[HN Gopher] Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news
___________________________________________________________________
Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news
Author : taubek
Score : 1524 points
Date : 2023-03-27 05:20 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Windows is an OS. It shouldn't display ANY news.
| varispeed wrote:
| There is more than that to this. Remember that news corporations
| are owned by billionaires and they show you the world through a
| lens that benefit them. They want you to be outraged at things
| they want, they want you to have blind spots, they want you to be
| distracted while they pick your pockets.
|
| True journalism no longer exists and the reason is that nobody
| wants to get killed for uncovering the truth.
| valeg wrote:
| That's why I switched to MX. I don't want to see this garbage
| pushed on me.
| appel wrote:
| MX?
| valeg wrote:
| Linux. It is actually quite nice.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| MSN should not exist. It's a clear-cut case of vertical
| integration.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| Author should have led with how to get rid of them. This article
| is padded with example headlines, has little analysis and no
| tutorial.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Apple News is not quite as bad, but does have a similar problem.
| I very rarely use it just because of the sheer amount of
| clickbait that it wants me to read. There seems to be no way to
| say "just show me actual news only, please".
|
| At least it is silo'd away into its own app, and not part of the
| OS UI, unlike Windows.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I switched my main desktop to Linux a bit over a year ago now. I
| got so sick of the Win11 issues and the advertising just irked me
| to no end. It's less than perfect, but I'm far more lenient when
| it comes to a free OS that I can do what I want with.
| favsq wrote:
| The following program which someone recommended to me here in HN
| has been a godsend in this regard since it allows me to configure
| my taskbar the way it was in Windows 10:
| https://www.startallback.com/
| construct0 wrote:
| Related and open source:
| https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
| favsq wrote:
| You can tell it's open source since it doesn't sell itself
| very well - not a single screenshot anywhere!
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > 100% C
|
| Noice
| a2tech wrote:
| They took a nice feature (showing the weather unobtrusively on
| your taskbar) and turned it into a nightmare where if your mouse
| accidentally passes through its space a giant popup shows up
| filled with the worst kind of junk news. Oh and on many
| (especially lower end systems) it causes terrible stuttering
| while its opening.
| Diapason wrote:
| I actually reported them several times to the Australian TGA (our
| "FDA") as they were illegally promoting unapproved medical
| devices. The TGA could not find out any Australian entity to go
| after so they gave up :/
| badcppdev wrote:
| That's quite pathetic on the part of the TGA.
| mbgerring wrote:
| This is why using for me, using Windows is a non-starter. My
| operating system should not be showing me random crap from the
| Internet that I can't turn off, period.
| zokier wrote:
| In couple of years Windows 10 will get eol'd and stop receiving
| security updates. It'll be interesting time certainly to see what
| the people who are contently now using Windows 10 without MS
| accont or Cortana or other online craziness, will do. I'm in that
| boat, but I have always been dualbooting Linux so to me changing
| it to be primary desktop won't be that big of a pain. But I do
| expect to see additional influx of new Linux users from the
| eventual eol. Of course some users probably will continue to use
| Windows 10 well beyond the eol date (there probably are still
| even some Windows 7 users around); heck, it might take good while
| until major vulns are found in Windows 10 after eol as the
| general security level certainly has improved.
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| MSN also needs to actually moderate their comment sections. Too
| many tinfoil hats, trolls and far right extremists on the German
| version.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The German version of every US website seems to greatly lack
| moderation.
| sph wrote:
| People that comment on news websites tend to be kooks, trolls
| and those old people that love posting terrible memes on
| Facebook.
| moreresearchplz wrote:
| That would probably reduce the success ratio of their pageview
| and ad impression metrics. There probably is not a metric
| tracking quality or societal benefit.
| honkycat wrote:
| i've had multiple issues where graphic photographs appeared on my
| news pop-up thing during meetings.
|
| it really pisses me off.
| progx wrote:
| First thing after install: disable all this sh.t.
|
| If i want entertainment, i open entertainmap apps or websites.
|
| I was wondering, that Microsoft is not in able to reduce all
| these things when you select a "work profile" at installation.
|
| They use windows too (i hope, or did their employees switch to
| apple or linux?), they must know, what productivity killer such
| "Features" are.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I have the same problem, but to a much, much lesser extent, with
| Reddit.
|
| When I click in the search box, it converts into a drop-down list
| of news headlines.
|
| If I want news, I'll click on news. Don't force it on me : I
| avoid news normally, because I find it's almost all unpleasant
| click-bait. I do not appreciate being forced to look at it, even
| for a few moments.
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| Old reddit is still available. Just type old.reddit.com or
| change it in the settings.
| lozenge wrote:
| Not for long I expect. Compact mobile reddit just got
| disabled last week.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| https://i.reddit.com/r/worldnews
|
| Seems to still work.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Don't waste your breath complaining about Windows. Microsoft
| isn't listening.
| kstenerud wrote:
| I finally made the switch to Ubuntu Mate on Friday and WOW, color
| me impressed!
|
| The only reason I stuck with Windows on my desktop machine for so
| long was gaming, and the last time I tried switching over was 10
| years ago. Spoiler: it was a shitshow.
|
| This time, things are MUCH better! The Mate desktop environment
| is simple, stable, clean, does the job and gets out of your way
| (kinda reminds me of Windows 2000). Steam's Proton makes running
| games a breeze. All of my favorites just work. I could even run
| battle.net as a non-steam game, USING Steam's Proton!
|
| And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of Diablo 4 just
| worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked play, and it just
| worked. Perfectly. As if I were still running under Windows. I've
| never before seen such sorcery.
|
| So bye bye Windows, except when I'm running one as a VM.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Sadly there's still a few very heavy hitters that make Linux a
| no-go for some.
|
| Genshin Impact and Fortnite are unusable.
|
| Unreal Editor requires Windows too.
|
| And I don't know how usable VR is on Windows.
|
| Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which there
| _could_ be a Linux equivalent but you really need _that one
| that only works on Windows_ for some reason.
|
| But at this point it's just a matter of time, I guess.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| > Plus the random assortment of windows programs for which
| there could be a Linux equivalent but you really need that
| one that only works on Windows for some reason.
|
| This!
|
| What keeps me working on Windows (besides the fact that I
| somehow have completely missed the in-OS ads) is the time it
| would take me to replace all the random little quality of
| life apps that I've gotten used to. I'm sure there's a great
| Linux clipboard manager that does everything Ditto does on
| Windows but I don't have to go and find it, get used to it,
| figure out all the quirks (and the things it lacks that Ditto
| provides, and all the things that it provides that Ditto
| lacks, etc, etc).
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You need[0] a slow migration. Like any major change really.
|
| Get a cheap small box that can run Linux and slowly start
| to build the tool familiarity alongside your defaults.
|
| That's pretty much how I did it. Went back to Windows less
| and less until it was only ever for Windows-only android
| flashing tools (which is about once every 6 months). Still
| annoys me how much space Windows takes up to dual-boot just
| for this use-case. Bloated PoS.
|
| [0]: If you're going to do it. I'm not saying you need to
| do it, I'm not that guy.
| shaan7 wrote:
| > Still annoys me how much space Windows takes up to
| dual-boot just for this use-case. Bloated PoS
|
| Made me chuckle, can 100% relate. I mostly reboot to
| Windows for some games and to one-off buy some soundtrack
| from iTunes.
| incompatible wrote:
| As a long-time Linux user, I have to wonder how much better
| my life would be if I had access to all of these. My naive
| guess is about 0%.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Oh yes for sure, the fact that Genshin Impact and Fortnite
| don't work on Linux is actually a point in favor of Linux
| lol. Many don't see it that way though, sadly.
| smolder wrote:
| A massively multiplayer combat-waifu simulator with the
| typical f2p monetization traps doesn't appeal to
| everyone? (OTOH, I'd say Fortnite is actually pretty fun
| since they added a no-building mode.)
| eloisant wrote:
| I know it's not the same, but both of these games can be
| played on cloud gaming (Geforce Now).
|
| I have a subscription to GFN, not to play games not supported
| on Linux but to play on max specs without needing an
| expensive rig, and both Genshin Impact and Fortnite are
| supported there.
|
| Anyway, it's never going to be a full drop-in replacement.
| Like you can't just replace your XBOX with a Playstation and
| play the same games. But still, Linux is a very valid option
| even for gaming.
| mort96 wrote:
| I think the Unreal Engine editor supports Linux now? This
| page seems to claim so: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-
| US/download
|
| Not that this takes away from your overall point.
| toastal wrote:
| Most of the games now are always online and some of them
| opt for home-grown, Microsoft Windows-only kernel anti-
| cheat detection rather than working with the bigger engines
| that Valve worked with to get said anti-cheat systems
| running on Linux.
|
| Others refuse to support Linux thinking it'll bring more
| bug reports, but there was an interview in recent years
| where the game company realized the Linux community knew
| they could submit bug reports, they submitted good bug
| reports (that affected all platforms too), and didn't see
| software as a black box for consumption but a community
| effort. They ended up praising the Linux community for
| their bug reports even if the number of reports were
| higher.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Huh, what the hell?
|
| Apparently it happened in July 2022.
|
| https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/07/unreal-
| engine-5-editor...
|
| These last few years have been moving way too fast, whew.
|
| Thanks for telling me.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Windows can be good, when its in vm-jello, frozzen in time,
| with no real network connection except for shared folders and
| the updaterapeware removed. Honestly, has anyone ever looked at
| these updates and though to themselves - "Yes, i need that!".
| [deleted]
| tapland wrote:
| Gaming on linux has really taken off. Very few games, even with
| anti cheat for multiplayer, don't work. It's nice that running
| Linux is no worse than missing out on console exclusives
| M95D wrote:
| So, people complain about Windows spyware and antifeatures,
| then they install Ubuntu and Steam client. What did that solve?
| Move your profiling data to someone else?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Steam wants to sell me video games that are similar to other
| video games I like and keep me on top of new releases.
| recommendations based on purchase history are kinda okay in
| my opinion.
|
| Microsoft wants to sell me the british royalty and reasons
| why millions of people are excited about german hearing aids.
| I don't really get this at all. What is their snoopware even
| good for if this is the best they can come up with?
| lexandstuff wrote:
| This will surely be the year of the Linux desktop.
| gryn wrote:
| has been the case for me for more than 5 years.
| nunodonato wrote:
| 20 years here, going fine :) But I guess the joke never
| ends
| labster wrote:
| No, 20 years is the fusion power joke, not the year of
| the linux desktop joke
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I thought that fusion is 40 years away, and has been
| every year for the past 50 years? :)
|
| The "Year Of The Linux Desktop" has been a thing since at
| least the heyday of Slashdot, which would put it at
| 20-ish years.
|
| Unless that was intended as a humorous joke? Your post, I
| mean - not the Year Of the Linux Desktop, :)
| labster wrote:
| My post was less of a joke than Windows 11 is. But
| probably funnier.
| AdamN wrote:
| Once Infrastructure Week is finished ... just a little bit
| longer
| HeckFeck wrote:
| You can even install PowerShell for your command line and
| you'll feel right at home!
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I can run pretty much any game out of the box, even random
| games that nobody would ever have optimised for linux.
|
| The time of the desktop has come.
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| Serious question: Did you play the Diablo IV open beta
| weekend? (It's live for 4 more hours).
|
| I did, on my Windows 10 box. The issue isn't random games
| that no one would ever have optimized, the issue is
| bleeding edge games that most people want to play, and play
| _right now_.
|
| If you didn't, can you? If (the royal) you can't, get
| started in the time remaining, download speeds allowing,
| the year of the Linux desktop isn't here.
| COGlory wrote:
| From the great grandparent - they did play the Diablo 4
| beta on Ubuntu.
|
| >And the kicker? Blizzard's recently opened beta of
| Diablo 4 just worked. As in, I clicked install, clicked
| play, and it just worked. Perfectly. As if I were still
| running under Windows. I've never before seen such
| sorcery.
| zamalek wrote:
| It sometimes does a better job than Windows at running
| Windows games.
| permo-w wrote:
| I'm sure that's never been said before
| floor_ wrote:
| Is it though? When you run apt upgrade you are nagged to go
| subscribe to UBUNTU PRO. There was a problem with amazon
| tracking Ubuntu store purchases.
| (https://www.howtogeek.com/126995/how-to-disable-the-
| amazon-s...) You can't exactly escape telemetry and unwanted
| ads. Seems like it on a slippery slope to another version of
| Windows 10 to me.
| Spivak wrote:
| The unity dash thing is ancient and not a thing anymore.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I would definitely recommend Linux Mint over vanilla Ubuntu.
| Canonical has made some really dumb moves over the last
| decade. Thankfully, it's trivial to avoid vanilla Ubuntu.
| herbst wrote:
| Wait until you give up on mate (kinda stuck approach to copy
| windows 95, just like modern windows or Mac mostly does) and
| try actual modern desktops like Gnome, KDE or if you want to go
| ultra productive something tiling like 3wm
| kstenerud wrote:
| Nah, tried all of those and settled on Mate.
|
| IMO the most important aspect of a desktop environment is
| that you never notice it. That's what I loved so much about
| Windows 2000 (and why I lamented every UI change they made
| since then).
| herbst wrote:
| That's the exact reason I am stuck with Gnome. First it
| might be a bit strange, but then you realize it's there,
| everything is one tab away yet you never actually see it.
|
| Giving maximal screen estate to whatever I focus on while
| being as distraction less as a WM just can be.
|
| However anyway, glad you found something that works for
| you! That's what choice is for
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The beauty is that they can do that _on their own time_.
| Possibly even never.
|
| I use i3wm and a split ergonomic keyboard. I use a shell
| instead of a file manager. I am fine with 99% of people never
| doing that, so long as _I_ can.
| kioshix wrote:
| MATE is a fork of Gnome 2. Not everyone likes Gnome 3 and
| newer versions.
| herbst wrote:
| Gnome 2 is just a windows 95 clone with Gimmics. Only from
| gnome shell on to gnome 3 the whole concept was brought to
| a new level.
|
| However I understand if people don't like that, it's new
| and maybe won't last it sure is easier to stick to a
| taskbar, etc when you are used to it.
| kstenerud wrote:
| That's exactly what I like about it. Windows 3.x was
| terrible. Win95 looked pretty but was a garbage os. But
| windows NT with the win95 UI on it finally convinced me
| to ditch my Amiga (although I was VERY tempted by NeXT).
| And honestly, I haven't seen any UI enhancements since
| then that are useful to me.
| lenkite wrote:
| But does that mean they will be stuck forever to an ancient
| GTK version ?
| nvrspyx wrote:
| It has supported GTK3+ for years now. I'm not familiar
| with the specifics, but GTK3/4 applications run fine.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Wait for a couple of major version updates before praising
| prematurely.
|
| Usually desktop Linux works great until it suddenly doesn't,
| and then the real fun of figuring out what's wrong begins ;)
| dreen wrote:
| I'd like to believe that, but can't shake the feeling there is
| a chance of performance impact or a need for special magic
| dance to make something work.
|
| The teenager me would have no problem, he had a (fairly)
| working Enlightenment config and tried an array of distros, and
| it was fun to tinker. But he had way, way more time, and didn't
| spend his own money on the gaming hardware.
| kstenerud wrote:
| There are warts, like it got confused into thinking that my
| second SSD was a removable device until I forced it in the
| fstab. But the level of annoyance nowadays is pretty much on
| par with Windows warts and annoyances (especially Windows
| printer drivers OMG).
|
| But I've been using Linux desktops for years on my laptops
| and virtual desktops, so I had a pretty good idea of what to
| expect before changing my PC over.
|
| But for games I'm completely intolerant of annoyances, which
| is why I took so long with this step.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| It definitely has a performance impact, and sometimes there
| are crash/other glitches in proton not present on windows.
|
| I also have much, much less time than I did as a teenager, so
| I can only stomach console gaming at this point. Games need
| to Just Work.
| elaus wrote:
| For me personally performance with Linux gaming is much less
| of a problem than it was with teenage me's Windows gaming.
| Back in the day I didn't have much money, but today I can
| just buy a slightly beefier GPU to compensate any possible
| performance loss from compatibility layers.
|
| With my 7 year old GTX 1080 and Ubuntu/Steam Proton I can
| still play most games at very high settings (except
| raytracing stuff).
| dreen wrote:
| Then we have different priorities, if I spend a lot of
| money on a gaming machine beefy GPU I want 100% of its
| performance at all times and no risk of problems cutting
| into my limited gaming time. If there is a problem on
| Windows you can be sure the game devs will give it a
| priority over a problem on Linux.
|
| Been a Linux user for over 20 years, still use it for work,
| and yes Proton does look great, but I don't see using it
| for gaming anytime soon.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I would sincerely recommend you give it another shot. If
| proton works well for the game, performance is most
| likely to be very close to windows, if not even exceed
| it.
|
| The best part is that it's _trivially easy_. Most games
| with decent proton support will install just like a
| native game. No frills. No mess.
|
| When the Linux experience is smooth, it's _smooth_. None
| of the fake Fullscreen BS. No memory paging quirks or
| other background processes causing stuttering. No
| automatically putting your game process in sleep mode.
| Freesync works. You get to keep your favorite window
| manager /desktop environment. If you are lucky, you can
| totally ditch windows _today_.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Funny thing is that there are lots of reports for games
| of linux outperforming Windows. So considering that you
| might want to checking first, you might need to run Linux
| to really get 100% out of your GPU.
| [deleted]
| malikNF wrote:
| Use linux. Its free.
| EntropyDenied wrote:
| On Windows 11. Taskbar Settings -> Personalization -> Turn
| Widgets off. Problem solved.
| alibarber wrote:
| It was having Nigel Farrage's tweets show up in the start menu on
| a box at work that did it for me. And no, there's no free speech
| on my or my company's desktop machines. I'm here to get work done
| - not be subjected to any political crap.
| defrost wrote:
| Farrage has a cockwomble level that transcends politics, his
| content delivery is axiomatically objectional regardless of
| whatever side he takes.
| alibarber wrote:
| And to elaborate - it's not really that he, or any other of his
| ilk, exist. Or the content of what they were saying (not that I
| care at all for it); The bit that made me angry the most was
| that, some PM at Microsoft actually thought "Yes, we will show
| divisive politics to a user who has paid for this software." Of
| course, they probably sold it as, "Let's _delight_ the user
| with treding twitter topics in $their_locale" - but if they
| didn't figure out what that would mean in the actual real
| world, then good heavens...
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I just went down a rabbit hole to remove the "Discover" button in
| Edge (top-right corner): - `regedit` -
| go to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft` -
| add a key (folder) `Edge` (ignore the folder `MicrosoftEdge` if
| it exists) - in `Edge` folder, add a `DWORD` with name
| `HubsSidebarEnabled` and a value of `0`. - in Edge, go to
| `edge://policy` and click on `Reload Policies` - it
| should list the policy and the 'Discover' button should disappear
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Aren't these kinds of hacks breaking every few months with new
| upgrades?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Currently, there was no other way to disable the button - I
| tested all. In the future, I hope there's an official option
| or policy directly available without the registry. I just
| couldn't see the button anymore.
| stathibus wrote:
| It's gets easier and easier every year to want an alternative to
| Windows, but it remains impossible to actually switch, at least
| for me.
| outsomnia wrote:
| What's this year's lock-in / excuse... games?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I have a NUC with KDE Neon on it as a second desktop. It's
| been pretty good so been thinking it might be time soon to
| switch my main over.
|
| However for years the main thing holding me back is the lack
| of a proper RDP alternative. And yes I've tried them all,
| nothing comes close to RDP on Windows.
|
| I use it all the time to connect home from work, so I can
| separate work from personal stuff, as well as from my laptop
| when I'm away. I just have Firefox installed on my laptop,
| RDP takes care of the rest.
| happymellon wrote:
| Honestly there is absolutely no reason to not switch to
| something else. Mac's have Office and Photoshop, and I
| haven't personally ran into any games I can't play on Linux.
|
| Shame that Microsoft haven't given Linux Office 365, because
| Microsoft Linux. Right?
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > Shame that Microsoft haven't given Linux Office 365,
| because Microsoft Linux. Right?
|
| For my basic needs, I've found that the office web apps
| actually work much better than the classic ones. Outlook,
| in particular, is much snappier. I use it daily on Firefox
| on Linux for work, since they're married to MS.
| happymellon wrote:
| I use Office via the web and it suits 99% of my cases.
|
| I think the only issues have been some formatting options
| are hidden, I honestly don't remember them because it
| mostly works.
|
| It was more a cheap jab that they don't want to actually
| support Linux.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I think that with the move to the web and web app
| everything, there are fewer and fewer reasons for people
| to use Windows as a client OS outside of specialty
| software.
|
| Hell, my last two HP laptops, nothing fancy, had _worse_
| hardware support on Windows than on Linux (where they
| were working 100% since day one), even with all the HP
| drivers installed. Took them about a year to fix this. So
| even "don't need to futz around with drivers" is no
| longer a reason.
|
| And I think MS realizes this, seeing that recent .net
| things work on Linux, MSSQL Server now works on Linux
| (but not the studio, though). So, I guess they're just
| trying their damnedest to stay at least somewhat
| relevant. Companies are usually a bit slower to change
| user-facing things, so I guess MS won't go out of their
| way to help with the switch.
| protoster wrote:
| I use Ubuntu (as stock as possible) for my media center PC,
| here are some reasons off the top of my head that prevent me
| from using desktop Linux for anything more serious:
|
| Bluetooth connection to my headset sometimes causes the
| entire system to hard lock, requiring physical reset.
|
| Sound sometimes goes static-y, have to reboot to fix.
|
| I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a
| sound output device that I didn't want to use.
|
| Tearing of full screen video, I don't even remember how I
| fixed it.
|
| A notification about something called "snap store" keeps
| coming up and needs a command line fix to dismiss.
|
| The built-in app store keeps notifying me about a firmware
| update for my wireless keyboard. I'm not interested, and
| there is no way to dismiss it.
|
| Firefox on Linux has an obnoxious habit of refusing to open a
| new tab until I restart it for updates (that were installed
| automatically, not through the system updates app). Sure, I
| want my browser up-to-date, but this is not an issue on
| Windows where it will never force you to restart the
| application. I looked around why this is the way it is, and
| the answers were that it had to do with how Linux works.
|
| And, yeah, games.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I'm always surprised whenever these Bluetooth issues come
| up. The best Bluetooth experience I've had is with Linux,
| by far.
|
| I have a BT keyboard (keychron), mouse (mx master 3s) and
| two headphones. They've all always connected instantly
| under Linux.
|
| The headsets can use LDAC and aptx HD, which are both
| unsupported under Windows but work perfectly under Linux.
|
| The mouse has noticeable lag under Windows, while under
| Linux it's indistinguishable from its wireless (non-BT)
| dongle. Installing the Logitech app and drivers doesn't
| change anything.
|
| The keyboard and headphones usually take a while to connect
| under windows.
|
| Except for the mouse, I've had these same peripherals on
| multiple PCs, all with Intel wireless cards, and all have
| exhibited the same difference in behavior between Windows
| and Linux.
|
| > I had to download a third party tweaker app to disable a
| sound output device that I didn't want to use.
|
| This is weird, I can disable any and all sound peripherals
| from the pulse audio control panel. I don't use ubuntu,
| though, so not sure what its default apps are.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Switch to Debian and install the Mozilla Firefox package
| rather than the distro's version. The bullshit will
| disappear.
| josephg wrote:
| I get that staticy sound problem from time to time on linux
| mint. `sudo killall pulseaudiod` seems to reset it without
| needing a reboot.
| noahtallen wrote:
| All my audio problems (including this) were fixed by
| switching to pipewire
| stathibus wrote:
| This little thread already has like five different
| versions of "Linux works great for me, you just need to
| fizzbang the wagglesprocket"
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| For bluetooth issues pipewire may be a magic bullet. It was
| for me.
| toastal wrote:
| I decided to switch back to analog headphones that don't
| require firmware updates from proprietary apps only
| available on Android/iOS with tracking built in. You
| can't get much simpler than inserting a wire into a jack
| --and as a bonus with detachable cables they can last
| over a decade & don't have batteries I'd have to repair
| in two years but can't because of how they're designed to
| be e-waste.
| herbst wrote:
| Ubuntu is well known for blowing their operating systems
| up. It's not unusual to disable a few things on a fresh
| Ubuntu.
|
| One thing I vaguely remember is bluetooth being started
| with more options that you generally need. Can't remember
| what options I removed but using a more bare Bluetooth
| driver often fixes things.
|
| You can control your sound output via alsa, usually a alsa
| control is shipped with Ubuntu.
|
| Annoying you with snap is one of those typical Ubuntu
| things why people stopped recommending it.
|
| So yeah, try using not Ubuntu
| stathibus wrote:
| MacOS requires that I purchase apple hardware at absurd brand
| markup, so that's out.
|
| I use Linux at work because I have good IT support and I
| don't rely on any windows only software. Neither are the case
| at home.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > at absurd brand markup
|
| The markup for Apple hardware is really not big at all.
| They just don't have a budget option. If you compare
| macbooks to really any competing device the prices are
| similar (and the competing device will be much worse). Same
| situation when comparing iPhone to flagship Android. In
| fact, new iPhones are often cheaper than new flagship
| Android phones.
|
| There was once a time where what you said is true, where a
| truly great Windows laptop could be had for half the price
| or less than a mac, and a flagship Android phone could be
| had for half the price or less than an iPhone, but that was
| in the past. Now, there is almost price parity.
| stathibus wrote:
| I run mid to high end desktops. It's not even close.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't know about desktop mac pricing, I'm referring to
| laptops. Desktops can surely be built for cheaper.
| Desktops with screens as good as the iMacs? Not sure.
| Laptops? No way
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Use a simple distro and look at WINE or OSS alternatives?
| What program do you really need that is Windows only?
| stathibus wrote:
| With great effort you can achieve a partial solution. I'm
| not interested in a new hobby, I want my computer to
| actually work without me fucking with it incessantly.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| It doesn't require 'great effort' at all. Maybe 10 years
| ago.
|
| There's a reason numerous governments and industries have
| switched over. I suspect you are vastly overestimating
| the complexity and trouble you would face in switching.
| stathibus wrote:
| I already said I use Linux at work, I know exactly what
| I'm talking about.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| With your comments referring to how hard or complex you
| think switching would be, it doesn't seem like it. But
| OK.
| bytehowl wrote:
| I have recently put Fedora with KDE on my work laptop and
| here are a couple of reasons off the top of my head (I
| believe I have come across more, but can't remember them
| right now) why I'm currently not considering switching from
| W10 on my home stuff:
|
| - I don't game that much anymore, but yeah, I hear games are
| still far from 100% on Linux.
|
| - There are various graphical issues linked to fractional
| scaling (I think), such as random lines appearing near the
| edges of windows or windows leaving behind lines when being
| dragged around, etc.
|
| - My external monitor doesn't appear to be affected by energy
| management settings (dimming/sleeping after some time, etc.)
| whatsoever.
|
| - There is no option to disable the touchpad when a mouse is
| connected.
|
| - Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with
| seemingly no global way to change it (I wonder who came up
| with THAT genius bit of UX).
|
| - A lot of things can still only be achieved via the
| terminal.
| nunodonato wrote:
| Pasting with middle-mouse button was a thing even before
| auto-scroll existed! And yes, for us who grew with it, its
| a damn good feature, I couldn't care less for auto-scroll,
| but I love my middle-mouse paste :)
| bytehowl wrote:
| Your hand never leaves the position where you can just
| Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Scrolling through a long document
| requires either a ton of mouse-wheeling, fiddling around
| with the scrollbar or letting go of the mouse and using
| PgUp/Dn, and out of those, only the scrollbar can be
| faster than autoscroll.
|
| Either way, it should be a configurable option, not
| hardcoded deep inside the bowels of the system, which
| appears to be the case as far as I have been able to
| determine.
| gpderetta wrote:
| When I use Windows I'm always annoyed by the lack of
| advanced WM features: focus-follow-mouse, windows always
| on top, etc. But the thing I miss the most is the
| transparent copy on select and paste on mid-button. I
| always have to end up doing it twice.
| dagw wrote:
| _focus-follow-mouse, windows always on top_
|
| For what it's worth Windows has (had? don't know about
| Windows 11) both of these, but they're either buried in
| the registry or need Microsoft PowerToys to enable.
| gpderetta wrote:
| The only place I really use windows is at work, so I'm
| not at liberty to install additional applications
| unfortunately.
|
| I did manage to enable follow focus a while ago, but it
| didn't behave as I was used to (I don't remember the
| details), so I disabled it.
| haunter wrote:
| I installed Fedora recently and 30s in the first bug:
| dnfdragora missing the update button
|
| https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/dnfdragora-missing-
| up...
| sph wrote:
| dnfdragora is terrible. Either you use GNOME
| Software/Discover, or dnf from the command line.
|
| Just don't use dnfdragora, and it is not an official GUI
| anyway.
| dagw wrote:
| _Middle mouse button is paste instead of autoscroll with
| seemingly no global way to change it_
|
| Unix was the first to start using 3 button mice as
| standard, almost a decade before they really showed up in
| Windows world, and paste on middle mouse click has always
| been the standard behaviour in the Unix world, so changing
| it now would be very weird for *nix users. Whether Linux
| should follow the common Unix defaults or Windows defaults
| for their UI/UX has been a long running debate in the
| community.
|
| I would personally be really confused and annoyed if I sat
| down at a Linux machine and middle click didn't paste,
| because that is the behaviour I've been seeing for
| literally 25 years.
| bytehowl wrote:
| Well, sticking with outdated 30-year-old defaults seems
| to be par for the course when it comes to Linux. I just
| wish there was an OPTION to change them (especially when
| Linux fans keep pushing the narrative about how much more
| customizable it is).
