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Last Windows 11 update changed all default browser settings to Edge
619 points by nixass on Jan 24, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 440 comments
Last Windows 11 update changed default browser to Edge, default Chrome search-engine to Bing and changed "restore previous tabs" setting to "always open Bing on startup"

So they basically messed around with third-party software settings to push their shitty products. This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.

How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?




> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I don't; I develop on Linux. Ignoring this, within my very limited usage of Windows, it seems to me that MS has become increasingly more hostile over the last few years or so.

To answer with something actionable: I discourage people from upgrading to Windows 11.


Advertisements in the start menu around Windows 8 was my tipping point. It's just a trashy thing to see candy crush and other crap in there that I never asked for, never could remove, etc. I went to Ubuntu and now PopOS and haven't looked back in almost 10 years. Maybe they've cleaned things up and removed the crap in later Windows but the damage is done and I'm never going back.


Frustrating thing is it's hard to escape. It's petty, but one of the most infuriating episodes of my life was Apple forcing that U2 album into everyone iOS owner's existence and making it difficult (impossible at the time?) to delete. I'd forgotten all about it until, a couple of phones later, it reappeared as the first song played every time I connected my phone to the car. Petty, like I said, but enraging. Having some basic control over an environment you've paid for should be a given.


That is not petty. An entertainment device that doesnt follow orders, doesnt play what you want it to play, fails its primary function. It should be repaired (good luck) or dumped.


It also had weird cover art which, while artistic, was borderline NSFW and not what I wanted to have pop up every time I got in my car. Apple makes weird decisions sometimes.


I finally contacted Apple support to have the album removed, years after the fact, because I switched to Apple Music. And felt nervous about having, in my open floor plan workplace, a shirtless man tenderly caressing another shirtless man's crotch with his face every time I opened the app. There was literally no way to change this default behavior, because Apple are control freaks.

As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.


My brother is gay. I have a gay friend. I am not homophobic. But I do not prefer homosexual images myself. I also stress over this. I don't understand why people can't accept that being okay with something, and wanting that thing in your eyes, might be two independent things.

My daughter is vegetarian. We always cook her vegetarian food for dinner. Her little brother likes to bug her about it. We tell him not to, because giving people a hard time about their preferences is rude and annoying. But we also make sure that the vegetarian can't get cranky when everybody else is eating real bacon and she's eating vegetarian bacon. That'd be just as rude and annoying. It's called "tolerance", kids. I don't understand how we've entered into this world where we aren't all supposed to try to tolerate (let alone encourage and support) one another, but that tolerance only goes in one direction. That seems very odd to me.


>As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.

If you would still feel uncomfortable if it were a photo of man and a woman doing the same thing on your screen in your open office at work, then no. I personally wouldn't want either in my work environment. I have a strong separation of my personal life and work. It's a simple test really, just imagine the reverse and if you feel the same way about a naked man and woman on your desktop at work, then no, you aren't being a homophobe.

Though the U2 album has become such a meme, I'm sure people would have a good laugh at Apple over it.


I believe it was impossible. You could hide it but even that was a bit tricky to finding. They did eventually come up with a website where you could scrub it from your account. It wasn't even just iOS owners but everybody with an iTunes account.


As per the sibling link to Apple's support it's impossible again to remove it without contacting support.

> It sounds like you did some great research on this, and you're right. Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed.


I had a problem getting my car to recognize my iphone, specifically constant USB "unsupported" errors. It turned out the problem was I had no music loaded on my device. I downloaded that U2 album and like magic the problem was resolved. Thanks Bono!


Had to install Windows 11 yesterday and the fresh install had Facebook, TikTok, Xing, Spotify and more on the start menu as shortcuts. No clue, if they are actually fully installed but I was able deinstall and remove them through the context menu. May vary for other contries as Xing is very specific and only relevant for German speaking countries.


[flagged]


Nobody forces anyone to install an OS, but he probably meant that he was pressured into, not by someone but by the very conditions of software.

My example: I had to return to Windows a while back because I rely heavily on Zoom Meetings, and Zoom in Linux is just near unusable.


Not that I care about zoom, but screen sharing is in a problematic state since the introduction of Wayland:

- If you use X.org, things are mostly fine because there are no security barriers and screen capturing has been done the same way since forever.

- If you use Wayland, this used to be impossible because Wayland doesn't allow it for security reasons. To get screen sharing to work:

1. A new protocol had to be invented for it (pipewire)

2. Every compositor (read: every major Desktop Environment like KDE or Gnome) had to implement the funcitonality. Among other things, the compositor is now responsible for showing a permissions dialog where the user authorizes an application to capture the screen (or _a_ screen, or a single window).

3. Every application that wants to capture the screen/a window/etc. has to request access through this new protocol and read the capture through it.

To make things worse, pipewire itself has been evolving, meaning that both compositors and applications may only support certain versions but not others. In the end, this means that if you are running the latest versions of all these things (wayland, de, browser) and enable all flags that say "pipewire" in your browser, it will work just fine. If you have older software it may work partially (e.g.: you can share a single window but not the entire screen and stuff like that) or it may not work at all.


Please elaborate. I've been pair programming on zoom for years (Ubuntu, i3wm). So had my colleague on Elementary and another one on Fedora. It's clearly usable.

EDIT: via native app that is


What I needed most back then was to remote control my peer's computer (as in, providing Tech Support) and that's where the UI/UX is not as polished as the Windows version.

I didn't use the web version, because it's not possible to control the remote host that way.

It was very quirky (taking control and giving up control + the keystrokes needed to be used in the remote host) and getting in the way of providing effective Tech Support (the meeting bar flickered several times). Anything else worked fine, like holding the audio meeting itself.

So, I had to return to Windows, just because of Zoom.

EDIT: Typo.


it’s dependent in your window system. with wayland zoom is using screen shots to create a video feed in lieu of using the actual api because it would mean zoom has to respect privacy so no go


I don't think Zoom's here choice has anything to do with privacy but rather incompetence. They didn't even bother trying to solve it until users intentionally flooded them with tickets.


I just launch zoom from Firefox and use the browser edition on Wayland. It will nag you to download a program, but you can skip that. Hasn't failed me yet.


People here willingly use Zoom over Jitsi Meet? How come?


Zoom works okay in Linux via web browser.

EDIT: I use Firefox.


Works in Arch fine whenever I've needed it (admittedly not used regularly but it never failed/became unstable)


I could never get it working on Firefox, but OK with Chrome


Maybe GP is required by its employer / an autoupdate.


My tipping point was not being able to figure out how to shut down the computer in Windows 8 (not 8.1). I've used Alt+F4 to shut it down for months because I legit couldn't figure out that the shut down button is in Charms.

They've moved it back to start in 8.1, but by that point I've already switched to elementary OS (beta of 0.2 Luna), and that's (mostly) where I've stayed for the past 10 years (there were a couple of attempts of switching to GNOME, they've all failed).


I'd definitely recommend checking out Arch or Manjaro if you're a developer btw. Ironically, I've had fewer issues with Linux since swapping. Simple things like being on the newest kernel tends to keep hardware issues at bay. (And switching to Pipewire has fixed all of my audio issues completely)

It's ironic that a "rolling release" OS is often more stable than a "mainstream" OS like Ubuntu. That's just been my experience over the past few years though, and I feel that it's important to help more devs realize that!


Seconding this, except Manjaro specifically seems to have a lot of issues that don't hit me on regular Arch. Void and Alpine are also good.


Similar reason to why I'm on Fedora. 6-month release cycle with a 12-month maintenance cycle. Which means I can frequently get on the latest kernel and other goodies such as Pipewire, yet I can also wait a couple months after release to pull the trigger in case there are issues.

I'm also seriously considering Fedora Silverblue once I get more of a feel for how it works under the covers.


How does that work with EOL for a release? Does everything break and you have to re-install?

My disk encryption is a little complicated so I'm happy that my rolling release means I only have to re-install when I swap boxes. That was my biggest issue with Ubuntu -- your were SOL when EOL :P


There's an in place upgrade process, as long as you haven't put a bunch of third party repositories/packages on the system they tend to go generally well

Some of the more drastic changes aren't adopted this way, eg: filesystem defaults


Eh, you could change your source repos/force upgrade etc — just couldn't expect the forums to support your borked system, afterwards.


Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start menu for a while?


Usually on Linux and Linux-like systems ("Free" ones I guess), you can easily change something that you don't like, or at least it's not impossible to change it.

On other systems, some things are literally (today) impossible to change, unless you have access to the source code, which you as a normal person don't.


That could be removed and never come back, on the other hand i think canonical is going towards the path of Microsoft nonetheless


I fully expect Microsoft to eventually acquire Canonical, and if you pay attention to behind-the-scenes interactions between the two, it seems very likely.


As the other replies, I also agree with you, I've been a bit upset by Canonical for their support to Microsoft in making WSL, I'm not sure Linux has anything to gain from the thing, if not a bad advertising due to the suboptimal experience, but also it is a Linux system that has to exist under the government of microsoft which is a bit scary for me, but yeah I agree with you, I also see them working together for WSL, and at some point I see M$ buying Canonical


I suspect something similar. They have a good partnership. While we're dreaming, I'd love to see a version of Windows with a Linux kernel. They could do what they did with Edge, replace the core with something better.


Eh, word on the street NT is expertly engineered. It's all the compatibility layers and crud that gives Windows it's bad name.


Link or two to get me started?


I don't want to generate unwanted interest or drama for specific people by pasting links to mailing lists.

You can Google for "microsoft (buy|acquire) canonical" and find points on why it's very likely.


Nah Ubuntu got rid of the Amazon link and app, I think they're doing well in the enterprise space these days so there's no fuckery on the desktop (although that means they've also given up on stuff like phones).


Yeah there were amazon search results in app searches for a time. It's part of the reason why I switched to PopOS, which has none of that crap but builds on ubuntu's base.


>Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start

You don't have to use Unity, and thank god for that.


I've used win 8 and win 10 exclusively for years but have never seen an advert. Is this because I have the business (enterprise) edition, not the home version?

I'm not sure how good or bad Bing, Edge etc are as I only use them occasionally, but it does seem concerning that Microsoft has changed these defaults during an update. Is this even legal, post anti trust etc?


Your company may have removed the crapware; that’s what our image team did.


Possible, in my experience it's always been the hardware vendors that add all that stuff, but it seems like Microsoft wants in on the action.


I doubt it, given that Microsoft now actually owns the Candy Crush IP.


No, the only "actually" is that a deal was announced to buy the company that has that. The acquisition won't be finished for months if at all (government may block based on antitrust concerns)


by months I think you mean years


not yet, the deal has to pass through a lot of regulatory bodies to become a thing.


To be fair, Ubuntu also has had advertisements in the menus.


And so does firefox


Yeah, the answer is to simply not use Windows. I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days.

Linux is actually a much better OS for techies: you can make it look nicer, have a better workflow, and you can really play games now that Steam Deck brought so much focus on Linux compatibility.

Otherwise, Mac OS is doing just fine as well.


Unfortunately laptop driver support is often rough. I used an XPS 9343 (one marketed as supporting Ubuntu) but I faced issues with popping speaker sounds and mobile data tethering sucking GBs of data for some crazy reason.


Thats why I changed to thinkpads. They seen to use less weird hardware with no support. But I had to do some concessions. I don`t use notebooks with discrete gpus, since NVIDIA optimus have shit support.


Thinkpads have ACPI bugs that transfer to Windows too, it's amazing.

I've been using Lenovo's Legion devices instead. They don't run this horribly bloated BIOS, they run the much less critically acclaimed Insyde BIOS, but guess what, it just works. I've not had an unexpected wake-crash in years (aside from nvidia drivers with the mux switch on, but just use amdgpu instead). Desktop grade processors, weight comparable to a T420. Definitely not a device to use on the go, but very capable if you just need to carry a computer to the office.


I think the new Framework laptops might be better than Thinkpads now.


I'd use one in a heartbeat if they had a trackpoint.


I have been using the HP Elitebooks provided by my company and works well with Ubuntu. No complaints. I even upgraded my RAM to 64 GB.


Is amatter of time before someone provide a keyboard with one.


And also impossible to buy in Brazil. So for a while,, I will still have to relly on thinkpads.


At least with some ThinkPad with discrete GPUs they put a BIOS option for toggling whether to use integrated graphics, discrete graphics or both which means you can avoid Optimus if you want. I've had other laptops without such an option and then you have to deal with Optimus or some other workaround. It's not perfect though because often video outputs will be routed through one card or the other so if you want to use the Displayport out you have to use discrete graphics.


I'm on a Lenovo Yoga 5 Slim now. Cheap for the specs, needed some tweaking to get suspend working, otherwise works like a charm out-of-the-box.


My everyday beater is a Thinkpad x250. Small, ligth, not exactly top of the line, but works for most aplications. Only thing I suffer is running Android studio in it.


For some reason I've never really had any issues with any of the many many laptops I've used over the years. Various HP laptops in the past, mostly, and DEC laptops back in the 20th century. Lately a private NEC laptop (all parts Intel, everything worked out of the box), and my work laptop is currently a Fujitsu Lifebook. No problems with anything. It Just Works.


Dell XPS have great drivers support in kernel, but I actually found the vanilla Mate DE experience to be a downgrade from Ubuntu 18 to 20, I needed to do an unusual amount of tinkering. I am convinced this will always be the case for Linux DEs unless some company starts to sell support packages for properly tested configuration combinations.


Buy hardware for the software you want to use for your comfort and security.

It can't be an afterthought.

Same goes for phones. Buy the right phone, don't be upset you can't load GrapheneOS on your cheap Samsung handset.


Right, that's why it was disappointing that a laptop so clearly marketed as supporting Ubuntu (XPS 9343) didn't even have decent sound support.


For the remote data thing -- I ran into this a few years ago on Fedora when I was spending a lot of time away from the house, and buying 5 GB at a time for wireless data. I eventually had to write a script to sound an alarm when data usage started increasing, and caught the culprit program in the act. Was one of the background Yum / DNF update processes. Ended up killing Packagekit, and problem went away.


Had a similar experience with a Dell preshipped with Ubuntu. Also wouldn't go to sleep when I got it, was crazy. Eventually started working maybe after bios update but was pretty frustrating


Have an XPS 13 9310 running Ubuntu 20.04 and it runs flawlessly. Things like sleep were a little rough when it was first released, but updates by Dell since have made it rock solid.


No popping sounds in headphones/speakers from the realtek driver?


Nope, none.


Indeed. I'm a web developer and my tools genuinely work better just under native Linux than they ever could with WSL etc.


Would love to, but my employer has complex network settings (using 802.11X..), specific vpn client, im software, hw auth tokens with specific drivers and Windows shares and ntlm proxies all of which that makes integrating to the internal network with Linux a part time job. I gave up and set up a vm with Linux keeping windows do its thing.


