> also a lot of half baked buggy stuff

This morning I noticed I have a 3D Objects folder pinned to the This PC item that I can't remove. I also have Mixed Reality Portal and Mixed Reality Viewer that I can't remove.

Why on earth are those apps part of the default install? Worse though - why doesn't Microsoft make it easy to uninstall them? I don't want their crappy news, weather, contacts, maps, music, and other default apps. They should make the apps so good users want them, not force install them and make them uninstallable.

That's to be able to claim an 'installed base of 100's of millions of users' for technology 'x'. Even if none of those people installed it voluntarily or has ever used it.

In their conference they presented that shit part of their VR strategy or similar completely insane BS.

In the same vein, I don't know what they intent to mean by their AI division (esp as a platform, service, whatever) and probably neither do they, but hey, you got to make the speech of the boss somehow vaguely believable, even if the whole earth know it is just for show.

> There's already a lot of low hanging fruit they could clean up with an update, but haven't.

In all honesty that's been my impression of Windows since its inception. The only time I can recall ever feeling like Windows was deserved market leader was with Windows 2000: Linux wasn't mature on the desktop, OS X wasn't yet released or literally only just released and OS 9 was god awful (worse than the Win 95 in my opinion). The only platform that really competed in technical merit was BeOS and we all know how that ended up.

Win 3.x felt like a huge step backwards from what Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Windows 9x was an improvement but slow and buggy. Windows XP took a long time to mature - years and two service packs in fact. And before then it was basically just a slower (bar start up time), uglier version of Win 2000. And by the time Microsoft recovered from the cluster fuck of Longhorn OS X and Linux were both streets ahead in terms of stability, usability and even just basic features.

There are obviously people who genuinely warm to Windows and prefer that as a platform - good for them; variety is the spice of life and all - but from a technical standpoint Windows has always felt like it's had a multitude of low hanging fruit which aren't trendy enough for Redmond to invest development time in (case in point: why did it take until Windows 10 before shortcut keys were added to cmd.exe? And then why did MS stop there? The terminal emulator still totally sucks compared to nearly every other ever made!)

I think because there's no career advancement at Microsoft, working on cleaning up existing features. Only by working on new stuff can you get noticed.

So, interns work on 'old' stuff (like office apps, Windows, tools). And they always look pretty rough.

Interns don’t do maintenance work in general. They build new stuff, often flashy new stuff that never ships [1], because the intern program is about evaluating potential hires and giving them a great experience so they want to come back. Giving interns tedious unrecognized maintenance work is a great way to convince them to go elsewhere.

Source: Microsoft employee

[1] The goal is still to build features that ship, but because they get new, shiny stuff, sometimes it’s speculative development and the winds shift before it goes out the door.

That's pretty much how it works everywhere. There's no career, or even pay, advancement for people who like to do this sort of work. You're called a "maintenance programmer" which people take to mean you're not very good. On the contrary, a lot of those types of developers are very good. Better than the people who initially wrote the code and jumped ship when the bugs started rolling in that they couldn't fix. They understand the system and the business much better than the talky-talky system architecture wanna-bes.

Whew, that turned into a rant quickly. I've just seen plenty of strong, smart developers get screwed because they don't do flashy work.

...as attested to by my relatives and friends who work there.

Am I remembering the timing wrong? XP came after 2000 and before Vista, right?

Yup literally that. Was my post ambiguous?

Linux on desktop is pretty amazing. Haven't looked back in 3 years.

A tiny linux/windows story:

For the last year I ran a x200 (c2d p8400, passmark 1458) + below average ssd. Win10, almost no cruft, some cortana disabled etc.

It's ok but became worse and worse (regular pointer lag for a minute, pointer lag is very very sad and indicates very low level perf issues)

I don't use full fledged linux Desktops, if at all. I run a bare i3wm + emacs + $browser + mpv setup.

