[HN Gopher] Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Author : bobsterlobster
Score : 1473 points
Date : 2026-01-28 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.himthe.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.himthe.dev)
| ColinWright wrote:
| Still reading the article, but early on it says:
|
| "Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first
| computer, 22 years later?"
|
| My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB
| RAM.
|
| That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Nah, I think it's awesome. Great computer by the way. With all
| that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.
| xxs wrote:
| 22 years back is still this century, nothing weird about. As
| for remembering stuff 6502/48KB RAM (along with call -151)
| seems boring, I guess.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years
| ago.
|
| First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram,
| AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a
| 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with
| (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some
| sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well
| (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)
|
| Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect
| order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)
|
| Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they
| should be somewhat indelible memories.
| xxs wrote:
| >an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.
|
| 32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being
| grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive
| and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.
|
| 32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).
| Kye wrote:
| It could have been bought old and upgraded. Not everyone
| had the luxury of a brand new first computer.
| xxs wrote:
| Possibly, but even mother boards supporting 32MB would be
| rare. Perhaps on "DX3"?
|
| As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to
| get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...
| pixl97 wrote:
| So this depends if it was a 72 pin DIMM board. I don't
| think you could get there (easily?) on a 30 pin board,
| but 72 may have had native support for 64 out of the box.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Haha, I wondered if someone would complain about 32MB. We
| had the board maxed out. My grandfather's computer before
| ours.
|
| A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk
| to a luxurious 400MB.
| Kye wrote:
| The classic NAND-me-down. My first personal computer was
| a "broken" 486 system I got for $25 at a yard sale. All
| it needed was a hard drive.
| netule wrote:
| We had a 386 DX with 32MB of RAM. I don't think it was
| _that_ uncommon. DOOM still didn't run super smoothly,
| though.
| Narishma wrote:
| Nah, as the other poster said 4 or 8 MB was what was
| common on 486 machines. Even less on 386. Most 386
| motherboards didn't even support more than 16MB.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, IIRC my first computer, or at least the first one I
| really maintained, was a Pentium 2 with 32MB of ram and a
| 2gb hard drive. Good ole gateway pcs.
|
| The first first computer I had was an old IBM PC.
| crumpled wrote:
| TigerDirect? Wow. How did I forget the first place I used and
| instantly maxxed a credit card? I would look through that
| catalog right now if I had it.
| Kye wrote:
| Internet Archive has three:
|
| https://archive.org/details/tiger-direct-pc-price-blitz-
| cata...
|
| https://archive.org/details/tigerdirect-v15i5a
|
| https://archive.org/details/tiger-direct-web-safe
| rglullis wrote:
| Mine was an Intel 386 DX 40MHZ with 2MB RAM and 80MB HD, bought
| in late 1993.
| heywire wrote:
| IBM PC XT 5150 4.77MHz, 640KB, no, not weird at all :)
| drivers99 wrote:
| The 5150 was just an "IBM PC" not an XT, but still... I think
| we're talking about the same thing.
|
| I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA
| graphics card, 5.25" floppy (360K, double-sided, double-
| density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard
| has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus
| expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel
| Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so
| you don't have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At
| one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The
| floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own
| controller cards so there's almost no more room for
| expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette
| (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I
| doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it
| out anyway.
| justin66 wrote:
| There is no reason you would have forgotten.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| ZX-81 with 1Kb RAM
| WillAdams wrote:
| Radio Shack PC-1 w/ the printer and cassette tape player ---
| really should have waited until the Model 100 was available....
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I documented all of my early computers throughout early
| college, and I'm glad I did. I remember the first computers
| well, but without those notes, I wouldn't remember the first
| ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family
| computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was
| crushed when sat on by sibling)
| zabzonk wrote:
| My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased
| myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime
| around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all
| the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I
| spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger).
| These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.
| consp wrote:
| First PC: 8088 with 640K, then a 286 with 2MB! The memory!
|
| First own "PC": Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run
| DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation
| from a family member.
| tracker1 wrote:
| First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a
| cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I
| remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had
| to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb
| ram and an EGA card and display.
|
| First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the
| larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded
| for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran
| circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it
| just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since
| then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend
| from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the
| most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to
| a single pair at a higher speed.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 36 years ago: A Wyse branded AT clone 12.5MHz 286 with 1MB of
| ram, a 10MB hard drive and a Hercules graphics card (it was a
| decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work).
| ikidd wrote:
| I was late to the party with an Apple IIe. I've never managed
| to catch up since.
| arkensaw wrote:
| Amstrad 2286 PC, 4Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive, 3.5" floppy.
|
| 40 Megabytes. I have photos that size these days.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer.
| Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant
| price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I
| think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in
| place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought
| it.
|
| Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging
| post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is
| still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter
| and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen
| because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Apple forced me to switch to Linux!
|
| Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new
| customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long,
| at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before
| switching to Debian ( _Xfce_ ), but it was worth it!
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| It's only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for
| their software to Microsoft in exchange
| jasoneckert wrote:
| If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense.
| But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let
| others gravitate to you as a result.
| jhickok wrote:
| I am good laptop hardware away from making the move.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported
| (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily
| driver with a UGreen GAN charger.
| aljgz wrote:
| I'm on frame.work with AMD, 96GB RAM. Using it with
| fedora+KDE Absolutely love it
| jhickok wrote:
| Do they still use a paddle trackpad? Framework seems like
| its nearly perfect for me, even if I would miss Apple's
| displays on the MBP.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| Frameworks are built like crap. Sorry for the language.
| Watch the laptop olympics:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96O0Sn1LXA
| gregors wrote:
| thinkpad
| neop1x wrote:
| I can also recommend HP Zbook Ultra G1a. It's probably the
| closest thing to Macbooks at the moment. It has lower battery
| life and latest M chips are still faster but it's fast enough
| for me. The hardware is solid and sw support is great.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is
| like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard
| aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it
| makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is
| at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power
| hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch
| of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4
| series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking
| reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).
|
| So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or
| I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to
| likely be even worse on Linux.
| miyuru wrote:
| There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahi_Linux
| morshu9001 wrote:
| It's not really viable
| reconnecting wrote:
| So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to
| render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak
| for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times
| fewer resources to run the OS itself.
| deaux wrote:
| Or you just don't run Tahoe?
| reconnecting wrote:
| Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.
|
| Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and
| starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep
| _old hardware_ to _run older MacOS_ versions, and it 's
| only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest
| OS you can run on your Mac.
| deaux wrote:
| > Actually, you don't have this choice anymore.
|
| I must have taken some shrooms before I downgraded from
| Tahoe to Sequoia a few hours ago then.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| Old Macs can certainly be downgraded. iOS doesn't allow
| it though and they pulled the latest security update
| which fucking sucks. And if you buy a M5, Tahoe is the
| only OS that's available.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I have nothing against old Macs and MacOS, but I
| certainly won't be buying anything since the Apple
| Silicon switch, because now only Apple controls which OS
| you can run.
| deaux wrote:
| >If you buy a machine that isn't even released yet
|
| Uhh, I guess.
|
| AFAIK iOS has been very locked down wrt rolling back
| upgrades since forever and isn't super relevant to this
| thread. Happy to be corrected.
| klausa wrote:
| M5 MacBook Pros have been shipping for over three months
| now.
|
| The M5 Pro/Max variants aren't; but an M5 Mac is a thing
| you could have bought for a good while now.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Oh, I must be clear here: I'm not considering M1 Macs or
| later, since Apple closed the ecosystem with Apple
| Silicon.
|
| What you did is a downgrade in what's called the
| supported OS.
|
| However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1
| Mac, it's not possible -- Big Sur is the earliest version
| that runs on Apple Silicon.
|
| Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older
| than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a
| Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.
| array_key_first wrote:
| That's a very temporary solution to be fair. KDE and
| even, _shudder_ , Gnome put mac os and windows to shame
| when it comes to responsiveness, performance, and
| resource usage.
|
| I mean, KDE does 3x the stuff for 1/3 the cost. That's
| more memory and CPU for your IDE or, more likely, chrome
| tabs.
| barrkel wrote:
| I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a
| portable form factor.
|
| Most of my personal development these days is done on my home
| server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in
| headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud
| workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are
| distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for
| heavier development.
|
| I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices.
| Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a
| remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop
| to work anywhere.
|
| I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight,
| cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I'd like to use this kind of setup but unfortunately every
| time I try there's just soo many annoying edge cases that
| are wasting my time. Especially when I need to do FE/Mobile
| - but even BE has gotchas. I guess it depends on your
| environment - I'll try making this setup work sometimes in
| the next few months again.
| ecshafer wrote:
| As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used
| windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had
| gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple
| there were three things that stood out: The M processors are
| amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is
| absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
| reconnecting wrote:
| Man, we didn't have this all along.
|
| Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's
| board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users
| can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging
| it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely
| terrible.
| steve1977 wrote:
| They also decided that they have to capture React devs and
| everything should use a declarative UI, which has brought
| us the wonderful new Systems Settings.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people
| use Mac.
|
| Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of
| the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to
| the OS is very limited.
|
| Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all
| the previous releases.
| AdamN wrote:
| Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but
| so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never
| get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal
| bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want
| ...
| ikidd wrote:
| Fucking Finder. What a colossal dumpster fire. It drags
| that entire OS down.
| juuular wrote:
| Better than Windows Explorer
| morshu9001 wrote:
| No it's not. It's one of very few things that Windows
| does better
| array_key_first wrote:
| Windows explorer got significantly better in 11, except
| for fucking context menus. Also it's incredibly slow and
| unstable now and frequently crashes, taking the taskbar
| down with it (???).
|
| But, at least it has tabs. Jesus Christ, took long
| enough.
| chezelenkoooo wrote:
| There's a couple but nothing I've found at the level of i3
| or whatever the hyprland equivalent is.
| AaronM wrote:
| For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which
| window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and
| then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the
| window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the
| older window. Really annoying when using an app with many
| windows
| figers wrote:
| right click on the app and select the window you want...
| Carrok wrote:
| There are an absolute ton of very capable tiling window
| managers for macOS, posted here frequently. From yabi to
| aerospace to fully programmable ones like hammerspoon. A
| quick search will turn up plenty more. I would be shocked
| if none of them meet your needs.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Shouldn't need to install third party stuff for such a
| basic feature. One more thing that will possibly break
| with updates or not play nice with something.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Window wiling is a big one for me. I have tried the third
| party options, and nothing compares to i3.
| lastdong wrote:
| "I get that it takes some tweaking (MacOS)" How times have
| changed, it used to be as intuitive as drinking water.
| al_borland wrote:
| > mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use
| mac.
|
| I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first
| Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it
| tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used
| to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or
| rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated,
| those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard
| time. This is true of any opinionated software.
| ep103 wrote:
| MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything
| should work and frequently attempt to predict your
| workflow.
|
| Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each
| tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to
| you to learn how to use the tools available.
|
| On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would
| just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture
| image" button could do anything from displaying the image
| on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving
| and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM
| decided the most common use case was, and god help you if
| you want to do something different.
|
| If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've
| grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may
| even occasionally express happiness when a function does
| something unexpected and helpful!
|
| If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably
| painful.
| al_borland wrote:
| I'd frame it slightly differently.
|
| With Linux/Windows you're supplied with a toolbox and
| from that toolbox you're expected to cobble together a
| workflow that works for you and maintain it.
|
| I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn
| Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that
| would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They
| eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that,
| which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to
| the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
|
| Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a
| problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle
| it. If you're ok with their solution, great, problem
| solved. If you're not, you end up either fighting with
| the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app
| that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just
| going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of
| needless stress from my life. There are some places I do
| go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really
| need these things and if they're worth the trouble.
|
| It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the
| computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system
| and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I
| just looking for the system to fade into the background
| so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found
| tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a
| hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get
| done and move on with my life.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight
| against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is
| true of any opinionated software.
|
| And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own
| opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
|
| I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at
| work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
|
| I miss Windows. It wasn't _totally_ better, but I managed
| to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I
| haven 't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
|
| From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in
| different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have
| with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You
| get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then
| you find out that you can't.
|
| I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to
| find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
|
| It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl
| instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks
| (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of
| keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at
| home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Most of the stuff isn't really personal preference, more
| like being temporarily used to a different way.
|
| Btw search "modifier keys" in Mac sysprefs if you want to
| rebind command to control. I'm also sick of using
| separate shortcuts at work, but the other way around,
| gonna rebind Ubuntu.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| I use Karabinier to remap keys. Mac OS makes you work
| hard to enable it the first time, though.
| eigencoder wrote:
| MacOS lets you rebind Caps Lock, Ctrl, Option, Command,
| and the Globe/fn key in Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard
| shortcuts... > Modifier Keys. Does that not work for you?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I don't recall what problem I had with it, but it was a
| case of solving one problem and introducing another.
|
| I don't want to _globally_ swap Ctrl and Cmd. For some
| apps, the keys are identical to that on Windows. For
| others, it isn 't. I need to be able to do it on a per
| app basis.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I can give you a few examples:
|
| Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a
| poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything
| involved is constantly out of date.
|
| The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at
| the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller
| and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
|
| Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It
| doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make
| partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third
| party app to make it better, which was still worse than
| windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with
| i3.
|
| Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors
| and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy
| or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the
| next update.
| 3form wrote:
| There's something to it.
|
| On that note, is there any GUI tool that allows me to
| browse my zip archives without unpacking them, and is also
| free?
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and
| still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying
| bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
|
| E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect
| bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps
| popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged
| in" or something. I run a script that monitors that
| Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
|
| Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for
| years, accumulated many support threads, and still not
| fixed.
|
| Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start
| consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
|
| Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
|
| I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems
| that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it
| the wrong way".
|
| Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products
| like Factorio game or sqlite.
| al_borland wrote:
| I haven't had that Bluetooth issue (but I haven't tried
| connecting my non-airpods to my mac).
|
| Have you tried this? I saw it as a fix over on Reddit.
|
| Privacy & Security > Bluetooth > Click the + > Add Music
| from Applications > Toggle to disabled
|
| (This is insane to have to do, but better than running a
| script to monitor for it and kill it)
| ars wrote:
| Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).
|
| Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows
| is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic
| keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard
| behavior? Like why even do that?)
|
| If there is a window under another window, and you click on
| something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just
| activate the window.
|
| So now you have to click twice, except what if it's
| actually active? So now you have to always check if a
| window is active - which is harder than necessary because
| of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual
| window. (This is especially bad when you have two
| monitors.)
|
| The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse
| movements.
|
| There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen
| button.
|
| If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no
| way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or
| something like that to make the mac move it). If you do
| show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.
|
| I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I
| can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't
| right click on any of the icons in there to do anything
| with them.
|
| The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of
| me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's
| like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such
| thing as directories.
|
| If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway
| across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
|
| If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will
| "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down.
| (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently
| manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be
| helpful then?)
|
| When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline
| that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to
| figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.
|
| When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small
| one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it
| manages to place the window offset - so it's the right
| size, but like 40 pixels to the left.
|
| Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external
| monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in.
| Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
| int_19h wrote:
| I switched to Mac as my primary two years ago and I'm still
| finding myself frustrated at the software a lot.
|
| It's not just that it's opinionated - that's fine. It's
| that those opinions are often just poor UX.
| juuular wrote:
| Windows is such garbage, I can't understand how you think
| MacOS is worse lol. It's just Unix. Linux is definitely
| better than both though
| ecshafer wrote:
| Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application
| windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will
| take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick
| hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality
| without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't
| use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely
| linux otherwise.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Hover on the green button. Also, Mac has a really robust
| keyboard shortcut system. Including shortcuts for tiling.
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-
| windows-mc...
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-
| sho...
| 3form wrote:
| They didn't say they think macOS is worse, though.
| kaydub wrote:
| > I have no idea how people use mac.
|
| Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It's worth
| putting up with MacOS for the hardware.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive)
| Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the
| IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was
| great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected
| hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they
| shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was
| capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My 'never again'
| still in effect 15 years later.
|
| My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux)
| with no, zero, fails.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple
|
| Who or what is the "Linux" entity in this context?
| avaer wrote:
| Also who is paying "Linux" and for what?
|
| Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.
| breezykoi wrote:
| Well at least Microsoft is a platinum member of the Linux
| Foundation for many years...
| breezykoi wrote:
| Joking aside, I often hear people say "they should" when
| talking about GNU/Linux (for example: "they should just
| standardize on one audio stack"), as if there were a central
| authority making those decisions. What many don't realize is
| that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an
| abundance of choice. That diversity isn't a flaw, it's a
| consequence of how the ecosystem works.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| There's free choice for those OSes to use different
| kernels, but they don't, they all use the same Linux
| (rather than say BSD). There's a lot of advantage in
| getting aligned on things, even though anyone can choose
| not to.
| breezykoi wrote:
| It is true that Linux-based distributions have this thing
| in common: the Linux kernel. There have been some
| GNU/Hurd variants though...
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I guess Linus Torvalds and co? First they'd need to
| standardize a Linux desktop OS.
| kaydub wrote:
| If there was an easy and supported way to put linux on a
| macbook I'd be back on linux but I can't give up the hardware.
| geophile wrote:
| For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a
| Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front
| (multimedia), work in back (dev).
|
| And then: - Butterfly keyboard -
| Touchbar - M-series CPUs, which, while technically
| awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
|
| So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been
| wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.
| reconnecting wrote:
| - No esc
| bnchrch wrote:
| See I'm a ends justify the means guy:
|
| The more people forced into the beautiful world of capslock
| is escape the better!
| reconnecting wrote:
| Your website has stained my screen. lol
|
| _background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 12% 24%,
| var(--text-primary) 1.5px, transparent 1.5px),
|
| radial-gradient(circle at 73% 67%, var(--text-primary)
| 1px, transparent 1px),
|
| radial-gradient(circle at 41% 92%, var(--text-primary)
| 1.2px, transparent 1.2px),
|
| radial-gradient(circle at 89% 15%, var(--text-primary)
| 1px, transparent 1px);_
| progforlyfe wrote:
| Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love
| it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating
| system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.
|
| You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for
| that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose
| computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that
| own them!
| petcat wrote:
| > Every month more and more people switch to Linux
|
| We've been hearing this for _decades_ and yet the home Linux
| userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever.
| Unless we 're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS.
| Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever
| gained market share over desktop Windows.
| dralley wrote:
| I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is
| growing, it's bigger than it has ever been even without
| including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with
| desktop linux than ever before (Valve's suite of devices,
| multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a
| few SteamDeck competitors)
| vikramkr wrote:
| I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point
| quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular
| consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of
| desktop linux's single biggest barriers to adoption.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if
| it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of
| growth has been increasing too.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| Is the desktop/laptop linux market share really over 4%?
| What is that based on?
| jsheard wrote:
| The Steam survey has it at 3.6%, although that's
| obviously skewed towards gamers, and counts Steam Decks
| in addition to desktops.
| lambdaone wrote:
| According to Statcounter, Linux's share is 3.86% and
| rising; but I'd imagine that quite a bit of the almost
| 16% 'unknown' is also Linux.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/desktop/worldwide
|
| Not insignificant at all.
| godelski wrote:
| Maybe more interesting is that if you switch to looking
| at just America Linux jumps to 5.25% (unknown 7.4%)
| (Similar numbers for all of NA), and for Europe it is
| 4.32% (9.75% unknown).
|
| Again, not huge numbers but also not insignificant. But
| they are quickly growing and taking share from Microsoft.
| If we look back at (Dec) 2021 the numbers are 1.8% and
| 2.2% respectively. Those gains are meaningful.
| havblue wrote:
| You can see that while Windows 10 numbers are going down
| over the past few months, the Windows 11 numbers aren't
| making up for it. About 2/3 of that gap are going to
| Linux with the other third going to Mac. So Mac is
| getting more market at the expense of Windows as well.
| There are a significant number of disgruntled Windows
| users leaving over the past year.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| At least according to Statcounter, Linux is currently at
| 3.86% worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/desktop/worldwide.
|
| It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/desktop/united-st...
|
| In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
|
| Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from
| Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of
| those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is
| not something to scoff at.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| The high amount of "Unknown" is interesting. Especially
| as it doubled in the last 6-8 months.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| "Unknown" is always mostly some version of Windows that
| they couldn't classify for one reason or another.
| seanw444 wrote:
| There's also the people like me that couldn't
| historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so
| we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough.
| Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam
| stats, but a Linux user in other stats.
|
| The state of gaming has improved drastically since I
| started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering
| ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be
| getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC
| Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs
| flawlessly directly on Linux.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and
| something percent. That's where I pulled the number from.
| But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over
| for the Linux community.
| benjiro wrote:
| Its not ... The problem is that people do not realize
| that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux
| desktop devices in those numbers. Chrome tends to also
| inflate those numbers. Yes, they are Linux desktops but
| not in the way people are comparing Windows to Linux.
|
| The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is
| still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
|
| You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you
| feel like there is some major switch but looking here in
| the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20
| years ago are people that are part of the old statistics.
| There are some new converts but not what you expect to
| see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
|
| It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that
| involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its
| still not the often click and play, works under every
| resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the
| part people often do not tell you, because a lot of
| people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it
| and forget about it.
|
| Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative
| to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got
| their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual
| strong contender to Windows.
| tokai wrote:
| Steam Deck _is_ a Linux desktop device. It is literally a
| thin laptop with a build-in screen and joystick running
| linux. Does my linux system stop being that when I turn
| on big picture mode in steam? You can run the steam deck
| as your daily driver hooked up to a keyboard and a
| monitor.
| benjiro wrote:
| The Steam Deck is not a Desktop ... That is like saying
| that every Android smartphone is a desktop. Sure, you can
| use it as a desktop but 99.99% of the people are using it
| as a handheld console.
|
| And nice downvotes... Typical in Linux Desktop topics.
| jajuuka wrote:
| A growth of 4% over 20 years is not an increasing rate. And
| yes, 4% marketshare is microscopic. macOS has a bigger
| share but you wouldn't say macOS is massive. Posts like
| this are cheerleading OS's because everything needs to be a
| zero sum competition.
| Hasnep wrote:
| But it's also not not an increasing rate, there's not
| enough information to know if the rate is increasing or
| not.
| fundatus wrote:
| Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though.
| People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments
| around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce
| dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes
| it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like
| there is more momentum than ever for this.
|
| On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that
| Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have
| its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time
| though_
|
| > _governments around the world are loudly thinking about
| how to reduce dependence on US tech_
|
| I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a
| major Linux company for quite a few years, started using
| Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related
| kernel modules.
|
| However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart
| from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many
| non-PC systems).
|
| I have been in projects for large companies but also
| government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50
| employees) non-IT business with people in several
| countries.
|
| People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be
| entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters
| _the least_ in business. Office is another, and even there
| most people who don 't deal with it at scale are way too
| focused on some use case where individuals write documents
| and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very
| small setup, or even just a single PC.
|
| However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID
| management. Device management. Uncountable number of little
| helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot
| port to a Linux based stack without significant effort.
| Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the
| domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365
| from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are
| done.
|
| Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess,
| duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But
| _nobody_ in the world would be able to provide soooo much
| stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep
| continuously innovating and I can see it, little things
| just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams
| button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that
| if more than one person opens an Office document that is
| stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the
| document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
|
| Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to
| Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of
| resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most
| businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just
| a tool will not switch.
|
| But _something_ can be done.
|
| The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for
| new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to
| switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start
| with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has
| to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
|
| They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once
| wrote some code for some government agency to manage
| business registrations, and it was web software.
|
| The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches
| for local business to start making money using other
| stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based
| stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same
| time, enact policies that let local business grow using
| alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does
| not have to compete with US based ones.
|
| The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about
| the MS stack is that I can use it _everywhere_ , in almost
| all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business
| would have to use a different local company in each
| country.
|
| I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by
| only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and
| that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny
| fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are
| not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their
| focus is on their own business and domain problems first of
| all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if
| the US were to do something really drastic that crashes
| some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
| fragmede wrote:
| Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for
| one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving
| away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that
| it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are
| several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I
| know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it
| means it's _possible_ for the EU to get there. The only
| question is will they ever? Let 's form a committee to
| schedule a meeting to look into that question.
| nosianu wrote:
| "Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws
| of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
|
| Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess.
| Not that I expected anything different, it is always the
| same in these threads after all. Why bother with
| arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
|
| But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point.
| Not even _you_ want to do the hard thing and bother with
| what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier
| path. But you expect others to care about the things that
| you care about, without spending much effort even merely
| understanding their position.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID
| management. Device management. Uncountable number of
| little helpers in form of software and scripts that you
| cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant
| effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 -
| you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses
| for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to
| Microsoft, you are done.
|
| Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does
| not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser,
| and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented
| distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be
| a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is
| certainly competition in the IT management space.
| Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based
| fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
|
| > The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I
| can see it, little things just conveniently showing up,
| like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI
| script of my conversations, or that if more than one
| person opens an Office document that is stored in
| OneDrive we can see each other inside the document,
| cursor positions, and who has it open.
|
| This is stuff other vendors have been offering for _ages_
| now.
| layer8 wrote:
| The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable
| to the native apps, and also don't support whatever
| native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| They may not be, but I can almost guarantee that
| Microsoft will get rid of them sooner than later.
| emacdona wrote:
| > On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think
| that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will
| certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
|
| I _love_ Linux, but I agree with this as well. I don't
| think Linux will ever be _easy enough_ that I could
| recommend it to an elderly neighbor. I hope to be proven
| wrong, though.
|
| What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at
| the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is
| _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to
| put a big dent in Windows market share.
| deaux wrote:
| Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of
| torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r/gaming. Relative
| frequency graph of Linux mentions. You'll see a magnitude
| increase over the last 12 months compared to years before.
| It's real.
|
| Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now
| that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on
| the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| According to the Steam Hardware Survey
| (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-
| Softw...) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these
| statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for
| ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to
| ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at
| the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More
| and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some
| native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in
| terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just
| Work on Linux without any tinkering.
|
| While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the
| Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I
| really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year,
| until it's not so microscopic anymore.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users,
| leaving a concentration of "skilled" users, my suspicion is
| that the pattern will resemble the quote "Slowly, then all at
| once."
| tempaccsoz5 wrote:
| Have a look at the Steam Hardware [and software] Survey [0]
| results. Linux has been trending upwards whist Windows has
| been trending down for a wee while. And the population this
| looks at is primarily interested in gaming, which means that
| this is despite a compatibility layer being needed for a
| large amount of the software used. I imagine in other
| communities (software, old people) it's trending much faster.
|
| E.g. I recently installed Linux Mint for my grandma so she
| could use email and an up-to-date web browser on her old
| laptop that can't run (secure) Windows anymore. The UI
| differences are marginal for her, and she can do everything
| she needs to much better than she could before (which was not
| at all).
|
| [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's a form of Stockholm Syndrome for most people. They'll have
| some bit of software they imagine is irreplaceable because they
| have some special use case that means that they just have to
| tolerate the relentless abuse. Or some other excuse. Whatever.
| It all boils down to people being afraid of change.
|
| Most of that fear is not all that rational. It's not unlike
| kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your mind
| just tries to make the most of what fundamentally is a really
| messed up situation. You'll tell yourself it isn't that bad or
| that the next update will fix it or that you can get some magic
| software thingy that makes it go faster. Whatever.
|
| Once you realize you are being abused, you can make some
| choices and do something about it. Most tools can be replaced
| if you look around a bit and do a bit of research. And virtual
| machines on Linux can run Windows just fine if you have one or
| two things that just really need it (been there done that).
| There's also wine and proton which aren't half bad these days.
| And they work for lots of things other than games. You can dual
| boot. Etc. Try it and find out. The absolute worst case is that
| you have to go back to being a lame abuse victim here. You'll
| feel extra bad because now you know. The best case gets you out
| of that abusive relation ship for the rest of your life. Life
| is too short to get subjected to this kind of abuse.
| neogodless wrote:
| This might have some merit for some people.
|
| But the talk of abuse is also heavy-handed.
|
| I've spent months testing and trying out RAW photo editors,
| and months trying out Linux gaming.
|
| Linux is incredible, but my experience with Windows is still
| better. As many that still use it can attest, you can disable
| almost any annoyance. It's extremely stable. Things just work
| including brightness controls, fractional scaling, high
| refresh rates and high FPS gaming, and my favorite RAW photo
| editing. I could switch to a less enjoyable experience with
| Linux but I choose not to after extensive evaluation. I don't
| spend any money on Microsoft services, no Office or OneDrive
| subscription.
|
| But my decision isn't permanent. My hobbies, software use,
| gaming selection, etc. can change over time, and Linux is
| getting better while Windows is getting worse. If it's ever
| "abuse" and I can have a better experience with Linux, I
| won't hesitate to change. But it's also a lot of effort to
| try out alternatives, and dual booting is slow and annoying.
| Plus when I dual boot to Linux Mint the kernel fails to boot
| every other time and I have to select an older one, reboot,
| select a newer one, reboot. It's a huge waste of time. A bad
| experience and I have chosen to avoid it and try again in
| another year or two.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.
|
| jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.
| cies wrote:
| And you got Bitwig :)
| drumttocs8 wrote:
| Yep, Ableton is why I have a Mac Mini on my KVM.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Ableton Live works fine on Wine, at least for me. Every once in
| a while I boot it up to bounce stems from an older project to
| Bitwig.
| fibers wrote:
| Microsoft forced me to switch to Apple AND Linux.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Maybe it's stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in
| Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Haven't really ever had much issues with nvidia drivers on
| Linux tbh, and I've been using it since the early 2000s.
| nusl wrote:
| Drivers are generally fine, but there's more to it than just
| switching. If you're not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching
| is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for
| your current use cases and see if it's at all attractive.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Depends on why they are bad.
|
| If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is.
| If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux
| than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor
| boogeyman problem are just around the corner.
| forbiddenlake wrote:
| What do you mean by bad?
|
| Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily
| closed source.
|
| Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can
| install them.
|
| Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're
| good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in
| dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it
| should be fixed this year.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these
| days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland
| developer so I don't have to deal with whatever technical
| annoyance there is there) is just the
| philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed
| source code on my open source system. This doesn't give the
| entirely closed source OS any points.
| parineum wrote:
| > Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily
| closed source.
|
| That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD
| GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a
| closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux
| full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't
| had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia
| GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed
| source linux drivers.
|
| You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting
| this here but not exactly replying to you.
| keyringlight wrote:
| One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the
| collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the
| performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has
| been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game
| development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has
| majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various
| efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.
|
| Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?)
| it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at
| gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when
| focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of
| consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to
| distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus
| 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users
| aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about
| development tools, to use the most popular engine as an
| example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it
| builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even
| if the tooling works best under windows.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > Are nvidia drivers still bad?
|
| Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well
| with the kernel but still not fully oss.
|
| You'll still have less trouble over all with amd though.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I
| mentioned in the article. They do have to fix VKD3D performance
| though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing
| DX12 games.
| aeroevan wrote:
| nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install now that all of AI is
| trained on nvidia drivers on linux
| chuckadams wrote:
| The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but
| thanks to Microsoft's recent efforts, Windows has reached the
| same level of reliability as well.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Wow gun to head and everything. Glad he survived the transition.
|
| More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait
| headlines are more important than ever. The title is very
| immature.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| lol! Sorry about the clickbait. Everyone's doing it nowadays,
| and I wanted to follow. Gonna think of a better title next time
| NobodyNada wrote:
| For what it's worth, personally I thought your writing style
| and sense of humor was excellent, and my favorite part of the
| post.
|
| I also appreciate you giving me an updated copy of the
| "Microsoft is a corporation" meme, as the one I have
| downloaded seems to become outdated each time a new Windows
| update comes out.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Thank you! Sadly, the one I posted is outdated too. I tried
| looking around for the newest one because I had seen it
| before, but couldn't find it anymore. The list was ~30%
| longer.
| nusl wrote:
| I'd switch if it weren't for anticheat breaking the games I play.
| I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than
| normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit
| to get it to a place that feels sane.
|
| "The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like
| Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But
| honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is
| actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."
|
| Fair point though :P
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I made the decision to just play a different game when I
| switched back in 2022 or so. Thankfully, the game in question
| supported Linux shortly after the switch even though I got used
| to not playing it and just don't anymore :) I still try any
| anti-cheat games I come across to see if they work and it's
| surprising how many actually do.
|
| Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an
| issue, though.
| b1temy wrote:
| A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such
| a level of anticheat that makes wine/proton unable to play it
| (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you
| _shouldn't_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also
| because if they had a bug in their code, you're just opening up
| your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that
| other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is
| not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin.
| Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was
| enough, since malware can just "Bring your own Driver" (BYOD)
| and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)
|
| Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the
| appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and
| actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're
| missing out on socialising or making new friends in that
| aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if
| you could just convince them to switch...
| dimitrisscript wrote:
| It's probably the toxicity that bothers you, so if you just
| switch chat to private mode you'll be golden.
|
| Ever since I did that, League of Legends is great honestly, and
| able to be played daily with no toxicity or rage.
| snarfy wrote:
| It's not going to get any better. Microsoft's problem is tech
| debt. Copilot doesn't pay tech debt it creates it. It will only
| get worse faster.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Microsoft probably has _a_ problem with tech debt, yes. That is
| however not _the_ problem. Instead, the product strategy is.
| And it was bad even before LLMs.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It's simply
| not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it
| slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out
| bdbdbdb wrote:
| I've never heard of CachyOS. I'm amazed at how many Linux
| versions there are and how good they seem and it makes me wish I
| could try them all.
| RIMR wrote:
| Oh, you can try them all. That's pretty much an entire hobby
| itself.
| xacky wrote:
| Gnome comes with built in virtual machine support with the
| Boxes app, just download an ISO and try as many as you want.
| bittumenEntity wrote:
| Like the author says:
|
| > Linux is the preferred platform for development
|
| Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long,
| I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can _seem_
| huge
| troupo wrote:
| Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for
| development. Especially MacOS.
|
| There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to
| development. And there are quite a few downsides especially
| when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors
| often only have Windows tools for their devices.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow.
| MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers. If you don't
| mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I
| wonder how long before you have to enable a scary "developer
| mode" to install software outside the app store.
| troupo wrote:
| While that's true, I still don't have any issues running
| any stack on Mac (I've had Java, Python, C++, some Rust,
| Erlang/Elixir; previously I also had PHP and Ruby)
| morshu9001 wrote:
| How is it hostile? Nothing seems to get in the way.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by
| development".
|
| For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything
| web related)... there _IS_ something special about linux: It
| 's where your product is going to run in production.
|
| For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially
| development that involves vendor provided physical devices:
| Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always
| better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent
| otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not
| yet over the hump.
|
| The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux
| alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it
| with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a
| shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with
| incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host
| of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
| troupo wrote:
| > For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost
| everything web related)... there IS something special about
| linux: It's where your product is going to run in
| production.
|
| I've been at several corporations and companies where the
| target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had
| multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
|
| Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware
| and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is
| developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to
| work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing
| development environments. Solution A might need a different
| environment than Solution B.
|
| Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare
| metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played
| sooner.
| troupo wrote:
| > I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best
| to work in.
|
| I had a friend who runs Windows host (because of gaming)
| and Linux as a guest OS for development for the same
| reasons :)
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I would have to agree with this. I don't understand people
| how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built
| C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can't say
| one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of
| the package management system that makes installing a
| compiler "easier" than downloading Xcode or
| downloading/running the Visual Studio installer??
|
| I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux,
| particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the
| leader in that regard.
|
| I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across
| all 3 and don't see the difference.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| and iTerm on Mac is better than any of the Linux terminals
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| I was using WSL for the longest time.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I
| just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have
| VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the
| "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for
| Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.
|
| This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also
| has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros
| for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer
| might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago
| it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in
| linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and
| content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago,
| so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
| condensedcrab wrote:
| That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows
| - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much
| better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer
| a Linux laptop.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'd say even then it depends... for some things WSL+Docker
| on Windows is better thn certain headaches with Docker on
| arm Macs.
|
| Which, similarly has more than convinced me to fight for
| PostgreSQL over MS-SQL everywhere possible.
| qiine wrote:
| > _somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in
| linux gui land_
|
| Hu... use Dolphin?
| iberator wrote:
| Citation needed. It's not. Linux is only good for hosting. Only
| very very few large companies gives laptops with Linux to
| developers.
|
| Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least
| Slackware 7.1 running at my 486
| physicles wrote:
| Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have
| changed _a little_ since 1992.
|
| I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to
| install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to
| find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get
| them working.
|
| On Linux: pip install, done.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Before MS really started mucking things up the past few years,
| I was referring to WSL as my favorite Linux distro... MS took a
| LOT of the rough edges off in terms of development.
| barelysapient wrote:
| I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of
| LLMs.
|
| Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often
| with just a few cut and paste commands.
|
| This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a
| reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible
| users.
| koe123 wrote:
| I also think LLMs are well suited to find niche strange bugs
| way quicker. User posts esoteric error on the issues page. LLM
| with proper context may converge quickly, allowing the
| programmer to implement a fix.
| RIMR wrote:
| 1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.
|
| 2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many
| esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
|
| People don't switch either because they are comfortable where
| they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing
| their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux
| Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
| robinei wrote:
| My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for
| my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows
| install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe
| invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but
| this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux
| installs.
| deaux wrote:
| 1. It is. It makes _me_ more likely to use Linux, and I 'm
| not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen
| people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I
| installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask
| an LLM and it has done a great job so far".
|
| It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the
| concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
|
| > or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops
| being error-filled nightmares
|
| Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because
| even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
| jfyi wrote:
| The one thing holding me to M$ Windows is visual studio.
|
| Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as
| good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.
| nailer wrote:
| Windows 11 was bad before AI. Press the Start menu? Wait. That
| much latency was never acceptable and Windows should die like
| desktop Java did.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I don't understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you
| knew that pressing Windows > P > across right > N would open
| Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just
| worked and responded.
|
| Today it's utter garbage.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows
| partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are
| these:
|
| * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a
| hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of
| GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their
| various compatibility layers.
|
| * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of
| the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of
| workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry.
| Every other major OS can deal with this.
|
| * Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're
| suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably
| work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
|
| * Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
| amelius wrote:
| > UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a
| hideous mess.
|
| At least things look more or less the same over time. With
| commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly
| everything looks different and all the functions are in a
| different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or
| some manager needed a raise.
|
| > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
| Hoo boy.
|
| LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems.
| They might even be the reason so many users made the switch
| recently.
| tracker1 wrote:
| They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it
| rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on
| my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and
| need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too
| bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for
| "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky.
|
| I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to
| a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but
| actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude
| Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a
| "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
| pdntspa wrote:
| You could just let the VMs be normal IPs on the network....
| tracker1 wrote:
| Where would those IPs route to/from if it didn't have a
| configured default gateway exactly?
|
| The machine got a single IP, I had to route the CIDR
| block using that IP as the gateway in the host OS. The
| VMs wouldn't just get assigned additional real IPs.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| KDE & Gnome are both guilty of the same.
| whateverboat wrote:
| - Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting
| core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for
| laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long
| time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its
| umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and
| Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be
| a good step.
|
| - Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this
| extremely well.
|
| - You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20
| years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.
|
| - Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire
| + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now
| aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
| int_19h wrote:
| It would help if Gnome wasn't so hostile towards proper
| cross-DE interop. A famous quote by a Gnome dev goes, "I
| guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu
| app, or an Xfce app unfortunately"
|
| They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right
| way and everyone else is "holding it wrong" so there's no
| need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even
| possible).
