This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma. If he reformats that drive and puts say Kubuntu on it - the kid's first PC experience is going to be a vaguely retro 90's style shell with a start menu, the start menu is going to have a Games folder and even a Science & Math folder. (I don't think Scratch is installed by default but he should install it.) Better than Win95! There will be no commercial nags, no pre-installed social media apps, no news about mass shootings.

And of course it's Linux, so there's infinite opportunity to get under the hood and tinker.

- Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not do the actual work/study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I'm 40 and still horrified to deal with those problems on a daily basis as my company requires me to work multiple platforms. Linux doesn't care for a regular non-geek user, and its experts all over the internet are very condescending in general.

It's a sad reality that no platform actually cares for what a general customer wants. Macs these days have a few times more problems than Windows. His best bet is probably to just stick to Windows and keep checking for any new auto-introduced problems.

Tinkering with Linux was my first real computing experience and also started my career in that field.

I was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means?

I do sympathize with being a grown adult and having no time for this stuff anymore. But there is a time and place where, for some, the act of making a computer work right and do what you want is fun in itself. Isn’t that why we’re all here?

"I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install. To get a feeling for how things work below the surface and how they do not work. To learn how to type fast and efficiently. To create things. Maybe, one day, even to learn how to code if he's interested."

RHEL (and its kin) is a stable server OS. Some organizations that have Linux-based desktops or laptops then also use it on those, perhaps for the sake of homogenisation. But the longer release cycle and conservative update policies that in part make it a stable and predictable server OS also mean that hardware support may lag by years.

This is always a topic on which people will have different experiences. Some people will have everything just working. That's perhaps most likely when the hardware has been chosen with compatibility in mind in the first place. In that case it can be pretty smooth sailing with little tweaking required and with things just working, especially compared to how it used to be, which is probably one reason why people react to claims of endless tweaking being required.

Other people will have hit a rough spot, and those certainly still exist particularly with non-specifically picked hardware, especially if that hardware is newer than the distro release.

CentOS is probably not representative of most people's experiences of running Linux on a desktop or laptop, though.

I will give you that Linux is needlessly complex due to undesirable issues, but that's the price of admission for a highly hackable system, since there are no serious alternatives. As for kids, I wouldn't underestimate them. If what you want to give someone is a rich and deep experience with computers, it's about all you have right now.

On the other hand, and I'm sure this part of my comment will go over swimmingly here, but I imagine... if you start kids out with iPads, what they learn is not that doing interesting things with their computers is challenging, but that it costs a monthly fee.

But I'm not going to let her have one when she's older. I now realise that I would love a Linux tablet. Not a small laptop, but a touch tablet, thin, with a light keyboard too.

Is there such a thing out there? Or should I start building one now?

I pointed out that Linux was the perfect OS for this and your reply was that you hate using Linux on your corporate job because you have to do all those things. I mean fine you can hate it, it's not right for your job, OK. But in addition to being negative, you were off-topic. It spawned a bunch of guys debating the merits of Linux in a corporate office which is not the freaking topic of the blog post and to the extent you want to rattle on about it, you're arguing with a straw man. It shouldn't be a huge surprise you got flak. Sorry if this comes across as elitist but in the context of what this post was about I don't really care that Linux sucks in your office, I did not suggest you should use it there.

What Linux won't do is shove mass shootings and Tiktok ads down his son's throat. Again I quote the post: "What the actual fuck? That kid is 10, and TikTok is one of the things I am actively trying to prevent from getting into his world as long as possible." I maintain: Linux sounds great for this guy and his son.

You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE.

Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.

Yes, you had to edit your XF86Config to make your graphics work right, maybe even write your own modeline and be nervous that you screwed up your timings and blew up your CRT permanently. Maybe you had to recompile the kernel to set the proper settings for your Soundblaster. Less fragmentation? Desktop consistency? FORGET IT. A million window managers to choose from. Whichever you go with, your apps will be in a mixture of Motif, Tk, GTK, Qt and/or plain Athena widgets and there are no theme engines that will save you. Just deal with it or write your own.

For those without memory of how it was, search up some screenshots of RedHat 5.2 and its stock FVWM95 window manager. That was the easy to use, business-oriented distro of the day. That was considered acceptable look and feel to ship to an end user.

But all this? Fun. FWIW I still think a kid could have fun tinkering with modern Linux, it's probably just that they would tinker with different things. (Because contrary to popular belief, video and audio almost always "just work" these days)

Rose tinted glasses. Each distro had its own scripts and layout.

SysV sucked.

It was XFree86 -- with separate server binary for each chipset. Then came XFree86 4.0 with a new, hot thing: modularity. You could load drivers as modules, but that presented an entirely new way to make things more complicated. XFree86 became an OS in itself, including dynamic linker, PCI handling, vm86 emulator...

With Wayland, things are much simpler.

