It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Linux is still crap software, but we've reached the point where most things can be done on Linux, so good riddance. I hope that more people switch and Linux continues to improve. There's actually interesting improvements being made in the Linux world too, like NixOS.
> It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows.
It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a desktop, and wasn't a clone of the mobile UI. No ads. Didn't phone home too much, and you could turn off auto-update. No issues with installing your own software.
Then Microsoft tried to make desktop look like mobile and tablet. Desktop began to look like a big phone, optimized for content consumption and fat finger selection. The result was something that was neither a good desktop nor a good content consumption device.
When you have things about as good as they'll reasonably get, having a group as large as that dev organization going full throttle is more likely to make things worse. From the top of the mountain all directions are down.
I sat near an administrator who loudly cursed all day, because they force that gui down upon all system internal tools and ruined the info-density of the dashboards.
As someone that’s been forced to reluctantly wear the ‘Windows sysadmin’ on and off for the past ~15 years due to circumstances beyond my control…this just sounds like the complaint of someone too lazy to learn PowerShell.
The linux subsystem, despite being about as wrongheaded as running linux user space on the Windows OS can be as an idea, solves that problem. Nobody needs PowerShell, unless you're dealing with very old systems. And in that case, you're already lost.
The point of learning powershell is not because it is some great shell, but the available bindings to many subsystems, that allow you to admin them; including many toggles and options, that are not available in any gui.
Yeah Windows 7 was cool. After that I though I can't be bothered with further versions and switched to mac. Which is fine though I miss some stuff like that Windows lets you use what hardware you like. And what software - maybe my biggest annoyance with MacOS is when they decided 32 bit software was suddenly verboten because why not. I mean who'd want to use Photoshop PS6 when you could use the new subscription spyware version.
everyone who has tried to combine mobile and desktop UI's has always fucked it up. I'm absolutely convinced it can't be done while servicing both well.
Everyone loves to use the meme "enshittification" but fat fingerization started the whole downward trend. In fact, most UI is designed for a big fat doughy hand to sloppily slap a single giant rounded button.
On the flip side, Windows 8 was a superior interface for the Surface and similar devices to either 10 or 11.
While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration.
The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
For the longest time, I was a die-hard MS guy, fully immersed in their ecosystem. From my Surface Pro to the Lumia Windows Phone, I embraced every facet of their landscape. It was like the stars had aligned perfectly, granting me a seamless and efficient workflow across all my devices. But then, as if the planets themselves shifted out of harmony, everything fell apart and now we are here.
We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
> The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile
I think that you're being a bit uncharitable here. The issue wasn't "purists who hate mobile". The issue is that what makes a good mobile UI is worlds apart from what makes a good desktop UI. You can't combine the two without making one or both use cases worse.
The pushback was due to Windows 8 being terrible on the desktop.
Microsoft's mistake was in trying to make One UI To Rule Them All rather than having different UIs for different form factors.
I don't know, I've been using Windows on desktop since 3.1 and found Windows 8 perfectly usable. In fact it was immediately better than Windows 7 because there were more keyboard shortcuts for window management.
The biggest regression in 8 was the Control Panel disaster that continues to this day and is less related to mobile friendliness and more a mismanaged attempt to try break free of some very ugly legacy components that were already behaving inconsistently in 7. Setting up a custom DNS still requires diving deep into multiple layers of ipv4 settings and popups, exactly as it did in Windows NT, I believe. It's a nightmare.
The Start menu at least since 8.1 was toggleable from full screen to corner mode, so I don't think that's really a worthy area of complaint. In every other respect, 8 behaved more or less like 7. Keyboard shortcuts worked the same. Double click worked the same. Explorer was still Explorer.
Edit to add: I just checked and Start menu was still full screen only in Windows 8.1. I guess it never bothered me because Ctrl+Esc still popped it, you could still type the name of the shortcut to find it, Win+X was there for admin menu and you could still hit Win+R to run binaries directly. Having a two-dimensional arrow key navigation felt faster than tree-based to get where I wanted too. Maybe for keyboard-centric users it didn't feel much different, while for touchscreen it was clearly better.
It's Windows 10 where they actually started actively removing features, and Windows 11 has taken that to the extreme by replacing the entire start menu and task bar philosophy that's been a core part of Windows since 95 and replacing it with some hideous MacOS dock like thing. Don't even get me started on the messing up of right click in Explorer. It's like Microsoft got taken over by Apple developers who never used a Windows PC in their lives. Awful.
The fact is that Windows 8.1 was far better that the shit hole that Windows 10/11 has become. Windows 7 was the last great Windows. Windows 8.1 was the last decent/good Windows.
Not in the slightest. Not in operating systems, not in browsers, not in video games, not in software as a whole.
This is a post about Microsoft ruining their software. That software is distributed through automatic updates. Do you recall the campaign to get everyone on 10? That and the telemetry (spying) they added around the same time convinced me to disable updates. I eventually landed on a linux with only manual updates.
1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha.
2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later.
Windows is #1. Linux is #2.
Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)
The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else.
If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Windows 10 / 11 always ask you when you want to apply the update.
> If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool.
Or they just know their users.
At our company,the policy is set up to request reboot during the next 30 days (so basically till the next patch Tuesday). Who complains the most about updates all the time or every day? Those, who didn't bother to reboot during the last 30 days.
Unfortunately I think they won't learn. What most of them will do is to click the next banner that shows "We detected a Virus on your computer. Please click here to fix this.", but they will will absolutely refuse to click on that popup in Windows that tells them to update, because Microsoft is the ultimate evil that can't be trusted.
> That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else.
That's alright also in Windows 10 or 11 when ransomware commes, so it must be something else. /s
Also, in Linux you can update and keep doing stuff. Even a full distribution version update! I remember playing Stellaris at the same time that Kubuntu was being updated to the 22.04 LTS version.
I certainly keep using my computer during updates but it's not advisable and you should be prepared to random and more or less subtle breakages. Maybe less on non rolling distros. On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it's usual that Network Manager stops being usable from the KDE GUI after big updates.
It is not safe. Few years ago (around ~2016-17), there was that Nvidia driver update, that killed Xorg during the process. Yes, I was running the update in the gnome-terminal, and it didn't end up well, I spent next few hours piecing the system together from a live usb.
For next few years, I was running updates inside screen, just to be sure.
Linux also doesn't have the use case of grandma/grandpa. Gunshy small brick and mortar owners, kiosks, banks, employee who doesn't have privileges (both on the system and in writing) to update...the list goes on.
Forcefully rolling out the update is the only way it may ever get updated, in a lot of cases.
