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The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver.

Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.

It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.

Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.

100% agree.

I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.

I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).

Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.

All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.

Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.

Regards " stability issues with Explorer", I doubt it is Explorer itself.

2 thoughts:

1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.

Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.

Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.

2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.

The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...

[0]:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...

I switched to Ubuntu on my main machine this year and even as a heavy 365 user it's better. Battery life is massively improved. I even still run the odd game on cs2. 11 feels like toy town in comparison.

How do you run 365?

PWA for Outlook and Teams, just straight web access for everything else. You can also access onedrive etc via the nautilus file manager as a onedrive:// url which is easier for some things.

Not OP but 365 has web apps for every software offered. The only disadvantage is that the web apps require an internet connection and the native windows apps don't.

Speak for yourself, I tried again to switch to Linux last year with standard Ubuntu and had multiple issues, the machine wouldn’t wake from sleep, would lock up with a grey graphics glitched login screen when locked, I tried to upgrade the OS and it broke all my graphics drivers, after I spent another few hours trying to fix it (and seeing a lot of very unfriendly and unwelcoming “help” from the Linux community), and running into other issues I didn’t list here, I gave up and switched back.

I’ve been a multi-os user for years, tried Linux on and off, but for now I have a windows machine I just use for gaming and a mac that I use for development and everything else. The truth if I struggled as much as I did and I’m a software developer with years of experience with this stuff, the dream of the general public using Linux is doomed. Every few years I hope Linux has gotten its act together so that it can actually grow again, but it’s still behind the times.

But my experiences aside, the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS. It might be the breaking point for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s the breaking point for many. If the Linux community continues to stay blind about this and about the very real problems people experience that they insist aren’t problems, then they’ll continue to have a tiny market share, that’s all there is to it.

Ok and I had the opposite issue of installing windows and not being able to get a lot of drivers work. Also getting issues with Bluetooth all the time that had me install and uninstall drivers. With linux I had no issues.

Nvidia graphics?

How much care did you take in getting a machine for running Linux? Did you get one specifically with that in mind? Or did you slap it on the machine you already had?

Endless raving about how painless and troubleshoot-free Linux is and then you try installing it on your very standard-built PC and face major glaring issues and then get told you're the idiot for not junking your perfectly good GPU from the most popular GPU maker and most valuable company on the planet.

I'm sure it's Nvidia's fault for whatever reason but Linux proselytizers need to stop being so dishonest about how pain-free switching is.

It is painless on hardware that's compatible. Nvidia issues are well known too.

It's like you running Windows 7 on a PC designed with Windows 11 in mind and expecting a good time. If you wanted a good Windows 7 experience you'd want a PC with parts that are actually compatible and have good drivers. Linux is the same.

So not painless then on perfectly normal PC builds. Got it.

It works fine on plenty of normal PC builds, just not EVERY PC build.

I’m aware

If you have all kinds of issues when installing Linux, “oh Linux bad”, “Linux not ready” etc. If you have the same with windows, it is normal, sometimes happens with certain hardware, it is manufacturer’s fault etc.

Agreed. My bog standard modern AMD card just flashes the screen in Linux. Why? Who knows? No way to fix either.

I used my perfectly normal PC that has absolutely bog standard components that any decent OS should run on. I’m not about to throw my whole computer out just to switch.

So you made zero effort got it. Try running PC-DOS on there instead. Should work fine with a "perfectly normal PC", everything should just "work".

This is the exact attitude that keeps people away from Linux. The moment someone points out practical problems with Linux, it's users get all defensive and elitist about it. Sigh, if at least this changed more people would use Linux.

lol, not throwing out my whole PC is “zero effort” - fuck off

You don't have to throw out your whole PC. Could you have waited for the next time you upgraded and thought about it then? Maybe if it's a desktop swapped out the GPU and kept the rest of the components?

It wasn't even clear from your original post that you even kept the same PC FFS. Nor did you clarify what "bog standard" PC components you used. Just expected perfection.

I expected the OS to function on standard hardware, that’s not perfection.

You’re acting in serious bad faith. Goodbye.

Getting a 5090 and 5k2k monitor is what forced me back off of Linux last time I switched. I'm used to crappy "cutting edge" hardware support in Linux and routinely bounce back and forth between Windows and Linux as the different annoyances build up. Yes, I know Linux has issues with NVidia. But AMD doesn't make a comparable card period.

Which distros have you tried? The new nVidia open drivers work so much more better in Linux these days than the fully proprietary ones (still not as good as AMD, but it's pretty decent).

Also there are distros which handle cutting edge hardware much better than others (like Fedora/based or Arch/based), and some are infamous for always lagging behind (Ubuntu/Debian based). Choosing the right distro can make a huge difference to your Linux experience.

This was literally about three months ago on NixOS. The upgrade also toasted the boot from USB linux distros that have smaller and older kernels to reduce file size.

NixOS is pretty niche and getting nVidia to work properly on it is a PITA. I would recommend using CachyOS instead (since you sound like an advanced user), it has excellent nVidia support - you don't need to do anything special to get it going.

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“You used the wrong distro” is literally the GO TO answer and to be honest I’m sick of hearing it. You get it from the Linux community no matter how major or popular a distro you use.

Just because something is "major" or "popular" doesn't mean that it's any good. I mean, just look at Windows.

My point stands so strongly it is baffled at how you missed it by so much.

... which is?

That the Linux community is elitist and will treat you like the issues you have are always your fault no matter what. If I used a niche distro, people would tell me I should’ve gone with a more mainstream one. You literally can’t win.

Also if the most major distros are still bad also, then why the heck would anyone switch? lol.

Yes there are some elitist users but what I've stated has nothing to do with elitism, it's just the way things are. Do your research and you can see for yourself how bad Ubuntu is. And you do have a point about niche distros as well.

Unfortunately you can't just dive into Linux blindly by choosing a random distro to run on random hardware, you'll likely not have a good time. You need to do your research and talk to a veteran user first for advice.

I have used Linux on and off for 20 years my friend. I am the veteran user. I’m just capable of seeing it from a newcomers eyes.

Yes and do you really expect a non-tech-savvy newbie to suddenly download and switch to Linux? That's never gonna happen, unless they're the really curious and determined type, the kind who loves to tinker/break/fix.

Therefore it falls upon veterans like us to guide the newbies so they have a smooth transaction and don't fall down the wrong path.

I’m confused, because you’re acting like you disagree with me but the things you’re saying are basically my entire set of points. Linux is unapproachable for newbies, Linux has an elitism problem in the community and therefore I think veterans should guide newbies to have a smooth transition… And also we should make Linux more approachable and reliable.

Telling people “you downloaded the wrong distro” when they download a popular one isn’t helpful, as many others with give contradictory advice - in fact Ubuntu is very often stated as a newbie friendly distro, relatively speaking. Also saying it’s outright “bad” or “terrible” is also hyperbole that they don’t have the context to parse. It’s just super unhelpful and unapproachable as a response to someone to start with “the distro you chose despite being a popular one is wrong because I said so”.

Your words and your actions are at odds with one another.

I re-read my comment chain and I don't see where I've acted in a conflicting way? I started by asking tstrimple which distros they've tried, and stated that some distros are better suited for handling cutting edge hardware, and finally concluded by saying that choosing the right distro makes a huge difference. I don't see what I did wrong here.

But then you suddenly started to pick a fight with me out of the blue, when I was merely trying to point OP in the right direction. So perhaps you're the one who needs to explain why you commented the way you did.

Hmm, I’m sorry, I seem to have confused you with another comment that was insisting Ubuntu was a terrible distro at me. My bad, I’ll delete my comment.

EDIT: I forgot you can’t delete comments past a certain time. I’ll just have to offer my apology.

Linux is generally a rock solid delight on any AMD desktop, but insists on being at least an occasional pain in the ass on basically every laptop in the world and anything with Nvidia.

Yep I only buy laptops/computers that are known to be compatible with linux or outright allow it as an option. Drivers are the biggest issue by far, especially video and power suspend modes. Life gets a bit easier when you get windows off the brain

My comment was about switching. I’m not going to throw out my whole perfectly good PC in order to switch, nor should I be expected to.

That's cool, just don't expect linux to handle infinite hardware, it will never happen. Windows doesn't either, your hardware was likely designed to handle windows from the beginning. We as a community welcome people but we aren't obligated to make their computers compatible because that's an impossible goal

Which is fine. But when you're next in the market, maybe look for a machine that supports both OSes well so you can have another look.

I agree that some people responding are assholes, though not the person you replied to here.

Sure, that’s fair, maybe in 5-10 years when a full rebuild is necessary I’ll consider it again, the cycle continues.

Perhaps, but I also have been told that nvidia should work now and works for many people yet I keep running into issues. Also, many of my issues were unrelated to the graphics card.

Full Intel or full AMD laptops are usually fine in my experience. It's when you have both an integrated and a discrete GPU, especially Nvidia, that things start to fall apart.

My AMD card does not work with any Linux Distro. Just flashes constantly.

"the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS."

First, I am writing this reply in Pale Moon browser running on Arch (KDE Plasma), so I'm a pretty diehard Linux user and have been so for years. That said, I still use Windows as I'll explain.

You are absolutely correct, switching to Linux from Windows is still very hard for many people—likely the majority—for a multitude of reasons, there being too many to give full justice to here. Several stand out however, such as having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new operating system and adapting to new apps that do not have the same feature set as their Windows counterparts, for those wishing to switch compatibility issues are still a significant headache.

Nevertheless, users within corporate environments usually find switching to Linux easier by virtue of having a more controlled set of applications as well as having access to training and helpdesk facilities. For example, switching from MSO/Outlook to say LibreOffice/Thunderbird ought not be too arduous, also their Linux environment is managed by their IT departments. On the other hand, home users and small businesses aren't afforded such 'luxuries' and have to manage everything for themselves. Unless one is technical or reasonably computer-literate converting can be not only challenging but also very time-consuming.

Clearly, Microsoft is aware of the resistance to change factor and is leveraging the fact to its full advantage. When it comes to switching from Windows to Linux I think many Linux users underestimate how important these differences are to Windows users. As mentioned, I still use Windows on a number of systems and I even balk at the changes between the way different Windows versions work at the GUI level let alone the differences between it and Linux (it's why on Windows I restored Quick Launch when MS removed it and why I use that wonderful program Classic Shell by Ivo Beltchev to make the GUIs of my different Win versions all look like XP). Suffice to say, I prefer the old Windows Task Bar to KDE Plasma's Panel; for me, it's ergonomically more functional (even after having made many tweaks to the former).

The same goes for certain important (well-loved) Windows applications, whilst some key programs such as LibreOffice are native to both Windows and Linux, others remain Windows-only apps sans native Linux equivalents but which are arguably substantially better any Linux program with the same or similar functions. No doubt, many Linux-only users will likely differ from that view but that's irrelevant, here it's the perception of Windows users that actually counts—if they cannot run their favourite programs on Linux (or close equivalents) then they will stubbornly resist changing operating systems. I say that from experience, I used to head an IT department and users can make management's life very difficult when forced to make changes against their will. Also, I'm reminded of someone at Microsoft whose name temporarily escapes me saying that the Win32 API was one of the company's most valuable assets. Very true indeed!

Putting a Windows hat on here with some examples, from my experience there is no equivalent or near equivalent native Linux program that is as good or as ergonomically functional as say the Windows file search program Everything, same goes for the excellent image viewer IrfanView, and to a lesser extent same for XnView (if necessary I can justify those claims). Similarly, when it comes to file managers nothing else comes close to Directory Opus in either Windows or Linux, if it were available for Linux I'd buy it immediately.

OK, Linux-only users will immediately retort "just use Wine and your problems will be solved". Right, Wine is great for many 'self-contained' programs but Wine's a pain and essentially incompatible with programs that make certain demands of the operating system outside of those normally handled (or not well implemented) by Wine. For instance, IrfanView allows the viewed image to be edited by an external image editor which here would likely be the native Linux version of GIMP. Attempting to get that to work from within IrfanView whilst running under Wine/Linux is a major headache, just check the many online requests from frustrated users who have been looking for a solution. Similarly, Everything's search relies on accessing NTFS's MFT (thus even on Windows it won't work in FAT32, simply forget any notion of using it with, say, Btrfs).

So we are back to the fundamental problem of incompatibility between Windows and Linux hence the many requests we've seen over the years to make Linux more compatible with Windows. Linux developers rightly say they're happy with their ecosystem and that any further moves in that direction would not only complicate matters but also require much additional work not to mention they'd likely make Linux less secure. That's also pretty much my position.

With these factors in mind it's clear Microsoft has no qualms about implementing changes to Windows that benefit itself even if they are to the considerable disadvantage of users (that's the inevitable outcome with monopolies). Thus, fallout from this latest change will be minimal, yes MS will lose a small percentage of users like those here on HN who are both outraged and technical enough to make the change, but as you say with no other practical option available the vast majority will simply fall into line with Microsoft's demands. In the wash-up, Microsoft will have done the sums and in the end it'll be further ahead.

Given the never-ending issues many users have with Microsoft's administration of Windows and the way it treats its users with abusive contempt, something has perplexed me for years which is why there has been so little support for the FOSS Windows lookalike, ReactOS, it's been in gestation for so long—over quarter-century—that I call it the "Going Nowhere Project". It's damned annoying ReactOS is still not available, if I could get a reasonably stable version I'd use it immediately for all that legacy Windows stuff that refuses to die.

It's not as if ReactOS doesn't have potential, it does and I've actually had various alpha versions running, although they weren't very stable. When I've queried the reasons for its snaillike development more often than not online commentators say it's because MS would sue it if it actually worked as intended. Possibly, but I reckon there's more to it than that which I'll not address here.

Nevertheless, with this latest edict from Microsoft it's clear to me that more than ever we urgently need an operating system that's capable of running the Win API without any Microsoft involvement. As I've shown, Linux can help many but not all Windows users escape Microsoft's clutches, that means we still need a more general/practical solution for ordinary users. Unfortunately, the only suitable project seemingly on the horizon is ReactOS, but it will never become a viable option unless it's put on a much more solid foundation and made into a well-supported mainstream FOSS project.

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I have been a software developer "for many years" and I have been using Linux full-time since 2007.

I rarely have issues with Linux, and some of those systems also had nVidia Graphics cards.

One time I had an issue was my wireless network, which the linux kernel did not support for that particular distro. That wasn't the end of the world -- I was using ethernet for it, anyway.

- My Wife has Linux

- My Daughter (now) has Linux -- after soo much annoyance with Windows 11 originally.

While more people are (slowly) going to Linux, we still have Convenience dominating over ethics/pride/politics/freedom/etc.

The Convenience Microsoft has right now is familarity. The Non-PC technies understand enough about the Start button, or Drive C: etc. However... and most importantly... is this reason:

New PCs (desktop or laptop) comes with Windows installed. Most of the Non-PC techs do not know any better, and will just follow like sheep each instructions to completing their Windows installation. Yes, even if it is "Oh, you need to create a Microsoft account with us"

The typical shops people buy their new desktop or laptops will encourage Windows as it is their job as well pushing for anti-virus and Office pack add-ons. They won't want you to say "don't worry, I am going to install Linux"

Imagine if new desktops and laptops provide a choice in main computer shops? I do wonder how many people will choose Linux as it does not cost extra? It does make you wonder. Sure, I am not expecting this to a 50/50 split - but I am sure Microsoft would notice a decline in various areas.

Anyway - I remember buying a laptop in a shop.. a laptop for my Wife.

Staff - "Would you like XYZ software for extra protection.. etc"

Me - "No thank you. I wont be using Windows"

Staff - [pause] "What are you using, sir?"

Me - "Linux"

Staff - "You wont be able to install these software and you will not have the security Windows can offer"

Me - "I know what I am doing, thank you"

Staff - [Goes to get laptop, return 10 mins later] "I just spoke with my manager and we can offer you a discount for out XYZ security software and include Microsoft Office"

Me - "This has not interest to me as I will be running Linux"

Staff - "You wont need to install Linux. You can keep Windows, sir"

Me - "Eh.. No thank you"

Staff walks to the counter with this look on his face. Yes.. yes.. he knows better, right?

Unfortunately you tried the worst possible distro out of them all - Ubuntu is infamous for being the Windows of the Linux world (for all the wrong reasons), and Canonical is getting worse every year. Still nowhere as bad as Microsoft, but they're getting there.

I would highly recommend using a sane newbie-friendly distro which bundles all relevant drivers, like Aurora[1]- they even have a developer edition which may be of interest to you. If you're a gamer though, Bazzite[2] may be a better option - comes with drivers for all popular game controllers and hardware and includes Steam and other stuff so you can get gaming in no time at all.

My 70yr old mum uses Aurora and she has zero issues. She surfs the web, edits documents, prints and scans, backs up and organised photos etc. Pretty much all your basic PC user stuff. If my mum can use Linux, so can anyone else.

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

[2] https://bazzite.gg/

Aurora is based on Ubuntu, so the user would probably face the same issue, plus it looks it is discontinued.

Not sure what you're on about? Aurora is based on Fedora and it's still very much active, last release update was just 3 days ago.

“Ubuntu” is the largest and most popular distro. Saying it’s the worst one I could use is ridiculous. If your community’s biggest distro is “the worst one you can use” then that is actually a bigger problem than everything else.

Replace “Ubuntu” in your comment with “Windows” and “distro” with “operating system”. (Maybe also “your community” with “the world”.)

You’re not making sense.

lol, “you used the wrong distro” was number 3 on my Linux response bingo card, right after “you did it wrong” and “your hardware is wrong”.

I can't really blame anybody for using Ubuntu, and many ways of "doing it wrong" should even be possible in the first place. But there definitely is badly & unsupported hardware you can really blame Linux for. That's on hardware manufacturers.

I agree with this to some degree. Still, means most people won’t switch

Weird, I have “the same leg, and it doesn’t hurt”.

I used Windows since always and switched to Linux two months ago. On one hand I still run into lots of Linuxisms on daily basis and I cannot recommend the system to a non-IT personn - bluetooth crashes, GPU driver crashes, applications crash, devices crash, all that stuff that's always been there. At the same time I have to say that the switch was easier than expected, and last weekend I removed Windows from my drive. I thought I'd keep dual-booting for a while, but no. Wine and Proton are marvelous pieces of software, pure magic. Moreover, I cannot recommend Linux to my parents until it gets MS Office. My parents specifically need MS Office.

I personally migrated to seniors (70+) to Linux. They both enjoyed it for years. One even found and installed a new driver for their printer when he switched. Plus most ChromeOS users can easily migrate to Linux. For Office I recommend ONLYOFFICE as that looks and behaves mostly the same as Microsoft Office. I haven't experience any issues with drivers but then again I never use NVIDEA, I used AMD and currently an Intel ARC.

When I put my computer to sleep and then wake it up, sometimes there's no video output until I switch to a different terminal and then back to GUI. How on Earth is a non-IT person supposed to figure this out.

Also, my parents bring home documents from work, and they often get documents from different institutions, which means they already hit edge cases of compatibility issues between different office suites, and telling them "this one sometimes reads docx correctly" is hard sell.

Is office 365 an option? What are the issues there? I thought web based office would solve this problem?

The issue is that it costs money while pirated offline installation only costs you your morality. Which is not a lot, considering that it's Microsoft we're talking about.

Well I never had any issue as I never put my machine to sleep. I actually turn my machine off and on. Yes that includes my laptops, sbc's and desktops. I also advise everyone (even Microsoft users) to never use hibernation. It's not that faster than a full reboot cycle and can cause issues you really do not want. Sorry I am old-fashioned.