> , sysv init (no systemd)

There was bsdinit at the time. Sysvinit was considered bloated by the same types, who cannot consider systemd today.

> you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE.

There were other topics, like switching from libc5 to glibc2. Again, unicode, localization, nss services, so much "unnecessary bloat".

Yes, you could map ISO... to ASCII to avoid 'cosas horribles de ver cæmo ⌷stas'. Most words can be read fine without the stress mark in Spanish, except for some verb conjugations where they look odd without them. But, reading n instead of 'ñ' gets tiring after a while.

Thank Plan9's gods for UTF-8.

On the rest, a separate comment it's better.

Also:

I use Hyperbola GNU/Linux. UTF-8. IceWM. Rox if bored, or for photo galleries with thumbnails, here a file manager makes sense. Metal2 theme with CDE icons. I liked the aesthetics from late 90's/early 2000's. I still use

    gv -smartan 

    mplayer2

XFree86 in the early days required you to at least know the refresh rate for your monitor, if not to actually write a modeline which is damn near black magic for most people. This stuff also came with a warning that theoretically you could break your monitor. When you're 12 that stuff is terrifying.

SysV was extremely flaky and system specific. Every distro out there, especially the friendly looking ones like Mandrake bolted on a top of fancy stuff on top that added a whole new layer of complication. Stuff that worked with Debian didn't work on Red Hat.

OSS and ALSA were pure hell unless you had a fancy soundcard with hardware mixing. Dmix required magical incantations to get working, and wasn't reliable because a lot of stuff back then still tried to go through /dev/dsp -- which would break audio for everything else if you had the wrong hardware.

ASCII was probably an okay thing in America, but if you were anywhere else, internationalization was a very un-fun thing to deal with. And if you by chance needed to deal with two non-English languages, that was a constant annoyance.

Bloat is kinda relative. You can still use IceWM if you want to, pretty much every distro has every desktop imaginable.

X11: it sucked. Modelines.

ALSA: DMIX worked, fine.

XFCE: XFCE with XForms and the GPL'ed with GTK was fast as hell. XFFM was delightful to use.

ASCII: Wake up from the coma, please.

America is the whole world? ASCII doesn't even have the £ sign for fucks sake, so it wasn't even adequate for Anglosphere countries, let alone two billion Chinese and Indians.

I also hardly tinkered until I got into programming classes later on the high school, and then it wasn't tinkering, my time spent with Timex, Amiga and MS-DOS was about coding, demoscene and games, not fixing the OS.

I went to the library in '97 and borrowed the Linux Bible, with a CD-ROM copy of Yggdrasil Plug'n'Play Linux that I installed on my 486, and the new world that opened up to me of being able to modify, tune and customize the entire OS to my liking with no restrictions was magic.

Today, I work as a Linux sysadmin and I have fun at work. Other people of the same persuasion are the ones who maintain Linux distributions or contribute to the kernel today.

The point here is that if a kid finds it fun and creative to futz around with "fixing the OS" then let them -- not only is it its own reward, it might lead somewhere. Don't say "no, this isn't fun in my opinion and you shouldn't have to do it".

And in what concerns WebOS, Android and ChromeOS, if it is Linux kernel, BSD, Fuchsia or whatever powering Chrome and Android Runtime, I couldn't care less.

Not user friendly at all.

assuming you're not trolling, it's user-unfriendly because novices are used to changing settings in GUIs. changing settings in a bash script is a qualitative difference, and paradoxically leaves novices more helpless, despite being a more powerful tool in principle.

they don't know any of the syntax or semantics of bash, so they may as well be pasting something written in Kanji. they must put their trust in some random person on the internet who told them the incantation, that it isn't malicious or outdated or irrelevant. if it doesn't work, they have no idea what to do, or how to even begin to debug it, or how to undo it. they don't know if the change they made is permanent or if it will go away if they delete the line and reboot. they don't know about man pages, or the difference between .bashrc and .profile, or what the PATH environmental variable is, or what an environmental variable is full-stop, or what sudo means, or file permissions, symlinks, shebang lines, package managers, or any of the myriad incidental complexity which might crop up when you try to run some shell command from stackoverflow.

because often it isn't as simple as running that shell command. it turns out you need to run it with sudo, or apt install some missing command, or it uses some syntactic construct that doesn't work in your current shell, or a grep option that doesn't exist on your version, or you're in the wrong directory, or you need to activate some systemd service first, or it says to pip install something but actually you should use your system's package manager, or X or Y or Z ... experienced users run into little snags like this all the time and fix them without even thinking about it. do an experiment for me right now: go through your bash command history and find some command you used to solve some minor problem. then look at the commands before it for the failed attempts and workarounds and diagnostic steps you did. you probably forgot you even did those. then ask yourself if a total novice could have done them. the answer will be "no".

compare a GUI: a GUI settings dialog will have options labelled in English, and leans on well-understood semiotics of checkboxes, dropdown menus, sliders and so on. those constrain the possible types and values (compare with stringly typed shell commands), and it's clear how to undo them afterwards if necessary. they inform you of both the current state of the system, and how to change it (contrast: viewing the state of the system vs changing the state is two different terminal commands).

novices have a perfectly rational fear of screwing with things on the terminal.