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently
| because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay
| current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) _and_ have better than
| hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor.
| NVIDIA's proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support
| lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making
| Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to
| do.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine
| systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.
|
| I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem
| here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last
| to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open
| source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't
| efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA
| doesn't release the needed information and directly competes
| with their proprietary driver.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Couldn't you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU? An RX
| 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what
| you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA
| workloads. Even on PCIe 2/3, it should be fine.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation
| of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the
| previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish
| that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung
| Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....
| tliltocatl wrote:
| > * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a
| hideous me
|
| I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to
| the hot new thing where nothing works".
|
| > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
|
| Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the
| market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore.
| Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This is not a driver issue I'm talking about. It's a "best
| way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app
| that hasn't seen maintenance since the Bush administration"
| issue.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Yes, this one is quite a problem as well.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone
| to the hot new thing where nothing works".
|
| The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial
| design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released.
| They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most
| notably).
|
| The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though
| it's more of a mess because there are several different ones,
| with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt
| though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since
| dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
|
| The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't _one_.
| jsheard wrote:
| > Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you
| can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major
| OS can deal with this.
|
| I think Windows is the only other one which really does this
| properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate
| fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-
| native resolution then scaling it down.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > I think Windows is the only other one which really does
| this properly
|
| Windows is the _only_ one that does this properly.
|
| Windows handles high pixel density on a _per-application_ ,
| _per-display_ basis. This is the most fine-grained. It 's
| pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too;
| just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done.
| [1]
|
| Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt
| handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is
| not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.
|
| Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but
| Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg
| setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the
| taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I
| think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being
| enabled.
|
| And of course, every application on Linux in theory can
| handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment
| variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed
| for the ideal result.
|
| On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at
| least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina',
| then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions
| that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution,
| the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed
| values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result
| is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down
| to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing
| artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin
| regions like text.
|
| On non-retina resolutions, there is _zero_ concept of
| 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another
| resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually _up_ ) with
| some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry.
| The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in
| Windows XP, 25 years ago.
|
| [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
| n8cpdx wrote:
| > Windows is the only one that does this properly.
|
| How can you say this when applications render either
| minuscule or gigantic, either way with contents totally out
| of proportion, seemingly at random?
|
| I don't have to pull out a magnifying glass to notice those
| issues.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| These were probably written against the old-school Win32.
| It's pretty easy to fix. Right-click on
| the `.exe` Properties Compatibility tab
| Change settings for all users Change high DPI
| settings Under 'High DPI scaling override' section,
| tick box for 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour.
| Scaling performed by' In the drop-down box below,
| select 'Application'
|
| Done.
|
| For MMC snap-ins like `diskmgmt.msc`, `services.msc`, or
| `devmgr.msc`, there's a Registry key you can set. See
| this ServerFault question:
| https://serverfault.com/q/570785/535358
| badsectoracula wrote:
| The 'doing it right' part is from how it _should_ be
| done, but it still needs application support.
|
| The thing is X11/Xorg can also theoretically do the same
| thing (and most likely Wayland too) but it needs, you
| guessed it, application (and window manager / compositor)
| support.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows
| handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-
| display basis.
|
| This is not our [0] experience. macOS handles things on a
| per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis.
| You can split a window across two monitors at two different
| DPIs, and it will display perfectly. This does not happen
| on Windows, or we have not found the right way to make it
| work thus far.
|
| [0] ardour.org
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-
| application, per-display basis.
|
| No, it does not. If you have two displays with different
| physical pixel densities, and especially if they are
| _sufficiently_ different that Apple will consider one
| 'Retina' and 'not Retina' (this is usually the case if,
| for instance, you have your MacBook's display--which
| probably _is_ 'Retina'--beneath a 2560 x 1440, 336 x 597
| mm monitor, which is 'not Retina'), then the part of the
| window on the non-Retina display _will_ be raster-scaled
| to account for the difference. This is how KDE Plasma on
| Wayland handles it, too.
|
| In my opinion, _any_ raster-scaling of vector /text UI is
| a deal-breaker.
| Macha wrote:
| I think there's one group of people who consider
| preserving the physical dimensions important that like
| the macOS approach. For me, if a window is across
| multiple displays then it's already broken up and I'm not
| too bothered about that. What I care about is getting
| application UI to a reasonable size without blurring.
| MacOS doesn't do that.
|
| Actually, the default in MacOS is that the window is only
| on one monitor, and its the monitor where the cursor was
| when you last moved the window, so you might have a
| window appearing invisible because you dragged it near
| the corner and some sliver ended on another monitor.
|
| Look at this complicated tinkering MacOS makes you do for
| something as simple as spanning windows across monitors!
| https://www.arzopa.com/blogs/guide/how-to-make-a-window-
| span... (OK this last part is slightly facetious but
| Linux gets dinged for having to go into menus because the
| writer wants something to work the way it does in on
| other operating systems the whole time)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc
| /Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution.
| This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious
| with high-contrast, thin regions like text._
|
| I don't think this is true. I use non-integer scaling on my
| Mac since I like the UX to be just a little bit bigger, and
| have never observed any kind of ringing or any specific
| artifacts at all around text, nor have I ever heard this as
| a complaint before. I assume it's just bilinear or bicubic
| unless you have evidence otherwise? The only complaint
| people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional
| blurriness, which barely matters at Retina resolution.
| kbolino wrote:
| Indeed, these artifacts sound like they're coming from
| Display Stream Compression [1] rather than scaling. I've
| had Macs occasionally use DSC when it wasn't necessary;
| power-cycling the display and/or changing the port it's
| plugged into usually fixed it. If it's consistently
| happening, though, it's probably because the display, the
| cable, the port, and/or the GPU can't handle the
| resolution and refresh rate at full bandwidth.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Stream_Compression
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > ringing or any specific artifacts at all around text
|
| There are a few Reddit threads that crop up when one
| searches for 'macOS ringing artifacts scaling'. For
| instance, these ones:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1252ml8/stra
| nge...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ki58zk/fractiona
| l_s...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/l8oadr/macos_frin
| gin...
|
| _All_ are ringing artifacts, typical of downscaling. I
| no longer have a Mac (chose one for work to try it out,
| saw this issue, returned it immediately), but I assure
| you this is what happens.
|
| > The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-
| slight additional blurriness
|
| At _no_ scale factor should there be _any_ blurriness
| unless a framebuffer resolution is explicitly set. The
| 'scale factor' should be entirely independent of the
| physical resolution, which macOS simply does not do.
|
| Apple's understanding and implementation of 'Retina'
| comes from a singular source: the straightforward
| doubling in each dimension of the display resolution of
| the iPhone 4 compared to the iPhone 3GS. It has not
| changed since, and has applied this algorithm throughout
| its OS stack.
| crazygringo wrote:
| All of these involve external monitors as far as I can
| tell, so it seems more likely it's the Display Stream
| Compression mentioned by the sibling to your comment that
| is the culprit.
|
| Like I said, absolutely nothing like that happens on my
| display. I see the ringing in the first link. That
| doesn't happen to me. Not even a hint of it.
|
| I get you don't like the scaling, but like I said, the
| very slight blurriness just isn't really noticeable in
| practice, especially given how Macs antialias text to
| begin with. Of all my complaints about Macs, this
| particular one is close to the bottom.
| kbolino wrote:
| I gotta say, as the guy who brought up DSC, that last
| Reddit post especially had me doubting. That is not what
| DSC artifacts look like. DSC subsamples the chroma, which
| causes distinct color bleeding issues. That is luma
| bloom, which doesn't happen with DSC.
|
| So I took my Mac Mini, hooked up to a 4K monitor,
| verified there were no DSC artifacts at native
| resolution, set it to "2560x1440" and sure enough the
| same artifacts appeared for me too, but still no telltale
| signs of DSC. So yeah, I gotta say, this is on Apple.
| Between this and dropping subpixel antialiasing support
| for text, it's pretty clear that their only properly
| supported configuration is 2x scaling on high-DPI
| displays.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Huh, very interesting.
|
| OK, I just grabbed my loupe to make sure I'm not missing
| anything, and pulled up an app in dark mode (so ringing
| should be more visible) on my MBA M4. I'm using its
| built-in display. I've cycled through all 4 available
| resolution settings in Display, and absolutely zero
| artifacts or ringing. Then tried connecting to my LG
| UltraFine 4K which connects over Thunderbolt, that gives
| 5 resolution settings instead of 4, and zero
| artifacts/ringing on any of those either.
|
| So I have no idea what's going on. I don't doubt that
| you're seeing it, and it's there in that Reddit photo.
| But maybe it's something specific to external monitors
| over a certain connection type or something? Seems very
| strange that Apple would use a different downsampling
| algorithm under different circumstances though.
|
| I'd normally assume the most likely culprit would be some
| kind of sharpening setting on a monitor, as that can
| _absolutely_ cause the type of ringing seen in that
| Reddit photo. But on the other hand, if you 're testing
| it right now and not seeing it at native 2x, then that
| would seem to be ruled out, at least in your case. Maybe
| it's some kind of resolution negotiation mismatch where
| it's actually the _monitor_ applying a _second_ scaling
| that has ringing, since monitors can accept signals that
| don 't match their native hardware resolution?
| kbolino wrote:
| I can get a mild form of it on my M4 MBP's built-in
| display at "1800x1125"* but it's not nearly as noticeable
| as it was on the 4K external display at "2560x1440" and
| honestly I needed my cell phone camera zoomed in to
| definitively identify it, so that was more of a fishing
| expedition than a real problem. However, I have tried 2
| different Macs, 2 different 4K monitors (both LG
| UltraFine also, though they differ in firmware version
| and color reproduction because of course they do), and 2
| different interfaces (HDMI, Thunderbolt), and I can
| reliably replicate it under all of those combinations. I
| think that exact scaling factor probably has a bad
| interaction with the scaling algorithm. I do agree that a
| lot of other scalings do not produce the
| ringing/halo/bloom effect.
|
| * = You have to go click "Advanced...", enable "Show
| resolutions as list", then when back on the main Displays
| page, enable "Show all resolutions", to get this and many
| other options -- but this is only necessary on the
| internal display, the external display offers "2560x1440"
| as a non-advanced choice
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > All of these involve external monitors as far as I can
| tell
|
| This happens on the native displays of MacBooks and
| iMacs, too. Try any of the 'looks larger'/'looks smaller'
| settings and it'll show up.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've repeatedly explained that's not the case. Not on any
| Mac I've ever owned, and I already explained I thoroughly
| investigated my current M4 MBA. It's _not_ showing.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| That just means you can't perceive it. Sorry, but raster
| scaling _is_ how Apple 's algorithm works, and just
| because you can't see it doesn't mean it is not the case.
|
| For the record, this isn't just visual. Rasterising to a
| framebuffer that is considerably larger than the physical
| resolution and then scaling produces a tangible effect on
| battery life. Not that it matters much with the
| impressive efficiency of the M-series SoCs, but it is
| there nonetheless.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I work a lot with Photoshop. I've studied digital signal
| processing. Believe me, I will perceive ringing when it's
| there.
|
| You seem to be _fundamentally misunderstanding_. Yes,
| raster scaling is how it works. _I haven 't disputed that
| anywhere._
|
| I'm saying the _ringing artifact_ specifically that you
| 're complaining about is _not happening_ on my setup, nor
| does it seem to be widespread. You were complaining about
| the _specific_ Lanczos algorithm due to its noticeable
| ringing, I 'm saying that therefore doesn't seem to be
| the algorithm being used on mine, nor is there any
| documentation that's the algorithm Apple uses. Your
| criticism seems to be based on partially wrong
| information, even if something like it seems to happen on
| certain external displays -- whatever it is, it's not a
| universal problem.
|
| If you somehow missed my other comment, please read it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46801536
| Gracana wrote:
| This is a surprising opinion to encounter, given my
| experience with scaling on Windows, where simple things
| like taking my laptop off its dock (going from desktop
| monitors to laptop screen) causes applications to become
| blurry, and they stay blurry even when I've returned the
| laptop to the dock. Or how scaling causes some maximized
| window edges to show up on the adjacent screen. Or all
| manner of subtle positioning and size bugs crop up.
|
| Is this more of an aspirational thing, like Windows
| _supports_ "doing it right", and with time and effort by
| the right people, more and more applications may be able to
| be drawn correctly?
|
| [edit] I guess so, I see your comment about setting
| registry keys to make stuff work in Microsoft's own
| programs. That aligns more closely with my experience.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's roughly what I did for my ANSI console/viewer... I
| started with EGA resolution, and each ega pixel renders 3x4
| in its' buffer then a minor blur, then scaled to fit the
| render area. The effect is really good down to about 960px
| wide, which is a bit bigger in terms of real pixels than the
| original... at 640px wide, it's a little hard to make out the
| actual pixels... but it's the best way I could think of to
| handle the non-square pixels of original EGA or VGA... I went
| with EGA because the ratio is slightly cleaner IMO. It's also
| what OG RIPterm used.
| amluto wrote:
| I have precisely one Windows thing I use regularly, and it
| has a giant window that needs lots of pixels, and I use it
| over Remote Desktop. The results are erratic and frequently
| awful.
| helterskelter wrote:
| > * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because
| of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a
| sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being
| blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
|
| This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway
| have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that
| hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
| jhasse wrote:
| I'm using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one
| at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed,
| nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME
| which lacks behind in this regard.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Mint/cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry. It's FUD.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic. Think using a
| laptop, which you sometimes connect to a screen on which
| you require a different scale. X11 won't handle different
| scales, and it also won't switch from one to the other
| without restarting it.
| simoncion wrote:
| > The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic.
|
| No, it _is_. Maybe you 're using an ancient (or
| misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK
| program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running
| that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as
| 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and
| GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling
| changes. [0]
|
| Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to
| be restarted in order to render with the new screen
| scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes
| immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a
| deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information
| they're being provided with.
|
| At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets
| you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider
| that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered
| to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under
| the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-
| display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE
| control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go
| figure.
|
| [0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know
| folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered
| Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling
| (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on
| my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I use whatever package is shipped by arch, so I think I'm
| fairly up to date.
|
| I did look a bit into this at one point, but I've found
| that it's mostly QT apps which work fine with different
| scaling (telegram comes to mind). GTK apps never did, but
| I admit I never went too deep in the rabbit hole. Didn't
| know there was supposed to be some kind of daemon
| handling this. I do run xsettingsd, but for unrelated
| reasons. I'll have a look if it can update things.
|
| In any case, except for work, I always used everything at
| 100% and just scaled the text as needed, which worked
| well enough.
|
| > I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's
| actually going on under the hood, and the underlying
| systems totally expose per-display scaling factors...
|
| Would you care to go into some details? What systems are
| those and how do you notify them there's been a change?
| simoncion wrote:
| FWIW, I can do the same with KDE on Xorg with Gentoo Linux.
|
| Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003
| or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to
| communicate system settings, the absence of "non-integer"
| scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI
| toolkits.
|
| > I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind
| in this regard.
|
| When _doesn 't_ GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland's
| problems have been because a project that expects protocol
| implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the
| project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME
| was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was
| required.
| tracker1 wrote:
| On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user
| even... so many apps still don't show up right in the tray, but
| it's getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and
| don't like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far
| Wayland hasn't been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if
| they don't scale right.
|
| I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too
| many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if
| they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to
| just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the
| time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have
| my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the
| other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering
| part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor
| and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows
| or mac, but you're right it's worse.
|
| For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo
| cams I've been using lately have been working very well...
| they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I
| tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in
| and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always
| work right in Linux.
|
| On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume
| it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current
| standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer
| to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they
| hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
| jraph wrote:
| > Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you
| can tolerate the entire screen being blurry
|
| Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd
| prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.
| pimeys wrote:
| KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right
| on Linux.
| craftkiller wrote:
| I've also been running fractional scaling on Sway for many
| years now and native wayland applications are not blurry. X11
| apps run through XWayland will be blurry, but I don't have
| any legacy X11 apps remaining on my system.
| Orygin wrote:
| > UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a
| hideous mess
|
| I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4
| (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing
| sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.
|
| At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a
| somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many
| apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the
| window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be
| consistent.
|
| I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user
| applications tho.
| reddalo wrote:
| >many apps now just use CSD
|
| If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-
| Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).
|
| If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other,
| I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with
| predictable window frames that are customizable and they all
| look the same. CSD destroys that.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical
| to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment
| of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without
| having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my
| state of flow in the process.
| int_19h wrote:
| That's what the title bar is for?
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Linux doesn't mean GNOME.
|
| KDE favors server-side decorations.
| conorbergin wrote:
| Having no CSD at all is unacceptable on small screens IMHO,
| far too much real estate is taken up by a title bar, you
| can be competitive with SSD by making them really thin, but
| then they are harder to click on and impossible with touch
| input. At the moment I have firefox setup with CSD and
| vertical tabs, only 7% of my vertical real estate is taken
| up by bars (inc. Gnome), which is pretty good for something
| that supports this many niceties.
| wackget wrote:
| If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there
| really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The
| vast majority of users - even techy people - will not
| understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of
| choosing one.
|
| Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they
| are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended),
| and they can all run on the same system at once.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or
| Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for
| example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.
|
| Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-
| configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about
| any of these things.
| andai wrote:
| Yeah I wanted to say, for people who don't care, there's
| Linux Mint. (I used to spend all my time tinkering with
| the DE, now I prefer to spend zero!)
|
| Except even with Linux Mint you have to choose which one
| ;)
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Linux user for decades, but headless since the early
| aughts. Decided to dip my toes back into the desktop
| space with Mint Cinnamon.
|
| I can mirror or run lots of phone apps on Windows or
| macOS, but ironically, not Linux. I decide to run an
| Android emulator so I can use some phone-only apps.
|
| I read up on reviews, then download and install Waydroid
| as the top contender.
|
| Does Waydroid work? No. It fails silently launching from
| the shortcut after the install. Run it from the command
| line, and, nope, it's a window manager issue. Mint
| Cinnamon uses X11, not Wayland, and Waydroid apparently
| needs... Wayland support.
|
| OK, I log out, log into Mint with Wayland support, then
| re-launch Waydroid. My screen goes into a fugue state
| where it randomly alternates between black and the
| desktop. Try a variety of things, and I guess this is
| just how it is. Google and try any number of fixes, end
| up giving up.
|
| Yes, that's my old pal Linux on the Desktop. Older,
| faster and wiser, but still flaky in precisely the same
| ways.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Headless daily driver? Hardcore. What do you use for a
| browser?
|
| I've tried it as a challenge for a couple of days (lynx,
| mutt, some other TUI stuff) and it made some things like
| Vim stick (although that may have as much to do with that
| challenge as Tridactyl did). But I couldn't last longer
| than a week. It does free you from the burden of system
| requirements. CPU: Optional.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| w3m can even display images in a linux console if you
| have the proper drivers or use KMSCON. It unwieldy but
| surprisingly usable. And my laptop battery runs for 8
| hours which is quite amazing for a Zen1.
| hparadiz wrote:
| That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is
| using older builds of stuff.
|
| Get yourself a most recent plasma 6 Wayland setup with
| pipewire for audio. It even has rdp server now.
|
| What's most likely happening is your user space app wants
| the newer API but you're running old builds from two
| years ago.
|
| It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully
| switch to a Wayland DM.
|
| Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no
| one is building on it anymore.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| > That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is
| using older builds of stuff.
|
| The context here is that I was commenting on the parent's
| assertion that one "can just use a pre-configured system
| like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these
| things." Nope!
|
| > It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully
| switch to a Wayland DM. Anything built on X11 is
| basically deprecated now and no one is building on it
| anymore.
|
| That's my impression as well, and again, with the 2nd
| most popular Linux distro using X11 by default and with
| "experimental" Wayland support, that only reinforces my
| rebuttal of parent's claim.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I don't recommend Mint for this reason. SteamOS or Nobara
| for the white glove premium experience.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| You can't run X11 programs on Wayland without Xwayland.
|
| Likewise you cannot run Wayland programs on X11 without a
| wayland compositor like Cage (a wayland kiosk) or Weston.
| Both run as a window on X11 inside of which Waydroid
| works just fine.
|
| It's an odd complaint that incompatible software is
| incompatible.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| You read the parent I was responding to, no? You're
| reinforcing my point.
|
| "Users who don't know about the feature can just use a
| pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know
| about any of these things."
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| I did. I agree it's not obvious. But you cannot run
| OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either
| without having the proper hardware and software
| installed. So yeah. Waydroid needs wayland. Anbox runs on
| X11.
| anon291 wrote:
| > Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but
| they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun
| intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
|
| I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern
| distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with
| flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything
| like this in years.
|
| The windows UIs are way more different than linux was.
| There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to
| follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and
| they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not
| as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything,
| things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are _more_ consistent
| than any windows app.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| No, it's not about _users_ picking a camp, it 's about
| developers.
|
| It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application
| utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework
| running under a totally different DE.
|
| Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still
| work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way.
| It'll run on your machine.
|
| [0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility
| or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter
| array_key_first wrote:
| The same is true of Linux - GTK3 apps runs just fine on
| Plasma, and so do GTK4, and Qt 5, and Qt 6, and X11 apps,
| and on.
|
| Sure they all look slightly different, but it's definitely
| worse on Windows in that regard.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| _> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a
| hideous mess._
|
| Amen.
|
| But, which OS doesn't have this problem? I'm currently running
| windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps
| have a different look and behave differently from one another.
| Teams can't even be assed to use standard windows
| notifications! And don't get me started on electron apps, of
| which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look
| and feel.
|
| Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at
| night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer
| copy info window doesn't even have a dark mode! On outlook the
| window controls don't change colour, so you end up with black
| on black or white on white. You can't possibly hold up windows
| as a model of uniform UI.
|
| So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn't
| pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).
|
| _> Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi]._
|
| Don't know about mac os, but on Windows it's a shitshow. We use
| some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at
| 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start
| menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with
| the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while
| (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing's
| blurry! Some taskbar icons don't adapt, so I sometimes have
| tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external
| monitor. Plasma doesn't do this.
|
| IME KDE/Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I
| haven't tried "fractional" scales). The only app which doesn't
| play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it's sharp, but the
| mouse cursor is the wrong size).
|
| _> Audio filtering is a pain to set up._
|
| What do you mean? I've been using easyeffects for more than
| five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers
| or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the
| apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds
| a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so
| if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!)
| it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets
| accordingly. I also don't have to reboot when I connect some
| new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on
| Windows I don't anymore, either, since for some reason it can't
| connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to
| have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn't
| as polished. It also doesn't support dark mode, so it burns my
| eyes at night.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and
| tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS.
| Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship
| divergent KDE and Gnome apps.
|
| If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the
| box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just
| works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I
| say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app
| being the wrong scale? They'll notice that.
|
| But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows
| is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to
| just work on Windows.
| colordrops wrote:
| Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and
| even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for
| the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using
| native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more
| blurriness.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain
| point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and/or
| blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of
| time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.
|
| This is on a pretty clean/fresh install of current ubuntu
| desktop
| craftkiller wrote:
| > Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
|
| Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial
| to set up: https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-
| voice
| Aldipower wrote:
| "Like digital herpes, I just couldn't get rid of it."
|
| Made my day! :-D
| senko wrote:
| Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch
| derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.
|
| Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go
| crazy.
| levkk wrote:
| Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does
| everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty
| flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.
|
| Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few
| months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat.
| Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as
| far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on
| Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
|
| [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
| senko wrote:
| Possibly. If the installer happy path fails (which has
| happened to me), Arch is "here's root shell, figure it out",
| Ubuntu is slightly more user-friendly :)
|
| I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you're not using it.
| I'm on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random
| obscure hardware setup details.
| khat wrote:
| Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped
| windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to
| bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the
| base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch.
| It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored
| distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and
| found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it
| install or update? Never stuck around to find out.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Or ... like me, switch to Fedora full time 20 years ago and
| still use it (ok, I use AlmaLinux on my workstation and
| servers)...
| megous wrote:
| I started with Slackware Linux--something arguably even more
| "hard-core" than Arch.
|
| What mattered most at the beginning was good installation
| documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that
| front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was
| intentionally simple, largely because it was created and
| maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made
| it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally
| understood by a single human mind.
|
| Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach
| depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click
| through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but
| then what? From a beginner's perspective, you've just installed
| something somehow--and it looks like a crippled Windows machine
| with fewer buttons.
|
| Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting
| reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was
| genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what
| each component was and how it fit into the whole. The
| realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks--and
| that I might actually master the entire structure, or even
| build my own pieces--was deeply motivating.
|
| That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar
| distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic
| dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking
| seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which
| stayed with me forever.
| senko wrote:
| Yeah agree completely. Started with Slack at around 2.x, took
| a long time to switch to Debian and occasionally Ubuntu.
|
| That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed
| software by running ./configure && make && make install
|
| Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.
| floxy wrote:
| Ah yes, Slackware. I remember downloading something like 15
| floppy disks over the 56k modem for my first install. Maybe a
| v1.1 kernel?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The author tried everything _except_ switching graphics drivers?!
| That 's like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and
| declaring all new music is terrible.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back. But
| it wasn't the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched
| to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| You didn't use a non Nvidia driver then. Sounds exactly like
| you were always using beta drivers.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Ubuntu since 2012
| fnoef wrote:
| I'd be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor
| is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth,
| headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a
| beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don't see
| myself switching to Linux.
| zteppenwolf wrote:
| This post is so 2001
| raincole wrote:
| Every year is the year of linux desktop.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Ubuntu since 2011
|
| Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.
| ircop420 wrote:
| FSF is trying! https://librephone.org/
| Zambyte wrote:
| Android.
|
| Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.
| AHTERIX5000 wrote:
| My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates.
| Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update
| settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've
| installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any
| "tweaking" scripts or apps.
|
| I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we
| are.
| VirgilShelton wrote:
| Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was
| one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in
| tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on
| behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers
| must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only
| cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the
| main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved
| to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.
| duffyjp wrote:
| Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my
| favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student
| and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed
| for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where
| absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.
|
| I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-
| rot and can't be read properly. :(
| VirgilShelton wrote:
| Ha! You're very welcome! Ah the good ol' days of CD install
| media, CD Keys and install times that took hours!
|
| RIP to your install CD!
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I think the UI was reasonable and easily understood in 2000.
| After that it seems links and buttons became interchangeable,
| and now we end up in the mess where scrollbars may or may not
| be visible until you try fiddling with the UI etc.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a
| decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it's fair share of
| bugs but I'll take having to deal with those over running Windows
| or MacOS any day.
|
| For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some
| things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the
| same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but
| you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year
| when they decide to release a new OS update.
|
| Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your
| system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs
| pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates
| don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I
| tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the
| power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will
| resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix
| various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow
| I will go through the trouble of fixing it.
|
| I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm
| quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical
| community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually
| ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and
| more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have
| become.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations
| into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there
| was logic to see if they should disregard your command and
| install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?
|
| It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment but I keep Snap disabled because I
| like Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for its rock solid stability.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The control is both a blessing and a curse. It's really easy to
| accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of
| the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as
| desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you're
| facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it
| online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).
|
| It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished
| and complete enough that most people - even those of us who are
| more technical and are more demanding - rarely if ever have any
| need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an
| asset.
| debo_ wrote:
| This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other
| distros. I haven't had to "go under the hood" on my daily
| driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7
| years.
|
| I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making
| excuses not to change.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Those and other big distros are _better_ in that regard,
| but they 're still not perfect. Depending on one's machine
| and needs, there can still be pain.
|
| One recent example I experienced is jumping through hoops
| to get virtualization enabled in Fedora... it takes several
| steps that are not obvious at all. I understand not having
| it enabled by default since many won't need it, but there's
| no reason that can't just be a single CLI command that does
| it all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Things like that can be unbelievably annoying and
| confusing on Windows or Macs, too. Even worse, they can
| just turn out to be impossible: the company can actively
| be preventing you from doing the thing that you want to
| do, refuses to give you enough access to your own system
| to do the thing you want to do, and/or sells permission
| to do what you want to do as an upgrade that you have to
| renew yearly.
|
| These are things that don't happen in Linux. Doing what
| you want to do might be difficult (depending on how
| unusual it is), but there's no one actively trying to
| stop you from doing it for their own purposes (except
| systemd.)
|
| Also, as an aside, a reason that Windows and Macs might
| have easy virtualization (I have no idea if they do) is
| because of how often they're running _Linux VMs._
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| One needs to go a fair ways off the beaten path before
| they'll start running into trouble like that under macOS
| and Windows.
|
| For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y
| users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable
| system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally
| "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework
| and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like
| QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that
| QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and
| VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands
| necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people
| frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.
| bigyabai wrote:
| There's several distros that are fully usable without ever
| touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros
| give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down
| your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the
| internet.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| > It's really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g.
| trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make
| the system function as desired.
|
| 'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time
| Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make
| periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be
| saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.
|
| Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore
| files within their home directory (incl. config folder and
| separately installed apps).
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Meh, I don't care much about control, I care more about getting
| my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that
| for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a
| daily GUI driver.
| timbit42 wrote:
| > I've been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux
| still has it's fair share of bugs...
|
| > I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...
|
| I can see why you think the second statement is true based on
| the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to
| Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd
| recommend you to try Linux Mint.
| simgoh wrote:
| I'm curious, can you elaborate on why you believe that
| changing to Gnome meant they were giving up on being the best
| desktop distro?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Well, to start they tried putting Amazon ads in Unity's
| Dock which was also doing data collection, but removed them
| after the backlash.
|
| Then they switched to Gnome, meaning they gave up on their
| own desktop, Unity, so they were no longer dictating what
| their desktop was like, so how much did they care?
|
| Since then they have replaced a number of apps with SNAPs
| which are only available from Canonical so many people see
| it as an attempt to corner the Linux market. Many see
| AppImages and Flatpacks as better than SNAPs.
|
| They are a company. They exist to make money. Of course
| they are going to decide to do things that make more money
| and annoy their users.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Let me recommend Fedora to you Timbit.
|
| Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.
|
| I too was corrupted by Ubuntu's marketing strategy of being
| popular and using the misleading word 'Stable'.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I tried Fedora once. On a fresh install, all it did was
| clog up all the hard drive space with error logs within 3
| days.
|
| I'm not interested in any distro that is controlled by a
| corporation. IBM is a corporation and they already screwed
| up CentOS and is eventually going to screw up Fedora
| someday because that's what corporations do, and I'm not
| interesting in going through that.
|
| You have your fun running Fedora for now but know you're
| going to get burned someday.
| int_19h wrote:
| What exactly is "outdated" about Debian?
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| >Linux still has it's fair share of bugs
|
| >Linux, for all it's issues
|
| You are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is
| designed to be outdated upon release. When they say "Stable" it
| doesn't mean 'Stable like a table'. It means version fixed. You
| get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.
|
| Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.
|
| Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don't confuse the two.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a
| few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows
| Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a
| gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to
| use the other program which brought me back to the original
| program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make
| it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on
| POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus
| now.
|
| I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you
| want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS
| since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't
| invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you
| just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
|
| Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming
| rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you
| don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on
| Linux I am not buying or playing them.
| W3zzy wrote:
| ''By the way, I use Arch''
| bee_rider wrote:
| The meme was "I use Arch, BTW," but I think it has mostly
| died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn't really
| hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but
|
| 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
|
| 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is "basic
| literacy, to read the wiki"
|
| Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given
| me more headaches than Arch.
| W3zzy wrote:
| I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been
| fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to
| troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love
| a barebones no fuzz system.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >the skill barrier to getting a full system is "basic
| literacy, to read the wiki"
|
| if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed
| right now
|
| in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a
| big ask
| piperswe wrote:
| That's what they said about GenX, Millennials, and
| probably every other generation before them. Something
| something, "OK boomer."
