
Running I3 Window Manager on Ubuntu for Windows - bketelsen
https://brianketelsen.com/i3-windows/
======
chx
At first I was excited by bash for Windows but I am still not switching. You
know why? Malware. Ransomware. I have many layers of defense from various harm
(OpenWRT router, uBlock being the two most important ones) but the biggest
defense I have is that Windows programs simply do not run on Linux and the
Linux market is not big enough to bother with.

And I know many of you will say, oh that's not a problem, it never happened to
me -- I will say good for you. But I need my work computer to, well, work,
constantly. Yes, fighting a broken Arch Linux after an update is bad but not
as bad as fighting a downright malicious program.

~~~
vesche
Somewhat unrelated, but you should check out pi hole [https://pi-
hole.net](https://pi-hole.net) . Ads / spyware traffic won't even enter your
network. I still run uBlock, but it goes largely unused.

~~~
chx
Pretty good idea -- since I am running OpenWRT already I could just use
[https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752](https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752)

~~~
StavrosK
Actually, good call. I'll just make a cron job to get uBlock's lists and stick
them in dnsmasq.

------
kristianp
A lot of comments about Thunderbird here, despite the article saying "Save
your apologist comments and what about Open Office/Geary/Thunderbird
comments.". That means don't comment about it.

The interesting part of the article is not the part about why this guy uses
Windows!

~~~
adambatkin
You missed the rest of the paragraph though: "If you’ve used them, you know
that they’re not as nice as the applications available in macOS and Windows."

I used Thunderbird for about 10 years on my Mac laptop and every time I tried
to switch to Apple Mail (or anything else) I quickly switched back. But the
truth is, I have used Linux on my primary desktop PC for about 15 years now
and can honestly say that it is a very pleasant experience.

I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often
no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are
long gone.

As a software developer and general techie, I believe that Free Software is
important for my profession and for the public at large. For me, even if Linux
was less convenient (which it is not - today anyway...it was more challenging,
say, a decade ago) I would use it because I have serious concerns some of how
Apple and Microsoft treat developers and the Free Software movement.

~~~
hartator
Haven't Mozilla gave up on Thunderbird though?

~~~
MajesticHobo
There's always Icedove, which gets updates from Debian.

~~~
sciurus
Debian isn't doing any independent development on icedove, are they? I think
if thunderbird development stops so will icedove's.

[https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove](https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove)

------
shirro
Turn the indexing off in Thunderbird and it is still quite a usable email
client for me and I have recently done a bit of a tour of the alternatives. It
hits the sweet spot for me. Mutt is awesome but I have to deal with too much
html email.

I pretty much run the same stack for email/editor/docs on every platform. For
the most part Windows, OSX and Linux are interchangeable for me which is a
nice place to be. I just find Linux gets in the way a lot less for my
purposes.

Every platform has advantages and a slightly different mix of applications
that make it suit some users more than others. I can certainly understand
swapping between a Mac and Windows for iOS and Windows development or games
and back to Linux for web/server stuff. But being stuck on a particular
platform because of an email client would bother me.

I think it is great that this stuff is running on Windows but it bothers me
that people feel they are trapped on Windows because of their email client.
That seems so dated.

------
kristopolous
Well it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop.

~~~
noinsight
Actually, I feel like this is the one instance where saying "GNU" instead of
Linux is completely accurate, since WSL is not even running the Linux kernel
but GNU userland tools...

I wonder what Stallman would have to say about that? We've come around full
circle to GNU/NT.

~~~
mikegerwitz
Richard calls it "GNU/kWindows" (like GNU/kFreeBSD); I wrote an article with
his input a while back:

[https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-
kWindows](https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows)

~~~
kristopolous
I think Gnudows is a pretty catchy portmanteau.

------
douche
Initially I read this as "Running _13_ Window Manager _s_ on Ubuntu for
Windows", which piqued my interest as possibly the most Linux thing I can
imagine doing.

