
| info on you.
| oblio wrote:
| > Windows is for:
|
| > - People who know nothing about computers and don't want to.
|
| > - People who are being held hostage by some third party
| software that isn't built for ARM/Mac/Linux.
|
| - people who like to use a wide array of hardware without
| giving a f** about compatibility concerns [1]
|
| Those same people might know about computers at least as much
| as you and as a bonus point, might be less arrogant than you.
|
| [1] Because it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to
| make their hardware compatible with Windows, and the vast
| majority of them do it, competently enough.
| tokumei wrote:
| I used to use GNU/Linux on the desktop for many years, now I
| mostly use macOS. I became the same kind of person I used to
| argue with online.
| causality0 wrote:
| I expected this to be about how Windows was better/worse fifteen
| years ago. Instead it's just a list of whining about every little
| way Windows differs from Linux. We get it, you're pissy because
| your boss is making you use an OS you don't like.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I find this direct comparison completely bogus. Windows was never
| a toolbox to begin with. It's messy but part of it for backward
| compatibility (important market force.. Microsoft is not GNU).
| Windows GUI are not composable, news flash: almost no graphical
| app is, and even in linux it's not the case AFAIK. Fun point,
| some Desktop Environments have worse keyboard navigation than
| Win95.
|
| I can choose to have anything in linux, but I rarely do (I did
| LFS twice, now I have dreams of lisp os and smalltalk images).
| And I'm tech savvy.. the percentage of world population that will
| even care for dealing with the papercuts of tooling / scripting
| is probably minuscule (based on my interactions with them
| normies, even to my best pedagogical efforts, I realized that
| it's not in their life goals, no matter how much time and money
| it may save them). The author may fail to realize how many people
| interact with software in full rote mode.. they memorize
| sequences of locations on screens and buttons and that's it
| (which I infinitely understand, I'm not judging).
|
| Linux does have a better long term feel though, less moving parts
| than Windows. I have to admit that often, using windows feels
| like fighting a living thing that constantly want to make me
| experience bloat.
| mdoms wrote:
| > Windows GUI are not composable, news flash: almost no
| graphical app is, and even in linux it's not the case AFAIK.
| Fun point, some Desktop Environments have worse keyboard
| navigation than Win95
|
| The author also ignores (or is ignorant of) that tools in
| PowerShell are generally far more powerfully composable than
| Linux tools in a bash-like environment.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I didn't want to go in on the powershell side of things, it's
| still too early, but it fits my needs as a tech user to have
| a smaller learning surface, safer (typed objects vs stringly
| typed bash) and potentially faster (maybe awk still beats
| powershell I don't know).
|
| Last year I found out, powershell 5+ included a generic
| hashmap/table viewer, so you can get stupid simple output
| presentation on the fly with one pipe.
| exfascist wrote:
| I've become convinced that the same things that make GNU/Linux
| good for us are exactly the same things that make normal people
| dislike it. Freedom means responsibility, in this case the
| freedom to configure your computer means the responsibility to
| understand its behavior, something people naturally avoid. They
| don't even mind learning things to avoid it; Microsoft and
| Google completely rearrange everything twice a decade meanwhile
| I still have my FVWM2 config from when I was 15.
|
| This whole effect even predates Linux: You can watch the
| archives of the "Computer Chronicles" from the late 80s to see
| it. You have everyone bringing in the fanciest new software
| wearing suits (because TV used to cost a zillion dollars a
| minute) and explaining state of the art OOP abstractions in the
| GUIs so that the machine "does the right thing" when you drag x
| onto y and the user "doesn't even have to think about it" (an
| idea that disturbs most of us because we know it's going to do
| the wrong thing probably 30% of the time and then you're going
| to have to untangle the mess.) Then they pan over to the guy at
| SCO who's got 5 Xclocks/Xterms on the screen who says "look,
| we've got graphics now! That's why people haven't been using
| Unix on the desktop in the past."
|
| It's not about the graphics, it's not even about learning new
| UIs or paradigms like shell scripting. People genuinely do not
| like personal computing.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| I don't disagree, there is a level of difficulty that comes
| from Linux being so configurable.
|
| I would say though that it doesn't discount sensible defaults
| that work for the majority of people. I only briefly used it
| but it seemed like elementary was on its way to towards that
| goal (before what seems like an implosion on the side of the
| company).
|
| That's never going to eliminate the problem, the user can
| always screw something up or bugs rear their ugly head. The
| one thing is though there has to be a reason to most non-tech
| people outside of conceptual ideas like Freedom. Like if my
| dad doesn't want to spend the money for a new rig but not
| have the OS slow to a crawl, then I might suggest Linux. If
| everything is working fine, then I probably wouldn't bother.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It kinda links to Alan Key 100kLoC OS. Nobody wants to
| learn 34 different sub systems, languages, scripts, etc
| etc. Some say BSDs are saner in that regard, the core is
| smaller, more integrated, better documented etc..
| agumonkey wrote:
| These are interesting aspects of it. I cannot disagree with
| the burden of responsibility. I felt it, and I have a sweng
| diploma (at the same time I don't consider myself that
| smarter than average and I cringe hard at the fake complexity
| of programs we force people to use). We all want freedom ..
