I am considering seriously to start using Fedora instead of Windows. And I have not had particular good experiences out of the box with linux (things breaking here and there for no reason). But lately I have been exactly having the same situation with Windows (start menu stops working, computer refusing to turn off and restarting instead, context menu stop working...)
The ads is also another problem, I am a mini sysadmin controlling not only my computers but my parents one. And I need to keep their computer in a safe state that they dont get in trouble by a misleading ad, but also, unable to do something because of an anti-ad pop up or similar.
And having them being stressed out because onedrive/office365/nobackups pop up is asking stuff they dont understand is getting on my fucking nerves.
I have been using different Linux distros, and I decided to settle on Linux Mint Mate edition: based on debian/ubuntu.
I tried Manjaro, the concept is very cool, but adding my Canon Pixma 5051 driver was extremely difficult, and adding OneDrive support was also difficult (getting some errors at compile time, no matter what package from AUR I choose), so I decided not to use it.
Furthermore, I also tried Fedora, Mate edition. I was really surprised how unpolished it looks compared to any other Mate editions (Mint, Manjaro, Solus (solus is the most polished of them all), Ubuntu).
It is my understanding (and I am not an expert in Linux at all), that deb is better than RPM, so can I ask you, why Fedora?
By the way, you can install Windows 10/11 Enterprise (10 IoT will be supported till 2035), which has none of these problems.
Why Fedora? I had a chinese wifi dongle that I bought for a raspberry pi 2B. And when raspbian updated, it stopped working, with fedora, it was recognised immediately. With raspbian, you end up in a page of a community were the drivers are compiled with a script that you run, and that let me tell you I never managed to make it run.
That is the only experience I got. But it is a fairly popular cheap wifi dongle, and I think that fedora just has better compatibility. I am not sure about deb/rpm. I am more familiar with deb. But honestly, I prefer that things just work.
I have a windows 10 enterprise on my work laptop and I can still see several pop-up and annoyances. I am also not sure where would I be able to get a windows 10 IoT key that I can use and is reasonably priced. But I will have a look. thank you.
IMO there should be at least the possibility of paying for an ad-free experience, whatever the monetary value of that per user might be.
I used software called RaiDrive on the desktop a while ago and they have an ad-supported free version - there is a banner that shows up on top/bottom of the app window, IIRC: https://www.raidrive.com/
If developers need money but users want free software, wouldn't that be a possible option in the case of OSes and desktop software, in addition to that being the status quo on mobile? Then smarter users who don't want to pay can use a PiHole or something like that, users get the software and devs get some additional money, OR people can straight up pay for an ad free version and/or more features, or use an open source alternative.
I think the only thing holding us back in that regard is a lack of proper sandboxing for most desktop software, e.g. the user data that you agree to give it, rather than having spyware/PUP getting installed and so on. I do wonder why there are no good reputation ad networks for desktop software and such, say, AdSense for Windows/Linux.
> I think $MS is innovating in some areas that, if nothing changes, Apple will ape to great fanfare in a few years
IMO too late. Pretty much my entire network that I'm aware of refuses to use Microsoft anything - Windows, Teams, Visual Studio, .NET etc. The only exception to that are gamers but these people seem less and less as we all get older.
I enjoyed writing C# back in the day, its a great language, but I probably never will again.
On the other hand, VsCode dominates the basic editor space. TypeScript basically became the standard in web development. GitHub is MS, NPM is MS. .net is now open source and I'd not be surprised if it starts getting popular again.
I'd say they are in a better place in terms of developer relations and perception compared to a couple years ago. Might be my network bias though.
This I don't get. Microsoft is copying Apple in this case. When you use OSX then you are more or less obligated to have an iCloud account. And then they ask you if you want to have iCloud+.
What is difference between Apple and pestering me with getting iCloud and Microsoft pestering me with getting Microsoft 365.
Both are convenient and provide great value and a better UX.
If you project is big enough, resource cost is more reasonable. VSCode starts lagging while Jetbrains products can scroll file with 500k lines without problem.
In my experience, it's mostly the less experienced use it. It's electron shovelware, with horrible typing latency and memory usage.
No matter how hard MS wants to push it, those don't change. If I need a text editor I use one, if I need a full IDE I use those. This Frankenstein abomination has zero purpose.
The vast majority of people I work with use VS Code, from recent graduates to very senior and seasoned devs, myself included.
I don't like Microsoft, and before VS Code I had high hopes for Atom. VS Code became nearly everything I wanted on an editor.