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why outdated? The Linux way of copy paste (or better
| select and middle click) is so much better than using
| ctrl+c/v, if you want to stick to your inferior behaviour
| that's fine (I have a mouse wheel for scrolling) a quick
| Google brought up this
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/101867/make-
| mouse-m...
|
| Just don't force us to use the same behaviour by default.
| bytehowl wrote:
| Outdated because it has been replaced by a better feature
| which has no equivalent anywhere else on the keyboard or
| mouse on other systems - as far as I can tell, not even
| Mac with its Unix heritage uses MMB paste.
|
| Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V is superior. The shortcuts are easily
| accessible and you can use it to select and replace a
| specific part in the middle of text. If you try that with
| MMB-pasting, you will just overwrite your clipboard with
| the part of the text you want to replace, due to the
| selection-to-clipboard feature.
|
| The answers from your "quick Google" only provided
| solutions for specific programs, solutions with self-
| admitted performance issues and a solution for X11 when
| I'm on Wayland. At a glance, the latter two look pretty
| hacky too.
|
| Lastly, stop putting words in my mouth. I have said my
| issue was that the "Middle mouse button is paste instead
| of autoscroll with seemingly _no global way to change it_
| " and "I just wish there was an OPTION to change them".
| It is YOU who is forcing your defaults on me, without
| even a consideration that my preference may also be
| valid.
| dagw wrote:
| While I don't agree the parent posters view on the middle
| mouse, if you actually read the link you posted you would
| find that none of the answers suggested there actually
| solve the problem and in fact offer pretty convincing
| evidence that reproducing the desired behaviour cannot be
| reasonably done in Linux. Dismissively saying "you're
| holding it wrong" or posting links to irrelevant forum
| posts while telling people to RTFM isn't a winning
| argument for Linux. If you're going to tell someone to
| RTFM at least make sure you're pointing them to the
| correct M that contains the answer they're looking for.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| For me, it's Visual Studio. I'm thinking about trying a
| windows 8 vm with VS2019 though.
| dagw wrote:
| Even though I've been using Linux desktops for 20 years, for
| me it's mostly CAD, BIM and 3D design apps still keeping me
| at least partially 'stuck' on windows
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Well, yeah. It's less of a hassle to run games on Windows.
| Also, in my case, photoshop and Lightroom.
|
| So, as another poster said, my solution is to have two pcs. A
| laptop with Linux I use basically all the time, and a desktop
| with an actual GPU for when I want to play or mess around
| with my photography.
|
| This arrangement works well enough, since for my everyday
| needs the iGPU is more than enough, and I would rather not
| lug around a 10-pound brick with a dedicated GPU. And, in my
| particular situation, it's actually cheaper since my desktop
| is a hand-me-down from work which only required a new GPU,
| which at the time was beefier and cheaper than what I could
| have had in a laptop.
| newjersey wrote:
| I've given up on a one computer solution. I am currently on
| multiple computers. One thinkpad and an old dell optiplex run
| Fedora. Main desktop runs Windows. I can still ssh into my
| old dell optiplex from my windows desktop with its nice
| windows 11 power shell terminal. I can switch over to my
| thinkpad t490s and use Fedora with gnome (and still ssh into
| my dell optiplex because all of them are on the same home
| Internet connection and router (and same switch other than
| the thinkpad).
|
| One thing I've noticed is remmina isn't quite the same as
| mstsc windows Remote Desktop but I think it is high praise
| that I could even get to the point of someday expecting it...
| Ballas wrote:
| I held the same belief until I made the switch. First on my
| work laptop, then at some point I realized I'm not using my
| Windows machine at all, now I only have Windows VMs for the
| rare occasion that I need to run something on it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I always thought it was quite funny how there was this dichotomy
| between Windows and macOS, with often the former being seen as
| more reliable or better for "getting work done". Then it seems
| that people remained in their camps to some degree, and over the
| last 5 to 10 years Windows has absolutely tanked in quality and
| appropriateness and a lot of those who use it barely seem to have
| noticed. Can you even imagine Apple putting Daily Mail articles
| in your dock for example? There would be vast backlash, but
| somehow this absolutely egregious, OS-destroying stuff that
| Windows is doing recently has been largely brushed off.
|
| Sorry to sound like the trope of an annoying mac fanboy, but
| Windows is grosser than ever, and I want nothing to do with it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Can you even imagine Apple putting Daily Mail articles in your
| dock for example?
|
| Currently the notification center on my mac has stories from
| USA Today and The Washington Post. It's not that different.
| moondev wrote:
| Dosen't macOS put an undismissable red notification in your
| dock if you are not logged in to iCloud?
| tmnvix wrote:
| Not for me
| devinprater wrote:
| I guess this is one good thing about being blind and using a
| screen reader. It never has to focus on those ads, so I never see
| them. Of course, MS folks probably come here oh dear God they're
| gonna turn them into notifications so I have to hear them now I'm
| sure. Can't wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to
| Linux.
| jraph wrote:
| > Can't wait until KDE is accessible so I can switch to Linux
|
| I'm curious (as a KDE user myself), why KDE and how do you know
| it's the one you want given it's not accessible? Why not any
| other desktop environment?
|
| By the way, your testimony to the KDE team could matter!
| themoonisachees wrote:
| What features would you need out of KDE to make it accessible
| to you?
| kjuulh wrote:
| After having been on Linux for years (Debian server and Arch
| desktop), and MacOS for work. Having to use Windows is downright
| jarring. Every time I have to fix something, or do regular tasks
| it become apparent how little windows is suited by itself for
| power users.
|
| As mentioned in the article, it can't get used to ads or tabloid
| news everywhere, it just feels wrong. I could spend some time
| removing them, but I'd rather not have to fight with Microsoft
| every time the product updates, I'd rather just avoid using it
| entirely. It is insane that you pay for a product, but is still
| served ads or tabloid news.
|
| When I use debian for my server usage, I have most of the
| essential tools available, but when I use windows I either have
| to install a whole bunch of tools, or make do with the lackluster
| experience. I dread having to fix a windows server installation.
|
| MacOS as well feels overrated, the UX has gotten noticeably worse
| over the years, unnecessary notifications that doesn't go away
| themselves, lackluster window management out of the box. MacOS is
| best for me when it exposes its unix roots so I can just get to
| work, the native stuff feels half baked at best. It does feel
| fast at least (m1 is a beast, by far the best laptop I've ever
| owned)
|
| Linux (Arch) feels like it puts the user in control, I've had
| less errors for my arch home-server (which does see quite a bit
| of traffic), it does have sharp edges but I always feel in
| control of what is going on, or at least have the tools to fix
| it.
|
| The desktop side is not quite as reliable, I've had to tinker
| with the bluetooth settings more than I'd like, that and audio
| (which may be a kde issue). Steam has been great, and I rarely
| have to jump into windows anymore.
|
| Linux (Debian) feels solid, it has been super reliable over the
| years.
|
| I may have become too used to the Linux way, which is why I am
| shitting a bit on Windows and MacOS, and those product definitely
| aren't for me. So take my rant with a grain of salt.
| DuckFeathers wrote:
| I had been using Linux and macOS for many years mostly because
| as a developer, you were not supposed to use Windows.
|
| In late 2019, when I got my new work computer, I decided to try
| it out.
|
| The Windows 10 experience was surprising. Imagine never having
| problems with wireless bluetooth, WiFi, graphics card etc.
| Imagine everything always working and never having to worry
| about updates breaking anything. That is what I got with
| Windows coming from Linux.
|
| Thankfully, I had given up on macOS a long time ago after a few
| years of use, because it is deliberately developer-hostile.
| Added bonus is the fact that I don't have to take the label of
| an Apple user... and it is not based on what non-Apple users
| think of Apple users. I couldn't care about it less had the
| devices worked for me. It is entirely based on how other Apple
| users talk to you when they think you are an Apple user. It
| always made me wonder how otherwise intelligent people can be
| like that about a brand. They act like they are "different" in
| a way that they should feel better about themselves because
| they bought this product. It somehow feels disgusting to be
| associated with them.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Not sure how old you are but this is really just an
| indictment of Linux.
|
| Both Mac OS and Windows have had this stuff sorted out for
| decades. Windows was not as good at it 20 years ago but it
| was still very good at it. Mac has been phenomenal at it even
| longer, largely because of the limited number of hardware
| configurations.
|
| It has always been a chore in Linux. Always. It's a hard
| problem to solve with the extreme diversity of PC hardware,
| and Microsoft really started doing a good job with it around
| Win 95 and later. Prior to that Dos & Windows 3.x you did
| have to jump through a lot of the same hoops linux is famous
| for.
|
| Linux has gotten better but is still relatively terrible
| about this. Users are not supposed to have to search
| compatibility lists and tweak config files to the degree they
| still are.
| superhuzza wrote:
| >Imagine never having problems with wireless bluetooth, WiFi,
| graphics card etc. Imagine everything always working and
| never having to worry about updates breaking anything.
|
| That's exactly how I felt when I started using MacOS after
| many years on Windows laptops!
| kjuulh wrote:
| I agree. Window especially was nice compared to the previous
| version (7 was great too). Wsl2 is a blessing.
|
| The drivers often just work. The sad thing is for desktop
| usage you often have to choose the drivers preferred way of
| updating. I.e. downloading graphics card updates, as opposed
| to through the package manager. I haven't investigated
| whether it is possible via. chocolatey yet.
|
| Linux desktop still feels quite grassroots. Especially as it
| is community effort to bring a lot of drivers to it. It is
| still quite sad that the Nvidia support is as poor as it is.
|
| I have only experienced the elitism or whatever you want to
| call it from non-tech friends and family. Apple's marketing
| definitely worked. Also the entire Intel saga was quite bad
| for their brand in regards to developers. At work some of us
| have been upgraded to m1, and others are still on intel the
| last few generations before m1 was published. It really is
| apparent how different those machines are. Intel macs are
| loud, overheat and unstable as all hell, while m1s are super
| solid for the most part. I wish I could buy a Linux laptop
| with the same specs and quality, I would pay a pretty penny
| for it, I have to give asahi a shot one of these days, if the
| company allows =D
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Windows + WSL works pretty well. I have all kinds of distros
| installed using Lxrunoffline, e.g. Debian Bullseye, Ubuntu etc.
| and WSL1 + WSL2 in parallel. I also start most of my Windows
| programs through WSL these days.
| kjuulh wrote:
| It really is a blessing. I feel like I can in good conscience
| publish my tools as *Nix only these days, because I know that
| my windows users can just launch it through wsl without
| problems. Now I don't have to deal with msvc and so on. Super
| nice.
|
| That said I don't even know if it is a viable option for
| windows server, but probably not =D
| M95D wrote:
| And Linux is different? Do you have ANY IDEEA how hard it is to
| prevent the installation of dbus or systemd?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| It's also pretty hard to prevent installation of libc. It's
| part of the OS, like dbus and systemd. There are distros of
| Linux that don't use systemd.
|
| And I'm a power user who loves systemd. :)
| M95D wrote:
| Except when you say "Linux", it's just a kernel. Everything
| else is... not linux. It may be GNU, or a specific computer
| program that uses that kernel.
|
| The original post I replied to argued that Linux puts the
| user in control, unlike Windows or OSX/Apple.
|
| My point is that for the last 10 years or so, it has become
| increasingly difficult to avoid certain parts of a linux-
| based OS, such as systemd and dbus, that reduces user's
| control over the system in the name of convenience.
|
| I would like a Windows without scheduled tasks - no longer
| possible. In the same way as Windows does things on it's
| own, I would feel less in control if a NON-ROOT app could
| open a connection to a wireless network, or auto-mount a
| block device, or start a service/daemon, or change audio
| settings. It's less about how dbus or systemd is set up,
| but more about capabilities. I can't say much about how a
| Linux with those things installed could again be made
| secure, private and obedient to root user, because I never
| had them installed. That's not the point. I simply don't
| like what it CAN do.
|
| PS: I have 3 Linux systems. 2 of them run musl. It's
| actually A LOT easier to change glibc with something else
| than have a desktop without dbus.
| kjuulh wrote:
| To be fair I don't mention those because I've never hard
| problems with them. That said there are definitely some
| architectural thing I don't agree with in regards to systems,
| but overall I am fine with it. I will also take the ini
| format over xml anyday. Though scripting may be more
| intuitive.
|
| The different libc backend is a bit of mess though and it can
| be quite cumbersome to get good compatibility of programs
| between libc variants.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah it's showing classic click bait it makes them look like fb
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Ok, switched to Linux.
|
| What's the best way to help improve the Linux Desktop experience?
| nativeit wrote:
| I couldn't get through the article because the website crashed
| twice when I tried to get rid of one of several modular ad
| windows covering the article's content. The modern internet is a
| dumpster fire, even in articles covering the ways in which the
| modern internet is a dumpster fire.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Indeed. To be honest, if I didn't have reader mode on by
| default, I don't think I'd use the web at all unless I had to
| (aside from sites known to not suck, like this one.) Ad
| blockers simply aren't enough any more, reader view is the only
| way the web works for me at this point. It's truly sad.
| aendruk wrote:
| I gave up when the auto-playing video started following me down
| the page.
|
| I don't understand how they think such hostility is a good
| idea. It only makes me despise the site and note never to
| return. But presumably some people go for it?
| samtho wrote:
| >> How can we get more people to watch our videos?
|
| > Autoplay it!
|
| >> Oh no, they are scrolling away from it now, how do we get
| them to keep watching it?
|
| > literally make it always present on the screen no matter
| where they have scrolled to!
|
| The road to hell, these days, is often paved with marketing
| OKRs.
| davycro wrote:
| I use windows when I work in the emergency department. These ads
| drive me bonkers when I'm trying to use the software to take care
| of patients.
| VLM wrote:
| Everything that's not "space aliens abducted my dog" is too
| politically charged in 2023, so they have to push tabloid content
| to avoid being cancelled.
| shmerl wrote:
| Using KDE is a breeze.
| nikanj wrote:
| They really want Windows to become a tablet OS, and someone
| misheard and turned it into a tabloid instead
| prennert wrote:
| I have the same in Chrome on my Android phone.
|
| Click on open a new tab and tabloid news are shown below the
| shortcuts of often used domains / links. Same when swiping left
| on the start screen (don't know what that screen does as I never
| used it due to the SHOCKING content..)
|
| There cannot be any good in this and it should stop. I see this
| as a notch to getting people accept more cookies etc so Google
| can present more relevant content (it's not like I browse any
| gossip page besides HN). But somehow I doubt that better content
| will be shown in those ad spaces if I allow for more cookies.
| toastal wrote:
| It's trivial to use a different default browser like Bromite or
| Fennec instead of the adware default you were given
| haunter wrote:
| Windows 10 LTSC for the win
| tacoman wrote:
| They've been doing this for almost decade. The last straw for me
| was when they decided to put the smiling face of a murdered woman
| in my start menu. It was just so bizarre.
|
| https://ibb.co/M8Y7gvj
| smusamashah wrote:
| Linking this comment here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 that designers at
| Microsoft use Mac and have been given more power than they
| should. This has been the case for a while. I
| worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10.
| Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most
| crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. I
| spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms
| explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate
| every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had
| been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want
| X, Y, and Z.
|
| There are more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780566
| relaxing wrote:
| MacOS doesn't have tabloid news. I doubt the decision to push
| clickbait was a driven by UX designers.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| Dogfooding should be a requirement for designers.
| marcod wrote:
| I think Ballmer had it right, when he (fake-) stomped that
| iPhone.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It explains why Win11 feels like the UI/UX is trying to imitate
| MacOS.
|
| The thing is, it means Microsoft has completely abandoned
| Windows users that use Windows _because_ it 's not MacOS.
|
| IMO, Win7 with the Classic theme was peak UI. It's been
| downhill ever since, starting first with replacing 3D button
| controls with flat buttons, which reduces discoverability and
| relies on using too much negative space. Over time it turned
| into displaying less information on the screen, like Win11
| eliminating the option to have task bar items show the window
| text, and instead merely having the application icon, which
| then hides how many windows an application, and making
| switching between windows in an app requiring two clicks
| instead of one.
|
| When I eventually install Win11, I'm going to have to buy
| WindowBlinds and Start11 just to make it usable.
| pornel wrote:
| Windows 11 is the number of UI redesigns they've started and
| never finished. Every time you click "Advanced" or
| "Properties" you get a UI from Windows one version older.
| donmcronald wrote:
| From that comment:
|
| > I fought passionately against things like the all-white title
| bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive
| windows apart
|
| That change was the exact point in time that I knew sanity was
| gone and that Windows would get progressively worse over time.
| You can even end up with one window inside another where they
| sort of blend together. It's mind boggling and it's _still_ the
| default.
|
| Whoever is responsible for that mess should be banned from
| touching UI design for the rest of their life. Lol.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Ironically after getting a Mac last year and expecting to hate
| it and put Linux on instead, I found MacOS a far more restful
| and pleasant desktop environment to work in than Windows has
| become. There's a few things I miss, like the File Manager, but
| OTOH I have a proper terminal environment instead.
|
| But mainly I like that it's the same every time unless I alter
| something, that it's very consistent, and that it's not
| constantly trying to steal my attention.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Yeah, I switched from Windows over a decade ago, and I still
| miss Windows File Manager. Nothing I've seen in other OS's
| can seem to match it. There are mods for Mac OS that can
| potentially fix it though.
| mijoharas wrote:
| It's probably been about a decade since I used Windows as
| well so this is probably just my memory, but I don't
| remember anything special about file manager.
|
| What's so good about it?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Try Path Finder
|
| https://www.cocoatech.io/
|
| No association, just a happy user when I had Macs.
| anon291 wrote:
| When it comes to the realm of commercial desktops for
| personal compute, MacOS is the best by far. Unfortunately,
| the only truly usable ones are the open source ones. After
| years of linux usage, I simply cannot operate a windows
| computer. I am impressed by those who can. You seemingly have
| to be a mouse ninja to dismiss the various notifications that
| continuously pop up.
| acedTrex wrote:
| The idea of Windows UI/UX designers having macbooks is so
| absurd to me it's hilarious
| lostgame wrote:
| That's...uh, surprising as hell. The idea of a designer that
| could actually tolerate having to use Windows full-time for
| design work, even at Microsoft; would be much more
| surprising, from my experience.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| The lead designers at Ford might drive Porches on the
| weekends, but I'll bet they still drive Fords into the
| office.
|
| The more painful it is to eat your own dogfood, the more
| it's necessary to do so. But it has to be mandated from the
| top down.
|
| If the only people with the power to actually change the
| product aren't even using it, the god-awful UI/UX decisions
| in the latest version of Windows begin to make sense.
| grouchomarx wrote:
| tells you everything there is to know
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| That Microsoft's designers don't take their jobs seriously?
|
| How on earth could you ever pretend to do you job well
| without using the product you're designing?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I can't imagine anyone starting their first day at
| Microsoft and saying with a straight face: "Yeah, I want
| a Mac."
|
| (Okay, I can imagine it; it's actually pretty funny.)
| [deleted]
| SteveDR wrote:
| That is a disservice to society. Students and workers
| everywhere are forced to deal with stupid headlines on their OS
| 10 hours a day, while the people who make those machines get to
| opt-out. Ridiculous.
| sizzle wrote:
| Blame the PM/PO and executives who greenlighted the tabloid
| filth for "engagement" metrics going up
| tracker1 wrote:
| That explains so very much about the horrible, inconsistent UX.
| Not the Linux is better, far worse imo, but at least it's
| getting better not worse.
| indymike wrote:
| The first thing I remove, disable or brain damage when I get a
| new device is anything that pumps news into notification. I had a
| day where I had been cruising along on a new mac, and then the
| news feed sent me three really gristly rape/murder stories in a
| row. I went from being on a cloud, getting stuff done to
| depressed.
|
| Incidentally, Apple News is not uninstallable (fortunately, you
| can disable it) on Mac and it needs to be for mental health
| reasons.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I have an Apple News app, but I don't think I've ever used it.
| I don't ever see notifications from it, though -- where would
| these appear? Maybe I've disabled it and/or maybe it's more
| insidious in later version of the OS (I'm on Big Sur). If macOS
| ever forces news onto me like that, I'll be moving to Linux.
| indymike wrote:
| It was a later version, and it just started sending
| notifications (that popped up in the corner) after an update.
| Not sure what version it was.
|
| I've never had something unexpected like that actually get to
| me the way those news notifications did, and as a result,
| I've become almost militant about managing notifications.
| Life is too short to have your day ruined by some product
| manager/growth manager trying to get clicks to earn an extra
| $2,000 bonus.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Does Classic Start Menu solve this? (It has its own search box)
| teekert wrote:
| This is insane indeed, on my work laptop I'm forced into Windows,
| what a mess! (Oh the glory of my clean KDE 5.27 on EndeavorOS at
| home, what a contrast, such beauty, such wobbly windows, such
| snappy tiling.)
|
| At some point I saw something about the Kardashians from my
| taskbar! Wtf, I though that with all this analytics Windows would
| at least show me something about Cardasians.
|
| I mean MS365 is nice, VSCode is nice, GitHub is nice... I gladly
| pay for all of it (not VSCode atm of course). But I really prefer
| them all from my clean KDE (or sometimes Gnome) environment. It's
| like Windows is the cheap part of the ecosystem, if you want to
| go full premium you replace that part of the chain with something
| else.
| magwa101 wrote:
| I have Power Toys installed and start everything via PT.
| <cmd>spacebar "application name", just like the old quicksilver
| which was amazing (for mac). PT is great...but crashes an FT.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yep. It's also just plain noise. eg it announces earnings are out
| and there is an accident on the highway.
|
| I don't have a car and no idea which company's earnings they
| think I care about. Nobody takes a step back and wonders whether
| it makes sense
|
| Feels like a real design by committee decision
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Microsoft has a funny way of selling us 'productivity' with
| Windows 11. On one side of the screen, they promise us a sleek
| and smooth user experience that will make our work easier and
| faster. On the other side, they bombard us with widgets full of
| celebrity gossip and sports trivia that have nothing to do with
| our lives. What's the point of that? Are they trying to distract
| us from our work or from their work? Maybe if Windows 11 were
| free, we could forgive them for their sneaky attempts to get us
| hooked on Bing. But no, they want us to pay 200 dollars for this
| dubious privilege. How are we supposed to feel about that?
| Grateful? Impressed? Satisfied? I don't think so.
| Veen wrote:
| Presumably, the teams who develop the OS do want to give us a
| smooth user experience and help us to be productive and
| efficient. But between us and them are other teams tasked with
| extracting the maximum value from Windows users and increasing
| engagement with Microsoft's shittier services.
|
| The same thing happens in web development. The developers and
| designers of news sites don't want to create an unusable mess
| of ads and auto-playing videos, but the business development
| guys love that shit.
| _xander wrote:
| The microsoft org chart comes to mind:
| https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
| hkatx wrote:
| There is a viral clip of Lebron James saying he doesn't pay
| for spotify premium. If a multi millionaire can justify going
| through the friction of the free software, you can argue
| masses feel the same way. An app/service with frictionless UX
| that requires subscription/fees is just going have a very
| small percentage of users. A developer/small team may be
| content with that, but VC funded outfits are advised and need
| to have a massive growth of user to justify further rounds.
| So the app/service has to be free with ads/other dark
| patterns to boost engagement/revenue. (exceptions that come
| to mind are netflix but even they have an ad tier now)
| epolanski wrote:
| A win 11 pro license isn't 200$.
|
| Also, I've never seen an ad in my win 11 installation, on win
| 10 it was trivial to remove them from start.
| dagw wrote:
| _A win 11 pro license isn 't 200$._
|
| A non-OEM Windows pro license bought from a legit reseller is
| actually quite a bit more than $200, at least here in Europe.
| layer8 wrote:
| Officially it is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Wow, this link shows $326 for my country. Even more
| expensive than most legit resellers.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Recently switch to Windows, and my feeling is the "Pro" moniker
| in the OS title has as much weight as in "iPhone Pro".
|
| Under the hood there's price discrimination on the Hypervisor
| and other services that regular users wouldn't use, but there
| seems fundamentally to be no difference in the interface
| between the two versions of the OS.
|
| I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have
| their IT department deal with removing all the crap and
| adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat
| productive. So Microsoft doesn't have to care at all about
| "productivity", and is free to bombard users with all the
| crapware of the worlds as long as there's some remote way to
| disable it.
| yanellena wrote:
| I have Enterprise 11 on a non managed device and I can't
| really recognise many of the comments here. No news or pre-
| loaded spam apps. It's actually a pretty good experience.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Same for me. I have been using Windows 10 Pro on various
| laptops and I have never seen any ads or other kinds of
| bullshit. I always thought that these were only a thing in
| Windows home editions?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Thanks, so it's really their segmentation of the market. I
| saw the Enterprise version of the Surface when buying mine,
| but didn't expect the internal OS was also different.
|
| The price was pretty stiff, so it looks like I got priced
| out of the reasonable default experience.
| nailer wrote:
| I have a Microsoft Surface device and I recognise all of
| them.
|
| Literally would pay more (kind of feel like I already have)
| to avoid advertising. If they sold Surfaces with Enterprise
| by default I'd be happy.
| zokier wrote:
| Enterprises have their own edition which leaves Pro to be
| just prosumer.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > I'd assume enterprise customers (the real "pros") will have
| their IT department deal with removing all the crap and
| adjusting the group policy so the experience is somewhat
| productive.
|
| Ha ha ha. You know what happens when you "assume," right? I
| work for a Fortune 250 with 30K employees. We just "upgraded"
| the fleet at the start of the year. We're getting all the
| crap by default. It takes about 10 seconds for Edge to start
| and show the landing page with all of the stupid garbage. At
| least they NO LONGER prevent us from changing the start page
| on our browsers, and you can turn off the start menu crap.
| The only thing I can figure is that they got a discount on
| the licensing for leaving this stuff enabled. Like the
| general public, I assume that most people inside the company
| just live it.
| Kye wrote:
| Home lacks the group policy editor that's key to fixing so
| many Windows troubles. That's the only UI difference I know
| of.
| bdz wrote:
| Desktop: Windows 10 LTSC (honestly people should use this if
| Windows, it's perfect)
|
| Laptop: Debian
| uncharted9 wrote:
| I've tried getting LTSC copies but they seem to be very
| difficult to source.
| bdz wrote:
| As always, Archive.org https://archive.org/details/en-
| us_windows_10_enterprise_ltsc...
|
| LTSC is awesome, everything removed it's just an official
| vanilla Windows 10. I use it as a daily drive without any
| problems.
| ouid wrote:
| paraphrasing
|
| >It's ok for windows to push sponsored content because Tom's
| hardware is sponsored content, but its not ok to push _bad_
| sponsored content.
|
| I dont understand how you could arrive at this claim. Surely the
| only reasonable diagnosis of the problem is that Windows is
| pushing content at all.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Google too. There's an awesome swipe right screen on android that
| shows travel related information and upcoming events. But then
| they decided to add news articles to it and it's impossible to
| turn them off! You can only disable the entire feature.
| richiebful1 wrote:
| Looks like you can disable the news part by going to the Google
| Now feed > Settings > General. Unselect "Discover"
| deathanatos wrote:
| AFAICT, this just renders the entire pane "useless", with
| nothing but a message,
|
| > _Turn Discover back on to see your feed. You can always
| turn it off in Settings. Turn on Discover_
| ht85 wrote:
| Seeing this makes me really sad for the countless people who are
| forced to use Windows, most of them because they simply do not
| know better.
|
| I have a Windows installation that I boot sometimes and pretty
| much every time I do something despicable happens, though I
| understand I am not the target audience.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As proven by Android, and Netbooks before it, having OEMs
| shipping Linux distributions won't change it.
| ht85 wrote:
| Of course, because linux targeted at non-tech users allows
| greedy publishers to do the same things as microsoft.
|
| I used to think educating people was a solution, which it
| might be to some extent... truth is without regulations
| brought and enforced by people who understand the modern
| digital world and have the end users best interest in mind
| (lol), the cat will never go back to the box.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yes, I keep an old laptop around with Windows 10, which
| sometimes goes months without powering on. When I do boot it
| again, it potentially takes hours of non-deterministically
| finding and downloading and installing updates over multiple
| reboots.
|
| Compare to powering on a Linux machine and bringing it up-to-
| date in one shot with "sudo dnf upgrade."
| herbst wrote:
| Same here. I even have WMs wake up after a year of not using
| them just to watch them instantly break themselfs.
|
| It's not fun, it's 2022 and fixing OS level issues shouldn't be
| what we spend our time on
| nathants wrote:
| https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer
| buro9 wrote:
| There was a time when operating systems were pretty good and the
| future was full of hope. Windows was capable and felt modern, Mac
| felt powerful and had neat things like "delete an app to fully
| uninstall an app".
|
| It feels like both of the major desktop/laptop operating systems
| have been on a downward spiral for a good long while. I'd left
| Windows about 15-20 years ago for Linux, and then made it to Mac
| -- but to my surprise I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to
| be and definitely not stable.
|
| That's what I feel now -- which is least worse?
|
| That is hard, because they're both pretty damn bad especially if
| you don't want to use an Apple account or Microsoft account.
|
| Linux is least worst, but let's be clear that to say that you're
| already accepting terrible power management on a laptop and fun
| with audio visual things and having to hope your job doesn't
| require some piece of proprietary software.
|
| Least worse if you do need proprietary software? It's all bad,
| may as well use Windows with a Mac wallpaper or vice versa just
| to signal general disdain at the hellscape we've collectively
| incentivised.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > I found Mac was a lot worse than it used to be and definitely
| not stable.
|
| Can you clarify this comment? I haven't seen any stability
| problems in macOS for years.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah likewise. In ten years of macbook use the only change
| that really threw me a bit was stopping 32 bit apps working.
| herbst wrote:
| To be fair the power management issue is pretty much a niche
| issue at this point. Sure if you run closed down hardware like
| a Mac book don't except your drivers to work from day 1.
|
| If you go for a ThinkPad however there are usually no issues.
| Plus you can usually fix the power issues by just installing
| the right drivers or disable one or two well documented
| settings
| bpfrh wrote:
| thinkpads do have issues...
|
| S3 was disabled on some models which meant for the first 6
| months of release you couldn't go to sleep.
|
| The new thinkpad yoga x gen 10 uses a intel webcam which uses
| a special binary blob and doesn't work out of the box, but
| only if you buy it with windows installed, which makes for a
| fun game of "does-this-laptop-support-linux-out-of-the-box"
|
| The thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 has problems when waking up:
|
| * Sometimes not waking up until you plug in a power problem
|
| * Sometimes having to disable/enable the trackpad to make all
| buttons work again.
|
| I'm quite happy with using linux on my devices, but many
| modern thinkpads have issues.
|
| Edit: didn't want to sound aggressive
| heleninboodler wrote:
| My linux ThinkPad has a roughly 25% chance of failing to
| sleep when I close the lid, causing it to go from 100%
| battery to completely dead the next day when I take it out of
| my bag. I've caught it not even turning off the screen
| sometimes (you can see the glow through the crack).
| KirillPanov wrote:
| The secret trick for flawless power management and sleep on
| Linux is to buy a Chromebook and put Linux on it.
|
| They're natively Linux machines to begin with. All the
| manufacturer-coded power management stuff is upstream in the
| mainline kernel already.
| kichimi wrote:
| When was this? People have been moaning about Windows for over
| 30 years. If you just go by headlines, Windows has been getting
| worse and less capable with absolutely no improvement, and
| there are people who (probably on this site) unironically think
| Windows is worse now than it was in the Windows 3.1 days.
| vcryan wrote:
| I make a conscious effort not to read any generic news and this
| would drive me insane. Even reading something like hackernews,
| there is a time and a place for that.
| elboru wrote:
| I ignored it by not using the "Search" bar, I simply just never
| used it. Until recently, when they started showing a colorful
| drawing on my taskbar that changed depending the current holiday.
| It was so annoying and distracting, thankfully I had the option
| to hide the search bar I also hided the useless widget bar.
