Advertisements in the start menu around Windows 8 was my tipping point. It's just a trashy thing to see candy crush and other crap in there that I never asked for, never could remove, etc. I went to Ubuntu and now PopOS and haven't looked back in almost 10 years. Maybe they've cleaned things up and removed the crap in later Windows but the damage is done and I'm never going back.

Frustrating thing is it's hard to escape. It's petty, but one of the most infuriating episodes of my life was Apple forcing that U2 album into everyone iOS owner's existence and making it difficult (impossible at the time?) to delete. I'd forgotten all about it until, a couple of phones later, it reappeared as the first song played every time I connected my phone to the car. Petty, like I said, but enraging. Having some basic control over an environment you've paid for should be a given.

That is not petty. An entertainment device that doesnt follow orders, doesnt play what you want it to play, fails its primary function. It should be repaired (good luck) or dumped.

It also had weird cover art which, while artistic, was borderline NSFW and not what I wanted to have pop up every time I got in my car. Apple makes weird decisions sometimes.

I finally contacted Apple support to have the album removed, years after the fact, because I switched to Apple Music. And felt nervous about having, in my open floor plan workplace, a shirtless man tenderly caressing another shirtless man's crotch with his face every time I opened the app. There was literally no way to change this default behavior, because Apple are control freaks.

As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.

My brother is gay. I have a gay friend. I am not homophobic. But I do not prefer homosexual images myself. I also stress over this. I don't understand why people can't accept that being okay with something, and wanting that thing in your eyes, might be two independent things.

My daughter is vegetarian. We always cook her vegetarian food for dinner. Her little brother likes to bug her about it. We tell him not to, because giving people a hard time about their preferences is rude and annoying. But we also make sure that the vegetarian can't get cranky when everybody else is eating real bacon and she's eating vegetarian bacon. That'd be just as rude and annoying. It's called "tolerance", kids. I don't understand how we've entered into this world where we aren't all supposed to try to tolerate (let alone encourage and support) one another, but that tolerance only goes in one direction. That seems very odd to me.

>As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.

If you would still feel uncomfortable if it were a photo of man and a woman doing the same thing on your screen in your open office at work, then no. I personally wouldn't want either in my work environment. I have a strong separation of my personal life and work. It's a simple test really, just imagine the reverse and if you feel the same way about a naked man and woman on your desktop at work, then no, you aren't being a homophobe.

Though the U2 album has become such a meme, I'm sure people would have a good laugh at Apple over it.

I believe it was impossible. You could hide it but even that was a bit tricky to finding. They did eventually come up with a website where you could scrub it from your account. It wasn't even just iOS owners but everybody with an iTunes account.

As per the sibling link to Apple's support it's impossible again to remove it without contacting support.

> It sounds like you did some great research on this, and you're right. Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed.

I had a problem getting my car to recognize my iphone, specifically constant USB "unsupported" errors. It turned out the problem was I had no music loaded on my device. I downloaded that U2 album and like magic the problem was resolved. Thanks Bono!

Had to install Windows 11 yesterday and the fresh install had Facebook, TikTok, Xing, Spotify and more on the start menu as shortcuts. No clue, if they are actually fully installed but I was able deinstall and remove them through the context menu. May vary for other contries as Xing is very specific and only relevant for German speaking countries.

Nobody forces anyone to install an OS, but he probably meant that he was pressured into, not by someone but by the very conditions of software.

My example: I had to return to Windows a while back because I rely heavily on Zoom Meetings, and Zoom in Linux is just near unusable.

Not that I care about zoom, but screen sharing is in a problematic state since the introduction of Wayland:

- If you use X.org, things are mostly fine because there are no security barriers and screen capturing has been done the same way since forever.

- If you use Wayland, this used to be impossible because Wayland doesn't allow it for security reasons. To get screen sharing to work:

1. A new protocol had to be invented for it (pipewire)

2. Every compositor (read: every major Desktop Environment like KDE or Gnome) had to implement the funcitonality. Among other things, the compositor is now responsible for showing a permissions dialog where the user authorizes an application to capture the screen (or _a_ screen, or a single window).

3. Every application that wants to capture the screen/a window/etc. has to request access through this new protocol and read the capture through it.

To make things worse, pipewire itself has been evolving, meaning that both compositors and applications may only support certain versions but not others. In the end, this means that if you are running the latest versions of all these things (wayland, de, browser) and enable all flags that say "pipewire" in your browser, it will work just fine. If you have older software it may work partially (e.g.: you can share a single window but not the entire screen and stuff like that) or it may not work at all.

Please elaborate. I've been pair programming on zoom for years (Ubuntu, i3wm). So had my colleague on Elementary and another one on Fedora. It's clearly usable.

EDIT: via native app that is

What I needed most back then was to remote control my peer's computer (as in, providing Tech Support) and that's where the UI/UX is not as polished as the Windows version.

I didn't use the web version, because it's not possible to control the remote host that way.

It was very quirky (taking control and giving up control + the keystrokes needed to be used in the remote host) and getting in the way of providing effective Tech Support (the meeting bar flickered several times). Anything else worked fine, like holding the audio meeting itself.

So, I had to return to Windows, just because of Zoom.

EDIT: Typo.

it’s dependent in your window system. with wayland zoom is using screen shots to create a video feed in lieu of using the actual api because it would mean zoom has to respect privacy so no go

I don't think Zoom's here choice has anything to do with privacy but rather incompetence. They didn't even bother trying to solve it until users intentionally flooded them with tickets.

I just launch zoom from Firefox and use the browser edition on Wayland. It will nag you to download a program, but you can skip that. Hasn't failed me yet.

People here willingly use Zoom over Jitsi Meet? How come?

Zoom works okay in Linux via web browser.

EDIT: I use Firefox.

Works in Arch fine whenever I've needed it (admittedly not used regularly but it never failed/became unstable)

I could never get it working on Firefox, but OK with Chrome

Maybe GP is required by its employer / an autoupdate.

My tipping point was not being able to figure out how to shut down the computer in Windows 8 (not 8.1). I've used Alt+F4 to shut it down for months because I legit couldn't figure out that the shut down button is in Charms.

They've moved it back to start in 8.1, but by that point I've already switched to elementary OS (beta of 0.2 Luna), and that's (mostly) where I've stayed for the past 10 years (there were a couple of attempts of switching to GNOME, they've all failed).

I'd definitely recommend checking out Arch or Manjaro if you're a developer btw. Ironically, I've had fewer issues with Linux since swapping. Simple things like being on the newest kernel tends to keep hardware issues at bay. (And switching to Pipewire has fixed all of my audio issues completely)

It's ironic that a "rolling release" OS is often more stable than a "mainstream" OS like Ubuntu. That's just been my experience over the past few years though, and I feel that it's important to help more devs realize that!

Seconding this, except Manjaro specifically seems to have a lot of issues that don't hit me on regular Arch. Void and Alpine are also good.

Similar reason to why I'm on Fedora. 6-month release cycle with a 12-month maintenance cycle. Which means I can frequently get on the latest kernel and other goodies such as Pipewire, yet I can also wait a couple months after release to pull the trigger in case there are issues.

I'm also seriously considering Fedora Silverblue once I get more of a feel for how it works under the covers.

How does that work with EOL for a release? Does everything break and you have to re-install?