Any reason to not use wsl? I’m forced to either use windows/Mac at work and chose windows with wsl. Works reasonably well. I just live in WSL and use office (which is better than MAC office by a large margin)


wsl needs to be administrator if I'm not mistaken, plus needs internal network which may/may not be allowed by the antivirus/firewall package, I prefer no to spend too much neurons on windows debugging / internals and keep them for linux


High DPI displays support can be quite rough in Linux, along with slowish GUI. Some apps are fine, others less so. Last time I was using Mac - it was constantly overheating, then the battery inflated itself, Docker performance was awful. I went with Windows 10 + WSL2 ~ year ago (some for compatibility reasons, some because curiosity) and it's working OK so far. Most of my time is spent in WSL2 + VSC with rest being mostly for browser and running some VMs. It works surprisingly well. Well enough I don't feel any urgent need to go and install Linux (except the one running in WSL). I did look at Mac options ~ year ago but it just wasn't worth the money. Its price tag + effectively locked HW platform is just not worth it compared to what I currently use. It's not like I can't afford it, there's just no added value in it, at least for my type of work (DevOps,SysOps). I won't be upgrading to Win11 anytime soon though, I'll probably switch back to Linux sometime in the future.


> I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days

Maybe for developers writing games in C++ or their own engines (or small time engines), but for many, how is it better?

As far as I know, out of the most popular engines, only Godot actually offers out-of-the-box Linux support. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and the others don't offer Linux support for their editors, although some give you access to the source code so you can build it yourself on Linux, but that's often not so trivial.


while this data is 5 years out of date (and I was writing C++), the sdk and toolchain for PS3 and PS4 was only installable via windows (even though they're BSD platforms, go figure).

The same was true for wii/wiiU (linux under the hood) if I recall correctly. I'd be shocked if that weren't also the case for xbox* though I don't remember that specifically.


Unity has fairly good support for Linux editors. I've been working in Unity on Linux for years now, without any major issues.


Unity has supported Linux for a few years now.


> Yeah, the answer is to simply not use Windows.

Yeah, no.

You either switch to Mac and lose 99% of your applications and some of your hardware.

Or you switch to Linux and lose 90% of your applications and latest hardware; And enjoy random problems and figuring out which of hundred answers online is right. Answer could be none, because for example Wayland support for multiple monitors sucks.


If you want to run Linux on a computer, you do your research and build/buy one where the hardware support is there. Most people don't need "latest" hardware; hardware from 2-3 years ago is fine, and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too -- again, if you do your research.

Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine (especially if it's a laptop) will often fail, and that's why people spend hours on forums looking for answers.

Long ago I tried to run Linux on Macs. I would always get it to more or less work, but it would take a lot of time and toil. I had the patience for that back then. Now I just buy a Dell XPS 13 and stop worrying about it, because everything works out of the box. It's not my favorite piece of hardware, but it's fine.

I also do wonder where all these critical Windows-only applications are. I spend 90% of my computing time in a browser, terminal window, or text editor/IDE. Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without, but the vast majority of users out there don't.


> Grabbing a random machine and expecting it to work fine

Not random, but my current machine. How else am I (or random person on the Internet) to migrate to Linux then?

Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

E.g. You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away. Get AMD. Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I honestly dread switching to Linux.

> Certainly some people have Windows-only apps (or games) they can't do without

Stuff like Office (not online ones), Adobe suite, video editors, sound editors, etc.


Worth noting a lot of people had to upgrade their computer for Win10 (2 of my relatives were told they had to buy new computers by Windows but I managed to upgrade them with out after lots of fiddling), a lot will have to upgrade for Win11 (to get TPM2 modules).

I think the answer to the last one is if you need Microsoft software then use it. Not much you can do if your chosen vendor doesn't support other OS (WINE, VMs, and such aside).


TPM 2 plus a BIOS update for any board made pre August of 2021, & 60GB or so of free space on their OS drive, which these days is also more of a rarity since the trend has been small OS SSD drive with large secondary & storage drives.


Honestly, your machine will probably work. Linux supports a lot of hardware. Nowadays it's rare to find any that doesn't work.

> You bought an expensive nVidia card. Yeah, throw it away

Nvidia works fine (it has to, lots of ML shit on GPUs is done on Linux), you just need proprietary drivers. If anything their support on Linux is probably better than AMD's.

Why? Just make an Ubuntu startup stick and try it without installing... Nothing lost except maybe 10 minutes of your time.


> Want dual monitors. Throw one away...

I've used dual monitors on my linux setup for years without issues. Is this a common problem?


I've been using dual screens on Linux since 2009 and for the last 2 years triple screens.

My current PC is using and nVidia 1660 GPU to drive this.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04. It wasn't out-of-the-box easy to install, but running installer in safe-mode worked and regular boots are as normal.

Even on laptops dual screens work provided the laptop supports it.


There is a problem if there is a mismatched DPI between screens.

I've rarely seen it as i usually dock the machine with duplicate monitors.


This used to require some tweaking under gnome (different DPI), but is nice and smooth under wayland.


> Create an entire new machine just for Linux? That is a pretty hefty price.

I understand what you are saying but it is not such a big deal in practice as it may seem. You migrate if your current machine supports linux (you have to do some research), OR you migrate the next time you switch machines.

Linux is my daily driver for 15+ years now and the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't bother me at all. I am currently using two xps laptops and one custom built desktop - everything worked out of the box. I had good experience with thinkpads in the past.


It all comes down to the time you are willing to dedicate in learning something new.

For most of the stuff that runs on windows and mac there are alternatives on linux, some equal, some worse, some better. I have been mostly a linux users for years. I still have one laptop with a dual boot on windows...for only one use case: music production. Not because there are no music production software available, not because they aren't good, quite the contrary there are fairly decent tools both opensource and proprietary, but because I don't know them well. I only do music as a hobby in my free time and so far I have been too lazy, or more interested in producing music than learning a new workflow. I admit it is mostly about laziness and time to dedicate to something new. I intend to correct that because I don't want to feel forced to use windows, which I mostly hate for anything else, for that.


What on earth are you talking about? I am running Ubuntu 21.10 with triple monitors and a Nvidia 3090.


You're just making stuff up now. I bought an RTX 2070 (nvidia, as you know), and it worked fine, runs all my games, under archlinux just fine.

Same with dual, triple monitors, etc.


> You're just making stuff up now.

Linux Desktop evangelists being like this also makes people not want to switch. Who wants to deal with a community like that?


For you. On your hardware and your distro. I've seen and heard stuff going south from word go.


If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

If it's a laptop then buying an entire machine is the norm.

If you want to test hardware you already own, then just do it. No need to do any real research there.


> If it's a desktop nothing should go wrong.

Should isn't won't.

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M


I don't recall that series having much in the way of hardware problems, excluding the goxlr and such because that's not part of the desktop.

If it was unclear that my sentence was in the scope of hardware, sorry.

I remember Luke saying multiple monitors broke at one point on his laptop, but that was a laptop.


> and, honestly, most latest hardware works fine too

True: a bit more than a year ago I bought a new computer with (I think) a B550 chipset motherboard which was very recent.

Wasn't supported by Kubuntu 20.04, I just had to install Kubuntu 20.10 and that's it.

IMHO Linux hardware isn't a problem at all. Software is more problematic (I had a lot of side projects WPF apps that can't run on Linux and I'm a bit lazy to port them to another framework or language so I have installed a Windows VM.


> where all these critical Windows-only applications are

The vast majority of users would suffer if forced to use only Linux apps. Think Office Vs LibreOffice or Photoshop Vs GIMP. A lot wouldn't be able to work at all, like the folks who use Solidworks.

Let's not pretend that browser/terminal/IDE is the most common usage of PCs.


I would suffer if I had to use Windows applications. Because having to pay (or even pirate) quality paid software that I have to sit and learn is less convenient than downloading pretty good free (as in beer) software that I've used for the past 5 years and I'm very comfortable with. GNOME applications are surprisingly polished and good, and I'm not getting that on Windows.


I'm one of those who use Solidworks and there are no Linux equivalents, let alone polished ones. So, as in everything, YMMV.


100% fair.


Krita and Blender are pretty sweet though. And you can use some versions of Photoshop via Wine perfectly fine. The same goes for Office.


When x570 was just released, I bought all the newest stuff from AMD, and everything just worked, if you were on a recent kernel. Similarly, when I got a Thinkpad, I just bought it and everything worked. Not saying that this is a representative sample, but I've been successfully skipping the part where I spend months researching if the hardware I buy will work.


I have a recent AMD GPU and CPU, which I bought because of AMD's GPU drivers being part of the kernel. I have absolutely no problems with my PC running Ubuntu, it's rock solid and I can play almost any game on Steam via Proton - all while not dealing with Microsoft's shit. Windows where the dark ages for me.


Linux has many challenges, but honestly, Macs are way too expensive and closed system (maybe you don't care if you have an US salary, I do) and Microsoft trying to push for BS every update gets really old.


It depends what you work on. I have installed popos like 2 years ago. I have 0 issues so far. For web development, nodejs etc. Linux is better than windows by a miles.

Not everybody is graphics designer, video editor who needs Photoshop, Microsoft Excel etc.

And, I haven't found any random problems at least on PC. It might be problematic in laptop, which I honestly don't know.


My last and current laptops work completely fine with linux, but I chose hardware that works fine. The old one is a Latitude E5470, and the new one is a Lenovo Thinkbook 14 G2 ARE (with Ryzen 4700u). Both require no extra drivers, while the new one requires at least kernel 5.10 to work, and works better with 5.13. Both have similar battery life on windows 10 and linux.


Yeah, I run Arch and despite it being a kind of "hobbyist" type system, after the initial configuration, there are no problems or constant maintenance. I have had a few things break sometimes because I accidentally install a partial update, but that's obviously my own fault.

Also, part of the problem people have with Linux is that it does not run Windows programs and they complain because they can't get QEMU or VMware or WINE functioning correctly. You shouldn't need those. When you switch to Linux, you lose your software. It's a reality you accept, because that software you used was not designed for Linux. Instead of trying desperately to get your old software to run, you instead use alternatives, be they open or closed, to run what you want. There are more than a few alternatives, many of them having similar or exceeding the power of paid windows-only products.


Back when the 2070 came out I built a machine with that RTX 2070, i7-9700k, some new ram, some new harddrives and ssd(s), m.2 and not, etc. and I have not had any issues with Archlinux.

Same experience when I bought my thinkpad L14 AMD, no issues either.

Im convinced at this point that the entire "linux is bad on new hardware" is a thing of the past.


The thing here is, it never technically was. The issue in the past was vendors either writing the drivers like they do windows, but for linux, or producing technical documentation so someone could. Instead, there were lots of times years and years ago, where a lot of drivers had to be reverse engineered. So the hardware on linux being bad, was mostly and issue that at one time, no one cared to write drivers or provide the necessary information.


If the drivers aren’t there then Linux is bad on that hardware for anyone attempting to use it. It doesn’t matter to the end user that the lack of drivers is the manufacturer’s fault.


If you don't like to get raped by $megacorp1 buy $megacorp2 instead! After all, consoom you must, right?


What?!

It's just there isn't a good path. So might as well remain on current thing that works.

In my case the $15 Windows.


Aside from some weird GDI printer that refuse to work with any operating system other than Windows I never[0] had any issues with hardware. I recently tried to revive an ancient drawing board and when it didn't work with Linux I - for old habits' sake. Turned out it didn't work with Windows either because it was broken.

tldr; Linux' hardware support is excellent these days.

[0] Since about 2010. Before that I had lots of issues, especially with graphic cards and broken ALSA drivers and stuff. All of these problems have disappeared for all practical purposes.


It seems weird that when a company grows beyond one point they start these user hostile practices. Google is another example. When they are small they are more open to innovation than manipulating user into using their product. What goes wrong?


My probably a bit naive take:

The MBAs take over and implement KPIs that might even be well-intentioned but are ultimately easiest to satisfy by cutting corners. For example: KPI that measures market share of Edge; instead of making Edge better to increase its share, just screw your users by making Edge default on Windows on every other update.

I've seen it happen at my own company, and while I always had pipedreams that this isn't happening at the big tech players because there are too many smart folks around to stop that nonsense, I can well imagine that it boils down to these kind of bullshit reasons.


If their MBAs set-up KPIs that reward this kind of behaviour, they need better MBAs. Instead of "get more people to use Edge", it should be "get more people to choose Edge". Neither people nor geese respond well to having stuff rammed down their throats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras


How about no MBAs?


These practices are nothing new for M$, they did that in the past (15-20 years ago) with IE, then got several slaps on the wrist, which made them cut back on it for a few years, but now they seem to be thinking that if IE/Edge is no longer the dominant browser they can start using these tricks again?!


Probably, since just like back then with IE, Edge is now baked into the OS as well.


I think Microsoft is an exception, they have been obnoxious since day one.


Obnoxious is being far too nice. MS has done more than any other single organization to derail & suppress the pace of technological development, and by extension the progress of the species. I genuinely see them as an enemy of humanity.


Organic growth opportunities from gaining market share or acquiring users disappear and the new people they hire have to “make an impact”


> What goes wrong?

Quarterly Earnings reports. They've picked off all the low hanging fruit to show growth, now they're grasping.


They run out of improvements and start focusing on value extraction?


Windows is pretty much alive and kicking. The best it has been since Windows XP.

WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

Windows 11 is VERY solid and you can play lots of games on it too :)

I am dead serious. I have been using Windows since 3, using betas of Microsoft products since Longhorn - right now, Windows is reaching it's PEAK in terms of performance, ecosystem. Sure, they will need 2-3 more UI/UX iterations, but who cares - I use the terminal, File Explorer, Visual Studio 2022, Office apps and Outlook :D


> WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

As someone who also has a Linux desktop and laptops in addition to the Windows machine, WSL is terrible next to the real thing. Unless you need software that only runs on Windows, I advise against using it as a reason to stay on Windows.


I have been using Linux since Redhat 6.2 back in 1998. I have had my share of xconfig edits, bash scripts, etc explorations.

I am now reaching 36, I just like 'things that work' - like Windows. Windows works with all my hardware, with all my 7 laptops, with all my 2 towers, I can install Visual Studio 2022 on it, I can install Ubuntu in WSL2 and I can play Dota2/Civ/Baldur's Gate/Warhammer 40k Insquisitor Martyr/listen to Spotify/debugging/deploying to Azure/writing an email/writing a Presentation in Power Point.

And then go back to my family - because not worrying about Wayland, that new driver or that new update or "that new thing "- suprsingly leaves a lot of time that you can spend with your family :)

And of course I am using the .NET stack with Angular- all smooth, all good, no hassle, just smooth sailing :)


I am just a couple of years older than you, also using Windows since 3.0 (and MS-DOS for years before that) and Redhat Linux since the 90's. I've moved all my family over to Fedora, and support calls have dropped enormously. Windows 8 was the straw the broke the camel's back for most of them. They actually found Linux (sometimes with skinned XFCE) more familiar coming from Windows 7. I will accept that if you buy new low end hardware you may occasionally have driver issues, but the last few Lenovo AIO and Thinkpads I've bought all work flawlessly first time around. I will add that I've tried many vanilla Windows installs over the years, and without the special vendor drivers built in, found it to be even worse than Linux for compatibility. The hostility of modern Windows is just hard to accept to be honest.