> Doctor! It hurts when I do this.

> Then don't.

I understand the sentiment but I never started using hibernate; it's not in my system. I grew up without it and never used it when it was introduced. Keep in mind that I started software development when laptops did not exist yet.

For me it's been the opposite experience. I used to regularly get BSOD on windows, but ubuntu has been rock solid for me.

What? Zero crashes here, for decades. Maybe I bought specific hardware, dell and framework. Normies tend to use the web version of office these days don’t they?

I made the jump to Linux 3 years ago, when I learned that Windows 10 support was coming to an end, and I really didn't like what Windows 11 looked like.

3 years, and not a single time I had any regrets. Not a single time I thought about moving back.

I went for Mint because I am a filthy casual, and as you put it, that system is a joy to use. On Windows I needed to do yearly fresh installs as I could feel performance degrading as time went on, On Linux the laptop is performing as well if not better than when I freshly installed it.

It's so good that I even donate 20 bucks to the project every year. It has no right of being that good and also free.

About games - not only I can play basically everything in my Steam library, but even installing things from other sources is very easy with minor tinkering. At least to me, Windows became nearly superfluous nowadays.

I daily drive Ubuntu, the user experience is comparable (in many cases better) to Windows 11. The only sticking point for me is display drivers. HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience), and getting things like hardware accelerated AV1 encoding, full Vulkan API support etc to work has been extremely difficult. Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in. X11 doesn't suffer from this, but of course does not support HDR.

Yes, this is almost entirely Nvidia's fault, and yes I should know better than to use NV graphics cards on Linux distros; but frankly, the barrier to entry should not be having to replace an expensive piece of hardware to achieve feature parity. (Obligatory "Nvidia, f*k you!")

> Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in.

Are you using GNOME? mutter has this problem where it does not retry commit on the next CRTC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3833. If this is actually what's happening on your system, switching to KDE should solve it.

> HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience)

This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management. You'll get a better HDR experience with KDE.

GNOME is typically the worst of all the options if you need feature support. They aggressively nack wayland proposals, and subsequently don't implement those proposals - while almost the entirety of the ecosystem does.

Seriously, it's bizarre to me how aggressively they pushed to use Wayland but then hold it back like that.

> This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management.

Gnome 49 should've solved that. [0]

[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/4102

I don't think so. I'm on GNOME 49 and nothing has changed compared to 48.

GNOME has both color management and color representation protocols implemented. HDR works fine on it

No, having the bare minimum "HDR support" does not mean it works fine. I have a 27-inch 4K 144Hz monitor with P3 wide color gamut and HDR600. This monitor is connected to 2 PCs, one running Arch Linux with GNOME as the DE and one with Windows 11.

Since Windows 11 24H2, with the new color management feature turned on, I can get correct colors on the monitor in both SDR and HDR modes. So it ends up with HDR on at all times, and mpv can play HDR videos with no color or brightness issues.

GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with sRGB output in SDR mode, so you get oversaturated colors. With HDR on, SDR content will no longer be oversaturated, but if you play HDR videos with mpv, the image looks darkened and wrong. I've tried setting target-peak and target-contrast to match the auto-detected values on Windows, but the video still looks off.

Sorry it doesn't work for you. I don't have that issue. Gnome looks proper in HDR mode for both HDR and SDR content for me.

In my experience, hardware support with drivers is far better with Ubuntu than with any of the 'consumer operating systems'. Display drivers, Nvidia in particular, have been a problem though, which I avoid by just going for integrated graphics (Intel). This worked well since I don't play games, however, then I got into Blender, which really needs a proper GPU (with drivers).

This summer I tried to interest a relative in using a Wacom tablet on their Apple computer. In linux-world you just plug the thing in and the job is done. Yet on the Apple computer I was having to hunt down drivers and install stuff, taking me out of my comfort zone. We didn't get the Wacom tablet to work (it is a decade old) and gave up.

All operating systems will inevitably force their ways of working on you to some extent and it is 'better the devil you know' for most people, myself included. My first OS that 'didn't get in the way' of what I wanted to do was SGI Irix. I think Ubuntu has that aspect of not getting in the way, however, I am confidently able to use the command line to type in installation instructions. Text instructions for installing stuff is brilliant since you can reproduce results consistently with not much more than 'cut and paste' needed. As soon as you move to a consumer OS then this becomes murkier, particularly if you have to use things like 'Homebrew'. An Apple user will quibble with me that this is difficult, but each to their own.

Along the way I have invariably kept the standard Windows installation, to never use it, ever. I thought I would need dual boot to hop into Photoshop, Word or some other Windows application, however, this has proven to not be the case.

The time has come for me to delete those Windows partitions and get my disk space back. In so doing I will also be excluding myself from any of those AI integrations that must be polluting Windows these days.

All of my problem was solved by disabling hybrid graphics and use the dedicated card only. I had not a single bug since then on X11 (I didn’t try Wayland yet, because it was almost completely unusable with hybrid config). The only drawback is battery life, but that wasn’t great even before. I could never reach the ~4 hours, which was possible with Windows. Even with the dedicated card disabled. So, I’m not entirely sure that it’s entirely on Nvidia.

Same, on my laptop. Hybrid graphics destabilised both Debian (with Nvidia drivers installed) and the Windows 11 installation I have on there for SharpCap. Switching to Nvidia GPU only made everything rock solid.

This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.

Hybrid graphics had troubles last spring, but in my case it was fixed around late July. I still launch steam with weird env variables (i don't often change my shortcuts), but i'm not sure it's needed.

Are you using a ThinkPad? My work laptop has this issue too, on windows 11. 75% of the time I have to unplug the monitor after waking up the laptop. 20% of the time it works. 5% of the time it has 640x480 resolution, and I have to unplug it again.

HDR is unusable on Windows too. I finally decided to sell my HDR monitor after like a year because it was a massive pain in the ass from the moment I bought it. One of my biggest wastes of money ever.

Also, the new look and feel is kinda botched. Win10 was sharp and sleek. Really a bad turn imo.

Is Linux gaming on Steam actually competitive in performance and availability to what you'll get on Windows? I'm looking into building a gaming computer I'm surprised to hear I could roll with Linux for it.

Essentially, the only games that doesn't work nowadays are the ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat. This is common among the big AAA-games that are multiplayer (think Fortnite).

Riot games did this on purpose too. League worked perfectly fine on Linux for years until they decided that kernel level spying on users was absolutely necessary to play a moba. For some reason my one friend thinks I'll run windows just for one game.

I'd sooner get a console, personally. The only legitimate use case I have for a console (nintendo notwithstanding) is to sandbox invasive anticheat in multiplayer games. I don't really have a ton of free time or friend group into multiplayer video games, so it's not happening for me. Smart console makers would lean into this.

Yup, I've also gone with a console for all my gaming needs, and keep my computer as just a productivity machine. As a result I don't need nearly as beefy machine and don't need to grind my teeth in bitterness using Windows.

> ones that intentionally break it by adding Linux-incompatible anti-cheat.

That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.

Pre-Wine, would you have argued that a software vendor is intentionally preventing their software from running on any non-Windows OS?

Or was it just that their audience wasn't on said non-Windows OS?

> That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.

Not OP, but this is true depending on the game. For instance, when Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA V Online, they broke Linux support, and blatantly lied about Linux not supporting BattleEye, when that's just not true - they just needed to enable that option, but they just straight up lied saying BattlEye doesn't support Linux.

See: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...

> BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication.

So all Rockstar had to do was reach out to BattlEye to enable it, but they couldn't be bothered to do so. Their anti-Linux stance here is pretty obvious.

Rockstar aside, there are other studios/publishers that have been openly hostile against Linux, like Epic for instance - Tim Sweeny has made scathing remarks against Linux, so it's clear where he/Epic stands on that front.

Is BattlEye equally as effective on Linux as it is on Windows, i.e. is it a 1:1 drop-in? If not, I could see why they wouldn't want to enable it.

I’m using Bazzite now for about 8 months, and I have a dual boot Windows drive. I haven’t used the Windows drive once. Windows was my daily driver for 3 decades.

Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.

Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.

It's unbelievable just how unclear Bazzite's website is.

They don't spell out clearly what Bazzite is. Is it a distro? A layer on top of Steam? Something else? No idea from the first page.

Still on par with Linux UX, I'm afraid :(

Bazzite -> Community & Docs -> FAQ

https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#what-is-the-difference-...

> Bazzite originally was developed for the Steam Deck targeting users who used their Steam Deck as their primary PC. Bazzite is a collection of custom Fedora Atomic Desktop images built with Universal Blue's tooling (with the power of OCI) as opposed to using an Arch Linux base with A/B updates utilizing RAUC. The main advantages of Bazzite versus SteamOS is receiving system packages in updates at a much faster rate and a choice of an alternative desktop environment.

It is a Linux distribution, that aims to compete with Valve's SteamOS Linux distribution supplied with the Steam Deck (which itself is based on Arch Linux). Like SteamOS, it can be used on a regular desktop PC as well... but they are mainly aiming to run on the Steam Deck:

https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#is-this-another-fringe-...

> The purpose of Bazzite is to be Fedora Linux, but provide a great gaming experience out of the box while also being an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck and other handheld devices.

Effectively they have taken Fedora Linux, and added to it the same sort of setup and programs that you get out-of-the-box with SteamOS as well.

For the most part, it is not the people offering Bazzite that are doing the hard job of providing security updates, etc., they are hoping that being based on Fedora will provide that assurance. They merely supply and configure some extras on top (e.g. the Steam client software)

What I meant is not "I can't find what it is", but that the landing page of Bazzite says this: "The next generation of Linux gaming - Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.

Play your favorite games - Bazzite is designed for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts alike with Steam pre-installed, HDR & VRR support, improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools and tweaks to streamline your gaming and streaming experience."

In the first 5 words after the 1st title there should be mentioned "Linux distribution". It's not even in the 2nd paragraph, now.

If this is the clarity of the landing page, I suspect documentation is equally user-hostile/inaccessible, which is why 2025 is still not the year of the Linux desktop... in the Linux world there's still an abundance of great developers, and a terrible lack of HCI/UX expertise.

I agree with you that it's vague text... but I don't think this website is alone in having nothing but sizzle on its landing page.

Not only is it competitive, it's actually superior in many instances.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...

Basically the only games that don't work are those which include anticheat which intentionally borks Linux. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for any game you're interested in to see if it'll run or not.

Yes. Nearly every game is compatible. Checkout protondb.com and check the games you play.

Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No. But besides from that, everything is pretty damn nice.

>Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No.

Please stop repeating this long outdated information. The two most widely used kernel anti cheat provider easyanticheat and battle eye support linux with a user space component which needs to be enabled by the developer and has been in many games.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown

That is... a bit of an oversimplifciation.

Tools like Battle eye and EAC are not just one tool that gives a binary answer, they are tools that detect a huge range of heuristics about the device and how easy it is to interfere with the memory.

While they have been ported to Linux, an awful lot of those bits of telemetry simply don't give the desired answer, or even any answer at all, because that is very hard to so when there aren't proprietary drivers signed down to the hardware root of trust by a third party (and certainly the average Linux user on HN wouldn't want there to be!).

It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.

None of this is relevant to the original point of "kernel anti cheats don't work" when yes the two most widely used ACs do work despite being kernel level.

>It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.

Again irrelevant to the original point

Pretty much none of the kernel level features work.

Irrelevant. They work so you can play a game and it's supported by the devs despite it using kernel level anti cheat.

Yes, it works great, actually. But you have to have specific hardware, for example AMD gpu instead of Nvidia.

Also, nearly anything with anti-cheat (many online games, esp shooters) won't work.

Nvidia works great, and has since this summer. So long as you’re on a recent release you shouldn’t have issues.

Nvidia on a machine with an AMD iGPU requires you to blacklist the amdgpu module.

Nobody tell my machine that. I have a 5080 paired with an 9800X3D, no blacklisting of kernel modules necessary (for me at least).

I should have added “sometimes”. It worked fine that way with most games (I have the same CPU), but Cyberpunk 2099 in particular really doesn’t like that configuration.

Depends on what you like to play. Some games are heavily encumbered with either copy protection like denuvo or anti-cheat and those either don't support linux or flat out try to sniff out linux and refuse to run on anything but windows. Otherwise its great, you can check protondb and winehq for reports of compatibilty.

I swear I saw these exact same comments when Windows 8 released.

Dogs will always bark. I daily drive linux, and I am happy with it. Majority will not make the switch because they either are dependent on the office, adobe, or video editing software.

Linux user base grows. One tiny percent of percent every year. Too little to make a dent.

We were able to wait out Windows 8. Windows 7 was supported through 2020 and Windows 10 came out in 2015.

Developing for linux servers using a linux workstation can be so unbelievably smooth.

It's been two to three years now for me. I'm never going back. The only time I use Windows is on employer provided hardware. If given the choice I'd rather get a Mac or be allowed to smash over Windows with Linux (which most employers wont allow anyway).

Indeed. I always dabbled with Linux here and there. W11 was the final straw for me as well. I feel like LLMs help a ton too, not only do they make initial troubleshooting much easier, they also are pretty great at generating simple scripts that enhance the system.

I'm so happy to have made the swap, using my system is now much more enjoyable and if I don't like some aspect of it I can change it up with MUCH less effort than in Windows.

Also I'm positively surprised how good gaming on Linux is now. It was always a big blocker to full commitment to Linux.

I did it 15 years ago and never looked back. Vista was enough to give me the nudge. On the occasion I've had to use Windoze over the years I've laughed harder and harder each time. It's hard to explain to people who only know Windoze, but it's just really nice to use software made by people who don't hate you.

While I don't disagree with you at all, I'd advise against calling the OS “Windoze” (or “Winblows”, or the company “Micro$oft”). This gives off a very “From my parent's basement, I stab at thee!” impression and reduces how seriously a lot of people will take you and what you are saying, and those people could apply the same impression to the rest of us too. I used to do the same thing, about 1½-to-2 decades ago.

"The worst kind of oppression is when the victims think and talk in the language of their oppressors."

Why would I care if suits "take me seriously"? I grew out of "Windoze" etc. Now I've grown back into it, because fuck Micro$oft.

I'm not talking about “the suits” and what they think.

I'm talking about the people, the home users nominally in control of their own machines, who are on the edge of considering Linux, or something else non-MS, who might be put off if they see something that reinforces a negative stereotype that they've been fed elsewhere (for instance, that the surrounding community is mostly a bunch of undeservedly cocksure 14-year-olds or practically indistinguishable from the same).

You might consider it childish but it's the way I am and it's not just me. I've been masking it for decades but I'm sick of it. I won't use their carefully crafted marketing language. The internet was more fun when people could just be themselves and not try to be beige for fear of scaring people away. We need more variety in the world, not less.

Man, you just reminded me how unapproachable the Linux community is, I guess I’ll stay away from it a bit longer. I’ll come back if/when they mature.

May I suggest if you want to approach a community you don't start with telling them how to talk?

You've got that barse akwards. They aren't telling you how to talk, they are walking away because of how you talk. You are inadvertently gatekeeping, basically working to help “the suits” you are railing against.

To jama211 and everyone else: we aren't all like this, honest!

To globular-toast; this brings to mind the old aphorism:

    Always be yourself.
    Unless you are a bit of a dick, 
    in which case please try to be someone better.

Well said, thank you

[flagged]

I will move back to Linux if they're going to force account creation. This is my red line.

Congrats. I had the same thought when Windows XP came out in 2001. I triple booted OS/2 Warp with Win98 and Linux for a couple years. Linux only since 2003, I guess I missed a lot of MS fun.

I am looking forward for a good energy management on Linux notebooks. I think it is currently one of Linux blind spots.

What do you mean? My Intel MacBook Pro works better on Linux than it works on the latest supported macOS (Big Sur in my case). It works longer, and fans almost always stay silent. I have a fairly minimal sway setup, however.

I mean, when you have an Mx notebook there is no step back regarding energy management and duration. It is a hardware innovation first but the macOS helps. We need the same for Linux.

Agreed. I used to toy with Linux at home, but now it's my daily driver along with Mac OS.

Sadly, as a developer there is no beating Visual Studio. Microsoft still makes the best developer IDE that unfortunately only runs on their worst OS. But as a C++ developer there is just no substitute(imho). Not to mention some development toolchains only work on windows(for playstation/xbox/switch) so if you work in games there is very little choice.

I left Visual Studio for Rider long before I gave up Windows, IMO it's far superior to VS for everything other than GUI Apps or Blazor hot reloading (which is basically broken in both).

JetBrains seem to have the best IDE for every language I've tried: Rider / IntelliJ / Android Studio / PyCharm / PhpStorm / RubyMine. Never tried CLion though, but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?

>but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?

Such a naive assumption

Parsing cpp fast and reliably may be significant differentiator between languages

> Such a naive assumption

My bad. I naively assumed the successful developer-focued tools company with 25 years experience in parsing programming languages and building IDEs with advanced AST/refactoring tooling, that I've been happily using for 8 years had a great C/C++ story based on my experience of having used 7 of their other IDEs (built from the same platform base), were all best-in-class.

Maybe that's why I ended my thought with a question mark? i.e. So C/C++ developers with experience in both can clarify what makes VS so much better than CLion. Or if they haven't tried CLion that it would be a good alternative on Linux to try given all JetBrains other IDEs are of high quality.

Cpp compiler writers have even more experience yet here we are with those insane compilation times

Visual Studio is nice for C++ if you target Windows and CLR languages but for the rest it’s pretty abysmal. I personally generally prefer IntelliJ and used to find CLion nicer for C++ but that was a long time ago.

Anyway, Windows has become a pain for normal user but remains fine if you are a company user. The management tools will strip away most if not all the annoyance people are complaining about here. I think Microsoft knows where the money comes from.

You know, I think that's the key - I'm on Windows Enterprise and it just works. I start my PC, I code for 8 hours a day, I switch it off - it just works.

If your target platform is MS Windows only or only supported by MS Windows like with your examples, by all means, use Visual Studio. If Visual Studio is dictating your choice of platform, I'd consider the tradeoffs.

Have you tried out CLion (https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/)? AFAIK the JetBrains IDEs work pretty well on Linux.

I use Emacs. It does need some fine tuning, tree-sitter installation, etc. but after that, I cannot understand colleges using VS. I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.

Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.

> I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.

Guys, please. I am all for FOSS, but such delusions can only be harmful, for they prevent from actually improving stuff.

Did you sir ever use debugger in your life?

Almost every day. I use gdb both for JTAG targets in embedded systems, as in a programs running in my host.

Emacs has a front end for gdb. Some colleges use other front ends.

What I’m preventing to improve, in your opinion?

Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?

I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.

I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.

(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)

Setting a breakpoint ist just „b place“ place can be for example file:line, or the name of a function, etc.

Then „n“ for next line, „s“ for step-in, „fin“ to go to the end of the function

Dprintf for adding dynamically printfs for watching variables

List will show you 10 (default) lines of code around the cursor, bt will show you a backtrace…

I think that covers the basics. As you can see, ist just a keypress mostly for doing anything.

With Emacs you can click on the fringe for setting/deleting breakpoinst.

The bread and butter is really easy, and other than seeing the cursor in the code, there is no advantage. In Emacs you DO see the cursor moving…

Some emacs-fans really like emacs and will invent any justification for its shortcomings. You are 100% right it has a subpar debugging experience. There were better debuggers 20 years ago than emacs has now.

