This is very much debatable. What's true however is that if your HW is not supported by at least Windows 8.1 you're SoL.
> Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
I haven't observed any slow downs in Windows 10 for ages. As for "less memory and CPU cycles" it's just outright false. Windows offers much better hardware acceleration for everything: display rendering, video encoding and decoding, RDP (VNC in X11/Wayland taxes the CPU quite a lot and forget about effectively streaming video via VNC), etc. Linux is quite horrible in this regard.
> Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Unless you're obsessed with downloading software illegally, it's not an issue in Windows either. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with malware for my +20 of friends using it.
> Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates are very much in your face.
> Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Except there's 100 times more software in Windows.
> Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
No one has ever proven Microsoft accesses or downloads any of your files, or uses telemetry data to find out what applications you're running.
> Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This one is true however with a lot of choice comes a lot of confusion and doubt.
> Linux is free.
Windows 10 OEM license can be bought for as little as $10. This is 100% irrelevant nowadays.
Really? Where? When asking Microsoft about it, they say No.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/where-...
Really? I bet dockerhub alone has more linux-capable software than windows has anywhere. I also expect that a randomly chosen GitHub repo is more likely to support Linux than it is to support Windows.
Maybe these aren't fair comparisons, but I'm not sure what would be. The ecosystems are so different it's hard to know how such a count would go.
You are confusing a subset "developers who use linux-compatible tools" with the set "users".
I'm not saying "I have more tools than you have cars" because I think it makes me win at something. I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
Yes
> I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
No. In response to "there's 100 times more software in Windows." you started speaking about dockerhub and git. That does not encompass all software, especially software that is required by non-programmers.
If there is a subset of L that is larger than W, then L itself is also larger than W.
I was proposing that if you count every image, or every repo, then dockerhub-only or the GitHub-only subsets of L might be larger than W because the effort of creating an additional windows project is much greater than the effort of creating an additional Linux project.
Except an unactivated Windows, once past its trial window, will shut down after an hour of use, without warning. That's very annoying.
MS absolutely does enforce activation. They likely won't come after you for using cracks (unless you have hundreds of corporate machines using them), but they will make your life awkward remotely, as they are entitled to by the EULA.
You just can't change the wallpaper away from black, and there is a notice displayed on it.
> Except an unactivated Windows, once past its trial window, will shut down after an hour of use, without warning.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/OEM/Windows/10/UseT...
In all seriousness though, you are wrong on all points. Sorry, yes you are wrong. Rather than write a point by point rebuttal, against my common sense (you know, the thing about arguing with someone one the Internet) I'll just write a few paragraphs, provide some professional anecdotal and maybe quantitative evidence, and allow others to decide what's reasonable.
I build laptops and desktops for students of whom I teach programming and electronics. I build both new and used systems, and I loan and sell a lot of computers. Students get the loaners, buyers fund profits to buy more students computers. That said I experience a wide variety of actual system performance information across a large spectrum of computers.
Linux installs faster than Windows by a lot. When booting it's my experience that Linux can open a task manager (sometimes called system monitor on Linux) quicker than on a Windows system, the same goes for the file manager (explore on Windows). Across the board most programs open faster on Linux. You can disbelieve all you want, but that's just an objective reality.
https://i.imgur.com/UxR30xG.png
Regarding less CPU cycles, yes again it 's true, Linux uses less. Linux has far fewer background services and other tasks running in the background doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
https://www.pcerror-fix.com/windows-10-services-to-disable-f...
It's not just the services though. Windows is constantly scanning files for viruses or other malware, it's recording your activity, it's indexing the content of your computer as files are written or change. All this causes guess what? More CPU cycles and more memory being consumed. You may now go back and check my second point.
Moving on, you are wrong again on point number three. You don't need to download illegal Windows software to get malware. You can get it attached as an add on to free legal Windows programs.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-extends-its-adware-bund... https://www.information-age.com/hotbed-malware-another-blow-...