This is a very valid point. When I first started with Linux, pretty terrified of screwing something up fundamentally with the terminal.

Most terminal commands are not particularly intuitive either. I'm technically very competent but before I learned how to code, I would have no way of knowing that "sudo" gives you admin privilege, or that "cat" shows the contents of a file.

For the average person, "sudo" or "chmod" are pure gibberish, and "cat" is an adorable pet.

Like this is part of the code for creating a mouse scrollwheel control script:

"if [ ! -f ~/.imwheelrc ] then cat >~/.imwheelrc<<EOF"

You can't be serious if you pretend that a non poweruser is supposed to understand what -f or cat, or E0F are supposed to mean.

In my experience, a GUI settings dialog normally will have options labelled in Brazilian Portuguese, which is even more friendly. The command line, on the other hand, is always in English (though its output is often in a mix of English and Brazilian Portuguese).

(Your experience may vary; people from smaller countries might have only a partial translation of the GUI, or even none at all.)

This might sound a bit harsh but Microsoft actively cultivated a type of user I would call "long time novice computer user" and combine that with the poor choices that were made regarding security design and you get results like the ninja updates Windows has these days.

As for hardware compatibility Windows has the big advantage that everything is tested on it. One can definitively minimize the risk of issues by just selecting appropriate hardware for linux.

There is no expectation that I'll grab a random laptop off eBay and install MacOS, or install Windows on a Switch.

Then you have Windows users complaining that they have some random hardware that the manufacturer refuses to support Linux, and are shocked that it doesn't work perfectly out the box.

After all Mac OS only runs on a few dedicated Apple computers and that's partly why it is a smoother experience overall. If Linux only had to support a few Laptop models it would have been easier to get it all working.

As of an hour ago, plugging a trrs headset into the jack on my laptop breaks audio until I go kick the daemon. Linux is a pain in the neck.

They work completely fine. I use them all the time and have been using them for about a decade.

The bug to which I refer has been open for over a year and is well replicated on my hardware and distro. I would fix it myself but I can’t be bothered so I use Bluetooth (in one of the rare cases were there’s an audio problem on Linux and the solution is Bluetooth).

Example: I booted a friend's Thinkpad t440p with an Ubuntu 22.04 pen drive to check that she was OK with it and that there were no issues. All went well (screen, touchpad, USB, printer, scanner) except resume from sleep: the pointer froze. An internet search returned the workaround from many years ago

  sudo modprobe -r psmouse
  sudo modprobe psmouse

thanks for posting the fix!

Man, there are so many of these. Not just in FOSS but software in general. What makes it annoying in FOSS is the fact that developers would rather rewrite everything in rust than fix many-years-old issues, even when someone has submitted a patch.

Could it be MS has stats from MS Store to actually see what users install (say I have WhatsApp from the Store, among several others, not mentioning Office). We don't have numbers from the telemetry, but they have, so we guess, but they may actually know. Not something unrealistic for me.

As side note, I find astonishing things, for good or bad, when looking out of my nerdy bubble.

Preloads are not there to make the service or experience better. Preloads are there, because someone paid for them to be there. So someone makes money on them, doesn't care exactly what they are, and is selling your attention and your time to get there.

So no popularity numbers needed, only a good offer.

Now laptops are a different matter.

I had a problem with an Asus, but that's because of an Nvidia embedded GPU that wasn't even supported under Windows, so it's not like this was a Linux issue. Just get a machine that supports Linux, you wouldn't complain that you can't install MacOS on your Inspiron and even with all the hacks it doesn't work right, or that Windows is struggling to boot on your Playstation.

And laptops are most client PCs sold these days, people barely buy desktops anymore:

https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-pc-market-Q4-2021

Linux is skating where the puck has been.

One of them, AMD-based, "only" had some issue with the USB hub to which the webcam and light sensor are connected. It otherwise worked OK. On the OOB Windows install which came with the PC from the factory, the backlight couldn't go up all the day and was a horribly dim affair. It was fixed around a year later. It would also randomly hang when waking up from sleep.

The second one, a full-Intel affair, was much more of a PITA. First off, the Windows installer didn't recognize the touchpad nor track point. It still doesn't, more than a year later! Then, once installed, there was some stupid issue with the display out via the HP dock. I'd have to do a ridiculous dance of plugging in the display via both HDMI and DP and unplugging and re-plugging the DP connector at just the right time. Then, almost a year later, Intel released a new driver that actually fixed it! But then, for a while, Windows Update wouldn't have any of that, and insisted on updating the driver to the older one with the bug. Good times.