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| they absolutely did not say that tiktok and tablets are
| destroying basic literacy about GenX or Millenials
|
| if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
| ikamm wrote:
| Yeah cause that's what he was talking about
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I know. I was emphasising that this time is not like
| before. That there are major differences, and things look
| similar only on a very superficial level.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| It really is nothing new. People quickly close windows
| with errors, they go out of they way to avoid reading
| actual message.
| friendzis wrote:
| > very stable due to rolling-release producing small
| changes
|
| Can you elaborate on the _chain of thought_ here? The small
| changes at high frequency means that _something_ is nearly
| constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from
| stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are
| not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull
| updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible
| updates. Again, quite different from stable.
| roer wrote:
| I think op meant the subjective feeling of having a
| system that runs in a stable manner. I don't quite follow
| their reasoning either (maybe the smaller changesets
| expose compatibility bugs before affecting general ux?),
| but I agree that arch was a joy for me to use and felt
| "stable".
| bri3d wrote:
| It's the same train of thought as the modern cloud
| software notion that deploying small changes more often
| is safer than bundling "releases"; if you upgrade 3
| packages 3x a week (or deploy 50 lines of code 3x a
| week), you catch small issues quickly and resolve them
| immediately, rather than upgrading 400 packages 1x a year
| (or deploying 50,000 lines of code 2x a year), where when
| things break you have a rather tall order just to triage
| what failed.
|
| I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that
| I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge
| benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the
| user base and openness of the forums; when something
| breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name
| broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real
| fix.
|
| I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production
| server for change management reasons alone, but for a
| home desktop and my home server, it's actually the
| distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux
| crap" to keep it going.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It's stable in the way that a person taking small
| predictable steps at a time is stable compared to
| somebody who making large random lurching steps. Sure,
| the system is often changed, but if only a few packages
| have changed, should there be a problem it is easy to
| identify the culprit.
|
| Although it is hard to say. Ubuntu also has, I guess,
| intentional behavior that is hard to distinguish from a
| bug, like packages switching from apt to snap. So it
| might just be that my subjective experience feels more
| buggy.
| Levitating wrote:
| > 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small
| changes
|
| Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software
| versions, often requiring manual intervention is not
| "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace
| your config files and update software to versions
| incompatible with the previous.
|
| That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system,
| maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions
| are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever
| requiring human intervention.
|
| > 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is "basic
| literacy, to read the wiki"
|
| As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the
| linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom
| has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
|
| ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly
| operating system in the same way that
| Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
| Macha wrote:
| > Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software
| versions, often requiring manual intervention is not
| "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace
| your config files and update software to versions
| incompatible with the previous.
|
| 12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don't
| many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably
| actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/
|
| That's not too dissimilar from what you'd get running
| stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course
| plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in
| potentially undesired ways, windows users just don't
| blame the OS for that
| Levitating wrote:
| I don't just mean the types of manual intervention
| mentioned in the news. ArchLinux ships bleeding edge
| software to users with very little downstream changes.
| ArchLinux also replaces config files when upgrading. This
| is inherently different behavior from stable release
| distributions like Ubuntu.
|
| ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an
| unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad"
| or "good", that's just a design choice.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questio
| ns#...?
| Macha wrote:
| Arch replaces _unmodified_ config files when changing.
| It's not an uncommon behaviour in software to update
| defaults to the new defaults.
|
| If you have a modified config file, it puts the new
| default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which
| seems strictly better to just deleting the new default
| one.
| Levitating wrote:
| Huh you're right, I must've confused myself by
| removing/installing instead of upgrading recently.
|
| Anyway I think the discussion boils down to semantics.
| ArchLinux is not "unstable" in the sense that it is prone
| to breaking. But it also delivers none of the stability
| promises that stable release distros or rolling release
| distros with snapshotting and testing like OpenSUSE
| Tumbleweed deliver. To call ArchLinux stable would make
| every distribution stable, and the word would lose all
| meaning.
|
| Most distributions promise that an upgrade always results
| in a working system. Instead moving the manual
| maintenance to major release upgrades.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software
| versions, often requiring manual intervention is not
| "stable".
|
| I dunno. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4
| years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only
| had one issue.
|
| Any issues are usually on the front page of archlinux.org
| what the issue is, and how to fix it.
| WD-42 wrote:
| > without warning, replace your config files and update
| software to versions incompatible with the previous.
|
| This is just nonsense, pacman doesn't do this. If you'd
| modified a config file, it will create a .pacnew version
| instead of replacing it. Otherwise you'll get the default
| config synced with the version of the software you've
| installed, which is desirable.
|
| It's pretty rare to modify any config files outside of
| ~/.config these days anyway. What few modifications I
| have at the system level are for things like mkinitcpio,
| locale, etc and they never change.
| pdntspa wrote:
| If ubuntu had stuck with APT for software installs instead
| of snap and whatever else, it would be a lock less
| headachey
| dgritsko wrote:
| What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a
| couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around
| with/learn from.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running
| Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.
| dgritsko wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are
| (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as
| someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as
| a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I would say EndeavourOS is the "Ubuntu" to "Arch" if you
| will. The installer is easy, and it comes with "yay" out
| of the box which is a frontend to Pacman which holds your
| hand in just the right ways. If I want to update my OS I
| type "yay" into a terminal, hit enter and confirm the
| packages needing updating (or select which ones I want)
| and type my password, and that's it. In the past with
| Manjaro I did a system update with Pacman, and problems
| ensued.
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| not OP, but for some it might be availability of latest
| versions packages (say, you've heard about new major
| version of Bash or Vim being released today, and
| wondering how soon it might be available in your distro
| packages), and, as someone else mentioned, less update
| stress due to lack of "major version bumps" - just
| remember to subscribe to https://archlinux.org/news/ and
| watch out for entries requiring "manual intervention".
| wafflemaker wrote:
| You usually try a few distros, until you find the one
| that does whenever you needed, and then you stick with it
| for 15 years ;)
|
| From my own experience: 15 years ago, when (except for
| academia), Linux was very nisje, it was hard to use it.
| Random rare errors would pop up. On Windows you would
| know someone who knew what to do, but with Linux? So I
| chose Ubuntu, because it had the most support. Solution
| to any error could be found on askubuntu (?) forums. But
| if you had a friend, you would choose his system and get
| help from him. I once had university admins very happy to
| help me with something and even give me some tips.
|
| Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much, other than
| extra easy (with an LLM everything is already easy)
| installation of drivers (POP os?)/initial programs you
| used on Windows (on Mate it takes 10min due to a special
| GUI appstore).
|
| BUT there are reasons to switch. Like Ubuntu's pushing of
| very annoying snaps, making it very hard to get Firefox
| without a snap. Snaps are annoying, because they don't
| have a cleaning mechanism and old versions just clog your
| hard drive. They take forever to launch and it's just not
| a good idea for a browser. Don't mind snaps for other
| things. There is also Desktop Environment support and
| support for hidpi monitors and such.
|
| Other than that, there is a little of philosophy. Like
| super FOSS and idealistic like Debian (i guess? Pls
| correct me if I'm wrong). Or more business aligned, like
| Redhat/Fedora. Or elitist that like to waste their users
| time and make them read manuals for fdisk like Arch,
| where you have to format your hard drive without GParted
| or any other GUI.
|
| I'm no pro, but that's a little that came to mind if you
| wanted to know what mattered in the past.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the
| job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like
| you're implying.
|
| My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that
| wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with
| GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008,
| and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing
| PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to
| finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for
| Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I
| don't like to waste any time with command line incantations
| anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I
| found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it
| (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.
|
| I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro,
| but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to
| do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update
| packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update
| all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it
| installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you
| tell it to be that nuanced.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Long term stability is less important for gaming computers
| than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest
| performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so
| heavily towards arch.
| the_arun wrote:
| I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so
| resilient & haven't seen that in PC world.
| tremarley wrote:
| You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux
| k2enemy wrote:
| There's a whole lot of asterisks that you're leaving out of
| that statement.
| fcantournet wrote:
| M1&2 yes with slight caveats, m3-5 not really (at least
| yet)
| gambiting wrote:
| What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I've
| never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and
| years.
| pimeys wrote:
| I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13.
| It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing
| matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W
| idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing
| keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint,
| everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it
| with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).
|
| Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day.
| Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
|
| The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber
| body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us,
| going back more than 2 decades.
| nout wrote:
| If you have older Mac (based on the Intel CPUs), then it may
| actually already work out of the box for you to run linux.
| I'm running Debian on Macbook Pro 2015, fully replaced the
| original system and I haven't looked back.
| mrln wrote:
| Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman
| library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and
| then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use
| it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but
| it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.
| fsmv wrote:
| I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had
| this problem.
| Levitating wrote:
| That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay.
| However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've
| obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That
| may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with
| the installed yay/paru.
| nicce wrote:
| yay used to be in the official Arch Linux repository for
| some time, wonder why it was removed.
| morserer wrote:
| Iirc it was to force the extra step necessary for the
| user to acknowledge that the AUR can bootstrap malware if
| used blindly.
|
| This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion
| surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding
| UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR
| becomes an attractive vector for skids.
|
| No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that
| will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the
| small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is
| an effective way of accomplishing that.
| Levitating wrote:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers
|
| AUR helpers like yay are not supported officially. The
| other commenter sheds some light as to why.
| pamcake wrote:
| Assume they mean having to recompile the AUR package they
| were trying to install using yay.
|
| If users mental model is mostly "yay is like pacman but can
| also install packages from AUR the same way" wihout
| thinking deeper about the difference then I think it using
| it is very risky and that you should just stick to pacman +
| git/makepkg. Only consider helpers once that's become
| second nature and routine. Telling people to "just yay
| install" is doing them a disservice. An upgrade breaking
| the system isn't even that bad compared to getting infected
| with malware due to an old package you were using being
| orphaned and hijacked to spread malware or getting a bad
| copycat version due to a typo.
|
| I think EndeavourOS is doing users a disservice if they
| provide sth like yay preinstalled and ready to use out of
| the box. It isn't installing packages from a shared repo:
| It's downloading code from arbitrary locations and running
| it on your machine in order to produce a package. Being
| able to read and understand shell script (PKGBUILD) is kind
| of a prerequisite to using it safely.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| You can download a precompiled yay/paru from their Github
| pages btw.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run
| them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
|
| So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't
| run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU /
| Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games
| that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't,
| and it's been that way for years.
| nightski wrote:
| I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either
| runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is
| especially true if you play games with friends.
| neogodless wrote:
| > But I have to say it either runs the game you want to
| play or it doesn't
|
| Can you elaborate on this?
|
| For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run.
| Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so
| slightly laggy.
|
| Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down,
| occasionally crashed, and multiplayer _never_ worked.
|
| Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower
| / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in
| Windows.
|
| All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
| nightski wrote:
| That's not what I am saying, sorry if it was confusing.
| The parent was implying that if it doesn't run a game
| just pick a different game. But I was pointing out that
| isn't always an option, and some times you just want to
| play a specific game.
| ozim wrote:
| I do understand the premise but ... people want to play
| the games they want to play.
|
| For example I am a good customer for streaming services
| because I don't care about specific titles - I will watch
| a series or a movie because it is available. I will most
| likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific
| show if it is not on streaming I already have.
|
| Gaming doesn't really work like that for me. I usually
| want to play specific titles - not just some game.
|
| But I fully understand someone has the same approach to
| games as I have for movies/series.
| neogodless wrote:
| Gotcha - yeah I'm on the same page.
|
| I used Linux Mint for 2 full months, 99% of my personal
| computing. Really like it. BUT... not all games my gaming
| group plays work on it, and social gaming is very
| important to me.
|
| That doesn't mean I'm sour on Linux PC gaming. I think
| it's great, and will work for a lot of people, and it's
| so close for me. And I might switch, since my gaming
| tastes are shifting.
| cevn wrote:
| It's like this. You eventually got Starcraft2 to work.
| That means Linux can run Starcraft2, it's in the "Runs"
| category. Games like League of Legends, which have kernel
| level anti cheat, are in the "Won't Run" category.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| But you don't want to sacrifice comfort or other things.
| The game should work just right on Linux.
|
| I have an Nvidia card and use mostly Ubuntu (mate), also
| for gaming. It's even a problem now, because I would
| benefit from a hard divide between the gaming and
| working\studying system (I have a gaming user in
| backlog). On Linux it's mostly KSP, Factorio, but
| sometimes DeepRockGalactic, Valheim, Euro Truck Sim or
| Warhammer: Total War1\2\3. These games work flawlessly or
| with <10%fps hit.
|
| There are games that kind of work - Ancestors: Humankind
| Odyssey, Cyberpunk, Hunt: Showdown. But you lose comfort
| and I'd rather just play them on Windows, than suffer
| decreased functionality on Linux. I know that some of it
| (definitely Cyberpunk) is only because of NVIDIA.
|
| When buying games I usually don't buy Windows only games
| unless there is a very good reason. And I quit League of
| Legends and WRC rally because of anti cheat scam. I feel
| scammed after putting lot of money in a game and suddenly
| losing the ability to play it.
| oreally wrote:
| This shifting of goalposts just to cater to linux just
| explains it all.
|
| Comeon. If a customer bought a game that says it runs on
| linux, they should be able to play it on linux well, not
| just launch it and quit within 5 mins.
|
| I get you have the ideology up in your head, but don't
| lie and embellish linux to this degree. The attitude just
| turns people off.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| "Linux" is really a family of operating systems, so
| people need to be more specific. It might run perfectly
| out of the box on consumer/gamer focused operating
| systems like Bazzite or SteamOS while perhaps requiring
| more work on something like Red Hat or NixOS. Those
| different operating systems all have _wildly_ different
| approaches to how the OS actually works despite generally
| being able to run a largely overlapping set of programs.
|
| It's like saying something works on "laptop" without
| specifying whether it's a Thinkpad or a Chromebook or a
| Macbook.
| chrsmth wrote:
| I can't comment generally but I use NixOS and have had no
| issues playing games on Steam. The setup was laughably
| simple, just `programs.steam.enable = true;` and Steam
| handles compatibility so well that I buy games without
| thinking "will this run".
|
| Actually there was one thing I couldn't do but this isn't
| unique to NixOS. I tried to install a GTAV mod that
| allows you to ride your smart bike trainer in game:
| GTBikeV. The mod can be installed, but the Bluetooth
| doesn't work. This is a WINE limitation.
| craftkiller wrote:
| > If a customer bought a game that says it runs on linux,
| they should be able to play it on linux well
|
| None of those games say they run on Linux.
| - Starcraft 2 is available for windows/mac:
| https://starcraft2.blizzard.com/en-us/ - Anno 1800
| is available for windows:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/916440/Anno_1800/
| - Hogwarts Legacy is available for windows:
| https://www.hogwartslegacy.com/en-us/pc-specs
|
| The fact that you can play most games on Linux these days
| is due to the Wine developers, Valve, and CodeWeavers.
| But those efforts are completely unrelated to the
| developers of those three games. Buying Starcraft 2 is
| not, in any way, purchasing a Linux game or transferring
| money to anyone working on Linux support.
|
| Every game I've purchased that actually says it runs on
| Linux, has worked beautifully on Linux (stellaris and
| factorio come to mind). Most windows games work
| beautifully on Linux too, but Blizzard isn't lifting any
| fingers to make it that way.
| Macha wrote:
| Not saying you didn't experience this, but I've
| definitely run StarCraft 2 in the past, and I play Anno
| 1800 regularly fine (thanks to the mods I've been playing
| it's even got 50% more sessions than the base game)
| neogodless wrote:
| Did multiplayer LAN work in Anno 1800 for you out of the
| box, or did you make adjustments? I couldn't figure out
| how to get it to work.
|
| StarCraft 2 worked, oddly enough, run from Steam as an
| external program. (Lots of search results tried to get me
| to use Lutris/bottles, but I couldn't get it to work
| consistently under Lutris.)
| Macha wrote:
| I've done multiplayer internet play rather than LAN play,
| but that worked just fine without any changes from my
| part.
| neogodless wrote:
| Ah yes that's what I meant. But yes unfortunately I could
| not figure out how to get multiplayer to connect. No idea
| why or how to troubleshoot and fix.
| tapoxi wrote:
| In Lutris it'll try to run on Wine 8 by default, I had to
| set it to use the latest Proton GE.
|
| Was also able to get WoW, Diablo 4, WC3 and SC1 running
| well this way, since they're all in a single Wine
| Battle.net install.
| godelski wrote:
| Fwiw I've been playing Hogwarts Legacy lately, though
| single player. Only problem I ever face is sometimes in a
| cave if I'm facing a certain direction I'll get blinding
| light as if I have ray tracing enabled and it's badly
| implemented. Though considering it's a AAA game and other
| things I've seen, I don't think that's exactly a Linux
| problem. Much like Starfield...
| jandrese wrote:
| I ran Starcraft 2 through Lutrus and it was a piece of
| cake. No lag that I could discern. There was a little
| mini launcher and everything. The multiplayer also worked
| just fine, although the matchmaking system seemed to
| think I was an expert level player for some reason and
| kept matching me with dudes who were way better at the
| game than I was.
| neogodless wrote:
| To me, this is the one thorn in Linux (and the Linux
| online community) that gives me pause.
|
| For the people that it just works for, well it just works
| for.
|
| For anyone else, apparently they are the problem? Not
| Linux?
|
| Well sorry no. I did get StarCraft 2 working with
| Lutris... once. Then I couldn't get it to start again.
| Eventually I switched to running Battle.Net from Steam
| and for some reason that did work. But it wasn't a "just
| works" or "piece of cake." It was a puzzle.
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe the difference is that I am running Ubuntu?
| Personally I think it's a common mistake for new users to
| jump on some obscure distro because they read something
| online where someone says it's the best. Even if that's
| true there is value in being on a popular distro in that
| bugs tend to be discovered and fixed quicker and there's
| almost always someone who has had the same problem you
| did and often figured out the solution just a web search
| away.
|
| I think Canonical and the Gnome foundation have made some
| really bone headed decisions over the years, but I stick
| with Ubuntu because the mass of users on it means I never
| get left high and dry. Or at least I'm not alone when I
| run into a problem.
| neogodless wrote:
| Yeah, I was using Linux Mint at the time. Which is based
| on Ubuntu... So that's often where I'd look for help.
|
| Though any kind of documentation is like Linux, scattered
| and inconsistent. And I'm "OK" with that, as in I think
| the way that Linux came to be and is maintained, and
| provides user choice is also the reason why it's not
| "user-friendly" in every scenario. You can choose your
| distribution, and a lot of other things. And then look in
| a wide variety of places for bug reports, user questions,
| etc. You'll get a variety of answers from "it just works
| for me" to "change your distribution _that you chose_ "
| to "even though some guides say to use Lutris, it's
| easier to just put it in Steam's external program
| launcher and choose Proton version x.yz."
|
| Even then, not everything _will work_ because it wasn 't
| written to work (for Linux). It was written to work for
| Windows, and then some smart people rolled up their
| sleeves and found ways to make a great many things work
| for Linux, and it's all amazing. And I find using Linux
| (mostly) quite pleasant. But when things don't work...
| there's going to be friction. It will take user effort to
| find a solution, or a solution might not be found.
|
| And for me personally, being someone who really likes to
| poke and customize and do things _my_ way, Linux is a
| blessing and a curse, because I can guarantee I 'll hit
| "weird edge cases" like trying to use the online
| multiplayer part of a game instead of just single player,
| or try to use my laptop's brightness controls, but they
| don't work, or I'll want fractional scaling to work, but
| it won't. And maybe there's a fix out there, or maybe
| not. Fixes like "it works for me" or "change your
| distribution", though, are non-fixes. They just frustrate
| people. If changing my distribution fixes an issue, how
| many new issues does it create for me?
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| I'd quote your own example from Anno -> "multiplayer
| never worked". Thats the "doesn't run" part. I always
| play Anno 1800 with friends. It has been my experience
| with linux gaming for a while - anything that involves
| multiplayer usually doesn't work, either because its just
| broken (less likely) or because its specifically stopped
| by the developer (anticheat, etc..). Reality is though,
| that most mainstream games (as in, biggest player counts
| and as such, the games most people are playing) do not
| support linux. If my Valorant or League of Legends or
| Counter Strike or Rust or ARC Raiders or Marvel Rivals
| don't allow me to play on linux then the state still is
| "linux can't really run games yet".
|
| How do you fix this? I dont know - most of these are the
| developers refusing support because of anticheat or just
| support overload, but it's insane to suggest that linux
| works for gaming when the most played games in the world
| straight up do not work. I'd love if linux was more
| viable though, can't wait to ditch the slowness from
| windows.
| techpression wrote:
| Most of the games I play would work fine, but it's the damn
| anti cheat and multiplayer games that forces Windows down my
| throat, and I'm not happy about it. I only use my gaming rig
| for gaming so I have no other requirements, which kind of
| makes it even worse.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I play multiplayer games with anti cheat all the time. The
| only ones that don't run are straight up malware.
| techpression wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing, it's just how certain very popular
| games operate nowadays. I would never play them on a
| computer I used for anything but gaming.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| They don't mean all games thru all times, they mean "the
| latest $70 release" that still can have problem if it is
| multiplayer DRM/anticheat ridden one.
|
| I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely
| some caveats for gamers
| anon22981 wrote:
| This. I'd move to Linux in a heartbeat if certain
| anticheats for certain competetive games had supports for
| it. (i.e. faceit anticheat)
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| its easier for me to just have 2 different system for
| work and entertainment honestly
| shimman wrote:
| Even easier is to just give up on competitive games, at a
| certain point it becomes another job and you know... not
| fun?
|
| I think Starcraft 2 broke me from this habit, once you're
| studying various metas rather than having fun you need to
| take a step back and reevaluate.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Studying metas can in fact be fun for people. It's
| mentally stimulating.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Play premier instead! I suck and have hugh trust so I
| never see any cheaters.
| redeeman wrote:
| how do you actually accept having a rootkit installed on
| your system?
| int_19h wrote:
| It doesn't have to be "the latest $70 release", there are
| plenty of games that are many years old now that still
| don't work because of KAC.
| RunSet wrote:
| On the other hand, those who find contemporary game
| development trends distasteful might find much to like
| about the fruits of the Debian Games Team's work on game-
| data-packager.
|
| https://game-data-packager.debian.net/available.html
|
| The games on that list have native ports that can be
| integrated into the Debian environment just by installing
| packages, and the game data packages can be automatically
| generated from each game's official install media.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming
|
| People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is
| "it's not reasonable for gaming _for the games I play._
|
| I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo
| of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still
| give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the
| problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous
| crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
|
| My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia
| 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is
| "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
|
| This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips
| way too literally.
|
| I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I
| do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which
| I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
|
| But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a
| Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo
| editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be
| assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep
| a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because
| it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I
| don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel
| like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible
| benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other
| needs.
| jp191919 wrote:
| FWIW, I've been gaming with a 1660 on Nobara OS for the
| past 3 months w/o issue.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows
| on a partition and only start it when you want to play that
| one game. Problem solved.
|
| In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on
| your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but
| is that a good enough reason to keep living in your
| parents' basement?
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I'll be honest I'm really struggling with this analogy.
| baka367 wrote:
| Win partition will make you want to cry.
|
| Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of
| the Linux doesn't boot with it or you have to go though
| hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia,
| gentle-yall).
|
| I'd all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0
| euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape
| by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than
| to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work
| stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of
| unpaid overtime to get comfortable
| tapoxi wrote:
| Bazzite supports secure boot just fine, its actually
| enabled by default. I'm sure others do too.
| jsheard wrote:
| Secure boot mainly gets annoying if you have an Nvidia
| card, since the akmod needs to be self-signed. It's not
| insurmountable but you have to load your keys into the
| UEFI before it'll work.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Bazzite builds the Nvidia driver into its kernel, so you
| don't need to do anything special. Post installation it
| prompts you to do key enrollment, so all the user needs
| to do is select "Enroll MOK" and type "universalblue".
| godelski wrote:
| This is a solvable problem and there's even pacman hooks
| around to do it for you
|
| But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the
| problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at
| the right entity if we're going to get them to change.
| Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found
| that they can bully people so much it gives them
| Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmw
| are...
| keyringlight wrote:
| For quite a while I've found that the much easier answer
| is to have a physical drive per OS and make sure it's the
| only drive connected during install, or at least one for
| anything that doesn't play entirely nicely with multi-
| boot. Obviously there's downsides to that, buying another
| drive or you might be using something like a laptop which
| is less friendly to extra drives, dis/reconnecting M.2
| drives isn't as trivial as SATA either.
| int_19h wrote:
| Linux can handle BitLocker & Secure Boot just fine. The
| problem with dual booting in that configuration is rather
| that every time Linux updates the boot loader, Windows
| will freak out and stop booting until you enter the
| recovery key for BitLocker. This can be prevented by
| first booting into Windows to disable BitLocker until the
| next reboot and then installing the Linux updates, but in
| practice I find that I forget about it all the time with
| my dual-boot laptop (which spends most of its time booted
| into Linux).
| jama211 wrote:
| Running two systems has cons of its own
| Draiken wrote:
| Which are?
|
| I've had Windows in one disk and Linux in another for
| maybe a decade and use the boot selection to pick what I
| want. Never had a single issue.
|
| Although I haven't opened Windows in months, so I'll
| likely nuke it soon and give more space for my Linux.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series
| of hardware has gotten pretty stable.
|
| With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel
| card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue
| using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very
| little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I only update my rig ever 8-10 years. Saves money though
| I tend to then play the older games, which is OK for me.
| I've had a 3080 for 3 years and it still feels like a new
| card.
| reactordev wrote:
| Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so
| the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE
| Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their
| own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan,
| DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Of course, and it's mostly DRM and/or anti-cheat. The
| studios want full control over the device running their
| IP, and they can't achieve that with desktop Linux, but
| they also don't want to leave the PC gaming market behind
| entirely to launch exclusively on consoles. Hence why the
| Windows versions of these games install rootkits on your
| PC, they aren't cooperating with the PC ecosystem, they
| are forcibly turning your computer into a locked-down
| console.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| and for a good reason, you want an infested cheater to be
| more a problem than currently bad problem that is
| happening????
|
| giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game
| to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete
| and come out of others ???? who would guess
| yetihehe wrote:
| I hope they won't start providing their own tailored
| heavily locked encrypted operating system versions as a
| requirement to run their games.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| They did, it's called Xbox and PlayStation
| yetihehe wrote:
| Does xbox and playstation run on my custom PC?
| krs_ wrote:
| Technically PS5 and I think Switch 2 is based on the BSD
| kernel probably because of the license. Xbox is not
| exactly Windows but it's using an NT kernel.
| jsheard wrote:
| Playstation is FreeBSD, yeah, but the Switch runs a
| completely bespoke microkernel. Nintendo did borrow the
| BSD networking stack, which led some to infer from the
| license disclosure that it runs a BSD, but it's been
| extensively reverse engineered now and it doesn't even
| vaguely resemble Unix.
| krs_ wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that! Thanks.
| jsheard wrote:
| The fun thing about it being a true microkernel is that
| although there's zero official public information about
| it, it was small enough to fully reverse engineer and
| more or less reconstitute the original source code. You
| can see it here, it's _tiny:_
| https://github.com/Atmosphere-
| NX/Atmosphere/tree/master/meso...
| reactordev wrote:
| I've been trying to train a model to do this kind of
| work. Take a black box and try to reverse engineer its
| functions back into something usable (not necessarily
| identical). Obviously on things that are out of copyright
| or copyleft.
| baka367 wrote:
| I find this mostly applies to the competitive games due to
| most standard anti cheat apps not working outside win32.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I've gamed since 1979 and have used nVidia on Linux since
| the early 2000's...without issue.
| krs_ wrote:
| There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with
| mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's almost always
| been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a
| kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes,
| understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on
| nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the
| current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in
| more recent times.
|
| But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience
| during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at
| release. Not always supporting all the latest features
| straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to
| hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at
| release frequently in comparison.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my
| Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less
| headaches.
|
| Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only
| accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.
|
| You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-
| only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| AMD drivers are now open and in the mainline kernel. They
| dropped their proprietary driver and now use the upstream
| MESA stack. Nvidia also still suffers from a 20-30%
| performance drop on DX12 games on Linux, while AMD does
| not.
|
| It used to be the reverse as you stated, but that hasn't
| been true since about 2015.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Okay, but AMD isn't accelerated. It's godawful slow for
| anything to do with video, and really you just need an
| NVidia card if you're doing anything to do with video
| editing or motion graphics.
|
| The built-in amdgpu drivers are awful, constantly crashy
| and with very poor hardware support of anything more than
| a couple of years old.
| Gracana wrote:
| > AMD isn't accelerated
|
| This is a bewildering assertion.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| It doesn't have CUDA beacuse that's NVidia-only and it
| doesn't have OpenCL unless you use the binary-only
| drivers, which only work on a handful of very new cards.
|
| What good is it?
|
| You can't use it for editing video.
| Gracana wrote:
| > CUDA .. nvidia-only
|
| Well, duh.
|
| > unless you use the binary-only drivers
|
| Which you also have to do with nvidia cards.
|
| > which only work on a handful of very new cards
|
| So get a new card?
|
| > You can't use it for editing video.
|
| Yes I can.
|
| ----
|
| I actually switched from a 7900 XTX to a 4090 BITD
| because I wanted CUDA, so I get that angle, but that
| doesn't mean I go around telling people "AMD isn't
| accelerated," because it's not true and it's a silly
| thing to try to claim.
| everdrive wrote:
| NVIDIA is currently improving as well! Of course AMD is
| still the safer bet, but I think things look bright for
| NVIDIA in the future. The kernel driver was open sourced,
| and they are currently working on the DX12 performance
| issues.
| bikelang wrote:
| FWIW my 4070 Ti Super has had zero headaches in Linux. It's
| only older Nvidia cards I've had issues with. Seems like
| there was a major driver change starting with the RTX 20xx
| series.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Linux probably became first-class for them because a lot
| of ML workflows rely on NVidia in the cloud, and I don't
| think anyone really uses Windows for that.
| robotnikman wrote:
| It's telling how Nvidia released an ARM driver for Linux,
| but has not for Windows.
| volkercraig wrote:
| Up until last week I was running a 960 on mint and had
| absolutely no problems, nor did I even have to think
| about drivers. I also have a server running Tesla M10s
| and they're great too, little more fiddly getting the
| right driver, but that's moreso on the cards being weird.
|
| Post last week I put in an Arc B580 and I had some issues
| at the start, but that's more to do with the fact that my
| workstation has a Haswell Xeon v3... Otherwise it was
| just turning CSM off.
| pksebben wrote:
| The only pain point I've found is VR. I've bounced off trying
| to get it working multiple times with the best results
| getting about 10% functional (video working on one or two
| games, input broken on all).
|
| That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on
| windows so I can't say if it's any better.
| jsheard wrote:
| VR is rough at the moment, but one would hope that Valve is
| prepping an overhaul for SteamVR on Linux since they're
| launching a standalone VR headset which _runs_ Linux soon.
| Thegn wrote:
| I suspect that this might not ship given the recent
| dramatic change in memory prices.
| Akronymus wrote:
| or DRM for old games that check stuff like the cd being
| present
| psyonity wrote:
| It was very broken for a long time. Since fairly recently
| you have WiVRn (specifically wivrn-dashboard on Arch) for
| Oculus (more supported though) and I would daresay it works
| better then SteamVR used to do for me on Windows
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I ran into the issue where I didn't know that you can tell
| Steam to always prefer NATIVE LINUX programs over
| everything over Proton. This was causing a ton of issues
| with VR, I havent gone back to try it yet though, havent
| found the time.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Hardware for flight sim games is also in a similar boat.
| It's hard to configure most of the newer hardware, but a
| lot of the old low quality joysticks work alright out of
| the box.
| rounce wrote:
| I have both a Reverb G2 and a Pimax both working great via
| Monado.
| mortos wrote:
| That's great to hear as a fellow Reverb G2 user. Starting
| with Windows 11 24h2 they dropped all Windows MR support.
| It looks like there's also a driver called "Oasis" now
| which restores functionality on Windows.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I have owned the index for a few years, running it on
| ubuntu/mint. It is a pain. But VR is a pain generally. I go
| months without using the thing. Then when i do use it some
| bit of software has been updated and i inevitably have to
| spend an hour getting it to work correctly again. Honestly,
| VR on linux feels like using windows again.
|
| VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware
| is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the
| hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS
| community and so too will the overall experiance.
| ukuina wrote:
| Do the top sellers from the past year work on Linux?
|
| I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.
| mitkebes wrote:
| Basically all games work, except some multiplayer games
| with kernel anticheat. You can look up the status of games
| here:
|
| https://www.protondb.com/
|
| And specifically the state of multiplayer games with
| anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working
| games):
|
| https://areweanticheatyet.com/
|
| I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a
| computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I
| would personally refuse to install the incompatible games
| even if I was using windows.
| observationist wrote:
| "Just trust us, bro! Our security is better than the
| banks, governments, and major services and we would never
| let anyone exploit or abuse the gaping hole we're
| deliberately installing in your security profile! It's
| just our perfectly secure rootkit that won't ever be used
| for anything bad!"
|
| It's so weird to me that people just allow this, or even
| defend it. Game companies should be legally obligated to
| scale human moderation and curation of multiplayer games,
| and if you're paying for service that gets moderated and
| curated, there should be some legal expectation of
| process - a requirement that the service provider lay out
| a specific "due process" framework, even if it ends up
| mediated, that gives a customer legal recourse. Instead,
| they try to automate everything, which has notoriously
| indiscriminate collateral damage with no recourse.
|
| If you pour significant chunk of your private time and
| money into a game, you should be entitled to not
| arbitrarily lose an account or gameplay progress because
| some poorly configured naive Bayes classifier decided you
| did something wrong, without corresponding evidence or
| recourse to undo bad bans.
|
| For some reason companies are entitled to infinitely
| expand their reach without concurrently expanding their
| responsibilities in providing service to individuals.
| Must be nice.
| jsheard wrote:
| Take ProtonDB with a grain of salt, Apex Legends still
| has a Silver rating ("Runs with minor issues") despite
| being 100% unplayable on Linux for over a year now.
| Macha wrote:
| From Steam's 2025 top X charts (https://store.steampowered.
| com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3)
|
| 11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is
| battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)
|
| 9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)
|
| 11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)
|
| So if you're into competitive ranked games (especially
| fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but
| practically everything else works
| zeta0134 wrote:
| The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer.
| That's because almost all of the big players in that space
| currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-
| cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project)
| refuse to support for security reasons.
|
| If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library
| is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always
| favored single player experiences and indie games from
| smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
| godelski wrote:
| It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people
| switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their
| ways.
|
| So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs
| that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
|
| Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not
| an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security
| issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a
| line, where's yours?
| seanw444 wrote:
| But standing on principle is too hard!
| abustamam wrote:
| This is true in principle but most gamers are just gonna
| take the path of least resistance. If they can't play
| fortnite on Linux (I'm using an example, I don't know if
| it's actually unplayable on Linux) then they will use
| whatever OS lets them play.
|
| People have been saying "vote with your wallet" every
| time gaming companies do something anti consumer like day
| one dlc or buggy releases (don't pre-order!) or $90
| games, but gaming companies continue to push the envelope
| on what gamers will pay for because gamers keep paying
| for it.