Stallman himself wrote it so it lies at the intersection of that camp and the lisp cultists (though Ig they are mostly extinct post-LLM), but they used to have a really strong belief that lisp was the path to AI because of it's homoiconicity.

What should be said in it's favor is that due to its architecture it is crazy extensible and hackable. And the fact that the line between configuration and code is very blurry really encourages you to dive into that.

The choice of lisp also helps ensure user freedom as it's a quite simple language - ensuring that compilers and interpreters are a commodity. You don't like one, pick another. Contrast that with say Rust where if you don't like the official Rust you are shit out of luck. It's also a rolling release deal so you can't even easily stay on an old version.

To improve GDB and its frontends so they match VC++ debugger experience.

Maybe is personal preference? I like better gdb directly to VC. I’ve tried to debug with VC, but I felt slow working with it. After several tries, I gave up.

What is so superior about Visual Studios debugging experience that you're sure it can't be replicated anywhere else? I've never used it.

The UI is great but could be matched by other tools, what's superior are advanced features like the remote debugger.

Most of my colleagues never use a debugger even though they use vscode. I (the weird emacs user) actually had to show them how to use one, but they still don't.

Are they actually programmers? Or just people who pretend to know how to code? How can you be a professional programmer and not use a debugger? Also not sure what VS Code has to do with it, it's not Visual Studio proper.

I know plenty of professional programmers (job title states so) that not even they do not use a debugger, many don’t even know how to install/use one or even the very concept of “execute step by step”. Plenty of python users don’t know what pdb is (as matter of fact, have never met one that does know it!). Also plenty of embedded developers writing C or C++ or Java

They go all the time adding hundreds of print(f) of log_* function calls. Often they don’t care to remove them after the fact, as I ask them to, often comes “can/will be useful to detect future bugs”

I’m in the automotive industry, where is known to be a disaster in topic SW. but I think it is also common in other industries. I have seen it in telco already.

While I agree that knowing a debugger is important, and as a leader won’t hire somebody who do not use it, is a fact that many people don’t use it, and are doing ok.

Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints: in fact yesterday I had to, as I was debugging a library with sockets, which would timeout pretty quickly. I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.

>>Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints

Well yes, obviously - it's an indespensible tool in any arsenal, I just cannot fathom(as a C++ low level engineer) how someone can be a professional programmer where they are paid for their job and they don't know to use a debugger even to just do a basic pause and step through flow. But then again I don't work with any python programmers, so maybe that's why.

They managed to grow a career out of a minimum set of skills, printf was enough I guess. Also they leverage stupid IT shops where squeaky wheel gets the grease.. being efficient at debugging would almost prove harmful in their world.

printf will get you far.

In C etc. printf calls also make all intermediate variables observable in the debugger. You can debug programs where you can't pause it. Etc.

Just wait for it, from what I know Sony uses clang for it toolchain, don't know about the others so if enough studios start to switch they will start to offer the tools.

Side note: I have been using msvc in wine for almost 5 years now, so if that works I don't know why the Sony/Nintendo/Xbox toolchain wouldn't.

Have you tried the intellij IDEs? I thought that they were pretty similar in terms of experience, although I have used them for java/dotnet primarily.

I've found Visual Studio fairly helpful wirh debugging, but for general code editing it is unusably slow.

I generally use Sublime Text (+ various plugins) for code editing and leave Visual Studio for dwbugging the code or editing GUIs.

Is running windows inside a VM a possibility for you?

No, but also.....why would you do that? If you're going to do 99% of your work inside a Windows VM, just.....run Windows?

Or maybe even WSL?

I guess downvotes come from people that believe vim + grep + printf debugging is peak development environment. Quite amazing that they even go for something such advanced as vim, instead of sticking with ed, for I believe there exists some Linux user claiming that ed doesn't lack anything that VS has.

No you’re just completely ignorant. You can trivially set breakpoints, use conditional breakpoints, watch variables, step over, through, and into in exactly the same way. Hell, even raw-dogging lldb directly on the CLI is incredibly user friendly, fast, and has a ton features you wish were more exposed by common IDEs. Don’t feel like debugging right now? Take a heap snapshot and do it later! Don’t even need to launch the process.

Visual Studio is ridiculously overrated, and this is coming from someone that works at Microsoft and forced to use it every day. What really kills me are the insanely complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the process is like some finger breaking ctrl+alt+function key nonsense? Seriously wtf? Oh to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE? Why??

Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?

I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.

I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.

(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)

I much prefer lldb over gdb, but why don’t you just try it and see for yourself?

Of course setting a gutter breakpoint is easier in an IDE, and that’s irrelevant to my point. OP made this aabout vim/emacs versus VisualStudio as if the former doesn’t have gutter-clicking capabilities. Which is ridiculous

> to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE

Eh? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...

> complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the proces

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/identifyi...

Debug.TerminateAll is right there in the list

> No you’re just completely ignorant

Forgive my skepticism

The keyboard layout change is not on my version (dogfood) for some reason, maybe because I have to use Remote Desktop and it doesn’t detect a physical keyboard. But fine, I’ll take that back. I even asked AssPilot for help and it was predictably useless.

And cmon modify the registry to debug multiple processes? People work together in teams and share a common tooling that ideally tries to minimize the friction required to get work done. Think about that while contrasting the steps required in that article with the alternative of“launch the app a couple more times, then…”

Huh? The registry thing is for a specific niche*, not just "multiple processes"

You just set the startup properties on the solution to start the multiple projects. On that page, look for "To set the startup project or multiple projects from solution Properties" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...)

* "Sometimes, you might need to debug the startup code for an app that is launched by another process. Examples include services and custom setup actions"

Starting multiple copies of the IDE wouldn't handle these scenarios either

Fair enough, but still way more complicated than doing ‘make debug’ more than once

> It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.

I moved back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon yesterday, because my boot drive with Windows got fried and the replacement will only be here on Thursday. It doesn't feel like the OS is trying to make my life worse, it just sucks sometimes.

Note: this ended up being a bit long, there's a summary at the bottom. Apologies.

It doesn't save window positions after boot properly (I'd probably have to look in the direction of devilspie2 for that, admittedly I was using FancyZones on Windows as well). The grouped window list Applet in the panel doesn't show windows on the correct screen even if I move them from one monitor to the other and then back. This is really annoying because I have 4 monitors and want each of them have a panel and half of those being wrong about what is where sucks, admittedly Windows sometimes had a similar issue with its taskbar, BUT it resolved itself by just dragging the windows across monitors, instead of needing to refresh the entire applet.

The sound output default is something called Line Out Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller which works fine, but there's no obvious way for me to disable HDMI/DisplayPort output devices so programs can't pick those by accident. Whereas for input I have Rear Microphone Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller but that one makes the sound horrible, so I instead need to switch over to Microphone USB PnP Audio Device and hope that will be fine. Better than the issues with audio on Fedora years ago, still not great.

Software availability varies - some stuff is in the regular repositories, some software needs PPAs, some comes in Flatpaks, other software needs AppImages. I still appreciate that I can get most stuff running, but there's occasional weirdness, like KeePassXC starting up with the wrong theme, for example, the light mode kinda burns my eyes. Speaking of which, I no longer need Redshift because Mint comes with a built in Night Light, except that when it toggles on and fades the screen color, it makes the CPU usage spike (Ryzen 7 5800X) and renders the whole system unusable. Oh and speaking of which there is something weird with the CPU scheduler or something, because when I launch some intensive task, it makes even the desktop environment freeze entirely (and voice calls stall) for seconds at a time. Windows wasn't amazing at this, but could definitely be made even better with Process Lasso.

Oh and I tried some gaming with Steam: out of 20 games I tried only 6 worked. Turns out that if I mount my NTFS drives then Wine will get confused and claim I don't own the directory (which I only figured out by enabling Proton logging), which is funny for something that's supposed to provide Windows compatibility and could probably be resolved by UID/GID in the drive mount config... but even so some games like Mashinky just crash the desktop - I get a screen with the OS desktop background and a pointer, much like the login screen, but nothing reacts to input, no ability to close the game or switch to other windows. At the end of it, to even get some games running, I have to put them on the only ext4 drive that I have... which is also only 256 GB and the reason for me picking Linux in the first place until the 1 TB replacement drive arrives. And other games just don't launch no matter how much you babysit them, for example, I couldn't get Motor Town: Behind the Wheel working at all, but maybe because I don't have a lot of time to tinker.

I also miss software like SourceTree (used to pay for GitKraken, cool software, now just have Git Cola), MobaXTerm (way better than Remmina), SteelSeries Sonar, GlassWire and some other packages that don't have direct equivalents. I really like the more consistent approach to theming and fonts, though. Also, way nicer that I don't have to jump through hoops with setting up dev tools and now what's running locally can be closer to what's either on the server or inside of the containers I build. Oddly enough, I didn't find a way to change the default width of the Cinnamon terminal to 120 characters instead of 80. Also I still like how nice updates generally are and how the system seems to have less bitrot and uses less space and resources, even with a midweight DE like Cinnamon (would have gone for XFCE otherwise). Maybe KDE some day.

Summary:

This isn't really meant to be a hit piece or condemnation, but there's plenty of real problems that I still very much encounter for my preferences and desires of using an OS, there are probably solutions and to someone else these might not be problems. The difference is that Windows feels purposefully enshittified and works against me even when the software ecosystem (and stuff like support for games) is good. If they didn't try to make the OS bad with their bullshit and incentives, it would blow the Linux experience out of the water in quite a few regards.

At the same time, Linux distros feel like they're trying to be good and the OS generally respects you as the user... but there's a lot of moving pieces and lots of stuff breaks and some things (like anti-cheat support for games) won't be fixed because that's out of the control of the community and depends on corpos. Same for running Windows software, if Wine has issues you're often on your own, or just have to get used to the closest Linux software equivalent if you want fewer issues. I will say that it constantly feels like it's getting better, though.

In the limited subset of things that "just work" (generally webdev and DevOps stuff, without venturing too far off the beaten path), I have to say that I prefer Linux distros to both Windows and macOS though.

The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is not that it has improved but that its biggest competitor has dropped the ball? That’s not really praising it.

Linux is the better OS. Windows 11 just forces people to evaluate other OS's to experience the latest Linux for themselves.

I didn't have the time as a working Adult for distro hopping and Gentoo compiles, but the thought of having to live with Windows 11 made me try out modern linux again, glad I did.

Linux is now the better OS, after the other one got significantly worse than it used to be, and even that is close call depending on what you need Linux to do.

IMO, it was definitely the better OS even going back to 15 years ago. People use Windows only because of the network effect of people being school-taught how to use computers on Windows, which leads to a positive feedback loop of more software being made for it which locks-in people further.

I remember after learning Linux, how much of a toy Windows felt, with my needing to grab windows by the bar to move them around (instead of grabbing from anywhere), and trying to resize them by the thin corner (instead of resizing from anywhere), having no concept of workspaces, having no choice of window manager while Linux could engulf windows in flames and render them in a cube, only being able to backspace single characters at a time, no choice of file manager, files having weird limitations on their names, having nothing like bash (pre-powershell) while Linux had multiple shells, no block devices (this could be expanded into a lot of points), no simple way to work the partition tables, not being able to mount things wherever, not being able to treat a regular file like a disk, no real choices of filesystems, poor network utilities, ping only pings an arbitrary 3 times by default instead of just going on indefinitely, no package managers and repos, etc. I could go on a lot more probably, but this is enough. Windows XP was a toy compared to Linux.

Also not to forget the 260 character file path limitation, which still haunts Windows till date! You can lift the limits via a registry key, but programs still need support for it. Forget third-party programs, even many first-party Microsoft apps like Explorer itself still can't handle long paths.

But my biggest pet peeve with Windows is updates. Updates, updates, updates, it's such an underrated thing that Linux does so much better, I wish more folks would speak about this:

1. You only really need to reboot for kernel updates 2. Updates aren't forced upon you 3. You're in full control of the whole process - you can even decide to hold back certain packages, , or choose a different flavour that suits your needs better 4. Update everything - including thirdparty apps - from either the CLI or GUI (KDE Discover or Gnome Software etc) 5. Unlike Windows, updates rarely slow down your system, and if anything, they tend to make your system faster and better. 6. Most Linux users actually look forward to updates, whereas Windows users groan and swear at them, praying and hoping they MS doesn't break anything or add more crap/anti-features 7. When you reboot after updates, it's instant - no annoying "configuring... please don't turn of your computer" message that hijack your system when you need it the most. 8. If you've got an immutable distro, updates are atomic and can't break your system. 9. Many decent mutable distros also have the option to instantly snapshot the OS before an update, and allow you to rollback right from the boot menu.

Honestly, updates for me is easily the top reason why I feel Linux is a superior experience to Windows, I could write a whole essay on this.

> 1. You only really need to reboot for kernel updates

You don't even need to throw the userspace away. You can update the kernel, hibernate and choose the new kernel on boot. No need to close anything.

One thing I dislike is that Synaptic style proper package managers are being phased out in favour of app stores.

Are they? I continue to use the apt/dnf CLI or the Mint updater, no store app required.

Synaptic was a nice middle ground between apt and App Center / Discover.

Yes, and it no longer works? I only have fedora handy and dnfdragora is still available.

You don't need to manually enable long paths, and Explorer handles them just fine as will any other Win32 application respecting max_path.

You list many things that are advantages, but not for the regular end user, the primary target of Windows.

No it doesn't. You can navigate to long paths, but try doing any file operations (like renaming a file) and you'll see it doesn't work.

Also, the rest of my points are end user impacting. Updates impact everyone and is a very important part of an OS experience. I used to work on a helpdesk for an MSP, and you've no idea the number calls we used to get from users frustrated about updates for various reasons. Hell, we use Windows at work and I still get annoyed as a user.

Renaming works just fine on long paths.

The rest of your points don't apply to a user who buys a desktop/laptop and starts using it.

> not being able to mount things wherever

Just to clarify, this was actually like most of Windows. You could (in XP at least via Disk Manager), but they made it harder than it needed to be.

Multiple workspaces was a thing as well that came with XP Power Toys and was a feature in later versions, but not simple to access, and mostly broken because they never test it.

I made my final transition during Vista. Touching 7, 10 and 11 for work purposes means I can see that I don't miss any of it.

I’m not sure any of what you wrote is an endorsement of the grandparents comment about Windows being a superior OS 15 years ago.

It wasn't.

Windows is awful, and has terrible discovery for features, and anything off the main "happy path" is usually broken. This isn't a new thing since they fired their QA folks, it's always been bad.

It is just the "Windows can't do this" statements, when it can.

> no simple way to work the partition tables

yeah, that's exactly what your average Windows user wants from an OS

The average windows users wants it to run the software they want and not completely fucking shit the bed. Windows is allowed to be designed poorly, and it is.

But, shockingly, despite Windows goals being so small and easily achievable, Microsoft still fucks it up.

Wine is a better Win32 implementation than Win32. And Microsoft just can't help making the OS worse. Every new feature is basically strictly worse than the stuff before.

All they have to do is do nothing and continue making the same things work. But no.

you managed to pick on the one thing you don't know how to do.

I know very well how to use diskpart, thank you

Average users don't care that ping only pings 3 times by default either, you know.

Pedant point: 4 times.

Though you might not notice the last result ever if you always run it from the GUI run box instead of a console, as the resulting console in that instance closes pretty instantly after the fourth result is displayed.

I remember simple things in Linux taking hours of fudging to get them to work.

As someone who was burned by it during the 2010s, this is no longer the case. My Bazzite install worked out-of-the-box with no tweaking whatsoever. I've been on this install since April 2024.

Better hardware support, more funding and development on the desktops, Flatpak, more apps being web apps, Proton, everything converged finally.

What's odd is this machine does not work seamlessly under Windows, it doesn't support the wifi or ethernet driver out of the box and refuses to load it during Windows setup, and that of course requires an internet connection to complete now. This works fine under Linux.

I'm afraid you are not going to convince anyone like that who was not already convinced.

I've been using both Windows and Linux for the past decade, and I think we have to acknowledge that both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there is no doubt that the Linux UX is less polished or that Windows makes UI customization more difficult (it is possible but you have to write dlls instead of css).

But the points you make do not really touch the core of the difference. The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window. It's like the shitty toolbars in Office 95 that were not 'locked' by default so you would accidentally move them around all the time.

Backspace only single characters? Windows 2000 already supported ctrl+bs/del, so not sure where this is going. Same for block devices, those were supported for an eternity, and were contributing to make Windows more prone to rootkits. And so on for most of the points you made - they are simply not true, perhaps because you are not familiar with Windows :(

I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers. So let's get the facts straight and leave out controversial and opinionated topics that only let Windows fanboys go "Akshually".

> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers.

As someone who's used a variety of OSes (ranging from FreeBSD to Windows and macOS) on desktops and laptops, including trying out 6 Linux distros in the past couple of years (Arch, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Bluefin, and currently NixOS), I honestly don't understand how you end up with "Linux is the best choice for people who are just starting out".

I'm experienced and I prefer Linux, but the amount of time investment I've needed to put into troubleshooting and customizing any of these distros (from Mint having the least to NixOS having the most) has been higher than either Windows (10 or 11) or macOS.

Depends on what you’re customizing them toward. If you want to make it act exactly like macOS, that’s going to be a lifelong struggle. (The opposite is also true: I hated my Mac until I stopped trying to make it work like my Linux desktop and started doing things its way.)

I have no interest in making my Linux laptop look anything like macOS.

> The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window.

Not OP, but that's not the way it works - you'll need to press a modifier key (typically Alt or Win/Meta) along with the drag operation, so you can't do it accidentally. And you can always turn it off from the settings if you don't like this behaviour.

> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers

Why just single out newbies? Even old fogies can switch to Windows. My 70yr old mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 - 7, and she switched to Linux about a decade ago, starting with Mint, and now on Aurora. She does all the basic tasks most PC users do (surfing the web, editing docs, printing/scanning, backing up photos etc) and has zero issues. If my mum - and old school Windows user - can use Linux, so can anyone else.

Just use a sensible distro with sane defaults (like Aurora), or a DE with a sane GUI (KDE or XFCE) and you'll be fine. The core UI /UX paradigms is the same as Windows, you just need to have an open mind and take your time getting used to the differences.

Naturally there are some people who can't deal with change, so Linux may never be an option for them, but for other folks, unless the have a legit reason to stick to Windows (like dependency on some proprietary app/workflow), Linux is a pretty viable option these days.

That's uncharitable: Stability matters, and Linux just doesn't give a fuck about breaking the environment since software is of course FOSS and can just be recompiled from sauce, right?

Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.

[dead]

Very subjective. I made the switch to Linux from Windows 7 over 10 years ago and even at that time I found Linux to be orders of magnitude better in almost every aspect, and those few areas where it was worse (which, aside from games, I'm struggling to even think of any now) were well worth the trade-off.

Linux has been better for a long, long time now.

People use Windows because of the software, not because of the operating system itself. The best thing windows can do is not assert itself and hide as much as possible. As soon as you have to start interacting with any windows systems, it becomes clear how hacky and poorly conceptualized the OS is.

The best versions of Windows were the least annoying.

Linux distros became much better than Windows during Win 10 times.

I love how people confidently claim something like this.

FWIW, for me Linux became better in the times of Windows XP.

I also love how people confidently claim something like this.

FWIW, for me Linux stopped being better than Windows around Windows 7 and still isn't back.