Absolutely 0 issues under Linux since day one. The only "config file fiddling" I did was actually Xorg, but that's because I insisted on remapping CAPS to Hyper and using a mac-style US layout with the win and menu keys working as level 3 shift for easier French typing. How do you even do that under windows?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102...

I've been using Linux and Windows for a long time.

A lot of Linux enthusiasts are frankly uninformed about Windows power functions.

I've managed to make this work by combining that and another app that fiddled something in the registry to move super to caps and remap super to alt-gr.

> A lot of Linux enthusiasts are frankly uninformed about Windows power functions.

Because they're basically undiscoverable and require hours of googling.

The first approach I'd found, using the remap function of PowerToys kinda worked. But it randomly stopped working and would behave as if I had the super key pressed all the time. Cue windows randomly moving around, etc.

https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys/releases

BIG WARNING if you do this! I've done it in the past and using other computers will just break your brain. Think working with someone else or helping relatives, etc.

> Because they're basically undiscoverable and require hours of googling.

Oh, so just like Linux stuff? :-p The double standards are real :-D

> The first approach I'd found, using the remap function of PowerToys kinda worked. But it randomly stopped working and would behave as if I had the super key pressed all the time. Cue windows randomly moving around, etc.

I've used SharpKeys and the Microsoft KLC tool in the past, after many, many failed attempts with other tools, they're quite reliable. Only a handful of apps and websites (WhatsApp web... for some reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) don't 100% work well with them.

> BIG WARNING if you do this! I've done it in the past and using other computers will just break your brain. Think working with someone else or helping relatives, etc.

What saves me is that my French colleagues use French layout keyboards, so I have to mentally switch anyway when I use theirs. Luckily, it's not that often.

> Oh, so just like Linux stuff? :-p The double standards are real :-D

I think the biggest issue with Windows is finding a reliable source for these things. For Linux, there's the arch wiki, which is wonderful even for people using other distros. For Windows, there are many sources which are just blogspam and basically say that you should reinstall some driver and reboot your pc. Also, fiddling with registry keys with opaque names that you found on ad-laden webpages always feels a bit off (I'm thinking about trying to remove the "shortcuts" in windows 10's explorer, for example).

I'm actually quite impressed with some things available on Windows, especially the lesser known ones, but find it extremely frustrating that they're so hard to find out about.

Windows is a very complex beast and frankly many of the good people move on, usually to Linux, since all the good IT work happens on Linux.

(Admittedly, I've done well by staying away from nvidia)

All I have to do now is rebuild the driver after an update. "No Biggie"

Seriously though, compatibility issues seem the exception to the rule nowadays. Getting wifi or display drivers working used to be...challenging, if not traumatizing. You could put that shit on your resume nowadays. "I set up X11 with native resolution and got WiFi working most of the time in 2003 without damaging hardware."

Almost nobody. Most manufacturers have come to the conclusion that if they're going to dick about with special proprietary drivers, they can expect to sell a handful of their product compared to one that is just normal.

No-one wants a webcam that uses a special super-sekrit magic driver that has to be downloaded from some sketchy website. They want to plug it in and wave to granny, or join their Teams call. Thus, the special super-sekrit proprietary crap got evolved out of existence.

- I can't connect my Sony Xperia 10 II mobile via USB cord to transfer files. Debian won't recognize it as a mass storage device.

- Can't connect to my wife's ancient Samsung ML-1640 laser printer.

Both of the above work in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but not Debian 11 XFCE.

The truth is things like that are not as common as they used to be. Everything with Xorg is plug-n-play, input and video devices are greatly standardized, etc. Not to mention, if your machine boots into Wayland, there simply isn't an Xorg configuration to worry about.

That having been said, that was my experience when I was a kid, and I do not regret it at all. On the contrary, it was the perfect time to become proficient with Linux at a deeper level. Different strokes.

Manjaro has caused me no more (and in some respects less) issues than Windows did. The biggest issue for me is finding equivalent software from what I had on Windows. In almost all cases, I've been successful.

Gaming is great so far. Same games.

> experts all over the internet are very condescending in general.

This is a dissapointing generalisation and not my experience. I've had nothing but support and help with any questions I have asked recently.

The Linux ecosystem is a different beast now and one I'd recommend to most people. It's not going to work for everybody but if your user case is not special, chances are you'll have a better time than the current Windows.

Linux just works, straight out of the box, with pretty much any sane hardware.

Have you ever tried to get anything as outré as a USB keyboard, or USB memory stick, or heaven help you, a USB serial port working in Windows?

The whole FTDI hoopla happened only because FTDI serial driver was the only one shipped with Windows, so only one that was really plug and play.

And if you plug it into a different socket, it has to go on the Internet to find the driver all over again.