Who cares if you ARE "grandma". That assumes that old women are technologically incompetent, and a pretty shit thing to assume.
My MiL (early 70's), happily runs Xubuntu on her machine. After getting the printer/scanner to work, it just fucking works. She agreed to schedule the updates in the early morning, so its just done.
She wanted a password manager, and showed her how to install software. That's done now, since we've had an app store longer than Apple.
The only thing she couldnt figure out was how to open an Access database made in 2003. That took me some time to figure out. Finally did and got them exported to LibreOffice spreadsheets.
My examples were perhaps too specific, but I was just trying to illustrate there's many use cases where updating will functionally not exist if not for a forced rollout.
Your comment is orthogonal to mine. Updating is always the right thing to do. How it is scheduled by the OS provider is another story. But refusing to update because you don’t like the scheduler is unreasonable. If you can’t stand the scheduler, change OS.
To point out the obvious: run auto-update before doing the "crucial thing" and that won't occur. Or pay for the non-consumer oriented editions of Windows that allow full administrative control; they exist.
Anybody who could not figure that out is probably not capable of managing Linux properly either.
All the moaning and groaning over something trivial to avoid with even a modicum of common sense is neither fair nor rational. Even more so since it's an intentional design decision and it's already well known to be an intentional design decision.
What common sense is your own moaning and groaning exhibiting?
It is a useful ability to be able to deal with something that isn't as you would wish.
But that is orthoganol to another fact which is that in the entire history of the world, not one thing ever got better by accepting things as they are.
I bought my first Windows pc recently (a gaming rig).
I was shocked to find that even Minesweeper had ads! “Microsoft has no taste” seems to still hold.
It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
My own experience doesn't reflect that. I've been using Linux for work for years and tried to switch from Windows to Linux for games.
NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not well supported. Knowing which is which before buying requires reading extensive documentation. Even Dell on their XPS 9310 fucked up Linux support so bad they dediced to quietly remove the option to buy Ubuntu laptop and communication about supporting Linux.
My personal laptop recovers all screen when waking up from sleep, my work laptop doesn't and I need to unplug and plug them again.
One thing that works awesomely well for me is Printer supports (scanners are another pair of hands though). Anywhere I tried, discovery works great out of the box, even for USB printers it works without having to download a driver from a strange website.
When using snap (default on Ubuntu) Firefox crashes often if it updates in background. Libre office is far from the Office experience, which I tend to forget as I use Google Workspace apps instead.
Having tried working on Windows, Linux and MacOS, I wouldn't move to another environment. The pros greatly outweigh the cons for my own use-case. But I will still keep a Windows for gaming and cannot recommend it to relatives.
Gaming and pro audio plugins are the reasons for me to keep Windows bootable.
However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to re-install), I'm thinking more than twice before booting into Windows these days. I don't have much time for gaming anyway, and will probably just give up my audio plugins at some point.
Yes, that's good advice and I thought so, too, but I've been checking them many times and they're all fine. The problem persists for more than 2 years already.
I think most people eventually figure out hardware that works fine under Linux. Granted, nvidia is still a sore point, and it doesn't really have a viable alternative for some important scenarios. But in the end, it's usually not that hard to make work, many (millions?) people do it. It might not be slick, but it's fine. And Intel iGPU support is basically flawless if you have more modest needs.
Can't comment on the problems you have had. My own experience has been almost without issue for many years now, using Fedora. YMMV.
I have a few desktops of various vintage in my stable, and one with an Nvidia GPU is effectively totally unstable. Driver updates often break things (one display at 1024x768), the machine often fails to wake from sleep; sometimes it'll wake with one display no longer working (requiring reboot), and various other issues.
I lack the patience to try and troubleshoot it most of the time and primarily use another machine. Usefulness is limited when I can't count on "simple" things like waking from sleep in working state, IME.
People who want to run Linux buy hardware and laptops that support Linux. The user you're replying to specifically said they don't care to evangelize the benefits because it works great for them.
Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.
Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.
> Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.
Speak for yourself. That condescending attitude is disgustingly lame, and everyone is welcome to use linux, even the haters. It is free and open source, not free and open source (except for people that emptysongglass doesn't approve of)
Everything deserves criticism. Everything is imperfect. Calling out imperfections is not an insult to imperfect systems but a hope that the systems which can change in a way that we humans cannot would change for the better.
And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
I'm not upset and it's a little presumptuous to assume that I am or that I was condescending. I really do want people to be happy where and when they go to do their compute on whatever OS they go to do it on. Parent made a strawman where grandparent explicitly said Linux was in a place where they no longer felt the need to evangelize it.
And that's a good thing. Trying to convince people to use Linux has been likely the worst sort of thing to happen to its adoption. Chromebooks and Steam Deck promote Linux without arguing its virtues.
> It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux.
Grandparent explicitly stated that getting more users might actually be a worse thing for Linux. I agree. Parent going out of their way to criticize unsupported hardware makes their case.
> And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
No, I don't believe that to be the case, especially when it comes to bring-up on Nvidia. That blame sits squarely with Nvidia the corporation. And the people who can do something about it are the engineers sitting at Nvidia who haven't done anything about it for at least a decade. Rolling out the same old arguments for why Linux sucks because Nvidia is not productive.
For Snaps, there's a constellation of other distros available that don't ship Snaps. Shuttleworth doesn't want to listen to critique. He's been going his own way since the earliest days of Canonical. Have you seen their interview process? When he was called out publicly for the poor predictive power of screening using aptitude tests, he doubled down. That's been his way from the beginning. Critizing Snaps on Ubuntu as part of a broader argument on why Linux sucks is also not productive because the one person in charge of that decision does not want to make that decision.
been using linux as a daily driver for years now. like since 2009.
gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.
currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.
the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.
Yeah, i'm not a fan of Ubuntu either. But if Linux isn't for you, that's great. I don't think any of us should work to convince you otherwise. We're fine. You're fine. No problem.
And I agree, you cant really have a back and forth about it, trying to score points. The requirements are too myriad these days.
Hence my Chromebook comment - because for someone that just needs a device that gives them access to a web browser environment and some apps, it's a good choice.
I was aware Chromebooks are Linux, which is good :-)
I do like Linux - and do use it as my desktop dev environment from time to time. When I feel like a change from macOS.
Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS. There really isn't a company or organization that focuses on that, besides maybe Valve. We need more attention on it, for our own sanity, but most of the money is in enterprise servers.
There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me.
Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.
> Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS.
/me shakes head in disbelief. How can one persons experience be so different to mine? Everything is faster / small under Linux - the file system, the graphics, the size of a base OS install with GUI and brower is literally 1/10th of Windows. Windows taking seconds to respond to a click on the start button (I presume so it can fetch the ads) was the final straw for me.