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| polotics wrote:
| Indeed this kind of trash helped me get back to my senses and
| switch to Mac...
| thih9 wrote:
| Note that this is the case elsewhere, we just learned to ignore
| or block that ad space.
|
| This article itself on my mobile has in its body:
|
| > Sponsored Links / The 5 Books To Read To Transform Your Life /
| Blinkist Magazine
| Farbklex wrote:
| I just want to be able to pay once and not get annoyed by any
| crappy news or adds.
|
| I am super annoyed about my Sony Android TV which for weeks shows
| me a huge "Audi" add that fills half the home screen. I am not
| going to buy that car ffs!
| pharmakom wrote:
| This will never end. Just move to Linux. Wine (and proton) are
| very good these days. For everything else there's Virtual Box.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Would be cool if you could replace the news source with an rss
| feed
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| That would be handy. Designing your own front page to the
| internet was the height of web 2.0 AJAX & RSS but the idea is
| still valid and haven't seen a better replacement for what was
| easy back then despite Reddit's catchphrase.
| kyriakos wrote:
| it may be possible for someone to hack this functionality
| into windows 11
| charles_f wrote:
| I dont use windows search anymore, it's way too slow and
| imprecise. I use wox and everything instead.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| I work at Microsoft. This shit, along with "shopping toolbars"
| and "BNPL" in the Edge browser, is frankly embarrassing.
| midjji wrote:
| This is the way skype died, sure appears like they haven't
| learned their lesson.
| pharmakom wrote:
| A Windows PC... isn't really your Personal Computer. Same for
| Android, iOS, Macs... it's just that Microsoft (and some Android
| manufacturers) are abusing the power more than most.
| ofchnofc wrote:
| HN, literally "Hacker News" where people will spend (not an
| exaggeration) a decade complaining about Windows and macOS
| issues, with all sorts of workarounds, homebrew, homebrew
| workarounds and more, and yet still offer up their Ubuntu 18.04
| experiences as if they're indicative of where Desktop Linux is
| today.
|
| I have auto ZFS snapshots, the choice of 5+ competent desktop
| environments, every piece of software I need and use (including
| Halo, emulators, etc), an immutable OS, rollbacks to nearly any
| point in time, have never, ever, ever had anything "break", and
| have never remotely seen an advertisement or nagware, ever. Not
| to mention that my NixOS skills directly translate to running
| servers the way they're meant to be run. With my recently setup
| zrepl, I also have an exact replica of all of my data on a
| portable SSD. I can travel with a single laptop and know that I
| can literally get it back to its identical state in about 15
| minutes, should it ever be broken or stolen. Entire classes of
| anxieties eliminated in a way that other OSes can't even dream
| of, on top of complete control, and again no nagware.
|
| It's about tradeoffs and I'd much rather put up some up front
| investment and then never think about it again. Go re-install
| Windows and watch how long it takes to disable all the telemetry,
| un-privacy features, default browsers, application and desktop
| configuration, etc. And then realize for maybe 3x that cost, you
| could _learn something new_ and move past all of this nonsense.
| Or just keep dealing with Windows Updates and Bing shoved
| everywhere it doesn 't belong.
| schemescape wrote:
| Contrast the distracting tabloid news by default with Microsoft's
| mission statement:
|
| > Our mission is to empower every person and every organization
| on the planet to achieve more.
|
| Seems like a fail to me...
| tlb wrote:
| There could be (and probably is) some little app that sets good
| defaults in Windows and turns off all the abuseware. But who
| would trust such an app? At some level, the problem is that any
| company big enough to build a trusted brand is going to follow
| its incentives to just stick a few ads on your screen. We see it
| also with VPNs and adblockers.
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| There are a couple well-followed free utilities that turn off
| all the Windows telemetry and clean up the junk from a fresh
| Windows install. They're trusted by communities that would
| instantly abandon them if they showed signs of "selling out".
| They manage to stay free and trustworthy as passion projects,
| mostly.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| It's to the point that it's embarrassing to use in a professional
| setting.
|
| You are sharing your screen and suddenly you access the stupid
| "news" menu, popping up with tabloid and perhaps the weather at
| best.
|
| I try my best to use this software and disable what I can, but
| after an update to the OS or Edge you have to reconfigure stuff,
| and suddenly it has added back some horrible defaults.
|
| Okay, it's "free" I guess.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I stopped using Windows after 7 and every time I have to briefly
| dip back in or work with a modern Windows machine it just
| completely floors me that Microsoft does this advertising. It is
| the most cheap and tacky nonsense, and I agree it's always trashy
| tabloid news. I honestly think far worse about the Microsoft
| product teams because deep in the company multiple teams and
| people all greenlit this idea and decided that yes it's very good
| and should be shipped. It's god awful and no one stopped it.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| Windows 11 Pro retails for $200, but behaves as if it were free
| and makes you a product.
|
| MacOS is locked in to vendor's hardware.
|
| Linux's support for closed source drivers is not that great.
|
| I wish there was an open source OS with stable driver ABI, so
| even closed source driver blobs would work for decades.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Slightly ironic that this page shows me ads like "Stop Buying
| Lottery Tickets & Start Doing This Instead - Yukon Gold Casino"
| kramerger wrote:
| Pro tip:
|
| Disable search & news, install Microsoft PowerToys and use
| PowerToys Run. Never open the start menu again
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run
| isusycamore wrote:
| The dichotomy of Microsoft focusing on productivity tools, yet
| putting this garbage in their operating system.
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| Immediately on a new Windows install, I always rush to group
| policy to disable certain creepy and distracting features:
| Cortana, Widgets, OneDrive (I pay for a different cloud service),
| Xbox Game Bar, etc. Hopping on other machines I'm oftern struck
| by how janky and unusable Windows is by default. Lately I've
| noticed that the "new features" for feature updates tend to focus
| on add-ons like widgets rather than core functionality or
| stability, in other words Windows is more stagnant for me.
| Increasingly I'm considering linux despite using Windows for work
| (Adobe apps) and gaming... for the latter I recently purchased MS
| Flight Simulator without realizing an MS account is required. I'm
| not sure if I will try to play it or not.
| yabones wrote:
| I find it funny that it took them the entire lifespan of
| Windows 10 to finish moving everything from Control Panel to
| the 'Settings' app.
| joenathanone wrote:
| There are many things still not there, all the admin tools
| for example.
| beaugunderson wrote:
| There are still things only in Control Panel though!
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Notably, the ability to set a default (and enable/disable)
| audio device. Inevitably, windows will decide to make
| HDMI/DP the default output. And the ability to change the
| gain on your mic: cheap mics are way too quiet in windows,
| especially in discord.
| sizzle wrote:
| This has also been bothering me on my work machine. I can't
| believe Microsoft is getting away with peddling this tabloid news
| spam during work hours on corporate machines
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| I don't want _anything_ , any type of news being pushed by my OS.
| It simply isn't it's job. Maybe, as an option or optional add-on,
| but not the way MS does it.
|
| I use 10 now, as locked down and 'fixed' as I was able to make it
| (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some
| fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it
| altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS
| community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when
| it was good at least).
|
| The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things
| and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I'm so in love
| with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize
| and program _every_ part of my UI, allowing me to have something
| absolutely perfect and tailor made.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| It really ought to not exist, but if there has to be a news
| section, it needs to come with a few (like four or five) of the
| most respected news orgs in your locale, and be very easy to
| switch in or out.
|
| But otherwise, I agree with you. Windows should not be in the
| business of syndicating news. That should be the job of a third
| party widget (maybe provided by MSN!) that you install if
| you're interested.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| At this point I'm so used to using Feedbro with Firefox to
| get my news, getting it as part of the OS doesn't even occur
| to me. I'm not too sure how useful that would be either since
| I'd likely just end up clicking on a link.
|
| I agree with you though if it exists it should optional and
| from credible (or from user selectable) sources.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I wouldn't mind a built-in RSS reader that I can use to display
| NPR, National Weather Service, or other sources. It should
| definitely start as a blank slate and allow the user to add
| sources. Build it into Edge browser. A button on the browser
| allows adding the source to the reader. Sites not containing
| feeds can invoke bing chat or some AI to wrangle the page to
| the feed.
|
| This can be done in a user respecting and useful way but that
| doesn't make $
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Defaulting to nothing won't happen, because too many users
| won't know it's a feature that exists and they can tune. That
| said, making it RSS driven and letting any user who cares
| replace it would be a good idea.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Default to a placeholder that tells them how it works or a
| link to a microsoft blog explaining the feature.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Why bother doing that? No one is going to read an article
| about a feature they don't use and imagine using it and
| then go out of their way to sign up. People will see
| something in use, say "I wish it was all NPR" and go
| change it.
| OwlsParlay wrote:
| This, I find even trying to ignore news sources doesn't work.
| I continually try to prune the more tabloid papers like Daily
| Mail / Express / Sun but no avail.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah... I like parts of Edge, and tried to train the news
| feed on the new tab screen, but eventually just disabled
| the news from showing up on that screen. I'm sure it's the
| same underlying service for the Windows News feeds.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| That's _sorta_ what Apple News is, but you can't add your own
| sources and it isn't an RSS reader. It's an app that can be
| deleted, and it only appears in the OS using the same APIs
| that other apps have access to (widgets). I also don't think
| they push tabloid content by default, they push the biggest
| news outlets (probably the ones that pay Apple the most).
|
| I get that a company the size of Apple or Microsoft are going
| to want to have syndication deals. It should not be
| integrated so directly with the OS though, and should
| absolutely be removable (really, out of principle it
| shouldn't be installed by default).
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Come over to Mint, it has the feel of windows but it's fully
| customisable and works out of the box.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I'm an Ubuntu user at work and a Windows (desktop)/Arch
| (server) user at home. Wikipedia says that Mint is based on
| Ubuntu, but it doesn't really explain why I would use it over
| Ubuntu itself. What does Mint add?
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > What does Mint add?
|
| For you, nothing. The UI is just more Windows-esque.
|
| It's often recommended to Windows users to make their
| transition to Linux desktops easier.
| neogodless wrote:
| Yeah, I really like Mint, and I wish _everything_ worked, but
| there was just enough not working (for my particular
| configuration and use cases) that I went back to Windows 10.
|
| https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm
| TinkersW wrote:
| I have installed mint recently, dual boot with windows.
|
| I mostly like it, but it does have one major downside.. the
| 4k font scaling is terrible compared to windows. When I
| adjust font scaling on windows it _only_ modifies font size.
| When I do it in mint, it messes up a bunch of other things,
| and games start running at the wrong screen size etc.
|
| So I still ended up mostly using Windows almost entirely
| because of this issue.. (These search ads/news can be
| disabled that this post is talking about, so not a problem
| for me).
| naikrovek wrote:
| thank God you shared your opinion. we were all wondering what
| you do specifically.
|
| we were all hanging off the edges of our seats!
|
| I seriously want to know why people hijack threads like this to
| tell us how they've solved the issue as they uniquely see it to
| their own unique liking in their own unique situation in their
| own unique way.
|
| 1) no one asked. why you would want to show & tell at this
| point in time and in this location just puzzles me ceaselessly.
|
| 2) relatively few people are going to view your solution as
| something they can even use, because of their own unique
| constraints.
|
| 3) you're making an assumption that people want to see these
| solutions unprompted, which is quite a leap, especially here.
| we mostly know how to solve these things for ourselves.
|
| 4) (and the only correct move you have made) you're definitely
| on a site with a lot of hatred for Microsoft, so you've got
| ears listening, I suppose.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| HN user discovers comment sections and social (media)
| interaction at the same time.
| glitcher wrote:
| > I seriously want to know why people hijack threads
|
| I see what you did there.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| You seem new to the internet. Welcome!
| asveikau wrote:
| Want to say that MSN headlines have appeared in Windows for a
| long time. Vista had an RSS reader sidebar where the defaults
| were set to MSN.
| jgaa wrote:
| > I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my
| OS.
|
| Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your
| interests and sell that information to their "partners"?
|
| It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system.
| What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you
| can run applications if you are really disciplined and
| persistent. I don't understand how people keep up with it.
|
| I've used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > I don't understand how people keep up with it.
|
| For gaming / work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a
| .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess
| VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but
| otherwise, Windows is the main platform.
|
| I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Rider is definitely usable on Linux... it works on MacOS
| and Windows as well, and imo, better than VS for Mac. I've
| pretty much stuck to VS Code for pretty much everything,
| though the conspiracy theorist in me thinks MS
| intentionally gimps functionality in the VS Code extension
| support for .Net (they've shown this a couple times, live
| reload for example).
|
| I work in .Net for a lot of backend code, mostly in
| WSL/Linux on VS Code. And it's not been horrible, though
| I'm much more efficient with Node or Deno at this point.
| Since .Net Core (and now .Net 5+) the space has changed a
| lot.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| I found Rider much more enjoyable to use than VS. It
| doesn't implement so many languages, tools, etc, as langd
| come in plugins. It's much faster than VS with Resharper,
| and as a bonus, it is similar in usability to the rest of
| Jetbrains IDEs, which I was already using it.
|
| I only used .NET for modern Unity development, tho. I was
| using VS for C/C++ before using CLion and Riderfor that.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Last I used it it was unusable, but this was during the
| .NET 1.1.1 days, so I will have to check it out again.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I've tried for decades to enjoy Linux desktop experience but
| simply couldn't.
|
| As for these news you can disable them if you find them
| annoying.
| ftl64 wrote:
| It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience.
| I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user
| for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months
| at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia
| and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop
| battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB
| suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of
| troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something
| actually productive.
|
| Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me
| in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious
| affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as
| one.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| My experience is the opposite. I use Windows at work and
| Linux for everything else. Linux is much more stable and
| when something is wrong, much easier to fix. Windows has
| definitely broken for me in the middle of the day.
| beams_of_light wrote:
| I've experienced the same. In fact, I recently tried
| migrating to Ubuntu. The user experience is a lot better
| than it once was, but it's still not great. For instance,
| if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome,
| I need to install a weather app. There are several, and
| amongst them, the Ubuntu software installer says they're
| not verifiable because a 3rd party developed them. Ok,
| fine, I just want the one most people are using, because I
| assume that is the one that is best maintained and has the
| best features. I'm not sure which one that is. Oh well,
| install the first one after a brief search to determine
| which is considered most "native" to gnome and Ubuntu.
| After installation, I don't see the weather on my top bar.
| I open the weather app, look around the settings, but
| there's no option to see the weather displayed on the bar.
| I give up. Later, my machine seems to be stuttering a bit
| (64 GB RAM, AMD 5970, RTX 3060), so I reboot and it's back
| to normal. I try to play a game, and get an error stating
| that Vulkan isn't installed (it is). I reboot instead of
| fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it's working
| again.
|
| I don't have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works.
| I don't mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have
| gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It's
| pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I
| can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that
| Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or
| maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they're
| able to make strides on the experience.
| tracker1 wrote:
| The issue with the taskbar, is there are a couple
| different implemetation APIs, your shell probably only
| supports gnome out of the box. I don't recall the name,
| but there's an extension that will add support for the
| KDE api for taskbar extensions. I'm running Budgie, with
| a relatively customized setup, and that was a long while
| ago, so not as immediately familiar with all that I did.
|
| Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes
| out though.
| mehdix wrote:
| I think KDE would serve users coming from Windows much
| better. You'd have much better experience out of the box.
| I have used Ubuntu, Fedor, and Arch Linux with gnome-
| shell and have rigorously kept my extensions for a few
| years up and working but eventually got tiered of them
| breaking with every gnome update and desktop crashing
| every few days. I switched to tiling windows managers
| since then such as i3/sway for work and to KDE for
| personal use (for example with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > For instance, if I want to see what the temperature
| outside is on gnome,
|
| In the amount of time you took to do that, you could have
| opened a browser and typed weather.com to see the
| weather.
|
| I think this is the grandparent OP's point: Showing you
| news or showing you the weather is not the job of an
| operating system. The operating system is there to manage
| system memory, the filesystem, networking, security and
| permissions, drive peripherals and accessories, maybe
| provide a desktop environment.
|
| That said, I would expect my operating system's vendor to
| also ship high quality applications that I can optionally
| install after I install my operating system. Ubuntu
| _should_ have a weather application, or at least a strong
| opinion about which third party one is the best and that
| new users should use. So, you 're not wrong. The whole
| "search through 40,000 half-assed weather applications
| and hope user reviews are accurate" situation is also
| bad.
| treis wrote:
| Why shouldn't Ubuntu take the next step and pre-install
| the weather application if that's what Ubuntu thinks most
| of its users will want?
| ashwagary wrote:
| Sounds like they don't want to turn Ubuntu into what the
| Windows users above are complaining about.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| It shouldn't be preinstalled, but it should be easy to
| find professionally reviewed applications for the most
| common user application categories. Android's Google Play
| Store has "editor's choice" for example. If Ubuntu is
| trying to be THE desktop linux, this is something they
| should be doing.
| debatem1 wrote:
| Because even if Ubuntu knows that, users often want
| conflicting things.
|
| User A may want a weather app preinstalled; user B may
| not want their computer knowing their location. User A
| and user B might even be the same person.
|
| And that's assuming Ubuntu knows it, which let's be real,
| Ubuntu isn't great at knowing what its users want.
|
| And all of that is assuming it's even true that most
| people do want a weather app.
| samstave wrote:
| I've never understood the obsession of "weather" apps
| with some people.
|
| Heck, if a linux user wants to know the weather, all they
| have to do is lok at their _windows_. (might have to go
| up the stairs though :-)
|
| -
|
| I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my
| webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a
| creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly
| top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my
| to uncover my webcam.
|
| it only happened once - but WTF - and I havent seen it
| since, and I couldnt find anything on google about it.
| WTF is that?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have
| my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a
| creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly
| top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my
| to uncover my webcam.
|
| When I run Windows these days, I assume every single part
| of it is compromised, either by scummy third party
| software running in the background or by Microsoft's
| scummy software running in the background. This includes
| cameras, microphones, any radio, the networking stack,
| any drives (local or network) the machine can so much as
| ping, everything. I have a special vlan prison I put my
| Windows machines in because I treat them like the hostile
| attackers they are.
|
| Say what you will about Apple's "walled gardens" but
| every time a frustrated 3rd party developer complains
| online that they can't do X, Y, or Z on Macs because of
| permissions or security, I get a little more comforted
| that my Mac's software is not constantly attacking me.
| philg_jr wrote:
| >Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down
| from directly top-center of screen and gave me a
| notification asking my to uncover my webcam.
|
| I'm guessing that was probably Windows Hello attempting
| to use your camera for face recognition.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Looking out my window doesn't tell me how hot is actually
| is. It certainly won't tell me how hot it will be in 2
| hours or when the sun will set. :)
| cwillu wrote:
| And likewise cold. And humidity. And how it might change
| in eight hours.
| bwi4 wrote:
| You gotta open the window to find out how hot it is.
| After noon, stand facing West and see how many hand-
| widths between the horizon and the sun... each hand-width
| is an hour until sunset. Source: Boy Scouts
| genewitch wrote:
| at the extreme risk of being put on a list, what is the
| standard boyscout hand-width?
| samstave wrote:
| I have too many Monty Python jokes in mind for HN's taste
| justinclift wrote:
| As a data point with tape, depending upon the type you
| might need more than 1 later.
|
| Saying that because I've used black electrical tape for
| years, including over the camera lens of my iPhone SE.
|
| But it turns out the iPhone SE can take pictures right
| through that (at least in daylight), and they're not
| terrible quality.
|
| Showed a friend photography inclined friend and he was as
| surprised as I was. eg very
| genewitch wrote:
| When you say "black electrical tape" do you mean from,
| say, Harbor Freight, or from 3M? Since the 3M stuff
| _blocks UV_ fairly well, i can 't really see light
| getting through it, although i'd have to find some to
| test.
|
| years and years ago we'd buy a roll of film, pull it out
| in the sun, and then get it developed but not printed.
| You could use that as an IR-passthrough filter on a
| camera lens - this is if my memory isn't faulty.
| Animats wrote:
| > Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down
| from directly top-center of screen and gave me a
| notification asking my to uncover my webcam.
|
| "Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" -
| "1984", Orwell.
|
| Does the news you get depend on who you are?
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root
| cause, and it's working again. I don't have to do this
| stuff with Windows.
|
| Thanks, I needed that laugh this morning.
| mtone wrote:
| Just upgraded to Windows 11 (for its HDR features) and
| weather is now part of the "Widgets" bombarding me with
| ads and poor news sources. I genuinely tried to customize
| my "feed" but it's _all junk_ -no reputable sources
| whatsoever- and I didn 't find a way to remove them.
|
| So the only sane course of action was to disable widgets
| altogether while I still can. And now I don't have the
| weather anymore.
| ibiza wrote:
| You can run the Weather app stand-alone & pin it to your
| Taskbar or Start Menu: Windows Key >
| weather
| bennysonething wrote:
| Pretty much the same as me. Windows hardware support is
| really great, Linux is always a hassle for me. I've tried
| and tried with Linux, but I've given up on it as my primary
| desktop
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Nvidia
|
| Every time someone mentions Linux driver problems, I see
| that name.
|
| For me, the strategy that has worked for the longest time
| is to get boring computers. The boring Thinkpad, the boring
| Vostros and Latitudes, the boring ThinkStation and
| ThinkServer boxes. Large PC makers don't want their
| corporate-oriented products causing support calls, and that
| forces them to not be overly creative with their
| implementations. With that powerful incentive, the hardware
| is usually well supported by the two boring operating
| systems (for generic hardware) out there. Either that, or
| get a machine that's designed together with its OS (and
| know the odds of you installing anything other than that
| are slim).
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > It's just more stable, at least this has been my
| experience.
|
| It _was_ more stable, that 's why I used it. Then starting
| with a certain Windows 10 update I had to reinstall the
| system multiple times because automatic updates kept
| breaking it overnight, it started crashing the USB driver,
| suddenly it kept randomly switching keyboard layouts by
| itself, and somewhere around the third ruined weekend due
| to an unbootable system I had enough. Switched to an Arch-
| based distro for 3 years in which I only had one update-
| related issue and it took me a whole 5 minutes and one
| reboot to fix. Now I partially use Mac OS and while I'm
| disappointed by some of its aspects I can at least be
| certain it will boot tomorrow and it won't install a system
| update without my confirmation.
|
| Oh, how the turntables.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I had similar issues... especially after Win11.
| Admittedly, I was running Insiders builds, because I
| wanted new WSLg features, etc. Then one day I was on
| Windows 11... okay, got the app bar pinned back on the
| left... a month later, oh, you don't have secure boot
| enabled, you'll need to reinstall... enabled secure boot,
| still had to reinstall... a few months later, the nvidia
| drivers kept borking out and blanking my screen. The
| Windows release kept overriding the newer NVidia drivers
| for w11. Figured out how to pin them... another couple
| months, start seeing adverts in the damned start menu
| search. That's it, I'm out. I reinstalled Win10 in case I
| needed it, disabled secure boot and tpm... and haven't
| booted back to my windows drive since. I've had two small
| issues in Ubuntu, both relatively easily fixed.
|
| I don't think I'm going back. I use Win10 at work, and
| fortunately most of my actual day is in VS Code under
| WSL. And that's about all I can stand.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I was running Insiders builds
|
| In fairness, you can't take your experience with insider
| builds as an indicator of the stability of the OS.
| Insider builds are expected to be unstable.
| tracker1 wrote:
| When I reinstalled after the insiders build first nuked
| itself, I switched to stable/mainline. Still had issues
| after that. I had run insiders on Win10 about 3 years
| without issue before that.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Interesting. My experience is that Linux (Debian, anyway --
| Ubuntu has never given me anything but headaches and
| instability) is at least an order of magnitude more
| reliable than Windows. It's been over a decade since I've
| hit a serious or crashy bug in Linux. I hit one about every
| other day with Windows.
|
| I wonder why there's a difference in our experiences here?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Pop OS seens to be the best one for me at the moment.
| Definitely recommend a try.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux
| user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for
| months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows.
| Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs,
| reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness
|
| Oh boy where to begin?
|
| >Nvidia and Intel driver issues
|
| Not a personal dig, but this is a result of having been
| spoiled. I still remember the small dime novel that came
| with my box of WinNT 4.0 workstation, all it did was list
| the various hardware that was on its hardware compatibility
| list. You wanted to buy some piece of hardware? Better do
| the homework because not everything was going to be
| compatible or even supported at the same level. Today
| everyone expects everything to just work out of the box
| when you throw an operating system at it. They've
| completely forgotten the need to even check for
| compatibility, they've outsourced that to the operating
| system. They expect it to 'just work' without input.
|
| When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people
| forget that it's a relatively recent thing and that to get
| the best use of your hardware you're advised to research it
| before purchasing and to make sure you check compatibility
| with the operating system(s) you plan to use.
|
| >package manager bugs
|
| OK, this has hit us all eventually. Valid. But I've noticed
| most of the time when I've run into this it was a result of
| me doing things that I really shouldn't or at least which
| should prime me to monitor my system more carefully. Such
| as installing Debian packages into Ubuntu. Sure it can
| work, especially if you do your best to install any needed
| dependencies. But you'd better know what you're doing and
| watch for issues after doing so. I'm sure there are other
| ways the package manager can crap the bed. It's not all on
| us when it does so. But I really don't think Windows is any
| better in this regard. I've had stuff eat itself there too
| with applications and systems upgrading DLLs and leaving me
| up the famous creek without a paddle.
|
| >reduced laptop battery life
|
| Valid as well. But have you looked into tlp? Have you tried
| tuning it for battery life?
|
| >general UI clunkiness
|
| This heavily depends on your desktop of choice. As a Mate
| desktop user I've been fairly happy with how my UI behaves.
| To the point where it is actively annoying to be in another
| desktop now. Different strokes for different folks though.
| If Windows is the UI you rely on to the point you have
| muscle memory, I can sympathize. I'd argue there is a
| desktop that can match that UI for you on Linux but you'll
| have to customize it a bit and you'll have to test for
| which one is closest to what you prefer.
|
| But if your preferred desktop UI is indeed Windows, it's
| not Linux's fault that it is not Windows any more than it
| would be OSX's fault it is not Windows. You have to adapt
| and accept that things work differently in a different
| operating system. Not wrong. Not misconfigured. Different.
| fnimick wrote:
| The thing is: with Windows I don't _have_ to do any of
| the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc.
| You might have had to in the past, but you can 't compare
| past Windows to Linux today.
|
| I just want to get my work done, and be able to reliably
| turn my computer on and run my applications. Windows lets
| me do that. Linux doesn't. I haven't had a Windows update
| break things in _years_ , where my last Linux experience
| had the Ubuntu live USB work fine and completely fail to
| boot to a GUI environment after the install. I don't have
| time in my life to troubleshoot kernel issues anymore.
| vetinari wrote:
| > The thing is: with Windows I don't have to do any of
| the compatibility checking, tuning for battery life, etc.
| You might have had to in the past, but you can't compare
| past Windows to Linux today.
|
| I suspect you are talking about some other Windows that
| the rest of us.
|
| > I just want to get my work done, and be able to
| reliably turn my computer on and run my applications.
|
| Don't we all?
|
| > Windows lets me do that. Linux doesn't.
|
| You, ok. Others? It's the other way around.
|
| > I haven't had a Windows update break things in years,
|
| Last time? Cumulative update 2022.12 for W19 22H2...
| that's not that long time ago.
| julianeon wrote:
| I'm getting the sense of a category error here:
|
| Windows is the standard bearer of paid OS's - yes, true.
|
| Ubuntu is the standard bearer of free Linux OS's - not
| really, and (this is important) less true over time.
|
| What's happening is that, as Windows is improving, Linux
| appears to be getting worse. But that's really just an
| Ubuntu problem.
|
| I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly, but it
| seems to be performing less well over time, and is,
| increasingly, not the default choice. I would understand
| if other distros are harder to learn or simply
| unsupported, but that's not the case.
|
| It feels like 90% of these issues could be resolved by
| saying "Start with Fedora. In 2023, that's the actual
| default Linux distro that fixes these problems."
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >I don't know how Ubuntu got the crown exactly
|
| They asked for it. Red hat the former bearers of that
| crown dropped the ball and walked away, leaving it open
| for Ubuntu to step in.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20031127055732/http://zdnet.c
| om....