I get that my use-case doesn't apply to everyone, but I want people to know that if you do mostly web stuff etc... even as a non technical person, Linux can "just work".


Same here, I gave my mother a dual-boot system (Windows+Debian) somewhere around 2008 (or so, given that it was Windows XP), and told her to switch to Linux for online banking (my father's online account was blocked twice due to suspicious activity). I also configured her Thunderbird mail client to use the Windows' data folder, so she could access her e-mail on both. A year later she told me she never started Windows any more, she used Linux all the time.

Then my father's printer and sound card stopped working after upgrading to Windows 8, and I moved him to Linux as well.

In all this time there's only one thing I couldn't fix for them: the library's audiobooks had some form of Adobe DRM on them, and of course it didn't support Linux. I told them to take up the issue with their library, but of course they didn't have a satisfactory resolution to the problem.


> Windows just works.

I use Windows for audio recording, mixing, mastering and gaming, here are my examples of Windows not "just work"ing:

My Windows bluescreens immediately after booting on my Threadripper build with an MSI MEG x399 if I don't have the wifi driver installed. On a new install I have to deactivate it in UEFI settings, then boot/install windows, then install the driver before reactivating it.

Windows Update tries to install certain useless crapware (nahimic) that I can't reject or properly uninstall without a few obscure hacks to trick it.

I use an external audio interface, if Windows goes to standby I have to unplug it and plug it back in, otherwise it won't detect it anymore (this does not happen on Fedora 35).

Also windows will occasionally just switch my default input device after reboots or going to standby. This behaviour is not consistent, so I have to check everytime before I use it for calls. This problem does not occur on Fedora 35.

I currently have 13 .NET redistributables and Windows runtimes installed that all required manual downloading and installing for various games and software to work.


A friend decided to have a Mac to use Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, and other DAWs because of those problems. It's sad that those software isn't available in Linux.


> It's sad that those software isn't available in Linux.

It truly is, the only part on music production that is keeping me is not even the DAWs themselves (I mainly use Cubase and Reaper, and Reaper already offers a Linux build, which works well), it's the VST plugins, which rarely if ever offer Linux versions.

Other music software I make heavy use of: Transcribe!, which offers a linux build and Musescore, which is open source and runs on Linux as well.


I'm a similiar age (few years older but nothing too signficant) and have used nearly every version of Windows. Inc pre 3.x versions, pre-NT4 versions, and most of the CE and embedded versions too. And like yourself, used Linux since the 90s too (Redhat, SuSE, and Slackware were my favourites up until I discovered Arch).

Ironically I switched away from Windows and onto Linux precisely because I was sick of things not working on Windows. Sure, it has the best desktop application support of any operating system but to use it for anything more than just a desktop machine requires hours of configuration because everything is tailored to supporting technologically illeterate people (eg file extensions being hidden). Very little of any of this config can be automated -- or at least not in any easy way. And then Microsoft will pull some bullshit move that undoes half your config and you need to start all over again (much like the author of this submission has experienced). Or every few years you need to upgrade to a new release of Windows and you have to find where to change all those settings again plus learn a stack of new settings you need to change too.

Eventually I realised I was spending as much time maintaining the OS as I was actually writing software on it. So I stopped using Windows. Or rather decided to keep Windows around for emergencies but use Linux as my primary desktop (instead of keeping Linux around for emergencies and using Windows as my primary desktop).

My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades), but you can keep your config in Git so it's sync'ed across multiple machines or kept safe if you do need to reinstall your OS. Everything is automated and just works. Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).

I'm not saying your experiences are wrong but just offering the counterpoint that "thing that work" might differ for different people.


>My experience with Linux has been that you have the same install running for 10+ years (this is especially true for Arch because you have fewer risky distribution upgrades),

Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long. Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade", and it insists that you update every day.

On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.


I've been running basically the same Arch install since 2009:

> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head

[2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)

You can hedge against any distro breaking by using a volume manager which allows snapshots of the root volume, or even better, creates these snapshots automatically before a distro upgrade. Both LVM and Btrfs can do this. I use LVM because I love boring tech.


> Arch is needy; it commits seppuku if you abandon it for too long.

It's certainly introducing more risk but these days I only update my Arch systems a maximum of once every 6 months (usually less than that) and never have an issue. This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.

> Every update on Arch is a "risky distribution upgrade",

In theory it is a possibility but in practice that's not really the case. I mean you're not going to get breaking changes every week ;) Arch's package manager has really improved in recent years too so a lot of occasions that might have needed manual intervention can be handled automatically by the package manager (which wasn't the case back when this meme was true).

Also there is a news section on Arch's website so if you're genuinely nervous about running `pacman` you can check there first (this is the recommended best practice but most people don't bother these days because it's rare to have an issue).

> and it insists that you update every day.

Only if you kick off your package manager everyday. But this is true for any Linux distro since they're all pushing updated packages everyday so I don't really see how Arch differs in that regard.

> On the other hand, I have kept Debian installs going for a great many years, with dist-upgrades never failing, and I know that some people have maintained the same Debian install since they first installed it in the 90s.

I've had a Debian dist-upgrade fail before but that's just once out of a dozen(?) of successful dist-upgrades so I do agree Debian is solid. Never had an issue with upgrading CentOS either. Nor FreeBSD.

The only thing Arch does better than the above is you don't have an hour(s) of downtime during the upgrade. But as you said, that's paired with the risk that you might run into a breaking change at any point in the future. For that reason alone I wouldn't run Arch on servers (or at least not professionally -- thrown Arch on some personal servers in the past)


>This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since.

It's not a meme. Just this week I attempted to update an Arch system that had been left unattended for only a couple years. It got caught in some kind of cycle where it didn't have the GPG keys required to download the latest GPG keys. Then there was some package conflict issue. Finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I completed the update and rebooted... "kernel not found".

I gave up on it.

And lest I be accused of incompetence, here's another Arch user's 3-year update story, only a few weeks ago, on our very own HN:

"Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053

So I'm sorry, but "pretty smooth ride" my ass.


A minute ago you were complaining about updating Arch every day and now you're talking about not updating it over time spans lasting years! Talk about hopping from one extreme to another...

Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion.

So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.


> Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).

Instead, you run into "Firefox not supported" issues.


It's not 1998 any more. Nobody worries about their linux setup unless they want to. My pop os tower has been set up and forget for years now.


I have five Linux boxes in regular service (not counting the dozens of RPi-likes and VMs), with multiple configurations (mostly different filesystems - BtrFS, ZFS, XFS, LVM or bare metal, depending on requirements) and the only machines that give me surprises are the two Windows boxes, which, really, never do anything "weird".


Out of curiosity, what are you using so many machines for? I can imagine collecting a few, but getting regular service out of them without having a business workload of some kind seems unusual to me.


- One server that runs ad-hoc VMs for various reasons and also does heavy lifting when the laptops aren't quite well suited for it. It has a monitor, but it's almost never used like that.

- One very light (and slow by today's standards) Fedora laptop I use mostly from the couch and used to go with me to conferences.

- One reasonably sized (also old, but still snappy) Ubuntu laptop I use tethered to a desk with a keyboard and monitor.

- One that's mostly a file server that all computers on the network can see.

- One that's a "write-only" file server for backups.


Not the GP, but:

- a desktop on Arch

- an arm-based NAS on Debian

- a router running OpenWRT

- a backup target on Debian

- a media player (x86) with Kodi/Wine/Dosbox/Mame/other emulators

All are in regular use, but only the NAS and router run 24/7.


[flagged]


> That's the issue with Linux desktop users - they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice'... taking 2-3 hours per week to perfect their desktop with the perfect background and then post it on some Linux community site.

Oh please, that's absurd. I probably spend 2-3 hours per year cumulatively on system maintenance tasks, and the rest of the time I get my work and play done.

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work

Pretty sure that's what you're doing right now. I don't think Linux is right for everyone, but your criticisms don't make sense. You're not even criticizing the platform itself, you're making up weird things about the people who use it, which kinda says a lot about you right there.

> Let's move on.

Been there, done that, moved on from Windows, never looking back.


> That's the issue with Linux desktop users - they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice', by using desktop environments that mimic the same thing they migrated from :)

Microsoft and Apple have invested millions into design so it's not unreasonable that users of FOSS might like some of the design decisions made by those companies. That doesn't make FOSS users "fanatics", that makes them "pragmatic".

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work

Isn't that literally what you're doing right now?

> and then taking 2-3 hours per week to perfect their desktop with the perfect background and then post it on some Linux community site.

Now you're just being argumentative for the sake of it

> Been there done that. Windows just works. Let's move on.

As posted elsewhere, "just works" will differ depending on the individual and their requirements. Assuming what works for you is universal for everyone is the kind of delusional take that will get you pegged as a fanboy.


> they are fanatics and obsessed with their 'freedom of choice', by using desktop environments that mimic the same thing they migrated from :)

Have you ever met a Linux user in person?

I ask you because most Linux users I know just run whatever came with their distro and, when unhappy, change distro. I'm running both Fedora and Ubuntu and I'm quite happy with both. The biggest change was to use the Gnome wallpaper because I didn't really like the Ubuntu one. My Fedora laptop is mostly vanilla.

> Spending more time on forums defending their 'right choice' that doing actual work ;)

We just like to correct people who write some baseless criticism and attacks on our professional attitudes, because, you know, these kind of comment is not really nice. Or professional. Or even correct.

> Been there done that. Windows just works. Let's move on.

Been there, done that, Linux just works better, and keeps working. Let's move on.


> Been there done that.

As a Linux user, I've never done that. Any kinds of obsessions are useless. I'm concentrated on performance and efficiency, and I find Linux environment perfect for my needs, extremely rich and flexible. Someone might say the same about their Windows box - and that's perfectly fine, fortunately everybody is free to use what they want - let's leave OS wars to people who enjoy having this kind of argument.


One of the points of Gnome is that it has sensible defaults and you just live with them.

Like, you know, a Mac.

BTW, there's something to be said about how sensible Windows defaults are. I'm not really liking the start menu moving to the middle of the dock.


Mac has terrible defaults though. The DE with the best defaults I have used so far has been Xfce. Xfce is a bot rough in some areas since it is a small volunteer driven project bit the defaults are excellent.


I'm 40, and I've found current-day Linux to "just work" as well as Windows or macOS ever has for me in the past. I run Xfce on X11, as I've been doing since 2004, on Debian, as I've been doing for the past decade or so. I see no need to switch to Wayland or constantly chase "that new thing".

I don't game all that much; most of what I play that doesn't have a Linux-native build runs fine through Proton on my laptop. If I did do any serious gaming, I'd probably reluctantly have a separate Windows gaming rig that I'd use solely for gaming, but otherwise avoid it like the plague. Life is too short to deal with user-hostile OSes.


> I can install Ubuntu in WSL2

Funny how the best thing to have happened to Windows in the last 10-ish years is gaining the ability to install Linux on top ;)

Also making Python and Angular first class citizens in their dev stacks. Both of which are prominent open-source projects.


> And then go back to my family - because not worrying about Wayland, that new driver or that new update or "that new thing "- suprsingly leaves a lot of time that you can spend with your family :)

What about the times when windows take forever to "getting things ready". I once spent around two hours updating windows. And just after the reboot there were ten new updates.


My partner was about to get back from the office, bringing food. It was 8pm, and everything set for tomorrow with Windows. Except at this point it needed to update, and for a specific reason the computer needed to be in a working condition the next day and updates of course installed. Two hours later it was still updating, and we were eating in the end 11pm...

My NixOS machine updates in a few minutes even when it needs to compile some custom things. And it will not change settings without me changing the configuration. If it does, I can just reboot to the older version and file a bug report...

Edit: has anybody tried to install Windows on ZFS or Btrfs? If update does something you don't like, just boot to a snapshot and get rid of the update.


> has anybody tried to install Windows on ZFS or Btrfs?

I used to do banking on a VirtualBox immutable disk image. I only made it mutable when it was time to regular updates, then made it immutable again for using the bank and government software (in Brazil you had some govt issued tools that made life easier). You can also make it work with filesystem snapshots as well as letting VirtualBox manage its own snapshots for you.


Have been Windows 10 insider since 2016ish maybe, before that installing whatever WzoR iso put out. This PC I am writing from - had Windows 10 installed on it 2018 with Windows Insiders builds, upgraded to Windows 11 around August, joinned the beta/canary channel, right now I am on:

https://changewindows.org/platforms/pc/releases/windows-11-c...

[Version 10.0.22538.1010]

I had ZERO (0) issues with upgrades or downtime.


> I had ZERO (0) issues with upgrades or downtime.

I too could make coffee or read a book while apt or dnf do their magic, but the truth is I can continue working while they do it, probably because, unlike Windows, they can delete and replace open files while they install, making the update-on-reboot issue on Windows a non-issue on Linux machines.

It's been a while since I had a BSOD on Windows, but I have been forced to restart it quite a few times when something didn't work or stopped working, or the VPN went crazy or some other malfunction. Unscheduled downtime is still very much an issue on workstations and I wouldn't want to look into Windows Server and how it handles this issue.


Every single half-year release of Windows 10 took more than one hour on both of my windows computers (using upgrade assistant; windows update never offered an update). They are no slouchs either, one is i7 and the other is Threadripper, both with ample ram and disk space.

They also break Intel ANS on every single release - i.e. VLANs and LACP will stop working until Intel releases a new version. For Windows 11, Intel gave up and there will be no ANS anymore[1].

And the last, january 2022 update? It casually killed L2TP...

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...


without games windows would crumble. what has been changing in the past few years is the ammount of support given to gaming on linux as well as nvidia actively developing drivers for linux due to the machine learning community. it will be interesting to see how this develops

also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience


> without games windows would crumble

Eh, pretty sure it is mostly Office, specifically Outlook, that keep Windows alive. Glorious PC Gaming Master Race is relatively small, although they do spend a lot of money.


That's why Linux is a workstation OS. If you need a Playstation OS, the choice of hardware is obvious ;-)

> also, as someone who has to keep a windows machine for availability of certain applications that have no linux versions yet, the statement that "windows just works" is bs in my experience

For a very limited set of values of "works". ;-)


Depends what works means for you, for me its being able to have a desktop running with a an ide and being able to choose reliably my defaults with the os getting out of my way. Linux does it for me 100%, windows is a bunch of GUI with no portable config and always tries to sell you something, including unclear errors and sudden crashes


Unrelated question – being a .NET developer, would you be interested to try out ASPSecurityKit specifically it's activity data authorization [1] feature? Pl share your email if yes. Mine is varun at ASPSecurityKit

looking for some beta users, to get feedback as we're thinking a cross-platform component on similar lines.