As for stability, I watched co-workers come in in the morning and find their dev environment was broken due an overnight Microsoft update, and just accept the 30 delay while they fixed it as routine, unavoidable, "it's just how things are". But for one, an update that broke things so badly he needed an OS reinstall to drive him to having a "fuck it, I'm going to Debian" moment. That is rare though.
Meanwhile, I've never experienced unwanted downtime from any Debian security patch. OS upgrades are a different matter, but they only happen once in two years, and you have at least another 2 years to get around to it. Or you can do it once every 4 years. Which isn't surprising. Debian is used by a lot of servers around the globe. Stable is the name of the game, uptimes in years aren't uncommon.
The answer is stuff like ChromeBooks and Steam Decks.
The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.
People won't change, because people don't use their PC for the OS. This is why it's important to have systems that bundle Linux, for example, with the UX worked out as much as possible, like how it is on the Steam Deck.
I don't think this is the point, and many other technologists, including past myself, doesn't seem to get it.
Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary.
What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries.
Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old printer configuration dialog.
Really, even setting up a firewall or hardening your Linux PC is much simpler than Windows.
When you say “Linux is much easier” we can’t pick this weird anecdote of troubleshooting a printer.
Is the average printer setup in Linux much easier?
What about getting wifi going out of the box? Or Bluetooth? Or even finding out if something is not right?
I don’t want to sound like a Window defender (heh) but let’s be honest here. If I open device manager and I see a little triangle I know something is wrong. In Linux… ???? Where do you even go?
I get that this is hacker news but Linux unless very polished will forever be a power user platform.
Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.
It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now.
> Or Bluetooth?
Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both.
> In Linux… ???? Where do you even go?
If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually.
Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.
Unless the vendor ships the laptop with 'nix I guess there is a chance it won't work out of the box. But given it is is running on Apple's M series now, the odds of it not working after a while are very, very low.
As for me, I've only used laptops since 2000 or so (a variety of Dell's and Lenovo's), I've only run Debian on them, and at worst I've had to do is use a kernel from Debian testing.
I think it's safe to say the current version of Linux runs on more laptop and desktop hardware than the current version of Windows now. Windows may run on some bleeding edge hardware Linux doesn't because the laptop manufacturer "made it happen" with specialised drivers, but as a rule manufacturers don't give a rats about older hardware they shipped and Windows has been deliberately breaking compatibility with old hardware, so there is no comparison. Linux runs on everything older, Windows only the latest.
Every instance of a person throwing up their hands in disgust and moving to Windows has been because of that. They had some solid "well worn sock" of a laptop they adored as their daily driver, a Windows update broke it once too many times and they rage quit their Microsoft addiction.
Internal promotion-point systems similar to google decouple large companies from customer demands and reactions. One huge hamster-wheel producing unwanted features and deprecating the one thing that kept windows valuable, the customers are already trained in to the operating system when they enter the workforce.
> All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me.
But have they lost by doing that? They have not lost desktop users to any great extent, especially in the business market Windows is still dominant. They have lost some home desktop share to MacOS and ChomeOS, but they have gained a lot more access to user data.
For full Disclosure, I once upon was a software engineer at Microsoft. I witnessed first hand the evil decisions around Windows. I left Microsoft in 2006 but I am still part of the Alumni Network.
IMO Microsoft can gain users back by:
* Not requiring a Microsoft Account
* Ending all data/telemetry collection
* Not forcing Edge on its users
* Stop releasing improved UI updates every week
* Make bash, zsh, ... native for Windows
* Taking the AI out and making it an optional extension
* Making the Microsoft Store optional
It's wild how annoying Windows UX can be when it's something that microsoft wants you to use, to help improve their services revenue.
TBH, I'm on board with some of the negatives you listed, but I feel like the entire enthusiast community has been screaming about edge, telemetry, and start menu search for years. Microsoft seems determined not to listen, it's astonishing.
They may not consciously confirm it, but I suspect someone figured out "learned helplessness is good for business."
New users can be steered through every dark-pattern install process, and upsold into every service since they don't have existing preferences.
They can't directly revert power users to that state, but by keeping the UI in a state of constant flux, they might get some accidental traction from them.
Why should they listen? Will doing these things improve their profitability? I don't think so. Having this annoying stuff (telemetry, forcing Edge, etc.) is good for Microsoft's profitability, and that's all that's important. If users don't like it, they can pound sand. It's not like they're going to switch to Linux; if they were really going to do that, they would have done it already in the last 20 years. Microsoft has gotten smart, and realized that all those people swearing "if they do this, I'm finally switching to Linux!" weren't really serious, because they've been saying exactly that for a couple of decades now, and still haven't, so almost nothing they do at this point will actually get them to leave Windows as long as it actually lets them do their work, however poorly and annoyingly.
Those defections don't matter. The only thing that matters is MS's profits and stock price, and those are doing great. They can stand to lose a few malcontents and increase profits by squeezing the rest of the users.
IMO PowerShell is horrible. It is it an object, or not an object. You don't know, unless you know. How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). They went supreme extreme on namespaces. I could write a paper on how bad PowerShell is.
Huh... Everything is a object. But that object might be a string. And you don't have to know, you can ask.
I get that when everything is text, it becomes simpler to reason about. But you also have to do a lot of maneuvering to get information out of it. PS tries to give you more power.
My main gripe with ps is command discoverability: I don't know who thought that the "verb-subject" would be a good idea, because if I type "get-" and tab to auto complete, how the hell will I find the command about networking I want?
The learning curve also sucks, but I don't think it's worse than bash. I do remember spending six months with a bash manual tab open in my desktop back when I was starting Linux development.
There are also other crazy advantages ps have over bash, like the native ability to understand cmdlets and their parameters, powerful scripting capabilities with decent support for loops, conditionals etc.
And I don't event know what to tell you about the operators... They were copied from POSIX, so complaing about then is complaing about bash & co.
Finally, PowerShell also let's you access all of the dotnet namespace. This allows you to do a lot of stuff, because you would literally be programing instead of scripting.
Shells on Linux/Unix everything can be accessed as a file. Everything. In PowerShell it is a object, or maybe a file, or maybe a handle, or a resource, or a string. A complete catastrophe is Az PowerShell. Why isn't everything a object?
The answer is the origins of how Windows handles everything. It diverged every time a new hire took over a subsystem. "Not invented by me" ran strong in those days.
clear
function Get-Strings1 {
@('hello')
}
function Get-Strings2 {
@('hello', 'world!')