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030812095615/http://www.lin
| uxa...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040508195941/http://www.new
| sfo...
|
| People forget now but Fedora was created because Red Hat
| abandoned the home desktop market in 2003. Then Fedora
| was spun off to be a test bed for their enterprise
| offerings and it was no longer possible to buy a copy of
| workstation in stores. So when Canonical showed up in
| 2004 and was focused on the desktop they were able to get
| a lot of people to move over fairly quickly. The fact
| that they were using a different type of desktop
| interface with Gnome that had the two panels unlike
| Fedora which still had the single large panel like Gnome
| 1.x made it stand out even more. That and the way almost
| every other Linux desktop at the time was KDE based...
|
| So yeah, Ubuntu took the crown because it wanted it. It
| maintains that crown because outside of it and its
| various spinoffs and flavors no one else is really
| seeking to be a desktop operating system. Since Canonical
| has made it clear that its focus is now also Enterprise
| at the expense of the desktop experience, I imagine it's
| only a matter of time before someone else steals that
| crown by focusing on the desktop again. We just need one
| of these billionaires to fund a company to make it
| happen...Say what you will about Shuttleworth, he did put
| his money where his mouth was and I for one am grateful
| for the many years of good use I got from Ubuntu as a
| result. I will be sad for the day when inevitably the
| pain points out weigh the benefits and I must switch away
| from Ubuntu-Mate to some other system.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people
| forget that it's a relatively recent thing
|
| It absolutely is not! I recently put together a Windows
| 95 VM and was blown away by how straightforward and
| automatic everything was. It automatically recognized
| most hardware I threw at it, and didn't even need manual
| driver installation or anything. Things just worked after
| a reboot.
|
| Early versions of NT (pre 2000) were not consumer
| oriented and that's why they were more finicky, but by
| the time of XP, you could expect it to just work with
| mostly anything again.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| > I recently put together a Windows 95 VM and was blown
| away by how straightforward and automatic everything was.
| It automatically recognized most hardware I threw at it,
| and didn't even need manual driver installation or
| anything.
|
| A virtual machine you say? With a virtualized set of
| hardware prechosen for compatibility so that Windows
| would recognize it without issues? It just recognized
| this collection of virtual hardware selected for
| compatibility without further interactions? You don't
| say? ;)
|
| As someone who began with Windows 95 OSR2 on real
| hardware you will forgive my amusement I hope?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and
| "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't
| even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows
| just kinda found it.
|
| And don't make assumptions about me, our 1996 toshiba
| came with OSR2, including beta USB drivers and more built
| in driver profiles for commodity hardware than the plug
| and play "pick device" window actually could handle (it
| wasn't resizeable!)
|
| By the time of OSR2, and then 98, if your device had been
| reviewed in a PC magazine, you could probably just plug
| it in, select it from a list, and go on your way.
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >No, a 486 emulator that I installed Windows on, and
| "installed" an ATI Rage series "card" into, and didn't
| even have to look around for a driver CD, because Windows
| just kinda found it.
|
| ~woosh!~
| amalcon wrote:
| The issue is pretty much the same as it ever was --
| hardware manufacturers support Windows first. Linux is
| usually later if at all. Community support sometimes steps
| in to fill in the gap, and some manufacturers (most notably
| AMD) are coming around, but this is still usually the
| issue.
|
| Oddly enough, this means that Linux tends to work better as
| the computer it's running on gets older. The reverse is
| true for Windows -- updates tend to make it slower and/or
| have more compatibility issues. A computer that worked
| better with Windows a few years ago will not-infrequently
| perform better under Ubuntu today. It's not usually
| suggested on new PCs unless it's spec'd specifically with
| Linux compatibility in mind.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| When Windows breaks, it stays broken. I had a W10 install
| unable to update, running the update would break windows
| and be unable to log in at all. It required rolling back
| the upgrade. Best part? It would automatically try to
| install that update every time I forgot to click the dead
| mans switch. I'd regularly try to unlock to a useless
| machine. No online support was helpful, just had to re-
| install.
|
| Linux is the opposite, nearly everything has a documented
| fix. It can be fixed in less time than it takes to backup,
| reimage, and reconfigure your machine.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > Nvidia and Intel driver issues
|
| Intel is pretty good about upstreaming drivers into the
| kernel. The only bugs I've ever ran into are around brand
| new wifi cards that haven't been mainlined yet. And even
| then I don't think I've seen that in about ten years.
| Nvidia on the other hand is a huge pain on Linux, but thats
| deliberately done by Nvidia.
|
| > reduced laptop battery life.
|
| Been using Linux as a daily driver for over 15 years and
| laptop life has been better than windows nearly the entire
| time.
|
| To be fair, I cut my teeth automating Linux environments in
| physical datacenters. So I've lived in a world where power
| consumption mattered, know how to select hardware with good
| driver support, and can tune the os.
|
| That said, you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w
| without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With
| additional know how you can get it under 3w.
|
| > For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool,
| and Windows performs much better as one.
|
| Funny how you and I have the same value but wound up at
| opposite conclusions. I guess it's all about the tools and
| how we need/expect to use them.
|
| Edit: grammar
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a
| year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for
| things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life
| has been good.
|
| I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and
| Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-
| consumer.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Linux driver support was hell from roughly around 2010 to
| 2016. Both major GPU manufacturers had awful proprietary
| drivers (with even worse packaging), and most wifi chipsets
| required proprietary firmware blobs to work at all: which
| was very tricky to package, because of copyright bullshit.
|
| This was also the era of major desktop environments playing
| fast and loose with there UX. GNOME3 was released in 2011.
| Ubuntu started defaulting to Unity in 2010, and started
| their Wayland competitor (Mir) in 2014. KDE Plasma 5 (2014)
| defaulted to fancy composting, and felt really bloated
| relative to the others. The only desktop environments that
| really kept true to the good old days (~2008) are XFCE4 and
| MATE (the GNOME2 fork). KDE5 isn't bad, either, but it's
| still a bit too bloated.
|
| The other problem caused by proprietary video drivers was
| package versioning. It's tricky to have the right kernel
| version and Xorg version necessary to run a proprietary
| video driver blob; _and_ keep the rest of your system up-
| to-date. Ubuntu found its initial success by creating a
| generally stable package repository roughly as up-to-date
| as Debian unstable. Unfortunately, Ubuntu became a bloated
| mess with strange things like Unity and Mir bundled in.
| Archlinux has been a good alternative, but it does expect a
| level of familiarity with shell utilities. Linux Mint (an
| Ubuntu or Debian fork) is still my first recommendation to
| casual users. One of these days, it will be NixOS, which is
| a giant leap in stability and package versioning.
|
| The last change of that era that has been breaking the
| Linux experience is the switch from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT.
| This shift was slow and messy, with most hardware adoption
| following the release of Windows 8 in 2012. GRUB used to
| break in one predictable way: windows overwrites the MBR,
| replacing GRUB with its bootloader. Now, with UEFI, boot
| entries are saved directly to the motherboard, and the
| bootloader itself lives in the ESP partition. The windows
| installer will put its bootloader in the first ESP it can
| find, and you don't get to choose which one that is. Now
| you have to worry about the ESP running out of space, but
| that's about it: everything else has been generally
| resolved, and the UEFI bootloader experience is very solid
| (apart from the windows installer caveat).
|
| Now that AMDGPU is mature, and NVIDIA's drivers are
| relatively well maintained (and packaged), the Linux
| desktop experience is even more stable than its heyday back
| in 2008. If you install a distro that targets relatively
| recent package versions, like Archlinux, Linux Mint, or
| even Fedora; and you use a solid familiar desktop
| environment like MATE or XFCE4; you can avoid most UI/UX
| clunkiness and have very little need to fiddle with your
| package manager. Boot issues are pretty unlikely now, so
| long as you install in UEFI mode (not legacy BIOS
| emulation), and completely avoid MBR.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot
|
| I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky
| middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never
| share a drive well.
|
| >> reduced laptop battery life
|
| ??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on
| linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop
| doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do,
| will randomly decide to install/download something.
|
| >> general UI clunkiness,
|
| For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few
| months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the
| clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had
| to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new
| "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking
| widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen
| time.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky
| middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never
| share a drive well.
|
| The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber
| the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it
| happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a
| couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS
| almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups
| of any kind.
| vetinari wrote:
| > Linux and windows will never share a drive well.
|
| Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a
| problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and
| even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager.
|
| The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things
| ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop _doing
| stupid shit_ that worked with legacy BIOS and is not
| necessary anymore. _Grub breaking itself randomly_ is
| mostly self-inflicted problem.
| xpil wrote:
| My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used
| Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say,
| sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go
| back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for
| certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB
| acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a
| kernel upgrade and so on.
|
| Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but
| it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.
| LorenDB wrote:
| For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of
| Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU
| as I don't have a dedicated GPU though.
|
| GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my
| experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with
| config files).
| ftl64 wrote:
| Mine's also almost stock, the only changes being tracking
| and startup menu/taskbar garbage disabled.
| srjilarious wrote:
| I dual booted Windows on my desktop and laptop for a few
| years and also noticed lots of weird issues - reduced
| battery life on my laptop, sleep/hibernate being broken,
| GRUB occasionally just dying on me. I eventually got rid of
| Windows all together and now just run Manjaro. I was
| surprised that suspend issues and battery life on my
| laptop, for instance, completely went away.
|
| The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games,
| but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and
| now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game
| library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due
| to anti-cheat software like Battleye.
| naremu wrote:
| It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some
| achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have
| always been larger headaches.
|
| In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my
| distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my
| problems were...definitely _me_ problems.
|
| At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw
| droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up
| a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes
| sense.
|
| Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for
| gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a
| year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft
| publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it
| was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had
| nothing to do with them.
|
| Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just
| crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause
| it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing
| what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to
| do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows
| update, which I 'm sure had nothing to do with them_"
|
| Microsoft are often taking the blame for, and working
| around, other vendor's bugs. Just because they fixed it
| didn't mean they broke it.
|
| e.g. https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/136326622
| 89708113...
| hirundo wrote:
| > It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as
| some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs
| have always been larger headaches.
|
| Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows
| machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the
| motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows
| overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking
| the board I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily
| driver a decade later. And though there have been issues
| I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| This is why NixOS has been so great for me: it factors
| out an entire class of "me" problems.
|
| If I decide to go down a rabbit hole that involves
| totally messing up my system, I can undo all of that by
| simply rebooting into an older generation. NixOS _never_
| diverges from "fresh install".
|
| Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be
| incredible.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be
| incredible.
|
| The crux of the NixOS issue right here. I tried NixOS a
| few times, even this past weekend, and it was such a pain
| that I gave up each time!
|
| I am planning to integrate Nix (the package manager) into
| my recent fresh OS install if I have some time this week.
| I want to use Nix to have, at the very least, a
| controllable way to install and remove toolchains of
| different versions in a reproducible manner; if I can
| swing it I am going to use it to install pretty much
| anything that requires any sort of configuration care
| (the rest I'll just use apt). I also want to integrate
| more tools like asdf or pyenv which help with that, but I
| prefer if I could do it all through one package manager
| like Nix. I finally separated my /home into another drive
| this time, so that'll be nice for future re-installs.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The fact that Nix's user experience can be _so bad_ is
| the greatest evidence of its inherent usefulness. If you
| are able to get it working for you, it 's somehow worth
| it.
|
| NixOS is pain without scars.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Was that machine a laptop? In my experience, power-
| oriented laptops and Windows mix like oil and water.
|
| I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its
| Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it _had_ to be
| running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it
| wasn't it'd perform 20-30% worse while running just as
| hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening
| because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS
| drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed
| performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows
| policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia
| driver is split up into several pieces which then
| resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all
| sorts of things.
|
| I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a
| custom built tower instead, which has had none of these
| issues.
| prox wrote:
| That's all very well, but my end of the day take is that
| if you want more Windows/Mac adopters, you need zero
| friction. So often you get these handwavey (snobby?)
| attitudes of "why don't you just _insert hard to do thing
| for average user_ " and in the meantime nobody is the
| wiser.
|
| Also not saying that things aren't getting better, but
| it's a snail's pace.
|
| Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win
| from any competition.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win
| from any competition.
|
| It wins because it's _less_ friction, not zero friction.
| There 's a reason, other than old applications, that
| there are still Windows 7 installations. Many people
| don't want to upgrade their Windows until they upgrade
| their hardware because it's a hassle getting the
| interface back to the way you want it.
|
| Anecdotally I'm not a programmer and I switched to Ubuntu
| when I bought this laptop in 2013, with about 3 or 4
| years of dual booting for software purposes before I
| stayed on Ubuntu. I'll switch away from Ubuntu to a more
| user friendly distribution with my next computer because
| it's pushing features I really don't like, and deleting
| features I really do like. My wife is also not a
| programmer and with the upgrade to Windows 10 we had to
| do a bunch of searching and tinkering to make the user
| interface satisfactory. She's avoiding Windows 11 for as
| long as possible.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| I was having a conversation with my mother today about
| changing her bank. She ultimately decided against it
| because she doesn't want to change her bank account
| number.
|
| People are creatures of habit. Microsoft learned this
| when they removed the start button in 8.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Cellphone number portability was forced on that industry
| here in NZ, I wish bank account portability could be made
| a thing.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The difference isn't even _less_ friction. It 's _more
| familiar_ friction.
|
| Here's the most crucial point: windows has the most
| _thoroughly documented_ friction. If you ever have a
| problem, chances are 1,000 or more other people have had
| that problem, or a closely related one, and 1 or 2 of
| them even wrote about it somewhere. Life is way harder
| than it needs to be, but you are not even remotely alone.
|
| Apple takes the opposite approach: walls instead of
| friction. If you can't figure it out, it's because you
| computer can't do it. That implies your computer _shouldn
| 't be able to_ do it. You would be surprised at how
| comfortable people are with this conclusion. It doesn't
| get them what they want, but it saves them time and
| energy by providing _early and confident_ rejection.
|
| Linux maximizes the ability to _manage_ friction. There
| is always a way to actually resolve it with constructive
| effort. That 's an unfamiliar strategy, and it requires
| some level of education that the average user refuses to
| accommodate, even if it will definitely save them time
| and effort.
| papito wrote:
| There is a middle ground. I use Windows/Mac for gaming,
| entertainment, and casual browsing, and I run Mint in a
| VMWare for serious stuff. The added benefit is that I can
| easily back up, snapshot, and transfer my work OS anywhere.
| And Mint/Ubuntu provide much better out-of-the-box
| productivity tools. I map my multiple Mint desktops to
| numpad keys. You can't do that with the other ones without
| additional software.
| f4stjack wrote:
| All these might have been true for Windows 10, but with
| Windows 11 all the things you mentioned are my daily woes.
| W11 suddenly "upgrades" the video driver and explorer
| crashes; updates bios and camera borks. With Linux I have
| the opportunity to freeze the upgrades and go on to my
| work. Also due to behind the scenes shenanigans battery
| lives are worse all across the board - I am managing more
| than 100 laptops. In addition with this OS, 8gb of ram
| becomes a joke and most of my users are running office
| applications.
|
| Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially
| after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience
| any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux
| boring - because everything works out of the box.
| andrepd wrote:
| > It's just more stable, at least this has been my
| experience. I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia
| and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced
| laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when
| GRUB suddenly decided not to boot
|
| Well I've had the _exact opposite experience_. Windows was
| an endless source of bugs, crashes, and instability. Linux
| (Mint) is rock-solid, clean, fast, pretty, and stable. I
| 've had more blue screens that I can count but I remember
| less than a handful of kernel panics over the last 10
| years. No more fiddling around in settings, no more having
| to use external tools off some forum thread to accomplish
| something as simple as updating drivers.
|
| The only issue I give you credit for is the battery life,
| which is indeed better on Windows by some ~20%.
| gspencley wrote:
| It's funny because I've had a lot of people share this
| exact same experience with me, since they know I've been a
| Linux user since the late 90s. But this is my experience
| with Windows! Especially the shortened laptop battery life.
| Windows runs so much in the background that performance
| feels 10x slower on the same machine and the battery drains
| much faster ... in my experience anyway. But I also have
| issues with Windows drivers and applications crashing
| often. Whereas on Linux things "just work" for me the vast
| majority of the time.
|
| To be fair, though, there was a short-lived period a couple
| of years ago where a lot of laptop trackpads wouldn't work,
| and I had a work-issued laptop that didn't seem to want to
| play nicely with an external monitor.
|
| So I wonder if this is largely what you're used to. I run
| Linux on all of my devices, which are hardware I've chosen
| myself and had high confidence would have good Linux
| support. It's only been the work-issued machines that I've
| had issues with... so I probably just have a sense of how
| to get things to play nicely because it's what I've used
| primarily for so long.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > the vast majority of the time
|
| It's the times when it breaks that make the difference
| for me. One Windows, most breakage is an annoyance. On
| Linux it can grind my day to a halt. Here's something I
| did on an Ubuntu install recently. apt
| install python3
|
| Oops. That's not what I wanted. apt
| autoremove python3
|
| OMG! What have I done! IIRC that stripped out so much
| stuff I didn't even have networking. Lol.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| One of the reasons I went with AMD for my new GPU was Linux
| support. Nvidia has been abhorrent of Linux before Torvalds
| did the famous gesture and that was over 10 years ago! My
| old workstation had an Nvidia and performance has been all
| over the place, and that's on lucky days!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have found that more recent cards from both vendors are
| a lot better on Linux than their older gear. My 10 year
| old GPU had huge issues on Linux (running fine on
| Windows), but when I got a more recent GPU for my Linux
| box, it ran fine.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That's one of the main issues that is solved with open
| drivers.
|
| A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just
| gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards:
| the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon
| 9600 with a built-in capture card.
|
| This was also around the time I was really getting into
| Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu
| 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008.
|
| As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I
| watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support.
| I lived it.
|
| At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good.
| I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager",
| and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart
| of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all
| the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of
| virtual desktops.
|
| This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It
| was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a
| compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported
| AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future
| of Linux was bright and close.
|
| A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers
| weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver
| was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering).
| Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for
| ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for
| whose benefit?
|
| A few more years passed, and fglrx became the _best_
| driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this
| happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful
| card for ~$30, so the point was moot.
|
| When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a
| major hardware company found the value in making a full-
| featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I
| need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the
| pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the
| first place: proprietary video drivers.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Had a 5700 XT at launch... drivers were effectively
| broken in mainline Ubuntu for nearly 6 months. I had to
| use a beta Kernel, which broke other things. I sold that
| and managed to get a 3080 via newegg shuffle, went back
| to Linux after various Windows issues following.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I have been using Linux for work and my home server for
| around 20 years.For my personal computing I have been using
| windows and MacOS.
|
| Every now and then I get my hopes up that the year of Linux
| is finally here and I install the latest.
|
| I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting
| up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it
| means that more pain is coming in the future, so I
| immediately delete the Linux partition.
|
| I am still using just windows and macos for my personal
| computing needs.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > it means that more pain is coming in the future
|
| So you're no longer reality checking this prediction?
| What are the reasons for firing up the terminal? Config
| file editing? Or something more serious?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| last time for me was the audio was glitching which never
| happened on pc. i think the solution had something to do
| with changing the audio sampling rate fixed it.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of
| setting up the system I am required to fire up the
| terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the
| future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition.
|
| This is exactly my litmus test. The requirement to touch
| the CLI indicates little thought for the UX or care for
| users who don't want to use the CLI. Every year I boot up
| another flavour of Linux and every year it fails this
| test. Linux is built by developers, for developers.
| That's fine, but let's be honest about it.
| Lutger wrote:
| On various hardware, over the years, I've had both the same
| and the opposite experiences. For example, linux doesn't
| decide to reboot during the day to perform updates without
| your consent.
|
| Overall, when there is not some specific hardware issue,
| I've found linux running much smoother and more user
| friendly _for me_. Gnome is a lot less cluttered, things
| are easier to find. It is also often much better in
| supporting older hardware and, ironically, older windows
| applications.
| ajdude wrote:
| MacOS doesn't have the issues that you've described while
| giving you many of the same tools Linux has, in addition to
| support for most mainstream windows software.
|
| And while macOS isn't as free as Linux, it's certainly less
| "spyware" than windows.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Have you noticed Apple news notifications on a loved ones
| Mac in recent years? Happens even without a paid
| subscription if I recall correctly.
| r00fus wrote:
| Yes on iOS - but you can turn that off easily but
| installing News.app or removing it's notifications.
|
| Microsoft makes it much more difficult, then wipes out
| your preferences a few patches later.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I've never seen this and if I did, I would just turn it
| off.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| That only happens if the loved one opens the Apple News
| app, and grants permission for notifications. If they
| never open Apple News, or if they open it and deny
| permission, no notification.
| dmix wrote:
| I've not seen this and I set up new Macs every year. Can
| you expand? You'd have to open the news app to see this
| AFAIK. Unless it was part of some iCloud on-boarding
| process which I haven't done in years.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| I don't recall the details. Possibly may appear as an
| onboarding process.
|
| I think in the same way we now see advertising on school
| buses and display-covered vending machines (even inside a
| state office), were going to end up with forms of
| outreach / ads in our tools unless there's more robust
| forms of support (could be paying, could be a more
| multicapital flow of support).
| [deleted]
| ftl64 wrote:
| Growing up in a developing country, until recently Apple
| devices (laptops/desktops especially) have been a bit out
| of price range for me. Although I can afford one now, my
| current laptop is nowhere near its end of life, and
| something in my soviet-scarcity-mentality-influenced mind
| doesn't feel right about upgrading just for the sake of
| upgrading. That said, Apple laptops look very convincing
| at the moment, and when the time comes they will probably
| be my first choice.
| EricE wrote:
| One thing that more than balances it out for me - my
| Mac's have a lot longer of a lifespan than my Windows
| machines. I have a larger up front cost, but get far more
| out of them over time. I average at least 7 years without
| having to do anything with my Mac's (and used my last two
| for just under 10 years) - Windows has improved
| dramatically since the 2000's, but I seem to either need
| to reload Windows from scratch on the same hardware to
| maintain decent performance, or upgrade hardware a lot
| more frequently than I have with my Mac's. Also when
| setting up a new machine I have found Apple's migration
| assistant to be flawless in moving everything from my old
| machine to my new one. I only deviated with my current M1
| MacBook Pro because of the CPU architecture change - and
| friends overwhelmingly positive experiences with using
| migration assistant to move from Intel to AS Mac's
| indicate I probably wasted a bunch of time needlessly in
| setting everything up fresh.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| One thing that helped me is realising that I should be
| selling ild electronics, so it goes to people that need
| it most. Instead of having it collect dust in the drawerr
| untill it becomes c dead and obsolete
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| I used to dualboot with Slack and some version of Windows,
| since the early 2000s, although I stopped somewhat when VMs
| became a thing anf then WSL. I genuinely _liked_ Windows 7,
| but 10 was a start down a bad path and 11 is just too far
| gone.
| sircastor wrote:
| I've wondered for a bit if there's a future where Windows
| turns into A Linux distribution with some extra tools and
| runtimes for legacy executables. Microsoft has some really
| expensive software it has to maintain. Office is also
| maintained on multiple platforms, but it feels like Windows
| is starting to be a drag on the company - lots of resources
| for not a lot of income. As wild as it would be, offloading a
| lot of dev to the OSS community would free up resources to
| differentiate their product.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Eric S. Raymond had similar thoughts:
| http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wouldn't wonder if Microsoft will do such a thing in the
| future. But I wouldn't be happy about it. It will be messy
| and suffer from hardware problems and performance issues.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| That is an interesting idea. I wonder if that's true
| because they definitely seem like it's a loss for them
| because they absolutely do not care anymore about what they
| do to the operating system other than keeping it stable to
| run applications.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Windows is Windows because of the huge API, all the legacy
| support, the graphics subsystem, all the DirectX stuff etc.
| If the somehow did switch to running a Linux kernel for
| some reason, it wouldn't be noticeable to the end user at
| all. I can't see that ever happening though.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't
| replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near
| future. Here is a page which summarize Linux shortcomings
| on the desktop: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.i
| s.not.ready.for.t...
|
| One reason I think Linux (the kernel) would be a poor fit
| as a Windows replacement is the lack of a stable driver
| ABI. Linux is a monolithic kernel and all the drivers are
| expected to be part of it. It is a model that works because
| it fully embraces open source and community driven
| development. But not all manufacturers want that, first
| because they may not want to, open their code, or maybe
| they can't due to licensing arguments. It also means they
| need to invest significant resources into getting their
| code accepted by the community. The Windows driver model
| drove its rich hardware ecosystem. And if you think
| switching to a Linux driver model is going to be better,
| more free, think again, because we already have that with
| Android. Manufacturers fork the kernel and don't give much
| back to the community, just having them comply with the GPL
| is a struggle, and hardware support besides what is built
| into the phone is extremely limited, and because they don't
| work with the community, support for what's in the phone
| isn't carried on for more than a couple of years.
|
| And Windows really strong point is backwards compatibility.
| For example, I still use the "free" Photoshop CS2, 20 years
| later, works perfectly fine as a binary, I can run stuff
| that dates back from the 3.11 era, though as I understand
| it, it is mostly emulation at this point. This is part of
| the reason people use Windows. Microsoft tried to start
| clean with Windows RT, it was a failure. Apple can get away
| with it because they have complete control over their
| ecosystem, not Microsoft.
|
| Also, games.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > Also, games
|
| If you're saying that games work better than windows that
| they do in Linux I'd have to say that this is changing
| very quickly.
|
| The proton layer is really changing the game on that. And
| it seems like many companies like Google will be moving
| to running applications in that environment. I could see
| The day where this leads to companies developing native
| applications for Linux.
| consp wrote:
| > But not all manufacturers want that
|
| I have a device in our work environment which runs on
| kernel 2.6.32, last patch 2014. Can't update the machine
| because they do not update the drivers for that machine's
| hardware. The "open" (aka diy) driver runs on 4.9 at the
| latest and won't be updated any further despite the EOL
| being only this year.
|
| It's all about money, they just want you to buy the new
| hardware and cough up some extra cash for them.
| bombolo wrote:
| > No plug-and-play support for a lot of input devices
| like joysticks and steering wheels. Many require editing
| of cryptic configuration files.
|
| If they are USB they just work.
|
| I imagine something that uses a serial port or the
| microphone jack to function as a joystick would need a
| special driver, yes.
| bityard wrote:
| My experience with drivers on Linux and Windows has been
| just about the exact opposite from yours somehow.
|
| On Windows, you sometimes cannot even install the OS
| without hunting down the right drivers for some piece of
| hardware like the RAID controller, if you can even find
| them. Most drivers are authored by the hardware vendors
| whose main competency may not be writing kernel code, so
| driver quality tends to be extremely variable. The result
| is often drivers that just don't work well (which can
| look like a hardware issue, e.g. lack of performance) or
| crash the whole system.
|
| Not all Linux drivers are bug-free or feature-complete of
| course, but they tend to be reasonable or high quality
| due to the fact that they are written by and/or reviewed
| by the kernel community. Since all the drivers come with
| the kernel, the user generally has to do nothing to make
| their hardware work, it just does right out of the box.
|
| (Notable exceptions here are vendors of certain video
| cards and wifi chips who refuse to either write Linux
| drivers or supply the information needed to write them.
| So you do have to be somewhat careful to avoid those
| vendors when purchasing hardware.)
|
| I'm not a heavy gamer but my understanding is that a
| surprising number of popular games run just fine on
| Linux, thanks in part to the WINE community and the
| efforts of Valve.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I've always found the same, especially with audio
| equipment. On Linux it's always plug and play but on
| Windows I have to search and search for drivers from
| random websites.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > I'm not a heavy gamer but my understanding is that a
| surprising number of popular games run just fine on
| Linux, thanks in part to the WINE community and the
| efforts of Valve.
|
| True but at a loss of performance compared to running the
| game natively on Windows.
|
| But my problem wouldn't be with games, it would be with
| software I either use professionally or out of personal
| interest. Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3D Max.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I was talking about a Linux desktop. I think Windows on
| the server is another story and Linux could probably take
| its place if it hadn't already. RAID controllers are
| mostly server hardware these tend to get pretty good
| Linux support. I know some people use them on desktops,
| but it is more of an oddity compared to, say, NAS for
| which it is the norm, and they often run some flavor of
| Linux.
|
| The "notable exceptions" of video cards and WiFi (and
| Bluetooth) chips are huge ones. But I would also add
| fancy keyboards/mice, printers, RGB, VR, etc... There is
| a video by LinusTechTips where they try to do tasks like
| printing a document or streaming a video game that I find
| very interesting because I think it is representative of
| what the experience of an experienced Windows user coming
| to Linux would be, and it is painful. If I remember well,
| at one point they have to run a Windows VM to have some
| of their hardware work.
|
| Sound cards tend to have pretty good support, but as
| often with Linux, it is all about the details. You will
| get sound, but maybe you won't be able to reassign your
| outputs, or that physical volume knob won't work. In my
| case, which is a somewhat complex setup, I sometimes get
| Pulseaudio crashes and sync issues I don't have on
| Windows. The setup itself was a pain on both OSes, on one
| side, a mess of drivers and broken Windows 10 UI, on the
| other, obscure text file configuration and Pulseaudio
| plugins.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Can confirm. Even pre-deck release, Proton was already
| working amazingly well for almost anything I could throw
| at it ( I think the last issue I had was with Fallout 76,
| but that may have been fate saving me and for the best ).
| I have a dedicated VM to gaming with Windows on it, but,
| well, I don't have to use it as much anymore. Gaming
| mostly stopped being an issue for Linux ( for me, I am
| sure some issues persist ).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > On Windows, you sometimes cannot even install the OS
| without hunting down the right drivers for some piece of
| hardware like the RAID controller, if you can even find
| them.
|
| This sounds like an experience from 2007.
|
| For the past 5 years, every piece of hardware I have ever
| bought, even from aliexpress, either works automatically
| or downloads a driver from windows uodate automatically.
|
| Coming back to linix, I want wifi 6 on my little linux
| server, and you have to hint down the few pieces of
| hardware that are compatiable.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| AliExpress hardware - that seems like an adventure.
| Curious, how has your overall experience been with the
| hardware you bought?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Can't speak for GP, but for me, it's been relatively
| good, though delivery can take a long time. I'm using a
| router setup based on Ali Express purchased hardware
| (N6005, w/ 4x 2.5GbE intel ports running OpnSense).
|
| I've also used a few other intel mini pcs, since the
| pricing for RPi went insane from limited availability...
| 8gb RPi 4's were going for close to or over $180, adding
| in a case, drive, power and the intel mini pc options
| were about the same price, coming with storage, ram,
| case, etc.
| headsoup wrote:
| Games are minor issue now, to the point I buy new games
| on Steam without even checking compatibility, because
| they just work (or have the same problems Windows does
| anyway).
|
| Windows' strong point is basically some large software
| vendors just don't support Linux (Photoshop, finance
| software, etc). And of course corporate. For the day to
| day 'casual' user Linux is every bit as good. But, much
| as we all had to 'learn' Windows when we started using
| it, so there will be at least a little learning required
| for Linux.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Exactly. As someone else pointed out some AAA titles
| don't work, and stuff with strong DRM/anti-cheat won't,
| but that's a minority of stuff at this point which will
| only dwindle further.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even then... with Vavle's efforts, a lot of DRM just
| takes a software update (mostly) to work in Proton/Linux.
| Not that a lot of the older AAA titles have been updated
| (or even recent ones). But it's consistently getting
| better.
|
| Will have to see which direction things head over time.
| anthk wrote:
| Not Linux but you could do that with a BSD kernel
| perfectly. MS could implement Win32 on top of a BSD
| kernel in just weeks.
|
| Did you know Win32 runs as a subsystem on top of NT, as
| there are several more such as a subsystem for Unix?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Support for the POSIX subsystem was deprecated some time
| ago according to Wikipedia:
|
| > Microsoft's first foray into achieving Unix-like
| compatibility on Windows began with the Microsoft POSIX
| Subsystem, superseded by Windows Services for UNIX via
| MKS/Interix, which was eventually deprecated with the
| release of Windows 8.1.
|
| There was also the possibility to run Linux software
| under Windows using coLinux.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| I know NT was designed with that in mind, but I don't
| think any type of unix subsystem is still maintained or
| would work these days. Although they could make it if
| they wanted it to.
|
| Then again maybe the modern NT no longer has that
| capability.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't
| replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near
| future.
|
| You can with emulation, compatibility layers, stuff like
| Wine and DXVK and using Linux drivers. Also lots of
| software ends up being written in top of Electron, so it
| makes easier.
|
| Will it be a great user experience? Probably not, but
| that's not the point. If it will win Microsoft some
| money, that would be enough of a reason.
|
| A better idea would be open sourcing Windows if that is
| legally possible for them to do.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| I've used a Linux desktop for decades and I'm sick of it. My
| Windows machine never bricks itself on updates. All my
| hardware works with it. Getting something as basic as
| Bluetooth or 3D rendering working doesn't require a PhD. I
| don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly
| Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for
| philosophical engineering reasons.
|
| I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I
| don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the
| goddamn thing.
|
| I would pay the NSA money _in addition_ to letting them spy
| on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Yeah. My takeaway after 20 years is that Linux is in a
| constant state of churn and it's always going to be. It's
| like if you're a mechanic and every single year someone
| swaps your entire toolbox for something with new tools that
| work completely differently. Of course there's a point
| where you get sick of it and rage quit.
|
| To make it even worse, no one likes doing the last 20% of
| the work to make things stable and even less people like
| maintaining finished projects, so basically everything in
| Linux is about 80% done and gets replaced before it even
| hits the point of being reliable.
| binkHN wrote:
| Have you tried ChromeOS?