Next, Windows updates are notorious for downloading updates in the background without your knowledge or consent. There are well known stories of people who were working on an important task on their Windows computer, who got up for a break and came back to see updates being applied from an automatic reboot causing their work to be forever lost.
https://www.howtogeek.com/224471/how-to-prevent-windows-10-f... https://www.constellationsolutions.com/informational/tired-o...
Without a doubt Windows has more software, but I said the Linux app store experience is better than Windows. On Linux distributions have app stores that come from a curated list, and those apps are built from source by the distribution maintainer. They are verified to some degree and use the same installation methodology. On Windows this is not the case, a lot of software installs automatically without user consent. I keep getting Espon software each time I install Windows on a new computer attached to my network, gleefully telling me I need to buy ink from Epson. Additionally, Windows software often contains other adware or malware even if it comes from a Windows store. The software management side of things on Windows is a big stinking mess, which was the point I made, but yeah feel free miss that point to morph it into "Windows has more software".
When I said telemetry, that means collecting you data. You're not only being disingenuous in asserting that means downloading your personal files, you're also asking someone to prove a negative.
Regarding customization, on my distribution of choice it's very easy to change the icon or control theme, add extensions, and change those settings. There are prebuilt themes you can preview and click on to make a bunch of changes all at once, or you can click the original prebuilt to restore to the default settings.
You say the price of Linux versus Windows is 100% irrelevant nowadays. As a system builder I don't follow. Does Windows cost a system builder money or not? If it does, then it's not irrelevant.
Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?
As for background services, of course they spend (at that moment unused resources). But you completely forego that they have an actual usefulness. Indexing files makes searching later faster. Prefetching makes loading commonly used programs faster. Virus scanning keeps your computer safe. Telemetry helps developers recognize issues and prioritize bugs, even stop hackers in time. The article you mentioned wants you to disable the firewall (bad advice) but also a lot of services that are not even consuming resources unless you have the necessary policies/hardware, like the bluetooth service or touch screen service.
Not that Windows these days runs from high-end server to low powered ARM devices, while still looking generally the same. This is not the same Windows from 20 years ago where you could easily tweak the system to get some more performance out of it. These days Windows comes out of the box running as fast as it can, while giving a reasonable user experience.
As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
I feel like a lot of people here are devs running reasonably modern computers but as someone running dualboots at home (manjaro KDE) and at work from time to time dealing with the kind of desktops most people use in their day to day life.... (As in they're not actually that old but weren't top of the line when bought either) ....this is actually one of my biggest gripes with it.
Windows really is slow as fuck. Sometimes it's really noticeable on the somewhat older hardware but on the other stuff it doesn't really annoy you until you compare because we're talking very short delays, little bits of lags....the thing is...It's there for just about everything. There's not a whole lot that feels instantaneous which makes it all perfectly usable but feel off at the same time.
I didn't even think about it till I switched to Linux at home and noticed just how snappy stuff feels. MacOS has felt similarly snappy the few times i've used it but I don't use it enough to really comment.
>As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
Tbh I thought similar (and mostly it'll still be true) until I tried to use a playstation 3 controller (a very common item at least at the time) for a windows only game. It worked out of the box on Linux and I believe an xbox controller would have worked like that and on windows as well but to get the ps3 one I had working on windows i had to jump trough hoops, change some stuff so i could then disable driver signature enforcement and tweak a few other things only to give up in the end when it still didn't work after I had managed. Even if it worked it wouldn't work every time because the ways of getting around permanently disabling signed drivers constantly keep being patched by Windows.
It's been my experience that Windows search is anything but fast. On Linux on the other hand, the speed of find(1) was never an issue. There is really nothing to speed up (and in so doing increase median load).
Some of the Linux alternatives are good, but they still aren't as good as Adobe. I still do quite a bit of JS development and some app development on my older Linux rig, but I just wish at some point Adobe will pull their heads out and support Linux. I remember in several threads on the Adobe forums, the attitude towards Linux users was pretty offensive. Their argument was all the Linux users would want Adobe products to be free and open source and its not something they could do and still support all the Apple and MS people "who actually pay for their products".