Windows wasn’t fully usable until the terminal and WSL shipped. And now isn’t due to adverts and loss of local accounts, and other hostile anti-features.

Windows 7 was the first version that gave me stability that made Linux feel like less of a must-have / only option.

Windows 11 largely gives me no problems and has worked perfectly fine with the hardware I've thrown at it, with no effort on my part. WSL is definitely a bonus.

The same just has not been true of Linux for me during the same time period with the same pieces of hardware.

I still happen to run NixOS on my laptop (the most recent of 6 distros, and Windows, I've tried over the past couple of years). It's not been entirely trouble-free but (thanks to the Arch wiki, mostly), it's in a decent state now.

And you are right about the hostile anti-features, though, and that promises to only get worse.

My windows PC has been relegated to games and will likely get whatever first stable, headache free SteamOS+NVIDIA incarnation turns up.

I've got no more affection for Windows than for Linux. There are just cases where the former has given me fewer headaches than the latter.

Sounds like a hardware issue on the Linux side. Been using Dell developers for decades and recently Frameworks and had only temporary issues with brand-new chipsets. Star labs tablet is great as well.

On the Windows side NT 3.5 was rock solid with limited software selection, 4 was decent, XP was fine for me behind a firewall but not everyone was so lucky on the security angle. No one liked Vista but I don't remember it being due to crashing.

The 2017 Dell developer edition XPS 13 with Ubuntu is actually one of the systems that gave me the most trouble, quite ironically.

Bluetooth loved to disappear for no reason and would only return with a reboot. No amount of unloading/reloading modules could bring it back.

Didn't have any issues with Windows on that laptop.

Current laptop is a Lenovo X1 Nano and it's behaving reasonably.

Sounds like the wireless card issue of a few years back. Believe it was fixed by replacing the cheaper module with an Intel wireless card. Never affected me.

Just in case, that was exactly my point. For different people better is defined differently.

Ah, that wasn't how I read it. We agree, then!

Both can be true, depending on a few factors.

My first attempt at Linux was installing Mandrake sometime circa 2002. I was only a kid that liked computers back then, not really an advanced user. I could not make the mouse work, and gave up. Probably for a more advanced user that was not an issue, and Linux was better already.

Many years later, around 2015, I had the option to work from a Linux environment at my workplace, and went for it. Ubuntu this time around, during Windows 7 days. Many consider Windows 7 to be peak Windows, and I found Ubuntu to be much, much better. At least for regular use and Dev work. The only thing that kept me from using it on my own PC was that running my game library was not possible back then. I did keep it on dual boot for a few years though.

What allowed me to move for good was Proton. In some ways, that is the point where I can say, without any caveats or asterisks, that Linux is definitely better.

My experience is kinsa similar to yours, started around 98/99 with Red Hat and Mandrake. Linux was just so clunky at the time. I could never take it seriously, having to compile the kernel for getting something basic going was not very fun. Although it was pretty fun trying out all the various distros that would come on free CDs bundled with computer magazines (remember those?!).

I was in fact playing around with several alternate OSes at the time, and the ones which really impressed me the most were QNX and BeOS. I absolutely loved QNX for being so performant - especially at multitasking, was smooth as butter my humble 450MHz PIII. QNX solved the desktop interactivity problem more than two *decades* before Linux did, and I think that's pretty damn impressive. And BeOS blew me away with its multimedia performance.

It wasn't until Windows 7 came out, that I decided to switch to Linux full time (started with SuSE, then Fedora and switched to Arch a few years later). Basically my reason for switching was because I wasn't eligible for Microsoft's student discount and I couldn't afford to pay the full price for 7, and I was actually really looking forward to it and really wanted to buy it instead of pirating it, thinking I could get the student discount... but no. I got really ticked off at Microsoft and decided to just format my PC and switch to Linux for good.

I agree, but that's possibly because my experience with Linux in the age of 95 and 98 was Dragon Linux, which was adapted to sitting next to a Windows installation on a FAT partition and had some limitations and instabilities.

Once I got my first consumer high end PC that was really my own and payed for with my own money, with one of the early hyperthreading CPU:s, it didn't take long until I made the move from Windows to Slackware and never looked back. I've used later Windows versions quite a lot, but spent more time in Putty sessions against Linux and BSD boxes than anything else on them.

it was the better os for me in 2005 because it allowed me to do everything I needed for class on the only laptop I could afford at the time. windows mistake edition just didn't work at all beyond booting and running a browser and even that caused it to crash several times per hour.

Linux has remained the best operating system for me since that time despite multiple upgrades to more powerful machines. everything I needed was available in the package manager. when I turned it on to work, it turned on and I worked. when I turned it off, it turned off. it didn't start upgrading and then hang, like my friends computers.

In fact I kept supporting friends on windows for a few more years, but after that I just told them I didn't know how it worked, because windows was just such mess to support.

Linux is now the better OS on the desktop for many more people after the other one got significantly¹ worse than it used to be.

It has been the better OS server-side and for appliance applications (routers, media players, …) for a long time, Windows may be drawing equal but does that count if some of it is due to WSL?

It has been the better OS, or often just the equal OS for a lot of desktop users for a fair while also, particularly non-gamers who don't need other specific tools that don't have a sufficiently compatible Linux offering/alternative. Many use it because the cost is hidden and might use something else given a properly informed choice.

I wouldn't put it in front of my Dad, even though pretty much all he does is no different on Windows than Linux and has been for years, because of compatibility concerns with printers/scanners and because there are others in the family able+willing to support Windows so he isn't stuck waiting for me if he ever has trouble while I'm difficult to contact.

I don't run Linux on my main desktop due to inertia (games are largely what kept me with Windows long enough to have to make the 8->10 transition) but that is not enough any more, partly because it just isn't really there (lack of things keeping me on Windows because they don't work well easily elsewhere, and irritations with Win11 applying a noticeable retrograde force) and partly because my use patterns have changed (modern games are not a thing in my life ATM, my hobbies have changed considerably in the last decade). That machine will be switching over to Linux when I get around to it, or it might just be shut off (almost all data is on Linux on the little house server, and off-site copies, already anyway) in which case the laptop will just gain a dock so it can better use the big screens & whatnot.

--------

[1] I might also take issue with significantly, as that might imply the change is sudden and due specifically to the Win10 EOL. Windows, both 11 & 10 and 8 before them, has been going downhill slowly enough that each extra irritation has faded into something that people put up with before the next one comes along. Recent changes (more ads etc) are generally small² but are the final straw.

[2] Recall (and the justified consternation it creates) is the one recent change that I would call significant in its own right. As irritating as the other AI stuff nagging us to give it something to do is to those of use that don't want it, in many places it just feels like an evolution of Cortana's presence from a UX PoV more than a revolution in its own right, and doesn't feel nearly as invasive overall as the Recall subset does on its own.

I think the better way to look at is that no matter how good Linux gets, if MS didn't shoot themselves in the foot it would always struggle to make headway. Even the modest headway it's made over the last couple years.

It's not about quality, it's about market dominance. Walk into any major retailer, 95% of the computers they sell have Windows on them (100% if they don't sell Apple). Go to any company and see what they run on almost all their computers, Windows. Go to any school, probably the same thing (though years ago Apple would have had a strong presence too).

And that's not even talking about business software like Office. MS built that dominance back when Linux was almost entirely focused on the server space. What Desktops did exist where mostly hobby projects or relatively small companies. Shit Linux itself was a hobby project lol.

MS has had that position for over 20 years. Windows is the Xerox of computers. A lot of people don't even realize there are options out there. In that environment, even if the Linux Desktops got better than Windows, it should have taken an absolute killer app or some big evolution in the space to get people switching. All MS had to do was keeping offering a competent product. Or even a kind of shitty one that didn't actively give people a reason to switch.

But they can't help themselves. Most of the money isn't enough, they need all the money. And they've degraded their product to the point where it is actively driving people away. And even now it'll probably take another decade for Linux Desktops to break the 10% mark.

Modern Ubuntu, for me, is akin to Windows 7 (peak Windows), but with some added benefits like real package management and mnemonics (the underlined letters in menus you can access with alt+underlined letter), and other cool things like middle-click anywhere on the window to resize.

Even Mac is pretty bad by comparison.

Again, this is just me, but I wonder if people saying Linux is bad are really just complaining it's different? It does help that I only buy hardware I know works.

Linux desktop has improved a lot, but the huge momentum of the competitor has prevented many people (including OP) from switching or even remotely considering it. Anything that decreases the momentum of Windows lets the improvements of Linux show.

I think it has improved significantly. For the last few years KDE has been great and getting more polished.

The pain points are nothing worse than the crap Windows 11 throws at you. The only difference for the average person is that their go to tech support person might not know Linux. And paid support options like the India call centre stuff that gets thrown in with a laptop purchase for a month or so doesn't exist for Linux.

As with anything, there are transition costs. If your current solution becomes worse, those transition costs become relatively lower. So it says a lot more an issue of moving over than anything about linux

Yes, of course? Linux could be immaculate, but having less than 5% user share is a bigger issue that is best solved by the current market leader cratering.

I bet you're a blast at parties.

"You say meeting them was the best thing that happened to you? What does that say about your achievements?"

Linux being the best OS didn't just "happen". It was a long process in many fronts (usability, devices, drivers, games, etc). But despite that, people are still reluctant to even try Linux, so Windows screwing around is the best thing that can happen to Linux.

I think it counts. If the most popular airline in the world suddenly started forcing you to commit to a subscription model to travel, one would consider less popular airlines going forward. Sometimes consistency of doing the job without adding hassle is more important than arriving at every destination under the sun. The problem with the Linux Desktop is it that it has a reputation as a scrappy alternative until it hits that random problem that grounds it. It will never replace Windows but it can take bigger and bigger chunks of users out of it.

The argunent is that it forced people to break their habit. Which is always the main hurdle for adoption. There is nothing innovative about Linux 2025 compared to 2024 or 2023, Windows just got worse. I say this as a 12+ years linux user. The biggest shift for the normies was Proton, and we got steam to thank for that. But Linux is more secure, reliable and hard tested as ever.

I think you missed the point. Linux was already good: it didn't become good because its competitor became worse. Rather, the competitor becoming worse gives some people the push they finally needed to make the switch.

The point of the comment is that without Microsoft misbehaving, many people wouldn't have discovered/would not discover how good Linux is now.

As a long term Linux desktoppy, I find this a mixed blessing.

I fear Linux will get ruined by the influx of windows runaways. Enterprise managers will start enforcing their braindead ideas. Group policies, DRM, security scanner slowness, ads, they will all start to appear. Banks will start to 'secure' yoyr desktop. Then politicians will come in and require the KDEs of this world to implement chat control-like things. Eternal september awaits.

Linux is still reasonably controlled by the end user. The powers that be only allow that if we are a fringe group. The golden cage to lock down Linux is already built or being built, and letting us keep the key to it is not something that will be tolerated.

They'd have to outlaw compilers to make that work.

Say (hypothetically) they forced KDE and Gnome to do that - they are open source, you can't hide that it was done, someone will rip out that part and either compile and release a new distro or post the git somewhere outside that jurisdiction and someone else will do it.

This isn't a new thing even - we've had free/non-free/rpmfusion and the like for decades - hell back in the day I had to pull and compile freetype because of the patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and not in the EU.

The one that does worry me more is that they straight up just start locking down the hardware more strictly - a mobile phone style attestation/locked bootloaders would be a major challenge to open computing.

I am confused. What "Linux"? There are many distributions. There is the kernel (many versions). Maybe even today they are some distributions that are as you described, used in certain companies or states or whatever. But you can choose another one and you will still be fine.

Yes and no. There are many distros, but they all use the same components. If outside entities only allow you to run specific distros or configs, you're done. Some examples:

* My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.

* My bank wants the chrome browser. Messing with headers makes it work on firefox. But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.

* sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.

* systemd slowly moves towards encrypted home dirs and a fully validated boot chain. That's a golden cage with a lock to which we have the key. Microsoft can take the key away, and governements can make them do this.

* Android is also theoretically multi distro, but Google is the only one that matters. And they just decided they want developers identity.

* Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers. Facebook, cloudflare, Teams...

Computers are now part of networks, a bit like their own societies. These will force you to use their rules or isolate you. And that's assuming you can keep buying machines that are open or legally jailbreakable.

> If outside entities only allow you to run specific distros or configs, you're done For many years the only thing "allowed" was Windows. There was a big effort done by some people to push back against that.

> My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu Does your job allow a personal device? For many jobs I got a company laptop and that was it. No choice of OS/distro or anything. And to be honest, I find this reasonable considering how "careful" are people with their devices.

> My bank wants the chrome browser From the banks I tried (I ended up with 6 accounts) in the last 3 years, only one had some issues with Firefox. So, for me, there was (still) plenty of option.

> Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers And whoever cares should push back (I mean Facebook? I stopped using it because is crap ignoring any browser/os behavior). It was much worse, I am honestly amazed that we managed to arrive were we are.

Just as an example: in the 2000 I had to wait one month to get a laptop without Windows pre-installed, and need to travel one hour because they would not deliver at home, then install a Linux distro myself. Would you have said then "but we have no option, everything that comes to my doorstep tomorrow is Windows" ? You can say "but not everybody can do that", sure, but if people that can, don't, then wo will?

> My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.

You can fake the data via eBPF.

> But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.

As with anything else.

> sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.

Could be avoided via namespaces.

> systemd slowly moves ...

Could be thrown out of the system, unless you're happy RH user.

> Android is also theoretically multi distro

That is out of scope because I'm fine without it's HAL and other parts.

> Facebook

Sad state of affairs, their mobile version worked fine even in lynx.

Linux is not one single entity. You aren't bound to one single distribution if their philosophy doesn't satisfy you.

My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.

Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.

Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.

Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.

If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.

They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.

This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.

Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.

If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.

It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.

> Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.

The best way to do that would be for all the governments and large corporations that buy Windows machines for their employees to switch to Linux. That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.

Unless and until that happens, the unfortunate fact for individual Windows users is that you're rounding error in MS's numbers anyway. You're not the one they're making all the money from. The large government and corporate accounts are. And as long as people have to use Windows at work, they're going to use Windows at home because it's familiar to them. (Except for outliers like me who run Linux at home even though we have to use Windows at work. But those outliers are rounding error to the rounding error.)

> That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.

If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].

And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-police-move-from-window...

That just ends with everyone back in the same boat. Serious enterprises will still need OS support and no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts whether they be Linux, Windows, or otherwise.

> no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts

I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so. The support people have to use MS tools, at least to some extent, but they're not MS employees and they have no inside connections with MS.

It's true that what "OS Support", or more generally "Supporting workstations for employees", would amount to would be different for a large organization that uses Linux, compared to what it is for a large organization that uses Windows. But "different" does not mean "worse". I would expect the quality of such support to be better once it sinks in that the organization means what it says about using open source solutions. And there are plenty of open source software projects that would love a huge influx of customers willing to pay for features (LibreOffice comes to mind, for example).

> I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so

I’ve received excellent powershell-based support for their cloud services. I can’t imagine what I’d ask of them for OS support. If we can’t solve the issue in a timely fashion, we just reimage the device.

[dead]

They should have gone with GendArch as it kinda makes more sense than GendBuntu.

No, the best way would be to have legislation and regulation that mandates that level of service.

"Voting with your wallet" cannot solve every issue, and that's never been more true than today. Rampant hyperconsolidation means that there are no longer enough companies providing these products and services to have any real hope of being able to just switch to one that does what you need. Furthermore, even if you can find a solution that lets you stop giving them money—like switching to Linux—those solutions are not sufficient for the vast majority of people and institutions, and there's no way for enough to switch to actually hurt the megacorporations.

And even if it did start to hurt them, what do you think would happen? They'd say "oh, our bad, we'll be real nicey-nice now!"?

No; they'd flex their money muscles and find ways to make sure those institutional customers switched back.

The only ways to solve these problems are a) better regulations mandating an acceptable level of service and customer protection, and b) serious antitrust with real teeth. Break 'em up.

Unfortunately, neither of those are going to happen in the current political...situation.

Apple has customer service you can call and speak to a person.

Apple offers tech support via FaceTime for people who require a sign language interpreter.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101572

They are the polar opposite of Microsoft and Google when it comes to providing customer support.

I had the iPhone 3G back in 2008 and only had Android phones after that. Until 2020. But when trying to log into my old Apple account, it was asking for answers to security questions I’ve never setup because they weren’t a thing in 2008. After calling Apple support, my problem went up the ladder until someone called me and told me the way to do it. Try that with Google.

Your Apple tax dollars at work.

No, really. They're not perfect, and as time goes on I keep agonizing more and more about whether they're worth the money. But also, I've had some amazing customer support from Apple employees over the years, and I at least have to concede that the money for those people's salaries has to come from somewhere.

We're constantly reminded that "if it is free/cheap, then you're the product", which is more or less a restatement of "you get what you pay for".

Apple charges more, and people lose their absolute shit over that, but then you don't get abused anywhere near as much as Microsoft/Google do to you.

I don't think Apple charges all that much. I can afford latest Apple products, but, for example, not a one bedroom apartment.

Also, divide the cost of the product by the replacement interval.

I have some landfill android tablets that are too slow to run the moral equivalent of flash games. The iPad’s I have (all low end models) are older than the androids (in one case, 2x older) and still work much better.

Retail price / years supported is pretty comparable for Apple and Android. On top of that, you can get deals on “discontinued” newly manufactured apple devices, and used ones as well.

I have many complaints about Apple, but value for money isn’t one of them.

Meanwhile, in computer land, it's not even at all. I use both a PC and a Mac at home. In the time since I bought the MacBook, I've had to replace the PC three times.

I did pay for some out of warranty repairs on the Mac about 5 years ago. (Keyboard and battery replacement.) So that evens the total cost of ownership situation a little bit. Having a PC has only cost me about twice as much as having a Mac over the past 10 years.

You should qualify that with “in your chosen location.” And there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to live where housing happens to be expensive.

It was a long time ago but more than once I had troubles with a Windows license and it was known that if you talked to somebody at Microsoft on the phone long enough they'd take pity on you and give you a new license key.

They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.

They also high-street stores as well for that human experience.

Every time I call Apple customer service, they tell me to box up my device and send it in to be replaced. The human element is nice but it's hardly a panacea - you need trained customer support.

That is a bit inconvenient but replacing a faulty device is an example of excellent customer service

that's minimal, not excellent

In a land of below-minimal customer support, minimal customer support becomes excellent.

Also, calling them is an exception path. If you take it into the store, they’re more likely to try fixing it first (often same day).

When you ship them a computer, that also gets repaired. They may replace enough components that it’s essentially new, but it’s a repair.

Apple computers are more expensive, too.

It's not the computer that Microsoft is selling, it's Windows. It's apples and oranges (no pun intended). Apple doesn't charge for its software and Microsoft has many other products. It's just about how you distribute your costs.

FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.

Id argue that at this point, Microsoft isn't selling Windows. They're selling everything/anything touching their platform. Copilot, Office, Azure, gamepass. Almost all of these have a yearly subscription price that exceeds or is close to that of a Windows license. Windows just happens to be the platform they use to get you in.

When your computer comes with Windows installed, you're paying for it.

>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.

The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.

> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.

The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.

Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.

> Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.

Monopoly doesn't always mean 100% of the market. They're still the leader by far in desktop operating systems, and pretty much everyone who has a computer as work has an Office license allocated to them.

No but a monopoly also doesn't mean a majority market share, or being so much better than the competition that everyone chooses you.