My disk encryption is a little complicated so I'm happy that my rolling release means I only have to re-install when I swap boxes. That was my biggest issue with Ubuntu -- your were SOL when EOL :P

There's an in place upgrade process, as long as you haven't put a bunch of third party repositories/packages on the system they tend to go generally well

Some of the more drastic changes aren't adopted this way, eg: filesystem defaults

Eh, you could change your source repos/force upgrade etc — just couldn't expect the forums to support your borked system, afterwards.

Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start menu for a while?

Usually on Linux and Linux-like systems ("Free" ones I guess), you can easily change something that you don't like, or at least it's not impossible to change it.

On other systems, some things are literally (today) impossible to change, unless you have access to the source code, which you as a normal person don't.

That could be removed and never come back, on the other hand i think canonical is going towards the path of Microsoft nonetheless

I fully expect Microsoft to eventually acquire Canonical, and if you pay attention to behind-the-scenes interactions between the two, it seems very likely.

As the other replies, I also agree with you, I've been a bit upset by Canonical for their support to Microsoft in making WSL, I'm not sure Linux has anything to gain from the thing, if not a bad advertising due to the suboptimal experience, but also it is a Linux system that has to exist under the government of microsoft which is a bit scary for me, but yeah I agree with you, I also see them working together for WSL, and at some point I see M$ buying Canonical

I suspect something similar. They have a good partnership. While we're dreaming, I'd love to see a version of Windows with a Linux kernel. They could do what they did with Edge, replace the core with something better.

Eh, word on the street NT is expertly engineered. It's all the compatibility layers and crud that gives Windows it's bad name.

Link or two to get me started?

I don't want to generate unwanted interest or drama for specific people by pasting links to mailing lists.

You can Google for "microsoft (buy|acquire) canonical" and find points on why it's very likely.

Nah Ubuntu got rid of the Amazon link and app, I think they're doing well in the enterprise space these days so there's no fuckery on the desktop (although that means they've also given up on stuff like phones).

Yeah there were amazon search results in app searches for a time. It's part of the reason why I switched to PopOS, which has none of that crap but builds on ubuntu's base.

>Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start

You don't have to use Unity, and thank god for that.

I've used win 8 and win 10 exclusively for years but have never seen an advert. Is this because I have the business (enterprise) edition, not the home version?

I'm not sure how good or bad Bing, Edge etc are as I only use them occasionally, but it does seem concerning that Microsoft has changed these defaults during an update. Is this even legal, post anti trust etc?

Your company may have removed the crapware; that’s what our image team did.

Possible, in my experience it's always been the hardware vendors that add all that stuff, but it seems like Microsoft wants in on the action.

I doubt it, given that Microsoft now actually owns the Candy Crush IP.

No, the only "actually" is that a deal was announced to buy the company that has that. The acquisition won't be finished for months if at all (government may block based on antitrust concerns)

by months I think you mean years

not yet, the deal has to pass through a lot of regulatory bodies to become a thing.

To be fair, Ubuntu also has had advertisements in the menus.

And so does firefox

Yeah, the answer is to simply not use Windows. I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days.

Linux is actually a much better OS for techies: you can make it look nicer, have a better workflow, and you can really play games now that Steam Deck brought so much focus on Linux compatibility.

Otherwise, Mac OS is doing just fine as well.

Unfortunately laptop driver support is often rough. I used an XPS 9343 (one marketed as supporting Ubuntu) but I faced issues with popping speaker sounds and mobile data tethering sucking GBs of data for some crazy reason.

Thats why I changed to thinkpads. They seen to use less weird hardware with no support. But I had to do some concessions. I don`t use notebooks with discrete gpus, since NVIDIA optimus have shit support.

Thinkpads have ACPI bugs that transfer to Windows too, it's amazing.

I've been using Lenovo's Legion devices instead. They don't run this horribly bloated BIOS, they run the much less critically acclaimed Insyde BIOS, but guess what, it just works. I've not had an unexpected wake-crash in years (aside from nvidia drivers with the mux switch on, but just use amdgpu instead). Desktop grade processors, weight comparable to a T420. Definitely not a device to use on the go, but very capable if you just need to carry a computer to the office.

I think the new Framework laptops might be better than Thinkpads now.

I'd use one in a heartbeat if they had a trackpoint.

I have been using the HP Elitebooks provided by my company and works well with Ubuntu. No complaints. I even upgraded my RAM to 64 GB.

Is amatter of time before someone provide a keyboard with one.

And also impossible to buy in Brazil. So for a while,, I will still have to relly on thinkpads.

At least with some ThinkPad with discrete GPUs they put a BIOS option for toggling whether to use integrated graphics, discrete graphics or both which means you can avoid Optimus if you want. I've had other laptops without such an option and then you have to deal with Optimus or some other workaround. It's not perfect though because often video outputs will be routed through one card or the other so if you want to use the Displayport out you have to use discrete graphics.

I'm on a Lenovo Yoga 5 Slim now. Cheap for the specs, needed some tweaking to get suspend working, otherwise works like a charm out-of-the-box.

My everyday beater is a Thinkpad x250. Small, ligth, not exactly top of the line, but works for most aplications. Only thing I suffer is running Android studio in it.

For some reason I've never really had any issues with any of the many many laptops I've used over the years. Various HP laptops in the past, mostly, and DEC laptops back in the 20th century. Lately a private NEC laptop (all parts Intel, everything worked out of the box), and my work laptop is currently a Fujitsu Lifebook. No problems with anything. It Just Works.

Dell XPS have great drivers support in kernel, but I actually found the vanilla Mate DE experience to be a downgrade from Ubuntu 18 to 20, I needed to do an unusual amount of tinkering. I am convinced this will always be the case for Linux DEs unless some company starts to sell support packages for properly tested configuration combinations.

Buy hardware for the software you want to use for your comfort and security.

It can't be an afterthought.

Same goes for phones. Buy the right phone, don't be upset you can't load GrapheneOS on your cheap Samsung handset.

Right, that's why it was disappointing that a laptop so clearly marketed as supporting Ubuntu (XPS 9343) didn't even have decent sound support.

For the remote data thing -- I ran into this a few years ago on Fedora when I was spending a lot of time away from the house, and buying 5 GB at a time for wireless data. I eventually had to write a script to sound an alarm when data usage started increasing, and caught the culprit program in the act. Was one of the background Yum / DNF update processes. Ended up killing Packagekit, and problem went away.

Had a similar experience with a Dell preshipped with Ubuntu. Also wouldn't go to sleep when I got it, was crazy. Eventually started working maybe after bios update but was pretty frustrating

Have an XPS 13 9310 running Ubuntu 20.04 and it runs flawlessly. Things like sleep were a little rough when it was first released, but updates by Dell since have made it rock solid.

No popping sounds in headphones/speakers from the realtek driver?

Nope, none.

Indeed. I'm a web developer and my tools genuinely work better just under native Linux than they ever could with WSL etc.

Would love to, but my employer has complex network settings (using 802.11X..), specific vpn client, im software, hw auth tokens with specific drivers and Windows shares and ntlm proxies all of which that makes integrating to the internal network with Linux a part time job. I gave up and set up a vm with Linux keeping windows do its thing.