}
(Get-Strings1).Length
(Get-Strings2).Length
OUTPUT:
5
2
You see, PS will strip away the array for 1-element arrays. (Get-Strings1).Length is 5 because you're really calling Length on the string and not the array (the array doesn't exist at that point). As you can see with (Get-Strings2).Length, if there is more than 1 element it will not do this.
and you'll watch different features crash into each other in bizarre ways. For example, everything is an object but if that's the case how do you output log statements to the console since it's also a shell?
PS is hosted, the default PS host will print out whatever reaches the "top". Think of your PS code as the "first function" with it's own set of returns. The host will print out whatever your code "returns", but this is consistent all the way down the chain.
clear
function Get-Strings3 {
(Do-Stuff)
return 'hello'
}
function Do-Stuff {
Write-Output 'haha'
}
(Get-Strings3).Length
OUTPUT:
2
So your returns can be polluted by downstream function calls, including calls into packages that you don't easily have access to the source for. So you'll eventually start writing defensively.
(Do-Stuff) | Out-Null # throws away anything coming out of the function call
And consider what we've demonstrated here. That PS will happily remove arrays based upon runtime state and happily add them based upon runtime state.
If you're confused about why this still happens even though this version uses the return keyword, remember it's PS which means any silly, preconceived notions you have are out the window.
returns does two things.
1. Write-Output
2. Ends execution of the function
If you remove the return keyword it will have the exact behavior it did previously because it's the last statement in the function. And yes, that's how easy it is to accidentally write something to the output and thus turn your return value into an array.
How is the equality operator (-eq) returning an array?
You see, PS has been lying to you all this time, arrays in PS aren't arrays. They're wrapper objects that pretend to be an array to give all sorts of cool magic. One of those magic things being it's propensity to forward function calls on the array wrapper to the elements themselves.
What it's actually doing is calling -eq on each element (think LINQ select) and returning a new array.
Which is useful, you can imagine having a list of COM objects with a name property, you can do a select on the name by just doing ".name" on the array wrapper itself. It has its uses.
BUT
you can't do that for any properties that are on the array (such as Length). Also, PS allows you to attach functions to objects at runtime, if you were truly evil you could attach a myriad of functions to an array object you handed back and laugh as the poor suckers using your code can't understand why calling .Name doesn't forward like it should.
----
I could go on and on and on about PS. I once built a VPS automation solution in PS. My (naive) thinking at the time was that the remoting capabilities for windows was useful so I may as well build it out in powershell. I maintained that solution for 5 years, 4.5 years in and I was _still_ getting surprised by interactions w/i PS.
Here's an exercise for the reader.
write a function that will successfully test an input parameter against null for everything. There's a solution.
Ironically, power shell is the most consistent cross-platform scripting environment today. No more wrangling osx bsd grep commandline flags not working with linux gnu grep, and vice versa. Powershell just works cross platform. And this from a guy whose daily driver is an M3 MacBook.
I will explain my point of view, please comment on if you think my view is fair, or if I'm wrong.
My issue with powershell is that it isn't really a shell language, or rather, not a tty language. I do think it's way better than bash, but I do not want to use it like bash, I want to use it like AWK, but for my system. I want it to use it only in scripts, or with an exec in a command line at worst. I think bash have better built-in for ttys, and is faster/more reactive (that might be my windows config but I don't think so).
I want to navigate with bash, and script with powershell (which I do to be completely honest, but I'd like to do that in a windows terminal and not wsl).
The main issue with powershell is its name. It would have been better named powerscript. It’s not really a shell but a much more powerful script language along the lines of Perl or PHP.
Microsoft needs to realize that the UI revamps made since Windows 8 have been a degradation for usability, and return to the old values of the WIMP interface, interface consistency, and keyboard-ability, and get their UI framework story back on track for good.
What I don't get is... doesn't MS get more than enough data/telemetry from its cloud services and now AI usage? Do they REALLY have to shove it into the core desktop OS?
As much as I loathe my days being siphoned from me all day long while being forced to use Office, I'd at least forgive them if my daily driver OS wasn't a giant ad-infested spyware app.
Tbh telemetry is really useful for identifying bugs, feature requirements, and security issues. It's anonymized, not really that invasive, and the way they gather it is pretty responsible.
However...
It's my operating system. Can they not understand why people would be sensitive about this? It blows my mind that, at least, there isn't an on/off toggle in the Pro version. It's really disrespectful to those of us who care.
I think part of the problem is that it seems like an internal (corporate) push (shift?) to view it as only a "licensed" product that you're using, rather than as something you "own" on your machine.
We saw a bit of this with licensing and product validation. Now, we're seeing it with changes driven by internal (e.g.: corporate command chain) drives. They "need" this data but there's no open transparency about why they need it, where it's housed, who has access, what positive changes this data has driven (if at all), etc.
Back during the Watson or WER (Windows Error Reporting) days, that was the only "telemetry" that the company needed and they got by on quite a few versions of the OS without needing more.
I don't have an answer - but I do know that if my work didn't require Windows, I'd be happy to never see another Windows desktop again.
I was at Microsoft, leaving around the same time, but I was in the Game Studios.
How about making the installation about 90% less and dropping DCOM support. That is a dinosaur that has long out lived its usefulness. It is a constant source of security problems. DirectX needs a massive overhaul.
Most of the Linux ecosystem is not really interested in selling Linux, they are interested in solving their problems using Linux and then sharing. This leaves space open for groups like Valve or Google to create a nice UI on top of Linux and sell that. How can they compete with free? It turns out free is not actually interested in competing with them…
I still give it, like, less than 50% chance of occurring, but it wouldn’t be totally mind blowing to see MS selling a Linux distro, IMO. Why not, right?
>they are interested in solving their problems using Linux and then sharing. This leaves space open for groups like Valve or Google to create a nice UI on top of Linux and sell that.
In theory. In practice, this doesn't happen.
Overall, I'd say desktop UIs are actually Linux's greatest failing. It's dominated by two different groups (Gnome vs. KDE) with extremely different design philosophies, and both having major (but different) problems. The whole Wayland vs X thing is also part of the problem. Everything else in Linux generally works really well, which is part of why it's so successful on servers and embedded systems.
Almost all the software engineers I've worked with, using Linux desktop systems professionally, use Gnome or KDE (with far more using Gnome actually). I've never even heard of "sway" and I think I've met one person who uses i3, and maybe a few who use xfce.
Microsoft needs to fix their UX development platform urgently. WinUI 3 sucks compared to Apples SwiftUI. They don't appear to be investing anything much into it. Apple's efforts into improving their UX and development platform are orders of magnitude higher than Microsoft's.