|
| It's a sad reality.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Take a step back. Why do people want to play Fortnite so
| much and not anything else?
| jsheard wrote:
| Because their friends play Fortnite, for example?
| Multiplayer is often social, so "just play something
| else" turns into "just get new friends".
| godelski wrote:
| There's another way. Only a small portion of friends need
| to change to pull the rest of the group. Pull them to a
| game that runs on Linux.
|
| Don't do it like "let's play this game because it runs on
| Linux" do it like "let's play this game because it's
| fun".
|
| If you want to be the one to lead this change you have to
| do extra work. Dual boot Linux and find a game that's fun
| that you can do online. Find the other friend or two in
| your group that will do the same (at least play the game,
| Linux is optional but encouraged for this subset). Just
| play together for a bit, give it a trial run. Then when
| playing the other game with the larger group say "hey, so
| and so and I have been playing this game, you guys should
| play with us sometime". They don't have to install Linux,
| just play a new game that their friends are already
| playing. That's why they're there, to play games with
| their friends. Don't try to get them to switch to Linux,
| just play games with your friends. You might have a
| holdout but if most people move then everyone will. But
| if you want to do that move you have to find what works
| and at least one other friend to give it a trial (who
| won't need to do as much work as you). That's how you do
| it. No crazy scheme and honestly not massive amounts of
| work either. Just the normal process of finding new games
| to play with one constraint. It just seems complicated
| because I stated the process explicitly.
| abustamam wrote:
| I don't play a lot of online games anymore, but when I
| did, it wasn't just because friends were playing it. It
| was because it was fun, it was part of the cultural
| zeitgeist, it's popular, the community is fun, etc. You
| can't really replace something like that with just
| "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
| godelski wrote:
| > It was because it was fun
|
| I agree. But I think there are a lot of fun games. Plenty
| of them on Linux. > it was part of the
| cultural zeitgeist
|
| This is the harder part, but we are in an age where there
| are a lot of games. I think you'll be surprised to see
| the games that do work on Linux[0]. Looking at the most
| played multiplayer games on Steam[1] (in order): (1)
| Counterstrike, (2) Dota 2, (3) Arc Raiders, (5) Terraria,
| (8) Grand Theft Auto, and (9) Marvel Rivals all have good
| proton support. What doesn't work in the top 10 are (4)
| PUBG, (6) Bongo Cat, and (10) EA Sports FC 26. (7) Rust
| supposedly works, but only on Linux supported servers
| (smaller user base). > it's popular,
|
| The point I'm making here is that while you may not get
| to be part of every cultural zeitgeist, you can still
| participate in the 3 most popular ones and more than half
| of the top 10. Frankly, most people won't be able to
| participate in every zeitgeist for any number of reasons
| (cost, hardware, restrictions, etc). But I think
| considering this you don't have to fear being left out.
|
| Maybe you're obsessed with PUBG or Battlefield and then
| yeah, Linux isn't going to work for you. That's okay! But
| looking at the numbers, for _most_ people, they can still
| be a part of all the cultural excitement. It 's not going
| to work for everyone, and that's okay! If it doesn't work
| for you, it doesn't work for you. But I want to make sure
| we can distinguish real blockers from ones Microslop and
| EA want you to believe in. > the
| community is fun
|
| I think this is less of a blocker than you might think.
| Honestly, in my experience smaller communities tend to be
| more fun. They develop their own close knit culture.
| You've been on HN a long time and seen it grow. Isn't
| that a similar reason you come here? >
| You can't really replace something like that with just
| "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
|
| You're right, but again, I think there are fewer blockers
| than you think. I can't tell you if those blockers are
| real or not because what is a blocker comes down to you
| and your personal interpretations of all those variables.
| But if you're frustrated with Windows and the system, why
| not give it a try? You don't even have to switch to Linux
| to pressure the studios to change. Just spending more
| time playing games like Counterstrike or Arc Raiders than
| games like PUBG or Battlefield. And if you play more
| games like the former you make it easier for others that
| are thinking about making the jump. But hey, if PUBG or
| Battlefield is your jam and you don't want to try
| anything else, then no worries. You do you.
|
| _There 's one more important thing I want to bring up._
| I think it is important to ask _" where is your line?"_
| How much junk can Winblows shove in before you're willing
| to make sacrifices? Is EA installing a rootkit enough of
| a security concern where you won't take it? What is? You
| don't need to tell me what the answers are to these
| questions. What's important is that you yourself know
| where these lines are beforehand. The lines are personal
| and unique to you. People are going to have other lines
| than you and that's completely fine. I just ask you think
| about what conditions would cause you to make sacrifices?
| That way if they happen you can respond.
|
| [0] https://www.protondb.com/
|
| [1] https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=3859
| jsheard wrote:
| > Looking at the most played multiplayer games on Steam
|
| Note that this is skipping over some _extremely_ popular
| games which aren 't on Steam. Notably Fortnite, Roblox,
| League of Legends, Valorant, and everything else from
| Riot Games, none of which work on Linux. From the Steam
| examples there's also some grey areas, GTA5 singleplayer
| works but multiplayer does not, and Counterstrike works
| on official servers but not on Faceit servers, where a
| lot of serious competitive play happens.
| godelski wrote:
| You're right to bring up the limits, but I think you're
| missing what I'm saying. I'm not trying to say that
| everyone can and should switch. But I am saying that the
| costs are probably less than one might think.
|
| The costs of switching can only be answered at the
| individual level. No one can answer for you. But people
| can state their experiences and help you understand the
| costs and benefits.
|
| _Let 's make sure we can accurately understand the costs
| and benefits and differentiate from imaginary ones._
|
| I also said that you can take a stand without switching
| to Linux. Maybe the costs are too high for you right now.
| But maybe the costs of meeting up with your friends to
| play Dota rather than League is easy. At the end of the
| day the costs are due to the network effects. You can
| reduce those costs slowly and make it easier for others
| to jump ship without you needing to, which makes it
| easier for you to jump ship in the future if things
| change. The same is true for social media. Maybe you
| can't break from Instagram as you have too many contacts
| where that's your only way to communicate with them. But
| you can still encourage others to text you, Signal
| message you, or whatever. This still reduces the power of
| that network.
|
| Here's the thing: the less sticky platforms are the
| better it is for everyone. I'm not going to tell you that
| you aren't going to have to put in more effort, but I
| will criticize you if you think that effort is
| insurmountable. I will also say that this is also part of
| our social duty. If something like using Signal instead
| of Instagram to communicate with your friend because they
| want to is "too hard" for you, then I envy the life you
| have where such trivial actions are your biggest
| concerns. If _trying_ new games with friends who want to
| try new games is "too much" for you, then I think you
| should question if you're an addict.
|
| I'm not saying you have to switch. I'm not saying you
| have to play certain games and not others. But you do
| have to be open to changing things and recognize that if
| you don't then you're creating a doomed self-fulfilling
| prophecy. If you're unwilling to have the slightest
| inconveniences then the enshitification and dystopia is
| on you. If you are unwilling to have the slightest
| inconveniences then you have no right to complain as you
| are the one preventing that change. But also, if you
| don't have any of those concerns of enshitification and
| tech dystopia then you have every right to stand your
| ground and not be inconvenienced. But I want to make the
| conditions clear. We live in a society. The society has a
| duty to you and you have a duty to the society. You don't
| just get to take and give nothing back.
| abustamam wrote:
| This isn't about me though. I game on Linux. I love it.
| My original reply was to this in your comment
|
| > It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people
| switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their
| ways.
|
| The whole point of this subthread is that companies are
| not going to make Linux compatible games as long as there
| are customers OK with installing root kits on their
| companies to play their games. And most gamers are ok
| with that line being crossed. It sucks for the rest of
| us, but capitalism gonna capitalism.
| godelski wrote:
| I apologize for misunderstanding your comment, but I hope
| mine still stands to help others recognize the issues you
| brought up aren't as large as some may actually believe.
| I agree with you, companies that abuse us, the users,
| want to amplify that fear. It empowers them. It's why I
| am encouraging anyone who reads my comment to ask
| themselves where that line is. Personally I'm with you,
| the line has already been crossed. I've made the move and
| don't regret it for a second. Nothing changes for the
| better when no one is willing to take the first step.
| abustamam wrote:
| No worries, and no I completely agree with you on all
| fronts.
| some_random wrote:
| First off, a hell of a lot more of those top 50 are
| unplayable. But more importantly the thing that you are
| ignoring is that every single one works on Windows. By
| choosing to use Linux you are choosing to not be able to
| play these games and an unknown number of future games
| for... what? If you only have a PC to play games with
| your friends, what could possibly be more important to
| you than the ability to play games with your friends?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| There are lots of fun games in the cultural zeitgeist.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You assume I have friends. Or at least, friends that care
| about video games.
|
| Besides, more likely is that I leave to do my own thing,
| 0-1 peers joins me for a bit, then we all kinda drift
| away. Friendships in this era are much more ephemeral.
| godelski wrote:
| I want to step away from the conversation about Linux
|
| Honestly, I'm disheartened to hear this. Frankly, those
| don't sound like friends, or at least close friends. If a
| friendship can evaporate by the simple act of wanting to
| try another game, then it barely seems like a friendship
| and it seems like those will evaporate as soon as the
| next popular game comes about. I don't want to tell you
| to abandon your existing friends but I would encourage
| you to find friends you can have stronger bonds with. To
| have closer relationships. Hard truth is you need to put
| in work to make this happen. It doesn't matter what games
| you play or on what platform: everyone deserves to have
| deep human relationships. I really do hope you can find
| some friends. I hope the friendships you do have are
| stronger than you have conveyed because frankly, as
| humans, we all need close friends.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's most how most of my life has been in a nutshell;
| it isn't limited to games. Schools,college, old
| coworkers. A lot of the glue comes undone the moment you
| need to move on. I'm a late Millenial, but the advent of
| social media among Gen Z gave us the ability to connect
| more intimately than ever over the most niche topics. But
| at the cost of losing the deep bonds you'd normally form
| then bundled with a community based on proximity.
|
| I've had long conversations with some former guild mates
| yet can't point you to a name or face. I know quite a few
| never even lived in my country. But things loosen up once
| the game shuts down or one of us needs to move on. It's
| neat in some ways, hollow in others.
|
| On the larger scale, it's why local community is also
| weaker than ever. No one really puts and effort to come
| down to community events, or they may come once or twice
| and never again. Those gatherings are also less frequent
| than ever, often once a month. You can't really form a
| deep bond meeting once a month. So meetups end up
| frustrating in their own way (at least, the tech meetup.
| Maybe a run club would be different).
|
| I've even heard notions that it's easier to find a mate
| than a close friend these days. I can completely believe
| it.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm also in my 30s so I get it. The only real advice I
| can give is that it just takes more work to maintain
| friends as we get older. I had to be the one reaching out
| rather than waiting for others to reach out to me.
|
| The other thing is recognize where friendships came from.
| Most of it was just being physically near people. Sitting
| in the same classrooms day to day. If work doesn't create
| that space (or isn't good enough or you want to distance
| from work) you need something else that does the same
| thing. Join a club. Set up weekly beers with your
| friends. Or literally anything that puts you in the same
| physical space with the same people, routinely. A friend
| of mine gets together with his gamer friends once a year
| and they socialize off the game too.
|
| The convenience of social media is also its weakness. The
| ease of connecting makes it just as easy to disconnect.
|
| Real friendships require work. That's true of any
| relationship. I'll tell you my friends can be annoying
| and exhausting, but I love them and I'll gladly put up
| with their shit to keep them around. After all, who else
| is going to put up with my bullshit? lol
| thunderfork wrote:
| The market for multiplayer games, shooters especially, is
| already a mess, because people don't want to play a game
| that doesn't have an infinite pool of players to
| matchmake into, or a game that doesn't have all their
| cosmetics, or... etc. etc.
|
| So this ends up being easier said than done. I've had
| success, but that's my friend group out of however many.
|
| Try to find a shooter with a playerbase that doesn't use
| EAC/etc. - it's a crapshoot, unfortunately. You've got
| Valve's stuff and one or two outliers, but if those don't
| meet your group's genre needs, you're whomped.
| abustamam wrote:
| I can't answer that, but probably similar reason why
| anyone plays any game. It's fun, their friends play it,
| etc.
|
| I don't personally play fortnite. But substitute fortnite
| for any DRMd multi-player game (or MMO).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 1. The audience is mostly kids. They can't buy any
| premium games easily (and is the lens for the rest of my
| points)
|
| 2. Network effects. Works as well on them as any of us.
| Especially in a world that makes it more and more hostile
| to have them meet IRL.
|
| 3. It's a generation raised on "forever games". They are
| used to games they pick up and will continually play for
| years. Games that will always provide new stuff for them.
| They fundamentally have different habits from Millenials.
|
| 4. Mobile support. So many kids play on mobile. So they
| are even more isolated from the consple market.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I empathize with the question. But you are essentially
| asking *why do people want to use instagram and not any
| other one of millions social media app?*
| some_random wrote:
| Even this framing is silly, if you have a PC to game
| there are not enough pros to choose Linux. You are giving
| up the ability to play some popular games and increasing
| the amount of effort required to play another chunk of
| them in exchange for what? A snappier file browser? Fewer
| anti-consumer dark patterns? It's not about "path of
| least resistance" it just flat out isn't worth it.
| demilicious wrote:
| This is overestimating the amount of effort involved to
| game on Linux, imo. It is true that there are a couple
| games using kernel-level anticheat which preclude their
| working on linux, but for the most part the effort
| required to play games on Linux now is zero if it's a
| Steam game and almost zero elsewhere.
| some_random wrote:
| Rust on Linux only works for Linux based servers
| https://www.protondb.com/app/252490
|
| Apex Legend used to work but doesn't anymore (still
| marked Silver) https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470
|
| Delta Force used to work but also doesn't anymore (still
| marked Bronze), people are tinkering with config files
| but nothing seems to work
| https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
|
| NARAKA: BLADEPOINT is working but requires custom Proton,
| some tweaked settings, launch options, etc
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1203220
|
| GTA V public lobbies don't work, requires you to tweak
| launch options, disable battleeye anticheat, seems to
| just not work for some people.
| https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
|
| BG3 also seems to require a custom Proton and tweaked
| settings for some people
| https://www.protondb.com/app/271590
|
| It goes on and on these were just from the first few
| games sorted by player count. Much of the tweaking seems
| to be different person to person, sometimes it just works
| sometimes it's Nvidia's fault, sometimes it's something
| totally different. There's a "recommended for tinkerers"
| option for reviews. To be clear, every single one of
| these works right out of the box first time on Windows.
| godelski wrote:
| > but requires custom Proton, some tweaked settings,
| launch options, etc
|
| I was not shocked that that top comment mentioned they
| used Claude because the config line is dumb.
|
| The line is PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12=1
| PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1 %command% -force-d3d11
|
| Here's what they mean
| PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12: Disables DirectX12 There
| are also D3D11, D3D10, D3D9 options too
| PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=1: Tells the game you have an AMD
| GPU instead of Nvidia The default setting is that
| Proton hides the GPU, so this option here is superfluous.
| -force-d3d11: forces usage of DirectX11 This is
| already going to happen because you disabled DirectX12
|
| Here is the sane equivalent line
| PROTON_DISABLE_D3D12=1 %command% Alternatively
| %command% -force-d3d11
|
| People are copy pasting settings and sharing but not
| actually looking at any docs. Disabling DirectX12 is
| going to give you a pretty good success rate of making a
| game work _if it doesn 't work out of the box_.
|
| Here's a useful resource for understanding the settings.
| Use this before you ask the AI:
| https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
|
| Also, let's be clear about what those rankings mean on
| ProtonDB Native: Just works i.e.
| Devs are cool Platinum: Just works (but is using
| Proton) i.e. Valve has got this shit handled
| Gold: Works but you either need to use proton
| experimental or change an option that someone has already
| figured out. i.e. Community has figured it out,
| Valve is tweaking. Note that many people are
| on Proton Experimental by default so possibly that's why
| it "just works" for them. Silver: Very likely to
| work with a setting someone has listed. i.e.
| Community and Valve working on it Bronze: People
| are figuring it out, leave it to your friends that know
| Linux i.e. Sorry, you're probably out of luck.
| Leave it to the tinkerers Borked: Publisher is
| actively working against the community. i.e. EA
| hates you
|
| I'm not trying to say everything works on Linux. It
| doesn't. But let's also not pretend that it is worse than
| it is. That's the same error in the other direction.
| Linux is not the right choice for everyone, but it is a
| good choice for many people.
|
| You're implying that 'clicking the cog icon > properties
| > and then copy pasting some text into a text box' is
| overly burdensome. To be frank, if you believe that then
| not only is Linux not for you, but neither are computers,
| and I really really am curious why you're on a website
| called "Hacker News".
| ectospheno wrote:
| I switched to console gaming years ago. I can still play
| any major release while having whatever OS I want on my
| computers.
| Gracana wrote:
| I did this and was happily Windows-less for quite a few
| years. I ended up building a PC with a big GPU and so I
| switched back to PC gaming with a Windows installation
| alongside Linux, but I still think the console route is a
| great option.
| int_19h wrote:
| At this point, I think quite a few people are basically
| treating their Windows desktop as a console.
| phr4ts wrote:
| >It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people
| switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their
| ways.
|
| Nope. Not Nadella. He'll kill windows in a heartbeat.
| Macha wrote:
| MMOs are actually fine. WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, all work
| great on Linux. They're not really games that rely on
| hidden information, are not pvp first and need to
| simulate stuff on the server anyway, so can verify moves
| are valid there.
|
| It's the competitive progression shooters and ranked
| esports games that go in for the restrictive anti-cheat
| nhhvhy wrote:
| Even within competitive shooters there's still plenty
| that run great on Linux. 90% of my time spent gaming is
| on Overwatch or CS2, and I've found that both ran
| significantly better on my Debian 13 installation than
| they ever did on Win11.
| godelski wrote:
| And it's worth noting that CS2 is still the most played
| game on Steam. It has double the players of the second
| most played game, Dota 2, which _also_ works on Linux.
| And that has double the player base of the number 3 game,
| Arc Raiders, which _also_ works great on Linux.
|
| The idea that you'll be missing out is ill founded. Yes,
| there are some games that won't work. PUBG, Bongo Cat,
| Rust[0], and EA Sports FC 26 are the ones on the top 10
| multiplayer list. But it's also not like you don't have
| plenty of massively popular games to choose from.
|
| I'll even say don't switch to Linux, just stop playing
| these abusive games. Honestly, if you're unwilling to
| change OSes but willing to do this then people that want
| to jump ship can. We all win from this behavior. Even you
| as it discourages Windows from shoving in more junk and
| discourages publishers like EA from shoving in massive
| security vulnerabilities like rootkits. I mean we've all
| seen how glitchy many AAA games are, you really think
| their other software isn't going to be just as unpolished
| and bug ridden?
|
| [0] Apparently works with Linux servers?
| https://www.protondb.com/app/252490
|
| P.S. If anyone wants to check for yourself:
| - Steam Multiplayer by rankings:
| https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=3859 - Proton
| Support: https://www.protondb.com/
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line,
| where's yours?
|
| I just don't really play multiplayer to begin with. So I
| was never on the spectrum.
|
| But tens of millions are. They won't even be aware of
| what's happening. That's why this remains.
| jsheard wrote:
| > which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse
| to support for security reasons.
|
| It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it
| even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel
| internals is _well_ beyond the scope of what WINE is trying
| to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way
| for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between
| the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus
| sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC
| in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it 's for
| beingn reasons.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > That's because almost all of the big players in that
| space
|
| To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays,
| that if you and your friend group can skip some of those
| "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer
| games to play.
| logicchains wrote:
| The greatest PvP game, DOTA, works on Linux, and once you
| get hooked on that you'll never want to play another PvP
| game.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project)
| refuse to support for security reasons.
|
| I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured
| to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev
| whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is
| one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how
| "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very
| latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that
| multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.
|
| And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on
| Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game
| doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.
|
| [0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti
| Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden
| Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without
| any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at
| least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only
| _sometimes_ used as anti-cheat but does use many of the
| same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.
| jsheard wrote:
| > I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti
| Cheat can work on Linux.
|
| That's no secret, but the catch is that the Linux version
| is much, _much_ easier to bypass. That 's why some
| developers choose not to enable it, or in the case of
| Apex Legends, enabled it but later backtracked and
| disabled it again.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...but the catch is that the Linux version is much,
| _much_ easier to bypass.
|
| _Shrug_. Rumor has it that the Windows version is
| already fairly trivial to bypass.
| dleslie wrote:
| Oh, it absolutely is; if your product doesn't update its
| EAC bits regularly then it may as well not use EAC at
| all. Even still, there are known ways around it.
| Draiken wrote:
| > That's why some developers choose not to enable it
|
| That's an excuse. It's mostly incompetence or more often
| than not the company doesn't think it's worth the effort.
| With more Linux users, the balance will eventually shift
| from "fuck them" to "we have to figure out a way".
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well yeah, it always comes down to money. Even on an
| indie level Linux support is a commitment.
|
| https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/e2ww5s/mike_rose_li
| nux...
|
| Now if you do care about quality, having a committed,
| technical audience giving quality big reports is a
| godsend. But that's not where we are this decade rife
| with layoffs and rampant outsourcing in the industry.
| deaddodo wrote:
| You're posting an argument from 6 years ago. Not
| including Steam OS, the Linux market share has almost
| quadrupled since then (to ~3.2%); including Steam OS,
| it's up to ~24%. And continues to trend upwards.
|
| You also don't need to arbitrarily support Linux. It's
| not difficult to say "this has only been tested on
| Fedora, Ubuntu, POP, and SteamOS; other distributions are
| unsupported officially".
| int_19h wrote:
| Kernel-level anti-cheats are considerably more
| complicated to make for Linux for obvious reasons like
| lack of ABI stability in kernel space.
| bikelang wrote:
| Even PVP is starting to "just work" via Proton. Arc Raiders
| runs just fine on Linux and is a strictly PvP game. Over
| time I think this will be less and less of a problem.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Arc Raiders is a PvPvE game, like most extraction
| shooters.
| Draiken wrote:
| Still has an anti-cheat, they just bothered to allow
| Linux support.
|
| Companies don't do this out of laziness/incompetence, but
| even some large anti-cheats work on Linux and some games
| simply choose to not enable it (cough, Tarkov, cough).
| Their problem, I'm no longer gonna play games that don't
| work on Linux.
|
| Funnily enough the best FPS game ever (Counter-Strike)
| runs absolutely fine on Linux. Thanks Valve!
| int_19h wrote:
| As far as I know, all the anti-cheat options for Linux
| are not kernel-level, which means that they are
| drastically less effective at their intended purpose.
| That's why so many competitive multiplayer games choose
| to not enable it.
| RamRodification wrote:
| As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had
| a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low
| latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games
| I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
|
| There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get
| to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a
| Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton
| version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games
| based on this game engine needs?
| simoncion wrote:
| > The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and
| milliseconds matter.
|
| Out of curiosity, what games are those? I wonder if I
| also play a subset of them.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing?
|
| Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of
| stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland
| sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.
|
| Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work
| flawlessly for gaming.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11...
| Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work
| flawlessly for gaming.
|
| Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK-
| WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in
| WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either
| fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games...
| everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said
| that, I do know that -when using KDE- _some_ fullscreen
| games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up
| and remain that way until the notification disappears. I
| expect that that performance problem would go away if I
| was using the compositor... but I don 't want to spend
| the VRAM on it.
|
| I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing
| that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro
| simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm
| running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated
| versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]
|
| [0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived
| distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not
| match what I've been seeing for years... so some
| percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really,
| really can must be coming from distros that ship either
| dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg
| installs.
| hparadiz wrote:
| X11 has basically no development anymore. That means
| regressions are entirely ignored.
|
| I switched my Gentoo box from X11 to Wayland three years
| ago at this point.
|
| It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default
| in 2026 except with very old hardware.
| simoncion wrote:
| > X11 has basically no development anymore.
|
| Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in
| my distro's package manager.
|
| > That means regressions are entirely ignored.
|
| Should I ever actually have a problem, and it's something
| that I can't (or CBA to) fix, and my distro's maintainers
| don't want to try to fix (and then tell me that upstream
| will never fix), then I'll look more closely at XLibre.
| XLibre may or may not be a dumpster fire at that point,
| who knows? If it is a dumpster fire, then I'll look
| around for other alternatives.
|
| > It's shocking that people still install X11 as a
| default in [TYOOL]
|
| Nah. It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do
| anything that depends on Wayland. The shocking thing
| would be if I were to waste a ton of time chasing the new
| shiny... _especially_ when those responsible for the new
| shiny have been lying for the past 10+ years about how it
| 's ready for _everyone 's_ general use. [0]
|
| [0] Perhaps it's ready now, after nearly eighteen years
| in development. I can't rely on the statements of those
| responsible for the project to tell me, and I CBA to go
| searching for (and evaluating the trustworthiness of)
| information on the topic.
| hparadiz wrote:
| > Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version
| in my distro's package manager.
|
| Yea these are security updates but the eco system
| requires a lot of desktop manager scaffolding in user
| space. That has basically stopped. It's baffling why you
| would run X11 today. The X11 emulation layer for Wayland
| works great too by the way.
|
| Just as one example when you screen share from discord or
| zoom or Google meets there's now a pop-up that asks you
| to select the screen or window you wish to latch on to
| for streaming. This provides some security. With X11
| anything can just take a screenshot at any time. Sure
| that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11
| anymore. As someone that made the switch three years ago
| I get how you might think the old system is better but in
| reality you haven't tried the new one so you don't really
| have a way to compare. I noticed so many quality of life
| fixes that I can't even imagine running X11 anymore.
| cobar wrote:
| I've had better luck since the switch to Wayland. I don't
| play many FPS games but mouse input & overall smoothness
| for strategy games has been great. Check your mouse
| settings, you might need to set a higher USB sample rate.
| Piper is a frontend for adjusting them.
| eertami wrote:
| I know what you mean, though I have a device running
| SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the
| latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles
| where it can achieve the same framerate).
|
| I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever
| optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but
| unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.
| hparadiz wrote:
| You should only ever be using Wayland from now on.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Vote with your wallet, as the saying goes. If you quit
| paying money for the privilege of installing a rootkit,
| maybe they'll stop selling rootkits.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Lot of wallets are voting for AC, sadly. Sometimes the
| tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
| jmusall wrote:
| BattlEye works on linux nowadays, so there definitely is
| progress in this direction!
| shevy-java wrote:
| Well I used to game a lot when I was younger.
|
| Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
|
| Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still
| think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss
| Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary
| operating system on another computer; I just don't really
| care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it
| one iota).
| greener_grass wrote:
| Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity?
| 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A
| few graphical effects? Multiplayer?
|
| When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as
| it might seem.
|
| But I'm still gaming on Linux!
| seanw444 wrote:
| What you sacrifice in feature parity, you gain in user
| freedom and principle. To me, that is a worthwhile
| tradeoff. Especially since it's really not that much
| different at this point. You're not sacrificing much in
| most cases now. It's really quite remarkable.
| jama211 wrote:
| There it is, the classic "just change what you enjoy then!!".
| Linux will take off when the community stops trying to force
| new users to conform to the Linux way of life and instead
| respect that other people have other needs and wants that are
| valid, and not a moment before.
| krs_ wrote:
| While I agree it's unreasonable, it's also kind of a
| chicken and an egg thing. These things won't change until
| Linux becomes big enough to ignore. I'm not sure what the
| solution is though, as I don't think it's realistic to make
| people give up what they enjoy to get there. That's not
| gonna happen. But Valve has at least made a dent with the
| Steamdeck and Proton in general, and maybe more with the
| upcoming Steam Machine. Devs actively target the Steamdeck
| nowadays for games where it makes sense, so it is taken
| into consideration at a whole new level compared to years
| past.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not much else to do. You either convert people, convert the
| companies to support Linux, or convert the government into
| cracking down on whatever makes it difficult for Linux to
| be supported. The latter is highly unlikely, and the 2nd
| only cares if people shift their habits.
|
| So there's only one channel left.
| cesarb wrote:
| > More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console.
|
| Not for long. The Steam Machine aka "GabeCube" is also a
| gaming console, and will run all these games.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Games are more and more consolidating towards services, so it
| really only takes one game for the lions share of gamers. You
| can bet GTA V is a big draw away from Linux and that GTA VI
| will eventually be the same when it hits PC.
|
| As for me, I'm still stuck for professional reasons. I do
| intend to develop natively on Linux when time comes to make
| my own game.
| some_random wrote:
| You and most of the other people in this thread clearly do
| not understand what's going on here. I and everyone else
| you're griping about do not give a shit about Slop Spoogers 7
| from 1998 running great on Linux, we care about the games
| that we play with our friends being playable.
|
| https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount
|
| This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is
| Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until
| every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.
| Muromec wrote:
| This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started
| to suck in 2025. It always did.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too
| many people started to notice, and those people weren't tech
| people.
|
| Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot
| of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point.
| It's classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
| otherme123 wrote:
| >Most people had never even heard of Linux.
|
| My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not
| knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and
| people see half my screen is always a console, the other
| half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards,
| not for regular users. Nothing will convince them
| otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online
| webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code +
| WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear
| the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't know, man. In _my_ experience, people make no
| difference between "windows" and "the pc". I think the
| vast majority of "regular people" have no idea there are
| alternatives to "windows", other than "macs".
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| So much of it is a problem of execution. If people could
| use Linux without ever having to know what a terminal is
| (much like the average Windows user doesn't know what
| PowerShell is), then it would actually be quite
| successful. It has gotten better over the past decade,
| but it still suffers from endless paper cuts and the odd
| issue that requires a shell session to fix. I will say
| that Valve's SteamOS has come the closest to avoiding
| this trap. You can use a deck without ever having to
| touch a CLI.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an
| issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around
| 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of
| a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this
| day. Windows just bloats all hardware.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same
| time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus.
| Support has always sucked!
|
| Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding
| the right combination of driver versions, open or closed
| source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand...
| Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring
| albeit better off then they were.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well.
| Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have
| seen the performance bumps at the cost of software
| compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite
| to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the
| random game that _needs_ it.
| simoncion wrote:
| > I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always
| an issue.
|
| Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux
| since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my
| desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought
| on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread
| ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other
| hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk,
| so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken...
| I'd never know.
|
| I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't
| remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or
| disk.
| dvergeylen wrote:
| This was me in 2006 as well. Long live Edgy Eft!
| zikduruqe wrote:
| My first distro I booted from was Ubuntu 4.04.
| M4R5H4LL wrote:
| I suspect this is less about when Windows declined and more
| about individual computing journeys. Early exposure (home,
| school, work) tends to set a baseline that's hard to shake.
| maldev wrote:
| Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft
| internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and
| all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows
| side that anyone working with them can see. It started a
| couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and
| will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and
| someone who thinks linux is crap.
| esaym wrote:
| >This was me in 2005.
|
| Ha, same. Windows XP for me had a horrible habit of booting
| into a blue screen randomly after updating video card drivers
| (happened with both ATI and Nvidia). Trying to do a repair
| install wouldn't work. The only option was a full reinstall.
|
| Installation from the disk took an hour. Then (if you were
| going about this the legal way) you'd have to call the
| microsoft number to register your install, but be on hold for
| another 30 minutes. Then it was multiple hours of install
| your favorite video player, reboot. Install video codecs,
| reboot. Install firefox, reboot. Apply all of your registry
| tweaks, reboot. Install all your games from CD-ROM, more
| rebooting. And multiple hours of that.
|
| I moved to linux back in 2006 or so and never looked back.
| Documented part of the journey here
| https://net153.net/ubuntu_vs_debian.html
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro
|
| They largely have now, archinstall.
|
| It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive,
| anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro
| (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable
| with the archinstall script.
| simgoh wrote:
| > anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro
| (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable
| with the archinstall script.
|
| To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to
| think about when we talk about the enshittification of
| Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer
| users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of
| people that can fend for themselves with instructions to
| people that cannot.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience
| to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway.
|
| I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or
| CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI
| installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
| simgoh wrote:
| Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the
| Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time
| soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer"
| crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that
| it will make game devs try to design games that aren't
| only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
| theYipster wrote:
| It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old
| hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux
| today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS,
| let alone using the command line. The first time I
| installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first
| dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in
| 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since
| the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard
| way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this
| reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless
| times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the
| distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage
| with different skill levels.
| simgoh wrote:
| I agree. I also think that not everyone (I couldn't say
| if this is generational, I see this among peers sometimes
| too) has the same appetite for problem solving. People
| hit a problem or a wall and say "So I tried X and now I
| see Y. I dont know what to do" and then they just sit
| there. The reason that LMGTFY and RTFM come off as
| "elitist" is because people are frustrated by others'
| willingness to just "stop trying" whenever they hit a
| road block.
| morserer wrote:
| Came here to say this. Archinstall rocks.
|
| Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer,
| it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a
| different design philosophy than most installation media.
|
| The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies
| the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you
| special installation opportunities such as the ability to
| install Arch to _the same flash drive_ that booted the
| installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image
| remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for
| fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since
| archinstall is a TUI.
| ahepp wrote:
| I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles
| to providing a graphical installer in something like an
| initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical
| installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel
| and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in
| the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell
| it to)
|
| I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I
| thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case
| I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the
| backing store.
| Levitating wrote:
| > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro
|
| Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users
| hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a
| detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users.
| Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root
| filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
|
| ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but
| it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to
| automate the installation using profiles.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is
| basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but
| that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily
| driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and
| it's an excellent distro.
| muthuh wrote:
| There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be
| where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that
| there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you
| insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right
| from the start.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I
| swear that something like 12 years ago it _did_ have some
| form of menu-driven installer.
|
| Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive
| (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native
| encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot
| directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some
| bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
|
| One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able
| to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate
| to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I
| remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the
| installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install
| going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes
| reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual
| installation part is trivial.
|
| But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do,
| staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be
| daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for
| installation. I would have to look up the correct
| incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no
| wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a _very_
| long time.
| Levitating wrote:
| > One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being
| able to have a say in some of these base matters
|
| Exactly, Arch allows you to do many bleeding edge things.
| An installer would never keep up are give you that
| freedom.
|
| > I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the
| installer didn't it was rather involved to get the
| install going.
|
| That's why many installers allow you to drop a shell when
| it's time to partition.
|
| > I would have to look up the correct incantation to get
| the wifi connected on a newer PC
|
| To be honest that would largely be helped if archiso
| would start using NetworkManager
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I
| swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some
| form of menu-driven installer.
|
| Yep, removed in 2012 as the last maintainer quit.
| Maintaining an installer seems like one of the least fun
| hobbies.
| Levitating wrote:
| Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to
| have:
|
| * A user configured through systemd-homed with luks
| encryption
|
| * The limine bootloader
|
| * snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
|
| * systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
|
| * sway with my custom ruby based bar
|
| * A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across
| multiple disks in raid0
|
| If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you
| to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options
| just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports
| all these bleeding edge features is futile.
| kuerbel wrote:
| I installed fedora yesterday. Instead of steam i am hoping that
| GOG with heroic games launcher will work nicely. Idk, I want to
| support drm free software so if it's on gog, I buy it there.
| byronic wrote:
| [obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]
|
| I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows)
| but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of
| that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than
| Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based
| apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults
| lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver
| compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of
| once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected
| and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to
| appease the shell gods.
|
| In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat
| the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting
| since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I
| prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very
| solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly
| customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for
| gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those
| distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.
|
| PS I keep Snap disabled.
| Happily2020 wrote:
| What wild customisations are you talking about?
|
| As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse,
| Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to
| bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.
|
| Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I
| use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer
| ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well
| integrated.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play
| GoG games fine (*).
|
| (*): Apparently achievement support even on single player
| games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case)
| and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not
| care :p
| zamadatix wrote:
| > I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when
| you want the latest of something, Arch has it
|
| I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the
| oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories
| have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR
| and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than
| pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different
| package source normally.
| mock-possum wrote:
| You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn't shell out another
| $20-30 for a windows pro key? You're willing to burn a bunch of
| time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system
| setup, but you're not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling
| with setting up an offline windows account?
|
| I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but
| come on, "I switched to Linux because I didn't want to take an
| hour to set up Windows" really sounds like you never really
| wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an
| excuse.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux
| one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of
| the OS.
|
| And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows
| usable _now_ , when there is not knowing what Microsoft will
| do _next_?
| 7bit wrote:
| > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro
|
| Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers
| that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than
| theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction
| generally and any discussion about the installation process
| specifically.
|
| Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers
| would quit.
| DrBazza wrote:
| I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was
| last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all
| know what a squarified mess that was.
|
| Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
|
| For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an
| 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is
| different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no
| ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face
| demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet
| to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was
| probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows
| 2000.
| scoodah wrote:
| Afaik, you can choose to not sign into icloud when creating
| an account on your mac. It's not a hard requirement like it
| is on Windows, though they do obviously strongly nudge you to
| login to icloud.
| DrBazza wrote:
| I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5
| years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!
| cogman10 wrote:
| Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone
| familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it
| immediately.
|
| No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I
| as a long time windows user just really appreciate how
| familiar KDE feels.
| connicpu wrote:
| The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me
| to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to
| have an attitude of just implementing the features people
| want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but
| it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the
| box.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It's kind of funny because when I first got into linux it
| was practically the opposite story. Back in the day of
| KDE 2 or 3 and Gnome 2, KDE was the slow one to bring in
| features while Gnome felt like the wild wild west.
|
| Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically
| walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I
| wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on
| startup. The gnome response for that was basically
| "You're not allowed to do that".