| if we get what we want easily. Otherwise we enjoy sharing the
| duty and going back to a consensus (market / companies search
| for what is 80% best and I'll accept that because I don't
| have to care).
|
| Anthropology, ergonomics, pedagogics and economics all matter
| for an object. I've been seeking joy and productivity in
| software for a while, but for people computers are rarely
| that.
|
| - a requirement (especially since the web re-rooted society
| and administration)
|
| - a confusing toy (you pay 1000 to click and consume
| music/film)
|
| - a strange tool at work
|
| another thing is that the computing field has either a
| glowing magic aura, or a dark cloud around it. Some people
| will be amazed by things that are not especially amazing
| relatively speaking [0] and some will be scared by any
| software or keyboard.
|
| [0] it's easy to forget the intricacies, subtleties, beauty
| of pre-computer things.
| arboles wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of a talk that was on LibrePlanet
| 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQM-GWKdHsU There's a
| point at which complexity becomes irreducible. Computing
| freedom requires that the user elevate themself by learning
| (not the other way around).
| Genbox wrote:
| > _using windows feels like fighting a living thing that
| constantly want to make me experience bloat._
|
| Never has my professional life been distilled to such an
| accurate description.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's sad Microsoft is lazy on this, it could be a marketing
| lever to make people have really simple and stable experience
| on their OS. And there's enough infrastructure to
| programmatically ensure "immutability" to some degree. Alas
| they have other unicorns to chase these days.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| But why would they bother? Everyone and their grandma is
| using Windows anyway, and most people don't even know (or
| care) there are alternatives.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Slight counter point, I have 80yo neighbor. Her laptop is
| sluggish due to some strange problem in the windows
| install (I investigated hard but it's "window boot event
| log" level of problem).
|
| I mentioned her I can put another windows like thing,
| safer, faster, freeer, and probably easier. She agreed,
| when I ran Mint on a live usb key she said yeah but where
| are my icons and my things and lost interest in a second.
|
| Humans are complicated.
| dflock wrote:
| I've been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. I've recently
| started a fantastic new job -- the only wrinkle was that it came
| with a Windows 10 laptop.
|
| This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This
| is how it's been going.
| silviot wrote:
| > Screw you software, I'm in charge, not you.
|
| This is exactly my reaction: I don't understand how people can
| be Ok with this. I remember seeing this more than ten years ago
| already: you demand your computer to shut down (maybe you're
| done with your work, and you need to catch a train, and your
| laptop needs to shut down _right now_) and it replies with a
| command: "Do not shut down the computer". WHAT? Why is my
| computer not doing what I ask it to do? I don't think it's
| healthy to tolerate this kind of behavior.
| protomyth wrote:
| If you are going to work on a Windows box for a while, you can
| install some Unix tools and have a poor Unix experience, use WSL,
| or learn PowerShell. Some places are Windows only environments so
| learning PowerShell might cut down the frustration and allow you
| to do the automation you want.
| Saris wrote:
| I use windows full time for a desktop OS and I find myself
| agreeing with everything in here, I just don't normally notice it
| day to day because I'm used to it.
|
| I wish CAD software companies would support linux, I've tried
| FreeCAD and whatnot, but they're nothing like Fusion360.
| djbusby wrote:
| Have you tried using Wine?
|
| I've an architect friend who wanted to ditch Windows - except
| for his cad software - which we run in a VM on the home server
| so can access anywhere.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| I've found the new version of WSL plus the Windows Terminal
| pretty good. I have a small side project using Docker/Docker
| Compose and it was pretty easy to get WSL to talk to Docker for
| Windows just as if I were using my work Mac using Docker for Mac.
|
| There's still all of the numerous headaches of Windows, but
| everything has its own headaches. My work Mac for example, loses
| its monitor arrangement for my dual monitors about once every
| other day, so much so that I have a shell script to fix it.
| ansible wrote:
| Yeah, I was surprised that even with Windows 11, we still have
| some subsystems using the old interface. It is better than it was
| (Windows 8... having to look in multiple places to change various
| settings, yuck), but still far from consistent. I do wonder why
| they didn't (couldn't?) update everything to the latest standard
| by now.
|
| BTW, you can theoretically set "active hours" for Windows, so
| that updates and such don't bother you so much. This is far
| better than it was, where Windows would basically say "I'm going
| to restart, you have 5 minutes to save your work". [1]
|
| If you need to run X apps remotely, there are various X servers
| you can get. I've been using X410 with PuTTY successfully, though
| most of the time I'm in WSL instead.
|
| Also, since you did skip the last 15 years, you have missed the
| "joy" of UAC prompts with Windows Vista, so you should count
| yourself lucky there.
|
| [1] OK, it wasn't quite _that_ bad. But it was kind of bad.
| sedatk wrote:
| > I do wonder why they didn't (couldn't?) update everything to
| the latest standard by now.
|
| Many people has been asking this same question on this thread.
| The answer is simple: backwards compatibility. That begets
| tough trade-off decisions. Otherwise, no product designer loves
| inconsistency.