Apple now owns the majority of the mobile+tablet+developer laptop market. Getting rid of Windows Phone was a VERY bad decision made by Nadella. A short-term gain in profitability for a long-term loss in marketshare. He completely ceded the OS/device competition and effectively made Apple the dominant cross-form-factor OS company.
As an enterprise support engineer for the windows devices where I work a few notes:
* I agree with your list
* the store could have been awesome for users and enterprise but it blew it on both fronts. Linux has this nailed down. a note that I haven't seen a paid software store beyond steam I actually think doesn't suck or is full of garbage "is this malware" software
* yes, please stop forcing ux changes clearly driven by marketing, especially in edge and office
I would gladly pay $10/m as a home user for a version of Windows that provides those options. I can live without alternate shells and I can accept closed source software for those prices.
Give me the same base setup as Windows 7 but with the Windows 11 security bells and whistles.
From my point of view, WinDev decreasing their religious stance on COM and related crap tooling for using it (VB 6, .NET Framework, C++/CX, .NET Native were the only usable ones for it), would already be a great improvement.
* You can turn off the vast majority of the telemetry, and what little remains can be easily stopped via pihole
* Edge is advertised when you first install Windows, but nothing forces you to use it. I use Firefox with Windows 11 and no mention of Edge appears anywhere now.
* Updates aren't weekly, except maybe security updates. And most updates these days happen unobtrusively in the background.
* They've made great progress with the new Terminal and Powershell apps. They're very good and have more-or-less all the functionality you'd be used to. If you really want more, WSL exists.
* You can turn off anything AI-related. Again, I don't see anything like that on mine.
* You never need to interact with the store, and you can remove it via command if you're really insistent on it.
Yes, but why are these opt-out instead of OPT-IN? [answer: $$$, "ease of use"]
Why must you use command lines to disable features which should have been opt-in, in the first place?
Why must one use a 3rd party device (e.g. PiHoles, which ARE awesome) to disable stuff — particularly when you can't even turn all telemetry off in the first place?
Because Window is, at its core, meant for average, everyday users. Not developers. Not power users.
And for the average user, all they care about is having a web browser and access to get the applications they need.
I really don't see the harm in the MS store being present. It offers them a user-friendly way to tell people to "just go here and install X" without having to walk them through anything more complicated.
Perhaps, upon initial installation, operating systems should have an option of selecting which operating environment they prefer (e.g. do you want to have all your personal information sent to vendor for customized adds; do you want to have normal OS, or advanced; do you want to use generative AI)?
Personally, my only Windows machine runs Windows 7 Professional 64-bit [turns on once a month]. All my computers sit behind several PiHoles.
That's something I've noticed over the years. More and more of Windows debugging and configuration is happening on the (various) command line terminals. You're even starting to see it with official Microsoft installers.
It has tiers these days. You might need the new settings thingy (is it still called a “charm”? I hope not) or the control panel or MSC (which you might need to start from Win+R or the command line) or actually the command line. There seems to be no a priori way to figure out where a seething is.
It's where developers are learning. Most of my learning was done on a (Linux) command line. Making things usable on the command line makes sense to people like me.
The most bizarre thing in my experience is that they removed "Refresh" from that context menu, yet Explorer will a) not update when an application writes a new file, and b) when you rename a file, it does not get automatically sorted.
Reminds me, recently removed a folder and explorer showed it still being there and you could click on it and see the files.
I'm suspicious that they're trying to move to 'one drive' for the whole file system and so need to cache everything for reasons. Performance and also the files on your drive might actually be only in the cloud. IE your hard drive is for local caching not for storing data long term. Means perhaps if you save a file to disk. And then later pull the drive and put it on another machine those files won't actually be there.
I installed Windows 11 three days ago because I need to make Windows builds for software, this was my first serious attempt at using Windows since 2017. I thought I unchecked everything I possibly could regarding telemetry / cloud services, but I either missed something or they, without permission, uploaded all data in my users folder to their server. It was at almost 2 gigabytes of stuff on their cloud before I realized what was happening. Completely unacceptable to me, and a reminder for why I left Windows in the first place.
Imagine when your HD is just local cache for their cloud services. Oh yes you have a terabyte drive but you can't actually use more than 50 GB of it for storage without paying them.
Windows really is a confusing mess right now. Especially the two different settings areas.
All sorts of ridiculous stuff like Microsoft realizing people won't be able to find the options to turn system icons on and off on the Desktop anymore, so they add a tiny clickable link to a Bing search for how to find it
If you go back to Windows 95 right now and use the interface it feels amazing in comparison. It feels like everything is designed to be both easy and productive. There's even a little Task Scheduler icon in the taskbar just in case maybe you want to set up something to run sometime. Because why not let normal users discover power user features? The Task Scheduler interface is much clearer and less intimidating than the current one.
Can you imagine getting your first ever PC now and trying to learn Windows 11? Especially without using the Internet to find where everything is?
That's not even mentioning the other issues (advertising/privacy/bloat/Microsoft account to log in...).
-
A while ago I decided to see if there's still local help in Windows and wrote down my experience.
I typed 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.
It opened with an ad banner at the top: "Increase productivity and collaboration all while staying organized, using a new meeting solution designed for small businesses. Learn More". Out of morbid curiosity I chose to Learn More but "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found."
There were several features in Get Help beyond the primary feature of linking to a broken URL. You can sign in, you can rate your experience out of five, or you can send feedback. There is no Contents or Index, but there is a search box with a few suggested searches like 'How to install Office'. I tried searching 'how to copy paste' (without quotes) but "Your search did not match any solutions." It suggested I sign in to contact support. Closing the app was a little tricky because the minimise/maximise/close buttons are the wrong colour - white on pale grey. I rated my experience a 1/5, although it's 5/5 as a satire.
You’d think a multi-trillion dollar company would have the resources to properly re-do the control panel, but I guess not? However, even Apple can’t get this right (see the unnecessary iOS-ification of System Preferences which to this day is a disorienting mess).
I've posted about why I left Windows, and wont be back, the only device with Windows is my Surface Book 2, and even that I can install Linux on...
I have mentioned it a few times on HN in the past few weeks, but I already hated the telemetry spying, heck, it was creepy that me looking up files on my one computer was on their servers somewhere, so I wiped all that many years ago. Then I realized, their Antivirus tech will send files to "analyze" with zero audit trail as to which files, or anything of the sort. I immediately pulled down POP OS and wiped my drive. You shouldn't be sending my data around willy nilly without an audit trail. What if I'm working on something classified? What if its highly proprietary? This is so unethical on many levels.