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well_
|
| This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| It isn't. There's no such thing in macOS. Local and iCloud
| accounts are not necessarily linked, never been.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Yes, as pointed out, I was mistaken, but then in my
| defence, I've only ever set up one Mac, 5 years ago, so
| I've only seen 'that screen' once.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard
| requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it,
| but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember,
| macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You might need it for the App Store if anything, but even
| then... You don't need the app store for installing
| software. Mac is at its peak currently, though the new
| glass UI stuff is a little over the top for me. I miss the
| old simpler UI. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I only use KDE, though it has weird instability from time to
| time. They just changed which gcc version I'm on so I am not
| sure if I've noticed the same instability or not. Overall
| though KDE is the perfect DE for me.
| xattt wrote:
| > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro
|
| It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter
| out people who don't want to troubleshoot themselves.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The arch advantage is that your system gets setup exactly how
| you want it and you have to consciously choose the software
| set you want to work with.
|
| That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| > Steam and Proton work perfectly
|
| I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I
| cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does
| not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about
| voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying
| the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
|
| So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends,
| or you punish yourself and install windows. It's a damned
| situation regardless of your choice
|
| [0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want,
| the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
| Zekio wrote:
| this is why a lot of people run arch and why valve based
| steamOS on arch instead of debian as the previous version
| was, you need a newer kernel and other packages to really
| play games on linux with the least friction possible
| AuthAuth wrote:
| thats not a kernel issue its an anti cheat issue. No kernel
| except the windows kernel is going to allow him to play
| battlefield and cod.
| Mond_ wrote:
| Sounds like it might be an issue with your setup, considering
| that other people have no problems running it. Hard to tell
| what the problem is, but definitely a frustrating situation.
| tapoxi wrote:
| This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc
| Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play
| fine.
|
| I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting
| into it after interest in the game waned.
|
| Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to
| alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord
| works fine, and every game is cross-play.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Oh ok. I'll just stop playing my favorite games
| everdrive wrote:
| Isn't call of duty the game where Nikki Minaj shoots the cat
| from the Simpsons? I think I'll pass.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| That's Fortnite and while you can pass, I don't want to
| pass.. I want to play it!
| simgoh wrote:
| Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left
| Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I
| try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the
| ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the
| much better go-to.
|
| [0] - https://massgrave.dev/
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is
| demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer
| with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a
| Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel
| CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The
| company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old
| computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to
| Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue.
| In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard
| on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
| simgoh wrote:
| Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money
| "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular
| consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they
| get once you're on their operating system. How many non-
| power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data
| that MS collects through their operating system? How many
| people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is
| probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.
|
| On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in
| compliance with licensing agreements so they still see
| whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of
| computers that run Windows.
| tyjen wrote:
| The only game I regularly play refuses to pay their anti-cheat
| for Linux support. After Windows 10 support ends, my gaming
| days are probably over.
| runjake wrote:
| I use Arch but don't want to fiddle with stuff anymore.
|
| Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not
| quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone
| familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my
| system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times
| taught me a lot about operating systems and computers.
| Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any
| other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did
| configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system,
| if I ever even need to install an OS again.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run
| them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
|
| Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off
| so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and
| playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was
| free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent
| Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in
| Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses
| the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots,
| etc. in Steam.
|
| The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those
| companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
|
| I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).
|
| PS I keep Snap disabled.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| While you _can_ use their launcher, you don't _have_ to. Once
| you buy the game, you can just download the installer and run
| it to install on your box. If you want you can save the
| install package somewhere if you think you'll enjoy the game
| for years to come and don't want to be dependent on GOG.
|
| I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent
| games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner
| with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have
| plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more
| recent.
| godelski wrote:
| > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro
|
| Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to
| create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy.
|
| There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I
| do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install
| Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast
| because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's
| totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's
| the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone
| but you can build an environment that can become what anyone
| needs.
|
| But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main
| machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where
| I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so
| I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and
| a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade
| without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and
| that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also
| give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot
| partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
| Jnr wrote:
| I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they
| want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user
| choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you
| want then you learn it.
|
| I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by
| far the best way to understand it.
|
| Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out
| there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
| godelski wrote:
| > Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro
| out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
|
| I think this is an important thing to recognize. It's
| exactly why I tell people that _want to learn Linux_ to do
| it (but not people who want to _use_ Linux). The struggle
| is real, but the struggle is part of the learning process.
| The truth is that distros are not that different from one
| another. The main difference is in the package manager and
| the release schedule of their package databases.
|
| I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, _the Arch Wiki is
| your best friend_. It doesn 't matter if you're using
| Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually
| the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is
| the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out
| there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are
| written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance
| of writing good documentation)
| morshu9001 wrote:
| My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet
| and thus get an offline account.
|
| Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less
| annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually
| triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about.
| Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either
| OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| What kinda graphics card do you have in there? I'm considering
| building one soon.
| simoncion wrote:
| With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-
| fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to
| purchase a new computer.
|
| Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a
| Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT.
| Both work great.
| commandersaki wrote:
| If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without
| a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows
| does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't
| want to pay for it.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| How do you figure out Arch but not OOBE?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Pacman -syyu
|
| One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will
| fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between
| doing it.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other
| major distro)
|
| Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago,
| and that's why people liked it.
|
| The modern install process is paired down to something like 10
| steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your
| root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter
| and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure
| your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install
| media, and boot into your bare bones system.
|
| The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools
| you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to
| remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but
| it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My first distro was Slackware, which I setup all myself. I
| just don't see any true value in what could be a simple GUI.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I
| have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop
| (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how
| they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you
| find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with
| drivers?
| ziml77 wrote:
| There actually is an installer for arch. I haven't tried it
| myself, but there should be an application included on the ISO
| called archinstall which helps with basically everything that's
| part of the install guide on the Arch wiki.
| amputect wrote:
| I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or
| less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated
| runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play
| Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular
| hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a
| hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a
| rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of
| their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the
| 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear
| resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire
| gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos.
|
| Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with
| Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with
| more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or
| anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I
| switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a
| windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how
| many games support Linux now.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| > gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in
| order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming
| rig,
|
| If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is
| like $200. Makes no sense.
|
| Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't
| make sense.
| xtracto wrote:
| Mu gaming needs are more than fulfilled with Steam/Proton and
| Xbox Live. Both of them work in Linux (Mint is my flavour of
| choice) and Mac.
| sylware wrote:
| Don't worry, microsoft is putting its rust all over open source.
| teekert wrote:
| I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use
| Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For
| 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.
|
| I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to
| do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in
| OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love
| living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop
| with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery
| indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like
| that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
|
| I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so
| long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point
| that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you
| don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why
| would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished...
| it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with
| drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Every company I've worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the
| experience for me is the same on Linux. What's so appealing
| about the classic Office suite?
| teekert wrote:
| Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on
| some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams
| has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But
| overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux).
| Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become
| significantly better over the last year, before that I
| avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is
| numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference
| management. That just really annoying if people use those
| features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but
| mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's
| papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.
| mring33621 wrote:
| Worth clicking for the "Microslop" logo alone!
|
| Shortcut: https://www.himthe.dev/img/blog/microslop/4.png
| scalemaxx wrote:
| Curious to see how the Favicon will change too!
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| > my first computer was a Windows 98 machine
|
| The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.
| jmarcher wrote:
| The most puzzling part is why someone would run Windows 98 on a
| machine built around 2002/2003 (according to the specs).
| bhewes wrote:
| Ah 3d is fine with Maya and all the real VFX running on Linux.
| And we haven't had problems with game dev for years on Linux.
| Agree otherwise good to see another join.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Awesome, good to know that, and glad to be here
| bhewes wrote:
| Houdini,3dcoat,Nuke are the three things we pay for, will use
| Maya when we work with Maya artists, but dcc is mostly
| 3dcoat-blender-houndini workflow.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Unity works fine for example. I used it for a bit over a year
| on a project we did for multiple platforms
| a_e_k wrote:
| I spent over a decade developing rendering software used in
| VFX, and ran CentOS Linux as my development platform at work.
|
| We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became
| a thing back in 2014.
|
| https://vfxplatform.com/
| bilekas wrote:
| Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but
| the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.
|
| The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating
| simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the
| webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine
| was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.
|
| Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is
| atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's
| to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have
| come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up
| with Windows anymore.
|
| But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer
| market much anymore anyway.
| mixedbit wrote:
| I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always
| kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've
| build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have
| Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without
| major issues.
| sporedro wrote:
| It's sort of crazy how much changed in the past few years. The
| only things that don't run well under wine/proton now I feel
| like are online games with kernel anticheat and products like
| Autodesk or Adobe.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| There are some commercial Applications that just won't work
| on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for
| windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an
| absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained
| development software.
|
| Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor
| on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary
| if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or
| Games.
|
| I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work
| done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big"
| problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all
| team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
| consp wrote:
| Ah, the Microsoft "updates".
|
| After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game
| optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio
| unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and
| stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger
| update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with
| windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some
| updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
|
| The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with
| 98SE on it.
| Markoff wrote:
| My experience is more like:
|
| "I'll switch when Linux supports X."
|
| Linux still doesn't supports X.
|
| "Okay, but how about my X?"
|
| Linux still doesn't supports X.
|
| "Well, X is still missing..."
|
| Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the
| alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.
|
| Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro
| Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which
| had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of
| course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.
|
| So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install
| Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
|
| wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't
| detect Windows
|
| my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no
| point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows
|
| I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to
| install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case
| something would happen with my daily driver laptop).
|
| I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but
| somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection
| status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop
| experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work,
| where I could actually install it.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| If the activities are distinct, dual boot. I do all my dev in
| linux and boot into windows for gaming.
|
| Dev in linux is so much nicer for me than dev in Windows.
| iotapi322 wrote:
| You know what's funny about this article.... Back in 2012 I had
| the same problems with Windows Update and that is what forced me
| to go to a mac. I've never looked back.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _You had unsaved work? Too bad, it 's gone, get bent._
|
| This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep
| and the next morning I discover it has decided to close
| everything to install an update.
|
| Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will
| about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
| kavalg wrote:
| Not just a couple of times. It happened to me countless times.
| boxed wrote:
| Meanwhile on macOS, modern apps will not lose data if the power
| is janked out at any point.
| DanOpcode wrote:
| Happened to me just a few days ago. Woke up, turned on PC, all
| my open programs were gone due to a Windows Update...
| nashashmi wrote:
| Happens to me way too often. And it is frustrating if backup
| auto save is not included in the system. I have disabled auto
| update because of this.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I installed Windows Update Blocker (AKA "WUB") and i've stopped
| the nonsense shutdowns late at night.
|
| That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I
| last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm
| not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine
| installs fresh...
| causalscience wrote:
| The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual
| crazy part.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many
| TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even
| through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10
| years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And
| Microsoft just doesn't care.
|
| This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to
| get their work done, without the user having to worry about
| insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google
| Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser
| or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled
| document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it
| or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But
| as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just
| persists stuff automatically.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't disagree, but you have to know which applications
| reliably keep their state across restarts. You can't
| blindly rely on it on any desktop system. The Microsoft
| Office applications actually do auto-save documents since a
| couple of years ago, even though the recovery UX can be a
| bit awkward.
|
| What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have
| applications running that don't do that, when Windows
| reboots for updates.
| wpm wrote:
| On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app
| developer just opts into using them. If they don't,
| quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally,
| and _block_ the restart to the point where the OS will
| timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to
| purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I 've
| ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the
| power button down.
|
| Window locations and app state are written to plist
| files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume.
| I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened
| sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
| layer8 wrote:
| The blocking happens on Windows as well, except that the
| timeout logic is the reverse: it force-quits the
| applications then, because presumably the potential
| security update is more important.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| Yep. On Mac (and Linux, actually) I know of some
| applications that do that. I also know that on Windows
| most applications don't do that. I would also never leave
| un-saved work open on Windows.
|
| I was replying to: "The fact that you leave unsaved work
| overnight is the actual crazy part". As long as you know
| which apps auto-save and know you can somewhat rely on
| them, it's not so crazy.
| causalscience wrote:
| Ok, I wouldn't do that because I don't know what random
| apps are doing.
|
| But if you're happy with your workflow, don't mind me.
| HendrikHensen wrote:
| Of course, everyone has their own workflow. I won't tell
| anyone to adjust their workflow. But the exact point I
| was trying to make is that it's not random apps. It's
| specific apps that one knows about and how they behave.
| And once you know those apps (like TextEdit, Google Docs,
| etc) you can pretty much rely on it to survive reboots
| and power outages.
| chimprich wrote:
| There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save
| their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI
| model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI
| models running in a loop implementing tasks.
|
| Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's
| simple to recover.
|
| I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down
| without permission.
| pier25 wrote:
| Personally it's rare that I leave something unsaved. That
| said it has never been an issue on macOS in 20 years.
| simgoh wrote:
| I aspire to have your level of confidence in anything that
| amounts to leaving unsaved work in any sort of shape or form.
| ebbi wrote:
| The point is, the user shouldn't have to work around the OS.
| The OS should work around the user. If there are unsaved
| files, the OS should not be installing an update and removing
| unsaved work.
| anon291 wrote:
| Correct. Windows is not a serious operating system. It really
| never has been. I've been on desktop linux for decades now.
| Linux is a serious operating system. Nothing happens without
| you asking it too. My linux computers are never turned off,
| since they day I turn them on, except for the occasional kernel
| upgrade. Otherwise, all upgrades are live. Even most kernel
| upgrades can be avoided if you use one of the modern patch
| frameworks
| mminer237 wrote:
| I literally cannot count the number of times I put my Linux
| computer to sleep and it just doesn't wake up, and I have to
| hard reset the power to get it to do anything. I would never
| leave anything unsaved open for an extended period of time on
| a graphical Linux system.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Happens 90% of the time on my standard Elitebook laptop
| when I run windows. It just crashes and has the fan going
| crazy. On Linux it's been fine since day one, some 5 years
| ago.
|
| But this is a bug, and it's very different from the OS
| voluntarily rebooting without your consent.
| schlch wrote:
| I have been using Linux as a desktop operating system for what I
| believe is almost two decades. Recently(?) I see distro named
| like CashyOS and Bazzite being thrown around. Am I missing out on
| something?
| 3abiton wrote:
| If you don't want the "hassle" of flag optimization when
| compiling binaries, CachyOS is basically Arch but with
| optimized binaries. Otherwise, Gentoo all the way, you just
| need a good machine.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There are many really good ones these days that will have a
| much better experience than windows. I've used Ubuntu, Pop,
| Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked
| great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend
| to run that on my machines now.
|
| Once SteamOS becomes generally available I'll switch to that.
| It's incredibly polished on Steam Deck
| mythz wrote:
| EOL of Windows 10 forced me to, but I'm not mad - Desktop Linux
| is Great!
|
| It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and
| general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny
| valley kludge.
| jojohack wrote:
| Timing of your post is spot on. I just emptied a drive to prep
| for a Linux switch this morning ( for the same reasons ) :D
| breezykoi wrote:
| Audio latency on Linux was already very low long before PipeWire,
| thanks to JACK.
| scalemaxx wrote:
| Love that the Favicon for the blog is the Internet Explorer logo.
| Will that change?
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I haven't driven a Windows box since 2010 (and even then it was
| just a few months at work) and I'm perfectly happy! Except I'm on
| a Mac and have been at every job since 2006 when they came out
| with the Intel-based ones. I of course run Linux on VMs at work,
| but my daily driver has been and likely will forever be a Mac. I
| don't miss installing/tweaking video drivers or registry
| settings. Things just work 99.99% of the time for me. No one is
| perfect and Apple has made mistakes, but for me, I'm 100%
| satisfied.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| How do you find macOS Tahoe? I have deliberately avoided
| installing it on my M3 MacBook Air that I use for work mainly
| due to the lack of attention to detail they seem to have dumped
| on the UI.
|
| I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days
| and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of
| view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.
|
| I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development
| but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small
| enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows
| 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the
| house, but do I hate using Windows 11.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-
| consensual updates
|
| MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.
|
| Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns,
| it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams
| fainpul wrote:
| Same on macOS -- pestering me with the Tahoe update
| notification and the buttons are basically "now" or "later".
| chris_wot wrote:
| I've been working at a school that uses a mix of Surfacebooks, HP
| Elitebooks and MacBook Air M2s (now migrating everyone to M4s!).
|
| I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal
| performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I've never had
| to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot
| get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates
| take forever, reboots aren't very fast, programs crash, and (not
| OS related) but the new Outlook is _universally_ despised.
|
| I've never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly
| as I've seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want
| MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to
| access the one app that relies on Windows.
| kavalg wrote:
| It was a very entertaining read. I am just wondering if this one
| may be actionable:
|
| "And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed
| onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how
| much we tell you to."
| burningChrome wrote:
| Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed
| away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it
| had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts
| about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and
| MacOS are.
|
| Only to see this article today. lol
|
| I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation
| is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for
| the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off
| Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do.
| Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS
| and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other,
| but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different
| areas.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I'm kind of curious why Adobe hasn't gone all-in on Linux by
| now. IIRC Adobe apps were built on cross-platform tooling like
| Java (InDesign) and AIR (all the CS UI, and then the
| underpinnings in C++).
|
| I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows
| failing, but their inaction does mean the open source
| alternatives will continue to get better, and _that_ will hurt
| them.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Every few years someone posts the same thing in the Adobe
| forums which then piss off the moderators and Adobe
| "experts". They continue to say the same thing which makes
| zero sense.
|
| I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of:
| _" Linux users are open source people and expect everything
| for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no
| need to port them for Linux users because so few of them
| would be willing to pay for our products."_
|
| A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is
| already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-
|
| And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better
| and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I
| hold out hope they will be one day.
| gortok wrote:
| I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-
| for-gaming rig. It was "new" in 2016, so I hold out hope that
| there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are
| being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the
| problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that
| machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not
| play well with dual booting. I don't know if it's gotten better,
| but as of now I wouldn't be dual booting anyway so conceivably it
| wouldn't be an issue.
| al_borland wrote:
| > I wouldn't be dual booting anyway
|
| This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really
| looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've
| always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to
| think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets
| forgotten.
|
| Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find
| new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer
| for and accept it.
|
| I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt
| like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys
| admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while,
| then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked
| the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it
| wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming
| on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play
| games when I feel like playing games.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I doubt the dual boot issue was due to UEFI. It's more likely,
| Windows was clobbering over GRUB and overwriting your
| bootloader, as it likes to do. Windows _really_ wants to be the
| only OS on your drive.
|
| Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS
| on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot
| menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single
| drive.
|
| As for games, plug them into protondb
| (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through
| the comments
| Toutouxc wrote:
| My desktop is a gaming-only machine, it's still on Windows 10
| and it will probably stay on Windows 10 until Steam stops
| working.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Similar journey, different distro! I wanted a Linux gaming
| machine, but given my recent admission into the cult of NixOS, I
| went with Jovian.
|
| Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience
| on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak
| the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and
| has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up
| emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)
| jimbo808 wrote:
| Forced? It's been a delight. I'd say if anything, I've only ever
| felt forced to use MacOS or Windows, never forced to use Linux.
| domo__knows wrote:
| Just saw a video on YouTube video
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25)
| that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I
| totally forgot about booting up and magically having software
| appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made.
| I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never
| looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS
| updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid
| glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a
| week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even
| more screen real estate).
| LorenDB wrote:
| I'll copy my comment on another article here:
|
| 2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
|
| - Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to
| Linux to escape Windows 11
|
| - DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including
| some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
|
| - Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and
| selfhosting
|
| - Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
|
| - Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and
| crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
|
| - I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various
| media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed
| with how good it was
|
| - And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam
| Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around
| them
|
| In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and
| point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
| habitable5 wrote:
| > Windows 10 went EOL
|
| Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.
|
| Another very important feature which does not get mentioned
| enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an
| ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets
| you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket
| response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal
| with the driver problems Linux _always_ has, community support
| is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-
| eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and
| people directed me to the Arch Wiki page _that I wrote_. I
| stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on
| W10 /WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get
| my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I
| reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they
| didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
|
| Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for
| it? Yes. Is there experience with it? -\\_(tsu)_/-
| dmix wrote:
| My parents paying for One Drive when they didn't need it is why I
| finally moved them off Windows as well.
|
| I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and
| One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Another day another "hey guys I switched Linux" post gets pushed
| to the top of the heap. These add nothing except create an echo
| chamber about great Linux is and Windows is the worst.
| hereme888 wrote:
| It's worth noting that if someone has the skill to install and
| run Linux with games, they probably have the skill to use
| massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts and ask AI to help bypass
| to install a local Windows account. And that probable takes less
| time.
| alexambarch wrote:
| As an Ableton user myself, I'm pretty surprised that this
| musician could just... switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to
| show how dire the situation was I guess.
|
| I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know
| encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching
| away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very
| difficult to get people to shake off.
| morserer wrote:
| Bitwig was developed by ex-Ableton devs, and the layout is
| incredibly similar. It's a very easy transition compared to
| coming from a DAW like FL or Logic.
|
| It's also a _really_ attractive offering once you hear about
| it. It 's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton
| for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the
| software contains a modular software synth atop which most of
| the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its
| value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
|
| Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
| bichiliad wrote:
| I came in here looking for this thread specifically (I can't
| imagine moving off of Ableton). Thanks for taking a sec to
| write this up! I might give it a try, just for the synth
| alone.
| morserer wrote:
| You're so welcome!
|
| The soft modular synth is called The Grid, fyi. Little
| square button on the lower left corner of any instrument
| lets you see it in Grid form.
|
| Oh, man, and just wait until you find out that you can
| modulate literally every control in the UI...
|
| Have fun :)
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too)
| is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at
| all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even
| worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-
| well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...
| morserer wrote:
| Hmm. I'm on a stock Arch install and had no latency or
| quality issues to speak of. Bluetooth works out of the box
| using `bluez` and `blueman`, though Bluetooth is still
| Bluetooth, with inherent latency. Some headphones have low-
| latency modes that can be activated in their respective
| apps at the expense of ANC/battery life, maybe that'll
| help?
|
| The apt command you're looking for may be the audio
| backend, though. `apt install pipewire wireplumber -y`.
| Won't break your existing pulseaudio setup, but will allow
| low-latency operations. (I think--I avoid the dumpster fire
| that is Ubuntu like the plague, so ymmv)
| publicdebates wrote:
| How likely is a future where Microsoft
|
| (a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
|
| (b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have
| keyboard/mouse plugged in,
|
| (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it
| utilitarian again,
|
| (d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality
| dev/office apps?
|
| It would be _so nice_ if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and
| started from there.
|
| (Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One
| can only dream.)
| spikej wrote:
| I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this
| for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and
| just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features,
| and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still
| revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
| bootsmann wrote:
| > (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it
| utilitarian again
|
| Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a
| massive userbase that costs them money but doesn't generate any
| revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is
| ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so
| I doubt your wish will ever come true.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Give me back the proper search which last worked Windows 7-ish
| (or XP?). And traditional Office interface (not stupid
| "context-specific" tiles).
| cogman10 wrote:
| 0%
|
| I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have
| a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like
| they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
|
| And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see
| consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get
| around/away from consumer windows.
| nalekberov wrote:
| Microsoft is its own worst enemy.
|
| Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and
| convince millions of users to use Windows.
|
| Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but
| still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could
| make them happy.
|
| I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-
| in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility
| issues, but for non-tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.
|
| I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never
| looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy
| windows was much more painful.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a
| delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons.
| Took a lot of setup, but it's _dialed_ now and just works. My
| computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.
|
| I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS
| monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career
| and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives
| worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
|
| Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power
| users, _definitely_ dual boot and give it a try.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the
| configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like
| least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd
| unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app
| settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For
| packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all
| three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.
|
| The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that
| came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual
| booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
|
| Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that
| I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so
| nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at
| this point I don't think there's anything that could make me
| switch back.
| fguerraz wrote:
| They lost me at Vista lol
|
| In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I
| was always more interested in the computer itself rather than
| what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed
| a particular application. I also was more interested in making a
| game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing
| it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
| khat wrote:
| Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to
| hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of
| product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its
| computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought
| 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a
| direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other
| PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to
| dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific
| hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use.
| The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which
| deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the
| popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people
| used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system
| NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows
| is just awful.
| Aperocky wrote:
| macOS has been quite popular in the United States for a long
| time now (and I suspect it's not so popular in other region not
| due to product, but price), showing that things can exist
| without those "features".
|
| I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically
| open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware
| that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a
| month.
| radicalethics wrote:
| I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam
| and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC
| only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I
| basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles
| that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I
| was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with
| .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...
|
| I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX
| 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good
| Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a
| blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to
| recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd
| since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back
| to my windows drive...
|
| I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a
| Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and
| results etc. on the browser.
|
| Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started
| typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a
| freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a
| beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this
| was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.
|
| I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the
| updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better
| still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to
| do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can
| play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop
| Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot
| of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect,
| but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now
| seems to regularly.
|
| Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly
| drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done"
| and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting
| worse.
| otikik wrote:
| Yeah. The ads in he start menu are a sign that you are no
| longer the customer, you are the product. Windows has other
| similar "features".
| blackcatsec wrote:
| I do not have ads in my start menu, and no, I didn't
| "debloat" my PC. This is a base install where I flipped a
| couple of settings in the start menu options.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| For those that want to remove items, You can quickly
| disable these options by going into Settings >
| Personalization > Start and turn off "Show recommendations
| for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more".
|
| It's like a 10 second fix and basically everything is gone.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's not what I'm referring to... it was a beta test
| that included actual internet ads in the start menu
| search results... It was literally a product I was
| looking at on the previous day.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| Again, let's clarify here.
|
| Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider
| Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the
| Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty
| plainly how to turn off.
|
| I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up
| about this. You read some internet headline and start
| screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take
| 2 seconds to literally turn off.
| dijit wrote:
| The Ass-Fucker 3000 fucks you in the arse when you use
| your car ignition.
|
| But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in
| settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists
| and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.
|
| And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well,
| at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.
|
| Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn
| off. What, you want to use a _BMW_? Be a _BMW-user_? A
| _sheep_? All your tools already integrate with our car
| anyway. There 's no real choice, is there - unless you
| want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work
| properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept
| the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-
| Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.
|
| Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my
| software.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This sounds like Boeing MCAS cant.
| tracker1 wrote:
| _AGAIN_ this is _NOT_ what I was referring to... I 'm
| referring to when you start typing in the name of a
| program you have installed, and you get a short list of
| matches, with maybe additional results... not a PRODUCT
| ADVERTISEMENT (not software) from the internet at the
| top, which is what I got.
|
| It's not a feature that should EVER exist at an OS
| level... I didn't even mind the adjacent product ads or
| the Recommended section you mention that much... but it's
| emphatically not what I'm fucking talking about.
|
| The fact that this was even something that was
| implemented and tested means that I'm not someone who
| will buy or choose Microsoft Windows at all from here
| forward. I have over 3 decades of development experience
| on/for/with software that runs on Windows.
|
| An even then... It doesn't matter if I can shut it off,
| it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It might be different if they didn't push updates every
| other month that changed settings like default browser
| back to their products.
|
| You're right that there are simple fixes but the point is
| that Microsoft is no longer on your side. You're now
| stuck defensivly scrambling for value in a product where
| you are no longer the customer.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean you can also copy my dotfiles onto your linux
| machine and have a more advanced system than anything
| windows would provide, and it'll take less than ten
| seconds, but this is 'fiddling' or somethin.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It was a test they ran on Insiders channel to see how
| people reacted to them. It never mated it into GA, or for
| that matter the entire insiders channels... They'll feature
| gate things to some insiders users and A/B test them to see
| how the user response looks. There was a bit of an uproar
| at the time for those that saw them, including myself... I
| ditched windows altogether (except my assigned work
| laptop).
| dijit wrote:
| You're missing the point entirely.
|
| The problem isn't that ads can be disabled. The problem is
| that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first
| place. Full stop. There's no universe where that's
| acceptable product design, and the fact that you can
| disable them (for now, at least) doesn't make it less
| offensive.
|
| I don't understand why you're going to bat for a trillion-
| dollar corporation here. Your settings work now. Great.
| They won't after the next feature update, this is a well-
| documented pattern. Windows updates routinely re-enable
| telemetry, Bing integration, and promotional content that
| users explicitly disabled. You're not configuring your OS,
| you're fighting it.
|
| The TPM2 requirement is pure planned obsolescence. Millions
| of perfectly good machines binned because Microsoft decided
| hardware from 2016 is suddenly "insecure"... whilst the
| actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
|
| It's a corporate compliance tool, not a security feature.
|
| The Insiders build being referenced had actual web
| advertisements in search results. That's where this is
| headed. If you're comfortable defending that trajectory,
| carry on flipping those settings.
| benjiro wrote:
| > The problem is that a paid operating system ships with
| ads in the first place.
|
| You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full
| of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on
| by the OEM.
|
| Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a
| big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home
| and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper
| and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean.
| Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is
| just that ...
|
| But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the
| desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are
| missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE,
| master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other
| desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s
| (probably are) and never gotten updated.
|
| And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10.
| There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same
| with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time
| W10 was well polished and less buggy).
|
| The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more,
| then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh
| install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use
| the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows.
| That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane
| good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the
| os/desktop switch.
|
| I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are
| more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS,
| tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on
| their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply
| want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can
| literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa
| versa, and it will simply work with the correct full
| performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the
| draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.
|
| For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to
| Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back.
| Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive
| benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like
| me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases.
| What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux
| Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft
| does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes,
| it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh
| install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to
| remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year.
| So again, killer features?
|
| Often a lot of programs that are less developed or
| stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too
| often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by
| developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers
| involved _lol_
|
| I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a
| lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again.
| Resulting in this lag ...
|
| That is my yearly Linux rant _hahaha_. And yes, i know,
| W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and
| see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies
| down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting
| that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then
| get a better W12 again.
| dijit wrote:
| > You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often
| full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but
| add-on by the OEM.
|
| This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it
| subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the
| trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner
| experiences (often with the same manufacturer).
|
| Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or
| Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take
| it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with Pop in general, I did upgrade
| to COSMIC pre-release about 6 months ago, and although
| there have been rough edges, less than some of my Win11
| experiences. I don't really fiddle that much in practice,
| I did spend a year with Budgie, but only the first week
| fiddling. Pop's out of the box is about 90% of what I
| want, which is better than most.
|
| I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have
| used them for work off and on over the years... I'm
| currently using a very locked down windows laptop
| assigned from work. Not having WSL and Docker have held
| me back a lot though.
|
| In the end, I do most of my work in Linux anyway... it's
| where what I work on tends to get deployed and I don't
| really do much that doesn't work on Linux without issue
| at this point. Windows, specifically since Win11 has
| continued to piss me off and I jumped when I saw
| something that was just too much for me to consider
| dealing with. I ran insiders for years to get the latest
| WSL integrations and features. This bit me a few times,
| but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore.
|
| C# work is paying the bills... would I rather work on
| Rust or TS, sure... but I am where I am. I'm similar to
| you in that I looked at Linux every few years, kicked the
| tires, ran it for a month or a couple weeks and always
| went back. This time a couple years ago... it stuck.
| Ironically, my grandmother used Linux much longer than I
| ever did on her computer that I maintained for her. For
| her, it just worked, and she didn't need much beyond the
| browser.
| anon291 wrote:
| > if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in
| Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel
| like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and
| never gotten updated.
|
| All modern Linux desktops feel more advanced than the
| corresponding windows version, IMO. I just installed
| standard Raspbian on a bunch of Raspi5s, and it feels
| snappier and more advanced than Windows already.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You paid for windows 11? They basically give it away to
| end users.
| dijit wrote:
| Yes, I paid for Windows 11. It came bundled with the
| PS1,900 laptop I bought. The fact that the licence cost
| is hidden in the hardware price doesn't make it free.
|
| And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still
| wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free.
| Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system
| UI.
|
| Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year.
| They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative
| monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away
| with it, not because they need to.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not really. Only upgrading an existing Windows 10
| installation is free.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| OEM volume pricing is $20 USD or so for system builders
| like Dell, HP, etc last time I saw it, but that was a
| long time ago. So technically yes it was purchased if you
| bought a system, it was just built into the price.
| 3form wrote:
| >whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote
| attestation.
|
| This is not highlighted nearly enough. It's very bad.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| How generous of them to allow their paying user to disable
| the ads. It's only a matter of time until this either
| becomes some sort of premium feature.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's really hard to maintain a product team where the mandate
| is just "don't break anything and keep the quality high".
| Especially something with as big of an installed base as
| Windows.
|
| The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff
| and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product
| is pretty much "done".
| jayd16 wrote:
| The mandate seams to be "squeeze everything for a
| subscription fee and keep the quality... actually just the
| first thing".
| cogman10 wrote:
| I disagree, I think companies mostly just don't want to spend
| development money on existing "finished" products. That's the
| smell I'm getting from microsoft.
|
| There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with
| performance in windows 11. There should be people in the
| windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product
| owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in
| getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an
| "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete
| it.
| tracker1 wrote:
| No, it really shouldn't be... You can reduce headcount a lot,
| which they did, and concentrate on bugs (including security
| reports), while working with hardware vendors for if/when new
| features need to be integrated for better usability.
|
| If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to
| a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality
| gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and
| released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu
| that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old
| menu that has what you are actually looking for because the
| old extension interface was broken.
|
| Want a real exercise in _fun_ ... just for fun, because I
| know it 's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on
| desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs
| for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it...
| that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in
| there, but every third update will disable it all again. I
| get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to
| run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.
| k6hkUZtLUM wrote:
| I want to chime in here. It's advertisements on my desktop that
| repels me. There is something deeply personal about ads in my
| desktop that feels like being violated. This is a computer that
| I paid for, with software that I pay for, that includes all my
| most personal files and data. Seeing ads on the OS completely
| eroded my trust.
|
| Of course, I still use Windows for various things, but I have
| too much "ick" for it to be the system where I check my email,
| manage my business, keep my important files, etc.
|
| Windows is really great for lots of things, but I don't trust
| it.
| ajross wrote:
| > I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based
| distribution
|
| Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to
| get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's
| least prepared to accept new users.
|
| The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own
| distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and
| so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when
| they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
|
| For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install
| Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with
| nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we
| wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a
| reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the
| bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
|
| Now? CachyOS. Yikes.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros
| with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new
| "hey guys I made a OS!" types.
| ajross wrote:
| > There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros
|
| Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love
| customization and choice when they understand it. No one
| wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing
| mess right now.
|
| Also note that the distinction between "very stable and
| reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to
| people who know how the distro is put together.
| theYipster wrote:
| But that's the point. Choice and customization. It's the
| natural result of FOSS and the as-designed modularity of
| the Linux ecosystem.
|
| Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is
| easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference
| between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most
| setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely
| and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and
| variations and distributions and desktop environments and
| window managers and the like, pretty much every popular
| distro uses a recent or near recent version of the
| monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important
| stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel
| with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for
| music & gaming.
|
| I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and
| to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or
| Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
| ajross wrote:
| It's not anything about CachyOS in particular, frankly I
| don't know it and I'm sure it's fine. It's that the culture
| of "I'll grab this known-good base and tweak it, then
| advertise it to the world as the next best thing" is just
| toxic for Regular People wanting to learn about stuff.
|
| Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend
| to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you
| a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the
| feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?
|
| People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've
| used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works,
| where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for
| experimental kernel scheduler implementations!