Still, exciting times.

------
mempko
I'm one of those weird people that uses free software even if it isn't better.
The quality of the software is beside the point.

~~~
midnitewarrior
If you're not using the best functional tool for the job, the only person you
are hurting is you.

~~~
mempko
Sometimes I use software when people aren't paying me. I even write software
sometimes when people aren't paying me. So there isn't always a "Job"
involved.

In any case, while free software might hurt me short term, proprietary
software is guaranteed to hurt me long term.

------
616c
Another thought: when people complain about the state of Linux email clients,
what is so good about the Windows alternatives? Office productivity suites, I
get it. But email clients all suck. Mutt's mantra is so true, at least they're
honest about sucking less.

I believe Linux is a 100% of the time platform because the choice (again, user
choice) to run minimal terminal apps means like less than average 50% memory
utilization for Thunderbird, which I love, with a web browser GUI and
background full text indexing all damn day.

Outlook is just as crappy.

~~~
jkahn
Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of
features, yes - but that's what's good about it.

If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal
with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in
a professional role, nothing beats Outlook.

There's a reason it's so popular.

~~~
douche
I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for
more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of
Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and
mail files and do their best to scramble things up.

~~~
oblio
I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2
multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each
(probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated),
and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for
my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of
filter sync with Exchange.

As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock
solid.

Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.

~~~
douche
Lync/Skype for Business tends to play havoc with Outlook data files, I've
found.

------
dewiz
Serious question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I've used Eudora, Netscape
Messenger, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook up to 2016, Mail, Gmail,
Squirrel etc etc. I use Outlook where I _have_ to, but TB is a constant across
all my systems. IMAP support is great, search is fast, I rely on Google to
filter spam. Thunderbird is one of those apps that doesn't need extra work or
new features, it just works.

~~~
StavrosK
It's slow, it takes a crapload of resources and it has a bunch of bugs I've
never been able to fix. If I click the unified inbox on my laptop, I get a
blank view, even though there are emails in the sub-mailboxes. This has been
going on for years, and I haven't been able to fix it (short of deleting my
profile).

------
anderspitman
For me, modern virtualization has gotten so good that it's my preferred
solution. kvm, libvirt, virtio, and PCI passthrough et al have opened up a
whole new world of possibilities. Currently still requires fairly specific
hardware and kind of a pain to figure out how to make it work, but it's
already very impressive.

This is still really cool though.

~~~
rl3
Thing is you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest
operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the
guest operating systems require custom drivers at that.

My preferred setup would be Windows native, with macOS (ha) and Linux guests
running with GPU acceleration—preferably in a manner that doesn't necessitate
multiple videocards.

Too bad Apple is hellbent on locking macOS to Apple hardware. I'd totally
license it otherwise.

~~~
pierrec
>you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating
system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest
operating systems require custom drivers at that.

I, for one, think that sounds excellent. For a workstation, I would _much_
rather host everything on a simple Linux distro with focus on security and
privacy, and keep Windows in VMs where I can manage it a little better. And
the Windows Subsystem for Linux will run in there perfectly if I need it.

Also, multiple video cards are only necessary if your guest needs that GPU
power. Considering that having 2 video cards these days is surprisingly common
(Intel on-board + separate video card), I'm wondering about the feasibility of
easily switching between shared video (eg. when your laptop is on battery) and
separate GPU passthru (eg. when you're plugged into your epic 16-monitor
setup).

~~~
rl3
I'd prefer Windows as a guest OS too, but not at the expense of losing native
performance.

Granted, Windows makes for a fairly terrible host operating system when you
have to reboot it frequently on account of updates.

~~~
pierrec
Yeah, I'm writing this without having first-hand experience regarding the
current performance of Windows 10 as a guest. Apparently VMWare has good
support for it, but searching for reviews on the actual performance only turns
up a bunch of confusing, outdated rants. I'll just have to try it myself when
I get the chance.