1: https://aspsecuritykit.net/guides/aspnet-policy-authorizatio...


You clearly need to be introduced to Apple's ecosystem :)


In my case I began with DOS and later, Windows 98. I loved Windows 98SE/XP and Linux looked cool, "industrial" server graded OS but unusable for the desktop. As my Debian skills skyrocketed by a 20 euro bargain sale of Debian Sarge (4 DVD's, 3 for sw and 1 for the sources), I never went back to Windows.

Today I use Slackware 14.2 on a netbook and -current (almost 15 nowadays) as my desktop OS. No driver issues, every emulated game works. I use either text mode via framebuffer (I can even watch videos and run SDL2 based cool stuff like mednafen) or fluxbox.

I don't care on modern gaming, Slashem and IF killed modern graphical-intensive games but with a childish and boring script. Kinda like the current decade trend of Marvel superhero movies. I had more fun reading classical sci-fi comics from the 50's. BG was cool... at 18. Today I have no time to follow a 20000 pages long script based not on sequential reading, but on choices. Slashem has better and more inmersive RPG elements (Nethack was the king of emergent gameplay) and I can play it anywhere on any machine from a 486 or a Classic Mac. Mednafen does magic for my gf, two player 8-16 bits classics with a gamepad while I use the keyboard. It works even without X. No DLC's, no always online. Oh, and Jap nerds translated loads of games into English. I am not an English native, but for sure I can read English better than Kanji.

On media, I don't care on Spotify, I have curseradio-improved, yt-dlp, Jamendo and Radio Paradise, and MPV plays HD content from Youtube and may other sites perfectly. My offline music collection (streamripper to Radio Paradise) does it better with the "shuffle" function on mocp. Fire and forget.

Time for my family? No social media, no "always connected" bullshit. I don't have to follow 2000 notifications on the framebuffer as in a GUI or a smarthone. https://68k.news, https://lite.cnn.io, https://efe.com for my country's news and Slashdot/HN/Lobste.rs has anything I want to read. Even in text mode. I also have some good times with Gopher and magical.fish/sdf.org and the tildeverse. Condensed geekeery thanks to few members, code sharing and a low volume of posts. Heaven. And, maybe, bbs@uncensored.citadel.org via SSH from time to time. Ah, a lot of people posted personal blogs on Gopher, so I can read posts back to ~2007 with the Gopher revival, and I can read it on a slow pace. The protocol is fast enough and there's no lag to load the sites, OFC.

Visual Studio? Heh. Nowadays almost everything I do it's cloud containered bullshit so there's very little to code, I almost do (jim)tcl and a bit of C for fun.

At home, everything else it's scripted over with a script called "do_the_internet.sh" pulling and fetching rss, mail, usenet news and podcasts. Once a week. No info overload.

Ironically thanks to that I spend much less time with the computer than you thanks to scripting ;), so I can focus on different stuff such as reading long books and biking.

And, yes, I geek sometimes, OFC, but with a fast as hell Fluxbox netbook, I can chat everywhere thanks to SSH (mosh) and Bitlbee (IRC gateway to Telegram/Jabber and whatever Pidgin supports), and hack and slash with Slashem on top of a mountain by using the phone's wifi sharing.

No ads. No unwanted updates. No pop-ups. No crapware. Batteries last hours.

If you are on Windows, get a Gopher client and head to gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org. Your brain will thank you.


Of course WSL2 can never be as good as running Linux natively. But as someone who needs software that runs on Windows, I like WSL2 a lot. For me the choice was native Linux + Wine or native Windows with WSL2. I have tried both, and I have to say that the WSL2 option runs much better in terms of both performance and stability.


> But as someone who needs software that runs on Windows

It boils down to which OS you want to be the "second-class citizen" on your machine. With Wine, it's Windows. With WSL, it's Linux.


> It boils down to which OS you want to be the "second-class citizen" on your machine. With Wine, it's Windows. With WSL, it's Linux.

That equivalence is only valid for WSL1. Since WSL2 runs the real Linux kernel on a VM, the equivalent for it on Linux would be running Windows on a VM.


> the equivalent for it on Linux would be running Windows on a VM.

Not quite. When Windows is on a VM, you mostly run only Windows-specific software on it. Within the VM, everything works mostly flawlessly. Most platform-neutral software will be running on the Linux side, which makes accessing data from the Linux environment a non-issue.

And don't even get me started on Windows-1252 and CRLF line endings.

WSL2 still has some issues with VPN software and my company doesn't support it on my corporate Windows laptop.


> ...WSL is terrible next to the real thing...

I am genuinely interested on knowing your reasons for saying WSL is terrible. Just for clarification, I'm a Linux/MacOS user but the times I've had to use WSL in the past whether experimenting at home or in some companies where I was force to use Windows, I though it is actually one of the most decent things Microsoft has created on its entire existence. It is easy to enable, to operate, it integrates well with the network stack of Windows (kubectl port-forwarding or docker run -p8000:80 works out of the box) it performs very decently (with exceptions on IO filesystem operations) etc.


> I am genuinely interested on knowing your reasons for saying WSL is terrible.

It's just that it's poorly integrated with the host environment (because there is a host environment). On Linux and Macs, the Unix side is the machine itself. With WSL1, you have a Windows kernel pretending to be a Linux one (I kind of prefer this approach) but my home folder is not my Windows home folder, but terminal still opens the Windows home anyway. On WSL2 (which I can't use on my corporate laptop because the VPN software breaks something in DNS and networking I haven't had the time to debug) the Windows side needs a network share to get access to the WSL environment (which is not present until the environment starts - and there are other side effects whether WSL starts before the VPN or after).

A Linux box (or Mac) is a so much simpler (to understand what happens) Unix environment it's not even funny.

Having said that, when you overcome those impedance mismatches, it mostly works for the typical use cases. Like you mentioned, Docker works (I need to set a DOCKER_HOST variable to point to the Windows box). And Windows Terminal is excellent (double height and width chars are still missing, but they have overline support).


Sorry about the VPN trouble (which may or may not be WSL's fault) but having to stick "cd ~" in .bashrc and not liking network drives isn't enough to get close to "terrible".


If you do a cd ~ in your profile, they you need to get to your Windows home in order to see the Downloads folder.

It's death by a thousand paper cuts.


I recently tried to use WSL2 for work on my Windows machine, and I had no end of issues getting things to work on it that I know work on both OSX and Linux because we usually use those 2.

I finally gave up on it and went back to using my underpowered OSX machine instead of continuing to try to get WSL2 to do the job.

Was it possible? Probably. But I'm not going to spend the time to figure it out. There's probably a correct way to install everything we needed, but I didn't find it, and I found numerous wrong ways.


I own a XPS 9500 I can tell you that even though I have dual boot I use windows and wsl2. Ubuntu is worse than wsl2 at running exactly same stuff, even the X apps through Vcxsrv are snappier on Windows compared to Ubuntu. To that, add lack of features in Linux apps, Discord lack of Krisp for example, poor cpu usage for videos in and outside browser, really bad BT, poor wireless performance and others. I am a power user and I don't like windows but it's just better any way you look at it, apart from customization. However, even there it starts to catch up, with apps like PowerToys.


Let me guess: Nvidia graphics?


Curious: in what way is WSL terrible? I've been using it daily for several years so wondering what I'm missing.


The tech that pushed me off windows on my dev machines was WSL2. My productivity lifted so much I started to wonder why I was using Windows at all for .NET development.

Did the switch to debian a couple of months ago. First two days was weird, after that the only thing I use Windows 11 for is gaming, and Lutris is making me think twice about that too.


I find Windows 11 to be the most bloated of all windows version with such stuff as Microsoft store, xbox app, cortana, or security center getting nastier on the user; You turn them off in the settings panel but they still keep running in the background. Now you have to fiddle with obscure registry variables, manually turn off services, ... to get rid of them.


I started running Windows back with version 3 as well, but gave up after 2000. I won't run an OS that I can't trust, and and OS that pulls the kind of thing that happened to OP is not one that I can trust.

I don't care how "solid" or performant it is. And I don't need WSL2 when I can just run Linux directly.


"The best it has been since Windows XP ... it's all good"

As far as I remember, XP had no tracking and advertisement build in by default. And it left control on when to update and when to invoke antivirus with you.

Is this really all good to you? Or are you so deep invested in windows, that you can just disable them? Because I surely can disable most of that shit, too - but it takes a while and one update later it can be all back.


> I am dead serious.

Thanks for adding this, as I thought you made a joke.

Ads, spyware, NSA backdoors, who still trusts them?

Also alternatives are just too readily available these days.


This user hostile mess is peak Windows? At least back then Microsoft had backwards compatibility as a core value.


Sure. Trivial stuff like disabling automated updates on Linux takes single command. On Windows you have to find tutorials on some shady sites, dig into binary registry. And a few months latter this settings gets reversed anyway, because Microsoft knows better.

Last solid Windows very Win Server 2003.

PS: I prefer to update once a month in controlled mode.


I disagree. This is the dark ages for windows, basic users and power users alike.


> WSL2, running Linux on Windows, VS Code, VS 2022, it's all good.

Actually, I decided to downgrade to WSL from WSL2. I often need to do some quick work in a Linux environment, and sometimes this even involves some files on my Windows machine, so WSL comes in handy. The problem is, WSL2 startup time is terribly long when compared to WSL. With WSL, i type wsl and a second later I run a couple of commands. With WSL2, once it has finally started, I already forgot what I wanted to do.


I've got a wsl2 shell in startup and never close it; it consumes relatively little memory (<1GB) and 0% cpu when idle.


I'd say it's pretty far from all good.

WSL2 has major IO issues outside of ext4, which is detrimental. It also doesn't support mounting NFS. It doesn't have systemd so lots of stuff doesn't work in a normal way.

To get a terminal that doesn't f*#& up you need to switch code page to utf-8.

Visual studio is almost as garbase as SSMS.

Windows is a pain


Yes, the bait in the hook is definitely more delicious.


I finally transitioned to Linux on my work desktop at the end of last year, after using WSL for a number of years and Linux on my home desktops for ages. I found that managing a Windows 10 VM in virt-manager for all the Windows-specific stuff is fine at the moment - nothing in particular has broken in my workflow. I find there’s slightly less mental overhead, but I haven’t yet figured out a good way to manage little configuration changes made to text files.

Only gripes are that I have experienced a few GNOME bugs with no explanation, like mouse gestures randomly breaking until I reboot - still, I just take this as an opportunity to reboot my computer. I also can no longer use Remote Desktop - VNC is too much of a pain and I can’t ‘steal’ my own session, and SSH forwarding is dead slow. (If anyone has a Remote Desktop solution for Linux that just works, I’d love to hear it.)

I can’t imagine ever really using Windows 11 at this point, at least not for a few years and then in passing.


Can you elaborate on your issues with VNC? I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to 'steal a session. Are you using Wayland or X11? I understand there may be some differences, but haven't explored them.

GNOME has desktop sharing built-in. I believe it is VNC based, but maybe you'll have better luck with something built into GNOME. SSH forwarding works fine for single apps, but for a true remote X desktop, I've usually configured XDMCP in the past. If you use Chrome, there is also Chrome Remote Desktop (remotedesktop.google.com). It worked fairly well when I used it last, but that was a while ago.


By ‘steal a session’ I mean be currently logged into my computer, either with the desktop locked or unlocked, and to jump onto another computer and log into the same session - so I get all my open programs, windows, etc. if that makes sense. The understanding I got was that this simply isn’t possible with VNC, or if it is it’d a major stuff-around. This really makes or breaks Remote Desktop for me.

I’m using Wayland, which is the Fedora 35 default. I considered X11 but the experience isn’t quite as smooth for the day-to-day stuff in Fedora and I just didn’t want to work around odd quirks if I could avoid it.

I tried the GNOME desktop sharing, but as far as I could see you need to be already logged in to jump in. Besides that it worked OK, though I recall screen resolution being a bit strange, like having 1024x768 or similar which is really quite small for GNOME’s big windows. I never looked into whether these issues I found were configurable, but they don’t seem to be easily accessible options if they are.


One hacky solution is to use run a VNC server on your desktop and connect to it locally. Then you can connect to that VNC server remotely and access all your stuff.

The issue I ran into was with multiple monitors. Stretching a VNC window to span multiple monitors is doable, but the window manager in the VNC session won’t know where the borders are and will treat it as one giant monitor. Using one big monitor is a workaround.


> Can you elaborate on your issues with VNC? I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to 'steal a session.

With RDP on Windows, if I stay logged in with programs running and walk away from my computer and remote in to it, I will get the same session I left open. Unlike VNC, this session will resize everything to fit my client's preferences because it isn't just passing screenshots or a video feed of the desktop back.


>> I haven’t yet figured out a good way to manage little configuration changes made to text files

I have a private git repo for this. I keep a copy of whatever directory structure I need in ~/_files. I wrote a small 'install.sh' script to install my packages and move the files around. I guess I'll get around to rsyncing them instead of manually moving them some day, but changes are few enough to warrant that yet.


Same here. I gave up on Windows years ago, switched to Linux and have been happy with it ever since.

Sure, there are some sharp corners here and there, but at least the operating system doesn't get out of it's way to stop you from fixing things. And since you have these sharp corners with any operating system, to the end user it doesn't really matter as long as they have any kind of informal support system (you know, the person in their extended family that 'knows' computers)

I offer tech support for my extended family and was able to slowly migrate most of them to Linux over the years. I'm much less inclined to angrily yell at people nowadays. I've also grown back much of my hair.


Indeed. I, on the other hand, use Windows all day every day and I'm a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, yet Microsoft has convinced me that it hates personal computing so much that the Windows Desktop will be the worse option (for my uses) in the near future.

Hell, even outside of trashing the desktop experience, we've noted that we used to get support for our SQL issues directly from Microsoft employees and were escalated to engineers in short order for data corruption issues, we now deal with a third party company for support and they're basically worthless. We pay for this treatment. It's absurd.


The only problem I have on linux is nvidia drivers for laptops. Getting Optimus to work is already a pain but simultaneously running the low DPI high refresh laptop LCD and the high DPI 60Hz 4k monitor is impossible.


Gnu/Linux doesn't have this problem.


Do you have any advice for someone who currently develops about 90% on Windows and ~10% (or less) on Mac, and wants to switch to Linux? Other than "just do it and get through the initial pain" which I think is a totally valid response.


There is also a Linux distribution called "WindowsFX 11". Try it out, very recommended.


Which distro do you enjoy using the most?


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

Based on this very recent comment, even the creaters of Windows do not:

This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307


> Based on this very recent comment, even the creaters of Windows do not:

I made a joke about this after the Windows 11 update introduced the new right click menu, meaning things like 7zip and my file reputation tool where all an additional click away for no apparent reason other than putting bigger spacing and more icons.