The article also mentions some issues I've run into, where their UI is just not working correctly, which led to me uninstalling Windows one time prior as well, I had Windows Home Edition after spending thousands of dollars on a prebuilt machine, I tried to add a new user, it told me to use a different program, so I went to the different program, which then told me to go back to the program that told me to use that specific program. Why not just let me add users instead of horsing me around? I uninstalled Windows on that box, until I wanted to play Starfield, I got enough hours in until I saw that their AV software violates any sense of privacy on a whim with zero audit trail.
Microsoft. You had a really good OS, and you keep making it worse. Please stop making it worse. I'll gladly take on the task at half of whatever you pay the person currently ruining the OS, which is clearly way too much. You peaked at Windows 7 and its been downhill since. I am someone who weirdly enough did not mind Vista or 8, but I will admit that 7 was the peak best version.
Microsoft has been driving users away for no less than 10 years now and nothing much is changing IMO because Windows is what most people think of as "the computer". Non-technical users think they have no other choice, they shrug the defects off and try to get their job done.
Though the article kind of piqued my interest by claiming that Microsoft "is in panic" -- any proof that they are indeed bleeding users more than what is deemed normal?
I have noticed people around me get recommended Linux Mint and being happy with it but I'd think that's a minority; many offices rely on bespoke local network setups with printers and scanners and people putting files in shared directories and what-not... modernizing that and making it better is no easy feat.
EDIT: Oh, and as other users are saying, Linux desktop is absolutely not going to eat Windows' lunch. There are still too many confusing things there, and "you can hack it and make it your own" appeal to an infinitesimally small audience.
> any proof that they are indeed bleeding users more than what is deemed normal?
They are, but not to other OSes. More and more people associate computers with something you use for work (and work provides) or for school (and school provides). All personal computing happens on a phone.
My partner, for example, uses her personal laptop about once a year to do taxes. Otherwise it sits in the closet.
Even I use an iPad for most personal work these days. Laptop is mostly for personal coding projects for which I have less and less time as life adultifies.
I know a lot of people who don’t even have a personal computer anymore and just use the work laptop the few times their phone isn’t good enough.
This makes me sad, and is scary, etc. However, putting emotions aside, can we extrapolate from this? Could the next "killer app" actually be an even tinier device? A smartwatch? Or have we reached a local extremum (phones)? And what does that say about attempts to regress towards larger screens (AR/VR headsets)?
Phones dominate not because of screen size but because the operating systems they run are fundamentally more user friendly. iOS/Android were the first time experienced OS engineers were able to go back to the drawing board and rethink the whole stack from scratch. They learned a lot of lessons from what worked and what didn't on generalized desktop computers and were able to build something people prefer using.
That's a rare opportunity. I hope someone gets a chance to do it for professional workstation computing one day. The Windows codebase has IMHO reached end-of-life. The Linux community isn't going to stray far outside the bounds of the 1970s era UNIX design. Apple does OK but they can't/won't change the macOS UI in any meaningful way and not enough people write native Mac apps to justify trying to do anything interesting there. ChromeOS is basically just a large screen smartphone OS experience with some Linux virtualization on the side. We're caught in a local minima.
It's mostly screen size... Life happens, and of the two, the phone is the one with you. Wherever I go, i carry my phone, but not my laptop. I take pictures with it, so they're stored there. I take screenshots, and share stuff with friends, gets saved on my phone. I browse on the phone on the bus/subway wherever. Browser history gets saved there, opened tabs, etc.
Bringing photos, saved stuff to computer all takes an extra step. For most of the time I need a digital device, the phone is good enough, and most importantly - it's with me. Not just when i get home.
When high productivity is needed, then yes, laptop is king. But if somehow we could have the same productivity on a device, 10x smaller that I can carry with me, why wouldn't I start doing everything on that device? That's why smartphone is king.
Can you share any anecdotes, or some more details? I've been watching this "app generation", and I've read Prensky's nonsense about "digital natives", so I'm always interested in concrete examples of how it's playing out. Thanks!
For example, students now regularly turn up at universities unable to use files or folders. They have to be given basic IT lessons before they can start to work with data.
It's not just them. Even software engineers under 35 don't use desktop computers any more, except at work. At home, for personal use, they just use phones, unless they're into the latest video games.
There's nothing disturbing about not being interested in the latest ultra-violent and ultra-realistic FPS. Similarly, there's nothing disturbing about not being interested in the latest Hollywood movies, which are all Marvel comic-book movies and uninspired Star Wars franchise installments.
Personally, I love playing some classic video games, such as through MAME, once in a while, but new games are nothing like this.
The appeal of the Linux desktop for the majority of people is that it runs chrome or Firefox just fine and is pretty much secure if you do your updates. That's how the majority of people use their computers. The underlaying OS is irrelevant as long as its not actively nagging it's users.
You don't have to use open source drivers. I only use them with intel CPU graphics where they work great IMO. AMD and Nvidia ship drivers, most distros somehow pack them. No issue there.
We don't have to go into details but I really wonder what kind of bad experience you had. I use Linux for ~20 years now and literally wasted weeks getting graphics to work the way I want. I know all about these pains.
However this was a long time ago. OS drivers were shit, official drivers horrible to install and maintain. Today all end customer facing Linux flavours feature a button do directly enable proprietary drivers on installs and just have them updated and maintained in your update routine.
There is literally zero friction other than a checkbox in the installer for a majority of setups.
Now try that on a random laptop with dedicated GPU.
It isn't as if I never used any other distribution since 1995, in fact I probably have used more in numeric value than the average age of HNers, just to use a random metric.
Hence why my Linux based media devices nowadays are Android and WebOS powered instead, I leave GNU/Linux for servers.
I really agree with this article- I used Windows as my primary OS (not counting work machines) until about 2 years ago, the mess of non coherent design and CONSTANTLY resetting my user preferences every update (like shoving new buttons [see: ads] onto my taskbar) ultimately lead me to buying the first m1 mbp as my new personal machine.
Never looked back. I only boot up windows for occasional games now, and even then, old games started to stop working. Linux at this point has better backwards compatibility using Proton/Wine/etc.
> like shoving new buttons [see: ads] onto my taskbar
searching for apps in the Windows menu used to take less than a second. Now it takes 5-10 seconds to fetch crap from the internet (ads and bing results), and mix it with local results.
I even went and disabled web search in the registry and it still takes forever.
It's also terrible. "Fr" will find FreeCAD, the program I want. "Fre" pulls up "advanced system settings" because there's some subsection about free disk space. "Free" brings back FreeCAD.
Every single thing I do that involves any level of interaction with Windows has found some way of pissing me off.