|
| The other alternatives are either to never innovate, or to keep
| support timeframes short.
|
| Windows 1.0 had 100% consistent UI.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| If you are coming from a Linux background, you should use WSL 2
| instead of PowerShell. Using the Windows SSH client? Hell no! I
| install everything (even Docker) inside WSL, the only thing I
| have outside is VS Code, but all the extensions are also
| installed inside WSL, and I only have WSL window open all the
| time, keeping all my files inside the WSL filesystem. Much more
| convenient and less learning of Windows things.
| nix0n wrote:
| > all my files inside the WSL filesystem
|
| Is this a necessary limitation of WSL?
|
| I've been using Cygwin instead, so I can access Windows-native
| files using Linux-y tools.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I've not used WSL2, but folks say accessing the windows files
| from linux and vice versa isn't nearly fast enough.
|
| I wonder which VM based "shared files" is the fastest.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| The performance is not great across Windows and WSL
| filesystems, so it's better to keep every file inside.
| oblio wrote:
| To be frank, except for some specific cases, Cygwin is good
| enough.
|
| You can use Windows versions of development tools (Java,
| Python, Node, etc) and you mix them with Cygwin. It's a bit
| of an unholy alliance but you can definitely develop a ton of
| stuff like this, I've done it for a decade.
|
| You just need to figure out a bit of Cygwin-fu with cygpath &
| related tools, to smooth over the sharp areas occasionally.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I've never actually had to dig that deep into the internals
| of cygwin, but you do need to understand how things are
| linked if you are going to distribute binaries.
|
| Over time I found msys2 to be a better fit. In theory
| they're supposed to do different things, but msys2 with no
| cross compilation is basically cygwin but with a package
| manager you can use from the command line.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Even better, use Windows Terminal. It integrates any number of
| shells (Powershell, cmd, and Ubuntu via WSL2) into a single
| terminal application.
| dkryptr wrote:
| This is the way. (my setup is 1:1 it sounds like)
| majkinetor wrote:
| Nah...
|
| I have SSH OTB (its OpenSSH after all), docker-desktop and
| vscode all outside WSL. Why would I use WSL with its vastly
| inferior shell ? Docker desktop sucked tho, but its now pretty
| hassle free.
|
| What do you mean, its much more convenient to use virtual
| machine instead of real thing ?
| k8sToGo wrote:
| WSL isn't a shell. You install any shell you want inside WSL.
| I use fish.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Still won't solve the update reboot problem.
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| While that's true, I'm not sure that I consider it a
| "problem" in the first place. I used to, but not any longer.
|
| In my experience, there's never a _good_ time to update
| /reboot. I always have multiple applications and tabs open,
| and always several tasks in flight.
|
| For many years, I had Windows set to not automatically
| update. Now, given the rapid speed with which vulnerabilities
| can be exploited, I'm personally glad that it does.
|
| In a corporate environment, though, as the blog author is in,
| it's really going to be the IT policies that dictate this.
| They typically have the ability to update not just Windows,
| but any other software on the system. And often do.
|
| That's one of the reasons that IT departments _do_ prefer
| (and sometimes dictate) Windows -- It does make it easier for
| them to secure the multitude of systems for which they are
| responsible.
| antiframe wrote:
| I don't think the problem is when to reboot when
| _necessary_. The problem is many reboots shouldn 't be
| necessary. If you update a service, restart it. If you
| update a kernel, reboot. While Microsoft has gotten better
| at not rebooting every time, most third party installed
| programs haven't. At least not when I last used a Windows
| desktop.
| idatum wrote:
| Yes! I've been using Windows as long as I've been a developer,
| and the combination of WSL(2), Terminal, and VSCode (running as
| Windows process) has been solid for me. I don't use Windows
| without WSL anymore. PowerShell just never did it for me.
|
| Early in my career I "ran Linux/BSD at home", so it was a
| natural transition to Windows + WSL.
|
| And on Win11, WSLg gives you gvim as an easy option.
|
| EDIT: But :) There are still plenty of Windows (specifically
| Win11) things that aggravate me still after so long.
| behnamoh wrote:
| How do you install vscode extensions in WSL? If vscode is
| inside Windows, then don't the extensions get installed in
| Windows as well?
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| When you want to install an extension, you can choose where
| you want it to install, you can do both.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Can WSL 2 interact with files outside itself yet? For example,
| can it run imagemagick commands on a file in
| C:/Users/name/Downloads? The last time I used it you couldn't
| do this and all the mounting workarounds had a chance to break
| the file.
| geek_at wrote:
| yes. By default all your harddrives (even freshly decrypted
| veracrypt volumes) are found as mountpoints in /mnt. So
| nstead of C:\users\name\Download you'd go to
| /mnt/c/users/name/Download
|
| But usually you don't even have to because by default the wsl
| shell already puts you in /mnt/c/users/name and you'd just cd
| into Download
| rufusroflpunch wrote:
| You mention that no one has figured out how to make GUIs as
| composable as command lines. I would argue Apple is actually
| getting there with Shortcuts. Combining that with the Share
| Sheet/Share Menu and you get some pretty nice composability.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Apple has been there since the start of OS X thanks to NeXT.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Microsoft did with VBX, OLE and later ActiveX, the entire point
| was to have embeddable reusable UIs. They sabotaged themselves
| by tying those to separate products you had to buy though
| instead of having a simple drag-and-drop form/window designer
| to put things - basically something like the QBasic equivalent
| of Visual Basic but also closer to the original idea of VB1
| where instead of writing basic code you'd drag connections
| between controls to activate methods or pipe data between them.