> Maybe gaming

Only if you limit scope desktop gaming, sure. 75% of gaming market share is on mobile and consoles.

Oh true.

No, that's not the reality of the situation. You are theorizing a perfect market with no costs of entry or exit. Customer demand for critical systems is inelastic to start with due to technical burden (ie most people are not good enough with computers to casually switch OS), and large vendors work hard to maximize that inelasticity.

By "not good enough" you mean "not motivated enough" which boils down to what the OP said. It's not a big problem in reality for most people.

No I don't. If meant that I would have written it. Most people are not competent to change out an operating system and find the idea of developing that competency unattractive and expensive. Many people not only do not understand how computers work, they don't want to. If they do switch to something different, it's usually via a purchase rather than DIY.

> they find the idea of developing that competency unattractive

You are repeating exactly what I'm saying you're saying. They could develop that competency. They don't want to because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. They are not motivated enough because it's not important enough to them.

> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.

The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.

Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.

I don't recall the Soviets building higher quality products.

That is an extreme, also undesirable alternative. How about just having a reasonable level of market regulation, especially monopoly regulation?

The US economy is already heavily regulated.

I think a good metaphor for the situation is that the US is like a tank and regulations are like armour on that tank.

It can both be true that the US has too many regulations (the tank has too much armour) and that it's in the wrong spots (too much armour in the back and not on the front.)

America needs less regulations in some scenarios, and more regulations in others. It may very well end up that the net result of these combined changes is less overall regulation and also more effective regulation.

Laughable because it’s nowhere near enough.

Sounds like you really want the government to micromanage everything.

Sounds like I think robber-barons are on the rise again.

If you care about high quality products we can start with the OP article and how this system, which is most definitely not capitalism as intended, has directly entailed this nosedive of enshittification for absolutely superfluous and nonsensical reasons. The Soviets succumbed to the exact same mistake, I'm not sure why you would bring them up.

I presume you live in a capitalist society. That means you are free to start your own business and avoid enshittification and nonsense.

Me, I started a game business because nobody else made the game I wanted to play. I started a compiler business because I didn't like the available compilers. I designed a new programming language because the existing languages were not good enough.

I think perhaps it's my fault for how I worded that reply, but to clarify it has scarcely little to do with products at all. They don't matter. I sure hope you still can make your own tools to your hearts desire, but that's not going to fix anything and it never will. I'll emphasize I'm still confused at your first reply, which reads like a non-sequitur to me, and this second reply makes me think we're having wildly different conversations, so I think I'll just leave it at that.

> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.

One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.

These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.

Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.

100%

So many business models today are based on rolling over the customer, on the theory that anything with that much momentum is impressive to new buyers.

They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.

Apple (which you mention earlier) do. I've used their live support at any time of the day to solve issues whether it be a software glitch or having trouble using something I just purchased. The only company that comes close to this level of streamlined, anytime support, is American Express.

If customers just start bugging Microsoft devs directly as though they are customer support (which…technically they should be since they built the product) then maybe productivity would grind to a halt. When all the MBAs running the show start seeing all their JIRA dashboards full bad news then perhaps they’ll think twice?

Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.

Companies that can’t run at a particular scale should definitely not be enabled to do so. But sadly, we seem to not hold them accountable, directly.

Building a product doesn't magically change your role. Devs are not customer support.

What you're saying is basically that the ability to do a task means you technically should do that task. I can definitely mop, but that doesn't make me a janitor, not even technically.

Worse, a software dev may have no experience with IT-style troubleshooting. I've seen this first-hand. And there's no telling what assumptions they might make about how much users do or do not know when offering advice.

>>>Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.

Hamurabbi's code: An architect, or equivalent next of kin, was put to death , if the building he had built killed the owner, or a kin of the owner.

This is why we have courts and judges, to hear complaints and issue remedies when the defendants are unwilling to do so. A better solution would be to reign in arbitration agreements, which are horribly inefficient. Arbitration purports to be lest costly, but it encourages unnecessary litigation by preventing the operation of res judicata, it increases the costs of litigation by preventing class actions, etc. It increases injuries by keeping wrongdoers conduct confidential.

The issue is cost. You're going to have to pay considerably more for a computer to have a human ready to help you with it.

How about giving less profit to the shareholders? How about making customer support legally mandated so companies don't have the "greedy shareholder" excuse?

> How about giving less profit to the shareholders?

Then the shareholders will sell their shares.

> How about making customer support legally mandated

Then you'll have to pay higher prices for the product. Every mandate put on a company costs money and so higher prices are the result.

There is a range between less profit and no profit. As a shareholder, I'd rather have a functional society for all at the cost of a bit less profit, rather than being the richest in a world of ashes.

As a shareholder, you can invest in whatever corporation you like and vote your agenda.

You really are on the side of letting companies steamroll customers throughout this thread. There's what's technically true, and there's the society most of us would prefer to inhabit. I want mine to be less extractive of profits by any means necessary.

Australia has very strong consumer protection laws but international companies still sell products here. They are forced to comply with the regulations and the prices are mostly comparable with other countries. Regulations work.

Multinationals cherish and welcome regulations. They have whole compliance departments for exactly that: obeying regulations.

How’s Australia’s startup scene though? Startups are the hardest hit by regulations.

Fewer startups mean less competition for incumbents. This is how de-facto monopolies appear: through regulating competition out of existence.

Australia's startup scene is doing ok, but the funding model is lacking. There are a few reputable VCs, and very limited government funding. I don't think it's regulations that are cramping Australian startups, I think it's more lack of investment from both private and public sectors. I know many people who are running successful startups in Australia.

I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition. It seems that monopolies in the US are very much protected by a lack of regulation on political donations rather than too much regulation.

> I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition.

Interesting. My belief is that regulations are the most harmful since they raise barriers to startup competition and thus protect monopolies (since startups, due to their hunger, are the most important source of competition in a market - incumbents usually end up in monopolies and cartels instead). We're seeing that here in the EU every day.

But let's explore your point: how exactly do you think lobbying and donations are stymying competition? What's the mechanism at work?

The mechanism is as old as the hills. You pay for favourable conditions for your business, and unfavourable conditions for your competitors. Australia has a classic history of political figures being given very comfortable jobs in the private sector after they've greased the wheel for their largest donors. This applies to tech, communications, finance, property development and probably every other money making sector.

When contracts are awarded to companies based on lobbying and donations it stymies competition.

The following quote is from the report linked at [1]. It's worth reading the entirety of that report.

"the growing politicisation of public service, exemplified by political appointments to government bodies (Griffiths et al. 2022), may spill over into the contract market. Links between politics, donations, and contracts may negatively impact competition and firm entry".

[1]: https://e61.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Political-Economy-...

What you are describing is how governments prop-up incumbents. But this rarely apply to startups, who seldom stand a chance at getting government contracts and the like. Entrepreneurs will ignore those and build the startup from the bottom up, with small customers first.

Of course a less corrupt government could help here, like the x-prize helped SpaceX and electric car subsidies helped Tesla. But that's too much to ask from politicians of most countries.

To actually prevent startups competing and disrupting the market, I maintain that regulations are much more effective: they will prevent entrepreneurs from even thinking of entering and competing highly regulated domains. See the three canonical examples (health care, education and housing) where high prices and scarcity are the name of the game.

I think we're debating around the actual core of the issue: Regulations are only as good or bad as the content of the regulations, and corrupt governments can (and do) ignore and enact regulations at their pleasure.

Ideally, regulations can promote startups and overall market competition. We do see that ideal in some Australian regulations (and I would guess in most countries) but regulations are decided by the government, and that means that their enforcement (or lack thereof) and intent is often pro-incumbent.

I still maintain that regulations on political lobbying and donations would go a long way to open up the playing field for startups. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence of any political party in any country doing more than pay lip service to actually doing this.

Have computer prices gotten considerably cheaper since the days when companies had human support employees? Some components have gotten considerably more expensive, so it seems like they haven't, at least on average.

Relatively speaking yes. My Macintosh Quadra 605 was around $1000 in 1994 and was a low end model at the time. Today that $1000 would be around $2100 or so. I can get an entry level MacMini for $499.

I don't think you can just compare one of the first personal computers with today's hardware.

Price for innovation and corresponding hardware is just way higher then for established tech items

Its like comparing apples vision pro to whatever cheap VR stuff we may get in the future which everyone uses then

Yeah; a better comparison would be with a current generation AI workstation. I’ll randomly go with Razer, since they look pretty and are shipping 5090’s with high-end AMD processors.

$3-5K.

The humans have gotten more expensive.

You have data showing wage increases for it support staff?

With many products, every contact a customer makes with customer service is an opportunity to profit. However, it requires quite a mindset to appreciate this.

You can rig your product reviews by providing above and beyond customer service, for example, warranty claims dealt with in a day with a replacement in the post arriving as if by magic to surprise the customer. Hit them up for a review and they will write a review with meaning, explaining how you fixed their problem, exceeding all expectations. Unless you have done this then you would never know. Although most companies do collect reviews, they don't know the way to do it is to get reviews from the customers that complained rather than the ones that didn't. It is very counterintuitive.

You can always upsell. If the customer has problems with the product then maybe they need a different product or a whole suite of stuff. With software you can always give trials too. Complaining about what comes with Windows? Maybe you need Office. Here you go, a three month trial to tide you over.

Customer service should also be the eyes and ears of the company, to alert product and sales teams to any problems with new products so corrections can be made very quickly.

It is also about having customers for life. It is more cost effective to retain the customers you have rather than churn them.

All of this applies regardless of the company size. There are some caveats though. Nothing can be queued unduly, queues don't save time for anyone and you still have to get all of that queued work done. This means you need team members that work from both the front and the back of the queue, to have a clean queue by the end of day.

If you get it right then customer service is not a cost, it is the exact opposite, at the heart of marketing due to word of mouth goodness that can't be bought so easily. If you can get the upsells to work too, then a customer service department can pay its own way, to profit even.

You also have to recruit people that will go above and beyond. Lots of people have hectic lives with kids and other obligations that make their lives unpredictable. They will need days off, special working hours and other niceties, however, give them a job that they can fit around their life and they will show gratitude with loyalty and hard work.

There are cultural problems why this 'bring it on' approach is not so common. Usually customer service are down there with the pigeons in corporate pecking order. In reality, customer service needs to be at the heart of the company with more than lip service given to the 'customer first' idea.

With companies giving customer service over to AI chatbots, there is plenty of opportunity for companies of all sizes, including Microsoft, to resist the AI temptation and get serious about customer service.

How can the government regulate companies into providing good customer service when they can't even provide good customer service to their citizens?

For the most part customer service is excellent from Swedish government agencies. There are exceptions with either poorly run or intentionally refunded agencies where it is not the case but usually the quality of customer service is excellent.

How can the government regulate car manufacturers when it produces no cars itself?

How are the two at all related

They don't.

What you do is have a real capitalist system with decent antitrust protections and real market competition instead a crony capitalist system where oligopolies can easily push regulators and legislators around.

And then, once you have enabled consumers to vote with their money, they will.

Perhaps some day we could try something other than fixing the problems of capitalism with more capitalism?

You've got the sheep and the wolf in sheep's clothing mixed up.

This kind of oligopolism, rent-seeking behavior, and general corruption are some of the problems capitalism was invented to fix. And the further societies stray away from actively defending a strong market economy, the more those problems start to come back.

We tried that last century.

Real capitalism just hasn't been tried yet /s

I guess they don't want Windows to cost $10000 per licence.

When you buy a Windows license, you expect at least a basic level of support from them in case something goes wrong. It is built into the cost.

Now come on. A basic level of support would not cost Microsoft $9900 - that's absurd to suggest. It may reduce their profit margins a bit, or they may have to increase the price, but it's not like Microsoft has earning problems.

I mean it's one phone call Michael, what could it cost, $9900?

Just use Massgravel and problem is solved :)

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

Even better, just switch to Linux. F** Microsoft.

I have legit licenses for Win 11 and I still use massgrave as it's easier.

LOL. I found that website today and thought it was named "mass grave".

The website IS called that;

https://massgrave.dev/

The Github account is "mass gravel" :-?

it is

https://massgrave.dev/

> When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.

This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...

My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.

But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)

I so wish I could move to Linux, but I extensively use Windows computers via RDP and the Linux RDP clients are just so bad on my eyes. I tried Remmina, rdesktop and FreeRDP. Maybe NX would be a good option but I can't install NX on all of the computers I use. I guess I should shut-up and try to contribute to those projects to make them better.

Have you looked into Rustdesk? The setup isn't complicated, it's basically TeamViewer but local. It provided me with a way better quality than anything VNC based on linux.

When did you last try Remmina (which uses FreeRDP as the backend btw)? Ever since FreeRDP got updated to V3, the RDP experience improved significantly. I use it every day for work stuff and it's been great - folder sharing works, clipboard works, so does audio forwarding and DPI scaling. Oh and RemoteApps too. Honestly I've got zero complaints with it.

A couple of weeks ago. My employer provided a new computer which I loaded with Fedora. I found the colors on Remmina really saturated and harsh. I loaded Win11 because I really disliked it. But, I will try Fedora again since I need to reinstall Win11 due to an account problem I can’t resolve.

I use Remmina all the time. It did take some tinkering but if you play with compression and bit depth settings, you should be able to get it working better. I think even cuddling with the encryption settings helped as well.

RDP worked flawlessly for me back when TSClient was still supported. Remmina and KRDC are always hit or miss.

Strange. I use remmina heavily for RDP to Windows machines and have never had a notable complaint.

> NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy

There's some form of "BIOS-attached license". Don't really know how it works, but I've seen this for many years. Basically all PCs that have the Windows logo have that, and you can install windows on them as many times as you like, without ever having to enter a license key (I suppose this is limited to the same edition level - I've only ever tried this on "enterprise-level" machines that came with windows pro).

This even works for machines that originally came with windows 8 to install 10, and 10 -> 11. I've never tried "forcing" a win11 install on any machine that came with win8.

Yep, device activated vs user activated. It makes sense to have the option in large environments but they really screw end users on this stuff. MS licensing is insane, I have to deal with it at work, and it's unbelievably complicated. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I run Linux at home too. Its annoying, but I sometimes need to run Windows in a WM for Word, as the online version is crap on large complex documents where formatting matters, and interoperability with colleagues keeps me from using LibreOffice Write.

Have you checked out OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice)? It's MSO file format compatibility is vastly superior to LibreOffice, I use it work on files shared by colleagues using MSO and it works fine for the most part.

The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.

I have. Its not bad at all. I also agree that it has better file compatibility. The main thing I came across is that not all the features that I expect are implemented yet, at least in their powerpoint/presentation application.

Another issue that I face is that it is increasingly expected that their would be a shared Word document in OneDrive that multiple people can be working on simultaneously. Its really hard to win sometimes when the infrastructure is all against it. :(

I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.

I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.

So... what's the former way?

It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...

Last I ever bothered to buy a CD key I got it off one of those gaming key sites. I have since moved on to Linux, but you can get a Pro key really cheap on those sites. I refuse to overspend to upgrade what should have been a computer with Windows Pro OOTB. If you spend over 2 grand on any computer you should not be getting Windows Home edition.

I have to ask, why even bother paying some key site? It is violating the terms of the license agreement anyway, so why not just pirate?

I guess if things get ugly they have some (terrible) plausible deniability? “What do you mean my $10 Windows Enterprise key is stolen? I thought that was the going rate. Linux is free”

Who is violating the terms? The seller or the buyer?

If it’s the seller, would Microsoft go after the buyer?

Both. Microsoft would probably never go after the buyer, but I just wondered the justification people buying from the grey market are - legally speaking in many places, you're just paying money to pirate it - it's not a valid license.

It's even more pointless now that I've just given up on Windows and use Linux.

Sail the high seas and you'll never feel cheated again.

Use free software from the get-go and nobody will feel cheated.

sounds good, doesn't work.

I had a similar issue recently and was able to convince the AI agent to give me a phone number to talk to a support representative. They manually fixed my accout and key and gtg in a few minutes.

What a PITA it took until I got a human though.

This appears to be endemic at Microsoft.

I have two Minecraft accounts, several Live.com accounts accrued over the years, and a smattering of Github accounts for various reasons (professional, self-employed, personal),

Logging into Minecraft java a week ago took me 7 logins across various different accounts -- and then it ALSO uses Xbox for auth, which I never set up. And then, the endpoint is blocked for my ISPs IP range so I had to use a VPN and try from a few locations. Bless you, Ohio.

Join the club. They 'stole' three Minecraft accounts from me. I tried their migration tool separately and all they were able to tell me was that old chestnut, "something happened".

same situation. I have 2 different licenses I've purchased via their store, hooked up to my account over the years, and none of them are recoverable.

can you claim it through the small claims court? it's the kind of thing I'd do out of spite.

I could, and maybe I should, but it's just too much effort, time, and money. It's not worth what I paid for the license. If the license was $10k that would be different.

Oddly, I have never bothered to buy a Windows 11 license and somehow do not have any issues with using Windows 11 on any of my computers. Some upgraded, some built from scratch.

So the problem is that MS isn't even consistent about how it enforces licenses.

the license is tied to your account in theory, if you log in with it, it should get activated?

I wish it worked like that! Sadly, it does not. That's why I was using a MS account login instead of a local username/password - I thought that it would be 'automatic'. No such luck.

Wow, this must be a recent change. My license somehow was disassociated from my machine. I was able to get someone to fix it over the phone after some basic troubleshooting. It was a little annoying it happened at all, but at least they fixed it.

Somehow my decade plus expired MSDN licensed Windows keys are still working like champs across multiple machine activations. I think at this point if they stopped working I'd just drop Windows altogether.

I've been using groupon to get licenses for about 10-15 bucks.

This seems like a situation where you could run a pirate kms server and license yourself. I imagine you would gave a strong case should it come to trial.

Call support. They’ll recover the license for you.

Can't. As I said, they don't have any on-phone support anymore. I tried for a couple days but it's not possible to reach a human anymore. No keywords like 'representative' work now. The try to offer automated support or redirect you to webpages, but that's it.

The days of reaching a human at MS are gone.

[dead]

Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a local account.

When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.

Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.

I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers.

If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.

They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.

For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.

The reason they don't meaningfully enforce their copyright on consumer PCs is precisely because they do care about their market share. If you buy a computer with Windows (or get it installed) in what I suspect is the overwhelming majority of the world, it's an 'illegitimate' copy and it works 100% fine, including operating with Microsoft's servers.

As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, but they don't. Because if this were not possible, there'd be billions of more PCs out there running instead what would most likely be Linux. Enabling people to use Windows without paying is a key component of their strategy of maintaining market dominance, especially on a global level.

I think the biggest 'threat' to windows for general users has been mobile, besides that it seems like it's mostly running on momentum from the ecosystem of decades ago. The challenge is that most migrations for established users of any system take effort, and right now the effort of running activation/account requirement bypasses is low effort compared to changing to and learning a new OS.

The way of framing it which works for me is that there doesn't seem to be much reason to move to windows, if you were starting computing with a blank slate and could pick anything, why would someone want to pick windows? Most people need a mobile anyway which serves a lot of consumer needs. Gaming is a big one if you're not happy with mobile/console, but there's the wine/proton on linux route although there's a subset that won't work or has compatibility issues (from minor paper-cuts to major). And then there's those that need specific windows-only software with no alternative elsewhere.