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I use it for a month as daily driver. For Linux it is ok.
| throw7 wrote:
| I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have
| given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on
| mate).
|
| It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my
| mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it.
| (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
|
| Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other
| family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain
| integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker
| extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows
| on my pc.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for
| most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before,
| most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration
| issues or hardware issues. And I still stand by this even as I've
| had issues over the years here or there.
|
| I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was
| OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though
| it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders
| wasn't showing up. But that's about it.
|
| My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it
| (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just
| absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.
|
| I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my
| monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had
| Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple
| Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).
|
| I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they
| just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools
| proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the
| hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard.
| Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which
| is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.
|
| The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer
| with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But,
| most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about
| doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep
| going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business
| devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS
| update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was
| incompatible RAM.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets
| for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated
| before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either
| configuration issues or hardware issues.
|
| And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with
| windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your
| experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other
| complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads
| yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft
| products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it?
| OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what
| some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and
| trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've
| got issues with it not working right too.
| brockers wrote:
| It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if
| they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have
| always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this
| effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become
| less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and
| watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is
| Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer,
| music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control,
| easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to
| mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage.
| There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from
| Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more
| comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.
| Archelaos wrote:
| If you were primarily targeting a Windows market for a desktop
| application, but want to develop under Linux, what tech stack
| would you choose?
| dz0ny wrote:
| I just want to mention that most apps that would be laggy on Wine
| just work via
| https://flathub.org/en/apps/ru.linux_gaming.PortProton. Install
| PortProton double click .exe install app and off you go.
|
| - xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR -
| professional radio station
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They
| gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of
| a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.
|
| Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more
| than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds
| to open at all.
|
| Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
|
| I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print
| Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping
| Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse
| over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc
| does/doesn't work.
|
| If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to
| save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
|
| If Windows 11 struggles _this_ badly on a brand new laptop that I
| 'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how
| miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have
| been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. _oof._
|
| Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even _do_ that KDE
| Plasma 5 wasn 't doing a decade ago? How did it take _this_ long
| to get a tabbed file browser?
| willk wrote:
| Your first gripe kind of sounds like DLP software is installed
| on the system and it is scanning files you're "accessing".
| AnonC wrote:
| On my company provided laptop with Windows 11 (previously
| Windows 10), the top three CPU usage was and is usually from
| Antimalware Executable, Microsoft Defender and MS Teams (or
| Crowdstrike). I don't download files or get files from other
| sources often, yet these things keep doing busywork and
| slowing things down. Despite virus and threat protection
| running quick scans often and forcing a full disk scan every
| couple of weeks or so.
|
| It's almost as if these programs are people who ought to show
| that they're doing something even though they're just heating
| the room and running the fan.
| rahkiin wrote:
| Same here. ng install takes 2000x as long as on my
| similairly priced mac. Installing a package for any
| language locks up the laptop for indexing
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't know, my personal windows install which I use for
| photoshop, lightroom, and the occasional game also has
| similar issues, and it only has the included windows
| defender. I've noticed on many computers that whenever there
| are a bunch of files in a directory, the explorer grinds to a
| halt.
|
| At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-
| handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and
| Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the
| time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing
| something which is fully equivalent, like installing an
| IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and _many_
| more on Windows.
|
| The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux,
| even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH.
| Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something.
| This morning I booted windows and the fan was running
| constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in
| outlook.
| zerd wrote:
| If it's DLP then using alternative file browsers should also
| be affected, right? Which at least in my case it isn't.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter
| how faster your system is.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or
| timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that
| under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few
| hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and
| then however long it takes to send the request and get the
| response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an
| accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone
| is always hitting a different set of connections. This
| creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything
| you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all
| over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't
| show up in any resource monitors.
|
| HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with
| undefined timings.
| pelotron wrote:
| Microsoft Windows: Accidental Microservice Architecture
| Edition
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| The real question is why is my file browser blocking on an
| http call? Oh right, tracking/telemetry/ads.
| bambax wrote:
| Same experience here, but I'm not sure it's just MS fault;
| companies have a way of installing a bunch of stupid software
| on top of one another, that you can't get rid of without admin
| rights, that continuously do things that slow the system down.
|
| (And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have
| a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have
| tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a
| while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
| bunderbunder wrote:
| It seems industry-wide these days.
|
| What I've seen as an older-than-average developer is that the
| Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make
| time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects
| of user experience such as performance. Because I can't
| predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign
| story points to the task, and that means that this kind of
| work frequently results in a black spot on our team
| performance metrics.
|
| CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does
| need some time to bake. Fast iterations don't leave much time
| to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended
| effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| That's not agile's fault. That's the orgs fault.
|
| We used to have a few days set aside regularly to fix
| things that would never get prioritised.
| jjordan wrote:
| Microsoft is progressively making everything an instance of
| Chrome. They've seemingly altogether given up the notion of
| native platform rendering. The win32 api for native ui
| elements hasn't been touched in two decades. There have been
| a few failed attempts to move on from it like Siverlight,
| WinForms, UWP, LightSwitch, etc, but they never bothered to
| revisit their native UI library. So now everything is a
| Chrome instance.
| chwtutha wrote:
| I'm using it on a work-issued ThinkPad with 8 gigs of RAM and
| an Intel i3. It's fucking horrible
| curiousmindz wrote:
| Maybe investigate the background apps that are running on your
| laptop?
|
| By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in
| months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer
| displayed them instantly.
| Romario77 wrote:
| I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did
| some optimization - namely turning off some services.
|
| AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons
| file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and
| weather, some other optional/not needed things.
|
| They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think
| it's almost better to install a third party one.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office
| and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB
| ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the
| CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a
| Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows
| 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call,
| and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and
| frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing
| piece of hardware.
|
| It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from
| 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video
| calls, and it performs way better.
|
| The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may
| just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows
| out of my house for good.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core
|
| Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even
| bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube
| video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual
| core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7,
| will do a lot better.
|
| Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Me and my fiance both bought Lenovo laptops with 16GB RAM and
| 5000-series Ryzen, 500 GB SSD. They were on sale, and the
| price seemed nice.
|
| Some of the Windows 11 features are laughably, hilariously
| slow. If I enter anything in the taskbar search, it will take
| a solid 6-7 seconds for the app to appear in the result. The
| result window will just be blank. If I press enter after
| having typed in, the app will start - but still, it is so, so
| laggy.
|
| And some weird flicker when running certain applications. It
| was like that out of the box, and I feared I had gotten a
| defective screen - nope, only certain apps.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I may just try to load ChromeOS on it.
|
| If you wife would be OK with ChromeOS, basically all she
| needs is a browser. I just installed Linux on the computer my
| wife is using. For a while she was on Ubuntu and then once
| she got used to it, I replaced Ubuntu with Debian (because I
| use Debian everywhere: NUCs, laptop, dekstops, servers,
| hypervisor (Proxmox, which is debian), etc.). It's easier for
| me to just slap Debian everywhere but YMMV.
|
| People have no idea the amount of people who nowadays only
| need a browser (and working sound/microphone: but that
| nowadays Just Works [TM] on Linux).
|
| It's never been easier to switch people to Linux than it is
| today.
| b1temy wrote:
| Similar story here.
|
| Started a new job about a year and a half ago and got a
| powerful laptop with a really top of the line CPU and GPU, 64
| GB of RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB, needed for my work, even with
| these specs compile times are longer than I'd like...), and it
| was a terrible experience, coming from someone who's used to
| Linux having used it for a bit (started in 2013 with Ubuntu
| with a dual boot. Moved all-in to Arch in 2016, distro-hopped
| or played with different desktop enviroments/wms after that
| (Recently switched to niri), but all of which are leagues ahead
| of Windows 11 IMO. Only occasionally ran Windows on a spare
| device or a VM on the rare occasion I needed to, eg for work /
| school.)
|
| Tons of issues, slow in some operations, weird bugs (in the
| explorer like you, or with my Bluetooth headphones, or other
| issues), and even occasional blue screens! It's not just my
| setup too, my coworkers have similar issues. Plus, it just
| isn't a nice environment to use.
|
| At first, I tried to set up a nicer environment (as much as IT
| would allow). I installed PowerToys for QOL improvements,
| GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window manager setup, I tried
| debloating as much as I can, I installed Wezterm for my
| terminal (Why is Windows Terminal so hyped up? It seems like an
| extremely basic terminal emulator to me...), oh-my-posh theming
| for my shell, and several other things.
|
| But every convenience program I added just noticeably slowed
| down my laptop, to the point I just gave up some of the
| niceties and lived with it. Why is such basic functionality
| able to be run so smoothly on a much weaker device on Linux,
| but struggle on Windows on a much more powerful device? I can
| only think of one reason...
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with
| more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few
| seconds to open at all.
|
| There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer
| that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think
| they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience
| with explorer.
|
| And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual
| Studio is on its splash screen.
|
| And another that has written a debugger with the same
| performance.
|
| And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust
| opening in just under 2 seconds.
|
| Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance.
| Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant
| software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable
| future.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > version of explorer that's so fast
|
| https://filepilot.tech/
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB
| file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing
| when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command
| prompt and no output of an error.
|
| I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The latter is normal on windows. Executables have a
| header flag which specifies they either use the terminal
| or not. If a terminal program is opened from outside a
| terminal, it opens a terminal window. If a nonterminal
| program is opened from a terminal, it instantly detaches.
| smusamashah wrote:
| After downloading, did you open its properties and
| "unblock" it?
| ZeWaka wrote:
| $250 for a version with updates past a year? yikes
| skrebbel wrote:
| For a lifetime license incl updates forever that seems
| quite reasonable to me. It's a bit over a year of
| Netflix.
|
| In fact, given that it includes perpetual priority
| support (within a business day!) I expect the author's
| gonna change that soon, once he gets one of those
| infinitely demanding customers and realizes what a
| terrible mistake he made (inf support for a one-time
| payment, oops!). So better bite while it's hot!
|
| The EUR40 option for one year of updates is a lot more
| economical and is still a perpetual license for the
| software itself.
| fleshmonad wrote:
| Imagine paying for a file browser. This is why windows
| will always win. They have the most docile userbase ever.
| They'd rather pay 250 bucks for a file picker than to
| change OS.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| If you use software that is $10k/year and Windows only, a
| few bucks here and there to improve your quality of life
| is a rounding error
| yread wrote:
| Hey Total Commander is free/shareware (if you can live
| with the nag screen) and superior to anything on any OS
| katsura wrote:
| My solution to the nag screen was that I never turned off
| my computer, just put it to sleep, so Total Commander was
| always running.
|
| Interestingly, TC was one of the few software that I
| considered paying for, but in the end I didn't because
| they asked for too much information at the time. Not long
| later I switched to Linux, and I couldn't use TC there.
| int_19h wrote:
| This is more of a macOS thing.
|
| Windows users just don't pay and keep using Explorer.
| Gracana wrote:
| Now I'm shocked by the cost of Netflix.
| Tom1380 wrote:
| The monthly subscriptions always sound cheaper than they
| are
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| some folks about to make a decent amount of money if the
| trend wrt win11 continues
| skrebbel wrote:
| woa!!
| AuthAuth wrote:
| The problem is on windows you're competing directly against
| the guys who own the operating system. So even when there is
| a gap for a better file manager the one that microsoft makes
| is so entrenched and microsoft can make sure they always win.
| It sucks.
| deaddodo wrote:
| That was the argument used for IE/Edge. But eventually it
| got so terrible that the first thing everyone does now is
| install Chrome/Firefox/Brave.
|
| They obviously have an advantage, but it's not
| insurmountable to being garbage.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I found chrome was putting itself into "eco mode" on my
| Lenovo (work) laptop all of a sudden. Meant that waking up
| took FOREVER, and accessing a web page (required as part of a
| daily login) took 15+ seconds to load when first logging in,
| as opposed to a few seconds, which caused our password app to
| timeout at times, etc. Who the heck comes up with these
| ideas? "Eco mode" by default? And no way to disable it
| easily? I had to add an obscure switch to the chrome startup
| to make it run normally again.
| vee-kay wrote:
| A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so
| pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who
| gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as
| (portable) freeware since 15+ years.
|
| Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/
|
| Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast
| file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface,
| and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11).
| Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any
| new Windows PC.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| > If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I
| have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
|
| Try wsl --shutdown. Works for me when WSL hangs for no apparent
| reason.
|
| I've also noticed that, in my case, these hangs are somehow
| tied to Docker for Windows. Couldn't figure what triggers them
| so far, though. I just restart DFW and kill WSL when that
| happens.
| dole wrote:
| Restarting the vmcompute service sometimes helps. Doing so
| completely blue/blackscreened my machine this morning so it
| just makes me more confident in WSL's low level hooks.
| varispeed wrote:
| If it's Intel then it might not be fully down to Windows 11.
| The PC laptops are universally crap. I had a few latest ones,
| Ultra 9 and they are atrocious. Experience reminds me using a
| netbook in early 2010s.
|
| I would refuse to work anywhere without a Mac. If x86 then it
| would have to be linux, as that would be passable (apart from
| fan noise).
| pimeys wrote:
| The Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms are finally really
| good again, comparable to AMD. Fast and power efficient.
| Before Lunar Lake they were pretty much crap, I agree.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| KDE is bloated garbage too! Half of the OS didn't work. The
| only DE's that I haven't had poor experiences with are xfce,
| bspwm, i3/i3gaps, and xmonad. Note how 3 of these are tiling
| WMs.
| demilicious wrote:
| KDE has been great for me on Fedora. What problems have you
| encountered?
| jofla_net wrote:
| > There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
|
| Its non-deterministic, as if developed with LLMs....
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with
| more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few
| seconds to open at all.
|
| I've got bad news for you. Nautilus also lags when opening some
| directories.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with
| more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few
| seconds to open at all.
|
| > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
|
| I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management
| software your company installed.
|
| I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for
| some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast.
| There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with
| a lot of files.
|
| If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files,
| Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile.
| I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal
| with high file count shares.
|
| > If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that
| I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how
| miserable it is for everyone else.
|
| I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family
| member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11
| requirements and put it on old hardware.
|
| It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're
| describing.
|
| I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow"
| comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with
| extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.
| mft_ wrote:
| I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not
| spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was
| super-fast; it didn't matter that sleep very quickly turned
| into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.
|
| Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it's just become
| progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be
| Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it's
| layer upon layer of corporate management and security
| nonsense.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Could also be a temperature throttling problem caused by
| dust or a stuck fan. My old work Laptop suffered from that,
| and recovered after I cleaned it.
| dannersy wrote:
| I don't share his experience entirely, by even on my desktop
| built for gaming I can notice the right click menu is delayed
| in comparison to Windows 10. Even more heinous, before you
| remove it, the AI button would lazy load causing you to
| sometimes hit it by accident when you mean to hit something
| else. God forbid I'm not 80 years old and click my menus with
| any sort of speed.
|
| Also, if I'm going to have to adjust anything to use an
| operating system, I might as well use Linux. The only value
| prop for me to use Windows was gaming, but at this point I'm
| just completely ripping the band-aid off because it doesn't
| seem like Microsoft is going in a better direction.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| How about a right click on the desktop? I have a very fast
| computer with no bloatware on, yet it takes half a second for
| the desktop context menu to appear. When I do this
| repeatedly. The first time takes 1 second or more.
|
| Compare with a right click menu in a browser which is
| instant.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop > MenuShowDelay set
| to 100 (ms) close regedit, reboot.
| xtracto wrote:
| Lol . You made my day. I was doing that kind of Registry
| mangling 25 years ago. Brought me good memories, its been
| a while.
|
| I'm so happy I haven't had to use a Windows machine in
| more than 10 years.
|
| For me, MacBookPro for coding, Linux Mint for home
| desktop and Steam + Xbox Live online for gaming. We live
| in excellent times
| niam wrote:
| If I were an assuming feller I'd "almost guarantee" that you
| haven't been blessed/cursed with anything besides Windows 11.
|
| A lot of my beef, personally, can be chalked up to Windows'
| aggressively long animation times. It's serviceable with them
| turned off. But even with animations turned off on an
| aggressively debloated consumer PC there is either a notable
| delay or a perception thereof in context menus and file
| explorer that did not exist with Windows 10, or on my Linux
| machines.
| stouset wrote:
| Speaking of animations, it's shocking to me how _bad_ they
| are.
|
| I turned on hiding the taskbar the other day. I don't think
| they've changed it since Windows 95. I have a modern gaming
| laptop, and the animation is purely linear, no
| acceleration. It feels so weirdly unnatural. Even worse,
| it's not smoothly animated! I have a 120Hz monitor but it
| seems to be animated at 5fps.
|
| Nobody on the Windows team seems to give a single shit at
| all.
| tempestn wrote:
| From the comment you're replying to: "Windows does it
| better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile"
|
| So I wouldn't assume they've only used Windows. FWIW I also
| primarily use Windows 11 currently, but have also used
| other OS'es. I've experienced frustrations with all of
| them. Just because it's fast for you doesn't mean it's fast
| for everyone, and vice-versa. I could certainly buy that
| more people are having problems with 11 than they did with
| 10, though it hasn't been my personal experience. Just
| saying we shouldn't assume our own experiences are
| universal.
| sundvor wrote:
| The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my
| previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB
| memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end.
|
| Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install
| (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like
| 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and
| Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few
| registry tweaks (yay for having admin access to get rid of
| the bloat/junk).
|
| Fedora/Wayland/Plasma still feels faster though - I just had
| some issues getting my video to work properly across all of
| Teams and Zoom.
| zerd wrote:
| Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A
| couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently
| used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned
| up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network
| share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure.
| It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second
| delay.
|
| I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not
| something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.
|
| Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super
| slow sometimes.
| leptons wrote:
| Your work laptop might have an excessive amount of "security"
| software installed that causes it to lag far more than it would
| normally without such bloated software installed that runs in
| the background and slows down practically every process you do
| with the machine.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Please try https://filepilot.tech/ Its like explorer but so
| much faster in every single way. I have it pinned on the
| taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window.
|
| Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon
| view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly
| fine though.
|
| Current problems I have with it are no native zip support,
| which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a
| defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens
| the explorer.exe.
| sysworld wrote:
| Corporate probably loaded up the laptop with work monitoring
| software, and some terrible AV software. Among other bloatware.
| A PC of your spec should run without noticeable delay,
| something else is going on there.
|
| Having said that, Windows has made a lot of the basic
| functionality way to resource heavy.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Another common issue on corporate-issued workstation laptops
| is that they don't install the proper GPU drivers. The basic
| ones that ship with the OS are awful, but work just well
| enough that people don't notice that they're missing
| something important.
| pplonski86 wrote:
| I have dual boot on decent laptop, doing nothing, on windows
| fan is always on, computing something? On Linux it is just
| silent
| koyote wrote:
| I have the same specs in my work machine.
|
| Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes.
| Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show
| the 'new' context menu. Start menu is actually fast to start
| drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a
| second to fully load.
|
| I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get
| added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they
| manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts
| of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Your experience is very far away from mine. I don't experience
| any of these issues on a standard 32gb office laptop, or my
| home gaming machine.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm definitely not defending Windows but when I ran Windows 10
| Pro for 11 years straight, I had no problem with performance.
|
| We're talking a 4 core i5-4460, with 16 GB of memory and an SSD
| running WSL 2, Docker Desktop, real work loads, video editing,
| etc..
|
| It was very performant and never got in my way. I'd leave the
| computer on 24 / 7 and only the monitors turned off. It only
| got rebooted for forced Windows patches.
|
| With that said, my hardware can't run 11 and even if I did
| patch around that, I'm choosing not to run 11 so Windows for me
| was over near the end of 2025.
|
| I'm running Arch now on the same box and except for GPU memory
| leaks, it's quite snappy. CPU intensive tasks finish faster and
| disk I/O feels even faster than Windows. There's also unlimited
| flexibility to tweak things however I see fit. Gaming
| performance is substantially worse for the few games I play. No
| regrets, except for gaming.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| I am also subjected to Windows at work and I hate it. WSL is an
| okay experience until it just crashes and stops working.
|
| The only reason I was forced on Windows was because they
| couldn't find an edge management system for Linux
| hadlock wrote:
| I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use
| that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning
| quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement
| for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even
| for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use
| it for windows and linux.
|
| If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can
| use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/
| misiek08 wrote:
| More a reply to few fellow comments: I have few Win 11 hosts
| that I use. No management software other than just antivirus.
| 90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest
| super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just
| doesn't display a single process. Of course Process Explorer
| works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to
| display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2
| for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on
| software like this again. Worst development experience of my life
| because of what a miserable dev env windows is.
|
| I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand
| experience supports it to the extreme.
| karteum wrote:
| > All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native
| Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.
|
| Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g.
| Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a
| scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the
| Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent
| image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription
| a few years ago)
| jsheard wrote:
| That's correct, proper open source Linux is always limited to
| the weakest tiers of streaming DRM (i.e. fully software based)
| which usually means you only get low resolution streams.
| Locked-down Linux derivatives like ChromeOS and Android can
| support the stronger DRM tiers of course but that's not the
| same thing.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Widevine on Linux now is 720p. I usually don't notice, only
| once in a while that show is not full HD.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Just do it.
|
| I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual
| boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows,
| opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than
| Linux.
| a-dub wrote:
| it's really bad these days. even the teams web client doesn't
| work properly and when it does it is missing the most basic
| features like "test my audio." i don't understand what it is
| about how that company is organized that the software keeps
| coming out with interfaces and user experiences that look like
| they were created by 2023 era generative ai.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would
| singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing
| than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy
| Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face
|
| I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
| tokai wrote:
| Its not a burn. Just acknowledging the memes about cross
| dressing and programming/computer science that has been going
| around certain online circles for years.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| o_O wow, okay. Appreciate it.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post asking
| people to stop calling AI-generated content "slop" and to think
| of AI as "bicycles for the mind."
|
| I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind"
| metaphor without attribution.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| I really want to like Linux but every time I try it (and I tried
| a lot of distros and DEs) it is death by a thousand UX paper
| cuts.
| larrik wrote:
| I went from Linux to Mac to Windows and every single one is
| death by a thousand UX paper cuts.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video
| acceleration, laggy at times), but functional
|
| That's not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things
| holding me back on a Mac.
|
| Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution
| like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
|
| For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some
| custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by
| WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to
| name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
|
| The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is
| through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making
| that as easily and seamless as possible.
| kaydub wrote:
| I haven't even touched a Windows PC in years at this point. Don't
| know why you'd do that to yourself. I was hanging on to a gaming
| PC, but it broke during a move over 2 years ago now. I decided
| that was the last windows box I'd own at that point.
| antonyh wrote:
| The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps
| (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch
| of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4
| years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid
| encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked
| back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-
| to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid
| transition.
|
| The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm
| fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11.
| That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically
| setting it for max performance because it's not important to me
| for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound,
| video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on
| mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my
| needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did
| look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
|
| When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from
| Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at
| least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential
| problems.
|
| Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
|
| Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things
| that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for
| those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
| nisegami wrote:
| FYI: latest Photoshop should work on Wine as of this week, but
| of course that situation may be too subject to change for
| someone's main source of income.
| Zolt wrote:
| I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and
| maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over
| 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly
| stable, and have made a lot of money using it.
|
| Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
|
| Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code
| has been an amazing asset in my development.
| jms703 wrote:
| Yes, did the same thing for similar reasons. Everything works
| well. When with Arch Linux.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to
| games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles,
| more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc).
| Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
|
| But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just
| browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)?
| Development? Media production? You're good.
|
| For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like
| 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell
| Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do
| that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get
| Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically
| for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly
| distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see
| if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If
| you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine,
| or install Linux on your main machine.
|
| That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with
| Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever
| since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my
| Steam collection.
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if
| you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia
| rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I
| don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom
| Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR),
| GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full
| HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so
| hdr videos get those popping brights.
| mrks_hy wrote:
| That's not my experience at all. The majority of games,
| especially on Steam, work out of the box.
|
| I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your
| new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and
| pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with
| the defaults).
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some
| software I used on Windows and files it created (think
| Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could
| find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new
| workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my
| primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to
| see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the
| software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have
| anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except
| games I guess).
|
| As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's
| easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead
| of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.
| starky wrote:
| >Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
|
| This is an overblown issue. For the most it is a case of
| installing the proprietary driver package following the
| instructions for your distro. One more step than AMD which just
| works, but not really any more difficult than installing
| another package.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how
| much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the
| local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".
| globalnode wrote:
| need to pay for a pro license for gpedit - normies still get
| forced updates
| zkmon wrote:
| I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought
| a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by
| the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a
| Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.
|
| I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns
| with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud,
| office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya
| is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built
| by Gates.
| perks_12 wrote:
| I've been using Linux on my devices for quite some time now. I
| was pleasantly surprised when I had to start 4k video editing
| work and could just use Davinci Resolve. 2026 might not be the
| year of the Linux desktop, but it's getting better day by day.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Linux has plenty of video card driver issues too. Windows may
| suck, but Linux sucks in different ways. Windows suckage is
| solved by "buy a different machine and reinstall". Linux suckage
| is solved by weeks googling and trying technical fixes in
| consoles, installing different distributions and trying the same,
| then eventually buying a different machine.
|
| Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of
| either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less.
| (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while
| Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS
| and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally)
| Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Microsoft Windows is an entitled tenant that thinks it owns the
| property (your computer).
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in
| Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on
| Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make
| Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.
|
| I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used
| that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
|
| Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently
| enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough
| to write for it, if you so desire).
| thetwentyone wrote:
| FWIW for similar reasons I nuked my Windows install and installed
| CauchyOS. My main reason for not doing it earlier was concerns
| about game compatibility but so far the games I want to play
| either are working without any issue or work after enabling
| Steam's proton compatibility layer.
| arthurjj wrote:
| Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to
| Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and
| bought a mid-range System76 laptop.
|
| Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so
| the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the
| last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer
| vs Windows where it felt like once a year
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Honestly that's what it feels like when something breaks. Linux
| - you see what's wrong, you fix it, it's done
|
| Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what
| caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update
| alphax314 wrote:
| There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will
| eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given
| all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely
| (I haven't used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no
| idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)
| robby_w_g wrote:
| If Microsoft vibe codes a Linux distro and calls it Windows 360
| Copilot, I'm on board with the conspiracy theory that the
| Hadron Collider broke reality
| morserer wrote:
| This is a simultaneously insane yet deeply delightful concept.
| Does anyone have the link to that discussion?
| alphax314 wrote:
| This is the discussion I was referring to:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673264
| tracker1 wrote:
| Except the problem is their UX more than the kernel itself. I
| don't see them keeping Gnome or KDE as a desktop UI even if
| they did fully adopt Linux for desktop usage.
|
| MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI
| and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly
| consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
|
| I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that
| Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms
| of Windows at this point.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Unlikely but growing as profit dwindles. Previously it was
| unfathomable that Apple would offer RISC/Unix Workstations, or
| MS would jettison IE.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| > _I 'm gonna go full conspiracy nut here, but I bet it's because
| the LLM understands JavaScript better, and Microsoft can't be
| asked to pay actual humans to write proper native code._
|
| Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other
| programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over
| other languages?
| shevy-java wrote:
| My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually
| late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons;
| in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due
| to elderly relatives.
|
| Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually
| interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder
| for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way
| too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland,
| GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if
| it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly
| already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11.
| Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long
| while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x
| era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where
| real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even
| able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for
| her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she
| had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.
|
| In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own
| computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since
| most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
|
| My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th
| time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't
| need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on
| the "you might have a virus" ads.
| juujian wrote:
| > Windows is now also too much work.
|
| Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining
| about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and
| for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You
| are never just done setting up Windows.
| incubo4u wrote:
| haha cool post btw RN not always runs on chromium/v8
| morshu9001 wrote:
| "Video playback works flawlessly, with hardware acceleration
| even" not really, especially on Netflix
| geophile wrote:
| FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the
| Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and
| switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that
| finally did it.
| AJ007 wrote:
| There is a good parallel here with Myspace and Facebook.
| Myspace added an ad network & was hammered by spammers around
| the same time Facebook was opening up user registration to
| everyone. Facebook had no ads. Myspace was dead.
|
| This time Linux has very good game support to the point where
| some games have a higher FPS on Linux. It will be so expensive
| for Microsoft to attempt to turn this ship around, and it will
| likely still fail.
|
| This is happening at the same time AI agents have gotten really
| good, so users will just use local AI agents to configure and
| troubleshoot the rough stuff about Linux. And then they will
| customize it so much they will never be able to go back to
| Windows.
|
| Ubuntu is just fine for 99% of non tech users. Windows has so
| many anti-patterns, tricks, and OneDrive rugpulls now that
| Ubuntu is actually much safer and simpler for non-techies to
| use (I can also make the case it beats iOS in that department
| too.)
| pdntspa wrote:
| I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST
| plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to
| use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other
| publishers.
|
| I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music
| production workflows were too.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Put that on a dedicated machine and move everything else,
| especially your personal files, over for privacy reasons.
| synalx wrote:
| For 3D modeling (assuming you want to do CAD), Onshape is a
| fantastic alternative to native applications.
| tipsyrobot wrote:
| Came here to say this too - after 10+ years with SolidWorks I
| switched to OnShape. A small learning curve but now I enjoy it
| just as much.
| sedatk wrote:
| My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10
| and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5
| years too old apparently.
|
| So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I
| went through the hurdles. It wasn't seamless. But, Fedora never
| said "I can't". When it was over, it was fine.
|
| Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer
| whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could
| consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
|
| But, "you can't install unless you upgrade your CPU" forced me to
| adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
|
| There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds'
| famous "you don't break userspace", something along the lines of
| "you don't break the upgrade path".
| stackghost wrote:
| >no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too
| old apparently.
|
| Let's be real. It's because new systems support DRM and
| Microsoft has been captured by the media company lobby.
| realusername wrote:
| Of course it is, there's no real requirement to have a TPM,
| plenty of people made a version with that requirement patched
| out and the system works fine.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| If they didn't, people might start capturing copyrighted
| streaming content and sharing torrents of it. We cannot allow
| that to happen.
| donmcronald wrote:
| It's way worse than that. It's for verified identity and
| attestation.
| WD-42 wrote:
| We had that announcement of a new "Verifiable" Linux project
| from Pottering, other kernel devs, and a bunch of ex-
| microsoft employees yesterday. Gives me the heebie jeebies.
| stackghost wrote:
| Yeah I caught a lot of downvotes for coming out early
| against it.
| jofla_net wrote:
| How dare you think for yourself in 2026!
|
| Remote Attestation of Immutable Operating Systems built
| on systemd
|
| Its the "remote" thing that has no place in personal
| computing, or rather, computing that is to extend one's
| own autonomy, or agency. Its no one's damn business
| whether my system is attested or not! I mean, sure theres
| certainly benefits for me knowing if its attested, but
| the other road is one of ruin, and will basically be the
| chains of the future.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Remote attestation is just generating a random blob on
| the remote side and then making the tpm 2.0 module on a
| computer sign the blob with a private key. You then
| provide the signature and the public key to the remote
| for verification. That enrolls that device. After that
| you can "verify" with a new binary blob and validate a
| new signature came back with the same key. That full loop
| is remote attestation. The idea is your disk didn't get
| moved to another computer. It's a security thing that
| Linux does need and is capable of being fully open
| source.
|
| It has nothing to do with drm.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It has _everything_ to do with DRM. It's not "dual use"
| technology. It has one use, and this is it.
| hparadiz wrote:
| We're gonna be using this to validate someone didn't move
| your login to another device. Which will protect you from
| session hijacking. Your work stuff will start requiring
| it. Your media accounts will too. Or else linux will
| simply be locked out from major services. DRM is already
| in your browser. And literally has no connection to
| identity attestation.
| noumenon1111 wrote:
| If you're trying to remotely attest immutable OSs you are
| definitely not a home user, or if you are, you're
| definitely very keen at least and likely a raging self-
| masochist.
|
| If you're NOT trying to remotely attest anything, you're
| fine. Just use your chosen OS, dawg.
| billfor wrote:
| .\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept
| /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning
| /Telemetry Disable
| hackeman300 wrote:
| What's this?
| epistasis wrote:
| Whenever I see an unexplained command I don't understand
| from a random internet forum, I hop onto the production
| server and run it, just in case it might boost performance.
| Wouldn't want to miss out on that.
|
| Been doing it since I was 12. It taught me all about the
| ins and outs of `rm`.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Sounds like me back in the early 80s when I used to war
| dial, and people used to share "active" prefixes. I
| learned all about the 911 prefix when I set my dialer and
| went to sleep. About 20 minutes later the cops were
| banging on my front door. True story; I was in 6th grade,
| got arrested for it.
| deepriverfish wrote:
| wow did you get a record? this is some Hackers(1995) vibe
| stuff
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I got taken to juvenile hall, put in a holding area with
| kids that had stolen cars and stabbed other kids in
| fights. The funny thing is all these "bad kids" were
| really cool; we talked about video games (Donkey Kong!).
| I remember one kid got into a fight with his football
| coach and broke both the coach's legs. He was a big kid,
| looked like a grown man. He was pretty much in charge of
| the holding area. But he was cool as hell, cracked jokes
| with me. I actually kinda enjoyed the holding area.
|
| Anyway, the officials thought I had just called 911 over
| and over, like to play a prank. They wouldn't hear
| anything about my computer or whatever (it was the early
| 80s). They were pissed. I was kept in the holding area
| for a few hours, then they let me go home. I was ordered
| to a bunch of community service, cleaning the parking
| lots of local parks, stuff like that.