|
| X11 supports this by allowing programs to "swallow" each other
| - the XEmbed protocol as well as normal IPC can be used for
| communication between them. Older desktop environments and
| window managers (CDE, FVWM, etc) can use this to compose
| programs. Some minimalistic window managers rely on this using
| single-purpose tools like dmenu.
|
| BeOS, as mentioned elsewhere also has a very limited form of
| OLE-like functionality.
|
| I'm sure there are others but TBH i think MS came closest, but
| they abandoned the entire idea after they decided to focus on
| .NET. FWIW the underlying tech is still there and in theory
| such QB-like-VB-lite app could be made but nothing really
| exposes reusable controls anymore so it'd be pointless. After
| all having the tech and ability is only half the battle at
| most, you also need applications to support it and nowadays
| everything GUI is made to be cross platform agnostic so any
| such solution would need to work everywhere there is a monitor,
| a keyboard and a mouse - not impossible but much harder
| nowadays than when computers were synonymous with Windows.
| criddell wrote:
| There are consultants that make quite a bit of money writing
| glue software that automates processing of data through the
| various Office applications.
| avereveard wrote:
| > how to make GUIs as composable as command lines
|
| beos did
| mdoms wrote:
| Incredible amount of misinformation in one post.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| jordache wrote:
| windows blows.. I only use it for gaming.
| orangetuba wrote:
| I have used GNU/Linux on a daily basis since 1997. And I must say
| that I am very disappointed with Linux on the desktop. I
| currently have two computers (that I was given by my employer)
| and there is a lot of trouble. On the laptop, the trackpad
| randomly stops working. If I kill -HUP xorg, it starts working
| again. The audio system has taken a lot of effort simply to keep
| it functional between distro updates.
|
| The desktop machine, sadly has an nVidia card. Every time the
| screensaver comes on and provide credentials, it seems to operate
| at 1% capacity for a time period (that depends on how long I've
| been away from the computer).
|
| Installing the nVidia drivers caused my machine not to boot any
| more, because SecureBoot was enabled. I tried to do the kernel
| module certificate signing, and failed (this process is a useful
| thing to present to someone who says Linux is ready for the
| desktop - good luck when grandma wants to sign kernel modules). I
| had to disable SecureBoot eventually, and now it nearly works,
| except the part about the screensaver. Linux is great, but the
| desktop system is a tragedy.
| nullc wrote:
| Linux desktop might (also) be a tragedy for other reasons _,
| but your post appears to be almost exclusively about Nvidia
| being a tragedy.
|
| (_ in particular, gnome is an astonishing regression in
| usability compared to the alternatives, or even what was
| standard a decade ago)
| aaomidi wrote:
| Recently moved to an AMD gpu. My God are things better now.
| orangetuba wrote:
| I should probably consider getting an AMD GPU, but I might as
| well get a new computer, then.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Hah that's basically what happened to me.
|
| Got a new gpu and new psu, reused old cables from old psu,
| fried the rest of my components. Had to buy everything
| again.
| johnturek wrote:
| Please don't forget WinGet for package management. No need for
| Scoop/3rd party.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| > Screw you software, I'm in charge, not you.
|
| Ahh, this guy didn't get the memo. With modern Windows you're
| just temporarily borrowing the computer, but Microsoft is in
| charge of it. They decide what programs you can run, which
| folders you can look in, which files you can delete and yes, they
| decide when it updates, even if you're in the middle of something
| important.
| ntauthority wrote:
| With modern x86 or ARM CPUs, you're doing the exact same. The
| OS you're running on the high-level OS cores being perceived as
| less unfriendly doesn't change this state about your hardware's
| monitor OSes (AMD PSP, Intel ME, Qualcomm QHEE/QSEE, other ARM
| TrustZone, ..) at all.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I was using Windows 15 years ago and had already solved almost
| all these complaints with Cygwin.
| quyleanh wrote:
| Terminal is not for Windows, at least for now. Please don't bring
| the Linux usage mindset to use Windows. Accept it and make it
| useful for you.
| pavon wrote:
| Not everyone at Microsoft agrees with that stance, or they
| would have never created PowerShell.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Somebody is wrong on the Internet.
| cube00 wrote:
| > _This is not how we do things in Linux land:
|
| > $ uptime
|
| > 09:33:15 up 56 days, 16:33, 1 user, load average: 1.36, 1.29,
| 0.91_
|
| We have to move beyond using uptime as the measure of stability.
| Unless you're live patching (and I doubt most people are) all
| this does is tell the world you're not applying security updates
| in a timely manner.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Absolutely. The last time _any_ of my current Linux systems
| rebooted for anything other than a power failure, hardware
| problem, or a kernel update was ... never.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Same for my Windows servers.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Back in the day, I ran Windows 2000 for 100 days without
| rebooting just to kill the meme that Windows was an unstable
| mess.