Any reason to not use wsl? I’m forced to either use windows/Mac at work and chose windows with wsl. Works reasonably well. I just live in WSL and use office (which is better than MAC office by a large margin)

wsl needs to be administrator if I'm not mistaken, plus needs internal network which may/may not be allowed by the antivirus/firewall package, I prefer no to spend too much neurons on windows debugging / internals and keep them for linux

High DPI displays support can be quite rough in Linux, along with slowish GUI. Some apps are fine, others less so. Last time I was using Mac - it was constantly overheating, then the battery inflated itself, Docker performance was awful. I went with Windows 10 + WSL2 ~ year ago (some for compatibility reasons, some because curiosity) and it's working OK so far. Most of my time is spent in WSL2 + VSC with rest being mostly for browser and running some VMs. It works surprisingly well. Well enough I don't feel any urgent need to go and install Linux (except the one running in WSL). I did look at Mac options ~ year ago but it just wasn't worth the money. Its price tag + effectively locked HW platform is just not worth it compared to what I currently use. It's not like I can't afford it, there's just no added value in it, at least for my type of work (DevOps,SysOps). I won't be upgrading to Win11 anytime soon though, I'll probably switch back to Linux sometime in the future.

> I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days

Maybe for developers writing games in C++ or their own engines (or small time engines), but for many, how is it better?

As far as I know, out of the most popular engines, only Godot actually offers out-of-the-box Linux support. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and the others don't offer Linux support for their editors, although some give you access to the source code so you can build it yourself on Linux, but that's often not so trivial.

while this data is 5 years out of date (and I was writing C++), the sdk and toolchain for PS3 and PS4 was only installable via windows (even though they're BSD platforms, go figure).

The same was true for wii/wiiU (linux under the hood) if I recall correctly. I'd be shocked if that weren't also the case for xbox* though I don't remember that specifically.

Unity has fairly good support for Linux editors. I've been working in Unity on Linux for years now, without any major issues.

Unity has supported Linux for a few years now.

> Yeah, the answer is to simply not use Windows.

Yeah, no.

You either switch to Mac and lose 99% of your applications and some of your hardware.

Or you switch to Linux and lose 90% of your applications and latest hardware; And enjoy random problems and figuring out which of hundred answers online is right. Answer could be none, because for example Wayland support for multiple monitors sucks.

If you want to run Linux on a computer, you do your research and build/buy one where the hardware support is there. Most people don't need "latest" hardware; hardware from 2-3 years ago is fine, and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too -- again, if you do your research.

Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine (especially if it's a laptop) will often fail, and that's why people spend hours on forums looking for answers.

Long ago I tried to run Linux on Macs. I would always get it to more or less work, but it would take a lot of time and toil. I had the patience for that back then. Now I just buy a Dell XPS 13 and stop worrying about it, because everything works out of the box. It's not my favorite piece of hardware, but it's fine.

I also do wonder where all these critical Windows-only applications are. I spend 90% of my computing time in a browser, terminal window, or text editor/IDE. Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without, but the vast majority of users out there don't.

> and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too

True: a bit more than a year ago I bought a new computer with (I think) a B550 chipset motherboard which was very recent.

Wasn't supported by Kubuntu 20.04, I just had to install Kubuntu 20.10 and that's it.

IMHO Linux hardware isn't a problem at all. Software is more problematic (I had a lot of side projects WPF apps that can't run on Linux and I'm a bit lazy to port them to another framework or language so I have installed a Windows VM.

> Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine

Not random, but my current machine. How else am I (or random person on the Internet) to migrate to Linux then?

Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

E.g. You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away. Get AMD. Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I honestly dread switching to Linux.

> Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without

Stuff like Office (not online ones), Adobe suite, video editors, sound editors, etc.

Worth noting a lot of people had to upgrade their computer for Win10 (2 of my relatives were told they had to buy new computers by Windows but I managed to upgrade them with out after lots of fiddling), a lot will have to upgrade for Win11 (to get TPM2 modules).

I think the answer to the last one is if you need Microsoft software then use it. Not much you can do if your chosen vendor doesn't support other OS (WINE, VMs, and such aside).

TPM 2 plus a BIOS update for any board made pre August of 2021, & 60GB or so of free space on their OS drive, which these days is also more of a rarity since the trend has been small OS SSD drive with large secondary & storage drives.

Honestly, your machine will probably work. Linux supports a lot of hardware. Nowadays it's rare to find any that doesn't work.

> You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away

Nvidia works fine (it has to, lots of ML shit on GPUs is done on Linux), you just need proprietary drivers. If anything their support on Linux is probably better than AMD's.

Why? Just make an Ubuntu startup stick and try it without installing... Nothing lost except maybe 10 minutes of your time.

> Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I've used dual monitors on my linux setup for years without issues. Is this a common problem?

I've been using dual screens on Linux since 2009 and for the last 2 years triple screens.

My current PC is using and nVidia 1660 GPU to drive this.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04. It wasn't out-of-the-box easy to install, but running installer in safe-mode worked and regular boots are as normal.

Even on laptops dual screens work provided the laptop supports it.

There is a problem if there is a mismatched DPI between screens.

I've rarely seen it as i usually dock the machine with duplicate monitors.

This used to require some tweaking under gnome (different DPI), but is nice and smooth under wayland.

> Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

I understand what you are saying but it is not such a big deal in practice as it may seem. You migrate if your current machine supports linux (you have to do some research), OR you migrate the next time you switch machines.

Linux is my daily driver for 15+ years now and the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't bother me at all. I am currently using two xps laptops and one custom built desktop - everything worked out of the box. I had good experience with thinkpads in the past.

It all comes down to the time you are willing to dedicate in learning something new.

For most of the stuff that runs on windows and mac there are alternatives on linux, some equal, some worse, some better. I have been mostly a linux users for years. I still have one laptop with a dual boot on windows...for only one use case: music production. Not because there are no music production software available, not because they aren't good, quite the contrary there are fairly decent tools both opensource and proprietary, but because I don't know them well. I only do music as a hobby in my free time and so far I have been too lazy, or more interested in producing music than learning a new workflow. I admit it is mostly about laziness and time to dedicate to something new. I intend to correct that because I don't want to feel forced to use windows, which I mostly hate for anything else, for that.

What on earth are you talking about? I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with triple monitors and a Nvidia 3090.

You're just making stuff up now. I bought an RTX 2070 (nvidia, as you know), and it worked fine, runs all my games, under archlinux just fine.

Same with dual, triple monitors, etc.

> You're just making stuff up now.

Linux Desktop evangelists being like this also makes people not want to switch. Who wants to deal with a community like that?

For you. On your hardware and your distro. I've seen and heard stuff going south from word go.

If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

If it's a laptop then buying an entire machine is the norm.

If you want to test hardware you already own, then just do it. No need to do any real research there.

> If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

Should isn't won't.

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M

I don't recall that series having much in the way of hardware problems, excluding the goxlr and such because that's not part of the desktop.

If it was unclear that my sentence was in the scope of hardware, sorry.

I remember Luke saying multiple monitors broke at one point on his laptop, but that was a laptop.

> where all these critical Windows-only applications are

The vast majority of users would suffer if forced to use only Linux apps. Think Office Vs LibreOffice or Photoshop Vs GIMP. A lot wouldn't be able to work at all, like the folks who use Solidworks.

Let's not pretend that browser/terminal/IDE is the most common usage of PCs.