Janky.

- IE with too many windows? BSOD

- Process stack being mad? BSOD

  1. Running the many cycles of updates and reboots that invariably need to happen on a fresh install. Oh yeah, and one hard reset or power loss when Windows update hangs, as it does regularly, can be enough to irreparably corrupt the installation and force you to reinstall.
  2. Finding the drivers that were missed by Windows update *without* being tricked into downloading malware.
  3. Finding and installing software without being tricked to download malware by SEO spam. And without every application adding itself to startup or installing 3rd party spyware, slowing down boot time.
  4. Finding and changing all the settings whose defaults are making the system slow, insecure, etc. Some of these settings automatically change themselves back after some time btw, unless you use regedit or other hacks.

Not experienced that for a decade on Linux, but it happens every day for me on MacOS. Not sure why, but coming out of sleep, half the time one monitor will be at the wrong resolution and a third of the time the other monitor will be rotated 90 degrees.

I've resorted to leaving the displays setting window open so I can change them back when it happens. Really frustrating and the same monitors, HDMI cables and USB-C hub cause no issues on Linux.

Just in around 3 months, this is already the 2nd time that Windows 11 screwed up and I wanted to clean wipe it. I never imaged a triple hit before: a bad update fcked up the external display; then uninstall the update again fcked up the whole system; and at last system restore did not work. And that's on a damn surface pro 8.

On the other hand, another toy laptop with Fedora installed has running flawlessly for quite a few years, started from Fedora 30 to 37 without a single hiccup.

For Macs, never liked Apple products, so no comments.

Especially these days, I get trouble from only two places - 1) driver issues on laptops that aren't advertised as Linux-ready, 2) adding 3rd party apt repositories and hoping everything will update painlessly down the road. It's hard for me to think of Linux problems I've had in the last... 5+ years? that didn't stem from one of those two things.

I'm not saying they don't exist but every OS has its share of bugs, I think the days of Linux randomly exploding for random reasons are long behind us.

So even if exaggerated, I think your post is an argument and not a counterpoint wrt to the intended purpose. ;)

X is dead or very nearly so, this problem doesn't really exist.

Introducing a child to an environment where almost nothing works out of the box is also borderline risking developing a repulsion for life, you know

I'm not sure about that. Ubuntu at least is being slowly turned into adware. Apt already shows advertisements, the snap store is being expanded and promoted — and yes, these are small changes for now, but that's exactly how Windows started changing as well. Change like this happens, as the saying goes "gradually, and then suddenly".

Sad fact is that while we accept being treated as "consumers", we will be "consumers" and we will be fed crap that the advertising/marketing team wishes to feed us this week.

This and the silent introduction of phased updates and some broken updates makes me avoid Ubuntu in the future for sure. My go-to would probably be Debian which I personally use, however something like Silverblue or microOS might also be attractive in the future ... but not yet for casual users.

edit: Or maybe vanillaOS, if I ever get over the waste that is a/b partitioning.

I am actually most concerned with advertising in apt. And yes, it's subtle for now, but that's how things begin.

That's the beauty of GPL, let a thousand distros bloom, yes it's chaotic but no one can ever really force a bad distro down your throat (except your corporate IT department I guess)

Windows on the other hand, is saying, we're in charge, and no, we'll make sure you can't (easily) uninstall any of this.

I never thought I'd see an OS become a thinly veiled advertisement platform, but here we are in 2023.

It was tradition, even 20 years ago to "dump on Windows", but that was generally by programmers about the Win32 api, spyware/crapware, random crashes and so on, but the UI/UX even then didn't really get too much hate (as I recall it, anyway).

I'm another 'me too' here. I've use Mac/Linux/Windows daily for work, but have used exclusively Linux since Windows 8, really. I keep a partition with Win11 on it, and when I do drop into it to run Windows Update stuff keeps coming back, or new crap appears on my Start Menu. Then I log out, and don't touch it for 6 months.

The irony in 2023 that increasing amounts of software have Mac (and even Linux downloads), but don't have a Windows download. Something unheard of a decade ago.

I'd love to hear Balmer's refrain in 2023. It won't be "Developers! Developers! Developers!" because we've all gone to Linux or MacOS.

I already hate the future when this becomes so ubiquituous that you cannot avoid this anymore without shooting yourself in the foot.

Otherwise I agree with the problems you have found. Its bad at logic/rules. Good at repeating what it found on reddit.

Then I have a kubuntu laptop / convertible tablet for all my personal projects which as you say is great but has lots of weird issues like rarely surviving sleep, screen tearing, high touchpad latency, etc.

The big win is avoiding Apple.

If doesn't work the first time try a few times

Windows sounds like it hasn’t changed much after all.

But it's little things about the desktop experience that makes me roll my eyes; like drag an icon from your desktop to your start menu. Try to change the settings on your audio device. Try to uninstall Skype and remove all of the preinstalled stuff without removing something important. Try to use the start menu search to launch an installed application.