|
| I only rebooted because I was scared of the growing pile of
| security updates.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Unlike Windows, you CAN shutdown a service in Linux, update it,
| and restart it.
|
| Uptime gets the *system* uptime, not a service uptime. And only
| Kernel and glibc require reboots... And with hotpatches, a
| reboot isn't strictly required either.
| cube00 wrote:
| I was thinking about the kernel, 65 CVEs so far this year.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| At least they are honest about them unlike windows where we
| won't find NT kernel vulnerabilities for a decade sometimes
| and by then it's been widely exploited.
| delusional wrote:
| You missed the point. The point was that 65 CVEs mean
| that you should at least have rebooted your PC 65 times.
| No judgment on whether that's few or many CVEs.
| antiframe wrote:
| Not every CVE affects every system. The kernel is modular
| and most people don't run every module.
| Karellen wrote:
| In addition to what others have said, CVSs often come in
| related groups, and are patched together. It's likely
| that a single kernel security release will fix multiple
| related CVEs all at once.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Looking at those 65 CVEs[1] and thinking just about the
| desktop use case (as that's what this is about), none of
| them really stand out as "zomg update immediately!" A
| number just aren't applicable at all for most desktop
| users, and quite a lot of others aren't readily
| exploitable, and are not cause for a panic update and
| reboot.
|
| [1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-
| list.php?vendor_id=...
| brigade wrote:
| Unless every single one of those CVEs was actively
| exploited at the time a fix was committed to the kernel,
| no. Just no.
|
| Even then, no.
| melissalobos wrote:
| > you should at least have rebooted your PC 65 times
|
| Really not every CVE in the kernel applies to every
| system and configuration. You can compile the linux
| kernel in all kinds of different ways and a decent number
| of security vulnerabilities found in any given year only
| apply to unusual configurations.
| d0mine wrote:
| There are KernelCare, Livepatch which enable updates
| without the need to reboot.
| ntauthority wrote:
| You can do the same on Windows, though this isn't done for
| client editions as they're mostly for interactive use - and
| on Linux you might run into issues the more complex dbus-y
| GUI bits you use too. There's even kernel hot patching,
| although it's exclusive to some cloud server editions as
| they're a known environment compared to desktop systems.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, it's an interesting relative of the CAP Theorem
| space, from what I can see of it: In theory Windows has
| most of the raw engineering tools to do hot-patching
| similar to Linux. In practice Windows seems to prefer for
| interactive users a Consistency/Fewer "Partitions" over
| Availability and shifts that position for server SKUs.
| Arguably an interactive user _is_ much more likely to have
| problems with an Inconsistent OS state and see more
| "weirdness" from partitioning/splits in the OS state than a
| server app in a (relative) steady state with well known to
| the OS dependencies.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Windows is such a mess! It's sort of shocking how much of a
| mess it is. Desktop Linux is often criticized for this, but
| Windows is much worse, somehow! It's really inconsistent. Half of
| it is "new" UI and half of it is old Win32/GDI type UI
|
| I've been daily driving Linux (at least on my machine, work is
| unfortunately MacOS) for a year after 20+ years on Windows.
| Almost entirely GNOME, I recently switched to KDE for variable
| refresh rate support (it's easy enough to make KDE behave like
| GNOME). I had to boot into Windows 11 this weekend, after not
| using it for a few months, and it was a very jarring and
| unpleasant experience.
|
| But it's not because of inconsistent UI which, to be fair, has
| seen some rapid progress. Before switching to Linux I _very_
| rarely had to visit the old control panel. I can 't actually put
| my finger on why, maybe it feels half-baked compared to
| GNOME/KDE? It just feels awful to use, within the first 10
| seconds. Printers are significantly more reliable with Linux. WSL
| is fucking fantastic.
|
| I feel as though year of the Linux desktop is on the horizon,
| it's definitely a possibility.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > I feel as though year of the Linux desktop is on the horizon,
| it's definitely a possibility.
|
| What would that mean, for you? It seems like free desktops
| already work quite well for you.
| zamalek wrote:
| Mainstream adoption, at least near to the ground Apple have
| been able to make against Windows.
| a-dub wrote:
| i've had a similar experience in past, winding up with an
| employer mandated windows desktop after a decade of pure linux
| (thanks canonical and debian and everybody else!) was jarring to
| say the least. in the end i found my way, but it was not fun.
|
| the big issue i have with windows is that it normalizes a whole
| bunch of approaches to computing that i think are bad. i think
| this is particularly problematic in the context of software
| design and development. people are influenced by what they
| interact with everyday...
| bradjohnson wrote:
| I'm surprised that the bloat and ads in the start menu were not
| mentioned.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| Enterprise and Pro editions don't have the same bloat as
| Windows Home, in my experience. Since the author is using a
| work computer, it's likely that they didn't encounter Candy
| Crush pre-installed and pinned to their start menu.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| What's even the reason Candy Crush is pre-installed?