Last week I booted my old x61 (c2d l7500, passmark 967) on old intel 80GB SSD linux machine. I was stunned ..

chromium and firefox are seriously more reactive. They're only slower for graphics/video/intense workloads. emacs and git flies. Everything is tiny and leaner. Even on an older, slower cpu.

It's even mentally easier since I have less things to handle under linux (still too much to my tastes, but windows has so many components and moving pieces..)

I have to run that archlinux/i3wm setup on the x200 to get more data.

> I have to run that archlinux/i3wm setup on the x200 to get more data.

Well, it's Linux; unless you're running Gentoo, you can probably just swap the hard drive :-) Unless of course the SSD is an important part of this test.

no you're right, I was just not willing to swap the disks

Caddies same size, so just one screw on each machine and a quick swap.

X220/8Gb/xfce4 runs fine for my modest needs.

At one of my employers they are using Windows 10 for Education. We had some atom based small form factor desktop PCs that worked really nicely with Windows 10 just after the upgrade, but then as great grandparent post says began to become noticebly slower as the weeks and months went by. They have been replaced with i5/8Mb machines now which seem fine.

Crazy how free market 'improves' things..

ps: btw I just did ssd swap. I'll see how the x200 does. First difference, wifi nic has a much stronger signal/bandwidth.

Outside of Dev work unfortunately Linux is not that much fun. If you need to do accounting, graphics or other work there are options on Linux but they are usually way behind what Mac or Windows are offering.

Even as an desktop developer, often Linux is 2% of the user base, very vocal, used to software being free, and with infinite OS variations. That's not very compelling.

Infinite variations is the bane of free/open software. It is the primary reason it hasn't taken over everything, IMHO.

And yet, it has, for definitions of "everything" that aren't a desktop computer, or an iDevice.

If I was in the market of workstation software such as CAD, Music DAWs, industrial automation etc. I would much rather have control over the base OS by shipping a customised version of Debian or similar. This would be very compelling for professional users also, who don't want the consumer-oriented cruft and bloat associated with Windows and Mac OS.

How would you deal with customers' corporate IT banning any non-certified OS from the network?

At work, we have a big TV screen showing an alert overview (a Grafana dashboard). A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and Firefox would be enough to do that, but if we were to connect one to the LAN, its MAC would be blacklisted within less than a hour. (I've heard a report from a contractor plugging his own notebook into Ethernet, who had said cable ripped out by the local admin a few minutes later.) We ended up using an old notebook from one of our colleagues running Windows 7 Enterprise. Every few days, we have to RDP into it to click through app updates or restart the browser or something like that.

IPtables, block all incoming traffic aside from arps and replys to known traffic?

And what do you do when your customer wants to use on the same machine two professional apps from different vendors?

How do you reconcile Adobe Linux for After Effects/Photoshop/Premier with Autodesk Linux for Maya/...?

This has nothing to do with Linux, rather with the publishers who decide not to support Linux or any particular distro at least.

Yeah sure, let's not wonder why maybe developers don't want to develop for your platform or anything.

Nothing to wonder, it's easy to understand why they prefer to invest in 90% of the market, but they shoot themselves in the foot by investing in non-free platforms at the end of the day.

You're ignoring how they got to be 90% of the market. It is a comforting lie to say that it was all shady business practices and marketing, though those certainly played a role. Here's a clue:

"One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging ... making binaries for Linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass. You don't make binaries for Linux, you make binaries for Fedora 19, Fedora 20, maybe even RHEL5 from 10 years ago. You make binaries for Debian Stable…well actually no, you don't make binaries for Debian Stable because Debian Stable has libraries that are so old that anything built in the last century it doesn't work. …and this [“Don't Break Userspace!”] is like, a big deal for the kernel, and I put a lot of effort into explaining to all the developers that this is a really important thing, and then all of the distributions come in, and they screw it all up. Because they break binary compatibility left and right."

--Linus Torvalds, DebConf 2014

"they shoot themselves in the foot by investing in non-free platforms at the end of the day."

When is that end of the day? Over the last decades it would have been extremely difficult making money with Linux dekstop software. Windows and Mac were the only viable options to run a business.