Also note this strategy is in its fourth (or fifth?) decade and is also very successfully deployed by adobe et al. It’s also why Linux won on the headless server, though why FreeBSD didn’t I’m not sure; GPL marketing at the right time, perhaps.

> though why FreeBSD didn’t I’m not sure

The same reason why Ubuntu won the server market (for a while): by capturing the home-desktop/laptop market first, and then worming its way to employer environments by way of familiarity. Linux had broader driver coverage for consumer hardware; there was a time when running *BSD on fragmented consumer hardware was a crapshot.

Linux was already dominant long before Ubuntu.

the answer is because of the AT&T lawsuit against university of California in the 90s that dragged and tainted the BSD code base.

I said Linux won for the same reason as Ubuntu (winning the distro wars), I did not say Linux won because of Ubuntu. Ubuntu:Linux Distros::Linux:server OSes

The funny thing is that I would be totally willing to pay for a license if in exchange for no ads and no needing a Microsoft account.

You can! Windows 11 Enterprise.

Where can a license be bought? When I tried on a legitimate site I got denied for not being a company.

>those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.

To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does.

If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.

Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.

A striking amount of business software runs on Windows because Microsoft was dominant during the peak PC era (e.g. 1990-2010). The companies running that stuff aren't doing so because old guys think Windows is good, they're running it because it's been built already and there's no real reason to change.

The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share.

But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now.

In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.

Hum, how much of the success of azure is due to enterprise customers being in the windows ecosystem already? And what happens when the next enterprises are not?

Around 60% of Azure VMs are Linux. Between that and WSL it sometimes seems like Microsoft is putting more effort into being a Linux company than a Windows one.

Who could have predicted that back in the Slashdot days!

They're putting effort into being a cloud corporate software provider.

Entra, outlook365, and cloud hosted solutions. VMs in the cloud are niche.

>outlook365

You probably meant office365, but it's been renamed to Microsoft365 :)

Do you mean Microsoft 365 Copilot[0]? : )

I realise that a good portion of the references to the product on that page is just "Microsoft 365", but other parts seem to include "Copilot" in the product name for Microsoft's office suite.

[0]: https://www.office.com/

What percentage of new computers are sold running windows again? I suspect the reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Macs were at a bit over 10% market share in q4 2024[1], but it's also worth noting that the PC market is shrinking as a whole. Windows still has most of the pie, but the pie itself is getting smaller, since many find phones to be a better (and cheaper) experience than Windows, and I can't say that I blame them.

I'm curious how inflated the numbers are from business sales, since the default option there is still Windows, even if you don't actually use any software that needs it (i.e. you just need a web browser). Consumer sales of PCs is probably only going to trend downwards, and it only got a small spike from people buying PCs for COVID.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/26/mac-market-share-growing-fast...

>many find phones to be a better (and cheaper) experience than Windows, and I can't say that I blame them.

With that said at least using native apps on phones is becoming more and more of a risk. If you can get away with a browser that's fine. But if you need native phone features you are at the risk of Apple/Google cutting off your entire business for some hidden reason and nearly zero recourse. On that note people have been getting more worried about Apple starting to treat their desktop OS like a phone and locking it down more.

The risk of that happening, while real and problematic, is not a real concern for most people, as the liklyhood of anything happening is really low. Same goes for the OS being more closed of. The normies, to out it that way, are happy with the normal app store experience and won't notice the difference before and after a complete lockdown, since they've never gone outside the normal bounds to begin with.

Even OEMs that have the option to select Linux, e.g. Dell, Lenovo, have "works best with Windows" all over the place, one needs to be rather persistent to track down the Linux as pre-installed OS options.

> If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.

There will be no ChromeOS anymore - just Android - and it will soon be locked down hard so that you need to pay Google or host ads/harvest data for every app.

You just need to make your choice of Tyrant landlord.

The crucial part: these business leaders won't see the ugly consumer side.

Enterprise windows is completely different, in that most of the crap we complain about will either be disable at the MDM level, or from the start depending on the license. A CEO being issued a windows laptop isn't barraged with ads, nor do they care if their account is local or not. It will "just work".

I don’t know, I work for a massive (benevolent of course) corporation and it’s still pushy with Lock Screen ads, copilot, etc… and it definitely doesn’t just work. Maybe for the CEO it does though…

It might depend on how much your IT departements cares about customizing your setups. The efforts described in TFA for instance don't cover auto install scripts which are still free to create whatever local account is needed, provided it's done through the fleet management mechanisms.

Much of the scripts to "debloat" windows also rely on MDM entry points and overriding user preferences with higher privilege.

I remember in the early win7 days when I built computers there were many powertools to debloat the install, I had fun running them.

Doesn't this exist today for W11 that makes most of the complaints mute? Or is MS getting better at the cat/mouse game?

They still exist, like Win11Debloat.

As you point out it's still a cat and mouse game but I assume they work OK. I tend to go the painful way and do most of it myself following instructions, as I'm not comfortable having these tools run as admin on a system. It's not that bad either.

> Lock Screen ads, copilot

We have a mandate on-high to block this crap at the MDM level. It's more about your company than the biz world overall, I think.

That is mostly a thing on US school system.

Do we believe that we’ll be using anything like today’s PCs and operating systems in 10-15 years time? I mean, that’s been the case since the 1980s, but now we have usable (if imperfect) AI.

Two reasons why so at least professionaly:

- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.

- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.

Personally: Yes, I do. Likely, voice assistants and other AI tools will have a bigger market share in a decade, sure. But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work». Instead, I imagine we’ll just continue the trend of laptops and tablets with AI assistants integrated in better ways, and perhaps a wider adoption of AR/VR in some sectors. Tre The tech that could replace today’s PC setup is a neural interface, but I doubt that NeuraLink et al will be anywhere near mainstream in a decade.

> But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work».

Most people, and most workers simply don't do what you call real work that needs a big screen and a keyboard. I think most of the kids at my child's school don't have a computer at home (other than the district issued chromebook) and likely won't ever own a personal computer.

People do everything on their phones. Google recently said Chrome OS is going to end next year... I don't know what schools are going to do.

I don’t doubt that a conventional laptop or desktop will be far less common in a decade.

But both iPads and Android tablets have keyboard cases. Even many phones can these days be plugged into USB-C docking stations that enable the use of a big screen and keyboard when needed. I agree that most non-programmers will probably end up using phones or tablets with an external keyboard, and even for programming it is kinda usable.

Those schools will probably just switch to Android netbooks or Android tablets with keyboard cases.

Still, I think that’s very different from AI technologies killing the PC form factor. The hardware and software might change, but I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.

> I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.

I'm not so sure. What was the interface pre-computer: voice and secretaries. Except the secretaries are now AI, and there is an unlimited supply of them and they don't need a salary or health insurance. Instead of "Ms. Wilson, come here and take a letter" it would be "Hey Google, take a letter"

We're already well on the way. Writing emails with AI is done today. Using AI to take notes in a meeting is possible today. OCR and cameras can handle a lot of "transcribe this printed form to that online form" input tasks today. And it will all be vastly better in 10 years.

I'm sure there will still be a place for screens. We are visually oriented and using paper would be wasteful. I'm not sure the screen + keyboard "workstation" of today will be common in 10 years.

I think mobile tech will be closer to a Star Trek TNG commnicator. A small device perhaps worn as jewelry with an earpiece and some kind of retinal projector for heads-up usage, and less like a rectangular slab of glass in your pocket. Current smart watches are a start, they only need a better way to show more information and they would replace phones for many people.

And of course this all presumes that "office work" as we know it is even a thing. If AI becomes AGI or close to it, what would we need people in offices to even do?

How will we interact with this AI?

Talking to machines is a horrible experience, especially if you’ve got loads of people all trying to do it in an open-plan office.

Operating systems and CPUs may come and go, but there’s plenty of life left in the mouse and keyboard yet.

Call centres manage it; they use headsets.

Alternatively it could be people working from home.

Though, with the state of "prompt engineering", I'm now imagining legions wandering down the street, speaking into Bluetooth headsets, desperately entreating an AI to do the task they've been assigned...

(you get better results if you sound like you're about to cry)

>Call centres manage it; they use headsets.

Eh, what? No, they use headsets to talk to the customer and type on a keyboard.

Worse it's always great when you can hear background noise.

Do you think the constant use of "great" sarcastically will end up with reversing its meaning so people think it just means "terrible"?

Words do that sometimes; it's interesting to see it happen.

Call centers won't exist in 10 years. It will all be AI agents.

If something displaces Windows in the consumer PC market, I wonder how long it is before those new OS consumers start to want to use what they're comfortable with in the business as well. Windows will start to feel like some weird legacy system. By the time business starts moving away, it will be too late for Microsoft to save.

This already sort of happened with kids using chrome books and android phones getting their first office job and having no clue about windows.

I think you're right that they don't care about the money from Windows licenses, but they seem to be pivoting to trying to pull data from consumer desktops for AI training. That's arguably way more valuable and no one besides Apple (or potentially Google) gets that kind of data.

As more and more public accessible areas start becoming so inundated with AI generated material, that makes the walled gardens where generated content is not AI generated that much more valuable for training.

Whether they care about consumer market or not, they know that most of the consumers aren't going to care about this problem. Hardly anyone would bat an eye at using their already existing Microsoft account/email address and internet connection to log on to their PC. They're almost 100% headed to get on the internet to do whatever anyways. These people are connected to the cloud 24/7. In the same way hardly any Apple user cares that they need an Apple account to get into a bunch of things/phone/whatever. This is a nerd/tech-niche problem.

> For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.

Yes, and making corporations and smaller businesses donate their stuff via official spyware os, clouded "services" and "agents" is perfect opportunity for spyware creator :) It is hard to blame them for wanting this :) Except that, probably, will explode in their faces...

Small businesses don't like creating Microsoft accounts either. Limit 30 software activations per email address or something like that. And retail Office stops working after 365 days offline.

"How did Microsoft go bankrupt?"

Two ways: slowly then all at once.

It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing.

Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I’ve had multiple friends who are not tech savvy ask me about steam os. Because they basically only use their gaming PC for gaming, and they are frustrated with windows.

None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.

Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(

I don't run Windows at home. My gaming PC is running Ubuntu. Very rarely do games not work perfectly. It's also usually underfunded indie games.

10 is no longer supported in 7 days, unless you activate ESU. Officially this requires a Microsoft account, but there's always the Massgrave way.

PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely.

Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.

I think you can approach this 3 different ways:

Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.

Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.

Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.

[1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...

I don't worry much about that. I has been often said that PCs would be dying. Seems it was mostly marketing. It survived consoles and Xbox is probably dead. I have no illusions that Microsoft has the same mismanagement in store for Windows, it didn't have sensible patronage for years.

I don't think it's dying, what I think has been happening and will continue to happen is that unless you're an enthusiast the PC presence is gradually being shrunk and tidied away in a corner and forgotten by many. For many having a 'home PC' would be a relic, similar to how they don't have anything like a dedicated stereo system for playing audio which might have taken up a significant amount of space (possibly more than a PC) years ago.

This is definitely not the case. PC ownership is near record highs right now. I cited the stats in a peer comment. [1] The only real hurdle is perceived cost. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.

Mobile, and to some degree tablets, just offer a generally poor interface for many aspects of computing from gaming to content creation, and I think that's mostly intractable.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45499483

Compared to most people that don't have a dedicated PC it is certainly true. But for media consumption in general PC is quite fine.

Sure, but I guess this depends on what model you have of someone doing media consumption, are they going to fire up their PC to watch/listen to media, or their phone, or (smart) TV, or a smart speaker?

I’d wait until they dip below 90% market share before I’d say it was “dying”

There is no Microsoft in this story. There is the structure of the company which roll up to the CEO. And they have 1 priority: make the shareholders happy.

This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere.

This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there.

And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.

The thing is, Microsoft did plenty of user-hostile stuff back then. Games for Windows Live with its weird DRM and making games unplayable after shutting down, for instance. And the push for using all kinds of "Live" services. Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days. .NET framework applications had their own special kinds of installers, Microsoft Silverlight thrived for a short moment, and the introduction of their (initially mediocre) antivirus program also wasn't well-received by the industry.

They just never shoveled their crap into the OS itself. It was always recommended addons, recommended freebies, and recommended optional features that came along with other products.

When MS started unifying everything into Just Windows, all of the crap they pulled with separate software packages merged into one digital blob, Windows 8/8.1/10/11.

With Windows 8, I can at least appreciate the attempt to unify things so they are easier to use for consumers (if only they hadn't bunged up Windows Phone, repeatedly). I wonder what Windows would be like if they hadn't tried to the Windows 8 experiment.

> Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days

That's essentially Microsoft Account nowadays, which went thru few rebrandings on the way. In XP it was promoted via Windows Messenger with popup message which for less experienced people would suggest that in order to access the Internet they need this "passport".

Considering how many sites now offer (still optional) logins with apple/meta/microsoft accounts I wonder if the goal here is to be the provider of identity for sites and services and at the same future-proofing for any digital ID checks govt's may introduce

There was for a few years a South Korean national identity scheme which linked your national ID card to .. an ActiveX control. Making it not only IE-only but effectively tying it to IE6.

Oh yes I remember reading news about that and being dumbfounded how's that actually possible

> compatible with Windows programs

It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.

To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.

To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.

I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?"

MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.

There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.

So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.

Office 365 is absolutely not what you seem to describe. I run a small non-profit and I am banking hard on Office 365 while I use a Mac.

O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.

I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.

Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929.

That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.

A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999.

The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.

CPU is almost never a limiting factor for workers. RAM is since they generally need a keep a bunch of browser tabs open to memory hogging things like Outlook/Teams/JIRA but RAM speed they probably won't notice.

If they have 3 external 4k displays, their company will probably shell out for Macbook.

Apple is still selling the M1 Macbook Air for 600$ at Walmart (only in the US).

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...

The thing is, the storage on Apple devices is so unbelievably fast, you can get by on 8GB just fine. Even with clogging up hundreds of Chrome tabs. Swap is barely noticeable.

Memory management on Windows devices in contrast is utterly painful. The RAM itself is already slower simply due to physics (can't beat the SoC proximity with anything socketed), storage I/O usually has to cross through a lot of chips (same thing, Apple attaches storage directly to the SoC), and then the storage itself that you find on cheap devices is actually SATA under the hood or bottom of the barrel NVMe, no competition at all to Apple. Oh and the storage and RAM are both adequately cooled on Apple devices, so Apple can drive them much much harder unlike the Windows world where often enough the only thing that gets cooled is the CPU and GPU.

Yes, I do think Apple wants far too much money for RAM and SSD storage upgrades, but it's undeniable that even the more expensive ends pack a lot of punch.

Mac costs more but are easier to support from an IT perspective, at least that's what many say.

I work in a large enterprise and I see more and more people move to macOS every year. We use Office 365. I run the Office apps on my Mac. We backup with OneDrive. We collaborate with SharePoint. We use our AD accounts to login on macOS, use InTune to manage endpoints. My Mac even has Defender on it now.

Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.

I’m willing to bet it’s about the hardware. Windows laptops almost all universally suck in at least a few areas: display, touchpad and wake from sleep at the most inconvenient times. Give me a MacBook which natively boots Windows and I’ll use it, if only because it has WSL2. If it boots Linux, even better. (Naturally, those three usually broken things must work on either.)

It depends on the industry... go to any (non-ms based) tech company and every developer will want a mac. Nobody will chose windows if asked.

Other less developer related companies are moving more towards mac as well.

This is just my anecdote between being in/out of tech for the last 25 years and have gone from: "Here is your windows laptop" to "Do you want windows or macos" to "here is your macbook"

Now, if they would just give us the Max.

I've got the same experience, just saying that if I was offered 'here's a mac, we can put windows on it' I'd actually pick that option, because I love the hardware, but I'm very not impressed with macos.

Most of the office apps sans excel are basically just the web apps though, office 365 for the most part is cross platform.

LibreOffice is not a real contender to replace MS Office. The real alternatives are:

- OnlyOffice - WPS Office - Google Docs.

> To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.

> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365

In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.

Large enterprises are switching to Google Sheets. The largest private employer in Australia, for example, pretty much has switched to Sheets now.

Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.

That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)

WINE it is. I can't see any point in playing cat and mouse with an actively hostile OS. When a new Windows update starts stealing IMAP credentials[1] before the modding community catches on, it's game over for the user. Better to not use anything based on Windows.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453

New Outlook is exactly the sort of thing that the modders would not want you to use anyway.

Ah, young people. This is the company that innovated a brand new style of monopolization and then lost a monopoly case about it.

I'm not sure if Microsoft knows it, but it doesn't care about or need Windows anymore. Office has native apps and is on the web, Xbox is doing its own things, dotnet has been freed from Windows, and Azure doesn't need Windows. Computing is generally moving away from the personal computing model, so Windows is just less relevant.

I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market.

They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.

We'll see how that works out for them.

They also just botched a price increase.

Microsoft is floundering right now.

XBox Game Pass looks a lot like the last straw to me. Looks like a(nother) cash grab.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." - Don Mattrick

Office on the web sucks though. Slow AF and can't handle large documents.

There's always ReactOS[1], a project for a bug-for-bug compatible Windows clone. It used to mostly aim at Windows 9x compatibility the last time I'd checked, though, but that could probably change. And if anyone wants to create a Win7 clone, at least some of the groundwork has already been made.

[1]: https://reactos.org/

Sorry, but ReactOS is not seriously usable. Not to insult the work done on it but it is an experimental OS.

"Compatibility with Windows programs" is a massive undertaking in the first place, as evidenced by the huge amount of development effort that has gone into Wine without quite reaching 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. (The level of compatibility they've achieved is truly impressive but it's really difficult to get to 100% for a large existing base of arbitrary applications.)

Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years.

I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky.

And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.

> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand.

Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore.

It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.

Pretty much.

I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.

Nowadays new Windows versions are like some unwanted background noise. I don't even know at what point Windows 10 stopped being the new version and 11 came out, but it went totally unnoticed to me until I heard that Windows 10 was close to EOL a couple of months ago. And then you start dreading the moment that you'll have to migrate and uninstall all the Xbox crap again that they force on you, etc.

>I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.

Lol. You can verify your claims in 1 minute just by simply googling

It is still huge topic

I liked Windows 7. I also liked Windows XP SP2 before that.

But you’re right that since Windows 8, Windows is just something I’ve tolerated.

That being said, Windows 11 seems nice, but it looks like Microsoft is pulling the same stuff again.

Not true. I like Windows 11, and I think it's the best desktop OS out there.

Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.

I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)

I'm not parent and Windows 11 is my least favourite desktop OS, but there are some things where I prefer Windows to Mac OS, for example multi monitor user experience, or the way full screen windows work (F11) and the ease of maximising windows without having to double click on the title bar. Also I like the way home/end/pgup/pgdown keys work. I much prefer how it renders text on non hidpi screeens. Finally I like how there is only one taskbar and no top bar, which results in more real estate on small displays.

Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).

> Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.

Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:

* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.

* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)

> UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)

We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess.

Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me.

And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault.

My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those.

edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.

> edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.

200% scaling works if you only want "looks like 1920x1080", but if you have a 27" 4K display, I'd typically want "looks like 2560x1440" or 150% scaling - if you do that on macOS, the desktop is rendered at 5120x2880 and then downscaled to 3840x2160. So you're getting both higher resource draw from rendering the desktop at a higher resolution and losing pixel-perfect rendering.

It won't be a problem for most people, but it's enough of a problem for me that I won't use macOS with scaled displays.

>The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached.

