Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!
So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.
Apple is disabling downgrading across all of iOS, and starting to do the same with MacOS. So you need to keep old hardware to run older MacOS versions, and it's only a matter of a few years before Tahoe is the latest OS you can run on your Mac.
I must have taken some shrooms before I downgraded from Tahoe to Sequoia a few hours ago then.
Uhh, I guess.
AFAIK iOS has been very locked down wrt rolling back upgrades since forever and isn't super relevant to this thread. Happy to be corrected.
The M5 Pro/Max variants aren't; but an M5 Mac is a thing you could have bought for a good while now.
What you did is a downgrade in what's called the supported OS.
However, if you decide to downgrade to Catalina on an M1 Mac, it's not possible — Big Sur is the earliest version that runs on Apple Silicon.
Anyway, you cannot downgrade to a macOS version older than what your Mac originally came with. So if you buy a Mac now, Tahoe will be the minimum option.
Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.
I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.
I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.
Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-windows-mc...
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It's worth putting up with MacOS for the hardware.
Who or what is the "Linux" entity in this context?
Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.
And then:
- Butterfly keyboard
- Touchbar
- M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Not insignificant at all.
It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.
Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.
jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.
If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.
Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.
Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.
Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.
That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.
You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.
You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.
More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.
"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."
Fair point though :P
Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
I had a friend who runs Windows host (because of gaming) and Linux as a guest OS for development for the same reasons :)
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
Which, similarly has more than convinced me to fight for PostgreSQL over MS-SQL everywhere possible.
Hu... use Dolphin?
Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486
Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.
This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.
2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares
Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.
Today it's utter garbage.
* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.
* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.
* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.
LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.
I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.
- You're back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.
- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.
I'd blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn't last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor 'work' but really aren't efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn't release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.
I'd take balkanization over the "we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works".
> It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't.
Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren't happening any time soon, sadly.
The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).
The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it's more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won't hurt though, and it hasn't changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.
The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn't one.
I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.
Windows is the only one that does this properly.
Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]
Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt handles this OK; GNOME/GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.
Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE/Qt are a bit better, but I'm quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.
And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.
On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider 'Retina', then the 'Retina' resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.
On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of 'scaling factor' whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi/trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/hidpi/settin...
How can you say this when applications render either minuscule or gigantic, either way with contents totally out of proportion, seemingly at random?
I don’t have to pull out a magnifying glass to notice those issues.
This is not our [0] experience. macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis. You can split a window across two monitors at two different DPIs, and it will display perfectly. This does not happen on Windows, or we have not found the right way to make it work thus far.
[0] ardour.org
This sounds like you're using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn't always been the case (it used to be terrible).
I'm on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven't had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I'm not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I'll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2/3 covering part of the browser. I'm usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I'd scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you're right it's worse.
For webcams, I don't use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I've been using lately have been working very well... they're the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo/mono mode for the headset mic doesn't always work right in Linux.
On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it's finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac's interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.
Not blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn't tolerate blurry, I'd prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.
I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.
At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.
I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.
Made my day! :-D
Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.
Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.
I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.
I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(
RIP to your install CD!
For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.
Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.
I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.
It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.
It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.
I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.
> I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...
I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I'd recommend you to try Linux Mint.
I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now
in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
if anything, they said the kids were good with technology
Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the user base and openness of the forums; when something breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real fix.
I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production server for change management reasons alone, but for a home desktop and my home server, it's actually the distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux crap" to keep it going.
Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.
> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don’t many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/
That’s not too dissimilar from what you’d get running stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in potentially undesired ways, windows users just don’t blame the OS for that
ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#...?
If you have a modified config file, it puts the new default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which seems strictly better to just deleting the new default one.
I dunno. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.
Any issues are usually on the front page of archlinux.org what the issue is, and how to fix it.
My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
This seems to be a relatively consistent discussion surrounding AUR helper development; for example, adding UX to incentivise users to read PKGBUILDs, lest the AUR becomes an attractive vector for skids.
No one wants the AUR to become NPM, and the thing that will incentivise that is uneducated users. Having the small barrier of not having helpers in the main repos is an effective way of accomplishing that.
So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
Can you elaborate on this?
For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy.
Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked.
Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows.
All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have.
Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game.
But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
I used Linux Mint for 2 full months, 99% of my personal computing. Really like it. BUT... not all games my gaming group plays work on it, and social gaming is very important to me.
That doesn't mean I'm sour on Linux PC gaming. I think it's great, and will work for a lot of people, and it's so close for me. And I might switch, since my gaming tastes are shifting.
I have an Nvidia card and use mostly Ubuntu (mate), also for gaming. It's even a problem now, because I would benefit from a hard divide between the gaming and working\studying system (I have a gaming user in backlog). On Linux it's mostly KSP, Factorio, but sometimes DeepRockGalactic, Valheim, Euro Truck Sim or Warhammer: Total War1\2\3. These games work flawlessly or with <10%fps hit.
There are games that kind of work - Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey, Cyberpunk, Hunt: Showdown. But you lose comfort and I'd rather just play them on Windows, than suffer decreased functionality on Linux. I know that some of it (definitely Cyberpunk) is only because of NVIDIA.
When buying games I usually don't buy Windows only games unless there is a very good reason. And I quit League of Legends and WRC rally because of anti cheat scam. I feel scammed after putting lot of money in a game and suddenly losing the ability to play it.
Comeon. If a customer bought a game that says it runs on linux, they should be able to play it on linux well, not just launch it and quit within 5 mins.
I get you have the ideology up in your head, but don't lie and embellish linux to this degree. The attitude just turns people off.
StarCraft 2 worked, oddly enough, run from Steam as an external program. (Lots of search results tried to get me to use Lutris/bottles, but I couldn't get it to work consistently under Lutris.)
Was also able to get WoW, Diablo 4, WC3 and SC1 running well this way, since they're all in a single Wine Battle.net install.
I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers
People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.
I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?
Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of the Linux doesn’t boot with it or you have to go though hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia, gentle-yall).
I’d all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0 euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of unpaid overtime to get comfortable
But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at the right entity if we're going to get them to change. Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found that they can bully people so much it gives them Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete and come out of others ???? who would guess
That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.
VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.
I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.
And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
It's so weird to me that people just allow this, or even defend it. Game companies should be legally obligated to scale human moderation and curation of multiplayer games, and if you're paying for service that gets moderated and curated, there should be some legal expectation of process - a requirement that the service provider lay out a specific "due process" framework, even if it ends up mediated, that gives a customer legal recourse. Instead, they try to automate everything, which has notoriously indiscriminate collateral damage with no recourse.
If you pour significant chunk of your private time and money into a game, you should be entitled to not arbitrarily lose an account or gameplay progress because some poorly configured naive Bayes classifier decided you did something wrong, without corresponding evidence or recourse to undo bad bans.
For some reason companies are entitled to infinitely expand their reach without concurrently expanding their responsibilities in providing service to individuals. Must be nice.
11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)
9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)
11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)
So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works
If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?
It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for benign reasons.
To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays, that if you and your friend group can skip some of those "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer games to play.
Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).
When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.
But I'm still gaming on Linux!
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.
They largely have now, archinstall.
It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.
The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.
Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
Exactly, Arch allows you to do many bleeding edge things. An installer would never keep up are give you that freedom.
> I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going.
That's why many installers allow you to drop a shell when it's time to partition.
> I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC
To be honest that would largely be helped if archiso would start using NetworkManager
Yep, removed in 2012 as the last maintainer quit. Maintaining an installer seems like one of the least fun hobbies.
* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption
* The limine bootloader
* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
* sway with my custom ruby based bar
* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0
If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
PS I keep Snap disabled.
(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?
Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.
Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
This has never been my experience. Is that new in Tahoe?
It could be a deliberate measure to set the bar high and filter out people who don’t want to troubleshoot themselves.
That minimalism is somewhat the point of the OS.
I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice
[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.
Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
[0] - https://massgrave.dev/
On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
Installing via the archinstall command was pretty easy. Not quite as easy as a Fedora or Ubuntu install, but for someone familiar with Linux, it's negligible.
Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.
The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).
PS I keep Snap disabled.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.
But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
Since they stopped full updates for it, it's actually a lottt less annoying. 90% of the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11.
I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.
We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became a thing back in 2014.