| NotTheDr01ds wrote:
| Windows has a long history of preinstalled games of various
| quality all the way back to Reversi in Windows 1.0.
| Solitaire, of course, was the third most popular
| application in Windows 3.1. But there hasn't been a single
| version of Windows that _hasn 't_ had games preinstalled.
| gundamdoubleO wrote:
| Windows 10 is quite tolerable for me as a gaming machine.
| Although, Proton is fantastic there's still a few things that
| "just work" on Windows in terms of gaming so I like to keep an
| install around.
|
| > _This lets me pick the distro that's closest to my needs and
| customize anything I want to change. I've been using Xubuntu for
| years and it suits me - but there are hundreds of Linux Distro's
| to choose from._
|
| That's really what it comes down to for me, it's simply how ugly
| I think the interface is in terms of visuals and usability. It's
| difficult to describe but navigating the OS feels so painful and
| easy to get lost in. I'm sure it's mainly to do with me lacking
| familiarity with it but I've never felt that way on my Mac that I
| use for work.
|
| Linux is a far cry from having the perfect window manager UX but
| it does have plenty of options so it's easy to find something
| that clicks.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Windows 10 is quite tolerable for me as a gaming machine.
| Although, Proton is fantastic there's still a few things that
| "just work" on Windows in terms of gaming so I like to keep an
| install around.
|
| Gaming is the only reason I'm not on Linux.
|
| Yeah, gaming on Linux is getting better, but Windows "just
| works" as you said.
| tomrod wrote:
| I simply love Cinnamon these days.
|
| I gave Plasma a go but felt it was designed like the mid-2000s
| MS products -- tons and tons of features but buried and not
| discoverable.
|
| Gnome3 is a joke. More and more reduction and laggy on every
| system I've used it on.
|
| XFCE has never been my flavor; I typically use LXDE when its
| needed.
|
| Xmonad and openbox were a lot of fun for awhile. I'd probably
| still use Xmonad if I had time to tinker.
|
| Cinnamon, the fork of Gnome2, gets a lot right in my view. Or
| maybe I'm getting old.
| homerowilson wrote:
| Wow, this was almost my exact experience (except that I had
| somehow gone through life _never_ using Windows). Using WSL is
| working out pretty well for me for the most part, except
| networking seems to break when the corporate VPN is on that I 'm
| required to use (which is very irritating). I find myself
| prototyping things on my personal Linux laptop and only using the
| corporate machine for required company stuff. It's been an awful
| experience.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Maybe I am old, but I think that all modern operating systems are
| great. I prefer using Mac OS as my Desktop Environment, but this
| is probably because I am used to Apple Machines. But my home
| server runs Ubuntu, and my entertainment machine is a samsung
| book pro running windows 11 because it is light weight as a
| tablet but without the limitations of a tablet. Mac Book Pros are
| too heavy to be used outside a table in my option.
|
| Yeah, windows have different window styles and a lot of different
| places to configure stuff. So what? I f* don't care.
|
| I could run linux on the Samsung PC? Yeah, I even have it on dual
| boot, never use it. It is not one of my development machines, and
| even when I use it for things like doing experiments or learning
| a new language, I can fire WSL2 and run Emacs on Windows Terminal
| or VS Code.
|
| I used NT 3.5, I used 90's Slackware, I used Mac OS classic.
| Jesus, I used MS-DOS. Any modern OS is great to me.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Stop fighting the platform:
|
| 1. winget is great and is not abandoned, but yes, don't count on
| it to do software updates for you. Central third-party package
| updates are not a thing on Windows or MacOS (outside of their app
| stores). Every application is in charge of its own updating.
|
| Linux distributions can pull this off because the software they
| install is almost all open source. On Windows and MacOS, it's
| proprietary software shipped as binaries. You could force them to
| go through an app store, but that would require closing the
| platform to non-app-store installs in order to get uptake.
|
| Microsoft is trying to encourage people to distribute software as
| msix packages, but because it's a backwards-compatible open
| platform, uptake is optional.
|
| 2. Powershell is great. You do way less text wrangling and
| escaping and such non-sense as you have to do with bash, and
| instead you interact with real functions ("commands" or
| "cmdlets") that take objects as arguments. You can also call into
| any .NET function. You can embed C# class definitions. And you
| can even call win32 functions with a little more work (but it's
| rare you wouldn't be able to accomplish something with either
| powershell commands or .NET functions).
|
| BUT, it is more verbose. Accept this and you will be happy.
|
| 3. Windows is extremely customizable. You probably just don't
| know it. Certainly, with registry tweaks you can customize way
| more than you can in Gnome. And if you're willing to do some
| win32 shell programming, you can make it do just about anything.
| Hence companies like Stardock that will happily sell you software
| to customize Windows any way you want.
|
| 4. You can definitely get middle click paste working with, e.g.,
| an AutoHotKey script.
|
| 5. Most of your points are petty complaints about defaults you
| can easily change.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I feel pretty fortunate to be able to turn down jobs where I'd
| need to use windows as a daily driver. I don't mind using it
| occasionally, and I've gotten quite good at targeting Windows
| cross compiling from Linux, but using it daily just grinds me
| into a paste.