I would suffer if I had to use Windows applications. Because having to pay (or even pirate) quality paid software that I have to sit and learn is less convenient than downloading pretty good free (as in beer) software that I've used for the past 5 years and I'm very comfortable with. GNOME applications are surprisingly polished and good, and I'm not getting that on Windows.

I'm one of those who use Solidworks and there are no Linux equivalents, let alone polished ones. So, as in everything, YMMV.

100% fair.

Krita and Blender are pretty sweet though. And you can use some versions of Photoshop via Wine perfectly fine. The same goes for Office.

When x570 was just released, I bought all the newest stuff from AMD, and everything just worked, if you were on a recent kernel. Similarly, when I got a Thinkpad, I just bought it and everything worked. Not saying that this is a representative sample, but I've been successfully skipping the part where I spend months researching if the hardware I buy will work.

I have a recent AMD GPU and CPU, which I bought because of AMD's GPU drivers being part of the kernel. I have absolutely no problems with my PC running Ubuntu, it's rock solid and I can play almost any game on Steam via Proton - all while not dealing with Microsoft's shit. Windows where the dark ages for me.

Linux has many challenges, but honestly, Macs are way too expensive and closed system (maybe you don't care if you have an US salary, I do) and Microsoft trying to push for BS every update gets really old.

It depends what you work on. I have installed popos like 2 years ago. I have 0 issues so far. For web development, nodejs etc. Linux is better than windows by a miles.

Not everybody is graphics designer, video editor who needs Photoshop, Microsoft Excel etc.

And, I haven't found any random problems at least on PC. It might be problematic in laptop, which I honestly don't know.

My last and current laptops work completely fine with linux, but I chose hardware that works fine. The old one is a Latitude E5470, and the new one is a Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 ARE (with Ryzen 4700u). Both require no extra drivers, while the new one requires at least kernel 5.10 to work, and works better with 5.13. Both have similar battery life on windows 10 and linux.

Yeah, I run Arch and despite it being a kind of "hobbyist" type system, after the initial configuration, there are no problems or constant maintenance. I have had a few things break sometimes because I accidentally install a partial update, but that's obviously my own fault.

Also, part of the problem people have with Linux is that it does not run Windows programs and they complain because they can't get QEMU or VMware or WINE functioning correctly. You shouldn't need those. When you switch to Linux, you lose your software. It's a reality you accept, because that software you used was not designed for Linux. Instead of trying desperately to get your old software to run, you instead use alternatives, be they open or closed, to run what you want. There are more than a few alternatives, many of them having similar or exceeding the power of paid windows-only products.

Back when the 2070 came out I built a machine with that RTX 2070, i7-9700k, some new ram, some new harddrives and ssd(s), m.2 and not, etc. and I have not had any issues with Archlinux.

Same experience when I bought my thinkpad L14 AMD, no issues either.

Im convinced at this point that the entire "linux is bad on new hardware" is a thing of the past.

The thing here is, it never technically was. The issue in the past was vendors either writing the drivers like they do windows, but for linux, or producing technical documentation so someone could. Instead, there were lots of times years and years ago, where a lot of drivers had to be reverse engineered. So the hardware on linux being bad, was mostly and issue that at one time, no one cared to write drivers or provide the necessary information.

If the drivers aren’t there then Linux is bad on that hardware for anyone attempting to use it. It doesn’t matter to the end user that the lack of drivers is the manufacturer’s fault.

If you don't like to get raped by $megacorp1 buy $megacorp2 instead! After all, consoom you must, right?

What?!

It's just there isn't a good path. So might as well remain on current thing that works.

In my case the $15 Windows.

Aside from some weird GDI printer that refuse to work with any operating system other than Windows I never[0] had any issues with hardware. I recently tried to revive an ancient drawing board and when it didn't work with Linux I - for old habits' sake. Turned out it didn't work with Windows either because it was broken.

tldr; Linux' hardware support is excellent these days.

[0] Since about 2010. Before that I had lots of issues, especially with graphic cards and broken ALSA drivers and stuff. All of these problems have disappeared for all practical purposes.

It seems weird that when a company grows beyond one point they start these user hostile practices. Google is another example. When they are small they are more open to innovation than manipulating user into using their product. What goes wrong?

My probably a bit naive take:

The MBAs take over and implement KPIs that might even be well-intentioned but are ultimately easiest to satisfy by cutting corners. For example: KPI that measures market share of Edge; instead of making Edge better to increase its share, just screw your users by making Edge default on Windows on every other update.

I've seen it happen at my own company, and while I always had pipedreams that this isn't happening at the big tech players because there are too many smart folks around to stop that nonsense, I can well imagine that it boils down to these kind of bullshit reasons.

If their MBAs set-up KPIs that reward this kind of behaviour, they need better MBAs. Instead of "get more people to use Edge", it should be "get more people to choose Edge". Neither people nor geese respond well to having stuff rammed down their throats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras

How about no MBAs?

These practices are nothing new for M$, they did that in the past (15-20 years ago) with IE, then got several slaps on the wrist, which made them cut back on it for a few years, but now they seem to be thinking that if IE/Edge is no longer the dominant browser they can start using these tricks again?!

Probably, since just like back then with IE, Edge is now baked into the OS as well.

I think Microsoft is an exception, they have been obnoxious since day one.

Obnoxious is being far too nice. MS has done more than any other single organization to derail & suppress the pace of technological development, and by extension the progress of the species. I genuinely see them as an enemy of humanity.

Organic growth opportunities from gaining market share or acquiring users disappear and the new people they hire have to “make an impact”

> What goes wrong?

Quarterly Earnings reports. They've picked off all the low hanging fruit to show growth, now they're grasping.

They run out of improvements and start focusing on value extraction?

Windows is pretty much alive and kicking. The best it has been since Windows XP.

WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

Windows 11 is VERY solid and you can play lots of games on it too :)

I am dead serious. I have been using Windows since 3, using betas of Microsoft products since Longhorn - right now, Windows is reaching it's PEAK in terms of performance, ecosystem. Sure, they will need 2-3 more UI/UX iterations, but who cares - I use the terminal, File Explorer, Visual Studio 2022, Office apps and Outlook :D

> WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

As someone who also has a Linux desktop and laptops in addition to the Windows machine, WSL is terrible next to the real thing. Unless you need software that only runs on Windows, I advise against using it as a reason to stay on Windows.

I have been using Linux since Redhat 6.2 back in 1998. I have had my share of xconfig edits, bash scripts, etc explorations.

I am now reaching 36, I just like 'things that work' - like Windows. Windows works with all my hardware, with all my 7 laptops, with all my 2 towers, I can install Visual Studio 2022 on it, I can install Ubuntu in WSL2 and I can play Dota2/Civ/Baldur's Gate/Warhammer 40k Insquisitor Martyr/listen to Spotify/debugging/deploying to Azure/writing an email/writing a Presentation in Power Point.