That just had to be designed by atleast someone who doesn't power use Windows, and maybe even daily drives a different OS


Microsoft broke their own right-click menu integrations in Explorer by doing this. "Open with Code" and "Open with Visual Studio" have both been relegated to the "Show more options" submenu.

It absolutely boggles the mind that any of this was shipped. This is Beta level software.


I have a feeling that larger businesses use the concept of 'data driven design' as a cost saving measure because it's easier to make decisions based on a few pie charts than it is to actually spend time with your users.

An issue like this would come up almost straight away if someone was actively observed while using the OS.


Well, if you want to go down this road, let's really talk about the entire right-click menu paradigm. I do almost all of my development on a personal MBP, but I make sure that my work PC laptop can _do_ everything I would need it to do for my job. On this minimally-functional, bog-standard corporate Dell machine, it takes about a third of a second to bring up the right-click menu. Juuust enough time to make you wait. There are TWENTY-EIGHT menu items, NINE of which are sub-menu openers. The menu is so tall that it takes 7/8ths the height of the screen, so I can't reliably know at what item the cursor will be lying at when it appears, and I have to think about it. This supposed "convenience" has now become an actual impediment to productivity.

I suppose I should be thankful. Before the last refresh, there were so many items in the right-click menu that it was taller than the internal LCD could display, and I would need to scroll to get to the bottom.

Sure, the Mac has right-click (and I don't like how it embeds a possibly-very-long file name on the "compress" item), but the entire _way_ you work with files on a Mac doesn't rely on it. Windows has centered it's workflow on right-click, so their right-click menu is critical to using it in anger. Every time I need to do something on that machine, I'm just glad to stop and go back to my Mac.

EDIT: I used Windows Explorer for these figures, because that's what everyone has. I just did the same thing in Directory Opus, which I use as a replacement. It took longer to open the right-click menu, and has 4 more items.

I should run a poll: how many items are in your right-click menus in Explorer? How many of them are just "convenience" placeholders for things you would normally be doing with dragging-and-dropping between targets IN THE PROGRAM? How many are "convenience" items for compression-related tasks? I suppose I could remove a bunch of these right-click menu item targets if I did some research on how.


Microsoft's error was the dynamic DLL part of the whole thing. They should have used a simple rules engine with which programs can register an icon, text, and an action. Processing ~1 KB of contiguously stored rules for each right-click would take less than 1ms even on the slowest budget laptop running on battery.

There are many similar design decisions in Windows that cause many orders of magnitude slowdown. For example, start menu indexing is also absurdly slow, despite processing only about 100 KB of data in total.


For extra items in the right click menu to appear, Explorer has to load dlls and ask them if they want something to appear.

If one of the dlls is slow to respond, Explorer can’t show the right click menu. Even though 99 out of 100 times you right click the desktop, it wasn’t to open that ‘ati settings utility’ or whatever a driver added to that menu.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the reason they removed the items from the main menu wasn’t both to make it less useful to add crap items and to make it less painful if they don’t load quickly.


I use Win10 on work and Linux at home. Last week I had to help some "not-so-tech" guy to copy and paste files in the Win11 File Explorer. Now there are just Icons for copy, paste etc. But there are two kind of computer user. The one who just use the shortcut and the other with the menu. But now they search for "copy" or "paste" but now there is no menu entry. There are just Icons on top of the context menu. So a less technical user has with just Icons a much harder life.


And the problem with icons is you can no longer tell someone over the phone, "click copy" or "click paste". Now it's something like, "click on the icon that looks like a clip board" or "click on the icon that looks like multiple pieces of paper" followed by "nothing happened" and then trying to figure out that they clicked on the wrong icon because they still couldn't figure out which icon because it wasn't something obvious like text, it was a subjective icon.

Maybe some blind people could sue Microsoft? I can only imagine that it has gotten harder for screen reading software.


If anyone from Microsoft is reading:

If this is true, find a way to FIRE THOSE PEOPLE OR FORCE THEM TO USE WINDOWS!

I don't care how great they are (on paper), or how kewl MacOS is, they should either walk the walk or get out. I'm sure there still are more than enough designers willing to work on products used by 1 billion people.


I'm also shocked to hear that designers at Microsoft are designing features for Windows on a Mac. I presume these are 'UX Designers' or 'Interaction Designers'.

Imagine the opposite scenario for Apple and how absurd it sounds: designers at Apple designing features for MacOS or iOS using Windows OS laptops.

This prompts the following question: What design apps are the Microsoft designers using on a Mac that they can't use on a Windows machine? (Is it Mac-only Sketch?)


"What design apps are the Microsoft designers using on a Mac that they can't use on a Windows machine? (Is it Mac-only Sketch?)"

The main designer tools, as far as I am aware, are bundled in the Adobe suite and that works on windows, as well as Mac.

But there are tons of other designer apps, that are Mac only - but I would assume it is mainly a designer thing to have Macs - they have been succesfully marketed (and to some excent were designed) for creative folks.


It's ironic that Microsoft promote their Surface Book models with pen pressure screens as ideal for all artists and designers. Except for their own designers who appear to prefer Macs.


I was amused recently sat with a bunch of IBM consultants that had mac books and couldn't get them to work with the conference video screen. If only they'd had the foresight to develop some kind of compatible PC.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

My advice is that, unless you are developing for Windows is don't. If you need the Adobe tools, you can get them for Macs and, since M1, Macs offer a lot of bang for the buck while being a perfectly usable Unix machine, they are an excellent choice.

If you don't need tools that aren't available on Linux, then Linux is a really good option. Hardware support may be an issue, so I always recommend the most boring machines possible - Intel, with integrated graphics - and only get components you know will work well with Linux.


hardware support isn't so bad these days. you can get basically any AMD graphics card and be fine, nvidia works too although it fights with wayland a bit (but supposedly that's getting better too)

laptops are a little more problematic but if you try to install linux on a random laptop, chances are everything will just work too. thinkpads are always a safe bet, in any case. or get something made for linux like a system76


The advice to go for the most boring laptop possible is out of this. I would avoid laptops with dual graphics (integrated and discrete) as much as possible. That's more or less what System 76 does. Dells are usually trouble-free unless you want a "mobile workstation" or gaming laptop. Full support for Intel's 12th gen will probably take a while to trickle down to mainstream distros (you should be fine if you compile your kernel from upstream though), so, if you are on the market now, I suggest 10th or 11th gen. Or wait a couple months.


> If you don't need tools that aren't available on Linux, then Linux is a really good option.

The lack of a decent[1] RDP alternative has kept me away for years.

I use KDE Neon on a NUC as a secondary PC and I've been very happy with it, but without a viable RDP alternative it's a no-go as my daily driver.


Have you looked into forwarding X?

https://ostechnix.com/how-to-configure-x11-forwarding-using-...


FreeRDP is a wonderful RDP server replacement: https://www.freerdp.com/

It's so good that Microsoft uses it for WSLg.


Last time I checked, FreeRDP was screen capture-based like VNC, with the associated horrible performance.

Has this been improved now?


It seems to have much better performance than VNC for me, so I don't think it's doing the screen capture thing. Or maybe it is and it's just fast regardless.

In my experience it feels almost as good as RDP for Windows, which I think is a great achievement.


Thanks, guess I'll have to try again then. Last time I tried it was definitely orders of magnitude worse than Windows RDP.


Every day that goes by more and more software isn't using rendering compatible with the model of rdp/x forwarding and requires full copies of buffers. The best you can do in this case is probably waypipe as it does some intelligent compression and buffer management but its a young project.


https://remmina.org/

I use this to access/admin a large amount of windows boxes.

The keyboard shortcuts are awesome.


Remmina is just a client, so doesn't solve the issue I mentioned.


Either boring or off lease enterprise machines. More likely to be hassle free in my experience.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I don't use Windows 11. On Windows 10, I modify the installation image with DISM, removing as much of the unnecessary and user-hostile stuff as possible. (Some of these packages are hidden but can be un-hidden and then uninstalled anyway. Edge can also be completely removed at this stage.)

I make extensive changes to the registry that disable all the unwanted stuff. Some of these settings are not documented, and even the documented ones are likely to change without notice or become re-enabled by default in subsequent builds. For this reason, to avoid such unpleasant surprises, I prevent any automatic updates.

All of these changes happen before Windows is even installed, and for what's not covered by them, I have a collection of setup scripts that disable what can only be disabled post-installation, and also apply my preferred settings.

In the end, I get a system that does only what I want it to do, and nothing else, although to make this possible one has to go through extensive hurdles.

For the record, I'm not saying things should be like that of course. On the contrary, I realize the situation we're in is ridiculous and some improvement is long overdue. But in the meantime, this is how I've been able to solve the immediate problem for myself.


I don't want to see anyone around here criticizing how much "work" it is to run Linux after this comment.


would you consider sharing this?


Not OP but there are many projects along those lines, eg. https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline/


Please share the process.


Is this done with Home or Enterprise edition?


Windows Update uses all disk space on space limited VMs hosting various services, disabling it has become more difficult (Disabling the service doesn't work anymore, recently a helper service to restart it was released)

Which has led to something a bit drastic but I haven't looked back - blocking all Windows IP's on router level for the VM address space. I still run updates every few months.

Edit: If anyone want's a list of IPs here's one that I use and is maintained somewhat regularly : https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker/tree/master/d...


Oh, that's nothing.

Windows Update can forcefully power-on a sleeping laptop, and then do 100% CPU load for a decent chunk of an hour whether you like it or not...

... while your laptop is in your laptop bag.

This destroyed one laptop for me already. It very nearly caught fire on a crowded train with no way to even throw it off for safety.

I keep saying: Microsoft will keep ramming this crap down people's throats until a laptop catches fire on a plane and a safety agency or two gets involved.

PS: Speaking of VMs and Windows Update -- the most hilarious thing ever is when 40,000 virtual desktop VMs forcefully run Windows Update all at the same time on a shared storage array. And then reboot to the golden image, resetting them to the previous state, from which they dutifully try to patch themselves. Again, and again, and again...


I had a MBP catch fire in my bed when I was asleep.

This was when Apple had already done a recall on the year/model of the machine for exploding batteries.

Apple then help the laptop for ~2months in the flagship union square store whike they 'investigated'

After 2 months, they told me that at some point in the laptops history a moisture sensor was set-off and thus, they would not honor the recall, nor the fact it caught fire in my bed and told me I was free to purchase another macbook at full price.

I have never bought a new apple product since. I never will.


To be fair it also happens on my MacBook. I charged my computer and placed it on my bag, asleep and unplugged, before a trip. I was not pleased to find it hot in the morning and at 60% battery.


One of my colleagues has a MacBook that managed to toast its own screen into a lovely golden brown.


This is especially true for Macbooks also btw.

https://www.latestly.com/technology/apple-macbook-pro-15-inc...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/macbook-recall-apple-recalls-43...


What does "very nearly caught fire" mean? Was smoke coming oot? Not doubting, just curious.


Burnt electronic smell, melted plastic, dead laptop.


40000 windows VMs is already painful, even without windows update experience


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

As others have mentioned, I don't! I left and went to Fedora about 3 months ago - still keep a W10 VM for my scanner as Linux still hasn't sorted that stuff but I use it once a month or something so no big deal.

It was my second or third attempt over the years to move to Linux and F35 is now rock solid and I can do .NET development with absolutely no problems now.

I had used Windows since DOS 5.x so it was quite a break for me :)


Fedora rocks, totally. I've never exprienced smoother upgrades in my life and I did every upgrade from F28 to F35 now. The most stable distro out there and boy I tried a lot of them.


I use VueScan which is available for Linux with great results (mostly scanning 35mm and medium format negatives).


I just went and resetted it back to Chrome.

Probably someone' house at Kabo at Microsoft depends on some OKR and metrics to show growth for Edge. Pathethic, short-sighted, but most probably true.


> I just went and resetted it back to Chrome.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.


Edge shares literally every single website you visit with Microsoft, even in InPrivate (= Incognito) mode. [1] The worst part is that you have to disable a genuine security feature (i.e., SmartScreen) to prevent this. No other browser makes you choose between security and privacy in this manner. Even Chrome attempts to protect your privacy by doing hash prefix computations for their Safe Browsing feature.

Also, at least Chrome lets you set a custom encryption passphrase. Microsoft managed to import every other feature from Chrome, except this one, apparently.

Microsoft has somehow done the impossible and beat Google in its own game. Edge is a complete privacy nightmare, only rivaled by the likes of Opera and Yandex browsers. If Chrome is the fire, Edge is a nuclear reactor in meltdown.

[1]: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/microsoft-edge-datensendeverhalte... (English version: https://www-kuketz--blog-de.translate.goog/microsoft-edge-da...)


Exactly, why would anyone prefer Chrome to Edge? They both are built on the same Chromium core but Google adds a bunch tracking with merging your website logging together with your browser account.


Edge has more user hostile “features” at the moment. I use firefox, but make use of chromium for google earth (which runs poorly in firefox on a laptop). I had been using edge for a while, but the constant pop-ups and frequent crashes on MacOS has made me switch back to chrome. Freshly installed chrome has limited pop-up bullshit and doesn’t force itself to be the default. Big wins for me for my backup chromium browser.


>>Exactly, why would anyone prefer Chrome to Edge?

Is this....a real question?

I'll bite - because Chrome signs into my google account and it seemlessly remembers everything I do between my PC, my laptop and my phone. I literally couldn't care any less what core it uses, the usability aspect is just better than in Edge.


> it seemlessly remembers everything I do between my PC, my laptop and my phone

That is not a feature, unless you are OK with Google spying on you.


How is this not a feature then? Yes I'm ok with my browsing history and bookmarks and tabs and extensions and everything else being synced using google servers because it makes my life easier.

To give another example - my Volvo allows me to track every single journey in the app, seeing the electricity/petrol consumption, mileage, start/end date.....

Yes it means Volvo now knows all of my travel history. But it also means I get access to functionality that is useful to me.

If that's not a feature to you, then don't use it.

The question was "why would anyone prefer Chrome" - because it's a very good browser which has useful features. Like, it's not rocket science.


> Yes it means Volvo now knows all of my travel history.

No it doesn't. The features you listed could be implemented without the data reaching Volvo's servers at all, or reaching them in only an encrypted form, to which only you have the key. A better way to phrase it is that Volvo allows you to track your journeys, and they spy on you. The two features are separate.

95% of the time, the privacy-convenience tradeoff is nothing but a false excuse for spyware.


Agreed. Since people don't seem to care to share private details with giant companies, those that do get shafted by user behavior like this.

It has everything to do with what you allow companies to do. A few years ago the standard mobile app behavior wouldn't be acceptable on Desktop. User expectations have suffered since then.


What do you gain from having every single journey in your app and seeing the fuel consumption? Have you ever actually looked at those stats? I think I've never in my life been in a situation where I thought "Dang, I wish I knew how much kilometers my last 18 trips where, if only I had some kind of tracking device that kept these stats for me!"


>>Have you ever actually looked at those stats?