And don't forget the never ending Sisyphean hell of trying to quickly jump to settings. Windows 7 NAILED this and 10 was mostly fine at it, but 11 has completely fucked the dog with this in particular, especially since all your PC's settings are now situated across three different locations, any of which can seemingly change things at the same time.
Yep, locally installed programs sometimes don't even show up anymore when I press WinKey + <string> because whatever ad server they're running on the backend doesn't respond and it hangs the search.
Meanwhile, Linux keeps getting better and better. I used to run Ubuntu 15 years ago, then went back to Windows for a while for software and because Windows 7 was okish. Now I'm back, and while Ubuntu may not be as good as it was 15 years ago, debian and other distributions are great, and getting awesome new releases left and right. Smartphone connectibility with KDE connect has blown me away. It's and interesting trajectory right now.
I really don't care about design to be honest but the fact that update after updte they keep changing where you find things and how they work pisses me off so much.
The good thing is that powertoys and WSL2 at the end of the day compensate for me enough.
But get into setting up some bluetooth device and you want to cry if it doesn't work at first shot. You want to find help online? Pretty much all guides speak about the same OS like Windows 10, and yet they are already outdated with everything having been moved away.
The thing is users have no choice, it makes a complete mockery of computer programming as a profession. The people that were quality oriented lost the people selling licenses won.
> CONSTANTLY resetting my user preferences every update (like shoving new buttons [see: ads] onto my taskbar) ultimately lead me to buying the first m1 mbp as my new personal machine.
Boy are you going to be disappointed when you discover that settings reset quite aggressively, especially in cases where Apple really thinks it knows better.
Want to keep bluetooth off? Both iPhone and macs will not abide.
Want to keep your passwords in local keychain? Nah, they will be automatically migrated to cloud keychain on next upgrade.
A warning for anyone who is using local keychain: Don't. Either give in to iCloud keychain or use a different secrets manager.
If you're using a Mac with a T1 or T2 security coprocessor or Apple Silicon, your local keychain can only be decrypted with a key stored in those chips. Your backups are useless. I figured this out the hard way when an Apple depot repair for a failed display flex somehow ended up with my logic board getting replaced as well. After reimaging from backup (SSD was integrated on the logic board), the keychain was unreadable and I lost several accounts without recovery options. AppleCare's response was, well, you should have backed up your files, even though I had...
A fair warning, but I similarly lost a secret after transferring to a new iPhone, even while using 3rd party password manager. Said manager likely used secure enclave and thus failed to work on new phone. Failure was very quiet, not even an error or anything, it just stopped generating codes.
I was able to restore it through external means, but this reinforced “have a non-proprietary backups” for me.
Oh no company is perfect that’s for sure. I don’t use anything deep integrated stuff like the iCloud Keychain, I mainly use my own password manager of choice etc.
The iOS Bluetooth/wifi never bothered me personally because I use those all the time anyway. Of course everyone’s use case is gonna differ, but for me macOS is far from doing things like pushing huge full page “finish setting up edge” or “buy office” when I log in so, I’m happy.
iOS has a “feature” where wifi and Bluetooth will switch itself back on after a set period of time if you use control center to turn it off. If you use settings it behaves as you would expect.
I’m aware of that feature, but using proper option in settings will not retain off position after next OS update, which is what OP was discussing. This happens every update, so I’m quite sure it’s by design.
I for one have stopped supporting Windows for friends and family. The last version I used myself was XP, but I could still muddle around to help people with later versions for a long time. Now I can't.
At least the move to using web browsers for everything really eases migration to easier platforms.
I’m not new to macOS by any means, used it for work for far more than 2 years - so I do know this pain, but I’m not a huge system extension user so I’m probably an outlier
I guess because the majority of Linux folks don't really care about making it a solid user experience for normies, and those that do so might have strong opinions on things that might not roll with everyone, especially coming from Windows (read: gnome).
I've maintained an in-house distro for a couple years so I know the ins and outs of systemd, dbus, polkit, xorg and whatever crap is needed to run a desktop session, and how to track down what's broken if the system misbehaves in some way. So switching every machine I use to Linux wasn't really an extra burden. Ironically it made me switch to i3 as my WM and ditching a file manager, gvfs and other moving parts. I'm doing a lot of things in the terminal. I loathe complicated setups - less moving parts, less things that can break. But I'm fully aware that I'm a complete oddball here, and I don't think nor care whether the day of the Linux desktop will ever come. Unless maybe we're at a point where really absolutely everything runs in the cloud and people only need a browser. But at that point just get a Chromebook?
The Free Software and Open Source ecosystems are, at their best, about communities putting together projects to serve their own needs and then generously sharing those solutions out.
I think an easily discoverable UI for non-technical people is not a problem that many technical communities have. Anyone who does try to start that project is signing themselves up for a lot of complaints from outside the project, almost by definition. I don’t really see why anyone would do it.
The Chromebook is probably the right way to go. I’d recommend them to my non-technical friends if they weren’t designed by an ad company. As it is, I have no idea, there legitimately doesn’t seem to be a good desktop OS for non-technical users anymore.
I think the end result is less people using the desktop overall (ie, just relying on tablets and phones), which in my opinion is a catastrophe since phones and tablets are generally consumption devices rather than creative devices (sorry, I'm not counting selfies or tiktoks), and we're slowly dumbing down the next generation.
I've converted a handful of some of the least computer tech heavy people to Linux. This was years ago.
The final few nails of Microsoft's coffin are being nailed as we speak. Not only because they are just fundamentally bad at innovation, but because they also sold out the United States to China. Billy boy is scared, and he should be.
Is converting the least tech literate an issue? I assume some of the easier distros are pretty much plug and play now, and if your only goal is to browse Facebook and print off recipes from an already set up printer pretty much anything can do that easily. But these people would probably be happy with an iPad if their iPhone wasn't cutting it.
I think the big middle of the population that's the problem, people who are tech literate enough to do some things, but not willing to relearn the wheel. They can use microsoft office, but don't want to have to relearn a new file structure. Those are the people who probably will have the biggest issue, and there's a lot of them. That's office workers, computer gamers, all those people. Even the pretty tech literate people who know how to do things in Windows but don't care to relearn it all in Linux.
I managed to convince my mother-in-law to use Linux and drop Windows.
But it seems that convincing the network guys at work is harder than convincing a retiree. Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
> Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
Not really. I suspect that there's a fallacy similar to the one in <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/an-obvious-requirement> going on. (The most relevant comment: 'Ah, so the user is using "obvious" to mean "familiar."').
While I do agree that nowadays users with a basic computer usage would be much better served by a modern Linux distribution compared to Windows, it won't happen due to the power of defaults. Windows is preinstalled and that will be enough, no matter how badly it degrades.