Terminal is a great application though, very needed on Windows and the usability of things like explorer and multi monitor window management is fantastic (though MacOS does workspaces better than Windows, everything else about MacOS's window management story is garbage)

You can run Linux in a virtual machine on any OS.

WSL1 was interesting because it was a Linux compatibility layer for Windows. WSL2 is a VM that automatically provisions additional hardware and adds some paravirtualization for Nvidia GPUs.

Before WSL I was just using VMWare or VirtualBox to run a Linux instance on Windows. VSCode has the ssh extension that allowed me to develop within the Linux VM while appearing to be native.

If you don't care, just use windows

If you want to be a creative type use a Mac

If you are a tinkerer just go straight to linux.

The thing is, even Linux has a great noob experience right now if you pick a starter distro (elementary, ubuntu, etc). And if you think "imnnot in any of these categories" then you are probably only going to be happy with the first two, so flip a coin or decide on budget.

But it is so comfortable, I know where everything is, The system is simple enough for me to understand every part of it, the init system is a simple shell script, it is right there, you can read and understand everything there is to know about openbsd boot in an hour. My window manager is fully described in one man page.

Windows angers me up every time I use it, linux is a little better, but still has too much magic going on, I love this openbsd desktop setup. plus I have an old thinkpad x131 that runs obsd perfectly, I will be very sad when it dies.

But currently MacOS and Linux look more interesting

I have pet peeves with all of them.

I really dislike Mac’s handling of files and window management.

Windows ads and forced updates are a major annoyance. So many times I wanted to boot up quickly and find some files before leaving for work, and I would be forced to wait for some random update to install.

Ubuntu is filled with minor annoyances, from software failing to auto-update to poor scrollwheel management.

Hate to say it, but out of all these systems, OSX is the least worst.

I see this a little bit different. I have ADHD and this relates to my operating system because I tend to go with the path of least resistance a little more so than my peers, or at least that's my anecdotal experience. Which means I haven't used Linux for a loooong time, exactly because it's janky.

Where Linux is improving, however, both Windows and MacOS aren't. MacOS is degrading at a much slower rate, and it's likely going to be a long time before a MacBook Air with MacOS stops being my main Laptop (things like Framekwork aren't available in Denmark). I am, however, seriously considering putting Linux on my gaming machine because of how bad Windows has become. This is sort of "easy" for me because I don't play a lot of games. For the past 10 years it's been Blood Bowl 2 and Path of Exile/Diablo 3, for the next ten years it'll likely be Blood Bowl 3 and Diablo 4 + whatever ARPG I come to love. So if those few games work on Linux, then I'll be perfectly set. I wouldn't have considered switching to Linux if it wasn't because Microsoft keeps making Windows worse. Who ever thought it was a good idea to put advertisements into your operating system? Like seriously? And why isn't it illegal, at least here in the EU?

Going back to Apple, the annoyance of having the closed ecosystem, is also getting to the point where it's becoming more of a burden than a feature. At least for me personally. This is largely because a lot of the people I communicate a lot with aren't in the ecosystem. It is also because a lot of the "digital home" stuff you can get in Denmark isn't going to be Apple. Even for the stuff that is available, like Apple TV, it's not like it's going to be a good option compared to a Chromecast because we simply don't get a lot of the features Americans do, and the Apple stuff is 10-100x the price of its alternatives. Then when your otherwise lovely ecosystem doesn't work when you're trying to have a group conversation via SMS with people not using iMessage, or a media setup with a Chromecast + some Linux stuff, it just becomes more trouble than it's worth, which means it no longer really makes sense to get the iPhone simply because it fits in with everything...

I could go on ranting, but the point is that so far, the closed tech giants have been mainly driving me toward open alternatives out of convenience, and I'm likely not the only one. I think it'll hurt Microsoft more than it'll hurt Apple, but then Microsoft likely makes it money in enterprise sales where they have no competition, at least not yet.

It's all thanks to Valve's work on the Steam Deck, but it works just as well for desktop Linux too. All you have to do is install Steam and then enable Proton for the Windows games you want to play. Some of my games even work better on Linux under Proton than they do on Windows. For your specific games, I see people saying Diablo works and Blood Bowl is marked as compatible.

If only Google would put the same effort into polishing Chrome on Linux :laugh:

Also Zoom, Slack...

Or better:

    1. You disable update (group policy or WuMgr tool or whateva)
    2. Install-Module PSWindowsUpdate then cherry pick with Install-WindowsUpdate 
    3. Reruns scripts you created in pwsh to disable junk.

That's totally fair, but I would definitely recommend that you try installing games on your Linux desktop as well. Proton is absolutely stunning in what they've managed to accomplish. I'm always a little surprised when a game _doesn't_ run well in Proton now.