|
| I mostly use Macs for work now, and while they do a pretty good
| job of exposing a Unix environment, they've been getting steadily
| worse over the past couple of years. I've had so many problems
| with recent critical OS patches that I'm debating convincing my
| employer to let me have a Linux machine, not that I would ever
| recommend that for a company who wants their employees to be
| productive.
|
| That being said I'm actually really impressed at how good Linux
| on the Desktop is right now. I've got my whole family running KDE
| on NixOS and it's basically flawless.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I can't get my brain to use a mac with a windows/Linux style
| keyboard
| [deleted]
| silisili wrote:
| Same all around. It's my first 'do you have any questions for
| us?' at every interview. My company now is starting to hint at
| clamping down the screws, and I was honest in saying I'd just
| go elsewhere before being forced to use a gimped Windows laptop
| daily. We'll see.
|
| I've used desktop Linux for a long time, and it's really,
| really good now. I cannot even remember the last time something
| didn't just work out of the box(probably my laser printer).
|
| Still working on the last part. Parents buy and use tax
| software each year for some odd reason, and I don't feel like
| even trying to navigate through WINE.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I would not even attend an interview if it's not clear that I
| can work on Linux in that company. I was forced to use
| Windows daily for 8 years. After that I got a chance to move
| to Linux development. I'll never want to go back. Not that
| Linux is free of problems. But the feeling of being in
| control cannot be replaced. If I don't accept the wart I can
| patch it. If I don't want to invest the effort to patch it I
| live with it. The choice is always mine.
| derekp7 wrote:
| What workflow do you use to target Windows builds from Linux?
| For myself I've used mingw64 to compile, then NSIS as an
| installer. Only problem is that quite a few Windows anti-
| malware systems automatically flag NSIS compiled based packages
| as suspicious.
|
| Also, any good guides for targeting Windows APIs for Linux
| programmers?
| psyclobe wrote:
| The problem has nothing to do with NSIS, instead you must
| sign your application with a ev cert that requires a hardware
| device to use.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| > not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants
| their employees to be productive.
|
| As someone who has moved to Linux from MacOS (Gnome 42, Debian
| Bookworm), it has been a near seamless transition.
|
| I expected it to consume a lot of time in overhead maintaining
| it - but it hasn't. It has been great so far. MacOS is still
| more ergonomic in a lot of ways by comparison to Gnome, but
| Gnome 4x has come a long way in the last few months.
|
| At this rate it, by the end of the year I would think it the
| best desktop environment offered by any platform.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| If you want to please corporate, maybe suggesting Suse is a
| good idea. I have a VM for remote desktop with OpenSuse and it
| has been good so far.
| Beached wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat, but I turn down jobs that require osx
| use. my current job I was told I was able to use osx, windows,
| or kubuntu, whichever I prefer. I chose kubuntu, and was handed
| a mac on day 1 because of chip shortage. it was the worse 3
| months of my professional career, finally my Dell came in and I
| could actually get work done. I don't understand how people use
| them, I don't consider them a viable alternative to a nic
| environment.
|
| all you people here surprise me, I consider windows + wsl a
| better development environment and more nix like than osx. but
| maybe I'm just hurt in the head and missing something...
| dcchambers wrote:
| Really interested why you felt that MacOS wasn't unix-like
| and wasn't productive? Assuming you have administrative
| control over your computer, you can use the terminal for
| everything. Open the terminal and you're literally dropped
| into a unix-y shell (zsh is the new default, but GNU bash and
| a POSIX-compatible sh are shipped as well, all right out of
| the box) and all of your favorite *nix commands will be
| available. The filesystem is like any other unix file system.
| There's several package managers available (Homebrew,
| MacPorts) for installing software - I virtually never use the
| Mac app store or even download .app images directly from
| vendors.
|
| Mac OS is not just Unix-like, it is a certified Unix-
| compliant operating system.^1
|
| Apple prefers to keep this fact far away from the _average_
| mac consumer, but if you want to use them, the Unix /BSD
| underpinnings are right there. There are plenty of things to
| criticize about MacOS, but not being Unix-like is not one of
| them.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm
| goosedragons wrote:
| The only thing that feels UNIX like is the terminal and
| even then zsh is different than most are used to and the
| included bash is essentially ancient. Even basic things
| like getting to your home folder with Finder is more
| trouble than it needs to be on a stock modern macOS
| install. They really go to lengths to hide it. If all that
| feels *nix-like is the the terminal why bother? WSL can do
| that too but if I want apt I can use that.
|
| I feel like there's no integration between the macOS UI
| stuff and the Unix underpinnings.
| dcchambers wrote:
| From a technical/programming perspective, there's just so
| much that MacOS (unix) does right: things like file
| permissions, the layout of the file system, and having
| industry-standard tools like vim, make, gcc, ssh, bash
| (even if older versions) built in. I haven't used Windows
| for anything other than playing games for almost 10
| years, but I remember things like Ruby (especially Rails)
| and Python programming were a complete PITA in Windows
| versus Mac (Unix) or Linux. Maybe that's changed...I
| honestly couldn't tell you.