~~~
anderspitman
For gaming performance on kvm most people say about 95% of native performance
when passing the GPU.

------
ThinkBeat
I haven't had any problems with macOS stability lately. Has anyone else
experienced what the author describes?

Around me Windows 10 has crashed more than macOS. but Windows 10 is really
stable too.

~~~
danieldk
From the post:

 _but I do daily development on an Arch linux desktop sitting next to my
MacBook Pro_

I have a similar set up, both at home and at work, where I use a MacBook for
Office, Omni{Focus,Graffle}, etc., but SSH into a Linux machine for serious
development word. My reasons are two-fold. First of all, many OS X's command-
line tools are behind the times and buggy. For instance, grep segfaults on
trivial usages such as[1]:

    
    
        % echo i860  | grep --color -e i860 -e i86
    

Or returns incorrect results for even trivial expressions:

    
    
        % echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o "^...."
        1234
         123
        4 12
    

Since I use UNIX command-line tools such as grep daily, I cannot have them
fail (yes, I know, get GNU grep from Homebrew). Secondly, Mac hardware is very
weak these days, even the Mac Pro is years behind. At the same time, you can
get a similarly spec'ed machine on eBay for a couple of hundred of Euros. Plug
a card to use CUDA, etc.

[1] [http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-
gr...](http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-grep/)

I don't have many real stability problems (kernel panics), but there are
oddball bugs everywhere. E.g. Mail.app likes to redownload all my e-mail when
I quit and open it.

------
bketelsen
author here - would love advice or tips on how to get dbus running so settings
work well and other WMs work like Gnome.

~~~
shlorn
Nice work. A few days ago I tried xfce4 with little luck, although
xfce4-terminal + Xming get me pretty much everything I need. Windows
ConHost.exe is a pretty poor terminal (specifically in terms of fonts and
colors) but hopefully things will get better in time.

Regarding Dbus, I haven't had time to try this out yet:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_can_run_gui_linux_apps_from_bash/d4o0k01)

~~~
bketelsen
hey thanks! I'll give this a shot, might make GNOME start up now.

------
rbanffy
As someone who has only briefly worked on Windows since the early 2000s, when
I moved to Debian and then Ubuntu (and, then, using Cygwin to make things
comfy), what is the compelling reason to adopt it?

Both Mac ans Linux offer very good developer experiences, with hosts of cross-
platform tooling and environments that are closer to the server that will most
likely run your application. I understand that Windows is essential when you
write code that runs on Windows, but, apart from that, what are the advantages
over macOS and a more traditional Unix-like environment?

~~~
StavrosK
Having used Windows extensively up until Vista (at which point I switched to
Ubuntu), none. It's a more solid OS than Ubuntu (in that the UI doesn't
sometimes have weird corruption bugs and is more responsive), but development
is a nightmare.

Development is split into two camps, Windows-centric and UNIX-centric. Trying
to develop one on the other is a disaster, so let that inform your choice. As
a consumer OS, I have a much easier time installing Ubuntu on my
parents'/friends' computers, as it's easier to get used to and doesn't have as
many viruses.

------
Zardoz84
I work on Windows. I can say that Thunderbird is far better that Outlook.

~~~
dingo_bat
I have the opposite experience.

~~~
raesene9
I agree, I've tried both and whilst neither are the fastest programs in the
universe, Outlook 2016 has been better than Thunderbird from a performance
standpoint. Thunderbird was so slow, I went back to Outlook.

------
makecheck
There’s something about “translating system calls” that just makes me wary.
It’s the kind of thing that could be proven to work for some common cases
while failing in mysterious ways for others (not to mention being hard to
debug).

Generally, there is a gap between what’s documented, what was thought to be
true, and what is. At some point they will produce behavior that just doesn’t
match what compiled code expects. For how many libraries, applications and
combinations thereof will they deal with this?