And then go back to my family - because not worrying about Wayland, that new driver or that new update or "that new thing "- suprsingly leaves a lot of time that you can spend with your family :)

And of course I am using the .NET stack with Angular- all smooth, all good, no hassle, just smooth sailing :)

I am just a couple of years older than you, also using Windows since 3.0 (and MS-DOS for years before that) and Redhat Linux since the 90's. I've moved all my family over to Fedora, and support calls have dropped enormously. Windows 8 was the straw the broke the camel's back for most of them. They actually found Linux (sometimes with skinned XFCE) more familiar coming from Windows 7. I will accept that if you buy new low end hardware you may occasionally have driver issues, but the last few Lenovo AIO and Thinkpads I've bought all work flawlessly first time around. I will add that I've tried many vanilla Windows installs over the years, and without the special vendor drivers built in, found it to be even worse than Linux for compatibility. The hostility of modern Windows is just hard to accept to be honest.

I get that my use-case doesn't apply to everyone, but I want people to know that if you do mostly web stuff etc... even as a non technical person, Linux can "just work".

Same here, I gave my mother a dual-boot system (Windows+Debian) somewhere around 2008 (or so, given that it was Windows XP), and told her to switch to Linux for online banking (my father's online account was blocked twice due to suspicious activity). I also configured her Thunderbird mail client to use the Windows' data folder, so she could access her e-mail on both. A year later she told me she never started Windows any more, she used Linux all the time.

Then my father's printer and sound card stopped working after upgrading to Windows 8, and I moved him to Linux as well.

In all this time there's only one thing I couldn't fix for them: the library's audiobooks had some form of Adobe DRM on them, and of course it didn't support Linux. I told them to take up the issue with their library, but of course they didn't have a satisfactory resolution to the problem.

> Windows just works.

I use Windows for audio recording, mixing, mastering and gaming, here are my examples of Windows not "just work"ing:

My Windows bluescreens immediately after booting on my Threadripper build with an MSI MEG x399 if I don't have the wifi driver installed. On a new install I have to deactivate it in UEFI settings, then boot/install windows, then install the driver before reactivating it.

Windows Update tries to install certain useless crapware (nahimic) that I can't reject or properly uninstall without a few obscure hacks to trick it.

I use an external audio interface, if Windows goes to standby I have to unplug it and plug it back in, otherwise it won't detect it anymore (this does not happen on Fedora 35).

Also windows will occasionally just switch my default input device after reboots or going to standby. This behaviour is not consistent, so I have to check everytime before I use it for calls. This problem does not occur on Fedora 35.

I currently have 13 .NET redistributables and Windows runtimes installed that all required manual downloading and installing for various games and software to work.

A friend decided to have a Mac to use Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, and other DAWs because of those problems. It's sad that those software isn't available in Linux.

> It's sad that those software isn't available in Linux.

It truly is, the only part on music production that is keeping me is not even the DAWs themselves (I mainly use Cubase and Reaper, and Reaper already offers a Linux build, which works well), it's the VST plugins, which rarely if ever offer Linux versions.

Other music software I make heavy use of: Transcribe!, which offers a linux build and Musescore, which is open source and runs on Linux as well.

I'm a similiar age (few years older but nothing too signficant) and have used nearly every version of Windows. Inc pre 3.x versions, pre-NT4 versions, and most of the CE and embedded versions too. And like yourself, used Linux since the 90s too (Redhat, SuSE, and Slackware were my favourites up until I discovered Arch).

Ironically I switched away from Windows and onto Linux precisely because I was sick of things not working on Windows. Sure, it has the best desktop application support of any operating system but to use it for anything more than just a desktop machine requires hours of configuration because everything is tailored to supporting technologically illeterate people (eg file extensions being hidden). Very little of any of this config can be automated -- or at least not in any easy way. And then Microsoft will pull some bullshit move that undoes half your config and you need to start all over again (much like the author of this submission has experienced). Or every few years you need to upgrade to a new release of Windows and you have to find where to change all those settings again plus learn a stack of new settings you need to change too.

Eventually I realised I was spending as much time maintaining the OS as I was actually writing software on it. So I stopped using Windows. Or rather decided to keep Windows around for emergencies but use Linux as my primary desktop (instead of keeping Linux around for emergencies and using Windows as my primary desktop).

My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades), but you can keep your config in Git so it's sync'ed across multiple machines or kept safe if you do need to reinstall your OS. Everything is automated and just works. Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).

I'm not saying your experiences are wrong but just offering the counterpoint that "thing that work" might differ for different people.

>My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades),

Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long. Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade", and it insists that you update every day.

On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.

I've been running basically the same Arch install since 2009:

> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head

[2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)

You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.

> Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long.

It's certainly introducing more risk but these days I only update my Arch systems a maximum of once every 6 months (usually less than that) and never have an issue. This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.

> Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade",

In theory it is a possibility but in practice that's not really the case. I mean you're not going to get breaking changes every week ;) Arch's package manager has really improved in recent years too so a lot of occasions that might have needed manual intervention can be handled automatically by the package manager (which wasn't the case back when this meme was true).

Also there is a news section on Arch's website so if you're genuinely nervous about running `pacman` you can check there first (this is the recommended best practice but most people don't bother these days because it's rare to have an issue).

> and it insists that you update every day.

Only if you kick off your package manager everyday. But this is true for any Linux distro since they're all pushing updated packages everyday so I don't really see how Arch differs in that regard.

> On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.

I've had a Debian dist-upgrade fail before but that's just once out of a dozen(?) of successful dist-upgrades so I do agree Debian is solid. Never had an issue with upgrading CentOS either. Nor FreeBSD.

The only thing Arch does better than the above is you don't have an hour(s) of downtime during the upgrade. But as you said, that's paired with the risk that you might run into a breaking change at any point in the future. For that reason alone I wouldn't run Arch on servers (or at least not professionally -- thrown Arch on some personal servers in the past)

>This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.

It's not a meme. Just this week I attempted to update an Arch system that had been left unattended for only a couple years. It got caught in some kind of cycle where it didn't have the GPG keys required to download the latest GPG keys. Then there was some package conflict issue. Finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I completed the update and rebooted... "kernel not found".

I gave up on it.

And lest I be accused of incompetence, here's another Arch user's 3-year update story, only a few weeks ago, on our very own HN:

"Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053

So I'm sorry, but "pretty smooth ride" my ass.

A minute ago you were complaining about updating Arch every day and now you're talking about not updating it over time spans lasting years! Talk about hopping from one extreme to another...

Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion.

So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.

> Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).

Instead, you run into "Firefox not supported" issues.

It's not 1998 any more. Nobody worries about their linux setup unless they want to. My pop os tower has been set up and forget for years now.

I have five Linux boxes in regular service (not counting the dozens of RPi-likes and VMs), with multiple configurations (mostly different filesystems - BtrFS, ZFS, XFS, LVM or bare metal, depending on requirements) and the only machines that give me surprises are the two Windows boxes, which, really, never do anything "weird".

Out of curiosity, what are you using so many machines for? I can imagine collecting a few, but getting regular service out of them without having a business workload of some kind seems unusual to me.

- One server that runs ad-hoc VMs for various reasons and also does heavy lifting when the laptops aren't quite well suited for it. It has a monitor, but it's almost never used like that.

- One very light (and slow by today's standards) Fedora laptop I use mostly from the couch and used to go with me to conferences.

- One reasonably sized (also old, but still snappy) Ubuntu laptop I use tethered to a desk with a keyboard and monitor.

- One that's mostly a file server that all computers on the network can see.

- One that's a "write-only" file server for backups.