It pissed me off enough where I did give it a full go on Linux with Gimp Shop and some other alternative open source alternatives, but it just wasn't the same - which really bummed me out.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that Adobe's Creative Cloud app is a total resource hog as well. Not to mention any of their programs you run will quickly eat up to a gig or more of your resources.
Is Gimp Shop still a thing?
Wikipedia says the stable release is from 2006.
Going to https://www.gimpshop.com/ leads you to the official gimp site when you try to download it.
It kind of looks like maybe it's a marketing site for gimp now?
I was one of those people who moved from Photoshop to gimp and for the longest time I thought gimp was really bad but after customizing a few hotkeys and setting up some pre-made scripts and brushes it's pretty decent. At least for casually making YouTube thumbnails and things like that.
Some design decisions still leave me baffled tho, like not having a default bind to merge a layer down or not being able to easily center things relative to objects in an intuitive and graphical way (ie. dragging something until it snaps in place while seeing some temporary guide lines overlay near where it's snapped and some basic pixel measurements near it).
I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
….
I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. …. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.
That said, Krita is incredibly comfortable to use, Inkscape replaced Illustrator for anything I care about.
2. Linux servers are targeted and breached. Linux desktop share is too small to be worth it (yet).
3. Windows updates aren't stealthy for a considerable time.
4. That's a matter of opinion.
5. Some distros do, but it's opt-in. Transparency is better on the Linux side too. I agree on this point.
6. You are tempted to spend time on customization with unclear objective benefits.
7. Developers don't owe you anything.
This can be prevented using earlyoom (which is packaged in most distros):
https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom
It's probably too difficult to fix the underlying design errors, e.g. fork() duplicating the process's entire address space, thus requiring overcommit and copy-on-write, but losing only one process beats losing all of them. earlyoom should be enabled by default.
Why aren't we replacing them with something better then? Why are most servers still running GNU/Linux?
Linux as my desktop OS, not so much. I have to reboot my Linux laptop every few days for various reasons, including complete unresponsiveness to any keyboard input.
Keep in mind I use my laptop for both coding and gaming (if it ever locks up it's because of a game -- which wasn't uncommon years ago when I used Windows, either).
Are you running nvidia drivers?
In my opinion it's flawed logic _if_ you wanted to say that "Linux is more secure because windows has more malware"
>Linux user experience is much more customizable.
In what way? desktop? kernel tweaks?
How deep do you want the Rabbit hole to go Alice?
On one end you have Arch Linux:
Arch is largely based on binary packages. Packages target x86-64 microprocessors to assist performance on modern hardware. A ports/ebuild-like system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System.[28]
Arch Linux focuses on simplicity of design, meaning that the main focus involves creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools — the package manager, for example, does not have an official graphical front-end. This is largely achieved by encouraging the use of succinctly commented, clean configuration files that are arranged for quick access and editing.[29] This has earned it a reputation as a distribution for "advanced users" who are willing to use the command line.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Linux
And then on the other end you have Distro's like Mint, or Ubuntu:
Mint is designed for ease of use and a ready-to-roll out-of-box experience, including multimedia support on desktops. The operating system is easier to install than most Linux distributions. Mint includes software required for e-mail and online functionality as well as support for multimedia content, whether online or from a user's own files and physical media
There are several different desktop editions of Mint, including Cinnamon, GNOME, XFCE and KDE, to best support various hardware. The operating system is also provided in an alternate Linux Mint Debian Edition for those that are more familiar with Linux. That edition is said to be less intuitive and user-friendly but also faster and more responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint
I started with KDE, then went to Mint, Ubuntu, and some other distros like Manjaro that I've been tinkering with lately.