Literally all the time. It's a PHEV, and maybe not for every journey, but for 8/10 journeys I will look how many kWh of electricity and litres of petrol were consumed, and how many kWh of electricity have been regenerated. When I drive I try to stay in EV mode as long as possible, and regenerate power as much as I can and looking at those stats after every journey gives me a lot of satisfaction. I've driven across Europe last year and it was great to see detailed stats for the entire journey.

It's literally one of my favourite things about this car for me, alongside the ability to pre-heat and pre-cool it remotely.

Edit: also, I don't use it this way, but I know people find the online journal hugely useful for tracking business miles, you can just download an .xml with all trips from the app and that makes it super easy claiming tax/fuel costs back.


So your argument is "I like to look at it". Which is legitimate, but honestly does not convince me. My car reports stats on my dash, which works for me.

I don't think people need to record trips on non-shared business cars here.


And if you need that, my -98 Volvo got a little pin on the dash you can press to zero a sub-odometer. It also reset the fuel consumption average. So, ye, no need for spyware.

Google biggest sin is normalizing all these spywares embedded in everything. It is spreading everywhere, even my Samsung TV, and legislators are like 10 years behind were they should have started to "GDPR" everything.


>>And if you need that, my -98 Volvo got a little pin on the dash you can press to zero a sub-odometer. It also reset the fuel consumption average. So, ye, no need for spyware.

Not sure how this would work in a PHEV where the car is seamlessly switching between EV and ICE running, or in fact compliments ICE with the EV motor. You need the internal reads from the ECU to know exactly how much electricity/petrol was consumed.

You could - of course - provide that without syncing it externally to any servers and then avoid the whole privacy issue.


You can encrypt the synced data. Through it's probably only possible because Google doesn't need to snoop on the synced data when their browser is pinging everything you do back to them anyway through various Chrome telemetry features.


Ye, it is a bit like Google's push for https, blocking out competitors' spyware.


Many people are ok with trading privacy for convenience, or even basic fashion, or a bit of short term excitement. "I have nothing to hide".


Sure, just make the spying opt-in and I will stop complaining.


Those people should be quarantined in my opinion to not ruin it for everyone. Of course it would be easy to offer said convenience without the data sharing.


Firefox can do that as well. And the Android version is arguably better than Chrome, since it has extensions (even if limited at the moment).


Sure but the question was "why would anyone prefer chrome over Edge" not why would you use Chrome over Firefox.


Don’t all major browsers have this feature? My Firefox account syncs bookmarks/history, and I can share tabs between devices.


Edge interferes with other web sites. I was purchasing an item from Amazon when it started popping up messages about other suppliers.

If I didn't make my living writing Windows software I would have left the platform a long time ago.


When they integrated the buy now, pay later function you could make some scathing conclusion about the type of people calling the shots on Edge.

What does this have to do with a browser?


They keep adding features to Edge that nobody has asked for. And they have rewritten parts of the UI, making them much slower.

On the other hand, once you disable the Google sign-in feature of Chrome and change the new tab to about:blank, it's the cleanest browser there is - much cleaner than Firefox, which is shovelware at this point, and adds new crap every new major version.


Do you think it's okay to just make snide remarks about someone's browser choice on this website? Is that the kind of environment you want HN to be?


I am from Eastern Europe - Hard Bass ADIBAS :D


Every time a feature update happens they show the "get started" (iirc) screen over again. Every time if you just click accept/next without reading it resets your default browser and search engine.


yep, they pull this crap every year or so. Then apologize for the "bug".


They need to be fined for this, every year, according to the number of users affected. The fine needs to outweigh the value of the market gains they make. i.e. it needs to be a real deterrent.


Huh? Without asking the user? I received an update, and Edge asked me to update my settings. I respectfully clicked no and nothing changed.

For the novice user, there might be a use-case where this is a good solution, to revert settings settings in case you somehow messed them up.


> For the novice user, there might be a use-case where this is a good solution, to revert settings settings in case you somehow messed them up.

Maybe that's the justification for the product manager or developer, I'm pretty sure though it's just driven by management to increase usage of Edge and Bing. That I have to tell Microsoft on a monthly basis that I don't want to use Edge is in no way user friendly. But same goes for Google which will always ask me why I don't use Chrome.


After a restart I was presented with a screen which asked me whether to change or keep default browser settings. I clicked on "keep" and pretty much everything stayed the same.

Did OP got this question?

Edit: d'oh, didn't realize question was about Win 11. I'm still on Win 10 and Win 8 on my machines.


Same here. Received an update and was asked if I wanted to change default browser settings. I said no and no changes were made.


For me no change nor prompt after the update. Nothing changed, I still have my settings.


>How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll. Add 'Administrators' to permissions, then go back in and delete all permission entries. Basically deny windows access to its update system. Doesn't hurt to run Anti-Beacon as well.

NSudo as Trusted Installer to cripple security center and Update medic service, group policies can shut down most of Defender and Customer Experience Improvement Program as well as the nags about those. Also have a laundry list of scheduled tasks to kill.

Takes me days to get win 10 to run as i want, be secure (from MS) and stable, aka not just suddenly change something and mess up my work.

Its still a shadow of the operating system XP was (not that XP was very good). Just compulsory auto arrange and border-less windows alone really cripples its ability to multi-task or work with complex file sets efficiently. And the amount of bloat both in its install footprint and running services is insane.


> Basically deny windows access to its update system

If that also disables security updates that is not a good advice.


My advice would be to take control of your own security. Microsoft do not have your best interests at heart.


take control how? installing adblock and not downloading from shady websites isn't going to save you from stuff like BlueKeep.


As the NSA recommend, disable Remote Desktop Services and its associated port (TCP 3389). But I'm also not saying don't update. I'm saying choose when you want to update and what you want to update. Use your own firewall and virus software, lock down your own system.

Forgive me for being glib but; Leaving a backdoor for good old papa Gates to protect you is a bad strategy.


I find it very strange that a computer can boot up with some ports open, that's beyond stupid. Nevertheless all my modems have had the default config to block all incoming requests.

Imagine a port open connected to a program with admin priviles which sole purpose is to give people full access to your computer and your desktop. Hidden in plain sight, maybe?


Security updates are the actual malware


> This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.

IANAL, but it sounds questionable around anti-trust laws. Certainly not the first time Microsoft have run into problems with their browsers[^1].

[^1] https://www.cnet.com/news/eu-resolves-microsoft-ie-antitrust...


I worked on Edge for a bit (before it became chromium based). Browsers are ridiculously expensive to maintain. Like on the order of burning billions.

The way Edge was funded was that the default engine was Bing. Bing ads is how Edge stays afloat.

Seeing how many users changed Chrome to default, this was a constant struggle. It seems some exec finally pulled the trigger and went full hostile to maximize their revenue KPI.

I legit still hate the Bing page. It’s slow. It loads with msn ad crap. They even put ads on start menu.

We had to constantly spin up new VMs to get Edge. The first user experience with ads on your face was very annoying. I don’t think the execs even seriously dogfooded Windows. It seemed like promo driven development.

I don’t know how Apple is able to resist ad revenue unlike Google and Microsoft, but oh boy Apple seems to be cut from a different cloth.

This decision seems shortsighted.


Edge was pretty okay soon after the relaunch on Chromium. I've had to go back to Chrome by now though, the blatent disrespect for your preferences is all over this product. Search in sidebar with Bing. Search with Bing in the marked text menu. Address bar goes to Bing no matter your defined preference, unless you change a very badly explained setting from "Search box (recommended)" to "Address Bar".

As for other Microsoft products - if you can aquire 21H2 LTSC, it's a very good alternative to Windows 11.


I hate MS's stance on privacy like anyone else, but I have serious doubts about your post. This would be a very big thing if actually true. Most likely thing that happened was that you started Edge yourself, then clicked on the pop-up that sometimes shows up (regardless of updates installed) asking you to switch to "recommended settings" which replaces your default browser.

Yes, shitty dark patterns, but definitely not Windows Update replacing those settings behind your back.


I don't know why you would doubt this. Windows updates have been doing this for decades, first with Internet Explorer when they were battling Netscape/Firefox and now (apparently) with Edge.

edit: clarity


I've been running Windows since forever on hundreds of machines and this has literally never once happened to me.

Not discounting your experience, just saying it doesn't match my own.


Gotcha, not discounting your experiences either. Every desktop engineer I've met (10's or 100's of thousands of workstations) were well aware of this long-standing, dark pattern (esp. after a med-large upgrades), and gnashed their teeth whenever it was discussed because of the extra work/complications it caused. Hopefully those bad times aren't coming back. I'm not hopeful though. For example, Microsoft's tactics preventing Firefox from changing the default browser reminds me a lot of the nasty, underhanded Microsoft from way back in the day.

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/12/21/a-recent-windows-update-pr...


I've been using every version of windows since 3.1, literally never had it revert default browser settings on me


Tipping point, for using ms products in general, was malware posing as an Asus driver /s.

Fresh windows 10 install. Installed a bunch of drivers fresh off the vendor's site. Asus driver installation installed some GUI i didn't much care for, Armoury Crate. Well, no problem, right? One can extract the cab/inf files and let windows add the driver rather than use the vendor's executable. Wrong.

Trying to uninstall the driver through the vendor's uninstaller - Error. Add/Remove (probably points to the same location) - Error. It ran a web service; Trying to end task it - Automatically restarted.

This went on for a long debugging session until I realized it's like fighting hackers for control over my own PC. An experience commonplace to windows. Sifting through dodgy forums yielded no results.

Thanks to AMD's professionalism, they added drivers for their latest video card gen to the Linux kernel well before their cards released. Which made my new gaming PC transition to an Arch based distro a no brainer. Didn't look back since.

For anyone interested, I'm using the Garuda distro for games successfully. All games that don't use intrusive garbage like Easy Anti Cheat work. It isn't an inplace replacement for ms and requires patience and tinkering. With the latest Proton 7 release, games work a lot better. Even Cyberpunk 2077 works out of the box with no tinkering.

Sifting through git issues, discussions, solutions and usually just a cli command away for Linux issues is worlds apart than the walled garbage dump that is ms.

If you're up for it, i suggest installing arch yourself as Garuda has its unjustified quirks.

I must add that regardless of anecdotal experiences with ms products, it is important to support the only competition by moving away from ms. Because of their monopolistic practices in tying up hardware to their own software such as TPM and Pluton. Security is great but not proprietary security that ties the hardware to a specific operating system. Something ms always strived for by thrusting their product as the default on any PC and laptop.


That Armoury Crate bullshit is embeded inside the UEFI ROM. It's called Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT). I can't distinguish it from malware. Trully disgusting.


I didn't even know about the WPBT until I read this, that is truly horrifying. It's also probably a good attack vector for someone trying to install malware which persists on the machine even after reinstallation.


fwiw you don't have to download drivers yourself, vendors are perfectly happy to distribute barely-uninstallable Adware using Windows Update. This is not limited to pre-built machines, either.


I hate that on my Latitude. After installing Windows 11 without internet I applied 3 different methods of disabling the automatic installation of drivers: group policy, control panel, and the registry. I rebooted to make double sure, and after connecting to the internet the first thing it does is install the Dell Maxxaudio crapware. You have to then go to the device manager to install the Microsoft audio drivers over it, then remove the crapware, but you’re not allowed to remove the app for it. Terribly annoying.


I'm always stunned that stories like this happen on HN. Like maybe I'm blessed personally by Bill Gates but nothing ever like this happens with my Windows installs, they just work. And I'm on Windows 11 Insider Preview build. _It did ask me_ to change the default browser, I clicked on no and that's all.


Thank you Valve for making 90% of games i like available on linux. Windows Free for 5 years and counting. Desktop Linux has lot's of issues and annoyances but at least I can have reasonable trust that the developers behind the software I use don't have any incentive to fuck me over with mandatory browser switches or privacy nightmare "telemetry".

More interesting Question imo: If I can't trust Microsoft not to fuck with my desktop settings to maximize their revenue from bing adds via edge, why should anyone trust Microsoft not to do the same with azure?


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I've been exclusively using Windows 10 since 2016 on my main rig as well as my laptop. While there are a lot of small annoyances, for me, it's been far from _on a daily basis_. I'd say, from 360 days in the year, I spend maybe 10 days dealing with some Windows bullshittery.

These are the things I changed on my system:

- Disable Windows Defender real-time scanning and related scheduled tasks.

- Use classic shell to replace the Windows start menu.

- Tweak privacy settings in the Windows Settings panel.

Everything else is pretty much default. Yes, I do update Windows on a regular basis.

There have been occasions where default applications associated with file-types break after an update, but for me this never occurred with the default browser setting. Not while I've been using Chrome, neither now while using Firefox.

I live in central Europe, maybe that makes a difference.

For my background, I mainly work on video game stuff, which is the main reason for running Windows. Still, it's development work (mostly C++), not just things that can be done in a browser where no actual interaction with the OS is needed.

Edit: I've not reinstalled the OS on my main rig since 2018-12-22.

Edit 2: My most recent hard-crash that forced me to power-cycle the machine was in March 2021. According to my notes it appeared to be related to the GPU driver (NVIDIA) and occurred while developing an application that utilizes Vulkan.


Same here. I use Windows since ever on the desktop, and Linux on the servers (ever is ca. 1994)

I like Windows very much on the client side - everything pretty much works without any problems. I used to use Classic Shell but I got rid of it when I realized that I actually always start programs though a search (pressing the Win key and starting to type).

As I said somewhere else, once every year or so I install Linux desktop on a laptop to see how it goes. It does not go very well on my Thinkpad with two monitors attached.

It may be very well that with some tinkering it will work - the difference is that with Windows it works off the shelf.

I would not install Windows on a server because i) I do not know Windows enough, ii) there is too much clicking and iii) there is too much magic going on.

The magic on the laptop does not bother me - worst case I will reinstall (though I was forced to do that only once, when moving from the Insider ring)


There's a lot in here I can relate to.

I specifically use Classic Shell _because_ I always start programs through search, i.e. pressing the Windows key and start typing. It's just that the Windows start menu search doesn't work well for me. Linus from LTT ranted about this on multiple occasions.

I ran Linux (tried Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint) on my Lenovo T460s and the experience was quite bad. Battery life was down to 2.5 hours; even in sleep state, battery drain was significant. Often the laptop would wake up from sleep without apparent reason. The log showed that the lid switch was actuated while the laptop was, in fact, just sitting on my desk without anyone operating it. This never happened on Windows.

About every second Arch system update spawned new issues related to either ACPI, using the docking station or HDMI output. Things were better on Debian based distros but still a pain. I remember trying to get a bluetooth speaker to work, giving up after 5 hours of debugging.

Recently, while visiting a friend, I connected my laptop to a bluetooth speaker, now running Windows, and was surprised that it just worked as one would expect.

Yeah, so far, my experience with Linux on the desktop hasn't been great.


It takes you 10 days per year to disable defender and tweak some settings?