...because Microsoft is good at marketing, has no ethics, and successfully leveraged its advantages in the 90s to kill all the competition? Is this a trick question?

Possibly, or maybe that's an excuse the community uses because they're unwilling to see how openly hostile they are to proprietary software on their platform.

Let me ask you a quick question: How can I distribute an application in a way that will work on all Linux Desktops?

A way to do that in a cross-distro way with (almost) no dependencies is via AppImage[1]. This creates a single executable that contains your application and all the necessary libraries and data files.

There is also work towards a more modular approach with Flatpak and Snaps, but those require support from the distro side. AppImage doesn't need any specific distro support.

[1] https://appimage.org/

And even AppImage, a solution I frequently praise mind you, doesn't always work right.

It's 2018 and the Linux Desktop still doesn't have a consistent way to... well do anything now that I think about it, but that you can't even reliably distribute an application is pretty insane.

Flatpak and Snaps are a typical Linux Desktop solution: Over-engineer the shit out of it.

AFAIK the only issue that could make AppImage to not work is lack of FUSE support, but any modern distribution should have that enabled.

Beyond that, AppImage is really just a container. It is still up to the developer to bundle the necessary dependencies (libraries, runtimes, VMs, data files, etc), but this is something they'd need to do with Windows too.

What problems do you have with it?

I have only ever used one, personally, but users of NixOS don't seem to be able to use them out of the box.

> It is still up to the developer to bundle the necessary dependencies (libraries, runtimes, VMs, data files, etc), but this is something they'd need to do with Windows too.

Only for libraries not present in the base system. Problem with Linux Desktop world is that they seem to actively loathe the concept of a consistent base system.

>>> Let me ask you a quick question: How can I distribute an application in a way that will work on all Linux Desktops?

It's a trick question without a clear answer.

Many people tried, noone has ever succeeded.

Steam on Linux works very well.

The next question would be on which distributions and which versions of which distributions?

Linux is a very large family of operating systems, with hundreds of members and variations. It's really a meaningless term.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1504-QHX...

That KB entry is misleading: Steam works on most distros (at least all the ones that I've tried) because it includes its own runtime (glibc etc.) and thus avoids most of the idiosyncrasies of distros.

AppImage/Flatpak/Snap/Docker is mostly the same idea, just executed differently.

Yeah, it speaks volumes that the best way to ensure applications work on your platform is for the dev to bundle their own version of the platform in a container with the application.

Well, it's also how OS X apps work, and have worked for a long time already.

...those are called folders. DOS applications worked that way. Only UNIX people seem to think that not hardcoding all your paths is some kind of special voodoo.

Oh, you meant that they package the libraries with the application? Yeah. If it isn't part of the base system, they do. That's how it should work or you get DLL hell.

Problem with Linux Desktop is if you put any two of its community in a room you'd have 4 different incompatible base systems within a week.

At least with platforms such as Steam, the problem is one of porting the platform to each distribution, not all its applications.

Why bother to try to sell desktop software to users that want everything for free, and with source code available?

Usually the only ones willing to pay for Linux software are enterprise shops.

Linux users expect not to be locked-in and controlled. Perhaps if vendors tried different revenue models, such as sponsoring new features or charging for support/bug fixes. Over the last few years I have spent several hundred dollars in donations to free (libre) software. We are not all cheapskates :)

Hardly anyone can live from donations or bounties.

Try to get a mortage, pay a monthly rent, pay the kids school,.... just with donations.

One needs a regular source of income.

Desktop users are usually not keen to pay for consulting, trainigs or documentation. Rather just paying once.

Vendors that have pushed for web solutions get a constant revenue, but that solution makes the desktop irrelevant thus regular users see no benefit in running e.g. Chrome in other OS that wasn't already installed on the hardware that they bought.

Additionally such hardware is as proprietary as it ever was, even if built with a FOSS stack, as no one gets the sauce running on the server.