Not the GP, but:

- a desktop on Arch

- an arm-based NAS on Debian

- a router running OpenWRT

- a backup target on Debian

- a media player (x86) with Kodi/Wine/Dosbox/Mame/other emulators

All are in regular use, but only the NAS and router run 24/7.

> That's the issue with Linux desktop users - they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice'... taking 2-3 hours per week to perfect their desktop with the perfect background and then post it on some Linux community site.

Oh please, that's absurd. I probably spend 2-3 hours per year cumulatively on system maintenance tasks, and the rest of the time I get my work and play done.

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work

Pretty sure that's what you're doing right now. I don't think Linux is right for everyone, but your criticisms don't make sense. You're not even criticizing the platform itself, you're making up weird things about the people who use it, which kinda says a lot about you right there.

> Let's move on.

Been there, done that, moved on from Windows, never looking back.

> That's the issue with Linux desktop users - they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice', by using desktop environments that mimic the same thing they migrated from :)

Microsoft and Apple have invested millions into design so it's not unreasonable that users of FOSS might like some of the design decisions made by those companies. That doesn't make FOSS users "fanatics", that makes them "pragmatic".

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work

Isn't that literally what you're doing right now?

> and then taking 2-3 hours per week to perfect their desktop with the perfect background and then post it on some Linux community site.

Now you're just being argumentative for the sake of it

> Been there done that. Windows just works. Let's move on.

As posted elsewhere, "just works" will differ depending on the individual and their requirements. Assuming what works for you is universal for everyone is the kind of delusional take that will get you pegged as a fanboy.

> they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice', by using desktop environments that mimic the same thing they migrated from :)

Have you ever met a Linux user in person?

I ask you because most Linux users I know just run whatever came with their distro and, when unhappy, change distro. I'm running both Fedora and Ubuntu and I'm quite happy with both. The biggest change was to use the Gnome wallpaper because I didn't really like the Ubuntu one. My Fedora laptop is mostly vanilla.

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work ;)

We just like to correct people who write some baseless criticism and attacks on our professional attitudes, because, you know, these kind of comment is not really nice. Or professional. Or even correct.

> Been there done that. Windows just works. Let's move on.

Been there, done that, Linux just works better, and keeps working. Let's move on.

> Been there done that.

As a Linux user, I've never done that. Any kinds of obsessions are useless. I'm concentrated on performance and efficiency, and I find Linux environment perfect for my needs, extremely rich and flexible. Someone might say the same about their Windows box - and that's perfectly fine, fortunately everybody is free to use what they want - let's leave OS wars to people who enjoy having this kind of argument.

One of the points of Gnome is that it has sensible defaults and you just live with them.

Like, you know, a Mac.

BTW, there's something to be said about how sensible Windows defaults are. I'm not really liking the start menu moving to the middle of the dock.

Mac has terrible defaults though. The DE with the best defaults I have used so far has been Xfce. Xfce is a bot rough in some areas since it is a small volunteer driven project bit the defaults are excellent.

I'm 40, and I've found current-day Linux to "just work" as well as Windows or macOS ever has for me in the past. I run Xfce on X11, as I've been doing since 2004, on Debian, as I've been doing for the past decade or so. I see no need to switch to Wayland or constantly chase "that new thing".

I don't game all that much; most of what I play that doesn't have a Linux-native build runs fine through Proton on my laptop. If I did do any serious gaming, I'd probably reluctantly have a separate Windows gaming rig that I'd use solely for gaming, but otherwise avoid it like the plague. Life is too short to deal with user-hostile OSes.

> I can install Ubuntu in WSL2

Funny how the best thing to have happened to Windows in the last 10-ish years is gaining the ability to install Linux on top ;)

Also making Python and Angular first class citizens in their dev stacks. Both of which are prominent open-source projects.

> And then go back to my family - because not worrying about Wayland, that new driver or that new update or "that new thing "- suprsingly leaves a lot of time that you can spend with your family :)

What about the times when windows take forever to "getting things ready". I once spent around two hours updating windows. And just after the reboot there were ten new updates.

My partner was about to get back from the office, bringing food. It was 8pm, and everything set for tomorrow with Windows. Except at this point it needed to update, and for a specific reason the computer needed to be in a working condition the next day and updates of course installed. Two hours later it was still updating, and we were eating in the end 11pm...

My NixOS machine updates in a few minutes even when it needs to compile some custom things. And it will not change settings without me changing the configuration. If it does, I can just reboot to the older version and file a bug report...

Edit: has anybody tried to install Windows on ZFS or Btrfs? If update does something you don't like, just boot to a snapshot and get rid of the update.

> has anybody tried to install Windows on ZFS or Btrfs?

I used to do banking on a VirtualBox immutable disk image. I only made it mutable when it was time to regular updates, then made it immutable again for using the bank and government software (in Brazil you had some govt issued tools that made life easier). You can also make it work with filesystem snapshots as well as letting VirtualBox manage its own snapshots for you.

Have been Windows 10 insider since 2016ish maybe, before that installing whatever WzoR iso put out. This PC I am writing from - had Windows 10 installed on it 2018 with Windows Insiders builds, upgraded to Windows 11 around August, joinned the beta/canary channel, right now I am on:

https://changewindows.org/platforms/pc/releases/windows-11-c...

[Version 10.0.22538.1010]

I had ZERO (0) issues with upgrades or downtime.

> I had ZERO (0) issues with upgrades or downtime.

I too could make coffee or read a book while apt or dnf do their magic, but the truth is I can continue working while they do it, probably because, unlike Windows, they can delete and replace open files while they install, making the update-on-reboot issue on Windows a non-issue on Linux machines.

It's been a while since I had a BSOD on Windows, but I have been forced to restart it quite a few times when something didn't work or stopped working, or the VPN went crazy or some other malfunction. Unscheduled downtime is still very much an issue on workstations and I wouldn't want to look into Windows Server and how it handles this issue.

Every single half-year release of Windows 10 took more than one hour on both of my windows computers (using upgrade assistant; windows update never offered an update). They are no slouchs either, one is i7 and the other is Threadripper, both with ample ram and disk space.

They also break Intel ANS on every single release - i.e. VLANs and LACP will stop working until Intel releases a new version. For Windows 11, Intel gave up and there will be no ANS anymore[1].

And the last, january 2022 update? It casually killed L2TP...

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

without games windows would crumble. what has been changing in the past few years is the ammount of support given to gaming on linux as well as nvidia actively developing drivers for linux due to the machine learning community. it will be interesting to see how this develops

also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience

> without games windows would crumble

Eh, pretty sure it is mostly Office, specifically Outlook, that keep Windows alive. Glorious PC Gaming Master Race is relatively small, although they do spend a lot of money.

That's why Linux is a workstation OS. If you need a Playstation OS, the choice of hardware is obvious ;-)

> also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience

For a very limited set of values of "works". ;-)

Depends what works means for you, for me its being able to have a desktop running with a an ide and being able to choose reliably my defaults with the os getting out of my way. Linux does it for me 100%, windows is a bunch of GUI with no portable config and always tries to sell you something, including unclear errors and sudden crashes

Unrelated question – being a .NET developer, would you be interested to try out ASPSecurityKit specifically it's activity data authorization [1] feature? Pl share your email if yes. Mine is varun at ASPSecurityKit

looking for some beta users, to get feedback as we're thinking a cross-platform component on similar lines.