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| > I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I
| don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the
| goddamn thing.
|
| this is hackernews, not usernews
| DRW_ wrote:
| Yeah, and messing around configuring and troubleshooting
| my OS gets in the way of my preferred "hacking".
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| Modern computer has near infinite amout of software.
|
| Do i want write code. Yes.
|
| Do i want to write ALL of it. No.
|
| But linux assumes you kinda sorta do want to do it.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| > But linux assumes you kinda sorta do want to do it.
|
| huh?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Why would OS devs bother supporting hardware drives when
| people can do it themselves amirite? Who doesn't know how
| to write a kernel module anyway...
|
| Also bluetooth, who even needs that? It's important that
| we have out of the box docker support. /s
| blibble wrote:
| > I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly
| Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for
| philosophical engineering reasons.
|
| have you used Windows in the last 20 years?
| lukevp wrote:
| "Have to update" is the key here. You can still run apps
| from windows 95 if you want to.
| blibble wrote:
| I can run X applications from the 80s on Wayland
|
| meanwhile Windows 11 has 4 or 5 different UI styles in
| control panel
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't run Wayland, but a few times per year I find
| myself picking up some unmaintained X thing and running
| it with a recent OS. I'd say on average compatibility is
| much better on Windows.
|
| Binary compatibility on Linux is often out of the
| question. Frequently this means picking up some old libs.
| libc5, old stdc++... For really old stuff with fewer
| dependencies that may not be a problem. As you get into a
| more modern era where software started to pile on large
| heaps of dependencies it becomes more challenging.
|
| Source compatibility typically means porting, sometimes
| nontrivial. Likely something is written in a time capsule
| of that era's poor C and C++ standards compliance. (i.e.
| C89 or C++98 existed, but compilers of the day accepted
| lots of nonsense, so software of that era doesn't even
| conform to those.)
|
| In contrast the Win32 API or COM is designed around
| binary compatibility. Maybe early 2000s dependencies
| (when MS started getting worse at this) are a problem. I
| think Win16 on modern amd64 is also a problem. But on
| average, compatibility is higher.
| drno123 wrote:
| While Windows UI changes a lot, all old apps work fine in
| Win11. I guess the author was referring to Wayland
| bull...t
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Bluetooth_
|
| Heh, in my experience Bluetooth is actually entirely broken
| on Windows. I simply cannot get my headset to connect to my
| Windows laptop, but it works just fine on my Linux laptop
| out of the box.
| alex_lav wrote:
| It's amusing because, for me, Bluetooth doesn't work
| anywhere. Not a knock against Linux because IME the
| technology just doesn't work _anywhere_
| Zizizizz wrote:
| Wireplumber and Pipewire is the first time it just worked
| for me on Linux, it was definitely hit or miss for me
| before but I haven't had any issues in a couple years
| thanks to those replacing pulseaudio
| alex_lav wrote:
| The last time I tried to get it to work on linux, I
| remember modifying what I believe to be pulseaudio
| config? And hating it. But I've also just stopped buying
| non-apple bluetooth products.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| >It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating
| system.
|
| Mostly true, it's been a long time since Microsoft made a
| CONSUMER operating system.
|
| Windows Server isn't plagued with this crap, it costs a whole
| lot more, but doesn't have this nonsense. Also, isn't
| designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these
| days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get
| a powershell prompt, and that's it).
| intrasight wrote:
| Came here to say same. I install Windows Server as my base
| OS and everything else including my "desktop" Windows, runs
| as a VM. This lets me hack up my desktops - both Windows
| and Linux - without concern, as I can rollback to a
| snapshot. I can't imagine not having this.
|
| If you do Windows development you'll probably have a Visual
| Studio license which will include a server license for
| "testing". I use that license as my base OS.
| Rediscover wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I've used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid
| 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole
| shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I
| switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware).
|
| I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip
| that was fixed by loading MS-NT & copying their firmware from
| a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS -
| Dell Lat 360 or 36x).
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| The only reason I don't use Linux on my personal PC is that I
| use it for gaming.
|
| My homeserver runs linux and at work I use Linux, shrug.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Linux gaming is _almost_ in a state where I 'd find it
| quite tolerable, except that VR on the platform is still a
| sitshow (yes, even on Valve's own hardware) and,
| unfortunately for me, I've become quite attached to a few
| VR games.
|
| As it is though, I'll just give up on VR and whatever else
| I like that doesn't work on Linux before I go to 11.
| harph wrote:
| I've been playing games on Linux daily for years now
| (even AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077) and this is why I am
| still holding out on VR. I just don't want to be forced
| to go back to Windows just to play the games I want to
| play.
|
| I'm waiting for Valve to maybe make a successor to Index
| with proper Linux support, but I'm not holding my breath.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Have you ever compared in-game performances between
| Windows and Linux?
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Same here. I can't stand windows 11 feels like someone's
| taking over my OS. I was so upset that I wrote an article
| about it[1].
|
| I was a Windows user for a long time until Windows 11
| came out that was the last straw for me.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-
| transi...
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties.
| Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half
| a day with debugging.
|
| Man I havent played at a lan event in a long time. So
| many games now don't seem to support that. All my friends
| I use to play with have moved away. I would be nice to
| attend a LAN event again someday :D
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Well, maybe I have to clarify what I mean with these
| parties :D Me and three friends meet from time to time,
| and each of us takes their PC to a friends home, where we
| game and watch movies from friday evening to sunday
| afternoon. Sometimes we play local games but a lot of
| times we'll also play global multiplayer games. It's just
| about being physically together for a couple of nights :)
|
| A selection of games is Minecraft, Valorant, Left for
| Dead 2, CS:GO, Age of Empires, Stronghold, The
| Forest/Sons of the Forest, Valheim and some others.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > Linux gaming is almost in a state where I'd find it
| quite tolerable
|
| Definitely agree. It's almost there. But some things are
| still holding me back.
|
| 1) As you mentioned, VR is shit. I don't use VR a lot,
| but a couple of times per year I just want to try it
| again.
|
| 2) There's definitely a performance hit. Some games are
| very jittery on Linux, while running smoothly on windows.
| I spend a lot of money on my gaming PC because it's one
| of my oldest and favorite hobbies, and if an OS just
| tanks the performance it's kind of annoying.
|
| 3) Some games just don't work. Mostly multiplayer games.
| Normally I exclusively play offline, singleplayer games.
| But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which
| I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day
| with debugging.
|
| 3.1) My work-life consists of debugging linux servers and
| fixing them, or setting them up. After work I just want
| to turn on my PC and game a bit. With Windows, that's
| 99.9% doable. With Linux, I have to debug and fix things
| during my free time as well, because the chance that a
| game just works out-of-the-box is pretty slim for me,
| even though Steam Proton is quite awesome.
|
| 4) A smaller hobby of mine is video editing, which is
| also not optimal on Linux. Aka., I would have to find a
| different tool, which I've tried unsuccessfully.
|
| Basically, I use windows on my daily, free-time PC
| because gaming "just works" and sometimes I like to use
| VR or video editing softwares. If all I'd do in my free-
| time was browse the web etc., I'd just use a cheap laptop
| with Linux on it. After all, I really dislike Windows for
| anything else because it's such a bloated piece of shit
| OS -\\_(tsu)_/-
| account42 wrote:
| It is really odd how little Valve care about their VR
| implementation on Linux compared to their Linux gaming
| efforts in general. Perhaps the VR and Linux people at
| Valve just dont overlap that much?
| orange_fritter wrote:
| I bought a Windows gaming laptop in December, first time
| Windows gaming since 2010.
|
| Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use
| and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.
|
| I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's
| acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience
| crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm
| pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing
| Stockholm Syndrome.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I literally can't remember seeing a BSOD in Windows in as
| long as I can remember, at _least_ 5 years or more.
|
| I haven't rebooted this particular machine since the time
| it said it was required for an update, which was weeks
| ago.
|
| I use it as my primary dev machine for my day job and
| it's a gaming machine that I use for gaming daily.
|
| Something else is wrong. It's installed on billions of
| devices, noone would accept constant BSODs, crashes and
| forced reboots if this was the normal experience.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's very likely that there's a hardware issue. While it
| could be a driver bug, that's the kind of thing you would
| be able to easily find others with similar systems
| complaining about.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| did you do a memory test? grab a linux usb stick and
| select memtest86+ on boot and let it run overnight or for
| how long as you can
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of
| use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.
|
| > 've railed in the past about how Windows users think
| it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine,
| experience crashes, etc.
|
| Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I
| have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both
| need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a
| week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows
| box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous
| Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so
| it _did_ have some crashes).
| xxs wrote:
| Having had several gaming laptops and basically every
| single laptop in the past 15years had a dedicated GPU,
| gaming laptops are a gimmick, if you emphasize on gaming.
|
| They do make pretty decent machines for work, due to
| spec., large battery, and generous cooling. While many
| find them too heavy or bulking, but I do not mind that
| bit at all. However, the amount of heat needed to be
| dissipated, and GPUs having very low power envelop, makes
| them quite pitiful for the price paid.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of
| use a
|
| You don't honestly think that's what everyone else
| experiences, do you?
|
| I'm a gamer running Win10. In the past 5 years, I've had
| 4 BSoDs, 3 of them caused by Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat
| (Which I've uninstalled since I don't play Valorant
| anymore).
|
| It sounds to me that you got a faulty laptop, and rather
| than consider that possibility, you decided that Windows
| is to blame.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Pretty good chance it's either a bad driver for some
| hardware you are running, or a physical device fault. If
| the fault is different devices each time, likely ram. I
| can't stand Windows at this point, but the experiences
| you are seeing definitely aren't normal. What do the
| temperatures look like? It's possibly just a bad thermal
| design or fan curve for your model.
| swozey wrote:
| Do you _seriously_ think those of us running Windows deal
| with reboots and BSODs constantly and that you didn 't
| happen to buy bad ram or some other hardware problem?
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| If you don't work in tech and you aren't actually
| interested in tech which is quite a large proportion of
| home users then switching away is too much work.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| As others have said, this is not normal. Your laptop
| appears to be broken or misconfigured and you should
| probably make a warranty claim. If you bought a used
| laptop someone ripped you off with a lemon device.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I haven't seen a bsod in over 15 years on any of the 4
| personal or handful of work machines I've used in that
| time. Last one I can even remember seeing was in Vista
| and it was from legit hardware failure. Can't remember
| the last time I was forced to reboot either. It's been
| suggested plenty, but ignored without issue.
| xxs wrote:
| You are not into any form of overclocking I gather.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That is one nice thing about blue screens now. If you get
| them now it defiantly gets your attention. There is
| either a driver issue or a bad hw component (overheating,
| poor/broken connection) on the gp's new machine. I have
| not see one on my own machines in probably 4 years (bad
| driver). My wife gets one about every 2-3 months. They
| are identical hardware. I dropped her laptop on the floor
| one day by accident. It has not been quite right since
| (especially if she leaves an 360 controller plugged in).
| Forced reboots can happen. Usually about once a month you
| get a shot at it when they do their monthly update cycle.
| So if you happen to stay up past 3AM on the second
| Tuesday of the month you might get one.
| ilyt wrote:
| I just dual-boot, altought I usually try the game via
| Proton and it often "just works" on Linux.
|
| Way too many of my hobby stuff is better dealt with on
| Linux
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| WINE is pretty good, and Proton is basically pre-polished
| WINE. Works basically just out of the box, and anything
| that doesn't work perfectly can usually be addressed with
| posts in the WineDB or ProtonDB
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Unfortunately Gaming on Windows is "basically flawless",
| compared to Proton being "pretty good". I just got sick
| of debugging games because I didn't want to do the same
| thing during my free-time which I'm doing during the day
| at work.
|
| Now, I love Linux and don't really like Windows that
| much, but when I want to game I just want the experience
| to be as smooth and easy as possible. And if I spend
| thousands of dollars on hardware I want it to be used as
| effectively as possible.
|
| Maybe the problem with gaming on Linux is my own
| laziness...
| xxs wrote:
| Gaming on Windows is quite broken for ultrawide screen,
| or dual/triple screens. Other than that shader
| compilation is the bane of many (depends on the CPU) -
| resulting into 'random' stutters. The latter issues are a
| poster child of the fact most games are just console
| ports. So calling 'flawless' is an overstatement.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > ultrawide screen, or dual/triple screens
|
| Well, you know, if you have to take an edge-case which
| doesn't apply to my situation to tell me that windows
| isn't flawless for gaming...
|
| Does ultrawide/triple screen work better on Linux?
| ilyt wrote:
| I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to
| experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in
| windows".
|
| Only if game is on Steam, got no patience to fuck with
| wine/proton manually
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to
| experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in
| windows".
|
| Yeah, I think the best tip I got is to try dual booting
| to make it easier.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| When's the last time you gamed on Linux?
|
| In the past few years protons come a long way in my
| humble opinion.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Beginning of last year. But then I wanted to 1) game in
| VR again and 2) play games with friends which contained
| anti-cheat software which wasn't compatible with Windows,
| so I spontaneously went back to Windows for these two
| things.
|
| I'm someone who switches games pretty fast, I'm not one
| to play the same multiplayer game for a long time. So
| each time I started a new game, I had to debug in Linux
| to get it working.
|
| Since January I've played Planet Crafter, Steep, Back 4
| Blood, Bioshock Infinite, Atomic Heart, Hogwarts Legacy
| and now Elden Ring. No idea what percentage of these
| games "just work" on Linux, but I doubt that the
| experience would be the same as on Windows.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > dual-boot
|
| Don't know why I never considered this... Should try it
| :D
|
| Then I could use Windows for video editing and windows-
| only games and Linux for everything else.
| bombolo wrote:
| what's wrong with kdenlive?
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| I could try it out again. Tried to use it like 5 years
| ago and wasn't that happy, but don't remember why. I
| think the video playback was very laggy and I had more
| crashes than tolerable.
|
| Saw that it's even usable on Windows, so I could try the
| workflow before having to switch the OS completely.
| Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve but I'm not really a
| power-user anyways.
|
| Thanks for the tip!
| trinsic2 wrote:
| > video editing
|
| Yes I recently switched from windows to PopOS[1] and this
| is one thing that I haven't found a solution for. There
| doesn't seem to be any good video editing software for
| Linux other than blender and in my experience video
| editing on blender isn't that great.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-
| transi...
| tracker1 wrote:
| Most seem to prefer KdenlLive or Davinci Resolve (which
| has a free version, but many pony up for the paid
| version, get the hardware key). A lot of the YouTubers I
| follow have started using Davinci, even those sticking to
| Mac and Windows.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > or Davinci Resolve
|
| AFAIK Proprietary codecs(H.264/265, AAC) are not
| supported on Davinci Resolve on Linux. Maybe they fixed
| it since I last checked.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I guess not, which is surprising... maybe Davinci uses OS
| provided codecs in Windows and Mac? From a thread I
| looked at...
|
| ------
|
| Did you try the Linux appimage of "Shutter Encoder"
| shutterencoder.com/en/, it works fine for me to convert
| H.265 to DNxHD or DNxHR (a better format than h.@265 for
| editing in Davinci) and I can use these files in the free
| version of Davinci Resolve 17 & 18. But I'm just a
| hobbyist and I'm using Davinci only for basic things, I'm
| at the beginning of my learning path... So I hope I'm not
| giving you a bad advice !
|
| I'm on Arch Linux with ffmpeg4.4
| voldacar wrote:
| Could you share your ISO or the process you used to make it?
| Was it easy or is there a bunch of esoteric stuff you have to
| fiddle with? I'm switching to 10 for my new PC build and I'm
| about to do a ton of research on decrapifying the OS
| Fnoord wrote:
| Me neither. Which is why I am using Open Shell (with DLL hack
| on Windows 11, without on Windows 10) [1]. Although since I
| prefer to have the option to have my menu bar on left, which is
| a reason I don't want Windows 11.
|
| ..but its the popularity of Android and Google which put
| Microsoft to this direction. They get away with it, why not
| Microsoft? On my Nvidia Shield TV, I have to watch about 33% of
| my startup screen with commercials. Commercials which sometimes
| aren't meant for _my children_. What have we come to that we
| accept this behavior from a TV? And Google gets away with this.
| (I 'm not trying to downplay Microsoft's behavior, however.)
|
| [1] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
| tracker1 wrote:
| You can shift it back to the left, I'd still probably stick
| to a 3rd party menu adapter though.
| midoridensha wrote:
| >I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS.
| It simply isn't it's job.
|
| Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that
| company says it is. If it's shoveling annoying ads to users,
| that's its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible
| thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by
| profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of
| annoying ads. If you don't like the product your vendor has
| sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS
| that doesn't come from a company with a profit motive won't
| have this same problem.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| > Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that
| company says it is.
|
| That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not
| to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least
| primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not
| sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that
| can do that.
| avsteele wrote:
| We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give
| feedback on what parts of the product we like/don't like.
|
| The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the
| business-optimal thing to do is weird.
| alkonaut wrote:
| The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a
| total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some
| use cases.
|
| There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows
| for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few
| remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so
| perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft
| monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is
| a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please
| reconsider. It's just not.
|
| I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around
| these things. There is zero way that these news links
| actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer
| alienation. There must be something else to it.
| worble wrote:
| Welp someone better call up Gabe and tell him to stop
| selling the Steam Deck, apparently Linux can't be used to
| play games. Poor guy must've missed the memo.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I never said linux can't be used to play games.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam
| Deck if you haven't. Most games work, granted if you love
| some multiplayer game with kernel level anti-cheat it won't
| work. But at this point it feels like 90-95% compatible.
| I've run into I think one game I've tried out of probably
| 50-100 that I couldn't get to work just by launching or
| either bumping the Proton/Wine version.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a
| Steam Deck if you haven't.
|
| I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games
| to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then
| claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable
| gaming platform!".
|
| Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming
| platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton
| projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it
| has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a
| shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings.
|
| [0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could
| never get their shit together enough to actually be a
| platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own
| platform.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I'd strongly argue that for most people "90-95%
| compatible" means "not compatible" if it doesn't run the
| one AAA game they care about, and "could get it to work
| by messing with versions of other software" is
| incompatible with the words "perfectly usable".
|
| If it doesn't work out of the box and requires fiddling,
| then it's at most "barely usable", it doesn't even meet
| the standard for "decently usable" much less "perfectly
| usable".
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think this is mostly the same argument as "It's
| perfectly usable on the desktop" of previous decades.
| It's basically "yeah you will need some tweaking, but
| it's worth it for the benefit of being
| free/libre/open/hackable/..."
|
| The opposite is basically "Yeah you pay for an OS that
| shows ads in your face and that you hate, but on the
| other hand you don't need to occasionally google error
| messages for that latest game you bought or worry that
| the anticheat doesn't work" Sadly you can't have both.
| But my point is if you _absolutely must_ play all AAA
| online PC multiplayer games perfectly, then you _must_
| also use windows. I guess the contentious part is, is
| that the definition of "usable" to me it is, but clearly
| not to everyone.
| goosedragons wrote:
| No it's very very different. 15 years ago when I first
| tried gaming on Linux it was crap. A literal handful of
| titles worked. Most would not launch or they would be a
| slideshow after considerable futzing with Wine.
|
| 10 years ago things improved a bit when Valve started
| bringing Linux ports to Steam but still most games didn't
| work and needed effort in Wine to launch. Now you
| literally click one check box in Steam and install the
| game and it just works most of the time. If it doesn't
| work you can often use ProtonUp Qt to get the latest
| Proton build and that often solves it. It's about as much
| effort as updating a GPU driver on Windows. For non-Steam
| games Lutris and Heroic are pretty similar.
|
| I'm not just talking indie games either, big AAA stuff
| like Marvel's Spider-man work well. Online kernel anti-
| cheat games are really a pretty tiny list. Obviously
| there's some popular, high profile stuff on there but a
| lot of good recent stuff that does work.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think it's a matter of perspective, which mostly
| depends on your attitude to AAA online multiplayer. Those
| represent a huge % of copies sold and hours played for PC
| gaming (They are certainly the majority of titles on the
| most sold lists). Many of those titles also have windows-
| only anti-cheats (Valve obviously being a driving force
| for Linux here).
|
| So if you look at "N titles of M work well" then the
| Linux glass is half full. If you look at "X hours of Y of
| the total played hours of recent popular AAA games are
| played on games or modes that work poorly on linux" then
| it's still half empty.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Out of curiosity I took the top most played games on
| Steam of 2022 as given here:
| https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2022?tab=3
|
| Unfortunately it's not by hours but peak concurrent
| players. It's also pretty similar to the top grossing
| list. I checked each games Steam Deck rating and if it
| was verified or playable (usually means it needs text
| entry with a keyboard or doesn't support controllers)
| marked it as "works" (with the exception of TW: Warhammer
| III which is listed as not working because the
| performance isn't good on Steam Deck but it's a native
| linux title). If it was unsupported and the reason was
| given I marked as so, if it was some other reason I
| checked ProtonDB and noted the rating. I assumed if Valve
| marked it not supported it doesn't work regardless of
| ProtonDB rating (except again TW:Warhammer III). Out of
| the 90 titles there 21 are marked unsupported mainly
| because of anti-cheat or 23%, when weighted by player
| base that rises to 26%. So arguably it's 3/4 full. ;)
|
| Of course if you demand every title MUST work and no
| alternatives will ever suffice I doubt you'll ever be
| satisfied. Anti cheat also gets rarer as you move away
| from big online games.
|
| Here's the full list:
|
| Over 240,000 Peak players:
|
| Goose Goose Duck - works Ark Survival Evolved - works
| Elden Ring - Works Dota 2 - Works COD MWII (2022) -
| Doesn't work, anticheat PUBG Battlegrounds - Doesn't
| work, anticheat Yu-gi-oh Master Duel - Works Apex Legends
| - Works Lost Ark - Doesn't work, anticheat CS GO - Works
| Destiny II - Doesn't work, anticheat Dyling Light 2 -
| Works
|
| Over 130,000 peak players:
|
| Cyberpunk 2077 - Works New World - Works Monster Hunter
| Rise - Works Total War Warhammer III - Works WB
| Multiversus - Works V Rising - Works Path of Exile -
| Works Team Fortress II - Works Naraka: Bladepoint - Works
| Rust - Doesn't work, anticheat GTA 5 - Works Wallpaper
| Engine - Doesn't work? (is it really a game though?)
|
| Over 75,000 Peak players: Raft The final chaper - Works
| Vampire Survivors - Works The Sims 4 - Works Rainbow Six
| Siege - Doesn't work, anticheat War Thunder - Works Fifa
| 23 - Doesn't work, anticheat Left 4 Dead 2 - Works
| Unturned - Works Witcher III - works The Forest - works
| Civ 6 - Works Valheim - Works Fifa 22 - works Football
| Manager 2023 - Works Dead by Daylight - Doesn't work,
| anticheat Dread Hunger - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold
| Warframe - works Terraria - works Football Manager 2022 -
| works NFS Heat - Works Warhammer Darktide - Maybe works?
| ProtonDB says Gold Warhammer Vermintide - doesn't work,
| anticheat Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga - Works
|
| Over 40,000 peak players Skyrim - Works Euro Truck
| Simulator 2 - Works Fall Guys - Doesn't work, anticheat
| Don't Starve Together - works God of War - Works Gundam
| Evolution - Doesn't work, anticheat Cycle Frontier -
| Doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Stray - Works Deep Rock
| Galactic - Works Stellaris - Works The Scroll of Taiwu -
| Works Mirror 2 Project X - Doesn't work?, ProtonDB silver
| Conan Exiles - Doesn't work, anticheat NBA 2K22 - Works
| Farming Sim 22 - works Marvel's Spiderman - Works
| Battlefield 1 - works Battlefield V - works Risk of Rain
| 2 - works Crusader Kings III - works No man's sky - works
| Final Fantasy XIV - works Red Dead Redemption II - works
| Warm Snow - works Mount and Blade II Bannerlord - works
| World of Tanks Blitz - Works Payday 2 - works Hearts of
| Iron IV - works Super People 2 - doesn't work, anticheat
| Stardew Valley - works 7 days to die - works phasmophobia
| - works VR chat - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Undecember
| - works garry's mod - works Halo Infinite - works Stumble
| Guys - works Day Z - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Mir4 -
| doesn't work? ProtonDB borked Project Zomboid - Works
| Cult of the Lamb - works Victoria 3 - Works Rimworld -
| works
| SirMaster wrote:
| 90-95% sounds like a good stat, but I just checked and it
| doesn't support at all the main game I play for most of
| my gaming time. So it's very incompatible from my point
| of view.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1938090/Call_of_Duty_M
| ode...
|
| Looking back over the previous call of duty titles, it
| doesn't seem to support any of them. Missing giant and
| popular gaming franchises like this is why I would not
| even be comfortable calling it 90-95% compatible.
|
| I also checked BF 2042 which I play probably 2nd most
| often, same, not compatible.
|
| And 3rd most played for me, Rainbow Sig Siege, also not
| compatible.
|
| These are not exactly small games or small gaming
| franchises and so basically steam deck or Linux doesn't
| support basically any of the games I play.
|
| Just wanted to give my perspective.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I hear this a lot with this generation and I think its
| misguided. If you really want to support, or not support
| something, you will find a way to make it happen.
|
| Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that
| doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking.
|
| If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep
| blaming the world for your choices.
|
| Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all
| live in together. It's up to each individual to make right
| choices for this world to change.
| wellanyway wrote:
| > for some use cases
|
| let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?
| alkonaut wrote:
| For pro use. Then AAA multiplayer online gaming for home
| use.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Nah. Plenty of gamers and linux users disagree.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Anticheat makes a lot of multi-player games not work on
| Linux.
|
| Can't play Rust on a steam deck.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the
| gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton
| covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software,
| and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple
| OSes.
|
| I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they
| would probably be pleasantly surprised.
| wil421 wrote:
| Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I
| had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find
| the configs that would stop games from crashing or what
| not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes
| with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain
| games working.
|
| I sold my steam deck because I don't have the time to
| play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were
| one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of
| the switch or desktop.
|
| The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a
| big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I'm
| just not trying to debug pleasure activities.
| redeeman wrote:
| okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to
| the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers
| were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to
| play different incompatible games. Of course some bought
| multiple harddrives and had several installations
| concurrent.
|
| Which is worse? :)
| antiterra wrote:
| > Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible
| rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows
| weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible
| games.
|
| I am guessing that there have been real issues with
| incompatible root kits, but there has never been an 'era'
| where it was a common thing for the average gamer to
| reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible
| rootkits.
|
| The only thing close to that I can think of is places
| where poorly maintained rootkits were required for
| banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused
| havoc. That's a hellscape for sure but not quite the same
| thing.
| CleaveIt2Beaver wrote:
| Probably the problem that persists in the modern day,
| because it remains relevant.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others
| there is a performance penalty of several percent, a
| slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers
| lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows
| release specific for the game.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| That seems to be very much the exception. In many other
| cases Linux gives significantly better performance and
| less issues.
|
| Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days,
| and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's a _lot_ better than it used to be, but it 's still
| far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or
| anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are
| basically rootkits).
|
| Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US
| chart):
|
| #1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090
|
| #2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck
| apparently great, Desktop less than pefect)
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620
|
| #3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play
| and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250
|
| And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time
| it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games
| instead
|
| #1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with
| official anticheat support 3 years after release.