|
| I agree that it's annoying how much apple tries to hide
| the Unix nature of the OS. I have no idea why they hide
| the home folder from Finder by default, it's on my list
| of "things to change immediately" when I do a fresh Mac
| install/setup, as well as things like installing newer
| versions of Bash, Vim, etc (via Homebrew). But overall I
| think the pros of the OS vastly outweigh the cons. For
| the most part, all of the things I don't like about the
| OS can be turned off or tuned. And I value how things
| work under the hood too much to give that up.
|
| I will admit I have never tried WSL - because I've never
| had a need to. I've considered trying it, but then I just
| tell myself I'd rather just use Linux.
| kec wrote:
| > [...]Even basic things like getting to your home folder
| with Finder is more trouble than it needs to be on a
| stock modern macOS install. They really go to lengths to
| hide it.[...]
|
| Open finder then cmd-shift-h or cmd-shift-g, "~"
|
| Both of these work right out of the box, what would you
| rather macOS do to be easier?
| goosedragons wrote:
| Super discoverable.
|
| Put Home on the sidebar by default like Thunar, Nautilus,
| Dolphin, Caja, earlier versions of Mac OS X...
| tomrod wrote:
| MacOS is missing the common use of the control button.
|
| I just need control, alt, and a meta button ("Windows"
| button).
|
| What is this option and command nonsense?
| dcchambers wrote:
| That was one of the hardest things for me to get used to
| when I moved primarily from Linux --> Mac (and it still
| makes switching between Mac and Windows annoying).
| Keyboard remapping helped at first but I was getting
| tired of inconsistencies so I just forced myself to
| relearn the modifier keys.
|
| Funnily enough, the command key and many of those popular
| shortcuts (eg cut copy paste) predates windows by several
| years. The story goes that windows wanted to use the same
| shortcuts, but PC keyboards lacked a command key - so
| they used control instead. Since windows was backwards
| compatible with lots of hardware, they couldn't require a
| key that didn't exist on most keyboards.
|
| Prior to that of course, Control has a long history of
| interacting with command-line based applications in
| Unix/family (eg Ctrl-C to cancel a running CLI app). Of
| course those same things still work in MacOS like they
| did in the older Unixes.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| >> not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants
| their employees to be productive.
|
| That's a little odd to read considering you've got your whole
| family on it. I could imagine a lot of work going into internal
| software for the most part, are there other reasons you'd
| advise against it these days?
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Not OP: Companies of any size are already enmeshed in the
| security/deployment/productivity flows offered by
| 'enterprise' software, which I don't see Linux as matching
| currently. Is there anything comparable to Office +
| $whateverEndpointProtection + $whateverImaging that Linux
| could use to make IT jobs easy/fast?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I'm debating convincing my employer to let me have a Linux
| machine
|
| Could you just install Linux on your mac? That way you could
| also dual boot in case you need macOS on occasion.
| adastra22 wrote:
| There is no production-ready Linux distro for recent Macs.
| oraoraoraoraora wrote:
| True, but asahi Linux for the curious
| goosedragons wrote:
| Only helps for M1 macs. Intel T2 laptops are in a
| particularly bad spot when it comes to Linux support and
| things haven't really gotten better. You still need to
| add drivers to get the keyboard/trackpad working (AFAIK
| not supported on all kernels either), you can't have
| audio AND suspend just one of them, WiFi is a pain. I
| tried on my 2018 just had freezes every five minutes on
| the 1/3 of times it would boot correctly.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Yes - I made this "discovery" for a three year old Mac I
| have - it freezes on the first screen of the Ubuntu install
| :(
| saghm wrote:
| Depending on how recent the model is, it can be somewhat
| tough. Generally it takes a bit of time after a new model
| appears before there are working drivers for wifi, which
| quite often is a deal breaker. Sometimes a driver will be
| working a bit earlier but not be released yet, so you can
| compile your own kernel with it patched in, but even as a
| daily Arch user that's more effort than I'm willing to go
| through on a regular basis. I know there's progress being
| made on a distro that fully supports the new ARM macbooks,
| but my understanding is that most distros will not work on it
| right now. I think "everything works out of the box" is
| mostly true for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux,
| but I'm not sure it will ever be the case for macbooks
| (unless Apple decides to make sure it's the case, which seems
| fairly unlikely).
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I think "everything works out of the box" is mostly true
| for most non-Apple laptops nowadays for Linux, but I'm not
| sure it will ever be the case for macbooks (unless Apple
| decides to make sure it's the case, which seems fairly
| unlikely).
|
| My understanding is that "everything works out of the box"
| is still restricted to very specific products line when it
| comes to laptops and linux. And that the new Apple Silicon
| macbooks might actually make this situation a lot better
| because most of the hardware is Apple's and they seems to
| keep a more or less stable binary interface between
| hardware components even across hardware generations
| (presumably for their own benefit when writing their own
| firmware). So while the support isn't there yet (well, it's
| in Alpha), once it is there we might expect Apple laptops
| to have some of the best linux support going forwards.
| a_shovel wrote:
| One important benefit of Windows is that nobody has ever told me
| "submit a patch" after I complained about some part of Windows.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-07 23:01 UTC)