win10 was a great restart somehow but 11 transition was (and is) alienating many people
Now I'm just glad I only have to suffer windows at work.
So they were kind enough to give each one of us a Ubuntu 5.10 CD, one of those from back then when Canonical shipped free Ubuntu CDs to people around the world completely for free.
I can recall poking around that brown-y Gnome 2.x and feeling cozyness, like feeling at home. Everything felt transparent and humble and honest, from the desktop wallpaper, the icons and the typography to the tone the help pages were written. You could feel the ubuntu on it. It really felt like it was made for human beings.
The computer no longer felt like a dark box that only let you do things your license let you to do and if you dared to look at other direction, ever so slightly, things could go insanely wrong.
Granted, I didn't had internet at home back then (and wouldn't have it until late 2008 via a crappy 3G modem) so after nuking the Windows XP install and tried install it, also nuked the partition where I had all my uni docs and stuff and, defeated, had to go back to Windows via a pirate copy - until I had enough spare time to go learn what I did wrong and try again. Never went back ever since.
Things have changed a bit - Ubuntu is not what it what it used to be, I am not who I used to be (ended being a graphic designer) and not even the internet itself is not what it what it used to be - but I'm glad human creations like Linux still exist.
This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.
Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..
* Question with reasonable amount of detail.
* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"
* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"
[Thread closed.]
"Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"
* Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
Please run sfc /scannow closes topic
Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."
Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?
Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?
I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.
From the MS support doc:
> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."
MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.
My concern is that the Windows Credential itself doesn’t have a ton of value (opening windows apps) but the browser cookie jar (e..g Edge or Chrome) , which the Credential unlocks, has tremendous value — and threats.
The core problem is lack of granularity in permissions. If you allow the agent to do browser activities as your user, you can’t control which cookie / scope it will take action on.
You might say “buy me chips” and it instead logs into your Fidelity account and buys $100k worth of stock.
Let’s see how they figure out the authorization model.
I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.
Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.
In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.
Bazzite, being an atomic distro, is kind of hard to compare to. For basic use-cases like running just software available in Flathub, it is incredibly solid and easy to use. If I were choosing a Linux distro for a non-technical family member, I would go with an atomic Fedora distro and be completely confident they could get things done without breaking anything. However, if your needs are more advanced, you're going to need to be ready to relearn a lot (e.g. using containers for development), since atomic distros are a big paradigm shift from standard ones. This isn't a bad thing, just something to be ready for.
Started with Linux Mint then Debian/Ubuntu, tried some others too but ultimately just stuck with Ubuntu
Just you're kind of SOL if you want to play anything that isn't based on some flavour of Quake or Unreal engine.
Well, that's different now. See? Told you. Faster, smoother, less crashy.
Oh, you want Microsoft Office? Yeah well you're probably using Office 365 these days anyway. Everything's in a browser. No, it looks just the same. Edge? It's less crashy in Linux, weirdly.
AutoCAD? Nah. Still SOL.
I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.
I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.
I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.
The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.
And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?
At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."
Personally, I wish I'd swapped sooner.
I recently vibe coded a voice typing software (using Parakeet — your best bet is probably Handy though).
It works in my terminal. (I just changed my paste shortcut to Ctrl+V
I can now literally speak software into existence!
I made a thin wrapper around my llm() function I can pipe text into from Bash.
This allows me to make many other thin LLM wrappers, such as one that summarizes then contents of entire directories.
I have a thing called Jarvis inspired by a Twitter post, where I ask it to do anything in bash, and it just does that.
I wouldn't exactly say it's useful (I am unemployed) but I am kind of having my mind blown a little bit.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth.
You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.
Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.
Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.
Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.
A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.
LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.
If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.
Not once in initial setup or first week of use did it use dark patterns to try to trick or force me into something I don’t want to do.
When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.
Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.
I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
oh no
I suspect the combination of modern Linux + + Steam + LLM to troubleshoot and learn may see more conversions like myself
I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.
There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.
Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.
pinewurst•1h ago