I didn't actually suggest donations was a lucrative revenue model. Support could be though, for example, RedHat is a billion dollar business.

"We are not all cheapskates :)"

Most are though.

Sure. It's not the direct fault of Linux but it prevents wider adoption by non tech users.

Let's not forget that most non-tech users can do almost everything they need nowadays in the browser.

Yep, the other day I was also pretty amazed how using VS Code alongside Rust, for writing a Gtk-rs application, managed to hang X forcing me to reboot the whole thing.

With the open source AMD drivers.

One of the more amazing bits of technology in Windows is that which allows the graphics drivers to crash and restart without taking down the system. They've spent so long fighting buggy third parties that this is the solution.

One thing I love about debugging on Windows is that a program being debugged cannot grab the mouse and keyboard. On Linux, if you break a program that has a context menu open, you can say goodbye to your ability to interact with the PC.

You can enable grab break actions with "setxkbmap -option grab:break_actions" and then use Ctrl+Alt+KP/ to break grabs and Ctrl+Alt+KP* to kill the applications with grabs (note that setxkbmap -option blah adds the blah option to the existing options, which might interfere with this - you can try and reset all options by typing just "setxkbmap -option" without a parameter and then typing "setxkbmap -option grab:break_actions").

This is useful both when debugging and when dealing with broken applications.

I believe this is one of things that Wayland fixes. (Unless, of course, neither your debugger and application support Wayland natively and they both end up running in XWayland.)

QnX did that in ... 1983.

I too remember the QnX demo disk with a web browser and desktop environment on a single floppy. But Linux still doesn't do this kind of isolation, partly due to philosophical opposition.

Edit for the audience: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

In the famous Torvalds - Tanenbaum discussion Torvalds got it terribly wrong, but Linux was good enough to get off the ground anyway so in the longer term might made right. But a microkernel based Linux would have been a serious game changer rather than a re-run. After all we already had plenty of free Unixes back then, and the descendants of those are all still more or less alive today.

The major sticking point in that whole discussion is that Tanenbaum may have been right in principle but Minix was not a very good illustration of what a micro kernel could look like. QnX on the other hand was awesome and to this day powers a very large chunk of the embedded sphere.

Tanenbaum was certainly right, given the adoption of micro-kernel like architectures across the industry, specially on embedded.

Even containers are a kind of workaround for achieving the same goals.

I still have a clone of 32 bit QnX sitting on my harddrive, maybe one day I'll have enough time and energy to attempt to port it to x64 and/or Arm 64.

I'm not sure comparing an RTOS to a really old school monolithic kernal is fair. Windows wasn't designed to be like QnX. I really wish QnX was open source though and had a thriving community behind it.

It's perfectly fair. QnX had a fully functional desktop environment and a large chunk of functionality that experimental OS's like Plan9 popularized.

Whether or not Windows as designed to be like QnX is immaterial, the question is what would be the better OS to serve as the engine behind a computer interacting with its users and my vote definitely goes to a real time operating system using a micro kernel. Because in my opinion that's by far the best match for that workload.

Stability, speed of interaction driver isolation and so on are much much better when using something like QnX vs a monolith. And a GUI is a real time affair.

I have been quite impressed with VS Code. I’m....honestly shocked I’m using it but it’s doing what it advertises and is doing it pretty well. Sublime is getting less use these days.

Memory consumption and speed are apparently not important for you then, and that's fair enough. To each their own. I can only use so many resource hogs before my laptop says no. It starts with battery life and memory consumption. Speed (and benchmarks) is a good early warning sign.

I only use it because it is the best Rust experience on GNU/Linux and I am not willing to pay for CLion just for the debugger.

For everything else I do use native editors.

Tip: when X hangs, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 or F2 to switch to console mode, then Ctrl-Alt-F7 (or F8 on some distros) to go back to X. While in terminal mode you can investigate which process is reponsible for the X issue (high CPU? memory? disk I/O?) If that does not fix it, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will kill X and every X application and you won't have to reboot.