If you've got particular games that you must play that don't run well on Linux, you'll probably want to keep the Windows partition available. But I've found the amount of time I "switch over" to Windows for a game has drastically decreased. I can scratch the itch 95% of the time without leaving Linux now.

But, yes, the Steam Deck is an awesome linux gaming computer. Even better than the hardware itself, I think the Steam Deck is a _huge_ driver of Valve to improve Proton, so in a lot of ways the Steam Deck is driving forward linux desktop gaming too.

Big call out is controller support. Sometimes I game on my TV, when I do I use an Xbox whatever-the-current-gen-is controller with the official usb dongle.

To get it working on Linux, I had to compile/install a third party kernel extension from GitHub via the command line - fine for me but I could not ask anyone else to do it.

It also doesn't always launch properly. Sometimes I have to shutdown, unplug the usb, boot with it unplugged, login, plug it in, then turn on my controller. I have gotten into the rhythm of this because I really want Linux to be the place for me but the reality is that it would be nice if Linux had built in support for this hardware.

Also, I run my TV at 1440p@120hz rather than its default 4k@60hz - the login screen in Fedora runs at 4k before switching to 1440p after logging in.

But something interesting with Proton is that it runs some games better than Windows does - particularly older titles that use older APIs. I was playing through GTA4 recently (never got through the whole game, underrated IMO) and it plays _way_ better on Linux than Windows - even when you use DXVK on Windows. Same with COD2!

My 8BitDo controllers connected just fine on Linux. Once I add them as trusted devices, they connect automatically as soon as I turn them on

For balance I daily drive Fedora too, and I cannot connect my new Sony bluetooth headphones to it. Oh well ...

To be honest though, so is Windows (in certain aspects).

I believe that someone who works with Linux every day, gets used to certain stuff being janky and no longer notices it - just like someon working with Windows every day gets used to the jank found there, and no longer notices it.

It's only when you are used to one system and switch over to the other, that you notice the jank - because it's a degradation from your normal experience.

I've been using Mint for years now (and a few years of Ubuntu before that, and a single year of OSX before that, and many years of Windows before that). Despite still having a Windows PC for gaming which I use regularly - I've grown accustomed to Linux enough, that trying to use Windows professionally causes me pain.

For example: I'm so used to package managers these days, that the practice of installing software by going to a website, downloading a downloader which downloads an installer that installs an updater... all the while having to agree to various long and complicated EULAs and T&Cs, and also having to take care that no unwanted "bundled" software comes along... these days this seems just utterly absurd to me - but back when I was a Windows user, this was just normal - and having to do `sudo apt install the-thing-I-want` instead, would have seemed completely arcane and stupid to me.

Ask my 80 y.o., non-tech-savvy dad, who after struggling with Windows for years, is really happy with his Laptop running on Linux now. The amount of calls I get from him needing help with his machine has gone down to a fraction of what it was before.

Chrome on Linux feels like an afterthought. Even when it's set to use the Wayland renderer, dragging tabs doesn't work, scroll feels off, the window decorations don't resemble Chrome on Win/MacOS, nor do they feel native to Linux (in my case GTK and Gnome).

I have actually been raising bugs with the Chrome team on Linux issues, they closed the scroll speed bug not long ago - only took a year after I opened the ticket :laugh:

Though I am biased, I have a real soft spot for Linux and love how productive I am on it so I will look favourably on it.

Other than that - The file manager on Gnome/Fedora is nowhere near as powerful as the Windows file explorer - but it's about on par with MacOS's finder so the bar is pretty low there.

Aside from the installer, Fedora is actually pretty smooth when the stars align on your hardware. I can imagine it being a not terrible experience for a non tech savvy person - but I feel like I have been in the game so long I am out of touch with what it feels like to not be tech savvy

But the package manger is just one single example. There's many such things... I'm just too lazy to work out a whole list.

But I'll give you one more example:

When I run into an error message on Linux, I often get some cryptic error message - and when I google that, most times I come across an explanation and solution to exactly my problem. The instructions often involve bash commands - not very beginner friendly - but when going through the explanations you actually learn something and understand your system better.

When I run into an error message on Windows it's most often of the "An Error occurred" variety, which are an absolute nightmare to google (mostly leading to "fix-your-pc" software scams). And when I finally manage to figure out the right question to google (which requires you to be tech-savvy) - I get step-by-step instructions with screenshots that just don't match my version of Windows... and since the instructions don't contain an explanation, I learn nothing. And the good instructions that actually work... those often again require the use of power shell!

But thanks for mentioning chocolatey!

> To be honest though, so is Windows (in certain aspects).

Stockholm syndrome. I think people are so inured to Windows now, that people don't see the problems.