The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.
Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.
But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.
Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.
I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
"I'll switch when Linux supports X."
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Okay, but how about my X?"
Linux still doesn't supports X.
"Well, X is still missing..."
Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.
Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.
So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows
my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows
I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).
I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.
Dev in linux is so much nicer for me than dev in Windows.
This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.
Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...
Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck
It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.
I have used a Mac at work on/off since the Snow Leopard days and I think Snow Leopard made the most sense from a UI point of view, without wedging in iCloud file nonsense.
I have a Windows 10 machine at home for gaming / development but my daily driver at home is a Linux M910 Lenovo (small enough and powerful enough for C++ dev), along with a Windows 11 mini Lenovo machine for GeForce Now usage on a TV in the house, but do I hate using Windows 11.
MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.
Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams
I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.
I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.
"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."
Only to see this article today. lol
I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.
This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.
Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.
I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.
Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.
As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments
Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)
2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.
Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.
I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
The soft modular synth is called The Grid, fyi. Little square button on the lower left corner of any instrument lets you see it in Grid form.
Oh, man, and just wait until you find out that you can modulate literally every control in the UI...
Have fun :)
(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,
(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,
(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?
It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.
(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.
Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.
I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.
I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.
I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.
The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.
In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.
I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...
I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.
Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.
I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.
Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.
It's like a 10 second fix and basically everything is gone.
Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty plainly how to turn off.
I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up about this. You read some internet headline and start screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take 2 seconds to literally turn off.
But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.
And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well, at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.
Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn off. What, you want to use a BMW? Be a BMW-user? A sheep? All your tools already integrate with our car anyway. There's no real choice, is there - unless you want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.
Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my software.
It's not a feature that should EVER exist at an OS level... I didn't even mind the adjacent product ads or the Recommended section you mention that much... but it's emphatically not what I'm fucking talking about.
The fact that this was even something that was implemented and tested means that I'm not someone who will buy or choose Microsoft Windows at all from here forward. I have over 3 decades of development experience on/for/with software that runs on Windows.
An even then... It doesn't matter if I can shut it off, it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
You're right that there are simple fixes but the point is that Microsoft is no longer on your side. You're now stuck defensivly scrambling for value in a product where you are no longer the customer.
The problem isn't that ads can be disabled. The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place. Full stop. There's no universe where that's acceptable product design, and the fact that you can disable them (for now, at least) doesn't make it less offensive.
I don't understand why you're going to bat for a trillion-dollar corporation here. Your settings work now. Great. They won't after the next feature update, this is a well-documented pattern. Windows updates routinely re-enable telemetry, Bing integration, and promotional content that users explicitly disabled. You're not configuring your OS, you're fighting it.
The TPM2 requirement is pure planned obsolescence. Millions of perfectly good machines binned because Microsoft decided hardware from 2016 is suddenly "insecure"... whilst the actual benefit is DRM enforcement and remote attestation.
It's a corporate compliance tool, not a security feature.
The Insiders build being referenced had actual web advertisements in search results. That's where this is headed. If you're comfortable defending that trajectory, carry on flipping those settings.
You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.
Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean. Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is just that ...
But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.
And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10. There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time W10 was well polished and less buggy).
The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more, then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows. That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the os/desktop switch.
I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa versa, and it will simply work with the correct full performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.
For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back. Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases. What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?
Often a lot of programs that are less developed or stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers involved lol
I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again. Resulting in this lag ...
That is my yearly Linux rant hahaha. And yes, i know, W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then get a better W12 again.
This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner experiences (often with the same manufacturer).
Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.
And even if it were free, which it isn't, that still wouldn't justify ads. Android is free. Linux is free. Neither ships with gambling app promotions in the system UI.
Microsoft made $20 billion in Windows revenue last year. They're not a scrappy startup looking for alternative monetisation. The ads exist because they can get away with it, not because they need to.
This is not highlighted nearly enough. It's very bad.
The team will look for excuses to build new and exciting stuff and new opportunities to increase revenue. Even if the product is pretty much "done".
There are plenty of easily identifiable issues with performance in windows 11. There should be people in the windows team dedicated to eliminating "jank". MS product owners, on the other hand, are much more interested in getting copilot integrations into every menu. That's an "easy" task which looks good on a scorecard when you complete it.
Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.
The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
Now? CachyOS. Yikes.
Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.
Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.
I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.
My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.
I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).
I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.
The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.
And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.
- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station
Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.
Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.
I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.
If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.
If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.
Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?
It’s almost as if these programs are people who ought to show that they’re doing something even though they’re just heating the room and running the fan.
At work we use clownstrike for our driving-around-with-the-handbrake-on needs, which I have installed on both Linux and Windows, and the former flies while the latter lags all the time (I dual boot, so it's the same exact hardware). Doing something which is fully equivalent, like installing an IntelliJ update takes around a minute on Linux and many more on Windows.
The fan also comes on much more often on Windows than Linux, even though most of my job is done on remote servers via SSH. Under Linux I only hear the fan when I compile something. This morning I booted windows and the fan was running constantly while I was just catching up with a few mails in outlook.
(And, you can have a tabbed file browser on Win7. I still have a Win7 box at home that works perfectly well and that does have tabs in file explorer. I think it was an addon I installed a while ago; don't remember exactly, but it works perfectly.)
By the way, I just opened a directory that I hadn't accessed in months. It contains 10945 log files, and Windows Explorer displayed them instantly.
Started a new job around a year and a half ago. Absolute beast of a laptop, 64GB RAM (Now upgraded to 96GB), and an insane CPU and GPU (necessary for my work - even with this setup, compile times are kind of slow for compiling our product). I've been a Linux user for a bit, started around 2013/2014 with Ubuntu before ditching Windows completely around 2016 and installing Arch (Very occasionally using a VM or spare laptop for Windows if I really needed something, such as software I needed for work/school that only ran on Windows).
Using Windows seriously again was terrible. I had forgotten how bad it was (or perhaps it has gotten worse since I last used it). Very slow compared to Linux, many weird bugs (like you, several of which had to do with the file explorer too), blue screens! (not a problem with my setup, my coworkers have issues too) And it's just not as nice to use.
I initially tried to get a nicer environment, using Power Toys for necessary QOL improvements or GlazeWM to emulate a tiling window environment, setting up Wezterm for a multiplexing terminal with oh-my-posh (Not sure why Windows Terminal is so hyped, it's an extremely basic terminal emulator) and debloating as much as I can (as much as IT allowed me to anyway). But with every convenience program I added, it just made Windows even slower. Perhaps you can argue it's because of my "bloat", but why is such basic functionality able to run flawlessly on a weaker device with linux, compared to a much stronger device on Windows? I can think of only one reason.
I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.
Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.
I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.
That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.
Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.
Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.
But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.
For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.
That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.
I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.
Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update
MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.
Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?
Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.
I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.
So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.
Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.
But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.
There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.
Let's be real. It's because new systems support DRM and Microsoft has been captured by the media company lobby.
.\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry DisableI was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?
But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.
-- Napoleon.
Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.
I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.
The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
Windows servers are still pretty good imho.
ColinWright•2h ago
"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.
That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
bobsterlobster•2h ago
xxs•2h ago
iso1631•2h ago
First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
1123581321•2h ago
Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)
Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.
xxs•2h ago
32MB ram <-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.
32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).
Kye•1h ago
xxs•1h ago
As for a new computer and price - it was like $1000 to get AMD 486DX2-80 with 4MB RAM in '95...
pixl97•1h ago
1123581321•1h ago
A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk to a luxurious 400MB.
Kye•1h ago
netule•46m ago
cogman10•8m ago
The first first computer I had was an old IBM PC.
crumpled•18m ago
rglullis•2h ago
heywire•2h ago
justin66•2h ago
SanjayMehta•2h ago
WillAdams•2h ago
godzillabrennus•2h ago
forinti•1h ago
Then a 286 with 1MB.
Then a 386 with 4MB, then a 486DX with 8MB, then a P166 with 64MB (that was awesome), then a P4 with 1GB (hot and the first to burn the Motherboard), then an i3 with 4GB, gradually upgraded to 16GB.
And so on and so forth...
zabzonk•1h ago
consp•1h ago
First own "PC": Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation from a family member.
tracker1•13m ago
First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
aidenn0•1h ago
ikidd•1h ago