| prerok wrote:
| Reminds me of that story from an IRC channel:
|
| A: I have a program that will format your hard drive. I
| just need your IP.
|
| B: Ok, it's 127.0.0.1
|
| A: Ahahaha, it 56% now! Lol.
|
| A left the chat. Connection reset by peer.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| A work-around to install on unsupported hardware which both
| works, but is unsupported and could break during a feature
| Windows Update.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| At this point I'd say it's more of a "would" than a
| "could"
| bunderbunder wrote:
| A clever way to maximize the chances that your computer
| gets bricked on a future Patch Tuesday.
| jama211 wrote:
| It's really not
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Some of the checks are around CPU features that they
| don't currently use but may use in the future. And CPUs
| don't typically respond super gracefully to being asked
| to execute instructions they don't understand.
| bobsterlobster wrote:
| Yeah, until microsoft says "Sup there lil buddy? Running an
| unsupported system? Oof. The next update is gonna really turn
| it inside-out"
| billfor wrote:
| Take backups and disable the updates with group policy. OP
| just wanted to install Windows 11.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Seriously, if people are willing to learn all this, they
| can easily learn Linux and simply tell the corporate
| overlords to fuck right off.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Just stay at windows 10 at this point. The whole point of
| upgrading to 11 is to not stay on an unsupported OS
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Well that's never happened before (with Windows anyway), so
| it's not likely to happen now.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Has happened:
|
| Core2Duo, Opteron64 and Athlon64 can run W11 RTM
|
| They will bluescreen booting after an update to 24H2
| because they are missing the POPCNT instruction.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/windows-11-24h2-g
| oes...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Athlon 64 is a 20 yo CPU. At some point...
| abracadaniel wrote:
| From my experience it seems to happen all the time.
| Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall
| settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch
| that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it
| to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due
| to all the other times their updates have also deleted
| people's Documents folder. This was the first time I
| recall it happening:
| https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-
| updat...
| Paianni wrote:
| It's happened at least three times:
|
| Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange
| instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU
| or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to
| the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.
|
| Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no
| warning.
|
| Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that
| don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
| jterrys wrote:
| I think at a certain point you need to just call it quits
| with that sort of bullshit. I have my dignity. I'm a
| fucking grown adult. I'm not going to spend my spare time
| haplessly looking online to unfuck the new current set of
| fuckery. Just take the fucking bullet. Learn linux.
| Congrats you're playing whack-a-mole with a trillion dollar
| corporation and prolonging your misery. This is stupid.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah, microsoft will never change otherwise. People and
| companies continue to willingly allow themselves to get
| abused, and then wonder why Microsoft never changes and
| continues to abuse them.
|
| So long as said abuse never results in a loss of
| marketshare and revenue, it will continue. Why would they
| stop if there's no negative repercussions?
| jjkaczor wrote:
| This is exactly my experience - I have a Lenovo W530 from
| 2013, it has an i7, 32gb RAM and SSDs (RAID0 for
| performance, backups are off-device) - and it is STILL
| lightning fast.
|
| However - EVERY single trick I have tried... the above
| command, LTSC, Enterprise edition, etc, results in a
| situation where after installation a few days (or hours)
| and some updates get installed, and... blue-screen-of-death
| on every boot.
|
| Gave up, installed Linux - still working through some
| issues (GPU driver compatibility), but overall it is a much
| better experience...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Where can one read the source code of setup.exe
|
| That's, e.g., how I would determine what these commands do
|
| I have had HN replies in the past that argued Windows is open
| source and thus comparable to UNIX-like OS projects where
| _the public_ can read the source code and make modifications,
| _for free_
|
| Absent the source code, we can read Microsoft's documentation
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/manufactu...
|
| It seems like WinPE is the most useful version of Windows,
| e.g., it allows more options to setup.exe
|
| How does one quickly and easily download and install a copy
| of WinPE, preferably on removable media
| prerok wrote:
| Who would argue that Windows is open source? That's
| hilarious.
| zahllos wrote:
| The windows assessment and deployment kit is what you need,
| with the windows pe add-on: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
|
| You should be aware there's a 3 day limit to uptime, then
| PE reboots. You can work around that:
| https://lsoft.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360011128377-I-n...
|
| The other thing to tell you is that this is not a live
| version of windows with all the features of the full
| desktop. It is the windows that runs the windows installer
| application, so enough windows to do that and no more.
|
| I would personally recommend linux instead.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| LoL with the insane backslash crap
| bjt12345 wrote:
| It's a really bad time for Microsoft to force consumers to
| upgrade - even computer parts from 5 years ago are price
| hiking.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Which Microsoft really should have been able to see coming,
| since it's largely their money that's being used to soak up
| all the supply of computing hardware.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Someone inside Microsoft probably did see it coming. That
| comic of their org chart being individual bubbles, all
| pointing guns at each other really does explain that
| company's behavior.
|
| Microsoft doesn't seem to be one unified entity, but a
| bunch of smaller competing companies under the same
| umbrella, each trying to destroy the other.
| fullstop wrote:
| Allegedly Sony saw the writing on the wall and secured a
| good amount of GDDR supply for their consoles. Microsoft
| did not, and has had to raise the price of the Xbox Series
| X as a result.
|
| I don't think that Microsoft knows what Microsoft is doing.
| ufmace wrote:
| I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads
| etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try.
| But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but
| perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a
| feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my
| existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly
| seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-
| line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.
|
| So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised.
| All of the software I want to use installed easily and works,
| via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are
| actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also
| appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found
| annoying in Windows.
|
| It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing
| their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome,
| but what can you do.
| jama211 wrote:
| You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the
| moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to
| open the command window during the install and one cheeky
| command. I agree though that it's silly they don't offer it
| officially.
|
| But I get the feeling you were on the edge of transitioning
| anyway, which is fine! Sounds more like the straw that broke
| the camels back.
| avgDev wrote:
| I can confirm this.
|
| Honestly, I am really surprised this is a top comment here.
| This was an extremely easy work around. We are all mostly
| curious nerds here.
|
| All this work because one couldn't google a easy work
| around?
|
| Last time I tried Linux it sucked for gaming and I've spent
| hours trying to install a printer.
|
| Not to excuse Microsoft in this situation, Linux is
| obviously more open.
| basch wrote:
| Which still leaves you in a state that at any time your
| OS stops updating because they decide to close the
| "loophole" or remove the "feature"
| sylos wrote:
| When was the last time you tried any of that on linux?
| Printers have been plug and play(which is impressive
| considering the hoops I had to jump through on windows)
| and with advent of proton, there's been no game I've
| played that's had any issues
| avgDev wrote:
| It has been a few years to be fair. However, back when I
| ran into the issue people said the same thing.
|
| I might try it on one of my older laptops which are in
| the closet.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Linux has been good for gaming for _years_ now. I think I
| switched 4 or 5 years ago, and in all that time I 've
| almost never had problems running games.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Steam now supports 1 click install of its entire library
| windows and Linux native and the majority work. The
| majority of printers either work or do not. It's not a
| reasonable expectation that all hardware will work but
| you won't need hours of work either.
|
| MS is free to deprecate your work around any given
| Tuesday when you have work to do leaving you in the same
| spot with less time available to do anything about it.
|
| You are wrongly assessing the value of the alternatives
| to boot if you think they were just too stupid to google.
| Based on the article they already viewed Windows
| negatively prior to this and thus already had a
| motivation to switch.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I can't speak to gaming but i was warned about printer
| issues as well. However after a hasty switch from win10
| to xubuntu to save my phd work i was able to get the
| office printer working on ubuntu that i could never print
| to on windows. Sure, i installed a driver but the
| dialogue literally directed me to do so. My jaw hit the
| floor when the test page came out flawless.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yah, I feel like Linux was way worse with printers in the
| past.. now the story is more like: you'll have a
| _different set_ of printer issues across the major OSes
| but no OS is clearly better or worse.
| sdoering wrote:
| I have two laptops that - even being 8 years and 4 years
| old fit the specs MS decided to set.
|
| I still kicked itin the can. Am a happy Arch User & Ubuntu
| (will probably migrate that one to an Arch derivate as
| well, though) nowadays. I still use WIN11 in my day job.
| And it is an okay OS. I had worse. I had better.
|
| What I find interesting is, that I gained on average 30 -
| 50% more battery time from the laptops I switched to Linux.
| It is quite unexpected and to me quite frankly amazing. I
| am writing this on my day job quite expensive Surface
| machine. I pulled it from the power connection to sit on
| the sofa about 20 minutes ago. My battery? At 73%. And I am
| running Firefox and PowerPoint at the moment (plus whatever
| corp crapware is installed underneath).
|
| Except for exactly one set of tools (older Affinity progs)
| I have no need for WIN anymore. And as my day job provides
| a WIN machine...
| jacquesm wrote:
| My daily driver is a second hand W540 that was made in
| 2014 or so. It's got the maximum RAM that it will take
| (32G), and a larger HD, other than that it's just the
| same old box. It's indestructible and rock solid, drives
| three monitors and I couldn't be happier with it.
| matja wrote:
| If you bypass the installer minimum hardware checks then
| you're making a gamble that the official statement from
| Microsoft won't affect you:
|
| > If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your
| device won't receive support from Microsoft, and you should
| be comfortable assuming the risk of running into
| compatibility issues.
|
| > Devices that don't meet these system requirements might
| malfunction due to compatibility or other issues.
| Additionally, these devices aren't guaranteed to receive
| updates, including but not limited to security updates.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Aren't you guys actually talking about a TPM 2.0 device
| being present on the machine and not a CPU specifically?
| Cause the whole Windows 11 thing was (I thought) full
| disk encryption with TPM 2.0 attestation booted from a
| secure boot BIOS. That basically just means you can't
| take the disk and boot it on another machine. There would
| be no way to decrypt.
| tosti wrote:
| You can use a TPM for disk encryption with Linux if you
| want. You also get to use your own secureboot keys if you
| want. Your choice.
|
| I can't be bothered. My 80386 worked fine without any of
| the above and I still don't need any of it on a Zen%d
| (except Linux)
| hparadiz wrote:
| Yea I was looking at this for work. We require full disk
| encryption for all operating systems but linux is the one
| where it's a passphrase or a yubikey. In my personal life
| it would just make managing my PC more annoying. Imagine
| a motherboard failure and boom there goes my entire disk.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Imagine a motherboard failure
|
| Hold up, I'm no expert on Secure Boot, but LUKS allows
| you to have _multiple_ entry keys to the same drive.
|
| This means you can have one key of random gobbledegook
| which is kept and auto-used by the magic motherboard,
| _and also_ a passphrase that you can memorize or write
| down, and either one is totally sufficient on its own.
|
| You don't even need to set them up at the same time, you
| can start with one and then add the other as an option
| later.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Secureboot is something else. It verifies the boot loader
| at the BIOS. This can be broken by the system itself
| (like if it's hacked). So it's protecting you against
| modifications to the boot loader. This is where kernel
| modules can be injected.
|
| TPM 2.0 is something else. It's typically soldered onto
| the motherboard as a physical device and the key can be
| generated and then used to encrypt the disk. The private
| key can not be extracted. Only the signature and you can
| ask the TPM to sign a binary blob with the private key
| while providing you the public key to verify. This
| protects you against physical access to your device. No
| one can take your disk and decrypt it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > the key can be generated and then used to encrypt the
| disk
|
| Right, you can't recover or copy that specific key, but
| you also _don 't have to_ for accessing your data, if you
| set up some redundancy before disaster struck.
|
| AFAIK: 99% of your storage is encrypted by a giant fixed
| unchanging master-key, and that is _itself_ encrypted
| again with a non-master key /LS or passphrase, which is
| stored in the remaining "LUKS header". There's room to
| store _multiple copies_ of the same master-key encrypted
| with different non-master options.
|
| In that model, the TPM is simply providing (in a
| convoluted way) its own passphrase for one of those co-
| equal slots, so having one or more alternates prepared is
| sufficient to protect your drive from motherboard
| failure.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yubikeys are very useful. I was pointed to them by a
| colleague and was a bit skeptical in the beginning but
| since then I am more than happy to use them, absolutely
| flawless execution. The only thing that I am a bit
| concerned about is that it isn't the key that I place on
| the device that governs all this so you can't be 100%
| sure that there isn't some kind of supply chain trick
| that would allow the manufacturer or one or more of their
| employees to create duplicate keys.
| plagiarist wrote:
| With Linux I think you do have the option of encrypting
| with your own cert using the PCKS#11 module on the
| Yubikey.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's interesting, thank you, I will definitely look
| into this.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| You can have automatic unlock with tpm2, with or without
| a pin, _in addition_ to passphrase, file, fido2, pkcs#11
| cert, or whatever else is supported by luks.
|
| I've been using this for a few years now, and never had
| an issue.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-cryptenroll
|
| > Imagine a motherboard failure and boom there goes my
| entire disk.
|
| You can also set a long-ass key _in addition_ to the
| other methods, and back it up somewhere safe. It works
| the same as bitlocker: you have key which can decrypt the
| drive without external help from a TPM in case something
| goes wrong.
| ploxiln wrote:
| Windows 11 officially requires TPM 2.0, secure-boot
| enabled, _and_ an AMD Zen+ (Ryzen 2xxx) or later _or_ an
| Intel Core Gen 8 or later.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/windows-11-the-
| ars-t...
|
| > ... the best rationale for the processor requirement is
| that these chips (mostly) support something called "mode-
| based execution control," or MBEC. MBEC provides hardware
| acceleration for an optional memory integrity feature in
| Windows (also known as hypervisor-protected code
| integrity, or HVCI) that can be enabled on any Windows 10
| or Windows 11 PC but can come with hefty performance
| penalties for older processors without MBEC support.
|
| > Another theory: older processors are more likely to be
| running in old systems that haven't had their firmware
| updated to mitigate major hardware-level vulnerabilities
| that have been discovered in the last few years, like
| Spectre and Meltdown
| jacquesm wrote:
| For some reason that risk never seemed larger than the
| one that Microsoft would force me into subscribing to
| more services because they hold my data hostage or that
| they would be more than happy to pass the keys to my
| machine to the USG.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have a few machines which lack a supported CPU. There's
| CPU's only 6 years old which aren't supported. There may
| be some newer ones even (I didn't bother to look).
|
| If it was 2000 - it'd be like, "OK boss, you gotta
| upgrade that old dog of a CPU", but software bloat really
| hasn't kept up with CPU performance. I've got an i3 which
| is serviceable enough from 2014. Is it going to be able
| to keep up with modern SQL Server and Teams and VSCode
| and all that? Probably not all at once. But totally fine
| for basic computing.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| But if your next move is to go to Linux where all that
| applies as well, why would that stop you?
| vanviegen wrote:
| You are correct that a Linux installation is ineligible
| for support from Microsoft. Not that that means anything
| for private usage.
|
| Also, Linux has a great track record for _not_ dropping
| support for older hardware. I think that is a lot more
| informative than whatever statement Microsoft 's legal
| team has managed to come up with.
| ufmace wrote:
| There's a little bit of considering it already yeah. Plus
| what the sibling comments say of it being clearly against
| what Microsoft wants, so no guarantee they won't disable it
| or make it even harder in the future. And also, the factor
| of, doing any of these check-disabling hacks also seems to
| require a full OS reinstall instead of an in-place update.
| If I need to do a full reinstall anyways, why not do it
| with an OS I don't need to hack up to get it to install on
| a system the OS maintainer doesn't want it to be installed
| on.
|
| Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a
| user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd
| rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually
| wants me as a user.
| mort96 wrote:
| There's a ton of outdated guides out there because
| Microsoft has been patching out workaround after
| workaround. It's likely that the simple solution you used
| doesn't work anymore.
| Gud wrote:
| Linux _is_ superlatively awesome
|
| and I say that as a FreeBSD user.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| FreeBSD user here too <3 Mainly because I think Linux is
| way too aligned (and developed by) big tech these days.
|
| We have Netflix and Sun influence but the former is not
| really putting its stamp on it and the latter no longer
| exists (and evil Oracle has zero interest of course)
|
| I prefer the OS aligned with users like me not the big
| cloud boys.
| glenstein wrote:
| And I say it as a Linux user. My story is breathing life
| into old hardware back in the 2010s without having to spend
| any money, and just enjoying the No Man's Sky style freedom
| of exploring a whole new world of how a desktop operating
| system could look in feel and work, unmoored from the
| background sickness of thinking everything I do is
| channeled into Microsoft telemetry.
|
| If you're the type of person who's capable of falling in
| love with software and software ecosystems, there's nothing
| like a first jump into Linux and understanding it as a
| world ready and waiting for you.
| swat535 wrote:
| I know you've already switched but bid you try using FlyOOBE
| to bypass it?
|
| https://github.com/builtbybel/FlyOOBE/
| chaostheory wrote:
| Prior to a lot of apps transitioning to be web apps, this
| would be more important, but there's less value now that
| almost everything is non-native. Even MS Office is online
| now
| eterm wrote:
| I'm in a similar but more ridiculous reason. My reasonably
| modern hardware should support windows 11, but I get "disk
| not supported" because apparently I once picked the "wrong"
| bootloader?
|
| I can't be arsed, if I'm going to have to fiddle around
| getting that working I might as well move to linux.
| neocron wrote:
| Iike that you both started with Fedora. Same for me but
| almost 20 yrs ago
|
| Haven't touched it in a long time ever since debian8 was the
| point in time where it was fine to run on desktop and laptop
| for me, not only on server. Ever since then I have it on all
| my 20something machines
| jama211 wrote:
| You can bypass the warning really easily, I googled it the
| moment I saw it and it was very easy. A keyboard shortcut to
| open the command window during the install and one cheeky
| command.
| debugnik wrote:
| Microsoft is removing these bypasses over time though.
| deathsentience wrote:
| A future update may restrict access to your windows or break
| its ability to get further updates. It's a matter of time.
| They just haven't gotten around to it.
|
| And if you're thinking you'll just Google another solution
| then you might as well spend that time googling efforts for
| Linux. Windows shouldn't require constant hacking or
| tinkering to function.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've been using Linux for 20+ years, but I was fairly happy
| with Windows 11. At its core it did exactly what I needed it to
| do, and it allowed me to run some commercial software that is
| harder to install and run on Linux (Davinci Resolve).
|
| But my Dell hardware drivers were flaky in Windows. My
| bluetooth had extremely variable availability. And then Windows
| rebooted itself, against my wishes, 3x in one week. And then
| there was the promise of Recall.
|
| That's when I wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. All my
| hardware issues went away (yes, I had to fiddle the sound
| driver a little so it didn't crack when it woke up from sleep,
| and I had to make one small change so suspend worked properly..
| but both were easily solvable). My bluetooth has been flawless
| since and I was able to use my Logitech wireless mouse again.
|
| I'm never going back.
|
| I do a bit of napkin math on Apple Silicon single-threaded
| performance, GPU performance, and battery management against
| non-Macbook Air/Pro specs for same price. I follow DHH (who I
| otherwise object to) on his adventures with the Asus G14
| machines.. but I'm not sure its GPU performance still matches
| the similarly priced Apple offering.
|
| Less integrated OS, worse battery management, and weaker
| performance for more money? I'm not sure. But I'll probably
| still go that way.
|
| The Intel/AMD laptop manufacturers need to get out from under
| Nvidia's hardware GPU thumb.
| Trufa wrote:
| Say what you will about Macs, I ain't no fanboy, but from
| this side of the fence, I had forgotten that drivers were a
| thing.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Agreed. Given my expectation of travel, it's probably the
| sanest choice. Esp with the Stores for service.
| slashdave wrote:
| I get the intent, but moving to linux for better bluetooth
| support is... an interesting take
| browningstreet wrote:
| Well I won't be buying Dell again.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| How so? Bluetooth has been working out of the box (no
| tinkering) for me under Linux for the past ten years now
| across multiple devices. Including stuff like APT-X and
| LDAC. All with proper OS integration (I use Gnome). What's
| the story on Windows?
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Same here. The story for windows, IME, is that my work
| Logitech BT keyboard works fine, but neither my sony nor
| shure headphones work _at all_. Windows says connected,
| but then disconnects right away. On the same PC which
| dual-boots linux, they both work fine, with LDAC for the
| sony and apt-x hd for the shure.
|
| At work, we have BT Jabra headsets. I specifically asked
| for a corded version, I hate the latency for calls. My
| windows-using colleagues, for some reason, love wearing a
| wireless headset and talking through the laptop
| microphone.
| brightball wrote:
| Yep. Similar thing forced me off of Apple. They stopped making
| 17 inch laptops. They started soldering parts into place. Made
| it so you couldn't open your own laptop to replace the HD.
|
| Switched to Linux 8 years ago and haven't looked back.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Apple does this all the time, though, and seems to get a free
| pass here. I have four Macs in my home, and they are cut off at
| Ventura (for the 2017 iMac), Monterey (for the 2014 Mac Mini
| and the 2015 MacBook Air), and El Capitan (for the 2014 iMac).
| They are all stuck at 3, 4, and 5 major OS versions back.
| Nobody really seems to complain about this, though.
| basch wrote:
| I would say its part of the promise/agreement of buying into
| the ecosystem, and a known caveat. Might be overly optimistic
| viewpoint.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| because desktop Apple users have been domesticated for
| decades now and just accept whatever shows up in the feeding
| trough.
| radium3d wrote:
| They don't get a free pass, I think people have spoken with
| their wallets and it shows with the user base counts: Windows
| 66-73%, macOS 14-16%, Linux 3-4%.
|
| Apple seems to support their previous generation OS on older
| macs for ~8-9 years or so from what I've seen. You just don't
| get the latest generation features, they cut it off and move
| on similar to how Microsoft did.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury product.
| For the record, even though Apple has some really impressive
| hardware, this is one of the reasons I'm not very big on
| Apple. People praise their phone's longevity all the time,
| but I think this is crazy. I could be running a 13 year old
| computer right now and it would work fine if I had Linux.
| Smartphones don't really have options for this due to the
| market capture. Apple's PC could be supported longer, but
| Apple isn't interested in doing it. (and apparently they
| change architectures every 15 years anyhow.)
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I ran iPhone 6 and 8 well beyond their years. I only
| replaced because the batteries were already replaced once.
| But otherwise the phone was fine. I have had same issues
| with laptops
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I think Apple gets a pass because they're a luxury
| product.
|
| No they aren't. They've just convinced everyone that they
| are.
|
| I've seen people meme about Android being for people who
| couldn't afford an iPhone when the fact is that a flagship
| Android costs just as much as an iPhone.
| kid64 wrote:
| Or several times more, in some cases
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| > No they aren't. They've just convinced everyone that
| they are.
|
| What's the difference?
|
| Either way, Apple consistently makes decisions that I
| think put them on the side of "luxury item" -- even if I
| often disagree with those decisions.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| That's the contemporary luxury market for nearly all
| goods; signifiers that tell folks "this item is more
| valuable because it has the magic sigil" or whatever.
| sysworld wrote:
| I tried a "flagship Android" phone once (the top of the
| line Samsung), it was bugging the second I opened the
| pack. I returned it and got a cheap Pixel budget line
| phone. Then a few years later I jumped ship to iPhone,
| and largely am very happy now. Nothing is perfect, but
| for me, iPhone is the best I've tried.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| That is the reality of pretty much every "luxury
| product/brand"...
|
| It is convincing people to pay a premium for what is
| still at the end of the day a stitched leather bag,
| watch, computer or smartphone made in factories like
| everything else.
|
| People pay for names, to project their luxury lifestyle.
|
| It is very rare that the actual quality/performance of a
| "luxury item" is dramatically above a high-quality
| equivalent. Does a Rolex tell time and look better than a
| Breitling? Or a Tag Heur? Or a Seiko? Each of those
| represents a different price/style point - and ultimately
| it is subjective to a consumer - who wants to project a
| certain style/look.
| gregors wrote:
| I used to install linux on older mac hardware and donate
| it. I don't think that works anymore with with the M chips
| (at least in the same easy way)
| sysworld wrote:
| You can install Asahi Linux on some of the M chips. But
| you are right, it's not as easy as it used to be.
| ufmace wrote:
| I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just
| keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some
| new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else
| changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen
| notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to
| upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me
| again later".
| mort96 wrote:
| They also provide security updates for those old OSes for
| quite a while, AFAIK.
| Salgat wrote:
| macOS receives 1 year of full support and 2 additional
| years for security updates for each version with 6-8
| years of upgrade eligibility. Windows 10 received 10
| years of support (on top of a free upgrade from Windows
| 7/8.1 for most users).
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're counting the years of support for
| a version of the OS and not the years of support for a
| computer. The interesting thing is: if you bought a
| computer at year X, does it still receive updates at X+Y?
|
| There's loads of relatively young computers which can't
| upgrade to Windows 11 and therefore aren't supported
| anymore. That's the problem, not how long Windows 10 was
| supported.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Software in much more tied to the OS though. For example,
| Chrome is still compatible with Windows 10 which is more
| than 10 years old, while on macOS you cannot install it
| past Monterey (2021). Not to mention that also system
| applications are updated with the OS, so forget about using
| Safari
| freetanga wrote:
| 2013 MacBook Air on Linux Mint is fantastic
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I just installed Opencore and run the newer OSs anyway. It
| will eventually not be an option when they come up with an
| ARM-only OS, but at the moment it seems to work ok.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| That's great, but it's no silver bullet. We have a 4th Gen
| iPad that was used mostly for consumption. Only one of the
| streaming apps works with its ios version.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| The same issues plague old Android tablets. Lots of
| unecessary ewaste out there so OEM's can sell new
| devices.
| plagiarist wrote:
| There are a lot of Android devices that look temping
| until one discovers how out-of-date the firmware is.
|
| With no option to install your own, of course. Boot
| loaders should be exclusively for running the
| manufacturer's lone security update from 5 years ago.
| PTOB wrote:
| Apple only gets a free pass from folks who are invested in
| that particular kind of ... relationship.
| cgriswald wrote:
| They didn't get a pass from me. My MacPro has been running
| Linux longer than it ran MacOS. Apple stopped supporting it
| officially at Mojave but I jumped ship earlier when I was
| forced to do a clean install rather than an upgrade because I
| had a RAID.
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| Because Apple been continuously doing deprecating hardware
| regularly since the mid 90s. And they'll processor
| architecture every 10-15 years.
|
| Microsoft was the backward compatibility king.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Apple will provide software and hardware support for any
| given product for at least 5 years. After those 5 years, you
| sometimes will still get security fixes.
|
| The reason for this is that newer software will start using
| hardware features and capabilities that only exist on newer
| hardware, not because Tim Cook is evilly cackling in his
| office "hahhahha! Let's force people to buy new Macs!!!"
| phatfish wrote:
| Erm, isn't the last bit a key part of Tim Cooks job
| (getting people to buy new apple stuff even if they don't
| really need it)?
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Apple's hardware products generally sell themselves.
| muyuu wrote:
| idk what other people give passes to, but I had been a Linux
| desktop user since the mid 90s and Mac laptop user since ~G3
| iBook years and I finally gave up on their laptops a few
| years ago; so it's mainly linux-linux now
|
| i think the last straw was the added telemetry that required
| so much effort to get rid of, but also for years they have
| made clear moves to make their laptops iOS-like
| progressively, which I cannot stand on so many levels
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I am in the same boat. Running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 until
| the cows come home. I run Rocky Linux in my laptop but I am a
| gamer so I'll hold to Windows 10. Some Linux Distros are
| bringing AI. Not ready for that.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I have a similar issue with Windows. The machine already dual-
| boots Linux, but it is simultaneously demanding Windows 11 and
| telling me that it doesn't support it. It's a three year old
| Ryzen, it plays every game I've thrown at it flawlessly - which
| admittedly is only just so many things, but if it could manage
| Oblivion Remastered at launch it should manage a bloody
| operating system surely.
|
| I hear it might be some TPM thing. If so, it still seems like a
| bad decision to require this thing, and it's telling that I'm
| working on speculation here - it doesn't _tell_ me that's what
| it is.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Something is disabled in your BIOS. Ask an LLM to guide you.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I can solve this problem if I have to. Right now, I don't.
|
| But I think you miss my core point. If "Ask an LLM" is the
| answer to this, Microsoft are doing an unforgivably shit
| job of maintaining Windows. Why on earth should that be
| necessary? Surely they can provide the minimum of
| information about why they think the upgrade isn't
| possible.
| sedatk wrote:
| I had an issue with TPM too, enabling PTT (Intel's on-chip
| TPM) on BIOS fixed that one.
| gregors wrote:
| I saw a vid where they installed a recent version of linux on a
| Pentium 1.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DiK5FDpBTg
| stagger87 wrote:
| Why did you want to install windows 11 anyways? I also have a
| PC stuck on Windows 10 and it makes me happy that it's now
| stable and not part of the forced rolling releases in Win11. Im
| going to run it on Win10 as long as I can.
| sedatk wrote:
| Lack of security updates is a problem for a computer that's
| connected to internet.
| forty wrote:
| Microsoft asking to upgrade hardware reminds me of that old
| joke (from memory so excuse the bad story telling)
|
| User: hello, my PC smokes and I would like to purchase an anti
| smoke software
|
| Computer service: sorry it's not possible, you have to replace
| the hardware
|
| User: no I really want an anti smoke software
|
| (Later)
|
| User: hello I would like to purchase a new computer
|
| Service: see, I told you that an anti smoke software is not
| possible
|
| User: wrong! I have purchased one from Microsoft. But
| apparently it's not compatible with my current hardware
| xnx wrote:
| This was very useful for me. Force install Windows 11:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853012
| Snild wrote:
| > "you can't install unless you upgrade your CPU"
|
| To be fair, I recently had to switch distros for my little
| Atom-based server because of a similar deal:
|
| https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:X86-64-Architecture-Levels#...
|
| Granted, I only had to convert to Tumbleweed (not trivial, but
| easier than reinstalling), and the open source nature means
| there will always be lots of other alternatives, too.
| canibal wrote:
| I'm sure there's a million reasons not to, but they could even
| just open-source Windows 10. Leave you alone with the hardware
| that you rightfully purchased, and let the community police the
| security gaps that arise. It's beyond me how planned
| obsolescence especially on perfectly sufficient hardware is
| even legal.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| That's not what open source means / how it works.
|
| It's likely a large percentage of that code is also used in
| win 10 - it's not like 11 was a complete rewrite.
| themafia wrote:
| > because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently.
|
| And yet Nadella writes this:
|
| "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world
| eval impact. The choices we make about where we apply our
| scarce energy, compute, and talent resources will matter."
|
| Apparently resources are only "scarce" when Microsoft needs
| them. When it comes to your consumer outcomes you have to throw
| away working equipment and buy new.
| vee-kay wrote:
| > There is a marketing lesson there somewhere. Microsoft once
| had the IT world at its feet, because not only was its Windows
| 9x OSes ubiquitous everywhere, but it had many millions of
| programmers who had become experts at Visual Basic and Visual
| C++, so almost all corporates used programs written in these
| easy to learn, not too difficult to master, fun to program in
| (yay for Intellisense and Drag-n-drop ActiveX controls), and
| versatile despite some limitations. This was also the era where
| many corporates had complicated databases set up in MS Access
| or MS SQL Server, because they were easily accessible and
| usable from front-end applications written in VC or VC++.
|
| Microsoft even evolved it all to adapt to and compete with new
| ideas from rivals, such as COM+ as alternative to CORBA,
| ASP.Net as alternative to JSP, etc.
|
| Then Microsoft did the unthinkable. It inexplicably threw away
| all these IT dependencies away, that it had spent decades to
| build across the worlr.
|
| Microsoft unleashed .Net on an unsuspecting IT world.
|
| And M$ arrogantly expected the world to also throw all their
| years of efforts of building applications and databases
| revolving around VB/VC++.
|
| To save their careers, millions of VB/VC++ programmers tried
| hard to scramble and learn these new technologies, but
| Microsoft just kept updating and upgrading the .Net landscape
| with increasing frequency and leading to more chaos and
| confusions. And as the learning curve steeper and the .Net
| scope became too hard for sane people to master in a short
| time, it became apparent that to the entire IT world (except
| Microsoft) that it had become too difficult and cumbersome to
| build applications for corporations using Microsoft's new-age
| tools. Thus, the interest and ambitions of the programmers and
| corporations quickly waned towards Microsoft tools, especially
| when they realised that .Net was a mess for installations, and
| it called expensive licenses to build and ship.
|
| So programmers and SOHO/medium-scale companies, pivoted to
| alternatives to Microsoft imposed nightmares. Python, PHP,
| MySQL, Linux, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, JSP, etc. took centre
| stage, even as the IT world moved away from .Net.
|
| The worldwide chaos caused by Windows Vista and Windows 8, did
| nothing to improve upon IT people's disdain for all things
| Microsoft.
|
| And Microsoft's rivals pounced at such golden opportunities,
| and they slowly ate away at Microsoft's dominance in corporate
| world.
|
| Yes, there is indeed some lessons for Micro$oft to be learnt
| from these debacles.
|
| "Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's
| going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the
| completion of a pattern already started." ~ Mary Midgley
|
| "And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is
| Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
| despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that
| colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands
| stretch far away." ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
| caycep wrote:
| is there a good windows rdp client for Linux? I went looking
| for one a few months back but didn't find anything definitely
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I use remmina, which uses xfreerdp under the hood. It works
| well, but I haven't managed to get smartcard authentication
| working, if that matters for your environment.
| wsve wrote:
| I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux
| Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...
|
| I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video
| file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed,
| and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to
| open a shell to watch a common video file?
|
| But then while attempting to install some packages to install
| Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some
| kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint
| just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the
| bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
|
| Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I
| saw _so many people_ hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly
| Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to
| start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I
| 'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my
| first experience.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| No such thing as brick when you have a "live drive" available.
| Reinstall and be up again in a half hour.
|
| The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them,
| not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec
| movie or install from the "store" GUI.
| wsve wrote:
| You're slightly missing the point. Ultimately, it doesn't
| really matter to me, the end user, whose fault it is that my
| OS doesn't have codecs.
|
| The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation
| that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work,
| and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the
| issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why
| it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| There are tradeoffs in life, not perfection. Bondage vs.
| convenience, your choice.
|
| Having to install codecs once every few years is a tiny
| inconvenience compared to the dystopia offered elsewhere. I
| also run commands on Win and Mac all the time to fix
| things. For example Windows wastes tens of gigabytes of
| space unless you run a couple of inscrutable commands to
| free it.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| I think the steam thing was solved some years ago after being
| featured on LTT.
| ColinWright wrote:
| "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
|
| -- Napoleon.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD,
| LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12,
| now 13.
|
| Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
|
| Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7
| and 10, but never as my main system.
|
| I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production
| and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for
| me for almost 30 years now.
|
| One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company
| tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer
| provided by them, I quickly said, 'No, thank you,' and left. The
| faces they made were truly priceless.
|
| Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some
| hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a
| Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really
| cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted
| Windows 10.
| simgoh wrote:
| Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel
| yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you
| wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there
| by default?
| Aldipower wrote:
| The kernel compilation had a configuration UI where you could
| select all the drivers you wanted to literally build in. So I
| selected just what I needed, to save memory, recompiled,
| waited an hour et voila. Kernel modules came later.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Memory and storage were far more expensive and limited in
| 1996 than they are today.
|
| Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced
| a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to
| select which * _drivers*_ to load because, if you weren 't
| careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the
| game you were trying to run.
| jermberj wrote:
| > You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just
| install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of
| GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd
| rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and
| respects me as a user.
|
| The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
| nenadg wrote:
| I did exactly the same some 16-17 years ago, when they forced
| windows 8 square design bullshit and announced that they'll ditch
| 7. Never looked back.
|
| Windows servers are still pretty good imho.