That only works if console mode and X escape keys are configured.

Which is usually not the case on desktop oriented distributions.

X escape is usually not configured, but personally i haven't seen any desktop distribution to disable virtual terminals. Regardless, even if that is the case, it only takes a single PC restart for you to notice that the terminals are disabled and enabled them back so next time you need them they'll be there.

Yep, now explain that to a regular macOS/Windows user.

You gotta be kidding me. Good luck using multiple HiDPI monitors. The only reasonable way to use Linux is tiling wm with as less graphical interface as possible, in my case only xterm and emacs. Which is crazy, since it’s 2018. and I am using modern computer with modern OS like how computers were used before I was even born.

It doesn't sound like you have used Linux since 1998. It works "out of the box" with multiple screens no matter the DPI.

Ehh, screen zoom could be better on 4k monitors. I always find the display scaling to be WAY off by default and have to mess around with xrandr settings in the terminal to change fractional scaling. This (and many other basic setup issues) doesn't make for a great first-hand experience when first starting out with Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#Fractional_Scalin...

I tried an Ubuntu 17.10 live image yesterday on a Thinkpad P50 with a connected Samsung 4K display, and my experience was not as you describe.

I'm not having any problems running two monitors in HiDPI with my Ubuntu Studio workstation .. everything just works and I enjoy it immensely. Curious what your issues are...

To be fair, some applications on some distros have HiDPI issues. LibreOffice [0], icons in GTK2 apps, anything that uses Java Swing, etc. Particularly galling is the oft-suggested fix of temporarily reducing desktop resolution and fowling up all the other apps that are supporting the proper DPI.

[0] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i...

> anything that uses Java Swing

OpenJDK 9 supports HiDPI out of the box[1].

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/263

That he hasn't actually tried Linux.

Using Fedora and two HiDPI monitors, one landscape 4k screen and one portrait 2k screen, Gnome works great in this setup.

More common setup of one hidpi screen with another normal dpi screen (laptop + external screen) tends to break horribly in many cases though.

Don’t know about GNOME but recent KDE can handle that case just fine.

Sounds like a pretty edgy edge case to me. In a more typical deployment like a laptop with a built in display or a desktop with a single 1080p or 1440p monitor you can pick from a variety of distributions that on firm "it just works" territory.

I have a nice laptop, with a 3k display. I plug it to a normal screen, with a 1080p display. What happens? Well, it works but it looks like ass. Wanna fix it? Sure, just google around for 2 hours until you find a complicated xrandr command that you have to run every time on startup (but the OS will break every time you unplug the screen). Also, high DPI support is still garbage, which means that half the apps will have their text looking too small anyway.

So no, I don't consider it an "edge case" if everyone in the office with a Linux laptop has the same problem

It still is an edge case when the case is rare and people with high dpi Linux laptops (or monitors in general) combining them with regular dpi monitors is rare. Hell, high dpi monitors by themselves are still rare.

Pretty much any MacBook connected to an external monitor falls in this "edge case". Or any modern MacBook-class laptop. They might not be the majority, but they are still a group of people counted in millions.

It's only an edge case on Linux because anyone trying to use such a laptop on Linux is met with pretty much unacceptable breakage and has to move away to Windows or macOS.

It's as rare as high dpi laptops, which are less and less rare nowadays. If you have a laptop, you're gonna plug it to an external screen at some point, and regular dpi screens are very not rare. This shortcoming is indefensible and should've been fixed years ago

The intersection of people that care about high dpi laptop screens, but not about high dpi external screens is very, very small. Also, if you are in that group, why wouldn't you just turn down the resolution on the laptop or even turn it off (since you connected a low dpi external monitor, you don't seem to care about the additional sharpness of high dpi, right?)?

High dpi is important as is low dpi (for a while still at least), mixed dpi is an edge case even if you disagree.

I'm running linux with a 4k monitor and a 2560x1600 monitor, and it's plenty smooth. It is worth noting that I have a GTX 1080, but everything else in the system is 7 years old.