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470
|
| #2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290
|
| #3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the
| user reports look really painful).
| https://www.protondb.com/app/730
|
| Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a
| "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box
| without tweaking, is _extremely low_. (proton /steamdeck
| isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).
| majewsky wrote:
| I do gaming livestreams from a Linux setup. Out of the
| last dozen of games that I played, most worked perfectly
| right out the box. One had a minor texture glitch on the
| start screen (though not in-game), one had rather bad
| (though playable) performance. The only issue that I've
| seen across multiple games is that they seem to get
| confused when screens are on different resolutions, but I
| can usually fix that by flipping between windowed and
| fullscreen.
|
| So yeah, it's not all sunshine and butterflies, but
| "extremely low number of games that work out of the box"
| is not true in my experience.
|
| (Important side-note: I don't play online multiplayer
| stuff, so the whole anti-cheat software topic does not
| apply to me.)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yeah and I consider "PC gaming" to basically be "AAA
| multiplayer gaming" so you can see there are different
| niches here.
| viraptor wrote:
| Protondb is not great way to get a summary across many
| titles. It's effectively closer to a bug tracker. If some
| people have an issue, you'll see it on protondb - it may
| not be a real issue or may be due to some weird old
| config though.
|
| Few people think to visit it and report that a specific
| game works great for them.
| askiiart wrote:
| I've never had any issues with CS:GO. It's native to
| Linux. Also, I get better performance in CS:GO on Linux
| than Windows.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles.
| It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games
| might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small
| handful of games.
|
| I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only
| slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam
| thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.
|
| As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I
| do on Windows, and many other users support the same.
| alkonaut wrote:
| By number of copies sold or hours played even just those
| six are a huge chunk of "PC gaming". Including say the
| top 15 of the last 3 years, you can pretty much call all
| the rest of PC gaming a long tail roundoff error in terms
| of copies sold or hours played. It doen't really matter
| if for these 45 titles there are 4500 titles that work
| perfectly on Linux.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Depends how you look at it. If 95% of games play fine on
| Linux, and if a significant percentage of those play
| _better_ on Linux than they do on Windows, then it 's
| clearly not as far behind as you are trying to argue it
| is.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think all it comes down to is: how bad is bad? To me,
| if 9/10 work equally well and 1/10 doesn't work at all,
| then that's _way_ worse than unacceptable. I.e. not even
| close to acceptable.
|
| Others might shrug and say "hey 9/10 that's great, and if
| 3 of those run even better then I love it!"
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Yup. I'm in the latter group I suppose, since I don't
| really want to deal with any title that has intrusive DRM
| or anti-cheat as it is. I do security research and they
| don't tend to like some of the stuff I have on my system
| as it is.
| eloisant wrote:
| > If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS
| for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's
| just not.
|
| The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld
| that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint
| on the status of gaming on Linux
| falcolas wrote:
| I love my steam deck, but the subset of games it can play
| is exactly that - a subset of games that work fine on
| Windows.
|
| About 3/4 of my library is marked with "no" on their
| compatibility chart, and from some experimentation,
| they're largely not wrong.
| eloisant wrote:
| > About 3/4 of my library is marked with "no" on their
| compatibility chart
|
| It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I
| suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are
| very likely to just work in practice).
|
| Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case
| most of the games work out of the box regardless of the
| rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be
| played by changing the proton version or using
| protontricks.
|
| Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?
| alkonaut wrote:
| > most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by
| changing the proton version or using protontricks.
|
| I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's
| possible for power users like me or you, but if it
| requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to
| google an error message or visit a forum to look for
| solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people.
|
| I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people
| fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do
| that.
|
| My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and
| able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g.
| visit a forum or google the occasional error would this
| work for.
|
| Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an
| average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming
| experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less
| frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's
| still not so frustrating when put next to the windows
| start menu ads frustration.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS
| for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's
| just not.
|
| Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS
| (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases -
| what's missing?
| alkonaut wrote:
| By "usable" I mean "is equivalent to" in terms of
| performance, availability. I should have used a better
| term than "usable" I suppose. It's usable with some
| caveats if you are willing to miss some titles, miss some
| performance and so on. It's not usable as a complete
| replacement for windows if you don't accept missing any
| titles, any performance.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Windows itself has issues with titles that don't work, or
| leave performance on the table. Granted these are older
| titles long out of the spotlight but by your metric
| Windows 11 can't be a complete replacement for Windows 98
| or XP.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yes, the interesting segment imo is "online multiplayer
| AAA, released in the last 5 years".
|
| Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics
| cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to
| play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically
| work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or
| the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up
| and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).
| redeeman wrote:
| so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because
| it doesnt run all games including those that only come for
| xbox?
|
| no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task
| imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx,
| or ios, or android.
|
| People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to
| do, and since they consider that the default, thats just
| how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change
| that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of
| things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they
| put up with on windows does not get to go in same category,
| because they already accepted that thats just life.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console
| because it doesnt run all games including those that only
| come for xbox?
|
| There are games made _for_ xbox. On Linux, the story is
| sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games
| made _for_ windows to work on Linux. It 's not the same
| to the xbox vs playstation situation.
| soylentcola wrote:
| No, but if they want to play God of War or Uncharted,
| they get a Playstation, even if they may really dislike
| some aspects of the Playstation and would prefer an Xbox.
|
| Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or
| use software that is either Windows-only or works much
| better on Windows - even if we really dislike some
| aspects of Windows.
|
| Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we
| dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.
| pxc wrote:
| > People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them
| to do, and since they consider that the default, thats
| just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can
| change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all
| sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the
| shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in
| same category, because they already accepted that thats
| just life.
|
| This x 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I
| think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make
| essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as
| tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as
| 'facts of life'.
| teekert wrote:
| MS365 from Linux is at times painful but not undoable, for
| example sharing ppts from teams is nice. In the browser
| it's anyway easier to have multiple teams windows open.
|
| For everything development related, Windows is just that
| layer that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That describes my work experience right now... Mostly
| just slack, browser, vs code, and code/docker/etc is in
| WSL.
|
| Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage
| from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full
| switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this,
| and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Most notably: a gaming rig
|
| You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac,
| and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal
| computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to
| the operating system every other week? Maybe _you_ don 't,
| but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to
| Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how
| much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and
| keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the
| settings that ultimately make little difference in how
| games actually _play_. I know, I know. "Mouse and
| keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a
| console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting
| everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models,
| there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an
| outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!
| lenkite wrote:
| "... and suddenly noticing how much time you were
| spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up
| to date..."
|
| Honestly - has this ever been a problem on Windows ?
| After the initial setup, I am done. I occasionally update
| the Video Drivers - but thats once in 6 months. Only if
| you change the keyboard, mouse hardware, would you need
| to run through the driver update process again and that
| too - only if Windows did not auto-detect and install the
| driver.
|
| Source: experience in maintaining a dozen family windows
| installs on PC/laptops.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| I really, really wish I wasn't so terrible at using a
| console controller for FPS games. I would love to play
| COD and all the others on PS or Xbox, but I'm awful. It
| would be so much better.
| ntauthority wrote:
| Quite a lot of recent console FPS games just let you plug
| in a USB mouse/keyboard and you get matched with PC
| players (or other console users who use the same input
| method) instead.
|
| CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for
| example.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I'm not going to lie; it took a long time to readjust,
| but I have, and I don't even think about it any more. The
| key is that everyone else is using the same thing, so it
| works out. I've worked my way up to maxing out the
| sensitivity in Battlefield 1, and I can usually place in
| the top 25%. To be fair, it takes a long time to really
| dial in your snap 180's with a mouse too. The no cheating
| thing helped me get over the hump. I was pretty tired of
| ALWAYS having at least one hacker in PC Battlefield.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If you play on a reasonable server then hackers should be
| a non-issue. Any reasonable server is one you can return
| to every day and where you know there is a sane admin on,
| 100% of the time. That obviously all went out the window
| when they trashed community servers in BF (and some
| multiplayer games don't have stable servers to this day -
| which means I'll probably never play them).
| xnx wrote:
| Are Fortune 500 companies installing current versions of
| Windows? How do they disable all this junk (and how do I do it
| myself)?
| gorkish wrote:
| Windows Enterprise LTSB with some GPOs
| themadturk wrote:
| This. It doesn't stop the crap in Edge (which is easy to
| turn off once you know where the magic button is), but I
| never see any of this stuff at the OS level on my work
| machine. (My home machine is a Mac, so I don't see it there
| either.)
| opportune wrote:
| I just want MS to release a windows 7 clone with under-the-hood
| improvements from subsequent releases. All the consumer-facing
| changes since 7 have been utter crap - it's hard to think of a
| single change that I like. I just want windows 7 with WSL.
|
| If not for games I would NEVER run modern windows at all. It is
| explicitly anti-user. It violates my consent all the time with
| their Edge shenanigans, and it pushes all the MS services like
| Cortana that I simply do not care about. At this point it's
| hard to say that windows takes less fiddling than Linux to set
| up, if you include the time spent fighting the OS and time
| spent disabling Microsoft's crap
| chillfox wrote:
| I have always used Windows for my gaming PC, but last year when
| I got a new one I went for Linux. I was just tired of having to
| constantly reset my settings, remove ads/candy crush from the
| start menu.
| kibwen wrote:
| I've already resolved that my next gaming PC will be a docked
| Steam Deck. I'm through with Windows.
| TingPing wrote:
| The Steam Deck is quite weak, it isn't really a PC
| replacement. You can run Steam on desktop Linux. It is
| quite good.
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm sure you can run SteamOS on the desktop just as well,
| though in my case all the games that I want to play are
| either older or new-but-graphically-undemanding. And even
| for new and demanding games, PC games always have options
| to just turn the graphics down, which is fine by me.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Yeah it's ridiculous. The nerve to keep forcing something on
| a user after they have clearly rejected it. Honestly that
| kind of crap should be illegal IMO.
|
| After a lot of GPO settings and hacks I've tamed W10 to be
| acceptable, but it's still crappy on principle.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| > For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought
| Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).
|
| This is my biggest complaint about Windows (which I no longer
| use), in that it had the chance to be, and once was, an
| opportunity to bridge the gap between MacOS and Linux. More
| open than the former, more opinionated than the latter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Telemetry in Windows has some value for users. Specifically,
| Windows has a system for systematically shimming the standard
| library (which is the documented API for OS services) to fix
| problems with applications.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-t...
|
| Telemetry returns information about applications crashes to the
| "mothership" and MS is pretty quick to update the application
| compatibility database to fix problems.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Modern telemetry is completely unnecessary for that.
|
| In the Vista era, the OS was able to detect programs that
| crashed and give the user the choice to report it. It could
| even, with consent, check to see if there was already a known
| solution, which might involve an updated version or might
| involve changing compatibility settings.
|
| None of that needs the MS personal info vortex and none of
| that requires trampling on consent.
|
| https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/cfs-
| filesystemfile...
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/09/1pca.pn...
|
| http://s3.jasonlitka.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2007/05/bluescre...
| whoopdedo wrote:
| I'd love for that to be the case if it actually translated to
| fixing problems. For instance, in all of Windows 10 I would
| frequently get an error if I used the media device system
| tray to eject a USB drive, as I had been taught ever since
| Windows 98. However, if I instead ejected by right-clicking
| the drive in Explorer it would work. Obviously Explorer was
| preventing the drive from unmounting and the systray eject
| should be changed to notify other apps and give them a chance
| to close their handles. It got to where I would intentionally
| do the "wrong" thing hoping that the telemetry would make its
| way to Microsoft and they could notice the problem.
|
| So I was thrilled when I saw a headline saying that removing
| media would be fixed in Windows 11. The article informed me
| that Microsoft's solution was (pause for effect) to remove
| the system tray icon.
|
| Apply palm directly to face.
|
| I'll admit that modern Windows is more stable than in the
| past. But how much of that is simply the benefit of memory
| safety in C#? Also stricter oversight of third-party drivers.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That problem is fundamental to how Linux and Windows deal
| with a bad situation.
|
| Back when the love letter crisis was ungoing I had a Linux
| machine fill the disk with log messages and deleting
| /var/log/messages didn't free the space because there still
| was a process that had the file open.
|
| In a similar situation in Windows you can't delete the
| file. Either way it is a problem like looking at Cthulhu
| and something bad is going to happen either way you resolve
| the situation.
| drpixie wrote:
| Microsoft seem to have dropped any pretense of being a software
| company, and Windows of being an "OS". Windows is pretty much
| the same old same old but with more and more and more ads. It
| gets a big "gee whiz" when they change the backgrounds images
| and the shape of app windows! Their various apps are becoming
| more and more simplistic, apart from throwing ads into any
| conceivable screen. I find Windows and MS apps extraordinarily
| frustrating to use.
| arunsivadasan wrote:
| Just checked out awesomewm. It looks really interesting. Thank
| you !
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| You're welcome! It's really cool and IMO has a leg up on
| alternatives like i3 because the whole thing, every aspect is
| entirely programmable.
|
| Enjoy :)
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Neat. Will check it out, been looking for a successor to
| wmii for a while, and dwm is a little too basic.
| chaorace wrote:
| Counter-review: the level of control is unmatched, but it's
| a little _too_ extreme, I feel. Even something as simple as
| a volume widget isn 't included OoB. Yes, there _are_
| libraries of widgets out there, but not many -- and not
| always the best quality (memory leaks are unfortunately
| common, seems to be a screwy lua /GTK interaction).
|
| More importantly: the core framework just outright omits
| many of the core features that I've come to expect in
| tiling WMs. There's no support for i3-style window stacks,
| for example; I've tried several community solutions, but
| they're all trapped on a too-high abstraction layer and
| inevitably end up fighting with the WM in ways that you
| simply never need to deal with in first-class
| implementations.
|
| All in all, I'm planning on returning to i3wm. For me, it's
| a bigger struggle to try building up a usable environment
| from scratch than it is to start with a solid foundation
| and then replace the undesirable components (i3bar =>
| polybar, bindsym => sxhkd). AwesomeWM is very fun to work
| with thanks to the great APIs and documentation, but I can
| only wholeheartedly recommend it if you need absolute and
| total power over the UI, since that's AwesomeWMs whole
| schtick.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| I've been using it for several years at this point and
| haven't encountered any memory leaks (it already uses so
| little).
|
| As for widgets, I've had no trouble with that, there's
| quite a few fantastic collections and I've found
| everything I've needed.
|
| Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it is
| an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are
| entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything
| else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can
| also write a rule to deal with them as needed.
|
| I'll take a completely customizable lightweight interface
| that I can tailor every aspect of every time, especially
| when it's so user friendly (for what it is).
| chaorace wrote:
| > I've been using it for several years at this point and
| haven't encountered any memory leaks (it already uses so
| little).
|
| It's the community widgets that tend to have memory leak
| problems, not the core package. As mentioned, this seems
| to be a quirk in how Lua and GTK interact (many community
| widgets use GTK).
|
| > Sure, stacks are not supported out of the box, but it
| is an easy thing to add if you want it. I think they are
| entirely consistent and bug free, as much as anything
| else - some specific apps might have an issue but you can
| also write a rule to deal with them as needed.
|
| They're not. I've used all of them. It's not an issue of
| rules, it's an issue of the core UI framework fighting
| against the hacked-on stacking implementation. There are
| design-time assumptions baked into the AwesomeWM layout
| engine that cannot be worked around using the API. You'll
| just have to take my word for it when I tell you that
| I've tried very hard and for a very long time.
|
| > I'll take a completely customizable lightweight
| interface that I can tailor every aspect of every time,
| especially when it's so user friendly (for what it is).
|
| I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-
| friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's
| developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the
| ease-of-use goes.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| > It's the community widgets that tend to have memory
| leak problems, not the core package. As mentioned, this
| seems to be a quirk in how Lua and GTK interact (many
| community widgets use GTK).
|
| What widgets are you referring to that you found to have
| leaks?
|
| > You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you
| that I've tried very hard and for a very long time.
|
| It's just that it seems to contradict most of the other
| reports I've seen, but then I don't care about stacking
| myself, so ok.
|
| > I wouldn't really call AwesomeWM exceptionally user-
| friendly. The docs are good. The API is good. It's
| developer-friendly, certainly, but that's as far as the
| ease-of-use goes.
|
| I said it was user-friendly _for what it is_. There is
| nothing else really like it that allows that level of
| extensibility, and given how it abstracts so much
| complexity, I would say they did indeed do a good job of
| making it user friendly. Again though, that 's keeping in
| mind _what it is_. It isn 't trying to be i3/xfce/etc or
| as user-friendly as those.
| chaorace wrote:
| > What widgets are you referring to that you found to
| have leaks?
|
| I'll cite myself here:
| https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-
| widgets/issues/11...
|
| Here's another affected library [1]:
| https://github.com/deficient/volume-control
|
| I've had similar issues wherever GTK interacts with
| awful.spawn. Basically: glib (GTK) +
| awful.spawn.easy_async + polling = extremely leak-prone.
| This is a very common pattern in community awesomewm
| widgets.
|
| [1]: No bug under the main repo because they're
| considering it as a framework bug. See here for
| discussion: https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/3
| 584#issuecommen...
| npteljes wrote:
| I hate Windows for this, thankfully there's the LTSC version
| which has none of the nonsense. I'm using it for gaming, and it
| works well.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| plaguepilled wrote:
| This is your scheduled friendly reminder to try out Fedora Linux
| if you haven't tried Linux seriously yet. Its a great first Linux
| experience and comes with stock GNOME, which is a treat.
|
| It also has a KDE version, which is similarly a fantastic GUI and
| actually influenced a lot of the design patterns people today
| associate as "windows-y" (I forgot where I read that one though,
| so I can't cite that particular tidbit)
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >This is your scheduled friendly reminder to try out Fedora
| Linux if you haven't tried Linux seriously yet. Its a great
| first Linux experience and comes with stock GNOME, which is a
| treat.
|
| Absolutely! I've been using Fedora for a _long_ time and have
| been very pleased with it for my home systems.
|
| Although I prefer XFCE[0][1] over Gnome or KDE, and would
| definitely recommend it to recovering Windows users.
|
| [0] https://spins.fedoraproject.org/xfce/
|
| [1] Note that I _don 't_ use the "spin" I linked, rather I have
| multiple Kickstart[2] configs (including a 'desktop' config),
| but XFCE is XFCE.
|
| [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-
| guid...
| djha-skin wrote:
| It's that age old business model repeating itself again:
|
| 1. Service provider provides good service, but charges for it
|
| 2. Service provided becomes commoditized; cheap, easy to get
|
| 3. Service provider bottom line decreases
|
| 4. Service provider supplements service revenue with ad revenue
|
| Cable TV was a notable example of this pattern. Now it's
| happening to MS Windows.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The invisible elephant in the room is how modifying _your_ hosts
| file is no longer deemed acceptable.
|
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...
| donkeydoug wrote:
| same for Google News... I hate having _news_ customized based on
| what you assume my interests are and considering a bunch of
| shitty sources as relevant. Like you figured out I like marvel
| movies, way to go... hard pass on rumors and theories about
| plots. Hey I watched some youtube videos about the economy...
| guess it 's time for the _news_ to gaslight me for a few months
| and show anything that might spark fear of things outside my
| control.
| raphar wrote:
| It's ironic that tomshardware.com has their site full of same
| news that they are complaining about. (At least for me).
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| I dunno maybe the author of this article needs to stop googling
| for taylor swift.
|
| non-snark reply: we're once again going to have the "what is fake
| news" argument again I suppose.
| batch12 wrote:
| I agree on all counts. Funny though how the same types of ads
| being complained about litter this page.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| It's even more distasteful when it's the OS doing it.
| masswerk wrote:
| Retaliate: if someone is known as MS middle management, invest a
| short 20 minutes reading MDN news to them, before answering any
| questions or requests. (This shouldn't cause any annoyance, are
| they apparently deem this fine behavior.) ;-)
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| They are still so tasteless it's insane
| irq-1 wrote:
| Can't recommend it enough: O&O ShutUp10++
|
| https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
|
| Not open but free of charge and effective!
| seydor wrote:
| If you 're working , taking a break with trash news is all you
| need.
|
| In any case, i am sure you can remove those things because i have
| done so ages ago
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/how-...
| explorer83 wrote:
| Yeah it's crazy, I used to work on PCs for a living and saw what
| a lot of people see when they use their PC and it was so clear
| how much they were throwing biased, not even remotely balanced,
| news articles at people's faces everyday. Maybe if the articles
| made an attempt to breakdown each sides arguments or something
| it'd be OK.. I guess.. maybe. But it was just tabloid style
| articles written about important current events as if only one
| side exists to every argument.
| witx wrote:
| Windows needs to stop pushing news. FTFY
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Microsoft has been trying this for a long time and getting
| slapped back numerous times.
| dawnerd wrote:
| They also need to stop overriding settings each update. I'm tired
| of removing search from the taskbar.
| alberto7 wrote:
| News of any kind should not be pushed by an OS.
| Stracke123 wrote:
| Right-click on an empty space on the taskbar. Hover over "News
| and Interests." Click "Turn off."https://www.rapidfs.online/
| hazbot wrote:
| Every time I get a new windows device, I have to go hunting for
| the arcane registry settings to disable the start bar ads. It is
| really jarring when I use a relative's computer with the default
| ad vomit.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Any OS that shoves ads in my face should be free with a no add
| upgrade option.
|
| Just the other day I had to get some bloat ware off a friend's
| computer since it was making it unusable.
| nmca wrote:
| I honestly sometimes wonder if msft execs use windows at all in
| their personal lives...
| leshenka wrote:
| > Did you know that pigs eat humans (opens in new tab) "far more
| often than people expect?"
|
| straight outta snatch
| juandjara wrote:
| Windows needs to stop. Period.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I feel that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall when it comes
| to Windows. The world is going increasingly mobile, and people
| are doing more and more via their phones (iOS and Android) and
| ditching the desktop. Your average person isn't computer literate
| nearly to the degree of the average HN poster, and I think we
| sometimes forget this. The average person does not care about
| operating systems. They want something that works and is
| intuitive. Microsoft is pivoting to a services company for this
| reason. They have been unable to kill win32, their mobile
| aspirations have failed, and ARM is coming around the corner for
| desktop. Windows will not be killed by the competition. It will
| remain dominant in an ever-diminishing niche, just as the IBM
| mainframe gave way to PCs.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > their mobile aspirations have failed
|
| Their mobile aspirations were a walled garden because they
| wanted in on one of the ecosystems that was good for them at
| the expense of developers and users. I'm convinced that
| Microsoft would have a large share of the mobile market today
| if they would have tried to create a product that was good for
| users and developers instead of a product that was good for
| Microsoft.
| amanzi wrote:
| It's not just the search windows, Windows 11 also introduced a
| new sidebar feature with customisable widgets but there was no
| way to turn off these crappy articles completely. From memory you
| could customise them somewhat by providing some preferred
| interests, but no way to turn them off. I no longer use Windows
| at home - that was the last straw and am now completely on
| Pop_OS.
| ourmandave wrote:
| That sounds like an attack vector for malware, like the old
| windows desktop widgets they finally had to shutdown and turned
| off by default.
| graypegg wrote:
| If windows had an ad-riddled OEM version, and a Standard "clean"
| version that you could buy directly from Microsoft, I would
| consider windows again.
|
| Not like there's actually an incentive for them to do that, but I
| can dream.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I would pay 4 figures for a properly un-fucked version of
| Windows.
|
| I don't think its ridiculous to consider a hacker/developer
| edition in 2023.
| jwcacces wrote:
| Four figures for an operating system license? > $1000?
| Really? Per computer, for just that version of Windows? Can
| you explain how that could be worth it?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I would pay 4 figures for a properly un-fucked version of
| Windows.
|
| You can buy a Visual Studio (formerly Technet/MSDN)
| subscription[0] which includes not just Windows clients but
| servers as well for ~USD$1200.
|
| >I don't think its ridiculous to consider a hacker/developer
| edition in 2023.
|
| Which (unless things have changed dramatically in the past
| few years) is exactly what such a subscription provides.
|
| Such a subscription enables access for all current (and many
| old ones) products and, IIRC, these versions (unless changed
| from Technet/MSDN) are _not_ consumer versions that allow you
| to "un-fuck" Windows and you'll have access (need to
| download ISOs, so storage will be necessary) to just about
| all of Microsoft's offerings.
|
| Which, of course, can be used forever, although I'm guessing
| that a new subscription every five-ten years or so will
| update everything you may need.
|
| [0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/
|
| Edit: Fixed typo.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Most of my feed is sourced from one of our wretched right-wing
| daily newspapers (Briton here) - despite diligence in not reading
| _any_ of these articles, rather instead selecting to hide from
| this particular source, which I 've attempted numerous times,
| their occurrence only increases. I'd like to understand the
| algorithmic genius behind this behaviour.
| machinawhite wrote:
| "Engagement"
| mihaaly wrote:
| Windows is making so many and more small but frequent annoyances
| and barricades I have to navigate in the daily work - not to
| forget trivial mistakes like reminders in the background and
| alike - that I am in the process of moving towards Linux.
|
| Meanwhile, despite being more experienced in what I do than 20
| years ago my productivity is not increasing much, mostly due to
| the barricades introduced (when I am not distracted and able to
| work I am more performant than before). And the biggest component
| in it are the tools and 'services' that forgot how to support
| users instead of asking users to support the whims and needs of
| software, making the life of software vendors not the life of the
| users easier. Which is especially true for Windows which is in an
| eternal and constant incomplete reshuffling of concepts while
| previously working easy matters got ruined and confusing to use.
| Taskbar, notifications, navigation, positioning of frequently
| used features, behaviour and reaction to actions are altered,
| with less benefit than the mere change disrupting the user
| workflow.
|
| The software highjacks and intentionally diverts the attention of
| the user instead of helping them work. Having higher and higher
| maintenance level instead of being helpful.
|
| Never ever asked marginal but broadly advertised things pushed
| through without choice generating noise and nuisance in daily,
| hourly work! Focusing on experimental AI matters while a simple
| switch between windows and similar elementary things are more
| difficult than 20 years ago is maddening. Shortly: I am
| increasingly dissatisfied with what and how MS is doing (while
| not having a bright history to begin with). I feel increasing
| disgust trying to do anything with Windows. This will not end
| well in our relationship.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| marcod wrote:
| That's a very long article for
|
| > right clicking on the search box and unchecking Search -> Show
| Search Highlights.
| oliwarner wrote:
| I left Windows in a hail of Vista bugs, over a decade ago. I've
| seen it get worse and worse in that time, both in UX rot and
| anti-consumer "features".
|
| I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.
|
| Not here to eulogize over what I moved to, but I think it's
| important people consider why they're still using Windows. It's
| not your friend.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I only boot Windows these days in order to flash things onto
| mobiles to get rid of Google :)
|
| I was later to the Linux Desktop party, and it was the default
| ads, bloat, and telemetry included in a base Windows install
| that was the final nail in its coffin.
|
| I still use Windows for work, but that's outside of my control.
|
| Another vote for PopOS here as acknowledging nod to fxtentacle.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > I still use Windows for work, but that's outside of my
| control.
|
| I quit my job to avoid using it and I would do it again.
| okasaki wrote:
| People don't choose Windows, their company or OEM does.
| toastal wrote:
| This part sucks. I would rather save my $100 and not give a
| dime of that money to Microsoft, but in this country I was
| not allowed to order a laptop without it despite wasting more
| than $100 in folks' time trying to reach someone who would
| let my protest.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm still on Windows because I'm a gamer, and while the gaming
| on Linux situation is improving, it's still not there yet.
| Games on Windows _just work_. I never have to do any fiddling.
| Download, install, play.
|
| And maybe it's because I opt for the Pro version of Windows,
| but I don't have the advertisements people complain about. No
| Candy Crush, no news/tabloids, just my list of apps and a few
| shortcuts to things I've used.
| devn0ll wrote:
| This is the correct way to make people think.. Not: YOU NEED TO
| GO TO [OS.NAME], but asking them: "why are you putting up with
| this?"
|
| "Have you looked at _any_ other alternative?"