I could never get used to "full IDEs". I find them awkward and I always feel constrained by them, not in a good way.
I experience zero typing latency on VS Code (and I'm very sensitive to that). Granted, memory usage could be better but along with the browser it's my main work tool so I don't mind much that it uses a considerable amount, as long as it doesn't bog down my machine.
Of course, to each their own. I hate Microsoft as much as the next person and I wish someone would step in and give me a modular editor with extensive LSP support and an excellent extensions marketplace to replace it. I would consider paying for such a product if it was adequate.
I had high hopes that Jetbrains Fleet would be that product, but after having tried its pre-release a few times I'm not holding my breath.
Same path. On a mac I've been using Zed. If you're on a mac you could consider it. On the downside it's back to lldb for debugging, but that's not a big deal.
I love Linux and despise $MS in general. VS Code is the only thing from them I genuinely enjoy using. Since most of it is open source I have some confidence it will escape the usual $MS enshitification, or at least VS Codium. There's just not anything I've come across that's as versatile.
My dilemma: choosing between Windows that has too many ads and is increasingly buggy, a Linux desktop environment that requires lots of time to configure and always has something not working, or a Mac computer that has atrocious RAM and SSD markup. (A mac mini that matches my current $500 pc with 32GB/1TB would cost $1,899.) I decide to live with Windows and find ways to turn off the ads or ignore them.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm definitely a Linux fanboy, and am totally biased, but while yes, some distros require a lot of configuration, but others, like Mint and Fedora, just work. The only major issue I've ever had with those was, on rare occasions with niche WiFi cards or very new ones, missing WiFi drivers, which are available separately and can be installed pretty easily with just a quick Google search.
In my opinion, it's much less time to configure and get Linux working than Windows. For example, just last week I was on Debian, but then I decided I wanted to switch back to Fedora (just some minor preferences, nothing major), and I was able to reinstall and get back up and running within an hour or two–including reinstalling programs. And I had a separate /home partition, so I had all my data separate and just switched out the OS.
There's always something not working on Windows. Especially as cruft accumulates over time. We have a tendency to bail at the first sign of trouble and return to where we're comfortable. This doesn't mean there were no issues there. It just means we know how to handle them. It is in my opinion a much more useful skill to know how to handle Linux than Windows. Especially if one is into or adjacent to IT things.
I’d been off Windows since the early XP days, first Mac then Gentoo then running a hackintosh for several years, and got fed up with the maintenance. Since in the end I was mostly using it for gaming I just thought, WTH, I’ll use Windows 10, how bad can it be!? I lasted a month and then in a figure of pique and frustration I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 20.3. What a breath of fresh air! And the silver lining is Steam Play which makes it as good a gaming machine as ever and far better than it was as a hackintosh
I switched to Linux last year and it's an absolute dream in comparison.
Using Windows when Linux is available is just like using WhatsApp when Signal is available. It's a matter of mass-adoption and really not much more (ie the platforms are nearly functionally identical). So help spread the word! :-)
It is not immune to enshittification though. I currently have a notification from a parcel delivery guy I added to my contacts at some point at the top of the GUI. It's the new story functionality. O already switched to Nekogram on Android which so far does not have that feature but both web clients recently got it too.
(It should be reletively easy to remove it from the open source clients though)
I would not say functionally identical but more productivity tools are available on all platforms. For a developer I can only say that it is a must to use Linux. No emulation required to run docker for instance...
Inevitably they open network connections to untrustworthy content.
One of the best unintended side effects to happen in recent months was
that the NSO group weaponised ads, via the ad-serving infrastructure
at least in mobile devices, as a means to deliver malware.
They couldn't have stuck a knife into the heart if a nicer industry.
Now the mere presence of "advertisements" is a legitimate
cybersecurity concern. Adblockers, and configuring browsers to stop
ads is at the same level as firewalls and updates.
Advertisements baked into the Windows operating system is no mere
question of "annoyance", it's a sound, rational reason to dump
Microsoft in favour of something more secure.
Slowly boiling myself away from this and subscription software. The last few months have been moving my data to portable formats, open source software and on disk rather than in the cloud. The first step was to move away from macOS to Windows ironically because I can dispose of the Apple hardware and use my target hardware and what remanining software I am locked in to will work on windows. I'll boil the last few things off on that then migrate to Linux.
The biggest problem remaining is what to do with email as I need access to it on the road and I've got used to outlook/o365 for that. A half decent neutral IMAP service would do the job. Any recommendations?