That sounds like a (graphics driver) bug. It's not something I ever experienced on Windows 10, even when occasionally connecting an additional display set to 150% scaling. I believe you, though, bugs do happen.

>not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.

I think his point is that on macOS you pretty much have to use 200%, whereas on Windows it can be any value (though multiples of 25% are recommended).

> that sounds like a (graphics driver) bug.

It wouldn't surprise me, although this is a bog-standard-fare enterprise laptop, a 5 year-old full Intel affair. No dedicated GPU or anything fancy.

But, for a long time, I had weird issues with display output on Windows. It would refuse to output 4k@60Hz without doing a stupid plug-unplug-replug-just-at-the-right-time dance, even though it worked on Linux. It took a good 3 years for that to work reliably.

And, in the beginning, those 5k screens only worked at 4k for some reason. Again, no issue on Linux.

But when any of the above situations happened, the state was actually correctly reported, as in 4k@30 Hz, or the 5k screen running at 4k. That's not the case now, everything says what it should, but the image is not sharp.

That's the only situation where I use Windows with scaling, so don't have any easy way of figuring which component is broken. All I can say is that the hardware itself seems to work fine.

I like windows 11 family settings. I can let my kids play Minecraft on old corporate castaway Dells, which I setup from bios/pe to do a clean reinstall. Then I can manage screen time limits and content restrictions from an app on my phone. All free.

And your proprietary vendors manage privacy limits for both of you.

> Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.

Microsoft have done 180's in the past. I still hope that at some point they'll see the light and what you say here above will suddenly click and become evident to them. Windows, and DOS before that, did not succeed by holding customers as hostages.

Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.

I remembered something weird like this, & went looking for coverage last week. I thought it'd maybe gotten divied up between Azure Services and like some ads or online experience thing? I ended up giving up, so much noise and I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I'd love to see some coverage. Incredible seeing Windows broken up like that & internally sold for parts, just total throwing it to the MBA wolves to milk some money out of, it felt like & seems like.

I remember listening it from Paul Thurrott in a podcast, and it wasn't only 2018, it was reorganized several times during Satya's lead. no wonder it sucks

As a .NET developer for 20+ years I’m down to my last Windows box - a gaming rig I pretend I have time to play on. Everything else is a Mac.

mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.

Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.

Mac window management using gestures has been miles ahead of anything available in Windows for over a decade.

That's news to me. I've got a Magic Trackpad right in front of me and I'm still using it to tile windows into corners.

Hasn’t been true for years now as a 10+ year mac and windows user

> I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it

Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.

But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.

> mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.

There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys".

Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.

Raycast is all I need. AeroSpace if tiling windows is your thing.

Damage has been done, Windows has become synonymous with user-hostile ad/spyware OS. Everything under the "Windows" brand is meaningless to me now.

Can't think of a single feature Windows could add to get me to switch back from Linux.

If you _have_ to use Windows 11, check out this useful tool called Win11Debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

This is another good one: https://christitus.com/windows-tool/

Does this allow to:

- remove all this Games & XBox related stuff? - remove everything pre-installed but not used stuff? (Internet Explorer legacy?) - remove all this "fancy" Icons & links: Video/Music etc. in Explorer - deselect to install most of all these Background Services?

And: Does it work for the Windows Server versions as well?

> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand

Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?

Their reputation is irrelevant, at least whilst they maintain an OS monopoly. Enterprise customers don't care because all the issues you described are not present on Enterprise editions. The vast majority of users want a machine that "just works".

I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.

Enterprise edition is as much of a clownshow as the others. I actually run one such edition at work and since a few weeks ago I've noticed in the "home" screen of the settings a new tile, inviting me to add my microsoft account to benefit from something or other.

Now, this is a machine I mostly use for goofing out, so it actually has my microsoft account connected to it. It's fully entra id joined: I log into my windows session with my office 365 account, which has a full license (p2 or whatever it's called), I can see the bitlocker key in entra id, the works.

Now, curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I figured I might just as well click that button. Guess what? It didn't work! It apparently doesn't support business accounts!

On my home pc (pro edition, which I use for photoshop and the occasional game), which does have a consumer microsoft account, that tile doesn't show up.

Who needs a brand when you have a monopoly?

> maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.

What made Windows great were the contracts with hardware manufacturers to have it installed by default on every single PC ever sold.

> When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.

I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy.

(WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)

> Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs.

Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.

I'm a linux fan but calling linux user-focused is insane.

I think perhaps you are conflating user-friendly and user-focused.

Linux, and open source in general, is infinitely more user-focused than anything from Microsoft, since open source is often built for users and by users.

But if you don't have great computer skills already, Linux can be extremely un-friendly the moment you step off the beaten path.

Linux is user-friendly. It is just very particular about who its friends are.

I mean, unless you know the various arcane aspects of Windows, it's pretty hilariously un-friendly when you step off the path, too. After a decade of using Gnome exclusively, whenever a friend asks for help with Windows, all I can do is shrug and suggest reinstalling and/or living with the pain.

It's user-focused in the sense that the user's goals drive the design. The good non-profit distributions, such as Debian and Arch, would never even try to require or push an online account, since that is contrary to the user's interests.

Not disagreeing with you, but your comment brought back memories of Ubuntu One, and the amazon spyware(?) search thing. Ubuntu is kind of the Windows of the GNU/Linux world in that they repeatedly do user-hostile things that test everyone's limits.

Yeah, I would not use Ubuntu if I can help it. I'd still rather use it over Windows. This is why I specifically said "The good non-profit distributions," and not "Linux distributions" or some other broader phrase.

I'm sure that's why they weren't included in the examples of "the good non-profit distributions". It's not like Ubuntu is going to be overlooked. But they are malicious.

The snap disaster really was the final nail in the coffin for me. That bug report about ~/snap has to be the hottest bug in their bugtracker, and they simply don't seem to give a shit and pretend it's fine. All the while naive users like my father or colleagues at my workplace shoot themselves in the foot by thinking "what's that folder doing in my home directory? Delete." I'm not sure if that's still the case, but there was a time when that simply hosed your whole snap installation.

It's also completely ridiculous when you run "docker run ubuntu; apt install whatever" only to find out that "whatever" is now a snap and won't run w/o getting into nested containerization. For packages that got the snap treatment, window tracking for the Gnome dash was broken for ages if, god forbid, you wanted to create a custom .desktop file to add some parameters. Completely broke the custom launchers I created.

I created bug reports, I tried to work with them. Others did, too. Some of these reports approach 10 years now.

I am purging Ubuntu from all of my employers systems, replacing it with RockyLinux. Only one major application still to go. Friends and family get Debian, that transition is already completed.

> get Debian

I want to do the same, but there was some heavy discord at the top of the community a year or so ago that left me fearing for the org's future. If there was a satisfactory resolution, I haven't heard about it.

Anyone been following this?

That's concerning to hear. What discord? The number one thing I want from Debian is predictability, dependability. Other than that, it's not even that great of a distro. I don't use it for my own machines.

Nobody forces you to use Ubuntu. Thats the thing. If Ubuntu fucks up, I can switch to another distro at the blink of an eye and nothing of value was lost.

Developer goals drive the design, not users. It's how we ended up with such navel-gazing insanity as GNOME 3.

I think in Linux developers drive the design more than users.

Linux developers are the primary users of Linux if you think about it

There are no primary users. And no, Linux developers are a minority.

Lot of network admins, sysadmins, security -types.

Only for given value of user...

If user is linux nerd well yes. For more casual users there is way too many weird annoyances and problems. Maybe not with single version, but migrating between or at end of LTS support...

Linux is user focused but not user friendly. Of course there are exceptions, anyone can use a steamdeck without ever having to leave the steam app.

I beg to differ. There is less corporate BS on Linux than any mainstream OS.

The software if largely by users for users.

Obviously it caters to the power user, but it also works well for extremely novice users. It’s those savvy with Win/Mac that get screwed switching. I’d encourage them to put a bit more into trying.

I don’t even mind logging in on a personal laptop but we have shared computers at work to operate machines. It does not make any sense to login with your account in one of those.

Developing a new consumer-grade OS is literally not possible. I don't mean it would take a herculean effort like the software ecosystem issue takes to address, I mean actually not possible regardless of how much effort any development team put in. Virtually all hardware on the open market is made for Windows, largely powered by proprietary, closed-source drivers. Linux gets some afterthought from a percentage of vendors, but even for it, hardware support is in an absolutely atrocious state. Hardware vendors will obviously not give the time of day to any uppity new OS. This relegates any attempt to a hobbyist project targeting virtual machines or obsolete hardware. The only way a new player could enter the game is by using Apple-level money to develop their hardware in-house, but any kind of corporation fronting Apple money to do that would certainly not be aiming to produce a user-driven experience.

Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc.

If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.

That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.

> It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.

ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.

Not really, the same people are doing their best to kill XBox brand as well.

By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed.

Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.

Two weeks ago, after Microsoft reset my default apps twice in a week, I bought an external drive, backed up all my stuff and wiped Windows.

I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.

I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.

I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.

I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.

That's an interesting point. To what extent does AI support make Linux on the desktop more viable? Reminds me of a discussion recently that said something similar, that developing in Rust is easier now that you can have another machine do battle with the borrow checker, haha.

To extend, maybe someone could build a "SysAd AI" distribution that administers itself given natural language directions? Let me know if anyone wants to invest. ;-)

My example: I installed Debian 13 recently. I installed on the second SSD of my laptop, so I can dual boot and keep working with Debian 11 on the first SSD.

I encrypt my disks. Debian 13 can use the hardware encryption of my Samsung SSD, 11 didn't. The installer offered me the option and I accepted it. That nearly bricked the SSD because of (I'm not totally sure) a mismatch between the block size of the file system and the block size required by the SSD encryption. The installer should have made a check and at least warned me. It did nothing of that and the laptop didn't boot. I couldn't even change the partitions on that disk. It enforced its encryption and refused to do anything. I appreciate that but it left me without my disk. I asked questions to either chatgtp or Claude, found the problem and after a few attempts I got the right sequence of commands to unblock the SSD and get an empty one. I reverted to the standard OS based encryption and all is well now. I would have had to dig deeply into forums and learn the meaning of those commands. AI saved me a lot of time. Is this a Linux only thing or a Windows installer would have made the same mistake? No idea.

LLMs have probably trawled through ArchWiki+StackOverflow and can enough content to help you debug your system. That plus a few “are you sure” responses to LLM hallucinations have gotten me far.

So much Linux advice on the web is woefully outdated. Like answers for Ubuntu 8 still sometimes come up high in my search results. True that some things are still the same, but not many, especially pre-systemd.

I write in the prompt the distro and its version and so far no much problem with old answers. If anything, it made me realise that some knowledge I had is outdated.

I made a Gemini Gem with some of my preferences (vi not nano, Ubuntu LTS, my hardware) and it's been quite efficient and on-point. A few times it forgets to check ancillary contexts and I have to feather things back on course.

Enough things have changed in Linuxland in recent years that some of those diversions, as you pointed out, helped me work from old knowledge to new knowledge.

I had to fix a kiosk style linux desktop that had suddenly changed its touch input behaviour from touch to cursor today. ChatGPT gave me the steps immediately for troubleshooting, wrote me a udev rule and explained the potential reasons it could have happened and offered to walk me through the process of isolation. I suspect 99% of user problems in Linux can be solved this way.

There's a catch-22 in that the average Linux user is pretty loudly opposed to AI and so it appears hard for pro-AI software to gain footing in the space. Granted, most AI tools are Linux-friendly ATM, but my uneducated guess is that a larger % of Apple/Windows users use AI daily than Linux users

Agreed. We, the Linux crowd, are pretty big on understanding what our machines are doing, which is hard with LLMs. But I'd wager that a distribution that brings a local open source LLM for system administration tasks would find interest. Train it on man-pages and off you go ;)

Yes, though the idea would be to make Linux more viable for regular folks, and a sysad on their side should help.

I had a similar issue, after cleaning up a Windows machine for someone else, making sure Firefox with uBlock was running. I took a look at it a few weeks later and there was some bullshit Microsoft Bing search bar or AI thing on the toolbar. Wiped, installed Linux.

Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.

Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.

> Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.

I tried to have a gaming setup with Linux (SteamOS and Bazzite) but both failed when I tried to connect more than one Bluetooth controller and they'd be unable to distinguish them or disconnect everything after a few minutes, it was a frustrating experience.

This depends on the bluetooth chip and its driver. It works better on some than others.

I tested three pieces of hardware with different chips: T480, X670E Taichi, USB Bluetooth dongle

All worked better with Windows than Linux. It may depend but I hoped at least one would be good..

Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't care about the occasional admin who manages to uninstall Windows in favor of Linux. Since Windows is the default OS on most machines, Microsoft is already making it up in volume.

What flavor of Linux did you end up going with? Why?

Some years ago when an older Macbook Air of mine need a bit of Linux upgrade TLC I cycled through a bunch of linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc) and found that Ubuntu had more automatic built-in support for the hardware and had no 1st hour niggles. So I kept it.

When I decided to wipe Windows off my desktop, I started with Fedora because I wanted more container/package consistency with some of the other environments I interact with, and I thought I wanted some of the bare-bones Gnome stuff. But Fedora just didn't feel right.. it was uglier than Ubuntu, the Super-key action was a bit jankier, I missed the menu, I had to manually configure the NVIDIA drivers, and the flatpaks didn't really seem like a huge improvement to me.

Anyway, I wiped Fedora and went again with Ubuntu. I feel like that last round of polish they add to it, and some of their device driver defaults, just work better for me. I have had no issues with snaps though I had to learn to mount external directories over symlinks for things like Thunderbird's snap security for relocated profile stores (moved my profile off the SSD and over to the internal spinning disc). But that was easy.

I tried Linux Mint before and thought about Pop_OS but decided to stick with one of the major distros. Ubuntu has won two of my recent "let's try a bunch of distros" so I think that itch has been quieted for a while.

I will say, for Linux in general, after configuring all the apps I use on the daily (browsers, Obsidian, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc) my Linux storage on / takes up all of 35GB of storage on a 256GB SSD. I am unreasonably pleased by that.

I recently bought a big new desktop and before putting Windows 11 on it I decided to check out Linux (Mint, can't even remember why that one). The experience was amazing, everything worked out of the box and every Windows game I tried ran perfectly thanks to Steam's Proton.

I still went ahead and reinstalled Windows 11 on it. Suffice to say if I knew what it was going to be like, I'd have stayed on Linux.

I've been a windows user at home and professionally since 2.0 (as a bit of a toy) and 3.0+, never felt comfortable on macos, etc, so as close to a fanboy as it gets. But the love story is over.

I doubt it’s going to happen, but a part of me prays that people will eventually get sick Microsoft’s increasing bullshit and it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Gnome has genuinely gotten pretty great in the last couple years, and I think a lot of former Windows would genuinely like it if they gave it a chance, and virtually any Linux you install will have less tracking bullshit than Windows.

I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks, which I suppose are “Linux”, but not what I would consider the “Linux Desktop”

I think people will sooner just start hard breaking Windows ISOs just to get rid of MS's garbage (arguably already the case if you use Rufus, which customizes the OOBE setup to already reject checks and tracking if you tick the boxes. They also have a checkbox to iirc disable the TPM check that's killing a lot of older device support because there's nothing in W11 that actually relies on a TPM, it's just an artificial restriction from Microsoft to kill old hardware), which will just lead to people doing what they've already been doing with Microsoft's stuff: pass it around like arcane knowledge that becomes increasingly difficult to find as it gets ingested by dodgy spam sites to the point where you're entering registry keys that either fix your problem or send everything to a third party.

Microsoft is a level of entrenched that Linux practically won't be able to beat for reasons that have little to do with technical viability and everything to do with legacy tools, having software that works with business formats (Office; any other office equivalent on Linux will still have compat issues and as long as those exist, they won't be a valid replacement - for much the same reason, although not fully locked to their platform, Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption) and video game DRM on popular titles keeping them basically in that position forever.

> there's nothing in W11 that actually relies on a TPM, it's just an artificial restriction from Microsoft to kill old hardware

untrue; bitlocker, an important thing for businesses, is far more secure with a TPM. Lots of things are more secure with a TPM, but people who think that Microsoft requires a TPM to sell more copies of Windows will never, ever, believe that to be the case.

Windows is a relatively small portion of Microsoft's revenue generation these days. Windows used to be the main breadwinner for Microsoft, but that has all changed now that Office is a subscription and Azure exists. That smaller portion of the revenue pie is why Windows has stupid shit like suggestions and tons of preinstalled crap: it matters a lot less who is put off by Windows than it used to.

The TPM is a genuinely good thing. Windows DOES use it. You can write applications which use it as well, if you want to. Short of any hardware bug in the TPM (which did happen once) it is capital-S Secure, as I understand it.

I had to invest a bit of time to get my NixOS install to play well with secure boot and the TPM.

Something Windows was doing for free (time-wise).

Edit: my point was agreeing the TPM is useful which is why I spent time making Linux "more Windowsy" in this case.

> Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption

I tried their online versions of Lightroom and Photoshop in Firefox on Linux, and I am quite happy to continue paying the subscription. It definitely takes less clicking there to remove an unwanted bird from the sky in a photo than it would take in GIMP or RawTherapee.

With PhotoGIMP, Gimp is pretty usable, and I’d dare to say it can handle like 90% tasks (if not 100%) an average Joe has. If not for this beer weird interface, that would be a pretty usable piece of software. There are aspects that are much better than Photoshop.

For basic usage (crop, edit screenshots) I go for Pinta and can recommend. It’s fast, and usable too. No need to throw even more money into Adobe.

> I think people will sooner just start hard breaking Windows ISOs

Hasn't it always been the case? Nobody buy licenses besides companies right?

My uncle taught me how to torrent ~20 years ago, he was already cracking stuff for the whole family, he passed away but his legacy lives through me, I have never seen or heard about anyone buying a windows license in my entire life

You understand the situation better than most do here. The anti-cheat technologies built into competitive games is huge for me. I don’t enjoy gaming without it. That’s a big statement. When you simply don’t enjoy competitive gaming unless it’s on Windows.

Maybe it's time for the Linux version of WSL. Wine is already that for some subset of things - maybe the best way to run Win32 software in 2030 could be on Linux...

Is not supporting TPM an issue in terms of some app compability though? I was investigating whether to upgrade an old computer from windows 10 to 11 and that was said somewhere online. I don't know if its true or fearmongering.

Office and some other “modern auth” apps can store MFA-equivalent tokens in the TPM to minimise the number of “tap the thing on the phone” prompts during single sign on.

I discovered this when I recovered a dead laptop’s disk image to a VM and the sudden absence of a TPM killed all of my cached Office credentials.

>I doubt it’s going to happen, but a part of me prays that people will eventually get sick Microsoft’s increasing bullshit and it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. [...] I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks,

Most people will stay on Windows... even with all the increasing annoyances from Microsoft... because there's too much important software that runs only on Windows.

And workarounds such as Linux Wine emulator or QEMU virtual machines are still not enough because lots of Windows software won't run in those environments for various compatibility reasons.

E.g. I can't migrate a friend to Linux because her embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM. It doesn't work by passing it through as a USB device to a "Windows virtual machine" under Linux.

Other examples are Adobe Photoshop, CAD software like SolidWorks, etc. Too much inertia out there with Windows-only software.

If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.

I disagree with the reasoning "Because there's too much important software that runs only on windows."