> Disable Windows Defender real-time scanning and related scheduled tasks.

Why do this?


Because real-time malware scanning causes way more trouble than it is worth. It adds latency to every file open on the off chance that it might contain some kind of identifiably malicious code. That might be mildly useful if I had any faith it could actually detect the majority of malware, but I don't. In fact, the only things I've ever seen it identify reliably are any kind of piracy or forensics tools.


Personally, I am not a fan of Windows Defender in general, but disabling it completely renders other services (e.g. Windows Store) unusable. That's why I only disable the real-time scanning component.

There are two reasons for doing this:

Firstly, it has been shown that the real-time scanning features causes issues with file access latency. It's apparently quite noticeable when using WSL. On a laptop there might also be a noticeable improvement in battery life, but I don't have any data to back that up.

Secondly, every now and then the real-time scanning triggers on some file, removing/quarantining it without asking me first. This often happens, for instance, for video game cracks that I'd like to analyze / revers-engineer [^1]. So, for me, it's a lot of false positives and so far I haven't encountered a single case where Windows Defender actually protected me from something. At least that I know of.

^1: It's a hobby, I don't build DRM, don't worry. The games I work on typically release DRM-free.


Arch linux is unironically more stable than Windows 10+. Not saying it doesn't have its problems, but it has WAY less than Windows.


That strongly depends on "your" arch linux setup. My Sway/Wayland only system is not stable at all, but that's not what i need in a desktop/gaming setup


Oh interesting. I’d love to hear more about your setup.

I’m on the same stack (Sway, Arch) and it’s absolutely rock solid on a precision 5520, and has been for 4 years now.

I usually reinstall every year but I haven’t this time because everything kinda just works.

To be clear; I’m not doubting you but it’s wildly different than my experience and I would love to understand how to avoid this instability myself, if for instance you’re running strange kernel modules or a specific video card.

What machine do you have and what is breaking?


Well I have a thinkpad with a pretty stable setup (except suspend resume, i havent even bothered trying to get that to run well) but on my desktop system

Ryzen 5600x AMD rx6600xt MSI B550M pro Zen Kernel

with 3600mhz XMP Ram and auto overclock settings i get a hard crash once a month with some random MCE hardware errors, bluetooth card spams my dmesg on boot with some errors i cant be bothered to fix, firefox sometimes crashes HARD, totally freezing, games sometimes don't start, today i had a random chromium crash and then i couldnt open nemo (file manager) anymore and when i opened a shell (alacritty with fish shell) the shell wouldnt allow any input. Two reboots later and it was fixed...somehow...

but honestly i dont mind its my toy system/work system from home because its so much faster than my notebooks. If I have to reboot once a day thats stable enough for that newscase


MCE Errors are nothing to do with Linux, it's the CPU reporting itself as faulty.

I would check your warranty.


nah, it propably runs fine if i don't blindly overclock it with MSIs questionable auto OC feature and it's so rare, i don't really care


Since this is a pretty much install-linux thread, I’d like to ask fellow HN-ers which system should I try again. I have a rich experience with linux in the past, but modern OSes turn me off. They are windows-y, just without crap/spyware.

Which DE/FM will allow me to configure menus? E.g. “git push” item on a folder containing .git, “npm run myscript” on a folder containing package.json.

Which DE has presets for window placement like FancyZones? E.g. you move/resize a window normally, but when you hold Shift, it suggests (draws) pre-configured zones where you may drop it.

Which FM allows for in-place folder expansion (like Finder)?

Which distro goes with already preinstalled codecs drivers etc, so I don’t get 480p max on youtube and low playback fps? It was an issue even with ubuntus few years ago, maybe 4-5.

Do distros support G-sync at all? Many monitors with different DPI? Different refresh rates?

Thanks!


> Which DE/FM will allow me to configure menus? E.g. “git push” item on a folder containing .git, “npm run myscript” on a folder containing package.json.

Dolphin has "services" which allow you to get custom context menu items, though I've never written one so can't vouch for how much effort it is or isn't. It also has an embedded terminal for more adhoc commands.

> Which DE has presets for window placement like FancyZones? E.g. you move/resize a window normally, but when you hold Shift, it suggests (draws) pre-configured zones where you may drop it.

Tiling WMs obviously have options out the kazoo for this, but to my understanding, KDE also has snapping, though it's more akin to Windows 10 built in or Spectacle/Rectangle on OS X, than full on Fancy Zones.

> Which FM allows for in-place folder expansion (like Finder)?

If you mean the tree view features, Dolphin. If you mean the triple pane mode, no idea.

> Do distros support G-sync at all? Many monitors with different DPI? Different refresh rates?

G-Sync/VRR/mixed refresh rates: Yes. nvidia closed source drivers or Wayland required.

Mixed DPIs: I run my monitors at 1x, so can't comment about scaling. Apparently it's a clusterfuck though.


Thanks for your comment, I’ve really lost tracks for recent years!

As far as I understand, not using e.g. stock KDE WM means I’ll lose a big chunk of KDE functionality, or will I not? I’m afraid to go all in on custom WM-panel-tray-menu, because that easily meant weeks of configuration. This I find even coolish at home, but not at work.

Maybe some popular-enough DE invented some sort of WM plugins aince then? I don’t mind working in lighter DEs like Xfce, but not sure if they play nice with modern graphics stacks and <SubsystemName>Manager things.

If you mean the tree view features, Dolphin

Yep, the tree view.


Yes, swapping out the Kwin for a tiling WM will lose you some KDE functionality (for example, if your new WM provides a desktop, I wouldn't expect it to use the same context menus as Dolphin), and lead to a less integrated experience (you won't be able to configure i3 from KDE settings). I'd say if you just want a smooth experience, stick to KDE as a package.


I just use default Ubuntu. Third-party software that barely support Linux almost always target at least Ubuntu or one of the deployment systems it supports (Snap, Flatpak)


I used always Windows and Linux at home, since 1996. I tryed Win10 but decided thats not form me. Candy Crush an XBox all over the place, bad privacy etc. I deleted all Windows when Win7 support ended. Now I have even 3 never even booted diskimages with new, never used Windows licences. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I even bought many times Linux Distro CDs and later DVDs in the 90s. I'm using Linux because of freedom and respect.


There never was a "new microsoft". They are still the same shady business that they have always been.


Companies are often made up of teams with differing goals and ambitions. The folks working on WSL, VS Code, Github and other popular projects are quite different than those making predatory decisions like these. They very well may <3 Linux and believe in open-source.


Sure, every microsoft employee didn't unanimously agree with the decision to change the default browser settings (and any other example that might come to mind).

But it's obvious that the decision makers at microsoft are unethical and have been so since the beginning.

The employees who work on cool stuff that's useful to others could have done so anywhere, yet they _chose_ to do so at microsoft knowing that the higher-ups are consistently unethical.

That makes me question their ethics as well.


> GitHub

The same kind of rot is already starting. GitHub is now pushing its own CLI tools - in fact they're the only option shown to clone the code when looking at a PR. I wouldn't be surprised if in ~5 years you won't be able to use the regular git client with GitHub anymore.


They didn't get rid of HTTPS yet. They do offer their own CLI tool command line option, along with it.


During start up it asked me if I wanted to change my browser settings and I said no. My settings were not changed. Either you clicked yes without realizing what it would do, or there was something that made it not ask you. I think the wording of the question was something along the lines of “internet security”, which is Microsoft’s way of tricking users, so you may not have realized what it would do when you said yes


I agree with your assessment. They use dark patterns to get people to click yes.


i have TPM 2.0 disabled in BIOS, which blocks Windows 11, sounds like permanently. still will have to deal with occasional Windows 10 "feature" update shenanigans, but far fewer hopefully once 11 is widely-deployed.

still use Manjaro/XFCE as my daily & for dev but dual boot win10 for some tools like Affinity Photo/Designer and gaming.

https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-demands-tpm-20-and-heres-...


Next step will be installed crypto miners by default?

I still remember days when I knew every process on my laptop and know most of their settings keys. Software moved into direction I don't appreciate.


Symantec got this covered already.


Norton already installs a miner for you.


Are you serious?


Yes and no. If I got this right: they do have miner functionality built-in that you can opt-in to use for your benefit. But they take 15%.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795910


I recently switched a family small-business over to Fedora + xfce and it has been rock solid. It's a bunch of old Intel laptops (oldest one is 3rd gen i3 with 4gb ram + new cheap 2.5" ssd's). Think it was 8 machines in total that has now been cured. So far no calls yet. Everything just works.

I like Windows in general but it has become a hassle to maintain. Actually, it's a nightmare. It keeps getting in the way, changing settings or adding new applications between updates.

Windows 11 specifically, I tried it for a week but went back to windows 10. It is not ready yet even though it looks nice. (Only have 1 machine with Windows, please don't throw stones at me - the rest is all linux)


After initially feeling excited about Edge and Windows11, I moved to Ubuntu over the Christmas break for exactly this reason. It’s insane to me why Microsoft keep doing it, they literally lost me as a Windows, Edge, Office user because of it. All I wanted was my settings to stay the same.

I do all the above on a surface laptop which I love, but I may move hardware as no reason now to use it.


This didn't happen for me, unless you are talking about a different cumulative update. I just installed KB5010795 and Firefox is still my default.

Edge has been popping up a modal on startup lately to reset your default browser, are you sure you didn't click that? Not that it's your fault, but if you don't open Edge it doesn't bother you in my experience.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

That's the neat part, I don't. On the rare occasion that I use Windows 10 [1] (for some work), I try my best to get my work done quickly so I can switch back to my Linux boot.

[1]: Their desperate message to convince me to install Windows 11 makes me laugh.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

Well, I'm still on Windows 10, so I don't have that particular crap to deal with. And I think by that point I'm used to Windows 10's crap, or at least it's not as annoying to deal compared to Windows changing your configuration. As long as I can use Windows 10, I don't really see the point in switching to linux, it (mostly) works for what I need and, more importantly, I'm used to it and not really ready to relearn another OS/ecosystem.


A line was crossed. Users should remember old microsoft policies of spreading FUD but very few moves create more fear, uncertainty and doubt than acting this way.


I haven't been able to find out if Windows 11 is stable or not, it gets "must reboot" updates at least once a week on the dev track.


Unpopular opinion Windows 11 is best device for development + entertainment if you have high end PC/Monitor etc.

I cant use mac with my LG OLED cause refresh is limited to 60HZ (WTF apple) i dont have access to CUDA and a few linux based python libs and ofc most games just dont work.

I can't use Linux cause 60%+ of games (multiplayer) that i play with my friends just dont work on linux or have random crashes, my Bluetooth connections are trash and smoothness of the KDE/Gnome isn't as good as windows (on nvidia gpu).

On windows everything just works. If i need linux i just install wsl2 + cuda if i need video editing software i can even use KDenlive, if i want to turn on some multiplayer game i just press play and I can play it.

ofc. I turn off all the "seciurity" stuff and block most of the microsoft ad's domain in pi.hole but still from normal use cases for most people that i know of in age of 20-30 (mostly other developers) W11/W10 is just best overall experience and everyone is using it daily. Maybe when i get older and wont spend as much time on entertainment Ill go for some GNOME based linux distro and buy 5m cable to connect my headphones.


This is almost the exact path I took.

I had exactly this opinion until the grey beard mentor in my life said "bluetooth is stupid, get another laptop for real work and get a long cable for your headphones".

I still have a windows rig for games with friends (and so does my grey beard mentor).


Yep windows as the average business OS and and gamers' choice at home is not going away anytime soon.

In the enterprise environment I have control over all of these settings through GPO or our MDM so it's irrelevant.

At home it's a bit more cumbersome but can be overcome as well.


Not surprising this is why I have switched to Macbook Pro long back.

Windows is to crappy and bloated to deal with and linux desktop is great to some extent but nothing beats the hardware and software synergy provided by Macbook Pro.


I upgraded to windows 10 a few years ago, even paid for the pro version to have it in my home computer.

I remember spending more than an hour, checking every possible setting I could to reveal less data. At the end, I felt somehow happy with the situation.

A few days later, an upgrade came. I didn't notice immediately but the upgrade has reset all privacy settings to their worst value (of course, default value is the one that benefits Microsoft).

I hated that feeling. I felt betrayed, angry and powerless. This was a terrible breach if trust for me (today, I know I seem like the typical naive user but years ago, I trusted their configuration menus).

I don't accept this feeling that my privacy should be in control of a small group of individuals who have absolutely zero respect for my privacy. I guess the fact that I had actually bought the pro version purposely to benefit from more privacy influenced my experience.

I uninstalled Windows and switched to Ubuntu.

Today, my problem is Android/apple. I'd like to get rid of them but I haven't solved this problem yet...


I don't get much crap on a daily basis, but that's probably due to using corporate versions of the system. For Windows 10 it's LTSC. These are seemingly more timid with the updates, and there is no ads in Start menu.

The downside is, I don't think you can buy LTSC for the personal use. Personally, I don't mind pirating, but since I buy most of the games these days, and most of the software I use has free alternatives, it would be nice to step away from using KMS (and, well, other) cracks made by fuck knows who.


Thankfully LTSC 2021 was released, so I’m sitting on that until standard support ends in 5 years.


you should get IOT LTSC enterprise for 10 years support.


Unfortunately I doubt support for common applications and frameworks will continue for IoT. It’s annoying enough trying to game, although you can.

After 5 years I expect enough customisation and features/fixes available for Windows 11 to not suck.


Makes me glad my MacBook Pro can’t run Windows 11 in boot camp…


I think this is a common practice nowadays until the regulations resolved it. Even Google chrome now asks if you changed the default search engine by mistake.


There is a difference between asking if you want to change something, and going and changing this something without the user consent.


There is a difference between asking, and constantly nagging until the user presses the wrong key by mistake one day.


Sure but Google didn't nearly get broken up by anti-trust regulation agencies for unfair competition with browsers. Microsoft did... in a fair world they'd be facing serious fines or an actual breakup this time as repeat offenders.


They already did that once on my Windows 10 machine a few years back. Wallpaper was reset to the default and my complete Firefox session was replaced by a single Bing tab. Luckily I could restore the session via "recently closed windows", but that was one of the last straws that made me wipe my last Windows installation. Risk of data loss is crossing the line for me.


Well, ... you get used to it.

You also get used to the people who are "responsible for the desktop systems" resetting your settings with windows updates or group policy updates breaking web stuff, the outright blocking of websockets ... shall i continue ?

Ah, the best one. You also get used to the always-on-vpn not always working.

They are a troubled bunch running a desktop system you can not safely control.


Windows is still my main OS because of gaming. Until not so long ago, I would still argue the benefits of this OS over its numerous competitors - HN usually considers Linux, but let's not forget OSX and even mobile systems that can be used full time, at least by non technical people.

Nowadays, I just hope that one day I'll be able to game on Linux and never have to boot windows again. The UI is shit (try using multiple languages inputs and have fun with windows), it's still unstable, a damn memory hog (I boot to almost 8 gbs of RAM these days).