You can see a good list of all the distro's here (current and upcoming):
But I still run Windows because the only really good video editor on Linux (Davinci Resolve) is really unstable there with the hardware I have, the USB audio interface I use has all sorts of issues on Linux and not all games run well on Linux.
Basically what it boils down to is I've been one of those folks who builds their computers from parts for 20+ years with the goal of using 1 computer for everything (dev, video editing, gaming, etc.). I'm afraid Linux isn't ready for such users yet if you don't want to dual boot or set up a Windows 10 guest VM with a GPU pass-through.
If I didn't care about gaming or video editing and only focused on pure software development I would switch in a heart beat.
Resolve would be perfect if it worked with my set up. I hope one day it gets there.
[0]: I don't make cinema style movies. Mainly 1080p screencasts. So things like nice looking titles, simple animations, zooming / panning, adding overlays of various shapes and sizes, blurs, etc. are really important to me. Nothing I tried on Linux really comes close to how easy it is to do that stuff with Camtasia and make it look nice. Resolve is pretty close tho, after you put in enough time to build up your own custom libraries.
It is POSSIBLE to do a lot of things on Linux that you can do in Windows? Yes. The question is: how much time will it take you to make it work?
And don’t even start with hibernate or even just waking up. I’ve never rebooted a laptop so many times.
And what’s the deal with flatpak? A screen shot app is not 700mb? WTF?
20 years ago I was convinced Linux would win on the desktop. But we still have the same problems decades later.
And then the whole story with AMD open source driver, means I am unable to take full advantage of the GPU in Linux.
Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
Simply untrue. It could be true for some distros, some driver versions and some hardware... but if you consider everything, Windows runs better than Linux. Mostly because most hardware is designed to run well on Windows. The Linux versions are either an afterthought or built and maintained by third-party.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
* Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Linux is free.
Sure! Many things are. That's not always a good reason to use it.
You mean drivers instead of hardware right? Typically performance is roughly the same. Sometimes better sometimes worse. The issue is where they don't exist or are an afterthought indeed and then it's quite frustrating.
>Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
What? What are you on about? I have yet to install an update for Linux that I didn't specifically give my permission for. Automatic updates are turned of by default on any distro I've tried and they don't come as bundled as they do for windows where a recent random update I just checked includes some changes for input devices, office products, basic operations security and the DST start date for the Fiji Islands.
>Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
It looks neat but.... For some reason it uses a different language (that I've never selected to be used) in most of it's UI. Is a common problem in Belgium apparently and I guess same in other multilingual countries which is weird because that's not an issue anywhere else in the OS. Why am I looking at some loading ring for 3-4 seconds when i click on an app? Where do I add alternative sources? Can I do stuff like build something differently on install if I want to?
>Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
An outlier more than anything and one that asks you if you want it on install and later disabling it is a checbox away.
>This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Fully agree it has been a problem and still is for it's adoption. I don't think it's what notably contributed to Ubuntu's success in the past tho.
Unless "hardware" is many laptops or all tablets, which effectively can't run Linux (unless Android etc.)
1. Zero problems with sleep and resume.
2. Zero problems with bluetooth or wireless. Please recommend what vendors work well here.
3. Minimal issues with Slack or Teams.
4. Error free desktop environment.
5. Updates do not break stuff leading to Google searches on how to solve it.I think in general, if you check the ArchWiki page on Laptops, there is a wonderful (and extensive) list of most common laptops and their issues (if any). Thinkpads seem to work very well, and, worst case, have good drivers made by the community for anything that doesnt work.
Wait, Linux doesn't prevent doing stupid things, quite the opposite.
Unlike macOS, You can disable ALL telemetry in under 30 seconds on Windows. There is actually even a service named "User Experience and Telemetry" that you can conveniently stop and disable in a number of ways.
Windows is often used as a personal operating system. There is no reason for it to collect analytics, especially after decades of development, I don't think the devs are getting anything actually useful out of knowing how often my grandparents check their email.
They're collecting data, and it doesnt seem to be used to help UX development much.
Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
Linux is free.