And then there’s maintenance. This is a scary kind of layer to be responsible
for; future Microsoft employees will have a hard time doing _anything_ to this
layer without risking new misbehavior so we have to trust that they either
know what they’re doing or that they won’t touch anything.

I’m not saying that they weren’t clever to try this, or that there isn’t a way
to pull this off successfully. I do think the odds are against them though. Or
maybe, I just missed something about their implementation that makes this a
lot less risky than it seems to be.

~~~
ketralnis
Bryan Cantrill has a wonderful talk about exactly this in Illumos that I
recommend at every opportunity
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U)

~~~
ketralnis
Err, I meant
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs)

------
technojunkie
How did the author miss out on using Cmder? It's better the ConEmu and
probably the best terminal for Windows today.

~~~
b15h0p
Well, actually, Cmder is just a distribution around ConEmu. But I agree that
it is quite acceptable.

------
michaelmior
> far too many things don’t work in macOS that are required for modern
> Internet software development

It's been a few years since I've actively used Mac OS, but is this really
true? Ancedotally it seems like a lot of Web developers still use Mac OS as
their OS of choice.

~~~
chris_st
Nope, it's not true, at least for what I do.

You can look around [1] to see what kinds of things are just a "brew install"
away on macOS... an awful lot of unix-y goodness.

I have 61 things installed -- ansible, git, nvm, postgresql,
the_silver_searcher, tmux...

Since I develop on Linux for work, I don't know offhand of _anything_ that
Linux has that I can't get for macOS (not saying there are no such things, but
I can't think of any).

[1] [http://braumeister.org](http://braumeister.org)

------
newman314
This is tangential but my primary interest is being able to natively ssh into
a Windows machine.

I know options exist today but I would love to see native support and it's oh-
so-close.

Would be great to be able to finally script things to copy stuff over to the
Windows box such as LE certs.

~~~
voltagex_
It's getting there:
[https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH)

------
epheo
The gnu binaries used in this article are the ones included in maboXterm and
compiled for windows, nothing related to an abstraction layer between nt
kernel and Ubuntu gnu bin builds as mentioned I suppose. Working great anyway.

------
vesche
At this point why not just have a Linux system on your local network and
connect with VNC from Windows...? You can have a Linux environment to hack
around in while getting to use all the "nice" Windows GUI apps.

~~~
hiram112
VNC has never been near as fast as even Remote Desktop, and even that is
pretty slow for anything more than basic administration. Maybe in a local lan
it would work better, but I doubt considering it's slow even in a VM on a
powerful workstation.

It's getting to the point where I'm thinking about using a Windows laptop and
Linux desktop with a KVM switch, but then I'm not portable.

------
clinta
It's disappointing that i3 is constrained to one window. The ability to
replace Microsoft's window manager with i3 and allow linux and windows apps to
be nicely tiled together would be amazing.

~~~
616c
Now, it ain't tiling, but I once worked (not as the first guy, but took it
over as a major project and the hell out of it) was one of the ports of
Opebox-ish Windows managers (to be more accurate, really an Explorer
replacement shell, not a Windows manager traditionally) to Windows XP to build
very stripped down Windows kiosk machines with minimal UI and a lot of
control, custom UI, and cool fun features.

[http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php](http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php)

God I miss this. It was way ahead of the time and I guess Microsoft got their
UI act together, then lost it, and are trying to find it again.

As for tiling, the best you can do are these:

[https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n](https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n)

[https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM](https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM)

The latter is by a budding Chicken Lisp; I found him and love a lot of what he
does; not sure he is ready for prime-time.