1: https://aspsecuritykit.net/guides/aspnet-policy-authorizatio...

You clearly need to be introduced to Apple's ecosystem :)

In my case I began with DOS and later, Windows 98. I loved Windows 98SE/XP and Linux looked cool, "industrial" server graded OS but unusable for the desktop. As my Debian skills skyrocketed by a 20 euro bargain sale of Debian Sarge (4 DVD's, 3 for sw and 1 for the sources), I never went back to Windows.

Today I use Slackware 14.2 on a netbook and -current (almost 15 nowadays) as my desktop OS. No driver issues, every emulated game works. I use either text mode via framebuffer (I can even watch videos and run SDL2 based cool stuff like mednafen) or fluxbox.

I don't care on modern gaming, Slashem and IF killed modern graphical-intensive games but with a childish and boring script. Kinda like the current decade trend of Marvel superhero movies. I had more fun reading classical sci-fi comics from the 50's. BG was cool... at 18. Today I have no time to follow a 20000 pages long script based not on sequential reading, but on choices. Slashem has better and more inmersive RPG elements (Nethack was the king of emergent gameplay) and I can play it anywhere on any machine from a 486 or a Classic Mac. Mednafen does magic for my gf, two player 8-16 bits classics with a gamepad while I use the keyboard. It works even without X. No DLC's, no always online. Oh, and Jap nerds translated loads of games into English. I am not an English native, but for sure I can read English better than Kanji.

On media, I don't care on Spotify, I have curseradio-improved, yt-dlp, Jamendo and Radio Paradise, and MPV plays HD content from Youtube and may other sites perfectly. My offline music collection (streamripper to Radio Paradise) does it better with the "shuffle" function on mocp. Fire and forget.

Time for my family? No social media, no "always connected" bullshit. I don't have to follow 2000 notifications on the framebuffer as in a GUI or a smarthone. https://68k.news, https://lite.cnn.io, https://efe.com for my country's news and Slashdot/HN/Lobste.rs has anything I want to read. Even in text mode. I also have some good times with Gopher and magical.fish/sdf.org and the tildeverse. Condensed geekeery thanks to few members, code sharing and a low volume of posts. Heaven. And, maybe, [email protected] via SSH from time to time. Ah, a lot of people posted personal blogs on Gopher, so I can read posts back to ~2007 with the Gopher revival, and I can read it on a slow pace. The protocol is fast enough and there's no lag to load the sites, OFC.

Visual Studio? Heh. Nowadays almost everything I do it's cloud containered bullshit so there's very little to code, I almost do (jim)tcl and a bit of C for fun.

At home, everything else it's scripted over with a script called "do_the_internet.sh" pulling and fetching rss, mail, usenet news and podcasts. Once a week. No info overload.

Ironically thanks to that I spend much less time with the computer than you thanks to scripting ;), so I can focus on different stuff such as reading long books and biking.

And, yes, I geek sometimes, OFC, but with a fast as hell Fluxbox netbook, I can chat everywhere thanks to SSH (mosh) and Bitlbee (IRC gateway to Telegram/Jabber and whatever Pidgin supports), and hack and slash with Slashem on top of a mountain by using the phone's wifi sharing.

No ads. No unwanted updates. No pop-ups. No crapware. Batteries last hours.

If you are on Windows, get a Gopher client and head to gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org. Your brain will thank you.

Of course WSL2 can never be as good as running Linux natively. But as someone who needs software that runs on Windows, I like WSL2 a lot. For me the choice was native Linux + Wine or native Windows with WSL2. I have tried both, and I have to say that the WSL2 option runs much better in terms of both performance and stability.

> But as someone who needs software that runs on Windows

It boils down to which OS you want to be the "second-class citizen" on your machine. With Wine, it's Windows. With WSL, it's Linux.

> It boils down to which OS you want to be the "second-class citizen" on your machine. With Wine, it's Windows. With WSL, it's Linux.

That equivalence is only valid for WSL1. Since WSL2 runs the real Linux kernel on a VM, the equivalent for it on Linux would be running Windows on a VM.

> the equivalent for it on Linux would be running Windows on a VM.

Not quite. When Windows is on a VM, you mostly run only Windows-specific software on it. Within the VM, everything works mostly flawlessly. Most platform-neutral software will be running on the Linux side, which makes accessing data from the Linux environment a non-issue.

And don't even get me started on Windows-1252 and CRLF line endings.

WSL2 still has some issues with VPN software and my company doesn't support it on my corporate Windows laptop.

> ...WSL is terrible next to the real thing...

I am genuinely interested on knowing your reasons for saying WSL is terrible. Just for clarification, I'm a Linux/MacOS user but the times I've had to use WSL in the past whether experimenting at home or in some companies where I was force to use Windows, I though it is actually one of the most decent things Microsoft has created on its entire existence. It is easy to enable, to operate, it integrates well with the network stack of Windows (kubectl port-forwarding or docker run -p8000:80 works out of the box) it performs very decently (with exceptions on IO filesystem operations) etc.

> I am genuinely interested on knowing your reasons for saying WSL is terrible.

It's just that it's poorly integrated with the host environment (because there is a host environment). On Linux and Macs, the Unix side is the machine itself. With WSL1, you have a Windows kernel pretending to be a Linux one (I kind of prefer this approach) but my home folder is not my Windows home folder, but terminal still opens the Windows home anyway. On WSL2 (which I can't use on my corporate laptop because the VPN software breaks something in DNS and networking I haven't had the time to debug) the Windows side needs a network share to get access to the WSL environment (which is not present until the environment starts - and there are other side effects whether WSL starts before the VPN or after).

A Linux box (or Mac) is a so much simpler (to understand what happens) Unix environment it's not even funny.

Having said that, when you overcome those impedance mismatches, it mostly works for the typical use cases. Like you mentioned, Docker works (I need to set a DOCKER_HOST variable to point to the Windows box). And Windows Terminal is excellent (double height and width chars are still missing, but they have overline support).

Sorry about the VPN trouble (which may or may not be WSL's fault) but having to stick "cd ~" in .bashrc and not liking network drives isn't enough to get close to "terrible".

If you do a cd ~ in your profile, they you need to get to your Windows home in order to see the Downloads folder.

It's death by a thousand paper cuts.

I recently tried to use WSL2 for work on my Windows machine, and I had no end of issues getting things to work on it that I know work on both OSX and Linux because we usually use those 2.

I finally gave up on it and went back to using my underpowered OSX machine instead of continuing to try to get WSL2 to do the job.

Was it possible? Probably. But I'm not going to spend the time to figure it out. There's probably a correct way to install everything we needed, but I didn't find it, and I found numerous wrong ways.

I own a XPS 9500 I can tell you that even though I have dual boot I use windows and wsl2. Ubuntu is worse than wsl2 at running exactly same stuff, even the X apps through Vcxsrv are snappier on Windows compared to Ubuntu. To that, add lack of features in Linux apps, Discord lack of Krisp for example, poor cpu usage for videos in and outside browser, really bad BT, poor wireless performance and others. I am a power user and I don't like windows but it's just better any way you look at it, apart from customization. However, even there it starts to catch up, with apps like PowerToys.

Let me guess: Nvidia graphics?

Curious: in what way is WSL terrible? I've been using it daily for several years so wondering what I'm missing.