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Unfortunately, I fear what Apple is doing and will do to macOS.
| The trend seems to be that they are making it into another
| walled garden, ala iOS. I can still run Linux, but I hate that
| Apple's main competitor on the desktop is lowering the bar so,
| so low, and exerting so little effort to keep them on their
| toes to make something that people continue to want.
| clnq wrote:
| Windows innovation seems to have stalled, lacking notable
| improvements in productivity, accessibility, or utility in
| recent years.
|
| Despite its generally good quality (particularly regarding
| software and hardware compatibility, which is important for an
| OS), Microsoft's potential to innovate and monetize Windows
| further appears limited.
|
| This plateau is common among operating systems, with hardware
| breakthroughs in the 90s and 00s sparking innovation in PCs and
| later in mobile devices. The same could be said about business
| computing OS innovations in the 80s and 90s. But now the OSes
| for all this hardware and purposes roughly meet customer and
| consumer requirements. So what more innovation could there be?
|
| In response to this stagnation, Microsoft has to resort to
| adware and spyware to profit from the Windows franchise to
| extract further financial growth from the platform. They could
| probably earn a stable income from Windows for many years by
| just maintaining the OS in an ethical way, but "stable income"
| is not what tech companies are looking for, they are looking
| for infinite growth.
| psd1 wrote:
| Windows 7 was genuinely good. It was stable, it just worked, it
| shipped with Powershell, and I could launch anything with very
| few keystrokes.
|
| The downsides I will acknowledge are the modal dialogues (which
| are worse on macos) and the fact that many system tasks require
| diving into the win32 api, although I've at least always found
| that to be well documented.
|
| At the time of 7, Linux desktop options were not great
|
| Windows went downhill from 7. Although I still prefer it over
| macos.
|
| I have high hopes for Asahi, which I'm hoping will save my
| despicable work macbook
| zokier wrote:
| It's funny that even thinking for a sec, I don't know if
| there are any things that I'd miss from Windows 10 if I
| hypothetically were to jump back to Windows 7.
| nickcox wrote:
| Windows Terminal?
| jcparkyn wrote:
| Multiple desktops is a big one for me.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window management
| (though less than I like Spectacle on Mac) and search-to-
| launch. Both of which could probably be provided by add-
| ons.
|
| I can't think of any other user-facing features I'd miss if
| the UI otherwise reverted to Win98. Several things, I'd
| like better in their Win98 versions.
|
| Under the hood, it's nice that it doesn't crash nearly as
| often, and the driver situation is better. NTFS support is
| nice (consumer Windowses didn't used to have that) when the
| alternative is FAT32. Beyond that, not much I care about.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window
| management
|
| Ughhh: good idea, terribly implemented. Last time I used
| Windows 10, it seemed like every time I tried to drag my
| window around, Windows would guess that I wanted to also
| full-screen it, or pin it to one side, or close all other
| windows, or anything else besides just repositioning it.
| I feel I need to have a surgeon's precision in order to
| just drag a window around my desktop now.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| This is why Spectacle (loads of similar tools are
| available) is so good -- all that happens via keyboard
| shortcuts. Does Windows offer the same, plus the ability
| to turn off the dragging behaviour?
| ridgered4 wrote:
| > I like drag-to-side-to-go-halfscreen for window
| management
|
| Couldn't you do this in Windows 7 with WinKey+Left or
| WinKey+Right? I guess I am kind of keyboard oriented in
| my usage though, I mostly get frustrated with the edge of
| screen mouse features because I mostly enable them by
| accident.
| redeeman wrote:
| linux desktop was far far ahead of even current windows back
| in the days of windows 7. for something called "windows", it
| certainly had, and still continue to have pretty lousy window
| management
| nunodonato wrote:
| That's precisely the question I keep asking: how much more
| anti-consumer features people need, in order to switch? At this
| point it's hard to understand why there is so much resistance
| in leaving windows, I can't imagine having to deal with this
| kind of things on a daily-basis while trying to actually get
| stuff done.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| What kind of thing? That it comes with a News app that has a
| pre installed widget that can be removed with a single right
| click?
| yourusername wrote:
| Don't you think it is a strange default that users (even
| people that pay for the enterprise version) are bombarded
| with the worst of the worst clickbait that takes up 1/3 of
| your screen if you mousover a certain part of the screen?
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Absolutely, I think it's bizarre. But I find that many
| users actually seem to like it. The apple news app seems
| pretty tabloidy too (although not as bad) so I'm cautious
| about projecting my taste onto others.
| squarefoot wrote:
| At this point, I wouldn't be that surprised if people
| working at Microsoft competitors would receive more
| distracting junk.
| c0l0 wrote:
| Yes, for instance. Because defaults actually matter.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Worst thing is how it slows things down compared to a
| clean linux install. Sticking with Windows though because
| it is a family shared PC, for now.
| herbst wrote:
| Common anti virus, weird update windows, weird scary
| Dialogs you learn to blindly confirm to install things.
| Blinking and animations in the taskbar, ... Not even a
| common design pattern for the annoyances.
|
| As someone who hasn't used Windows in more than 10 years
| the whole desktop is full of distractions popping up
| unasked. IMO it's horrible for a productive environment
| because it doesn't allow to focus properly
| gcr wrote:
| Every week or so, my Windows 10 desktop pops up a dialog
| telling me to upgrade to Windows 11. I spend about a
| minute looking for the one tiny link to dismiss the
| dialog without upgrading. I swear it changes locations
| each time...
|
| Lately I've also had it sprout similar dialogs about
| converting my local account to a Microsoft account. Those
| are even harder to thwart, requiring multiple clicks
| through "Are you sure?" dialogs and dark patterns.
|
| It's easier to bear this little weekly hide-and-seek
| ritual when you think about it like a small child making
| bids for attention. "Mommy, Mommy, I hid your glasses!
| Play with me before you start your workday!" Kind of
| endearing in its own way.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Since mid-90s I allways had Linux and Windows. But when I
| updated a Testnotebook from Win7 to Win10 and saw CandyCrash
| and XBox all over the place, it was clear form me, I don't
| have professional licenses to let me spam from Microsoft with
| such BS. Since then, I'm Linux only.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| > I can't imagine having to deal with this kind of things on
| a daily-basis while trying to actually get stuff done.
|
| I switched from Windows to Arch Linux on Thinkpads for about
| 15 years and had a great time and learned a lot, but dealing
| with things on a daily basis was why I switched back to
| Windows 10 a few years ago, along with a new gaming habit
| during the pandemic. Gaming on Linux with Steam is wonderful
| these days, but the daily overhead of random stuff to deal
| with was too much when sometimes I just want to play games.
| Lewton wrote:
| You specifically chose a high maintenance distro?
|
| I'm running linux mint and I haven't had to fiddle with
| anything for years
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| > You specifically chose a high maintenance distro?
|
| I guess so? Overall Arch was pretty easy to maintain, I
| just got tired of bailing on friends because I needed to
| spend hours figuring out some random issue.
| nunodonato wrote:
| yeah... bad choice :) if you wanted the Arch ecossystem
| without all the manual work you could have picked Manjaro
| or other arch-based distro
| zokier wrote:
| You have to remember that these issues do not apply to all
| users equally. Between different editions, regions, accounts,
| a/b testing, usage patterns etc different folks can have very
| different experiences.
| Yizahi wrote:
| The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just
| differently (I haven't tried it, because of the vendor lock).
| Linux on the other hand is great, but has abysmal quality
| check due to wide variety of everything. Windows is just
| works (until Win11, which was a marketing pushed bullshit,
| without half of the featured from the Win10 branch).
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Apple provides a clear and beneficial point of difference.
| They are vertically integrated and now with Apple silicon,
| have arguably the best productivity laptops on the market.
| My M2 Air, lets me do all the personal dev and admin work
| my XPS 17 does, but I can easily go several days without a
| charge. My work provided MBP will easily go all day on a
| single charge and have plenty of charge left.
|
| Linux provides easily the best dev environment, is free,
| gives you all the control you could possible want, runs on
| lots of hardware and is speedy even on old hardware. Most
| of the internet is probably hosted on some flavour of
| linux, and open source frameworks so it's easy for you to
| do the same.
|
| Windows is good for games and if you need to use Excel? It
| also has the best drivers for my printer. Am I being unfair
| here?
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a ~95% Mac user, the only thing that I keep a Windows
| partition around for is games. If Apple could just give
| up that Steve Jobs-era bias against games and make their
| platform great for gaming, I could get rid of Windows
| altogether.
|
| Also, game companies share the blame. Even now in 2023,
| they're still not writing their games portably enough so
| that the macOS version is a recompile.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently
|
| I've never seen anything as abhorrent as the stuff this
| article is reporting on, in macOS. A lot of Apple's
| hardware policies and anti-consumer, I'll give you that --
| is there anything in macOS that you're aware of, that's in
| a similar ballpark?
| Yizahi wrote:
| As I said, I haven't actually used macOS because I can't
| without significant money investment for unclear reason.
| But just from the random mentions here and on Reddit over
| the years I've created a picture that there are issues
| with that OS too. Like for example there was a gigantic
| article a few years ago linked here by a windows switcher
| and pro user, who listed multiple complaints about window
| handling in the macOS DE. Like happens when use
| maximize/minimize windows, alt-tab through them,
| interaction with a taskbar etc. I wouldn't be able to
| recount all of it, but I got an idea that Win10 was miles
| ahead in this area (Win11 is trash though).
|
| There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a
| lot of hardware issues.
|
| I guess vendor lock is the key problem. As long as
| everything is nailed down without options, any defect or
| even design choice can be effective anti-consumer. All
| hardware issues become a whole product issues, because OS
| and hardware are inseparable.
|
| Some day maybe I'll try it, even just to see what's all
| the fuss is about, but vendor lock makes is just hard
| enough that I simply upgrade my Windows box every time.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > multiple complaints about window handling
|
| Gotcha. macOS has its own paradigm and does certain
| things differently, that's for sure, but I don't think
| it's anything a reasonably experienced user couldn't get
| used to. It's added things like full-screen in recent
| years -- not as good as a maximised window, IMO, but
| there are utilities that can handle that.
|
| > There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course
| a lot of hardware issues.
|
| I've never run into an upgrade issue, and the fact that
| they're free is a big bonus. I've had one or two issues
| with my macbook pro, hardware-wise, but the general
| quality of the hardware is second-to-none, as far as I'm
| aware.
|
| > everything is nailed down without options
|
| This is typically why I, and many others, prefer macOS. I
| actually don't want to be endlessly tinkering with my OS
| -- I quite enjoyed doing that in the early days, but now
| I just want to get my work done in the most pleasant
| environment possible. However, I haven't used any recent
| Windows versions, so I can't really compare.
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| > The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just
| differently
|
| I would argue against that. Just the fact alone that you
| can't use Windows 11 Home without your machine being
| connected to a Microsoft account is proof enough that
| Windows is more anti consumer than macOS.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| Isn't there some kind of physics law that says every 2nd
| Windows version sucks?
|
| I think it fits quite well, XP was good, Vista sucked,
| Win 7 was good, 8 sucked, 10 was good, 11 sucks. Windows
| 12 is going to be the next version to try I guess.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck, all games that I care about
| now run on Linux.
|
| I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because the
| text import crashes in Wine. But apart from that, this year has
| finally been the year of the Linux Desktop for me. And 3 months
| later, I can say that it's been a bliss :)
|
| PopOS feels exceptionally responsive. Looking back, it's hard
| to justify why Windows was feeling so sluggish on a PCI5 NVME
| with 64GB RAM and high-end GPU...
| sofixa wrote:
| > I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes, because
| the text import crashes in Wine.
|
| Wouldn't Excel Online be enough to do the trick? It's
| supposedly feature complete.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's far from feature-complete. If Excel Online is good
| enough for you, the faster, more stable LibreOffice Calc is
| good enough for you.
|
| People use Microsoft Excel for the stuff that just nothing
| else does.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Or the stuff that no other software wants to do. Macros
| that can upload your financial records to a Latvian
| server after a single click in an email? Nobody else
| wants to do that.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Don't try to understand the mind of a chronic Excel user:
| Their minds are as unknowable as an octopus' mind.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think it's more that Excel is incredibly capable.
| People who reach the status of Excel Power User are akin
| to F1 Drivers who need every seemingly absurd capability
| found on their steering wheels.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Excel is not tremendously capable, but near-infinitely
| flexible.
|
| It's a strange amorphous organism that can be coaxed into
| doing almost anything, if poorly.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Oh for sure, people use Excel to make the world go round.
| But for plebs like me, trying to understand it is just a
| path to madness.
| dagw wrote:
| _It 's supposedly feature complete._
|
| It is not. For one thing it is missing macros, power pivot,
| many solvers and support for third-party add-ons. It also
| screws up some visual things like text placement and the
| like.
| mcv wrote:
| Games were the main reason I came back to Windows after
| trying Ubuntu with Wine over 15 years ago, then quickly
| switched to Mac, and when I was unhappy with Apples
| direction, Windows the unfortunate but obvious place to come
| back to. Should have gone to Linux instead.
|
| I still need to check whether all my favourite games are
| supported on Linux. Also, a lot of my games are from GOG
| rather than Steam. And I need to choose a good distribution.
| My laziness and indecisiveness is holding me back.
|
| But I really think the time is right for something better. An
| OS on a Linux-like foundation, with an Apple-style UI (but
| better, because plenty of stuff there still doesn't make
| sense), capable of running all games. Probably developed and
| polished by a big hardware manufacturer trying to eat Apple's
| lunch. There's System76 of course, but they're small. I want
| something that's for everybody. A new standard to draw
| everybody away from the increasing piles of crap from Apple
| and Microsoft.
| tracker1 wrote:
| If you don't want to tinker with your UI, would suggest
| PopOS (System76 distro). If you like to tinker, I really
| like Ubuntu Budgie, which lets me have some bits of config
| based on Windows, Mac and just different from either. I
| took a few days to get it how I liked, and over a year
| since without much issue. Alternatively, there's always
| Mint or other Ubuntu or Fedora options out there.
|
| All said, I really liked PopOS, it has some very sane
| defaults, good out of the box support for hardware as well.
| Most of the support is upstream via Ubuntu, but a lot of UI
| tweaks and custom additions are coming from System76, and
| they have been doing very well. Will likely switch back for
| the next LTS release.
| mcv wrote:
| PopOS doesn't let me tinker with the UI? That's a shame.
| It was a big contender for me. But if it's Ubuntu-based,
| shouldn't it be just as configurable?
| StrauXX wrote:
| In case you don't know the site: ProtonDB offers crowd
| sourced reports on how well games run with Proton/Wine.
| With some playing around, you can run GoG games using
| Proton.
| eloisant wrote:
| Nowadays you don't need to mess with Wine manually, there
| are a lot of tools to install Windows binaries just like
| they were Linux binary. You'll even forget you're using
| Windows versions.
|
| You can check ProtonDB for compatibility. The information
| is valid even if you have the GOG version of the game. For
| games that are not on Steam there is WineDB but I find that
| the UI isn't as nice as ProtonDB.
|
| Steam has a Linux launcher and let you install Windows
| binaries directly. For GOG or Epic games there is Heroic
| launcher which is very easy to use.
|
| Don't overthink your distribution choice, just go for one
| of the major general purpose distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora,
| Mint, etc) and you'll be fine no matter what you pick.
| mcv wrote:
| Will the GOG version of the game work as well as the
| Steam version even if GOG doesn't list it as a Linux game
| while Steam does?
|
| Also, I think the choice of window manager might matter
| more to my experience than the choice of distribution. I
| find some Linux wms too clunky, too Win95.
| curiousguy wrote:
| > capable of running all games
|
| My solution for this is to have 2 computers.
|
| I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents,
| study, etc.
|
| And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only.
| I treat this pc as a console, it's only for gaming. Any OS
| annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it's
| still more flexible than a console.
| mcv wrote:
| I used to have that back when I had a Macbook, but now my
| son as confiscated the gaming PC because it's more
| powerful than his laptop.
|
| I've tried to set my laptop to dual boot Windows/PopOS,
| but it refuses to boot to PopOS.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I just use virtualized Windows from macOS to play games
| that don't run on mac. Worst case scenario I have to dual
| boot into Windows.
|
| There's a weirdly long thread of dorky gaming infighting
| happening in the top comment where people don't seem to
| know that you can just use Windows for a few games and
| otherwise use a main OS for the rest of your time.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| This would be my setup if I cared for Windows gaming at
| all. As it is, I use a Switch for that outlet. Why do you
| need the PC to be "more flexible than a console" -- are
| you talking about hardware upgrades? Are Xboxes not very
| upgradable?
| mcv wrote:
| Consoles tend to have very limited controllers. Nothing
| beats mouse+keyboard.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Ah, true -- if you're talking _those_ kinds of games! It
| 's a real shame consoles don't have better keyboard +
| mouse support. Then again, I guess game developers would
| be wary to rely on them since they wouldn't be
| guaranteed.
| miyuru wrote:
| > I sadly still need to use Excel in a VM sometimes
|
| Any reason for not using Google sheets or similar?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I need to send out Excel files to clients and they need to
| display 100% perfect when the client opens them with their
| Microsoft Excel. So using Google Sheets or LibreOffice is a
| risk, because while they work 99% of the time, they tend to
| break with power-user Excel features like integrated
| resource links.
| samtho wrote:
| Sometimes it's not up to the user if the company they
| work/contract for requires it.
| dzink wrote:
| It is woefully behind if you have real number crunching to
| do.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| If you need to be doing 'real number crunching', you
| probably shouldn't be using any spreadsheet. Excel is not
| MySQL or Jupyter.
| michaelt wrote:
| I think the Google Sheets devs would agree with you that
| spreadsheets shouldn't be used for anything serious.
| That's why it's missing such basic features as an X/Y
| scatter plot with a line - which is trivial in any other
| spreadsheet program.
|
| Personally when I have a few dozen data points and I want
| an X/Y plot with a line, I find a spreadsheet is a better
| tool than MySQL.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Yup, I pretty much guarantee that Google Sheets is not
| intended for people who need X/Y scatter plots. I would
| theorise that 99% of Excel users don't require that
| feature either.
| anthk wrote:
| Gnuplot.
| Takennickname wrote:
| MySQL and Jupyter don't have data visualization. Or are
| you saying the options are a) use google sheets, or b)
| learn to program
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| Jupyter absolutely includes data visualization, or rather
| all the major languages it supports do. But honestly,
| yes. Complicated work in excel _is_ programming, it 's
| just completely undebuggable since the logic is spread
| out invisibly in multiple grid dimensions, sheets, and
| macros.
|
| Give me a Jupyter notebook written in a language I don't
| yet know any day before you give me a complicated excel
| monstrosity.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Not a Python guy at all, but a couple of my coworkers use
| Jupyter notebooks a lot, and it's definitely very cool.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Vista was shit, but Win 7 was generally accepted as a very good
| version of Windows, with 8 being bad, and then 10 being eh.
|
| But 10 can be made pretty acceptable if you bring out the group
| policy editor.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| "Eulogise" has connotations of praising someone or something
| after its death.
|
| If you mean "trying to talk others round to it", you might mean
| "evangelise" :-)
| Last5Digits wrote:
| The average HN user seems to be a fervent Linux fan, so maybe I
| can give some perspective as someone who isn't.
|
| I used Linux for around 5 years, with Arch as my distro of
| choice, after which I switched to Windows 11. Most of the time,
| I didn't face any problems - but the problems I did face
| sometimes took me hours and hours to solve.
|
| And there were always issues that were basically unfixable:
| hibernate, battery life, security, CPU drivers, hardware
| acceleration etc. I say basically here, because I could have
| spend hundreds of hours to address some of these things, but
| I'd still end up with something very brittle and maintenance
| intensive.
|
| Some people will immediately point out that I should have been
| using a more "User friendly" distro like Ubuntu, but Arch has
| been the most stable and easiest to maintain distro of any that
| I tried. With Ubuntu and its ilk, the inevitable issue would
| take me ages to track down, because I had to first fight my way
| through a dozen layers of abstraction and figure out which of
| the hundreds of packages was the culprit. No, a simple and
| minimal install has always served me best with Linux.
|
| And yes, I tried other distros - every single major one - and I
| faced the same (or similar) issues in all of them.
|
| And outside of the OS, the entire Linux philosophy seems to be
| as user-unfriendly as possible. Packages, because they're
| maintained by someone in their free time, are very barebones
| and need extensive configuration to function. Which is
| especially annoying because I constantly needed to edit config
| files, each one with it's own unique syntax that required
| multiple Google searches to discover (and rediscover if some
| time had passed).
|
| With Windows, the only true issue I faced was with the
| telemetry. I bought an enterprise license, disabled it all,
| validated it with some external tools - and the problem was
| solved. I never saw ads, slowness or any UI/UX problems.
|
| And the benefits were numerous, I now had access to high-
| quality, powerful software for free. And these programs were
| easily configurable and usable - no googling necessary! On
| Linux, I sometimes wondered how so many people could quickly
| create graphics and audio, because that was always an
| incredible chore on Linux. Now it feels like a breeze, almost
| as if I've been catapulted a century forward.
|
| In fact, the reason why I switched was because there was a very
| insidious hardware problem that I couldn't track down on Linux,
| even after spending months on it. When I installed Windows on
| my secondary drive (to update my BIOS), I found the problem in
| one minute using ThrottleStop.
|
| And security wise, Windows is also far superior. Aside from the
| obvious Linux vulnerabilities, Windows allowed me to spin up
| lightweight sandboxes with system integration to isolate
| browser tabs or files I downloaded. As someone that used
| QubesOS for some time, this really impressed me.
|
| All in all I see no reason to go back, the only thing I miss is
| i3, and how it made using a single screen feel just as
| productive as using three.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| if someone says 'that I should have been using a more "User
| friendly" distro like Ubuntu' then reply to them "Then stop
| advocating Linux and explicitly say what when you say 'Linux'
| you actually mean Ubuntu".
|
| But on topic - the latest Gnome on Rocky 9: if you open
| Settings then the first... tab? is WiFi settings. For some
| reasons when the Gnome builds the list of available networks
| it demands sudo password prompt. But with or without entring
| it you would be prompted the same password again. And again.
| And again. No, you can't navigate to some other tab while the
| prompt is open. No, you shouldn't be asked for
| sudo/UAC/whatever elevation to display the list of WiFi
| networks.
|
| 'User friendly', my ass.
| cameronhowe wrote:
| Can you elaborate on your "CPU drivers" issue?
| Last5Digits wrote:
| Sure, the standard Intel drivers would randomly throttle my
| CPU into unusability or completely disable turbo boost for
| hours. I switched to the acpi driver and used the
| performance and powersave governors when appropriate. This,
| however, resulted in even worse battery life and somewhat
| subpar performance.
|
| Oh, and to be clear. The Intel driver would disable turbo
| boost even when the laptop was plugged in and the CPU
| wasn't running hot.
|
| I had other issues when the CPU would run hot, but that
| turned out to be a faulty sensor triggering BD_PROCHOT. In
| fact, this was the issue that ThrottleStop allowed me to
| find and solve.
|
| EDIT: The reason why I knew that this was a faulty sensor
| and not BD_PROCHOT doing its job was because I manually
| measured the temps on various components, each of which was
| completely within its normal operating temperature.
| cameronhowe wrote:
| Interesting. I'm having trouble with my amd laptop
| stuttering a lot. It is worse under load of course, but
| even without any I can see random input/output lag.
|
| I wonder if it the root cause could be the same.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've found that random stuttering is often an indication
| of a drive about to go bad, especially if you have a
| spinning drive attached.
|
| That said, I saw a lot of fan curve, temp issues in the
| later Intel macbooks... I had a $4000 macbook pro i9 that
| was effectively unusable with background services or
| Docker containers running at all.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| > The average HN user seems to be a fervent Linux fan
|
| maybe at one time, and it might be cool if that were
| true...but I would say HN is probably 90% fully committed to
| the Apple ecosystem at this point
|
| no different than the general public for their age
| cohort...we are slowly running out of people...even
| "technical" people, who understand systems under the hood
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Unfortunately, for PC gaming Windows still has sort of a
| monopoly, it's not as bad as in the past thanks to Proton
| though.
|
| Also under the hood Windows is pretty good technology for the
| most part, letting this solid technology base being vandalized
| by anti-social middle management assholes is almost a criminal
| offense by whoever oversees this stuff (but I guess the fish
| rots from the head).
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It took me 10 minutes to run w10privacy to remove all the
| telemetry and spyware from Windows. It took me hours fiddling
| with adb to partially remove some of evilness from my android
| phone. Dont know much about iOS, but I've heard they dont even
| have an adb equivalent.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've unrecoverably bricked a couple of android phones through
| not having the precisely correct model variant for the
| instructions I was following, or for the specific ROM I was
| installing. Sucks, but I generally don't faff with a device
| that's worth more than throw-away.
|
| The risk is worth it for the life that LineageOS really
| breathes into an older device.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| GrapheneOS is extremely easy to install, the installer is
| literally a website where you click "Install now" while the
| phone is connected via USB. It is also one of the most
| usable custom OSes I've used and it is not only more
| privacy oriented but also more secure!
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| I like GOS as well -- and use it -- but most people won't
| have Pixel phones.
| Jiocus wrote:
| Would love to go back to a flashed device, but last time
| I did (3-4 years ago) my banking and e-id apps refused to
| run in rooted environments. 2nd-factoring payments and
| the like is a main use case of a phone now. Are these
| kinds of issues still around?
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| For LineageOS? Yes. For GrapheneOS? Maybe.
|
| Essentialy banking apps _hate_ unlocked bootloaders. GOS
| (GrapheneOS) avoids this relocking the bootloader (the
| key is theirs, if you want to build your own GOS you 'll
| have to sign with your own key). _However_ GOS still
| fails Play Integrity checks: it fails CTS Profile Match.
|
| So, Banking Apps probably work but Google Wallet won't.
|
| Additionally, they run Google Apps as non-privileged
| apps, using a compatibility layer called `gmscompat`.
| It's cool because it's easy to Degoogle your phone in an
| instant if you wish to. But certain niche features, for
| example, using your camera to help Google Maps match your
| surrounding with Street View data crash Maps.
|
| Otherwise all runs mostly well. Waze a few weeks ago was
| wonky but I assume the bug they fixed in Wifi-location
| allowed Waze to behave -- haven't tested though.
| cies wrote:
| > As to the Linux, I tried to use it every so often, but it
| takes forever to learn all the command line switches to
| accomplish even the simplest tasks.
|
| I rather spend time on getting some weird hardware to work
| (yes this is still occasionally a thing in Linux land), that
| getting my system "reasonably spyware free" (as we have no
| clue what actually happens since it's closed source).
| 0x2c8 wrote:
| I share the same sentiment.
|
| The other day I was frustrated with several Linux quirks my
| laptop was experiencing and decided to give Windows 11 + WSL2 a
| try.
|
| The sheer amount of bloat, sneaky privacy settings, ads, clunky
| UI etc. literally make Windows unusable. I was willing to put
| up with the switch (leveraging WSL2), but the entire operating
| system feels like a browser with toolbars from the 2000s.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| WSL is an "embrace-extend-extinguish" feature.[1] It isn't
| good enough to be Linux, but it's good enough to draw people
| to make the change that you did.
|
| An operating system should boot my computer and give me
| access to my hardware on my terms. Full stop.
|
| Any exfiltration of telemetry about my use of the OS without
| my uncoerced consent is a much worse _quirk_ than any bug I
| have ever encountered in Linux.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_exting
| uis...
| tracker1 wrote:
| I see it as the opposite in practice... I've now worked at
| 3 different companies (Windows/.Net shops) since WSL has
| been available where most dev work is actually _in_ WSL,
| and deployed to Linux servers. And even grumblings about
| wanting to switch full dev to Linux and abandoning Windows
| altogether for at least dev work. Current job, the IT
| security guys are already dogfooding Linux...
|
| It's an exfiltration path in practice, from what I've seen
| far more than an ingratiation path, despite what MS's
| intentions may have been. Once you get devs able to spin up
| a DB via Docker in under a minute vs. the desktop installs,
| refresh/update, etc... it's a path away from MS.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Microsoft built WSL because software development and SaaS
| servers were moving inexorably towards *nix, and Windows
| was bleeding developers and MSDN subscribers. It was a
| 'stop the bleeding' move, not an EEE play. They needed to
| keep corporate developers on Windows, and give IT
| departments a good answer for "we need Linux support" that
| didn't involve a MS license count drop. Windows-oriented IT
| departments also appreciate being able to support
| developers who need Linux without having to add support for
| another OS.
|
| There may even be some developers who prefer WSL on Windows
| over Linux, especially at work. When Group Policy turns off
| all the adware/spyware and annoyances in Windows 11
| Enterprise, it isn't quite as horrible of an experience as
| it is at home.
| aidog wrote:
| I completely switched to Linux the first time since 2006
| because Windows is just way to slow or distracting now.
| Windows 10 worked okay for a while, but I don't want the
| random crashes, tabloid news and slow file navigation of
| Windows 11. Fedora Workstation GUI sometimes crashes, but
| productivity wise it is so much better and everything works.
| Software wise I only miss the google drive client, which is
| still not here after almost 11 years[0]. There is rclone, but
| I sometimes get logged out.
|
| [0] https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-
| a-go...
| ornornor wrote:
| Except that _you pay_ for windows. It's madness.
| squarefoot wrote:
| It's even worse: you become a product (spyware, telemetry,
| etc) but don't get a free product in return.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Unfortunately people are still free to use what they see fit.
|
| You'll have to live with it. Some people prefer Windows, no
| matter how wrong you think they are, how horrible you think the
| experience is, or how evil you think Microsoft is. I guess you
| don't use it anyway. Just continue.
|
| You don't have to be condescending. What kind of validation
| does hating on Windows bring to software devs?
| sumo89 wrote:
| I use my PC infrequently, just for video games when I get time.
| It feels like every time I turn it one, maybe once a month,
| it's done an update to somehow look worse and worse. One of the
| latest changes is the search bar in the menu bar now has scroll
| icons and is double height despite being empty. It's like they
| don't do visual QA.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I live in France, but usually use an English UI. So when I
| updated my gaming PC, I just saw a "search" or something,
| figured "wth?! start menu already does that", and kicked it
| off the taskbar.
|
| Then a few days later, a colleague shared his screen, with
| the French UI. The text was cut off mid-sentence. Something
| like "type here to". The remainder would have actually fit if
| not for the random icon displayed at the right of the search
| field.
| jacooper wrote:
| What's the alternative? The joke that is macOS?
|
| I use Linux daily, but its not ready for everyone, creative
| apps for example are nonexistent, And games aren't exactly plug
| and play.
|
| In addition to not having a distro that combines gnome + zero
| hassle driver installs + friendly defaults, it was Ubuntu till
| they ruined it with snap, and now there is still nothing like
| it.
|
| I just hope canonical gives up on snap.