My disagreement isn't because wine or proton exist, it's because most people only use a web browser. They check their email, watch tiktok and netflix, and write documents. 90% of people would have all their computing needs met by a basic chromebook.

No professional users exist in the world. All of these expensive expert tools are just illusions.

The thread was about "most people" and "90% of people." The claim wasn't that there's not a market for Windows.

Only 10% of people who use computers have a job with any professional requirements. All of those expert tools are faking their usage statistics and market share research.

You're going to need to cite your statistics about the specific Windows-only professional requirements and how many people need them instead of continuing the snark chain.

Here's an example to start: https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/mobile-vs-desktop...

> 15% of adults in the U.S. only use mobile devices to access the internet.

You're down to 85% already who even have the possibility of using your unicorn Windows-only software.

Yes, CNC machinists, mechanical engineers, and graphics designers exist. No, they're actually not the majority of the population. Also keep in mind this thread was talking about personal computers and not just work computers; just because some cashier's required to use a proprietary Windows XP program on their cash register doesn't mean they need to use Windows at home. Your argument is restricted to the small proportion of people who're either required or desire to do day job stuff on their personal PCs (of which not all of them actually need that highly specialized software you're referring to).

> embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM

While I don't have any sort of built up library of work or experience with a specific propriatary software, consider reccomending Inkscape + the Ink/Stitch extension to do embroidery designs.

I bought a Husqvarna Designer Jade, and the included windows-only software was a 'Lite' version, with an upsell for more advanced features (and pricing that was an additional 25-50% of the embroidery machine itself!), and I suspect a hardware dongle since I spotted references to it. I've been able to get by Ink/Stitch for the simple hobbyist jobs we've needed to do. The machine's USB port just expects a usb storage device, and the ink/stitch software can write the .vp3 files it needed to run a job.

Ink/Stitch (https://inkstitch.org/) is a F/OSS option for a lot of embroidery machines... maybe not hers, but worth a look.

I've been using Ink/Stitch for awhile, and it has an extraordinarily steep learning curve compared to manufacturer specific software. Most of the information you need to run it safely without getting tangles or breaking needles is not published by sewing machine vendors, and you have to trial+error it with ink/stitch. You can get there eventually, but it'll take a lot of frustration.

> If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.

Some streaming services don't work on Linux, the ones that do have degraded video quality, and it generally feels like streaming services are deliberately trying to break the Linux experience because it's associated with piracy.

You can fix thst fairly easily, with piracy.

That's a separate kind of failure.

It was enough to get me to try Linux again, and it was pretty eye opening for me. My work laptop is a $3,200 USD Dell 5570 from 2023. I bought a Beelink SER5 on amazon on discount because it was an older model around $300. I installed Ubuntu on the SER5. I've used gentoo and other distros, I wanted to use the computer, not configure it, that's why I went with Ubuntu. That little Beelink box runs circles over the Dell, it's embarrassing. Granted, the Dell has a bunch of corporate stuff that kills the performance, but I'm just happier using the Linux box. Luckily JetBrains tools, VSCode, Obsidian work just fine, which is what I use it for most of the time. I did install a steam game for giggles and it works. Like Dr. Seuss says in Green Eggs and Ham "Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say." I still have a Windows tower though...

If you have the space on your main drive you could probably shrink the partition a few hundred gigs and dual boot linux on it.

Swap over whenever you need something on Windows, easy peasy.

I did consider that. I've had more than one experience of screwing things up. The $300 investment was an insurance policy against me doing that again :) . With how happy I am with a cheap box it might be something to consider when I have a free weekend to mess with it... Or when a Windows Update installs more stuff that I don't want.

I really like stuff to work. My tinkering days are limited.

I think linux should be on a dedicated drive. Theoretically Windows should coexist with other operating systems. Realistically it nukes dual-boot setups with great regularity. It is called "win" after all...

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=windows%20breaks%20dual%...

Might happen. I told my entire family I would not support their windows installs past 10 and 11 is full of spyware. Half bought a mac and half opted to install Linux. IF all you want to do is a browser. Linux is honestly very easy to use.

I got frustrated dealing with my brother's laptop, threw Ubuntu on it, and never had to touch it again. Like, he got 4 or 5 extra years out of that clunker due to that switch.

He's really not a computer guy, and he picked it up no problem.

I pretty much said that to my wife; I told her that I will buy her a Windows computer if she wants, but I will not play sysadmin for it.

If she called my bluff I probably would have still helped her, but she was happy enough to use a Mac.

I know quite a few longtime Windows users who are interested in moving to Linux today because of what Microsoft has done to Windows 10/11. But I'm not too optimistic that they'll last long. Things still break a lot on my Linux devices (laptops mostly). I can't boot from a suspended state, I've been locked out of my system after an upgrade, and I've been tortured by cyclical dependency package conflicts. Getting a few pages out of my printer with the Linux drivers sometimes takes several attempts because it just locks up at random. KDE keeps breaking my two-monitor layout for some reason I haven't bothered investigating. I can get around those problems, but Windows, with all its problems, is more stable and hands-off. I use the Enterprise version and turn off as much garbage as possible, but that's a one-time annoyance.

With Windows 10 going out of support soon, I suspect there will be an increase in Linux adoption. After all, why throw out perfectly good hardware because of an arbitrary rule that Microsoft made? For me, I know that I'll install Linux for some relatives.

I have been a Linux desktop user for 20+ years. It is incredible how far it has come. There is nothing Microsoft can do that will drive the normies away though. Microsoft knows this and that is why we are where we are.

> It is incredible how far it has come

No argument on my end.

I have been running Linux since 2011, and so much more stuff is in the “Just Works” category, especially if you have AMD graphics. When I installed NixOS on my Thinkpad about a year ago, it was almost comical how easy it was for me; I had gotten used to having to waste an entire day messing with drivers and fixing issues in 2012-2015, so it felt kind of weird for stuff to work as expected immediately.

I am trying very hard to get my parents to use something like Linux Mint because the Windows 11 auto-update on my mom’s computer actually prevented it from booting (making me waste an entire day remotely having them flash a live USB so I could rsync over her files to me…thanks MS!), so this might be enough of a final straw for them.

I have tried switching family members over after malware incidents. The most success was setting my 80 year old grandmother up with Lubuntu. She had no issue picking it up. I don’t think she even really noticed vs Windows. Lasted a few years until she went to an iPad for accessibility reasons.

FWIW: I'm moving from my current win10 desktop to linux of some kind. I've been running mint on my laptop, in preparation, and I think I'm pretty comfortable with it (really hoping that the slowness that builds up over time has something to do with old laptop components, rather than the OS).

For me, it's always been the local account and network services. So long as I can run the thing with only a monitor and keyboard, I'm happy. The second I am required to have a net connection, or even a mouse, I will be looking for alternatives. It's 100% that simple.

About Gnome (Shell). I disagree it looks very pretty but the UX a huge step backwards from Gnome 2. Users are better off with KDE, XFCE or Mate.

I installed linux mint xfce edition on a laptop with only 8 gb of ram, and while there were a few hiccups where I had to adjust, it's a breath of fresh air. Super low memory usage, no wayland nonsense, it. just. works.

> only 8 gb of ram

I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".

What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?

Oh man, don't even get me started. My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram. That's more ram than I put in my first gaming pc back in 2003!

I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while

Oh, my first computer’s disk was smaller than this ram amount!

> My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram.

Eh, that’s a massively disingenuous take when you consider capabilities. Web browsers back then could not do even 1% of what we can do now with modern browsers, where we can run damn near full fledged desktop level apps in a browser or with frameworks like electron. With that vastly increased power comes increased requirements, which is a complete non issue given memory is dirt cheap nowadays.

Everyone says that it’s a step backwards, and even I did for awhile until I, you know, actually used it.

I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.

One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.

Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).

Agreed. Gnome shell is actually super keyboard driven. But the KDE folks point out the fact that there isn’t a start menu to click and declare it bad UX. It’s just sad.

It may be keyboard driven, but especially under Wayland (see Talon [0]), it's almost unusable for disabled users. The situation was better a few years ago.

[0]: https://rykarn.se/2025/01/26/wayland

Agreed. Using Gnome at work for a few weeks convinced me to ditch my custom twm setup and move all my personal machines to Gnome as well. It is different, but once giving it time and a honest try I found its a far better experience than any other desktop environment I've worked with.

I tried many times to use Gnome3+ and I never understand the logic behind it.

Yeah, for me XFCE > Cinnamon > Budgie > KDE.

To be honest, I think KDE is a better alternative to transition to from Windows.

Maybe it's just personal preference but I could also never really get the hang of Gnome.

I moved my parents from Windows 10, MS Office, Edge, Starpage.com to Kubuntu, ONLYOFFICE, Thunderbird, Firefox, qwant.com.

Most questions came because of the Outlook to Thunderbird switch. I can attribute zero questions to KDE. Though I said the new System is called Linux, they refer to it as Windows 11. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I'm keeping my eyes peeled. Proton has made a LOT of progress, and most of what I do could be done on Linux these days. I think things are moving foward.

Proton and flatpak. The latter still has a lot of issues, but I recently come across a $200+ piece of commercial software (Bitwig Studio) that distributes as a flatpak, and it works great. And so is 99% of the desktop apps I'm using, Steam included.

Flathub is the best app store around. Can't wait until they allow selling paid apps (they had a few contractors working on it last I checked)

Feels good to be on Linux, man.

I don’t do anything with audio more advanced than what FFmpeg can handle, but I do edit video on occasion and I think Lightworks on Linux is actually pretty solid.

> but I do edit video on occasion and I think Lightworks on Linux is actually pretty solid.

DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux and has a free version.

There’s a free version of Lightworks as well actually. I ended up paying for the permanent license for the pro version when it was on sale a few years ago and it’s been pretty ok.

I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.

Take a look at Bitwig. Developed by a team of ex-Ableton devs, it is the DAW-Live-should-have-become even at version 5.3, and version 6, which is in beta right now, will blow Ableton out of water. As soon as they add a microtonally aware piano roll like in Live 12, I'll have no reason to fire up Live other than to revisit old projects.

And yes it runs on Linux.

(Although truth be told, the CPU usage is somewhat higher on Linux than on Windows, even with low-latency kernel. Multimedia just doesn't quite shine on Linux yet.)

Switch to Rider. It takes a second to adjust, but you'll end up with a better understanding of dotnet in general.

re. Games, are you sure proton won't work? I've got ~1400 games on steam, and only a handful have serious issues with proton.

Rider is pretty solid.

I did F# for years in Visual Studio Pro, and I feel like getting used to Rider on Mac took about twenty minutes.

> the year of the linux desktop

At least on the gaming side, this is happening verrrrry slowly. It's almost entirely driven by the Steam Deck, which has around a 30% market share for linux users running steam. Since last year linux usage is up a solid percentile, and windows is down a similar amount. OSX and Linux both are making slow but steady progress against Windows' market share.

I don't think there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but there might be a decade of slow transition towards it.

The future of desktop Linux is in a Windows-hosted VM, and some configurations (Home) might not allow even that.

We're a few years out from machines that, by law, cannot run an alternative OS on bare metal. As it is, Linux only runs on bare metal because Microsoft, the sole Secure Boot key authority for almost all OEMs, deigns to allow it.

I would think it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to keep it technically possible to install Linux on bare metal, if only to stave off potential anti-trust lawsuits. They would likely just make it very difficult.

Maybe, but the permissible versions of Linux will be certain specific allowlisted distro images from major vendors.

I'm basing this on Brazil's "Felca law", that contains stipulations similar to the UK's age-verification act, but extends to end-user operating systems, which must also implement auditable and secure age checks and access controls for minors. Presumably only operating systems that tie user accounts to online accounts for which a government ID is required, much like Windows 11, would be allowed.

Anyway, Microsoft is still trying to make ARM-based "PCs" happen, like "fetch". Per Microsoft's guidelines, ARM-based Windows "PCs" cannot disable Secure Boot and cannot allow addition of user-supplied signing keys, unlike x86-based systems which must allow these things; in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows. Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and if their Microsofting on this leads anywhere, it's toward a PC ecosystem locked down in its entirety.

> in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows.

I’ve not tried it myself, but a quick google seems to indicate people are running Linux on existing ARM64 laptops and there’s active development to try to achieve full support. For example, Ubuntu is installable on a number of off the shelf laptops, including one of Microsoft’s own Surface devices [0].

[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...

I was wrong about booting only Windows, but this is because Microsoft still allows Ubuntu images to be signed with their master key. These machines are locked down to run only those systems Microsoft explicitly permits.

> it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Gnome has genuinely gotten pretty great in the last couple years, and I think a lot of former Windows would genuinely like it if they gave it a chance

This comment could have been written at any point in the past 20 years.

I ran Enlightement + GNOME at work... on OS/2... circa 1999/2000. Wasn't even that bad. Also on linux of course.

Since then it comes down to someone wanting to go deeper than the surface and that's not for everyone, particularily if they are busy.

Pain can get the attention of even the busiest people so I really hope they keep making user suffer like this because that is the best driver away from windows and off the plantation.

I wouldn’t say 20 years, I think the tides turned somewhat when AMD opened up their drivers around ~10 years ago and really turned when Valve released Proton in 2018. Prior to that it was still kind of hard for me to recommend Linux to people.

I would love for it to happen. I really like my Mint/XFCE install, but more people migrating to Linux should probably mean better support from hardware and software.

I used to have Windows just for gaming. I tried Bazzite on the new PC that I bought. It works so well. I don't need a toy SO for my games any more.

As someone who's used Linux on the desktop (mostly Ubuntu) daily for about 15 years, I still couldn't conscientiously recommend it except to tech hobbyists or for limited use cases. It's shinier than ever but still a mess.

I think it’s generally pretty ok for people who primarily just browse the web.

My grandmother, who doesn’t know anything about computers at all, runs Linux Mint. She primarily uses Chrome, and someone set her up with Thunderbird and LibreOffice and she’s been totally fine with that. Keep in mind, this computer is old. When she bought it, it had Windows Vista installed and she’s still getting some life out of it.

I think Linux is in a weird place, where it’s great for people who know a lot about computers or nothing about computers. If all you do is browse the web and write email, Linux is perfectly capable for pretty much anyone. If you’re a software engineer, Linux has a lot of useful utilities and is perfectly ok to debug and fix.

The worst case is someone like my dad, who is kind of in the “prosumer Windows” camp. He doesn’t know a lot about computers but he knows enough to where he would want to dig down and change stuff, and doing that he would have to relearn everything from scratch if he moved to Linux.

Since the advent of Chromebook, it's my recommendation for the "elderly user who just needs email"-type use cases. Linux has so much that can go wrong.

She didn't want to buy a new computer. At that point options are pretty limited.

I really don't think it's as bad as what you're saying.

A huge problem is driver support, especially for gaming. Yes, it's significantly better than it used to be, but it's still a problem and it's not something the average user is going to want or know how to deal with.

I feel like your knowledge is a little out of date. Drivers on Linux are generally pretty decent now, especially if you use AMD or Intel graphics.

I had to do some recovery stuff on my mom’s laptop recently, which has an Intel GPU, and I just had it boot off an Ubuntu flash drive into Ubuntu desktop, and it worked fine, including WiFi.

On my main “game console”, I have an Nvidia card running in an eGPU case, and that was a pain in the ass to set up, so fair enough I suppose.

I made the move two years ago and it's going great. Currently running Debian 13. Gaming was the last thing for me but in my case, that's no longer an issue thanks to the Steam Deck.

I think we'll see a small uptick in Linux desktop usage, but nothing massive. Gamers are one of the biggest windows holdouts, and Linux is much better for that now (outside of kernel-level anti-cheat games, which we should be pushing back on anyway even on Windows - no game should require that level of rootkit to play).

More likely though, it's going to be "Eh, do I really need a laptop?" and we'll see even more people than we do already just using their phones and maybe an iPad.

I already see it with the non-tech employees at my work. Very few even have laptops at home. They have an iPad, maybe, a gaming console, and their phone. Sooo many people do almost all of their computing from their phones now.

Windows dominates the market because it dominates the enterprise segment. Enterprises demand accountability and servicing, things that philanthropic community projects that are mainstream Linux distros cannot provide, at least at the scale that Microsoft does.

I could maybe convince my wife to move to Linux, but she's a full-time student and some of the EDU spyware for remote learning won't run on Linux. Most of it supports Mac, but she's not a Mac person either and I don't really see much advantage in trying to get her to be one. For at least the near term, we need to have a Windows PC somewhere in the house so she can get her work done.

Much has been said about this before, but much as I would like to see a year of the Linux desktop, what I think we're going to see is a situation where other software vendors will increasingly hook into these bullshit "features" and people will continue to use what is pushed out to them even as it gets worse and worse out of necessity. Companies see Microsoft squeezing as much value out of a customer as possible, and they want in; that means less control, more tracking, more ads, online activation, centralized accounts, etc.

Yeah, I am a bit concerned about that too. I just started a second masters and I think at least at one point I need to use that bullshit Guardian Browser spyware to do exams.

I might need to keep some piece of shit Windows computer around just to satisfy that because I think VMs are explicitly not allowed.

I would honestly do so, but if I want to run games and music production stuff (like Cubase) I'm pretty much forced to be on Windows.

I don’t play much AAA stuff, but Steam+Proton has gotten very good; I almost never even bother checking compatibility anymore.

I don’t know anything about music production though.

The snags arise when playing games that use specific anti-cheat measures. Which is particularly annoying these days because developers are forcing them to be active when you're playing single player.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Yes, but it's the usual suspects. If you literally do not play those, admittedly very popular 5 or 6 games, it's a smooth sailing.

There's an entire world outside of AAA FPS games-as-a-service that require kernel-level anticheat.

The shortsightedness of this comment makes me think that there are hundreds of comments, exactly like yours that talked about dedicated GPU’s or direct X or any other technology that was dismissed as Dan don’t worry it’s only the big guys using it.

Do you know how valve used to make games and now it makes money? What happens when EA comes up with an amazing amazingly effective and cheap anti-cheat solution? And they offer it effectively for free to all indie developers, and it just works?

I don’t care, because I switched over to console for effectively this and other reasons. But Colonel level anti-sheet absolutely must be rejected.

What exactly do you want people to do? I already don't buy the games that require kernel anti-cheat, which is the only power I have over the situation. I don't like that it exists either, but the reality is that unless someone reading here is a bigwig at a game publisher (unlikely), they can't reject these methods any more than they already are.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, and why you're criticising my comment as short-sighted. The hegemony of Valve isn't eternal? What's that got to do with gaming on Linux today?

Microsoft will eventually be able to build attestation services into the kernel that will allow third-party software assurance that no unauthorized software is also running on the same machine, obviating the need for third-party kernel-level anticheat. For security, of course.

I love when companies institute a policy that is super beneficial to them for a dozen reasons and is plainly anticompetitive and claim it’s “for security”.

Why stop there then? I could pound a nail through my SSD and now it’s even more secure…it won’t even have the opportunity to write compromising data!

For that matter, instead of wasting all this money on transistors and metal and whatnot, why not just have a piece of paper that has the word “computer” written on it? Don’t get much more secure than something that doesn’t even execute code.

But those solutions don't allow Microsoft to take your computing capabilities away and then sell them back to you piecemeal.

The whole windows game mod scene shows just how much of a toy operating system windows is. Game mods are changing memory values on the fly on running programs and the OS allows it. These mods can just as easily read/modify Excel spreadsheets to get business health data. This is why corporate windows machines lock everything down. Crazy.