The tech that pushed me off windows on my dev machines was WSL2. My productivity lifted so much I started to wonder why I was using Windows at all for .NET development.

Did the switch to debian a couple of months ago. First two days was weird, after that the only thing I use Windows 11 for is gaming, and Lutris is making me think twice about that too.

I find Windows 11 to be the most bloated of all windows version with such stuff as Microsoft store, xbox app, cortana, or security center getting nastier on the user; You turn them off in the settings panel but they still keep running in the background. Now you have to fiddle with obscure registry variables, manually turn off services, ... to get rid of them.

I started running Windows back with version 3 as well, but gave up after 2000. I won't run an OS that I can't trust, and and OS that pulls the kind of thing that happened to OP is not one that I can trust.

I don't care how "solid" or performant it is. And I don't need WSL2 when I can just run Linux directly.

"The best it has been since Windows XP ... it's all good"

As far as I remember, XP had no tracking and advertisement build in by default. And it left control on when to update and when to invoke antivirus with you.

Is this really all good to you? Or are you so deep invested in windows, that you can just disable them? Because I surely can disable most of that shit, too - but it takes a while and one update later it can be all back.

> I am dead serious.

Thanks for adding this, as I thought you made a joke.

Ads, spyware, NSA backdoors, who still trusts them?

Also alternatives are just too readily available these days.

This user hostile mess is peak Windows? At least back then Microsoft had backwards compatibility as a core value.

Sure. Trivial stuff like disabling automated updates on Linux takes single command. On Windows you have to find tutorials on some shady sites, dig into binary registry. And a few months latter this settings gets reversed anyway, because Microsoft knows better.

Last solid Windows very Win Server 2003.

PS: I prefer to update once a month in controlled mode.

I disagree. This is the dark ages for windows, basic users and power users alike.

> WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

Actually, I decided to downgrade to WSL from WSL2. I often need to do some quick work in a Linux environment, and sometimes this even involves some files on my Windows machine, so WSL comes in handy. The problem is, WSL2 startup time is terribly long when compared to WSL. With WSL, i type wsl and a second later I run a couple of commands. With WSL2, once it has finally started, I already forgot what I wanted to do.

I've got a wsl2 shell in startup and never close it; it consumes relatively little memory (<1GB) and 0% cpu when idle.

I'd say it's pretty far from all good.

WSL2 has major IO issues outside of ext4, which is detrimental. It also doesn't support mounting NFS. It doesn't have systemd so lots of stuff doesn't work in a normal way.

To get a terminal that doesn't f*#& up you need to switch code page to utf-8.

Visual studio is almost as garbase as SSMS.

Windows is a pain

Yes, the bait in the hook is definitely more delicious.

I finally transitioned to Linux on my work desktop at the end of last year, after using WSL for a number of years and Linux on my home desktops for ages. I found that managing a Windows 10 VM in virt-manager for all the Windows-specific stuff is fine at the moment - nothing in particular has broken in my workflow. I find there’s slightly less mental overhead, but I haven’t yet figured out a good way to manage little configuration changes made to text files.

Only gripes are that I have experienced a few GNOME bugs with no explanation, like mouse gestures randomly breaking until I reboot - still, I just take this as an opportunity to reboot my computer. I also can no longer use Remote Desktop - VNC is too much of a pain and I can’t ‘steal’ my own session, and SSH forwarding is dead slow. (If anyone has a Remote Desktop solution for Linux that just works, I’d love to hear it.)

I can’t imagine ever really using Windows 11 at this point, at least not for a few years and then in passing.

Can you elaborate on your issues with VNC? I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to 'steal a session. Are you using Wayland or X11? I understand there may be some differences, but haven't explored them.

GNOME has desktop sharing built-in. I believe it is VNC based, but maybe you'll have better luck with something built into GNOME. SSH forwarding works fine for single apps, but for a true remote X desktop, I've usually configured XDMCP in the past. If you use Chrome, there is also Chrome Remote Desktop (remotedesktop.google.com). It worked fairly well when I used it last, but that was a while ago.

By ‘steal a session’ I mean be currently logged into my computer, either with the desktop locked or unlocked, and to jump onto another computer and log into the same session - so I get all my open programs, windows, etc. if that makes sense. The understanding I got was that this simply isn’t possible with VNC, or if it is it’d a major stuff-around. This really makes or breaks Remote Desktop for me.

I’m using Wayland, which is the Fedora 35 default. I considered X11 but the experience isn’t quite as smooth for the day-to-day stuff in Fedora and I just didn’t want to work around odd quirks if I could avoid it.

I tried the GNOME desktop sharing, but as far as I could see you need to be already logged in to jump in. Besides that it worked OK, though I recall screen resolution being a bit strange, like having 1024x768 or similar which is really quite small for GNOME’s big windows. I never looked into whether these issues I found were configurable, but they don’t seem to be easily accessible options if they are.

One hacky solution is to use run a VNC server on your desktop and connect to it locally. Then you can connect to that VNC server remotely and access all your stuff.

The issue I ran into was with multiple monitors. Stretching a VNC window to span multiple monitors is doable, but the window manager in the VNC session won’t know where the borders are and will treat it as one giant monitor. Using one big monitor is a workaround.

> Can you elaborate on your issues with VNC? I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to 'steal a session.

With RDP on Windows, if I stay logged in with programs running and walk away from my computer and remote in to it, I will get the same session I left open. Unlike VNC, this session will resize everything to fit my client's preferences because it isn't just passing screenshots or a video feed of the desktop back.

>> I haven’t yet figured out a good way to manage little configuration changes made to text files

I have a private git repo for this. I keep a copy of whatever directory structure I need in ~/_files. I wrote a small 'install.sh' script to install my packages and move the files around. I guess I'll get around to rsyncing them instead of manually moving them some day, but changes are few enough to warrant that yet.

Same here. I gave up on Windows years ago, switched to Linux and have been happy with it ever since.

Sure, there are some sharp corners here and there, but at least the operating system doesn't get out of it's way to stop you from fixing things. And since you have these sharp corners with any operating system, to the end user it doesn't really matter as long as they have any kind of informal support system (you know, the person in their extended family that 'knows' computers)

I offer tech support for my extended family and was able to slowly migrate most of them to Linux over the years. I'm much less inclined to angrily yell at people nowadays. I've also grown back much of my hair.

Indeed. I, on the other hand, use Windows all day every day and I'm a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, yet Microsoft has convinced me that it hates personal computing so much that the Windows Desktop will be the worse option (for my uses) in the near future.

Hell, even outside of trashing the desktop experience, we've noted that we used to get support for our SQL issues directly from Microsoft employees and were escalated to engineers in short order for data corruption issues, we now deal with a third party company for support and they're basically worthless. We pay for this treatment. It's absurd.

The only problem I have on linux is nvidia drivers for laptops. Getting Optimus to work is already a pain but simultaneously running the low DPI high refresh laptop LCD and the high DPI 60Hz 4k monitor is impossible.

Gnu/Linux doesn't have this problem.

Do you have any advice for someone who currently develops about 90% on Windows and ~10% (or less) on Mac, and wants to switch to Linux? Other than "just do it and get through the initial pain" which I think is a totally valid response.

There is also a Linux distribution called "WindowsFX 11". Try it out, very recommended.

Which distro do you enjoy using the most?