| exterior4052 wrote:
| For a creative, why not macOS?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've asked before but the answer keeps changing before I get
| around to implementing it:
|
| My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They
| have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I'm very technical: I don't mind
| doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.
|
| I haven't run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I'm completely
| out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent
| games?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Recommend making a live drive with Ventoy. Copy over latest
| .iso's of Mint, Fedora, Bazzite? for gaming.
|
| Give them all a test drive, see what you like before
| committing. After install try new things in VMs.
| 3form wrote:
| Depends on the games. If your kid wants to play anything with
| kernel level anticheat, it will not work on Linux, period -
| these anticheats don't support Linux, and either prevent the
| game from running altogether or disable certain online modes.
|
| Otherwise, CachyOS is extremely popular these days, and I
| suppose a valid choice.
| Todd wrote:
| The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non
| consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don't
| even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and
| put things back the way they were but you can still tell that
| your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn't saved.
| elias1233 wrote:
| You could say they broke the window(s)
| pronik wrote:
| For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like
| Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support
| for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable
| multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that
| Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before,
| would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas
| we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not
| working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent
| configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank
| Valve for that.
| 3form wrote:
| On a modern laptop without S3 sleep, it works better for me on
| Linux than on Windows currently. So at least there's that.
| chang1 wrote:
| I think shortly we may see "Apple forced me to switch to Linux"
| because of Tahoe and subsequent releases.
| havblue wrote:
| I know we keep hearing about how their share holders are forcing
| this change of focus in order to monetize ai. I just fail to see
| how alienating developers and the gaming community in the process
| will ever help achieve that.
| pyrophane wrote:
| I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to
| install Windows 11.
|
| Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks.
| Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No!
| Am I forgetting one?
|
| All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.
| wowczarek wrote:
| Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network
| engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about
| 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional
| gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy
| things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using
| terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None
| of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are
| significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the
| current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11
| without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running
| Windows outside of a VM.
|
| Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I
| still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance
| tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode
| and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night.
| No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its
| time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy
| that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of
| choice are as good as they have ever been.
| kalap_ur wrote:
| Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the
| incremental market share they have.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...
|
| My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant
| on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether
| OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| LibreOffice does fine, though you'll probably be unhappy. What
| is more important to you? Freedom, privacy, consent, or
| spreadsheet features?
|
| VMs are an option to partition your life as well.
| _dain_ wrote:
| There are many features of Excel that LibreOffice Calc
| doesn't support. Most importantly: structured references,
| VBA, PowerQuery. Not to mention its UI is very laggy even on
| powerful machines.
|
| For real financial/business work, Calc is just not a serious
| player.
| mshroyer wrote:
| I even had to switch my reading list spreadsheet over from
| LibreOffice to Excel when the former started seriously
| lagging with about 250 rows total
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I think there is a recent performance regression but
| hopefully will be fixed soon. Hasn't affected me. Learn
| Python, much better than VB.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Fedora + Google's Office Suite is the best way.
|
| Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that
| Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about
| VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind,
| many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.
| Aldipower wrote:
| NI recently filed for bankruptcy! This means that the licence
| server will probably be shut down at some point. Take the
| opportunity now. :-P I've been using Bitwig for two years now.
| And already produced a complete album with success. Next album
| is already following. :-) Many of Bitwig's own plugins are very
| good, and there are now top-notch native VSTs for Linux!
| Alternatively, there is yabridge for running Win VSTs.
|
| Great Linux VST manufacturers: U-he, DDMF, Toneboosters, TAL,
| Bluelabs, etc.
|
| And more, more, more native plugins: https://linuxmusic.rocks/
| curtisblaine wrote:
| If the license server goes down I'll just pirate them, I
| guess. The point is that I can't really throw aways years of
| investment because Windows sucks. The other important lesson
| is: if they have a licensing server, it's OK to pirate them
| from the start.
| Aldipower wrote:
| I understand, but probably at some point the pain may be
| higher then your investment...
| cmxch wrote:
| Between all the telemetry and them separating workstation and
| server duties, Windows is a no go aside from a generic gaming
| console here.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Ironically for me Linux has become the obvious default for casual
| use - web browsing, entertainment, paying my bills etc. I only
| boot Windows when I need to do some weird nerdy stuff, like
| checking updating SSD firmware with some proprietary software
| available only for Windows.
| random_duck wrote:
| Just run arch. (+1 for terrible advice)
| reddalo wrote:
| Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity
| Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva,
| but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.
|
| You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker
| with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-
| Affinity-Installer/release...
|
| I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the
| meantime, this works really good.
| speedylight wrote:
| I've been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once
| in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and
| every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become,
| using it feels I'm dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me
| to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for
| how they do things, but no one can deny that once you're properly
| established in their ecosystem, it's a phenomenal experience.
| magicbuzz wrote:
| I love the poem at the end
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I'm getting closer and closer to making the same decision.
|
| I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won't enable the AI cruft so I got
| somewhat lucky there.
|
| But the copilot business is AAF.
|
| And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I'm
| pretty much done with visual studio development.
|
| Not sure what's left.
|
| Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows
| ecosystem.
| 0dayz wrote:
| I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin
| capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly
| because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows
| updates).
|
| Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and
| boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers,
| where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a
| different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to
| be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1
| versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU,
| disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic
| driver update in an obscure setting.
|
| Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the
| kernel.
|
| Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed
| & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more
| consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with
| immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I
| can rollback.
| DonThomasitos wrote:
| Since most application run in the browser nowadays, the OS
| becomes less meaningful and more of a layer between browser and
| hardware.
|
| If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is
| the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a
| Windows copy over time.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Marvellous, spot on. 10+ fucking points.
| whompyjaw wrote:
| Keep these posts coming! More the merrier! :))
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago
| with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's
| marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.
|
| https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Fwiw... I've been doing Leenucks since '92. Back when you had to
| install BSD first, compile the kernel and reverse engineer how to
| boot into the new kernel you just built with gcc. But it was
| cheaper than SunOS, and the developers mailing list was more
| active than the BSD lists. I still miss my 3B1.
|
| Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't
| matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made
| it here eventually.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I'm in the opposite position. Been a Linux user exclusively for
| 16+ years.
|
| But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I
| finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in
| nearly 2 decades.
|
| This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But
| I'm going to soon maybe!
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a
| middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being
| from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can
| run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of
| Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't
| live without).
| bigyabai wrote:
| > But honestly I think not being able to launch League of
| Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install
| Linux.
|
| For all of macOS' gaming advantages, it still can't keep an
| SBF-tier addict off The Rift.
| carodgers wrote:
| I take tremendous umbrage at "femboy Thinkpad enjoyer."
|
| A wonderful writeup.
| jama211 wrote:
| There's a lot of odd things said in this article. Like "no more
| file explorer hanging", "no more waiting for the start menu to
| open" - is this something that actually happens to people?
| Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it's not my
| experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts
| to this article.
|
| But it's just gonna take off here anyway because it's a switching
| to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.
| MattRix wrote:
| Of course those are things that happen to people, why would
| they make them up?! If anything, your reaction seems like an
| emotional and biased one, refusing to acknowledge the
| experiences of others when they conflict with your beliefs.
|
| (and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to
| move to Linux).
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| These are real things and they happen on very good hardware.
| They are even acknowledge by Microsoft. The explorer issue is
| from waiting on for a response from network drives that the
| explorer thinks exists or tries to find. The start menu I'm not
| sure, but I get the issue from time to time and I think its
| because of some background process hanging the UI or something.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Waiting to download ads to improve your experience.
| shams93 wrote:
| For me I made the switch in 1998 when Windows Me was so terrible
| it was unusble. I went to CompUSA and found this cool box of cd
| roms with a lizard logo - suse linux and I was done with MS
| forever (except at work).
| drivers99 wrote:
| Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had
| my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even
| really game very much. I had originally built it with all new
| parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already
| becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the
| nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up
| your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever
| and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The
| linked article also pointed this out.)
|
| So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off
| that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made
| me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To
| my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact
| type of system it expected:
|
| 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)
|
| AMD Radeon graphics.
|
| NVMe SSD primary boot drive.
|
| UEFI BIOS support
|
| Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I
| thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet,
| but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated
| something or maybe it just needed a reboot.
|
| If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have
| since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.
|
| So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP
| (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all
| the others. Windows 7 was peak.
| k__ wrote:
| I switched to Arch last Summer and I'm quite happy.
|
| Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| Shhh! Don't tell anyone.
|
| Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center.
| Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange
| was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other
| operating system.
|
| That all changed with Azure.
|
| MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with
| Azure.
|
| They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and
| everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They
| changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn't kick in
| unless you've sold enough cloud services).
|
| Windows is no longer a profit center. It's a cost center.
|
| Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.
|
| Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems.
| As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.
|
| Windows being worse and worse isn't a bug. It's a feature.
| chungusman wrote:
| You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something
| of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an
| even bigger headache than using windows?
| FlossyBean wrote:
| Ubuntu with the Gnome Desktop works well as a family PC. Very
| easy installer with a GUI that walks you through everything.
|
| https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
|
| Linux Mint is nice, but it's been a few years since I installed
| it. Back in 2018ish we had a lot of machines with old dual
| cores and 2-4GB of RAM that chugged on Windows. But after
| installing Linux Mint, they were given new life and ran very
| well.
|
| https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
|
| I have been daily driving Ubuntu Cinnamon at work for ~3 years
| and it works pretty well. Some minor bugs here and there, but I
| can't imagine going back to Windows for a work machine.
|
| https://ubuntucinnamon.org
|
| There is a bit of a learning curve for Linux, so might be worth
| dipping your toes in to start before you go 100%.
| chungusman wrote:
| I use linux all the time for work - i just haven't acutally
| ever installed it myself haha. Thanks for the links.
| elric wrote:
| Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998
| and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the
| occasional brief interaction.
|
| I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances
| where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative,
| that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases
| where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-
| wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only
| worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).
|
| Mostly I enjoy how _I_ 'm in control of my machine, instead of
| having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem
| hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.
| kaiokendev wrote:
| I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it
| "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that
| I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would
| be spending configuring Linux.
|
| I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is
| amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used
| to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a
| buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and
| restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working
| fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and
| vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple
| things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't
| break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone
| who is on Windows to reconsider.
| Nekorosu wrote:
| Regarding high-quality commercial Linux software: SideFX Houdini
| offers a relatively affordable Indie license and is fantastic for
| most kinds of 3D work, compositing, and post-processing tasks.
| It's also fully procedural and scriptable, which really makes my
| brain buzz.
| anon291 wrote:
| Once again, I don't really understand people who say Windows is
| easier. Take printer drivers. In windows you have a 'simple'
| wizard to install a printer driver. Except in my experience... it
| never works the first time and you have to fiddle. On Linux... I
| just bought a new printer, and it worked out of the box. My
| experience with most hardware today on Linux is out-of-the-box
| support while windows requires endless 'driver' installs. Even
| driver installs on linux are easier. Usually just drop a binary
| blob somewhere if you really need it and modprobe...
|
| Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is
| actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not
| useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2
| roba6 wrote:
| I have a ricoh postscript printer that just won't work on
| Linux, I also have a Canon 6020 that works well in Linux. The
| Ricoh works well on Windows. So my experience with CUPS is
| mixed.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Anyone have a recommendation on a decent cloud-based file sync
| tool ala OneDrive? I use OneDrive extensively but there is no
| official client for Linux and the unofficial one has some major
| stability issues. I'm willing to change providers but not willing
| to put in the effort to roll-my-own.
| duffyjp wrote:
| I would also love to hear any success stories here. I converted
| my wife's Macbook over to Linux Mint somewhat recently and the
| best I could do was setup a shortcut to the Web version of her
| iCloud.
| senfiaj wrote:
| I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an
| anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works
| fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have
| higher risk of having problems when running Linux.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I have to disagree here.
|
| There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells
| me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing
| easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.
|
| To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to
| my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time,
| I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts
| of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I
| purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time,
| the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why
| apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.
|
| So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast
| majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where
| these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up
| at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not
| breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent
| users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed
| properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does
| that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer
| versions of the OS with ads.
| pregnenolone wrote:
| My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there
| are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I
| think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on
| Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is
| working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone
| partitioning, isn't really a thing for Windows guests which is
| something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating
| part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that
| allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.
| artingent wrote:
| Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and
| laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win
| 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than
| fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the
| File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've
| started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering
| culture there seems completely broken and clueless.
|
| I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do
| suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and
| seems to be getting better.
| andai wrote:
| >No more waiting for the Start menu to decide it wants to open.
| No more File Explorer hanging when you need it the most.
|
| I ran XP in a VM on Windows 10.
|
| The start menu opens instantly. After one video frame.
|
| Windows explorer opens instantly. One video frame.
|
| If they had literally done nothing for 20 years, it would be like
| 50x faster now.
| mcswell wrote:
| I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November,
| mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is
| working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not
| being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real
| Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out
| why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt
| update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok
| yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after
| spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread
| here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-
| ava....)
|
| Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap',
| and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While
| I _think_ snap is updating automatically, it 's hard to tell;
| some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover
| that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
|
| Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I
| want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged
| problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
|
| I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the
| only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for
| reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for
| ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it
| from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind
| keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need
| antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard,
| particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
|
| I guess there are distros that are better about some of these
| things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that
| some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months
| later.
|
| So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to
| Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
| pamcake wrote:
| Can't help you with AV but otherwise your issues and confusions
| are all Ubuntu and Canonical and nothing on there is
| representative of other Linux dists.
|
| Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but
| not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation
| for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is
| basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those
| issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the
| Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their
| desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.
|
| Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for
| their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from
| their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what
| you want) or get the key for archive.
|
| Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop
| Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work
| better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you
| know.
| fragmede wrote:
| I've spent a long career getting good at Linux. Real good. But
| I'm only human. Over the decades, the number of how-tos, wiki
| pages, Linux distros, Linux kernel source, other programs
| documentation and source; all of that which I've ingested and
| used in practice and gotten good at, doesn't hold a candle to
| AI having been trained on _every single last one of them_. The
| solution to your apt /Vivaldi problem is easy: install Claude
| code, and paste in the error. Hit ctrl-o to gain insight on how
| it fixes it.
|
| You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate
| to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it,
| there's no market for that anymore.
|
| (for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for
| .../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )
| fragmede wrote:
| > particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks
|
| If you're on Linux and have a firewall, so there are no
| listening ports, there is no threat from using public wifi. TLS
| encrypts your connection on ~all websites these days.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist
| there.
|
| > And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you
| sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.
|
| This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick
| to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments,
| keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite
| working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
| nothrows wrote:
| My wife was complaining about her Windows 11 laptop crashing. I
| tried everything and even did fresh installs. Still crashing (and
| honestly pretty slow). I gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu
| and Chromium for her. She can instagram, facebook, save her
| memes, and its all fast. No crashes. She's a happy camper now. I
| think a lot of (even) non technical people would like Linux a lot
| more than they realize if they gave it a shot.
| asveikau wrote:
| > my first computer was a Windows 98 machine, with an Athlon XP
| 1900+ (Palomino core)
|
| Off topic, anyone else think Windows 98 is too old for this
| machine? At a similar era I built an athlon t-bird 1.0GHz, I was
| mostly using Linux by then but if I did Windows then it would
| have been Win2k, maybe by the time of Athlon "XP", Windows XP
| would have been a thing too.
| abetaha wrote:
| It is quiet sad to see Windows deteriorate that much over the
| years because of the decreased investment and lack of care and
| craftsmanship for the quality of the software being pushed out.
|
| Thankfully unless you're running a few specific applications that
| only run on Windows, you can use any other operating system. It
| will do the job, with much less frustrations.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Incredible moment when you have to ward off Windows, macOS and
| iPhone updates like a bouncer.
|
| I've gone over the years from Visual Studio fanboy to writing
| everything in vi, entirely due to software decay.
|
| Our culture and economy can no longer maintain complex GUIs.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I think I'm pretty much there and just haven't made the switch
| yet. I'm going to give Mint a shot on my old PC soon and if its a
| good experience I'll switch on my desktop as well. Every time I
| have a bad experience in Windows lately I wonder why I'm sticking
| with it. Everything has been solved, its only momentum keeping me
| going.
| system2 wrote:
| >"If you're always finding the next reason not to switch, you're
| not looking for solutions, you're looking for excuses to stay
| complacent."
|
| No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps
| installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as
| Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL
| foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is
| missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might
| work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my
| KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not
| 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).
|
| The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is
| that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises.
| Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another.
| We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is
| like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Microslop must be stopped, absolute cancer of a company
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| It's still not quite there yet, for me. A lot of older games
| (which I'm a big fan of) won't run well or at all - and support
| for Nvidia is still not great.
|
| If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on
| Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's
| game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't
| mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game
| I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.
| klooney wrote:
| You can tell all the Microsoft executives use Macs at work.
| matltc wrote:
| I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at
| the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is
| narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but
| it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of
| the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I
| don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless
| they've never even tried it
|
| That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day
| just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of
| fun,though.
| projektfu wrote:
| Another problem with Windows, that has been going on for quite
| some time now, is that they do not have a real support channel
| for non-enterprise users that produces useful knowledge for the
| future. Almost any issue you google now has a thousand "answers"
| on microsoft.com that do not fix the problem because the people
| answering have not reproduced it and have not confirmed their
| solution.
|
| In Linux forums, generally speaking, there is either a way it
| works or agreement that it hasn't been fixed yet. The main source
| of spam now is actually StackExchange, that prioritizes
| discussions from 10 years ago on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than
| up-to-date questions and answers.
| ark296 wrote:
| I switched after running basic dev tools became genuinely
| unusable (randomly freezing for minutes, start menu just didn't
| work, crashes all the time) despite being on good, new hardware.
|
| I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that
| worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps.
| But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.
| flaburgan wrote:
| I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP,
| but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7
| came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time.
| Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister,
| parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is
| perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about
| Zorin OS as well.
| pzo wrote:
| Its was a good read until at the end ...
|
| > For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one:
| replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't
| let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These
| are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and
| architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript.
| And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your
| RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.
|
| I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they
| have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react
| native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium
| process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8
| engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is
| native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit
| layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github
| at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else
| is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.
|
| The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http
| requests to downloads those ads.
| 85392_school wrote:
| > React Native doesn't even use v8 engine
|
| Are you saying you would use React Native with a language other
| than JS?
| tempaccsoz5 wrote:
| Engines other than v8 exist. React Native uses Hermes or
| JavaScriptCore (Apple/Safari). [0]
|
| Other engines include SpiderMonkey (Mozilla/Firefox) [1] and
| QuickJS [2]
|
| [0]: https://reactnative.dev/docs/javascript-environment
|
| [1]: https://spidermonkey.dev/
|
| [2]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/
| hgs3 wrote:
| But why is Microsoft using JS and react native when they
| already have a native UI toolkit for C# and C++? [1] It's
| strange they don't dogfood their own tech.
|
| [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I remember reading an article many years ago about product
| management being like being a parent, and there being a latter
| point where you need to let the product go and admit it's done.
| Windows is clearly there, and Microsoft are doing a terrible job
| of it. Yes, it's less relevant than it's ever been, but it's
| still vastly widely deployed, earns money, and delivers other
| cash cows (like Office) - all they have to do is do the basic
| stuff to keep it going and not mess it up, but somehow that is
| not what's happening. Wild.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I'm so glad ditching it 20 years ago, didn't look back once
| since.
| YVoyiatzis wrote:
| That is exactly why I ditched Microsoft for Mac thirty years ago.
| I've never looked back or regretted leaving MSFT during my
| "formative" years; in fact, I'm glad I did. That said, it's great
| to see Linux stay the course and build a real alternative for PC
| users.
|
| I've always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I
| never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these
| days...
| LowLevelBasket wrote:
| I switched during windows 10 and I had several friends switch
| after win7 wasn't supported. In hindsight I should have spent the
| few weeks to learn linux and switched back then too
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Why is opening the taskbar right click menu slower on Win11 than
| on Win95?
|
| Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?
|
| I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick
| taskbar -> leftclick "close" but this stopped working. Why??
| roba6 wrote:
| I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA
| programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux.
| Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run
| a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for
| automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a
| standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems
| pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to
| lead me into servitude.
| cess11 wrote:
| "All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native
| Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."
|
| This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious
| Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services,
| because if you for example want to do a download of email or
| files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then
| they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module
| that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and
| obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating
| system, plus they get users.
|
| Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way
| suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long
| time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues
| sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade
| reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.
|
| Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years,
| unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux
| because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than
| it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that
| carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.
|
| And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually,
| terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum
| thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again,
| whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did
| you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| If you thought we were getting bad bugs before, just wait until
| the 90% agent-coded PRs start landing. We're gonna have multiple
| crowdstrike-level blowups.
| hnsmhthrow wrote:
| That Ableton Flicker: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ev3vENli7wQ
| tomsiw wrote:
| Would be great to switch except I need Visual Studio Pro
| mrandish wrote:
| I'm still surviving on Windows but only because over the last
| four years, as each new annoyance and regression arose, I made
| the mistake of very gradually, in tiny increments, sinking the
| time into invoking the arcane incantations necessary to tame each
| one.
|
| 15 minutes to deactivate an entire branch of notification
| pathways, 20 minutes to (mostly) restore the Right-Ctrl key they
| hijacked into a CoPilot key. 10 minutes to restore Win10
| functionality to the Win11 taskbar with the wonderful
| ExplorerPatcher. $5 spent on Start11 to sidestep the whole start
| menu train wreck. And little 3 to 5 minute fixes with WindHawk
| (an amazing store-like platform to discover, install and manage
| open source Windows GUI patches).
|
| I'm the stupid frog who didn't leap from the gradually heating
| pot. I acclimated to the boiling. And it's... okay. At least for
| now. But I know someday soon, the thousand faceless product
| managers at MSFT will break something unfixable. Somehow exceed
| the considerable abilities of the large community finding clever
| hacks and patches to keep the harsh Win wasteland livable for
| hardy souls.
|
| While I greatly appreciate Linux philosophically and deeply
| respect it architecturally, I still really _liked_ what Windows
| got so close to being - right before MSFT shifted biz models,
| simultaneously de-investing and turning it into a promotional
| platform for their other business. When that day comes, it 'll
| suck to leave behind the wonderful third-party tools like
| Everything search, Ditto clipboard and AHK automation that
| streamline my day.
|
| The thing I don't understand is why MSFT refuses to just make a
| version of Windows that's a Product again. I'd gladly pay them
| $100/yr for an upgraded "Windows Ti Super+" that just wants to be
| a good operating system for advanced users, instead of a
| strategic moat or monetization flywheel.
| thr1owaway9621 wrote:
| I never realized Windows tuning was a thing (WindHawk,
| Start11). Thank you for mentioning those.
|
| I recently had to install Windows 11 to play a video game that
| runs janky on Linux, and I am encountering all the annoying
| problems people are describing in this thread (forced updates,
| full-screen ads, etc). It does not bother me too much, since I
| effectively use Windows only to play that one game. But maybe I
| can tune Windows 11 into something less obtrusive with the
| custom hacks. Thanks.
| mrandish wrote:
| You're welcome. One of the best things I did once I realized
| I was reluctantly on this journey, was start keeping notes in
| a cloud backed-up file of every registry setting I tweaked or
| little utility I installed. Just a quick cut and paste to
| remind me.
|
| Of course some of the notes become stale or irrelevant as
| things evolve but it's still invaluable insurance if this
| Windows install eventually gets crufty and needs to be hosed
| out for a fresh start (which eventually happens even with
| diligent hygiene). Also, don't forget ExplorerPatcher which
| restores some nice Win10 taskbar and explorer functionality
| MSFT removed from Win11 (promising to eventually replace it
| but now, years later, obviously never will).
| ilvez wrote:
| Everyone are very unhappy with Windows 11. They kind of were OK
| with Windows 10. It's continuing the same old cycle. Windows 12
| they will make hopefully things tolerable again..
|
| I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on
| 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".
| vanillax wrote:
| I made the same switch but all linux always feels slightly jank.
| I think Macos is the best premium decoupling from Winblows, but
| that comes with its own ecosystem lock in. I use all three
| equally daily and it just drives me insane. Lots of games on
| Windows ONLY work on windows due to anti cheat. Ie BattleField
| 6.... MacOs Gaming is non existent and any attempt with say
| wine/parallels or whatever brings you back to windows.... Linux /
| PopOS / Cosmic is so close to being there but the gaming
| restrictions takes you back to Windows.. I tried the whole WSL2
| but lots of apps need so much tuning to work properly.. Ie
| android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2
| paths and it gets broken fast.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Which would almost be unfortunate, but _Battlefield 6_ is the
| same slop as _2042_ with a fanservice texture pack on top. You
| can play BF4, BF2, Bad Company, Arma 2 /3/Reforger, and even
| _DCS World_ without issue on Linux - why are you spending _$70_
| to install a rootkit for a game you 'll put 20 hours into,
| tops?
|
| Giving up Windows pushed me to play better games and stay off
| the unhealthy AAA release cycle that has strangled innovation
| for years. If I was still playing _Rainbow Six Siege_ then I
| wouldn 't know how to cold-start an F-16 blk. 50.
| vanillax wrote:
| I mean next on list is Escape From Tarkov.. the list goes on.
| its more than just Battlefield 6, theres tons of games that
| require a anti cheat solution for linux..
| bigyabai wrote:
| Escape From Tarkov doesn't have functional anticheat on
| Windows. Most people either play EFT against bots (which is
| a $10 DLC) or modded SPT (which is free and works on
| Linux). Even livestreamers are struggling to play a match
| without cheaters post 1.0 release, you might as well play
| _Anomaly EFP_.
|
| There's definitely a list of games that don't work; they're
| usually outnumbered 10:1 by better titles. I haven't booted
| into Windows for 7 years, there's just not many new
| releases worth the effort.
| ingohelpinger wrote:
| Give it a few more years and Linux will complete its inevitable
| evolution into Microsoft, same consolidation, same gatekeeping,
| just with better slogans and a smug sense of moral superiority.
| leptons wrote:
| That is _highly_ unlikely.
| procone wrote:
| How is this possible? I don't think you quite understand what
| "Linux" is.
|
| There is no corporation, board, or CEO to force unwanted
| changes. Pretty much every piece of the operating system is
| free and open source.
|
| If you don't like your "Linux", you can swap it out for another
| distribution or "distro".
| liendolucas wrote:
| I just hope that more people are forced into this! I understand
| that the transition, learning path can be daunting but once
| someone's head gets the mindset on a Unix OS there is basically
| no turning back.
| cepcode wrote:
| As time goes on, I get closer and closer for Linux to be my daily
| driver. The ads, the Microsoft account login, the OneDrive in the
| explorer window, the 'recommendations' to change my default
| browser, etc make me more angry by the day. However, when I
| install Linux on an old machine, I initially have driver issues
| like wifi. And after fighting with that for an hour, I decide
| it's not worth the risk to blow away my main machine. So I accept
| the slop from MS and continue on.
| Animats wrote:
| I did that years ago, at the end of Windows 7 and the beginning
| of the need for a Microsoft account.
|
| I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than
| most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn.
| Purely because they became annoying.
| Toorkit wrote:
| My CPU can run Windows 11 fine, but what I don't tolerate is
| full-screen ad pop-ups on my desktop.
|
| When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the
| next day.
| vimwizard wrote:
| I finally installed Windows 11 last year so I could use Wifi 6E.
| Other than that, it is certainly a downgrade. With some
| debloating and ExplorerPatcher, its mostly the same as Windows 10
| now, but I'm praying that an update wont brick my install.
| Thankfully the latest forced feature update didn't affect me.
| fasterik wrote:
| With Windows 10 EOL, I had to decide whether to upgrade my laptop
| to Windows 11 or Linux. I've been a Windows user for decades, but
| with all the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft and
| the degradation of performance on Windows 11, I decided to go
| with Ubuntu instead.
|
| I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but
| seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing
| stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for
| professional video editing and music production, with no
| comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not
| thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and
| effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation
| on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily
| abandon all Microsoft products at this point.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Recommend to split your music workstation from your personal
| files machine to get some privacy back. Then run cleanup
| scripts to pare Windows down to the bone. Also Mint over
| Ubuntu.
| j45 wrote:
| This seems to historically have been a pattern. There was a
| period where Windows Vista was forced on everyone and downgrading
| to Windows XP until Vista was better was forbidden.
|
| Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's
| article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the
| best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so
| intel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista
| stewartjarod wrote:
| AI bubble pop, when???
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I'm not sure that "multi-compose" chrome bug is a windows-only
| thing though. I use chrome on Linux (slackware) with an nvidia
| card, and I get that issue all the time if I try to open more
| than one chrome WINDOW. Multiple tabs are ok, and SOMETIMES
| multiple windows are ok, but more often than not, I can only have
| one chrome window.
| floxy wrote:
| >Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first
| computer, 22 years later?
|
| Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer
| was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB
| harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-
| colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77
| MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded
| to v5.0.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Going to switch my non technical gf to Linux she is pissed at
| Windows 11 lately
| qwertox wrote:
| Past week I got to know about InputActions [0] so I installed
| Kubuntu 25.10 to test it, and it is very promising. Linux never
| had a proper mouse gesture support, and I won't go into details,
| but this was one of the three dealbreakers for me. The other one
| was a Windows-only app which ran so sluggishly on all previous
| tests I've made over the years, but with Wine 11 the app is just
| as good and fast as on Windows. Though I first need to populate
| the registry with an icon set. But now with AI this can be easily
| automated (letting it write a script I then run). The third is
| some custom electron-based launcher which is heavily Windows-
| customized, which I will need to migrate to Linux, but also this
| should be easy with AI.
|
| For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to
| switch to Linux, and it's about time!
|
| [0] https://github.com/taj-ny/InputActions
| tgtweak wrote:
| Literally just hit the MPO bug yesterday - what a shitshow that
| things like display scaling can fail with a mainstream gpu/cpu
| and windows 11 - like do they not have testing rigs for this in
| microsoft? if insiders preview is fine but production windows
| gets all these bugs... what are they inside previewing? The most
| stable build of windows I ever had (hell it's still chugging
| along with 1050 days of uptime...) was a windows 10 enterprise
| edition added to domain controller with update GPO set to
| basically never install windows updates automatically.
|
| There is some serious work needed inside microsoft camp to
| continue with a 6 month release cycle.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Windows was the robbery of the century.
| riccardomc wrote:
| I just came here to say that is ackchyually GNU/Linux.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| * thirteen years ago. The lost me with win7->win8 migration. I
| thought the cannot go lower that that, and here we are.
| dimitrisscript wrote:
| If only league of legends was playable in Linux. And a few other
| games.
| shnpln wrote:
| I just switched to Linux as well on my Windows laptop. 10 was
| getting so hard to run and I had no clear/stable path to 11.
| Ubuntu runs great for me!
| mihaic wrote:
| I've had a similar path, and I always recommend KDE with its
| taskbar on Ubuntu, it made the transition smoother for me in
| terms of preserving workflows.
| linza wrote:
| i also vividly remember the specs of my first machine but weirdly
| nothing else after. i386SX with 4MiB RAM and a 10MB hard drive
| aa_is_op wrote:
| I'm keeping an eye on SteamOS. I love how it's much better at
| running games than Windows, the platform those games were
| designed for.
| dismalaf wrote:
| I switched to Linux circa 2010 when I needed a word processor but
| didn't want to go to the store to buy Office (was pretty young
| and poor at the time). After some Googling I found LibreOffice
| and Ubuntu. I had used Suse Linux years earlier when I was a kid
| but it definitely wasn't ready for use (2003) so I was also
| curious about Ubuntu and the current state at the time. I
| installed Ubuntu, used LibreOffice for the thing I needed, and
| never looked back. Linux was a breath of fresh air and it did all
| the things I needed. I went to university using only Linux
| (2012-2016), opened businesses, did all sorts of things, all 100%
| on Linux. Nice to see everyone else finally catching up.
|
| Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux
| the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and
| 16 years.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| So happy to see so many new Linux users as a long time user and
| developer for the platform. I want to welcome anyone and PLEASE
| feel free to use AI to make awesome stuff or solve problems. The
| FOSS community is still adapting to the new influx of developers
| and tools, vibe coders, etc.
|
| Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based
| on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may
| realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting
| to vastly modify it.
|
| My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in
| there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get
| hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install
| Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will
| be fully owned.
| purpleredrose wrote:
| > 've used Windows for as long as I've been alive. At 6 years
| old, my first computer was a Windows 98 machine,
|
| this sounds like child abuse.
| mrsssnake wrote:
| I could talk about things better in Linux whole day. But besides
| popularity (so being preinstalled, proprietary software
| availability, being presented from childhood) is there a single
| reason to use Windows? Backwards compatibility, accessibility?
| Maybe?
| nout wrote:
| For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd
| just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd
| dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd
| with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I
| also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean
| Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only
| thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use
| it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight
| with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth,
| etc.
| jairuhme wrote:
| I'm an Apple guy through and through, but I am in Georgia Techs
| OMSCS program. For some of the classes, you need to use a VM that
| doesn't play nicely with Apple Silicon. So I went over to
| Microcenter and picked up a cheap PC with Windows. I loathe using
| it, even if I am in the VM the whole time. I'm amazed at the
| amount of ads that pop up and for a while, sound just didn't
| work. Like not with headphones or just out of the normal speakers
| until eventually a random update fixed it. I get not wanting to
| be in the Apple ecosystem, but at this point in time I don't know
| why you would want Windows and not go for Linux.
| geoffbp wrote:
| My main reason for getting into Linux, forget the version or
| distribution maybe Slackware or RH at the time (later loved
| Debian the most) was that windows in that era was horribly
| unstable, BSOD etc
| geoffbp wrote:
| Obligatory:
|
| It's the year of the Linux desktop!
| Desafinado wrote:
| I did the same on my laptop and PC. Unfortunately, my sound
| system receiver doesn't support Linux but I'll survive. And the
| speed of my machines more than makes up for it.
| j0057 wrote:
| I used https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat on a family
| member's new Win11 install and it actually works reasonably
| snappy. I wouldn't be want to caught dead with it, but I couldn't
| convince this one to go for macOS.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| The only thing keeping my secondary / gaming / file-server
| computer on Windows is Backblaze. The main obstacle to me
| switching from macOS to Linux is Office 365 (doesn't work on
| Wine).
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Any suggestions for photo-editing, sharing, album management
| process for linux?
|
| Its really the only thing on macOS + iOS that I use. Otherwise I
| am so over the mac lifestyle.
| jdboyd wrote:
| I think Windows 11 would have had much more consumer buy-in in
| the early days if they would have at least extended non-OEM
| support back to the Skylake generation, if not further, which it
| looks like it would have be easy to do, since it ran just fine on
| much older machines. I didn't object to them making TPM 2.0
| mandatory for new OEM builds, just to the making it mandatory for
| people wanting to upgrade to it.
|
| Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse.
| But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to
| Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that
| Windows 10 support has ended.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| Btw, my first computer was an Intel Pentium MMX 166Mhz IIRC,
| massive 64MB of SIMM ram, and impressive 8GB of disk. Trident
| "graphic card", Creative sound card and the ultra fast Motorola
| 56k modem haha
|
| "I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact,
| sleep mode was broken from the start"
|
| This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow
| hype instead of installing a stable distro.
|
| As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best
| distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming,
| video editing and 3D design, it just works.
|
| It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being
| up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel
| panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.
|
| If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling
| releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having
| problems. They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao
| rbc wrote:
| At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the
| desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft
| products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser
| on Linux or BSD.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-28 23:00 UTC)