Not sure which features you mean, but Linux seems to have more of the features that I need myself, like having the ability to choose in what way taskbar buttons are grouped, or the ability to not get regular "system notifications" that are not related to something I'm doing or interested in, and the ability to choose when you update it

I have to say that I agree with this. The primary purpose of an operating system now that I passed my *rties is to get out of the way. And Linux does that really well, while Windows is doing it less and less.

I'm happy that we have at least 3-4 popular operating systems still, and that this should help drive innovation. But at the same time, I feel like Linux gets all the free innovation because of its openness. And if you add all the benefits of Linux being very user-friendly (as in not spamming me with ads), then it's just going to be a better choice.

Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows? Not saying Windows has done anything special in a while. I don’t know what innovations Linux has done in the past decade either though.

Do you have concrete examples in mind of improved UI and UX in Windows and Mac in the past 20 years? I'm genuinely curious because comparing my memories of Windows XP and Windows 7 I can't think of any great innovations.

Windows 10's innovations were so bad I left the OS entirely with extensive telemetry, an abusive and confusing cloud account system, ads on your desktop. The only UX improvement I saw was being able to enter your session with a pin that doesn't require you to press the enter-key, but they even botched that by not letting you type letters and not showing any warnings: Something we learned was necessary 20 years ago with the caps-lock warning. Can't speak to Macs as I only recently began checking them out.

I've been studying Desktop Environments for a FOSS project, I have over a dozen VMs setup with different distros and operating systems using different DEs, and they're all basically the same. It strikes me as unfair to say Linux is copying either Windows or MacOS. I see a lot of innovation in open-source, there are a lot of innovative desktop components, settings and paradigms (Compiz comes to mind, have you seen such a customizable compositor in MacOS or Windows?) but it's natural that distributions end up choosing a common visual language by default, simply because it's what people know and expect.

Ah okay I was using innovation more in the way it’s used to describe a distinct big impactful change. I didn’t know the meaning of the word is simply change.

I included “either” at the end to point out I don’t see any of the three desktop OSes having done much of anything for a long time.

20 years for Mac is a long time though. OS X was just coming out then. I think just based off the fresh OS and simpler/cleaner user interface Mac was doing initially were decently big changes. You could say that only goes up to ~10.4 before there aren't many impactful positive changes besides security changes every one has been doing. 10.4 came out in like 2005.

Isn't the Windows 11 UI basically a total ripoff of Plasma?

KDE for example can trace it's heritage from CDE, which is based on Motif, which predates Windows.

> Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows?

No.

Whenever I fire up a Linux distro, I can never shake the feeling that the UI is just a subpar ripoff of Windows and MacOS. I can't really pinpoint anything, but it just doesn't feel as polished. And that even includes the mainstream distros like Ubuntu.

i3, sway and pop shell aren't a subpar ripoff of anything. they are plain superior to what you can get on other platforms.

Pop is the only one of those three that I'm familiar with, but I'd very much call it a subpar MacOS ripoff.

Try cinnamon. It's better than the current generation of Windows UIs.

That’s funny because windows 11 is such a Gnome 40 copy that it hurts.

If that is true, it’s like saying iPhone has done some copying of Android and is too funny.

Still, Android dropped their entire Blackberry inspired/copied design and copied iPhone instead in 2007/2008.

It's not just true, but blatantly obvious. Compare the design language of Big Sur with GTK 3.38 which predated it, and as the other anon mentioned, Windows 11 is effectively just GNOME with Dash-to-dock enabled. Whether or not Microsoft knowingly copied it is a different argument, but I find it hard to believe that their designers weren't at least inspired by the touch-friendly, reactive desktop UIs built with GTK.

So does that not make what I said even stronger? It isn’t really that amusing for the original (iPhone, windows) to copy aspects of the original inspiring copiers.

>Not sure which features you mean

One of them is probably mmap(). Windows has something similar, but I wouldn't be surprised at some of the open source products just falling back to something slow instead of exploring options that would work well.

On Linux, I can even move my taskbar to the top of the screen or to the side and drag & drop things to the taskbar. So now I can't have my normal screen brightness shortcut on my taskbar nor is there a way I know of to use hotkeys to launch it via command other than 3rd party like Autohotkey. I tried Windows 11 and I can't forgive MS for taking away these simple and essential features.

Depends on what desktop you install I guess. There are some that have taskbar at top of screen by default, like Gnome afaik. I'm more of a taskbar at the bottom person myself and use cinnamon.

What features does Windows have that Linux doesn't?

The only one I can think of off the top of my head is HDR support, but that wouldn't affect these benchmark results.

Ads delivered via OS components, for one!

Windows 11 has things like core isolation and "memory integrity" on by default now and that, so I've heard, can lower benchmarks by 10%-20%. Not to mention Defender running in the background constantly scanning all processes, which unfortunately can't easily be disabled.

I wish I could downvote. On what basis do you state this: "which is basically way more functional and has way more features than linux did pretty well" ?

I've been on HN for 13+ years now.

I can assure you that there's a better way to get the right to downvote than pretending you don't understand at all why someone would say Windows is more usable than Linux, and not posting anything other than a quote and a wish you can downvote.

I suppose today's that day: I wasn't pretending, since I use all platforms.

> basically way more functional and has way more features than linux

Uh, I don't think it works that way. If your features get in the way of your performance, you're doing it wrong.

In addition, Fedora is not optimized for a particular CPU microarchitecture.

It does work that way.

Otherwise, we’d all be running a stripped down Clear Linux kernel, BusyBox, and a few tool chains.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If performance was strictly dependent on features, as you say, then we would be running an extremely stripped down OS.

But it's otherwise, and no one does it, even those who care about performance (removing excessive services notwithstanding).

The point is people take trade-offs for performance vs. features. Features take up some measurable amount of performance.

It's a sliding scale, but everyone sits on that scale nonetheless.

Absolutely correct. There's a reason that Linux servers (and even some versions of Windows servers now) don't run a GUI, for example.

You got it in reverse then.

Last time I checked, performance was one of the benefits of the GNU environment over BusyBox.

Also, a lot of the features on the Linux kernel are there specifically to improve performance.

Plenty of features get in the way of performance. Or are you suggesting we should ditch animation, modern font rendering, file metadata, all permissions checks, most low level security features (ASLR, stack protection etc.), Spectre protection, high resolution displays, USB, frequency stepping, etc. etc. etc.