I was very confused when I booted a Windows VM the other day and a mini Freddie Mercury appeared in the taskbar’s search box.[1] Turned out that it would have been his birthday, but it’s an odd thing for an OS to do.
My current internal struggle is which is the better trade off. Fight ads on Windows 11 or fight getting games to work on my Linux Distro of choice. I should just dual boot and fight both battles at the same time.
Microsoft kills products this way. In Win 8 they killed OneNote which was a pretty good product by pinning 3 icons for it in the task bar. And putting it in all kinds of context menus, and putting it in as a printer, and trying to stuff it up your nose. It had a decent XML file format that I could extract content from but what really killed it for me was when it went cloud only and those files went away.
Then there is the strange case of SkyDrive, that they failed to run a trademark search on before launching, so they had to rename it to OneDrive. They set the default for Office to save to OneDrive. Well once I forgot to save elsewhere and OneDrive wasn’t working so I couldn’t save. And this is a product that is always harassing me about some document I didn’t save 5 years ago. That’s not how you kill a product, that is how you kill it, kill it again and kill it once more.
Recently I tried enabling "Syncing to OneDrive", to see what would happen. Documents, Desktop, and Pictures were moved up a level into "OneDrive - LongCompanyName.com" folder, those have become the preferred file save destination, and the original folders emptied out.
A lot of time is spent synching to the cloud. Also, "Date modified" metadata was all reset at the time of transition, so distinguishing "pre-OneDrive" files by date is not a thing anymore.
The software problem is still a thing. Games and many commercial software packages that people need to get work done. Adobe Suite, AutoDesk, Microsoft Office and I'm sure there are more. Things are tons better now than they were even 2-4 years ago, but it's still a thorn in the side of Linux (due to the fault of the software vendors) that keeps people on Windows.
Two other things that irk me with Linux is Remote Desktop and internal drives. Remote desktop on Windows has been solved at the basic+ level for years (RDP, Terminal Services). VNC on Linux is often barely useable or a lag filled struggle, even on LAN. I know there are 3rd party solutions, but none are cheap (TV, AnyDesk, etc) or as elegant (NoMachine, etc) out of the box as RDP. I should be able to turn on a toggle "Enable Remote Desktop" and connect from a client machine. I guess that's why Gnome is moving that way? I don't know.
The next is on Windows I typically have a plethora of random internal drives I use for storage, scratch disks for downloads or video encoding, temp storage, etc. These just format and assign a drive letter and done. Maybe I haven't done it enough but it always requires a guide, editing fstab, getting permissions right, mounting it as a folder or other witchcraft. Again this is probably me, but it's harder than it needs to be, IMHO.
Back on gaming, Steam really doesn't get enough credit. They have pushed developers to consider Linux for the first time in history. They have helped create the tools and the store front. The steam deck is a good PoC. And now that game engines are allowing cross platform type tools, it's never been easier.
Time will tell, but just like Firefox, I hope Linux on the desktop sticks around.
This software is great, and I love the 3 levels of defaults that you can choose from. Also creating a restore point automatically is nice.
I've used other O&O software (backup) and found it to be pretty solid, so when they first released this tool back for Windows 10 I was surprised to see it free.
I was in the same boat. I switched to linux on my main dev machine (linux lite), and it works for everything except certain games (a racing sim is the main one I care about). Various compatibility versions of proton got closer, but I couldn't do a full race. I ended up doing bootcamp on my mac (also for dev but less frequently used) and only booting into it for games. All my productivity and daily driving is on linux.
The struggle is becoming easier over time. Windows 11 ads are getting more and more prevalent while I've personally had less and less issues playing Linux games, to the point where I haven't had to really even think about it lately.
Yeah, consoles are even worse. You are not only paying 400-500 dollareuropounds for the console itself, you pay for the multiplayer, and another huge markup for the games and/or the game pass.
And you can only game on it, you can't do anything else with it. In 2 years you easily spend up to 1000 dollars on it, which in comparison could get you the most expensive GPUs other than the 4090.
The allure of a PC is (was?) to buy one machine that can do it all. I guess doing it all now includes having ads shoved into your face from every software vendor around. I don't know what the landscape for ads on consoles are, but I can't imagine it's much better.
Sometimes I get the impression that nobody knows O&O Shutup exists. Yes it sucks that such a third party app is necessary but Windows 10 is basically unusable without it. I have literally every disable option possible selected except two. One that makes the network applet know if there's a connection and one option about Windows update without which even manual updates don't work. (I remembered that it's actually 4 the other two having to do with camera and mic permissions)
I don't think people (or the author for that matter) "forget" that, it's more of a statement about shutup10 needing to exist.