At least I'll not upgrade to 11. The tpm requirement made sure of it, even if now I've updated my system - I don't think msft deserves my support as a user of their system, considering that they deemed my less than 6 years old machine unfit for 11.

And I know the security arguments. Was I more secure by being stuck with Win10? Don't think so.


About dealing with Microsoft crap. You customize Windows to your liking and move on. It's certainly not "on a daily basis" as suggested by OP. You don't have to keep anything as suggested by Microsoft. Oh, and you don't upgrade to newer Windows on existing PC until extended support runs out :)

If you don't like start menu changes, you install something like Classic Shell (I don't know whether it runs on Win 11 though).

If you don't like Explorer, you use something like TotalCommander. I've been using this fantastic software since mid 90-ties, crazy!

Btw. I'm tied to .Net and Visual Studio and can't change platforms. But even if I had a choice I probably wouldn't switch. I used Mac and Linux a bit and still prefer Windows. Probably old dog/new tricks kind of situation. Yes, Windows throws curve balls here and there, but you can usually work around them.


You can work around everything if you want to. The problem is, I shouldn’t have to work around stuff like this, the OS should compliment my PC work and be out of my way, not work actively against me and try to outsmart me.


Sure, that would be ideal, but I don't have a feeling that Windows gets in my way. If anything, it's that drivers or app updates make 90% of sys-admin work for users, not Windows itself. Yes, there are cases when Windows update creates havoc but it's not a constant struggle.

I also saw number of complaints about Mac OS in recent years. And constant cases of driver/sound/sleep issues with Linux desktops. And still, people use them and are happy. It's not like Windows is the only OS with issues you have to work around.


Not making any judgement on this reply, I just like to note that this is a very common reply to Linux criticism as well.


Migrate to Linux or MacOS, though MacOS has increasingly attained more dark patterns such as those you describe..

You'll instantly get after moving:

- No bitrot (it is there but like 5% of what it is in Windows) - No licensing crap - Sane file system (that can actually handle node_modules) - Unix environment (better for developing)


I used to try 11 when I'm an insider, but feel it's not for me. It seems like an unfinished product, so I reverted to 10. Recently get a banner showing my machine is ready for 11, and believing that problems in early days should have been solved, I gave it a try, only to roll back 30 minutes later.

The default browser thing is a factor that cause me to revert, but I also got a problem relating to "Microsoft.Windows.SecHealthUI". Somehow its residue from 10 got removed, and the start menu just show the icon of an app that is not functional and cannot be removed. I know Windows Defender/Security can be opened manually, but seeing this kind of thing makes me feel that Windows 11 was a joke, and until they seriously tackle the issues, I will simply remain with 10.


Man do I miss how excited for the new Windows I was when I was younger. Remember when the worst things about a new version were CPU footprint and compatibility problems?

Maybe this is nostalgia goggles but I don't remember my first weeks with Windows 98 or 7 making me feel like Microsoft hates me.


Manual updates means that they have to make an update appealing to entice users to install it. Automatic updates means they don't.


Either install Linux or accept that the actual owner of your PC (and no, this is not you). is going to do whatever they want with it.

There is no third option really.

"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart." M. Aurelius


I absolutely agree, but just want to say that when trying to promote this sentiment, you really should be saying "GNU" or "GNU/Linux" rather than just "Linux".


I've recently taken to calling it GNU plus Linux.


I used to be a MS "apologist" a long time ago for the majority of my "history" with computing.As with other bad habits in my life, I learned that there's only one solution: cut the head off.MS is becoming more restrictive precisely because it knows that if they allow even the smallest opening of freedom, users will break out of their grip.That in end of itself is enough of a reason to cut them off, besides shitty performance, de facto a data mining botnet, etcetera.

Sorry if i don't think having zoom and similar crapware is worth the cons of using win.Yes this is a strawman, and yes that's where the rest of the non-garbage software on windows is converging towards.


Similar, after a crash, I reinstalled Windows, but using my Azure work account and a PIN to login. However, the feeling of not 'owning' this machine anymore just became too irritating.

After that I installed CentOS 7 on machines I use for work development, including a desktop, and my Razer Blade 15. Our products are RHEL / Windows, and most everything I care about can be made to work pretty well on CentOS 7, including Teams, VS Code, CUDA, Python etc. A few things, including cmake work a heckuva lot faster in fact.

Other machines I have mostly run MacOS (anxiously awaiting Ashai Linux!) or Elementary OS, which is pretty awesome.


I've been using XFCE in my laptop for several years, because I don't have to wake up to some BS every now and then.

I do have Windows long term corporate whatever in my desktop, so to avoid most of the crap. I'm not very much a game, but I game from time to time. Didn't tested gaming in linux yet, but I'm not afraid.

I guess that if somewhere in the future Microsoft tries to make me swallow ther BS I'll just switch and be done with it. Ill suck it up with any difficulty and move on.

It's a pity because Windows is a good OS for most, but I can see in other people computers what they push for.


Buy a Mac or install Linux.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I deleted my last remaining Windows installation two days ago.

Linux is better for software development anyways, and with Proton, I can play all the games I like.


I only use Windows for gaming and I've yet to find a reason to upgrade to Windows 11. Seems like I'd be wiser to wait for whatever is going to be the Windows 8.1 of Windows 11.


I never click a link outside of a browser I have launched ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I run multiple browsers, Firefox is what I regard as my default but I use Chrome for work email. I launch the browsers on startup, and I just go into the browsers... once in a browser any link clicked is opened by that browser, so it all just works.

I can't think of a time when I've needed to follow a link that the OS has presented me with... or even of it presenting me with a link. Is that a thing?


I click links in my email client, chat client, Twitter client, etc


I often see a link in VS Code or terminal that I click.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis

I just don't bother with the concept of "default browser".

I use Portable FF for my main usage, I have firewall in a outbound whitelist mode, so in a rare circumstance something opens Edge... it's not going anywhere.

The only bother I had is with GitHub authenticator which doesn't have the option to just copy the auth link and opens the default browser. I copy the link from there and paste it in FF.


Yet another browser war?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars


Windows had become "xbox firmware" before they realized this and released WSL. And now they're trying to make it great for web surfing again


Ironically, the new Edge update for Xbox one made the browser so slow it's nigh unusable; loading times, is almost a whole minute, it often crashes when streaming video, and it feels slower than the non-Chromium predecessor.

Before the Chromium update, on the other hand, Edge was an excellent browser considering it ran on a gaming console.


I have Windows 10 because Windows 7 stopped updating and some software can have some problems with it, otherwise I would totally continue using it. I plan to do the same with Windows 10 and Windows 11.

I have enough crap every time I install Windows 10, needing to use ShutUp10, other "debloaters", and having to use the task scheduler to remove telemetry tasks, so I don't need more things to delete with Windows 11.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

Well, I went into settings and switched my default search engine back to Google. Wonder what I'll have to "deal with" tomorrow. Oh right, nothing. Because it isn't a daily occurrence. Far from it. Some people routinely exaggerate small rare annoyances into a constant ongoing process, and I don't really understand it.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I'm still using Windows 7 for specific Visual Studio 2019 developments where I must code. Most of times I'm under Debian.

For Windows specific build-only machine I use the free Hyper-V Server installation with OpenSSH installed via powershell and Add-WindowsCapability. I'ts one of the best Windows IMHO because there is nothing installed.


At this point, it's more likely that I permanently switch to Linux than it is that I upgrade to Windows 11. I was pacified and relatively content with Windows 10, but Microsoft is rapidly destroying the good will they accumulated with stuff like WSL (even if that's just a way to keep people from switching to Linux) and VSCode (which I might continue to use on Linux).


Are there any good options for me to switch to linux, if I'm forced to work on a windows project in visual studio 2022. I guess I can run a Windows VM but I fear performance degradation. Also I guess I could switch my IDE to Rider, but compiling to .NET Framework 4.8 would be impossible on linux I Guess (again It would be fine in a windows VM).


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

An M1 Macbook Air starts at $1k and is a perfectly usable machine for most tasks.


The usability of MacOS is horrible. saying it as a Win+Linux guy.


It's definitely getting worse and I agree it's worse than Windows 7, but I'll still take it over Windows 8+.

Linux really depends on what you do with it and whether you use a laptop or desktop. Desktop is really not a problem as you don't care about battery life, wireless connections or power management. But on laptops it can be tricky - Bluetooth is still a horrible mess in the Linux world for example.


There's a registry key you can set on Windows 10 to prevent the upgrade to 11. It'll be a long time before I have any need to upgrade.

As for all those hacks like disabling Windows Update, replacing the Start Menu etc, I prefer to stay on the standard so that the system is stable and there are less things to check if it becomes unstable.


It surprises me that MS still overrides user settings during updates. Especially since Satya Nadella is trying to modernise. But you can also see this disrespectful handling of user choices as result of internal conflicts. The old patronising MS is still there. Meanwhile MS is doing amazing stuff with Azure, Github and VS Code.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

For work: Windows 7 installed using FlashBoot Pro.

For games: Windows 10 Ameliorated + Firefox + FoxyProxy + SOCKS5 proxy on the router (github.com/rofl0r/microsocks) combined with default-to-deny firewall rules to filter remaining telemetry and updates.


Windows 11 is desktop as a service. Set it the easy you like it and use a firewall or pihole to block updates. It's been the only way to have a stable system since windows 10. On days when you have extra time, go ahead and update, then fix everything Microsoft ruined.


Business as usual: it's Microsoft. They know what you want more than you do.


I'd echo a sibling comment that I'm often confused by these stories on HN, since this kind of thing never happens to me, and I use Windows 11 on a daily basis (on multiple machines).

Yes, they sometimes show a prompt after updates asking if I want to change the default browser to Edge — I always decline. And no settings change.

Boosting Edge's numbers by force-switching the default browser without asking would have such obvious, predictable backlash, I'd be pretty surprised if this ever shipped intentionally. Let alone changing Chrome's default search engine without asking — that very likely is illegal.

Is your Windows machine a personal one, or is it a corporate machine? I could imagine that poorly designed corporate IT update enforcement software would accidentally do this kind of thing.


> changed "restore previous tabs" setting to "always open Bing on startup"

oh my god i would be so pissed off. I'm a tab hoarder and I do have Session Buddy to save tab sessions but still.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I don't. I moved fulltime to Linux rather than try to mitigate Windows 10's predations. I wouldn't go back.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I don't


The same I deal with the myriad of other things in my life that's out of control. I grumble, then maybe make some changes.

P.s. I use Linux everywhere currently


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

No techie I know does.

They're all on Linux and some still stuck on OSX.

The rest have left Windows a long time ago.

Possible exceptions: game devs


>How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

Does msft reset it daily? It sounds like no. On a daily basis windows is painless and easy to use.


good thing I’m using a Mac, probably won’t go back in the future, been using windows until I was 18 because I wasn’t able to afford one, but every since I started using it, I can’t go back. i stayed for peace of mind, stayed for good UX, stayed for the trackpad which I been using every day for the past four years, and I have barely used a mouse ever since.

though, I’m a big fan of Xbox


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

First: it’s defined not on daily basis. It’s on install or every blue moon update.

Secondly: I vastly prefer dealing with this occasional browser change then spending my whole week trying to discover:

- why my screen is tearing

- why my nvidia laptop is messed up

- why I can’t plug my external display and have the correct dpi on each display

OBS. I also vastly prefer to fix a browser change every once in a while than rebooting into tty to fix an unbootable system after a driver/firmware upgrade.


Atleast on Linux the problems you might have are not because of malware presented by the maintainers of the operating system.


You're right. In fact Firefox resets your settings during updates in order to try to entice you into enabling Pocket or donating (which you so naively disabled in preferences). Nobody says anything about that.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

I don't. Been running Ubuntu since 2010ish.


I've seen this movie before... wasn't Microsoft the defendant in an anti-trust case modeled after the exact same situation?

I just setup a Win 10 box at home and have finally started to appreciate some of it, but the Edge hooks are all over the place. I've noticed clicking a help link in one of the settings sidebars will open in Edge regardless of your browser choice. It's also the default PDF reader.


I have yet to have this happen. what version are you using? don't use home, use pro or enterprise.


How is Microsoft able to get away with this and not trigger another antitrust lawsuit?


Just installed the latest windows 11 update, it did none of the things OP mentioned.


I used Windows for many years, but this sort of dark pattern made me switch to Macs.


Never has there been a time I wanted to switch to linux for good so badly.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I don't. Been using Linux for over 10 years. The few Windows machines I have to use at work are actually nothing but glorified browser launchers.


> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

I try to use linux for a day or two to remind me why I don't use it instead.

Then I don't touch linux again for a few years.


I deal with it by not installing it.


Are you on the Insiders build?


Long live to Linux and Firefox (and all the surrounding social structures that keep them alive).


I have been Windows free for many years now, but because Windows and Microsoft are becoming increasingly user hostile I have also started to switch all my non-techie family members from Windows to macOS.

We have only one more Windows device left in our household and this year that one will get replaced as well.

This is the "new" Microsoft - so absolutely hostile and shit that I felt forced to convert everyone from my wife, to my grandmother to move from Windows to Apple and they all feel so happy and keep asking my why they never used Apple before. The integration with their iPhones and iPads is wonderful and the OS really gets out of their way and lets them do the things they care about the most. Things work and don't break.


Windows 11 made that computer my last MS purchase.

I’m only looking at computers that natively ship Linux from now on — that OS was a disaster, that doesn’t even support basic functionality and was shipped without support docs or training their support staff.


Why put up with it? As much as I dislike this kind of practice by M$ or any other corporation, the solution has always been in the users’ hands! Just don’t use it, switch!

Switch to Linux. Live a better life! Give pop OS! (Or any other distro) a shot


>How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. No updates and supported for 10 years. Rock solid.


It does actually update itself every now and then even though it shouldn't be. In the middle of the night no less. You may want to check the logs. No feature updates, just patches, but still.


I meant no feature updates.

Windows 10 does indeed update itself by default, but you can disable automatic updates using the policy editor.


DOS ain’t done till Lotus won’t run.


Yeah, I always hear about it and everyone jumps to trash on Microsoft and here we are with over 1000 windows machines deployed and have never seen it.


In windows 10, Settings > Default Apps, there is a button called "Reset to Microsoft recommended defaults". If you ever press it by mistake, it resets ALL of your settings. Doesn't even ask for confirmation. One misclick and you will lose 30 mins reverting it all back.


I use firefox,but the firefox ui is not very nice,so i create new ui that looks like chrome. https://www.alovez.com/bing


It asks you, you just have to catch it during the installation/upgrade.


>This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.

Haha, no it's not your product, you have the license to use it, not to own it. Don't waste your time with Microsoft (if your not getting paid for it)


Pardon if I'm getting this wrong, but

> This is pathetic, predatory and should be illegal.

> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

This is quite low effort, and frankly doesn't add anything to the known status quo.




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