| zokier wrote:
| None of the operating systems are your friends. They are all
| very imperfect tools with different problems and tradeoffs. In
| many cases the devil you know can still be reasonable choice
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It's not about technology but the people who create the
| technology. There seems to be a complete breakdown of ethics
| and responsibility at Microsoft (and also other large tech
| companies) for the sake of 'shareholder value' (or whatever
| the Golden Calf is they're dancing around at the moment).
| cies wrote:
| If you consider OSs potential friends, you may like the movie
| "Her".
|
| OSs are offers organizations, some may be friendlier than
| others. MS has shown not to care for your privacy the least
| bit. Apple at least tries to uphold the facade of respecting
| your privacy: so they probably will go to greater lengths.
|
| Linux (+ desktop packages) otoh are closest to what I
| consider a does-not-skrew-me-over OS-friend. Al east they do
| not have a public history of sneaky deals with 3-letter
| agencies and/or a business model that involves me being the
| product.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| What's the alternative though?
|
| I don't want to buy the overpriced hardware that comes with
| Apple.
|
| For Linux, I'd like something that provides some kind of
| stability without me having to search for obscure shell
| commands for fixing new issues every 2 weeks, which
| unfortunately has been my experience with using it on my laptop
| in the past. Maybe it has gotten better, I'm open for
| recommendations.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| I've been using Arch Linux for the past 6 years and I have
| rarely had anything break. In between I had to use Ubuntu for
| 6 months due to some software that would only run on Ubuntu,
| which I found horrible. Arch Linux might be difficult to set
| up for someone new to Linux but once it's installed I found
| it a breeze to use. There are distributions based on Arch
| that are easier to install, e.g. Manjaro.
| Last5Digits wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. The simpler you keep
| your Linux install, the less likely it'll be that something
| breaks - and if something does break, then you'll have a
| much easier time finding the culprit.
| petepete wrote:
| The best recommendation is to buy hardware that's well
| supported. Every piece of hardware on my ThinkPad X1C
| (including the fingerprint reader) worked with no extra
| config or messing around.
| qumpis wrote:
| When it comes to laptops, I don't see how apple is
| overpriced. I'm currently in search of a well-built CPU-
| performant laptop with a decent bettery, and the likes of XPS
| and Thinkpads cost about the same or more than a similarly
| decked Macbook m2 pro. Only the GPU and upgradeability could
| be considered limiting factors.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The main thing that makes Macs overpriced is the lack of
| 15" MacBook Air, so to get a large screen you need to buy a
| CPU/GPU you don't need.
|
| And the hardware is too good for the software longevity. A
| 10 year old Windows machine works fine if you have decent
| hardware (so, desktop, not laptop) but Apple EOLs and rots
| the software compatibility of your perfectly functional
| hardware after 7 years
| globular-toast wrote:
| For laptops you need to do a bit of research to make sure
| they have good Linux support. There are websites to help with
| this. You'll also gain an intuition for which manufacturers
| to avoid.
|
| For the software side, you need to learn it, just like
| anything else. You've spent years, perhaps the majority of
| your life, learning Windows. Of course there are going to be
| things you'll have to learn again. But you'll be better for
| it. I'd rather learn to use a system that respects me than
| one that treats me like a commodity.
| trelane wrote:
| > For laptops you need to do a bit of research to make sure
| they have good Linux support.
|
| Or, you know, you could buy it preinstalled, with support,
| form a vendor that actually supports Linux on the hardware.
| maqnius wrote:
| When someone complains about problems with Linux, I have a
| hard time to think of anything like that in my experience
| with Linux in the last 10 years. But when I put my experience
| in a wider context, I notice one important aspect:
|
| When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux
| compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer
| widespread and quality over new or cheap.
|
| That is probably (next to using a enduser-friendly distro
| like Ubuntu) the most important point to circumvent nasty
| bugs and digging deep into the OS.
|
| What is left are problems, that are mostly easily solved with
| a quick internet search and maybe copy pasting something in
| your command line.
|
| That will probably happen at some point, but not every two
| weeks. More like in the first month after setting up your
| system and then once a year or when you add new hardware to
| your stack.
| nailer wrote:
| > When buying new hardware, I make sure to check Linux
| compatibility before I buy something. In general, I prefer
| widespread and quality over new or cheap.
|
| I did that once. Every single component had an OSS in-
| kernel drivers.
|
| Compositing wouldn't work with an external display
| connected. After about 10 years of Linux on the desktop
| that was the last Linux desktop machine I ever used.
| rijoja wrote:
| Ubuntu
| KoftaBob wrote:
| The most user friendly Linux distro I've come across that
| provides what you're describing would be ZorinOS, it's
| awesome.
|
| https://zorin.com/os/
| fortran77 wrote:
| The alternative is to buy Windows and spend 10 minutes
| turning all this off.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| You've probably already got a monitor; if so, I'd recommend a
| Mac mini. Very powerful, slightly affordable, all the great
| Mac experience.
| mihaaly wrote:
| > I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.
|
| So true! We are pushed around for the sake of pretetious crap.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Last Windoze I used was XP. Back then most geeks reinstalled
| the OS from scratch every few months or so. This was necessary
| to combat the inevitable rot that happened to every
| installation. There was always a number of things that were
| necessary to install to make the system usable every time. We
| worked out how to streamline some things by building custom
| installation discs. But there was still a load of effort and
| accumulated knowledge applied to just using the damn thing.
|
| I'd been playing with Linux for a while but hadn't got beyond
| the dual-booting phase. Then at some point I realised that if I
| put as much effort into Linux to learn how things worked etc.
| it would probably be just as good in practice. Why did I
| continue to put up with Windows? Turns out I was right. I
| haven't had Windoze in my house for well over a decade at this
| point. I never had to use Vista. One of the best choices I ever
| made.
| Acutulus wrote:
| We come from similar eras. I never made the transition to 7,
| permanently moving to ubuntu 5.10 thanks to the CDs they sent
| out in the mail. Ubuntu for over a decade until late 2020,
| then arch and arch-likes since
|
| Just a couple weeks ago I was backing up some scripts and
| adding some arcane linux lore to my obsidian database when it
| occurred to me that I haven't re-installed my OS in 2.5
| years. That felt pretty wild to think about, especially when
| I consider all the scripts, packages and late night pamac
| hammering I occasionally do when I find a curious piece of
| software. While I tinkere with my linux installs far more
| than windows, they seem to have held up over time far better.
| Whether this is a consequence of the software itself, my
| behavior changing, or whatever, I cannot say for sure. But
| it's been a far more pleasurable experience using and
| maintaining my linux systems than windows installs.
|
| I think there is a distinct difference between people who
| compute for the sake of computing versus people who compute
| as the means to an end. One is a person who uses tools at
| least partially for the joy of tool usage itself, while the
| other a person who uses tools to complete tasks, the other .
| I cannot fault the latter for just using whatever works, if
| they are happy in doing so. But I think those of us who fit
| into the former category are far more likely to engage with
| linux and its brethren. My computer is a machine which,
| largely, I demand does what I instruct it to do. I prefer an
| OS that will do so and then get out of my way and I will
| accept idiosyncracies in exchange for this. So long as a
| laundry list of dependencies doesn't explode overnight from a
| goofball update or my nvidia drivers don't just disappear
| because they feel like it, linux meets those needs very well.
| themadturk wrote:
| I got my first MacBook around the time Vista came out and
| thereby was able to skip Vista on my own machine. My
| employers continued to use XP for several years, and (after a
| long period of unemployment during the Great Recession) I
| couldn't afford a Mac next time I needed a new machine. Now
| after a couple of years with a ho-hum Dell Latitude 13 that
| cost $1200, I'm using a MacBook Air M1 that cost less and
| performs far, far better and has none of the glitches and
| issues Windows and Intel are famous for.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > I'm almost impressed with what people willingly put up with.
|
| I had, in a sense, the opposite experience.
|
| I was discussing in a social circle of mine the reasons why one
| should avoid as much as possible the upgrade to Windows 11...
| and I completely failed to persuade anybody.
|
| Non-power users use a very limited subset of O/S
| functionalities (I'd say that as long as device and applicative
| support is sufficient, the O/S is essentially transparent to
| them), so, from their perspective, all those ideological and
| "weakly concrete" motivations are essentially pointless.
|
| I definitely bothers me ideologically because this is a large
| scale covert assault (and it will have long term effects), but
| sadly, to non-power users, it's completely irrelevant.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| As a power user, upgrading to Windows 11 is great if your
| hardware meets sysreqs.
|
| Why? Because of all the numerous and significant backend
| improvements, a relatively less schizophrenic UI, and more.
|
| Certain things that affect power users and common users
| alike, such as proper Intel 12th+ Gen CPU support and
| variable refresh rates, are Windows 11 exclusive, not being
| backported to Windows 10 (let alone 7).
|
| To be clear, I have my fair share of gripes with Windows 11
| that I've worked around. But overall it's an easy upgrade
| over Windows 10.
| wellanyway wrote:
| Non-power users operate entirely in browser these days. You
| can switch them over to arch and they wouldn't be able to
| tell the difference. The problem is switchover of the OS is a
| complicated, techie thing to do. Try convincing someone to
| switch to Win 10/12/whatever isn't current one and requires
| more than ticking "yes I agree to automagical update on next
| reboot". It's not an aversion to Linux, it's laziness.
|
| What we need is Linux laptops being sold in supermarkets. 99%
| of people won't even notice they aren't running Windows
| anymore.
| wfh wrote:
| I think you're talking about Chromebooks.
| wazoox wrote:
| Unfortunately they are also proprietary, spyware-laden
| devices, that cease to be updated for no good reason
| after 5 years.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Every non-power user I've seen actively really likes 11. It's
| baffling to me, I don't see how it doesn't get in the way
| more.
| revelio wrote:
| I prefer it. One reason is simply that MS haven't been
| fixing bugs in Win10 for a long time now, so Win11 is
| meaningfully less buggy and more consistent.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Everything I've heard makes 11 sound worse, from the new
| start bar, from things being rewritten but not everything
| so it's a horrible mix of old and new, features missing
| for no reason, telemetry, all kinds of horrible things.
|
| 10 at least with the way I customized it is entirely
| stable and I'm not aware of any bugs that affect my
| workflow at all.
| SergeAx wrote:
| There's a rule for Windows versions: you should skip every
| second one. So the right sequence is:
|
| install Windows 95
|
| skip Windows 98
|
| install Windows 2000
|
| skip Windows ME
|
| install Windows XP
|
| skip Windows Vista
|
| install Windows 7
|
| skip Windows 8
|
| install Windows 10
|
| skip Windows 11
|
| This is so consistent that I beleive there are two teams inside
| MS alternately developing next version.
|
| They say, though, that Windows 11 is the last version and there
| will be only updates since. I really hope this is not the case.
| dagw wrote:
| _They say, though, that Windows 11 is the last version and
| there will be only updates since. I really hope this is not
| the case._
|
| It was actually Windows 10 they said that about, so...
| genewitch wrote:
| right, because apple said Mac OS X (1998 or so) was the
| last version they were going to release.
|
| from new era Macs it went 7, 8, 9, X. Then intel macs,
| still macos X.
|
| I do know they're up to version 16 or something of whatever
| the OS is called these days. probably just MacOS.
|
| I didn't believe either of them!
| warner25 wrote:
| The ads are baked into Windows 10 too, although might be
| worse in 11.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Win95 was widely regarded as being shit prior to the C
| version IIRC (I had A, though, and always really liked it...)
|
| Win98se was considered damn good, compared to what had come
| before. Disruption for little benefit, at launch, though.
|
| 2K was only for businesses, bad driver support and lacking in
| some software support on account of using the NT kernel
| before hardware & software vendors were expecting home users
| to have it.
|
| ME was a pointless refresh of 98. Buggier and with system
| menus subtly messed-with to no purpose. The first miss-step
| of the Vista/8 variety.
|
| XP was good by SP3. Not so much at launch.
|
| Vista, yeah, slow as hell while adding nothing.
|
| 7 was still slow as hell, but wasn't as ugly and our hardware
| had gotten better so it was less-noticeable. Not much to
| recommend it aside from "XP's going out of support, and it's
| less-ugly than Vista".
|
| 8 was pointless and ugly, like Vista.
|
| 10 was another 7: de-uglified 8, but not much else going for
| it. Adware and shitware and spyware galore. This leaves 7 as
| the last "good" Windows.
|
| 11's 10 on steroids, so, two scoops of shit instead of one.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| Windows Vista was good by SP1 but required 2GB of RAM.
| WinSxS disk usage was only fixed on Win7, though.
|
| I actually miss all those transparent windows :)
| ridgered4 wrote:
| > Windows Vista was good by SP1 but required 2GB of RAM.
| WinSxS disk usage was only fixed on Win7, though.
|
| Was it? I remember they added a tool that claimed it
| would clean it up but in practice it didn't seem to do
| much.
|
| I thought Windows 10 just papered over the whole mess by
| doing an in place upgrade of the whole OS every 6-12
| months.
| xxs wrote:
| The GP list misses 8.1 which I consider the last actually
| good Windows, and the support has dwindled, esp. with the
| push of DX12... and AMD outright no supporting it at all,
| when it comes to GPUs.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Microsoft has a long history of abusing their market dominance
| within their Windows platform, coincidentally each case having
| something to do with online services. Microsoft has, would and
| will always do _anything_ to make money and choke any competitive
| threats to death one way or the other. They won 't even bother
| trying to be "less evil" like Google once tried and failed.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| We really need to stop letting ads destroy everything, even
| tabloid-style clickbait news seems to be spreading to sell more
| of them.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| From the article: "Windows is the most popular operating system
| in the world"
|
| Therein lies the rub, or lies the lie to be exact, a 38-year old+
| lie: Windows was never an operating system (neither is MacOS for
| that matter). The system worthy of that name, operating system,
| is only a type 1 hypervisor (such as Xen because open source),
| where you truly operate over the system(s): any issue with some
| weird quirk in a machine? nuke it from orbit and spin another
| one.
|
| Your Adobe Photoshop application has nothing to do with your
| Fortnite game, and both of them have nothing to do with your
| browser and your propensity for tabloids: they should have never
| been and should never be on and under the same "operating
| system", perhaps not even on the same disk. Isn't it insane that
| we must sometime restart the operating system with all the apps
| because some single app crashed? How could this system design
| ever use the name "operating system"?
|
| The only benefit of cohesion is the corporate benefit: the
| system, and hence you, your data, your consumption patterns, are
| easier to manage if they are under one "operating system". And
| you, the faceless, nameless, general you, because you don't
| actually care about your data, about your attention, and perhaps
| not even about your life, oppressed as you are into being
| choiceless, hence powerless, deserve "operating systems" such as
| Windows, MacOS, and companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google,
| Amazon, and nowadays "Open"AI.
| quitit wrote:
| This is like some old school prank developers would program in
| should the software detect it was pirated.
| spandrew wrote:
| The search bar just magically showing up in my version of Windows
| 11 was annoying enough. I haven't actually ever clicked on it.
| But to know clicking on it would bring me the type of news that
| attacks my peace of mind is just too far.
|
| I did notice some dark pattern bs in the Windows menu with the
| search bar looking like a system search, but it providing web
| search results. Does Microsoft think this is endearing them to
| anyone as a product?
| sireat wrote:
| What is the best way to go about creating a sane - meaning adware
| turned off as much as possible defaults for Windows 10?
|
| What I mean is preparing a custom ISO for installation.
|
| I realize that technically it should be possible:
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
|
| I have to handle relatives Windows machines quite often and have
| to reinstall Windows quite often.
|
| I like how Rufus adds a default local user to standard Windows
| ISO. So something like this with more customization would be
| fantastic.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Every last update is adding just a little bit more intrusion,
| from the news articles, the required user accounts, the updates
| without asking any form of permission from the user, and more.
|
| The only reason, and I mean the only reason, that I continue
| running it on any of my machines is that software often won't
| support Linux for edge case situations like VR games.
|
| Also performance is just trash. If you've tried to run windows on
| a non ssd in the last decade, it's an absolute slog.
|
| I'm slowly but surely trying to cut this windows software out of
| my life.
|
| This is also making me strongly consider moving off of .net and
| looking into any alternative I can find for it, which the only
| real option at this point is probably Kotlin.
| helmholtz wrote:
| What I don't understand is how _file explorer_ can be so slow.
| It's visibly lagging between directories, first-opening etc.
| That's a fundamental part of the OS. I believe there is so much
| phone-home going on that nothing on Windows is slick anymore.
| Kye wrote:
| This is often a sign of a problem with your file system, or
| worse, your drive.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| server/administrat...
|
| It's not necessarily or often a huge problem, but it's still
| enough to cause this. I've never had chkdsk fail to fix these
| little issues.
| weberer wrote:
| >This is also making me strongly consider moving off of .net
| and looking into any alternative I can find for it, which the
| only real option at this point is probably Kotlin.
|
| Even MS themselves moved from their proprietary .NET
| implementation to .NET Core, which works just fine in Linux.
| But I'd give a +1 to Kotlin anyway, its a great language. I'm
| also fond of using Python with Pydantic to enforce type
| checking.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I am not crazy prone to trust the open source dotnet core.
| Even if it's open source, it's still Microsoft.
|
| I feel like people give open source way too much credit in
| general when it comes to how it can be abused. There is still
| a very very large barrier to control over the ecosystem when
| it comes to core, so if Microsoft decides to start getting to
| 4E the project I fully believe they'll succeed.
|
| I will 100 percent look into that python option though. The
| main reason I've ruled it out is performance. JVM and Core
| just thrash python in terms of out of the box speed.
| sixothree wrote:
| What I hate about this is that it pretends to be something else
| - "light rain starting soon" with a cloud icon. But the result
| is the weather taking up very little real estate. And on top of
| that you _can't_ make the weather take up more space. It's
| always the smallest tile on the page.
| realitysballs wrote:
| I SO AGREE
| CommanderData wrote:
| Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrocious, I didn't
| know about the built in keylogger until I ran a declutter tool.
|
| Unpopular opinion but to stop Microsoft's shenanigans =
| legislation. Opt-in by default would be a good start.
| Transparency tools to show what's being exported to MS. How about
| stopping forced major updates too.
|
| User needs protective legislation fast.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Windows doesn't have a keylogger, and irresponsible 'declutter'
| tools can do more hard than good.
| LightHugger wrote:
| We are at the point where windows is irresponsible and those
| declutter tools are what the responsible user makes use of.
| You are irresponsible for not using them.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| What clutter? I removed the preinstalled news widget,
| turned off the telemetry options in the installer (I
| personally am ok with some light telemetry because I know
| from experience how useful it is as a developer but I agree
| it shouldn't be on by default). My NextDNS probably blocks
| it anyway. There are probably still a few preinstalled apps
| that I don't use, like candy crush, but they are mostly
| just stubs that don't download unless you use them - I
| wouldn't know as I never browse the start menu, I just type
| the first few characters and press enter. I check Autoruns
| occasionally and everything seems reasonably well-behaved,
| and I haven't had a BSOD in several years except for a few
| caused by crappy third party 'security' kernel drivers.
| nvllsvm wrote:
| Which declutter tools specifically?
| iakov wrote:
| I think you are right. Many people in tech, and especially
| americans, sneer at the thought of regulation, but I don't see
| any other way to un-fuck the most popular personal computer OS
| in the market.
|
| If not for GDPR, my email and phone would be still vacuumed up
| by every e-shop and sold in bulk to some shady data aggregator.
| If not for the upcoming USB-C charger law, Apple would be
| putting their Lightning holes in all devices. Sometimes the
| invisible hand of the market has to be forced I guess.
|
| Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-handed,
| and hard to change. But it's better then the current state of
| things, where the users are constantly screwed with no viable
| alternative for their OS.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Legislation is usually too little and too late, heavy-
| handed, and hard to change.
|
| Often EU regulations, especially tech-related ones (e.g. the
| USB C one) come with baked in provisions for how it will be
| updated to stay relevant in the future.
|
| The upcoming DMA and DSA will hopefully enable a lot more
| interoperability and interchangeable software and standards.
|
| Microsoft's Windows bullshit (the EU already established they
| can't force you to use their browser, why are they allowed to
| do it once again) will need a heavy slap down too.
|
| > Many people in tech, and especially americans, sneer at the
| thought of regulation, but I don't see any other way to un-
| fuck the most popular personal computer OS in the market.
|
| The only people who sneer generically at regulation are
| people who either misunderstanding or are just oblivious to
| how much their lives are shaped (in probably 90% of the
| cases, even in the US), for the better by existing
| regulations. One can argue on the merits of a specific
| proposal or law, but otherwise it's just absurdity like a
| house cat.
| [deleted]
| mdmglr wrote:
| Doesn't group policy editor fix all of this?
| mock-possum wrote:
| Sorry, "built in keylogger?" Which one is that?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Presumably "Inking and typing personalization". Microsoft
| collects all the words you type, presumably filters out the
| ones that match the dictionary, and collects things like
| names in your Microsoft account. This can be used for spell
| check and turning stylus-drawn shapes into text more
| accurately.
|
| So yes, Windows does collect some information akin to a
| keylogger.
| hansvm wrote:
| No idea which of the builtin keyloggers they're referring to,
| but the one with the most public outrage was the inking and
| typing personalization feature.
| mihaaly wrote:
| > Tracking and privacy on Windows is becoming atrocious
|
| It is pathetic how they promote (push like madman) telemetry as
| a tool for improving user experience while all it is used for
| is ruining it and exploit their paying users for their own
| benefit only (marketing).
| aquir wrote:
| I've tried moving to Linux but the simple task of using my laptop
| closed with a second screen was impossible so I went back to
| Windows 10. I will give Linux a try next year again...or but a
| Macbook
| midoridensha wrote:
| Works for me, with 2 external screens and a Thunderbolt docking
| station.
| aquir wrote:
| I am trying to do this with HDMI connected but once I close
| the laptop the external screen is reduced to a 1 FPS laggy
| mess. I have a laptop with 2 GPUs (1 in the CPU and a
| discrete one) and tried everything...no luck
| Symbiote wrote:
| Change the setting for what happens when you close the laptop.
|
| You need to do the same on Windows and MacOS. I remember
| finding the latter very confusing the first time I tried to
| play a movie with a projector connected and the lid closed. It
| would sleep, unless I first connected an external keyboard.
| nunodonato wrote:
| I do that everyday, works fine
| flipbrad wrote:
| I'm sorry this doesn't work for you. It has worked fine for me
| for years.
| resters wrote:
| It's truly unbelievable that Microsoft has allowed low quality
| garbage news to proliferate the Windows UI, including generating
| notifications.
|
| It's really quite embarrassing to see the low quality content and
| to imagine that somewhere within Microsoft a human actually made
| the decision to allow this content to flourish _within the OS_.
|
| My guess is that there is some product manager at Microsoft who
| has a bunch of friends who are creating the interfaces and
| garbage content generation "news" feeds and they are simply
| milking this for profit before it gets turned off.
| lbriner wrote:
| With the amount of money that MS makes, it is hard to imagine
| they do this for revenue. Are they trying to be "useful"?
|
| At very least, since many of us have enough to concentrate on as
| Developers, the install should either ask you "do you want loads
| of crap to read from the news?" or it should be a simple global
| switch.
|
| I think probably as a big company, Microsoft have lost the Bill
| Gates character who could decide everything in a holistic way and
| not random groups of people with their own objectives slinging
| mud at the OS to see what sticks and annoying everyone in the
| process. How much has been tried and dropped in the last 10-15
| years of Windows?
| alden5 wrote:
| They're still beholden to shareholders, anything that'll get
| them more money they'll do, and I'm sure showing ads on 1.4
| billion active devices isn't just chump change to them.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| This is why I moved to Mac.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| The irony of this article being posted on a website so littered
| with garbage ads that I can't reasonably scroll through it
| without waiting for several seconds at a time for the actual
| content to load is rich. And then, at the bottom of the article
| is something called a taboola feed, which looks eerily similar to
| a tabloid news feed.
| scblock wrote:
| The author is likely aware of the irony. That doesn't negate
| the content of the article. Which is about a product you pay
| real money for.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Microsoft needs to declutter. Windows and Edge are starting to
| feel like a very disorganized junk drawer.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _pigs eat humans (opens in new tab) "far more often than people
| expect?"_
|
| Sounds like something I would see on hacker news.
| euix wrote:
| The advances Steam has made to linux gaming has really brought
| alot of people over to permanent linux - including myself. Before
| I used to still have a dual boot system but for the last 3 years
| there hasn't been a Windows computer in my residence and I can
| honestly say I don't miss a thing. Even things like Microsoft
| Teams or Visual Code, skype, which are good utility products from
| Microsoft have Linux versions or are accessible from the browser.
| The only use for Windows I can see is in Enterprise corporate
| settings.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I think gaming + adobe suite are the biggest for me also.
| Listening if anyone has recommendations for the latter (I use
| darktable already, but Premiere is tough to replace)
| quaintdev wrote:
| They need to stop showing tabloid on bing as well.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Windows can only display the news that microsoft is willing to
| purchase. Since they don't have a subscription service for news
| like apple+ you get what is basically free or places that just
| want to 'work for exposure'.
| dspillett wrote:
| Do they purchase it, or is it a small revenue stream for them
| from the "news" outlets paying to get eyeballs passed their
| way? That would explain much of it being tacky lowest common-
| denominator click-bait crap (better reporting wouldn't get much
| traction in those spots as the target audience are more likely
| to ignore it or find a way to turn it off).
| labrador wrote:
| In the latest Windows 11 Home update - Right click task bar, task
| bar settings, Widgets OFF. Solved the problem for me.
| zeruch wrote:
| It needs to stop showing a lot of things, including its own ass.
|
| The "Microsoft's MSN content network, which syndicates content
| from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so" is
| drastic in its understatement, and MSFT cant even make anything
| these days without adding telemetry on one side and "content"
| noise on the other straight out of a Philip K Dick fever dream.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Hey with Windows integrating GPT-4, they can _generate those
| articles themselves_!
| carom wrote:
| Just disable that menu. I have the setting in Windows 11
| Workstation. I assume it is in the free version as well. There
| are no ads in the start menu, all that junk is contained.
| amir734jj wrote:
| Is there a script for windows 11 that disables all these ads
| and news and gives us no bs experience of windows 7?
| MikusR wrote:
| You need a script to automate two mouse clicks?
| josephcsible wrote:
| There are a lot of settings in Windows that need to be
| changed. If you look at any one in isolation, it doesn't
| make much sense to script it, but when you look at all of
| them at once, two clicks each start to add up.
| justin66 wrote:
| The ironic thing is, the first thing I had to do on this webpage
| was click "No Thanks" on a notifications request.
| ohduran wrote:
| Ironically, all those videos that start playing and are hard to
| escape from as you read this very post are quite distracting,
| too.
|
| In view of this, it's hard to read this article as "why is
| Windows showing their stories and not mine?".
| amir734jj wrote:
| Switched to PopOS 4 years ago before that was using Ubuntu.
| Haven't found a need to use windows ever since. Do yourself a
| favor and switch.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| [flagged]
| jtorsella wrote:
| I'm going to not engage on the Fauci/covid question (although I
| think you're misremembering which subject he was less than
| forthright about - it was the efficacy of masking, and the
| dispute you're talking about didn't happen until later). But
| the real point the author is making is that neither "Hero Fauci
| smashes Rand Paul" nor "Did Fauci visit Wuhan in 2019?" are
| things that I want on my windows desktop default! Most of the
| trash isn't even political, as the author mentions, but when it
| is political it is always extreme.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| idk, i think 'tomshardware.com' needs a reality check. there's
| like 100 disgusting taboola and google ads on their own website
| that look identical to these awful microsoft ads. its hard to
| take a rant about trashy ads seriously coming from a page that is
| littered with them.
| AmVess wrote:
| One has reason to expect ads on a website, but not on their OS.
| mihaaly wrote:
| What is this childish 'he does bad things so it is ok others do
| bad things too' dumbness please? Are you really trying to
| protect a bad practice you know is bad because this is a common
| bad things so bad thing should be accepted? Really? Because
| this is what sounds like.
|
| Also, analogy between a sometimes visited scoped web page and
| the operating system that you use 100% of time when your
| computer is on and is the foundation of any activity? Are you
| mad?
|
| Are you perhaps distracted from the message by those awful
| annoyances, ironicaly demonstrating the harmful nature of those
| in Windows too inadvertently?
| mozball wrote:
| Story time : A couple of years ago, i got a message from
| Mozilla about a survey/competition for Indian users to find
| websites which had the most number of trackers. The top winners
| would get a coupon worth a couple of bucks.
|
| I immediately embarked on my search with safeties off -
| Noscript, Ublock, disabled
|
| I surfed through various Indian websites - times of india,
| yellow journalism websites, local language tabloids, desi xxx
| sites - I expanded my search globally- dailymail, cnet,
| piratebay - my cpu fans whining in protest as i trawled through
| the darkest, most malware-infested, crypto-miner-laden,
| chumbox-ridden corners of the web. The average number of
| trackers was now in the triple digits but still i felt i could
| do better. That i had seen worse. Suddenly,it clicked. I could
| almost feel time stop and spacetime warp around me as my dsl
| connection struggled to load up tomshardware.com. Ding Ding, My
| quest had ended by a healthy margin.
|
| So thanks for the coffee, tomshardware.com
| insomagent wrote:
| > The stories come courtesy of Microsoft's MSN content network,
| which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some
| reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company,
| Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of
| its sites, including Tom's Hardware, occasionally have articles
| appear on the network. What's problematic here, though, is not
| that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the
| equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right
| into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to
| avoid.
| [deleted]
| lexandstuff wrote:
| The difference is: I paid for Windows, but I didn't pay for
| tomshardware.com.
| easrng wrote:
| i tried turning off my adblocker and yeahhhh the ads-to-content
| ratio is a bit out of control https://i.imgur.com/Dre5HJw.jpeg
| aendruk wrote:
| Unfortunately about the same ratio on that imgur link as
| well.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Every time I see the unfiltered web, it is a glimpse into how
| the 'other side' must live. It is surreal to imagine how
| anyone accepts this as 'normal' but somehow they manage to
| survive.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Worth noticing.. the site also still works fine with ad block
| enabled and there was no nag screen or paywall around it.
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