You don’t need a GTX 1080. Any modern low-end GPU like RX 550, GTX 1030 or the new Ryzen APU would be fine. Even higher-end Intel iGPUs should work[1].

Basically all you need is at least DisplayPort 1.2 (or 1.2a if you want Freesync) for 4K @ 60 Hz.

The RX 550 has 1.3 support, so it should handle up to 2x4K @ 60Hz with MST (daisy-chained or with a splitter) or a single 5K @ 60Hz.

Some 4K monitors can also work with 2×HDMI, but I don’t think you’ll find that on any low-end card. Maybe high-end used.

As for actual performance, there is a huge gap between what you need for gaming and what you need for office work.

A low-level graphics card from few generations ago with 1GB of VRAM would be fine even (like Quadro 2000), except that it will only be able to drive the display at 30 Hz.

The biggest gotcha with a 4K display is actually your host RAM. If you try to run anything like GIMP, Photoshop, or vector editors in particular, it will gobble up much more memory than usual. Your regular web browser will as well, though to a much lesser degree.

Getting something just a little better, like an RX 560, might be a good idea though, this gives you enough GPGPU power to run most expensive video filters and scalers at native 4K[2].

[1] My Apollo Lake netbook with an entry-level iGPU can handle a 3K display easy

[2] Your source material might be 1080p but you end up postprocessing it at 4K. This might surprise some people.

To some, that is good. Despite fancy displays, the terminal is still far more efficient in my opinion for many operations, although graphics are nice for things and those things work great on Linux

Linux is definitely ready for full time Desktop use as long as gaming isn't needed. 7 years only Linux and I feel great about it.

I highly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone just starting out.

I play KSP and Civ on Linux just fine. I stopped playing games shortly after civ 3 (which I installed windows specifically for, lasted about a year) - until about a year ago when I decided to check out KSP.

Solus is great for gaming, and very user friendly, too.

Funny - I use a linux desktop in a VM only when I absolutely have to. Because I can't get much done without a struggle. But to each his own!

Opposite. I use Linux in VM because I can't be bothered to do everything in Windows (when I have to be on Windows).

Reverse here: I only boot my Windows VM when I really need to build something with Windows. Other than that, its Linux all the way. I find it an utterly pleasant experience compared with either Windows or MacOS, which is interesting..

Oh, I use Linux all the way usually, except when I am stuck on a Windows workstation - hence the VM solution.

I should wade back in and try again. I attempt to use a Linux distro as my daily driver every couple of years or so. I can usually get pretty close, but inevitably I end up going back to Windows and MacOS.

There's small UI affordances I miss, there's no MS Office (which is becoming less of a problem for sure), Spotify is iffy, etc etc. So many small things that add up.

Finally - Windows Susbsytem for Linux, or whatever it's called, has really made CLI work on Windows painless. With oh my zsh and CMDer I can do just about everything I can on my Ubuntu machines. Even though Windows 10 or MacOS aren't perfect, the pain isn't quite great enough for me to seriously make a change.

I used it for a while a few years ago at work. My impression was that 90-95% of it works well but there remains this persistent and very stubborn 5% load of edge case bugs.

The problem is that when you hit one of these issues it's infuriating and often costs a lot of time. It also has a way of happening when you really don't want it to, since when you're traveling or in a hurry you're more likely to be doing "different" things with your machine and thus are more likely to hit a problem. Linux desktops are like a car that runs great for your daily commute but blows up on road trips.

IMHO the reason for this is that the remaining 5-10% of the polish that's required to reach excellence in software often takes >50% of the time and is by far the least fun part of programming. As a result people generally have to be paid to do it. Free software rarely does unless it's heavily sponsored or incubated in-house by someone with resources.

This is why I still like Mac. I think Apple as a company is a little past its prime but Mac still offers by far the most reliable and consistently productive desktop experience. Windows has improved but they've decided to encrust it with advertising. Ads in a paid app or OS are a total deal breaker. Windows also still has more edge case issues than Mac, mostly due to driver issues.