~~~
ZaneA
Hey, HackWM author here, this might be a better link
[https://github.com/ZaneA/HashTWM](https://github.com/ZaneA/HashTWM) :)
Unfortunately it has been largely unmaintained by myself since the initial
release, I occasionally pick it up for a day or two but I'm not using it
actively anymore. Just happy that some people find a use for it!

~~~
616c
Yeah I clearly saw it a long time ago.

As I said, stumbled upon your blog because of Chicken Lisp musings (dare I say
chicken scratch)? Thanks for that, all very interesting.

------
rspeer
When it comes to finding a decent terminal emulator for Windows: mintty is the
terminal you get when you use Git Bash, right? Because in my experience it's
better than ConEmu.

ConEmu makes a staggering number of off-by-one errors in putting characters on
the screen when I ssh into a Linux machine and use tmux. Vertical separators
end up jagged, things that are supposed to fit the width of the screen end up
wrapping, my Vim status line says "IISUAL", and so on. But mintty gets tmux
right.

~~~
bketelsen
i've noticed a lot of these same off-by-one errors in MobaXTerm, too.

------
dantillberg
I think the real trouble with Windows for many folks is not that we can't
figure out how to convert linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls, but that we
don't want to convert our linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls PLUS
"telemetry" data sent to Redmond. Windows is explicitly non-free (in so many
ways), and that's cool and all, but no thanks.

------
nowprovision
This is awesome stuff. If you fullscreened MobaXTerm and autohide the Windows
taskbar then what are the problematic points vs running a linux/i3wm natively?
Do certain keystrokes get intercepts by Windows regardless? You mention
Firefox have you tried Chrome/Chromium in i3wm? Can you play a HTML5 youtube
video?

Thanks for writing it up, interesting stuff! - An i3 user

~~~
bketelsen
I hadn't found any keystrokes that were masked by windows, but most of what I
do is ALT+something, I use ALT as my meta key in i3.

------
616c
Am ... am I falling in love with Windows?

Well, time to see if I can get StumpWM running on it, for more hipster cred.
(Partly joking, partly serious.)

~~~
lj3
> Am ... am I falling in love with Windows?

Spend some time with it again. You'll learn to hate it just as much as you did
the first time around. For me, it's because of a single factor: BSOD caused by
shitty geforce drivers. I used to think the linux geforce drivers were shit
because it was a neglected platform. Now I know the truth: windows geforce
drivers are full of pain and tears as well. I don't see any of the same issues
on OS X.

~~~
mook
The specific case of terrible video drivers might have been slightly better
these days (because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it
just means your screen flashes and weird for a second).

Spending more time with it can let you find _different_ things to hate, of
course. In general, all software suck.

~~~
lj3
> because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means
> your screen flashes and weird for a second

You mean on Linux, right? Because in Windows 10, going full screen in a
youtube video on an external screen routinely causes my entire system to crash
(BSOD, error dump, restart).

~~~
gman99
I'm on windows 10 with a shitty "optimus" enabled laptop. The NVidia drivers
routinely crash (typically when viewing a heavy webGL enabled page) and
windows 10 just flashes at me and throws up a notification saying my graphics
drivers have crashed but it helpfully restarted the drivers for me.

Perhaps you have a different issue? Maybe a hardware failure? Windows 10
should not be BSODing for a graphics driver failure

------
nray
_dyed_ in the wool...

~~~
bketelsen
fixed, thanks.

------
jimmcslim
I wonder if someone will get xmonad working?

------
diminish
A lot of alarms ringing in my mind, as a long time Linux and i3 user and
developer.

1\. You ran i3 as a proof of concept now but going long term you ll face
dozens of issues when you want to make it useful. The same is true for
everything you ll install through Ubuntu for Windows..

2\. Windows mail clients are totally wrong, slow and they are not only
hazardous to people using but also to receivers of emails. Outlook users don't
know how to put subjects, respond and distort the format and conversation all
the time. (Long time outlook user here)

3\. Desktop productivity tools are long history. No reason why someone would
use ms office anymore.