At which point did this Operating System become a Persistently-Shovel-Things-In-Your-Face System instead of being a tool to operate the system and thus disappears to let you efficiently go on with your work?
What I don't understand is how this is acceptable to enterprise IT departments at, say, Fortune 500s. It would have been an embarrassment 20 years ago for employees to be receiving these kinds of ads, news, and games from within the OS. What happened? When did people stop caring?
What? There are ads in macOS settings? I've never seen that. I guess the question whether to buy a maxed out macbook pro or a frame.work 17" has been answered.
No, iOS does this. Tries to push you promos for Apple Arcade, etc. minor dark patterns are already at play, with notifications that aren't, niggling red badges.
I recently upgraded to 11 22H2 and didn't have to deal with most of this, likely because I'm using Enterprise. I highly recommend using it instead of the consumer SKUs.
It's always a treadmill finding the 'good' version. W10 on our domain with the right group policy was perfect, never saw a Microsoft ad after disabling cortana & weather on a new machine. In the last month or so XBox notification ads every few days.
It's better in that you have no ads. But if anything it feels like a side step or backwards step in terms of usability.
There are three things driving me mad at the moment. One, despite having my audio muted I still get audible notifications for something, haven't figured it out. Two, volume control no longer works with my Jabra bluetooth earphones. Third, no amount of trying to convince Windows Explorer otherwise can I stop my downloads folder and it's sub-folders from going back to being grouped by date, which I hate.
The moment games either natively support linux or Proton becomes less of a hassle to use, I'm dropping Windows entirely.
Until then, running a de-shittified Windows 10.
Microsoft, having made huge enemies of everyone in free software, seems to now see business as its new target to antagonise. I genuinely don't understand what they are playing at with Windows. They seem to be gladly sacrificing the one thing keeping people tied to them.
I remember when OEM Windows came with a bunch of crap. Now there is no version of Windows that isn't full of crap.
You should be glad you don’t open(2) and then read(2) a file and get an ad instead of the content and have to seek(2) back to the beginning, get another ad, and then finally seek(2) again and get the content.
Why aren't we charging $0.2 per 1k API calls plus $0.5 per privileged calls? Where are my revenue share programs? You guys are leaving so much on the table!
Nah, I am just thinking of the old fogey professors who teach OS classes who think is an OS is all the invisible stuff and not the stuff that gets talked about when ArsTechnia reviews a new release of MacOS like iTunes and email client and the close buttons and the scrollbars and all that.
I am always facepalming when I see these articles like “you can’t read Postscript files on MacOS anymore” because it seems to me that reading files is a user space thing and you are infantilized or the computer is using you instead of the other way around when that is happening.
I bought my first Mac in ~30 years because of the ads in Win11. Yes, you can (kinda) disable them I'm just not interested in fighting that sort of nonsense in an OS
Exactly right, the ads are tiring. They keep introducing new ways to shove ads in your face with silent updates or they just restore the original settings even after you spent a considerable amount of time disabling them.
Move on until a month later when an update either adds more advertisements, or just changes you back to the default settings?
> or just use another OS
Sure, but lots of people can't. There's plenty of Windows-only software which is crucial for some people. Ignoring macOS, because the obvious problem there is that Macs are expensive, and Hackintoshes require lots of troubleshooting and configuration, translation layers, like Wine and Proton, have made huge progress, but there's some stuff that's just completely impractical, or currently impossible, to do with translation layers. Plus, even some games that could run on Linux are just refused support by their publisher. For example, Destiny 2 uses BattlEye for anti-cheat, which has Linux support, but Bungie refuses to enable it, instead banning anyone who plays Destiny 2 on Linux. There's more examples of this, but I won't go on about it further.
And don't get me started on running a Windows VM with passthrough. That's a big, confusing pain to set up. I've used Linux for years and couldn't get PCI(e) passthrough working, so it's unreasonable to expect someone just migrating away from Windows to be able to set it up properly. And it doesn't really solve anything if you're just going to be using Windows all day anyways.
The ads is also another problem, I am a mini sysadmin controlling not only my computers but my parents one. And I need to keep their computer in a safe state that they dont get in trouble by a misleading ad, but also, unable to do something because of an anti-ad pop up or similar.
And having them being stressed out because onedrive/office365/nobackups pop up is asking stuff they dont understand is getting on my fucking nerves.