Same. Linux desktop all day every day.

Say what you want about bloated Electron apps, but they've improved the Linux desktop experience. Slack, VSCode, Atom, KeeWeb, among others. Also the modern web, PWAs, etc.

Electron apps are by definition packaged web apps, the desktop where they run is irrelevant.

I just went back to using KDE a few days ago afters years on GNOME and boy, did KDE change! Plasma is a welcome change and KDE feels a lot more customizable and flexible.

If I still have to open the terminal and edit text files in /etc for essential things like sound, WiFi, accelerated graphics, and so on then it hasn't really evolved in the right ways.

Linux on the desktop has always been a niche experience for a niche audience. ChromeOS and Android (both based on Linux) are mainstream desktop experiences, as are MacOS, iOS, and Windows.

That hasn't been the case for a while for me, even for graphics stuff - do you use a desktop setup with gnome or similar? I'm pretty noobish at this stuff but gnome, unity, etc should be coming with gui settings baked in.

If you still have to, except you don't have to.

Except I have in the last month, I was following this article:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProced...

Someone should tell Ubuntu that this is no longer needed.

This is for when you're having issues, quite rare nowadays. Similar things happen on Windows, for example fiddling with drivers to get sound to work or stop popping.

Well, you can do that if you want to, but on the more desktop-friendly distros, I have not had to edit a configuration file in years.

Is there a laptop you would recommend?

Dell XPS 13.

Works with Linux out of the box as Dell made all of the driver's work for their developer edition's in Ubuntu. Battery life and and the 3200x1800 screen are phenomenal. Well made and Dell's warranty process is actually fairly good. It's no Apple warranty, but does the job.

Lenovo Thinkpads.

I’m, at-best, a mid-level Linux user and I’m coming from MacOS.

I bought a Lenovo Carbon X1 4th gen a few months ago. I was originally going to keep a Windows partition, but wiped Windows 10 Home after about 20 min. The fresh install of Linux Mint was even simpler than expected. I’ve been really enjoying Linux ever since, with the only issue being the HiDPI support mentioned elsewhere ... a 1.5x would be perfect and once that happens, I’d recommend my build even to my parents who are long-time mac/windows users.

FWIW, I run openSuse Tumbleweed on an Asus Zenbook; all in all, it has worked very well. I have the low-end model with a Core m3 CPU, so it's not blazingly fast, but it plays 1080p videos smoothly.

The only problem I had I might blame Linux for was that it randomly dropped the connection to my Bluetooth headset, and it took a reboot to connect the headset again.

I've used Linux on the desktop and laptop since about 2000, always with thinkpads.

Back in the late 90s there were genuine hurdles to do with Linux desktops, my 1999 desktop didn't work in X with redhat 5.2 because of the graphics card.

Today's when most productivity programs are web based, and so much more is cross platform, its far easier to run Linux than windows.

I like trackpoints, so I've been using various thinkpad models for a while and they all seem to work well.

I use an xps13 9350. I am running fedora on it and quite literally everything works out of the box on install.

I've used recent enough Dell and Asus laptops, no issues whatsoever.

Try to avoid any with optimus graphics (eg a dedicated GPU) if you can.

A 2010 thinkpad works well.

2018 is the year!

(I exclusively used Linux on the desktop from 1995 until I bought my first Mac in 2002).

>I'm worried they're going to let the OS stagnate.

An OS should be stagnant. Its job is to get out of the way as soon as possible, not to constantly wow its users with cool stuff. Any user-facing change will break existing workflows and force people to learn new habits.

Change is bad. That goes for every piece of software, from OSes to web browsers to libraries. Stagnation should be your goal.

Microsoft can't do things properly. Without constant pointless novelty they couldn't convince people to buy a new version every few years. That business model has made them a lot of money, but making money and making good software are nearly orthogonal goals.

EDIT: Maybe I've misunderstood you. It sounds like you're talking about bugfixes, which certainly something Microsoft should work on.