4\. Windows for Ubuntu is doomed to be a second class citizen, and if it by
chance becomes a first class citizen then why would someone need the Windows
overhead and complexity? (How can I apt-get remove windows)

I congratulate MS devs taking HN seriously recently but windows in 2016 is
obsolete..

~~~
raesene9
oh dear. I'd have to suggest here that you're projecting your own use cases
and assuming that they have a universality that they really don't.

Desktop productivity tools are history... no, no they're not, MS office sells
millions of copies for a reason.

Windows mail clients are wrong. They're not the same as unix mail clients for
sure, but who gets to dictate whether that's right or wrong? Personally I
think all mail clients that allow HTML are wrong, but I understand that I'm in
a minority there.

I'd suggest that Windows has many advantages over linux on the desktop. The
hardware support is better, there's a better range of desktop apps available
for people who like desktop apps (including games of course).

Personally I'm looking forward to ubuntu on windows. there's a load of areas
where I prefer working in a linux/unix like environment (e.g. anything
command-line based where linux is far superior to Windows (although Windows is
getting better in that regard)), and I hope that this will let me get the best
of both worlds, whilst avoiding the overhead of running a VM.

------
ArnoldP
Do you still need to be in the windows fast lane preview for access to bash on
windows? I want to try this but im a bit hesitant to run the earliest of beta
software on my only productivity machine...

~~~
JL2010
I'm on the slow ring and recently received it. They have a blog here which
details each of their releases on each of the release "rings":
[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-
insi...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insider-
program/)

------
marmaduke
There is a tiling window manager for windows using auto hot key, so entirely
native and works on previous versions of Windows too. I seem to have forgotten
the name but it worked well when I tried it.

~~~
T-A
There seems to be a whole bunch:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_window_manager_for_windows/)

------
FeepingCreature
Gentoo called it eleven years ago.
[http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/](http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/)

------
repsilat
Incredible. My fancy new Lenovo has gotten no use because they've made it
impossible to install another operating system in it. I look forward to giving
this a go.

~~~
smcl
Who have, Lenovo?

~~~
wildster
I have an Lenovo Thinkpad x220 running Ubuntu that I needed to set the BIOS to
Legacy.

~~~
rmsaksida
I had a x220 and it worked fine with Ubuntu in EFI-only mode. Same for my
current x230. Probably boots 1 or 2 seconds faster because of that. But I
never managed to get it working by doing the partitioning work myself (which I
prefer because I don't like having everything in a huge partition), you have
to format the whole drive and let Ubuntu do its thing.

------
qplex
It is rather trivial for Microsoft to implement support for Linux.

Also, if Windows source code was freely available there would be support for
Windows applications on Linux.

~~~
icebraining
There is support for Windows applications on Linux, no source code needed:
[https://www.winehq.org/](https://www.winehq.org/)

~~~
qplex
Yes.

My point was that it is trivial for Microsoft to implement support for an open
system, compared to implementing support for a closed system such as Windows.

There would be better support for running Windows applications under Linux if
Windows was an open system.

~~~
douche
Still, even if everything Windows-based was open-source, you'd still have to
build out the shim layers in front like Wine does, unless you wanted to deal
with the extreme tedium of converting all the Win32, DirectX, etc, etc, calls
over.

------
rosstex
I'm on Windows and I use Thunderbird. What's the alternative?

------
maga
Anyone knows when WSL is expected to arrive on non-insider versons?

~~~
tejinderss
2nd august with windows 10 anniversary update

------
ilaksh
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

------
hamilyon2
Did anyone try to use xmonad?

------
be5invis
Can WLS run Wine?

~~~
Longhanks
Can Wine run WSL's bash.exe?

~~~
johnhattan
Is it turtles all the way down?

~~~
frozenport
More like an operating system tower of babel!

------
OneNoteIsFree
Save your FUD, I've been using computers for 16 years and I've never had this
problem. Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in
search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading. Even then
the built in Windows defender catches it.

I love Arch too but people like you are so die hard in their toxicity that any
collaboration asking about Windows related stuff is impossible.

~~~
ams6110
Many people who get ransomwared are naive victims of phishing emails, some of
which are fairly convincing. There are usually some red flags if you're paying
attention, but it only takes one mistake.