I ran Gentoo exclusively on multiple boxes for years. I still use NixOS to host a few workloads for friends and family. But if I want to just __do stuff__, Windows is still the easiest way to just plug anything in, run any program, sync any thing, whatever...and now it has a bunch of trapdoors to more native Cygwin-type things...and I just don't want to reboot or keep two systems up to date anymore.

But yes, there's sketchy telemetry and phone home, and I'd _rather_ run something where the code's at least _theoretically_ been reviewed by someone who's not in the state's pocket. But I'm just tired, and it's good enough...

That said, there is nothing quiet like a new install of Windows XP/Windows 7. Nothing captures that feeling. It is merely an interface for running programs and managing data then it gets out of the way.

This captures exactly how I feel about it as well. Windows XP and 7 were fantastic in that they were graphical portals to run things. You didn't really notice them there for the most part.

Though I am speaking about vanilla installs and not preinstalled Windows from OEMs - they were loaded with garbage

Likewise though, Linux has been very stable for me in recent years

Could you elaborate?

But what functionality has been degraded? As far as I can tell, Windows still has the best multi-monitor support of the 3, and pretty good window management defaults out of the box. Driver support out of the box as well, and rock-solid stable DE.

macOS, on the other hand, has this weird ideas of window management and requires third party software for snapping your windows to the corners, and so on.

I see a lot of hand-waving in this thread which makes me doubt the credibility of many posters.

When working from home, I often switch between audio devices - this is something that was easier in previous versions of Windows, same with messing with the audio mixer to change the volume of different apps.

The start menu as a whole is _entirely_ useless now. You can't drag shortcuts onto it, you can drag shortcuts from it, who knows how to add items to it.

App data storage can get wacky with state stored who knows where. AppData, ProgramData, Local. They wanted to make everything UWP apps, which store stuff differently to legacy apps and then they changed that again - so now apps store stuff in like 4 places.

OneDrive rewrites locations like Desktop, Documents, etc so you have two Documents folders - one isn't used but it's there because... it's there. Some apps write to one of the folders and other apps write to the other.

Interacting with settings in any meaningful way. Network proxies are entirely broken on Windows 10 and 11 - with no diagnostic output or way to know they are active.

They announced the beautiful window decorations of Windows 11 (which I like) but there is no API to build apps using it - at least not that I can tell. There is the WinUI library, but the examples on the Windows developer website don't even compile and they don't seem to care about it at all.

--- That said ---

Windows absolutely _crushes_ window management and file admin. Nothing comes close for that.

Tiling is perfect. Windows explorer is rational and powerful.

Finder is not even 5% as good. However MacOS and Gnome do workspaces in multi monitor setups way better than Windows (separate workspaces per monitor).

IMO the _only_ thing MacOS has going for it is a bash terminal that is well integrated into the OS. WSL1 was a great start, WSL2 sucks. I would rather use Windows with WSL1 (or MSYS2) but there are no Windows laptops with 12 hour battery lives and a lucrative contract with my employer.

Audio devices are easy to switch than ever now. Click the wifi/sound button on taskbar, then click the icon on the right of the volume slider. It's not obvious but clicking it allows you to switch between all available audio devices.

AppData is where your preferences should be stored. ProgramData is for app store stuff. It's confusing and should hopefully clear up in a while. It's a step up from storing everything in <userhome>\Documents.

OneDrive only does it if you click Next without unchecking it - just turn it off. It's a bit of a dark pattern, I agree, but I don't have that "feature" enabled. There is only one "local" Documents folder (in <userhome>\Documents). But OneDrive wants to push the Cloud version of it (in <onedrive folder>\Documents). I think this where the confusion lies.

Settings is pretty well done, imo. Let's talk about recent macOS settings changes now.

No idea on network proxies...? I'll take your word for it, sucks.

> separate workspaces per monitor

I prefer how Windows does it. And GNOME only does it for the "primary" monitor, the other monitors do not get separate workspaces.

> the _only_ thing MacOS has going for it is a bash terminal that is well integrated into the OS.

It's zsh by default, and it's not "well-integrated". It's a leftover vestige from NeXT and they just didn't remove it - it literally has BSD underpinning its OS.

PowerShell with Windows Terminal is very powerful and I like it. It's completely integrated with Windows, and is a first-class citizen, just like on macOS and Linux. You get the added bonus of using WSL2 and having access to all of your Linux tools.

Learning PowerShell has been enlightening and does much more than bash/zsh.

Have you ever used Windows? Now *that'* janky.

Poor driver support, no way to update it, no package management, but plenty of ways to get it to show you adverts.

I feel like a reliable dependable modern desktop OS shouldn't need to connect to the Internet to pull down a new set of drivers every single time you plug a USB drive in.

Maybe 2024 will be the year of Windows on the desktop, but it's not ready yet.

If I didn't use software made for Windows, I'd be gone.

Linux has finally gotten decent enough for main use. It is incredibly nice not to be harassed by M$ ads + annoying features.