I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Game compatibility
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
yeah, thankfully I can go a bit more basic than that, I just need to figure out what hub, or even cable, I wanna get.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Idk is it CAD software? I know there are webapps for that now
Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
Linux: “We’re dropping support for this device because we’re fairly sure we had the last one in existence and it just died.”
Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:
- LinuxMint 21.1
- MxLinux 21.3
- Elementary OS 7
- Ubuntu 22.10
- RHEL 8.6
- RHEL 8.7
- RHEL 9.1
- Fedora 37
I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.
Still can’t believe they dropped support for i386 😤
carefully select hardware
lmao, i’ve exclusively run linux on franken pcs cobbled together out of mostly second hand parts
That’s much easier grounds then… checks notes… a modern laptop straight from the factory.
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
Even azure runs Linux
To think that even daedric prince would do that.
It’s the professional software that’s lacking in Linux, and that’s the only reason I keep a Windows machine around. For music production, video production, design work, photography and so on, Windows has good commercial software that is well established in these professions.
But for most people, including gamers, Linux is a very good option right now.
Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Probably an unpopular opinion on here, but the OS I recommend for grandparents and parents is ChromeOS. It’s so locked down that it’s almost indestructible, and they almost never need any specialized software that you’d use Windows/MacOS for. If you’re savvy enough you can also use Linux on it in a container, which is how I prefer to use it for day to day stuff (in my case, data related workflows).
As much as i dislike google, chromebooks are perfect for anyone tech illiterate that just need a simple web browser that works. Every family member I’ve recommended a chromebook to has not needed additional tech support for it, which IMO, is a truly impressive accomplishment on google’s behalf.
just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma
TempleOS satisfies all of these conditions
Okay, this quote from the Wikipedia page made me laugh.
TempleOS received mostly “sympathetic” reviews. Tech journalist David Cassel opined that “programming websites tried to find the necessary patience and understanding to accommodate Davis”.
Macbooks just make really nice ssh terminals for accessing your Linux dev environment. Though these days there are decent options for Linux terminals with a similar form factor, they just don’t tend to be much cheaper.
Linux is cool and all but can it tell if I’m watching porn and suggest me other porn like windows 11?
Is the other porn at least relevant?
For Microsofts sake it sure better be
There’s this thing I notice. If windows asks you to learn something or put up with some BS it’s seen as the cost of business, reasonable, or simply not even noticed. If Linux requires you to learn something, like read one article about which distro might work best for you, it’s seen as an insurmountable difficulty or an absurd ask.
Also the half life of windows knowledge is a lot lower than linux knowledge. Under windows: when you have this problem, click here, click there, find this button, select this option and then it might help, until the next version changes everything. Under linux you find this config file, change this line to that and the fix will likely survive multiple system upgrades and could even work on different distributions.
Absolutely. Once you spend just a bit of time figuring out how config files work suddenly fixing problems on and maintaining your Linux system is far easier than windows. Not hidden behind layers of bad UI that doesn’t work. Just edit the file. Restart the process.
You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’m really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I’ll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don’t have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.
I’ve been using all of the major OSs and they’re all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don’t think it’s as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.
I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I’d prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it’s not the worst thing.
I’ve used Linux on my private laptop for the past few years, never had any major issues. Work desktop is running Ubuntu, no major problems except for the odd bit of poorly maintained software (niche science things, so that’s not really a Linux issue). Laptop breaks, I get a Windows 11 laptop from work…and I’ve had so many problems. Updates keep breaking everything, and I’ve had to do a factory reset more than once since the recovery after those updates also always failed. Wish I had my good old Linux laptop back :(
Let me tell you the story about a stuck USB update on my work laptop.
Windows requirements: sprawling list of unsupported hardware based on an arbitrary requirment for a security chip that doesn’t actually improve security at all
Linux: CPU (optional)
As a person who has used linux i can confirm that my daughter runs linux
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The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I’m concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?
I upgraded my Intel system to AMD today. And I didn’t have to reinstall a damn thing, because my existing Linux installation Just Worked™. It really is to the point that I could never imagine going back to Windows.
I want to use Linux at the desktop, but I want HDR and Freesync support. Not sure if Linux supports either in a big way.
Freesync yes, HDR soon™
Ah yes… it is easy as long as you do something difficult first.
Reminds me of that comment on Dropbox where some guy said it’s going to fail because he can easily build something similar with an ftp server.
Nothing started easy, someone has to figure out the hard part for everyone else to benefit.
Dropbox is even making money…(I am shocked as it sends tech firms rarely do.)