Yes agree. I started using Linux (Gentoo) as student 20 years ago to learn LKMs programming, and with my main Desktop being Windows currently, I give a new try to linux distros every year. I see Linux distros improve year after year, but they are still light years away from providing a good user experience. And even if I don't agree with many Windows 11 updates (like the cumulating number of services required to run user interfaces, the taskbar which can't be moved anymore, the bloatware by default and so on...), Windows still provides a better & smoother user experience overall. Even Desktop multitasking experience feels better engineered in Windows, probably because of a better Desktop processes timing.
It's interesting hearing such diametrically opposed experiences. I've been using Linux as my main desktop for over 20 years.
I find Windows to be an unholy confusing mess these days. Want to set the microphone sound level; go to sound settings - nope, not there. Probably in some other legacy control panel I guess.
By contrast, most things I need to configure in Linux are in a single place. File copying is much faster than Windows. Updates don't prevent me from working and require multiple reboots. It crashes less often.
Anyway, a lot is probably just what you're used to. I'm sure I excuse many Linux failings because it doesn't bother me and I know how to work around it.
I understand your perspective and appreciate the flexibility of Linux, however achieving my desired setup on Linux does involve more effort and is sometimes impossible, as I explain in my post below.
How has had the entirety of the open source developer community not managed to make even a mediocre step forward in UI/UX of even the biggest Linux distro?l in 20 years? Hell, even Blender has made big strides and I thought that'd be impossible.
Blender is unique in having a big set of users who are actually good at aesthetics professionally. A subset of that group wanted to contribute, and the technically minded were actually willing to let them.
Most other open source projects have people behind them who don't put UX first, and who are suspicious, jealous, or plain disagree when people want to help with UX.
This shouldn't be too surprising in a world led by people who value technical excellence most.
The bottleneck regarding UI/UX was (and is still) X11 / Xorg, with the obsolete client/server architecture inherited from a time when computers had no graphic card. Wayland has been in progress for some time now to replace X11 / Xorg, but it is still bugged to some extend, and driver support needs to be improved.
> they are still light years away from providing a good user experience
I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).
Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?
Well, as you say, desktop environments look the same. But they don't feel the same. When we talk about UI/UX we talk about look and feel. I've installed Ubuntu & MX Linux to reply to your question, here are random issues I get with the default setup: why do I get no sound when I play a youtube video (it works on one distro, broken on the other one) ? why do I have no option to change the refresh rate of my monitor to more than 60Hz ? Therefore where is the 120hz smooth scrolling ? Why is my keyboard layout set to english by default while I am located in Europe ? How am I supposed to configure my WIFI password if my keyboard layout is incorrect by default ? Why does my CPU fan runs at full speed while I am just writing this text currently with no other user task in background ? If I use a laptop with a second keyboard (bluetooth), why aren't my keystrokes taken into account when the system asks me to confirm the reboot by pressing "enter" (I need to reach the laptop keyboard since the bluetooth one is not taken into account) ? Why does my browser need to reload its cache & configuration from my drive each time I boot my computer; why isn't it loaded in RAM by default ? Why do I still have the first mouse wheel scrolling event ignored in the Chrome/Chromium web browsers in most distros I try, while this bug has been driving users nuts for years while the solution is already known ? I use a dual monitor setup, why does the system displays some glitches at first boot ? Why doesn't it doesn't remember my primary screen when I log off the session, and shows the login prompt on the other screen ? Why does the system hangs when I run a game like counter strike 2 and I try to switch back to the desktop ? Why does the system get super slow while it tries to recompile shaders, making it impossible to open a web browser ? and I'm not even mentioning the issues installing/uninstalling proprietary video drivers which is still a huge mess. For my usage, the Linux Desktop feel experience is still pure hell currently... although I really wish it were good.
Fully agree, around 2010 I made my peace with it never happening, and switched fully into Windows, using GNU/Linux either from a VM (VMWare/Virtual Box), or some server.
Also managed to get hold of one of the last Asus netbooks (1215 B), that after all these years has finally given the ghost.
Netbooks are now replaced by Chromebooks/Android systems that care about a full stack developer experience where the underlying Linux is a kind of implementation detail, Windows ships WSL (no need for VMWare/Virtual Box), and those that want UNIX proper have macOS.
Yeah, Microsoft's got a huge majority of users captive and now they can do as they please, "Oh you don't like this obnoxious new 'feature'? Well what are you going to do about it?", like an abusive partner.
If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like they respect users...
> If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness...
Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years?
Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing applications to be see usage, it seems hard for any new company to break into the market with something genuinely new.
It seems like the way things are now are how they'll be for a long time. We'll just always use Linux, MacOS, or Windows, with superficial changes, I suppose. Or a BSD.
> Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system...
Nope, no one is willing to put up the money for a long term investment.
If I had the billions, I'd fund an easily installable OS that can accept Windows hardware drivers (easier said than done...). Or the cheaper way would probably to fund a slick Linux distro that an average user isn't scared away, but I guess they already are slick enough nowadays?
I installed a Manjaro KDE distro on a secondary PC a while ago, and on login it had the option of X11 or Wayland, but Wayland wouldn't work on my setup... Sigh, the average user doesn't care to learn about windowing system options, they just want to do their work.
I honestly think that Gnome is a big part of this. A lot of people very obviously and loudly like it, but since I've been giving developers the option to use KDE they've been a lot happier with it all.
Linux is my primary OS but sometimes I use Windows, and I really hate the UI changes. A typical example would be the printing dialog used by various apps. It used to work all right from the mouse. Now you can't tell which widget has focus, and can't tell how to activate a given UI element from the keyboard. Worse yet, you selected your print job parameters, press Enter, and nothing happens. You have to click the OK button with the mouse.
And don't get me started on the ribbon UI which was inflicted upon the world in Office 2007 onwards and then shoved upon everyone's throats in subsequent editions of Windows.
Why did they have to change such things? It worked as it was. There's no improvement and, on the contrary, a quite noticeable involution.
With the latest m2 macbook air's you actually get a significantly better laptop, for a lot less money, then a windows version I've found. Let alone the fact it just damn sexy.
I got a DELL laptop from a client to be able to access their windows applications. I used it for coding for a bit, it was so painfully slow, so I switched back to my macbook air m2.
I thought the Dell was just a cheap laptop, found out the retail price was a few 100 euros higher then my m2. I was dumbfounded a shitty laptop would go for those prices. (granted I have a 13 inch, 15 inch are around the same price)
The new macbook air's are really fairly priced and are sufficient for most professionals.
DELL's market is not cheap consumer machines, it's laptops and desktops that can run windows (macbooks could until 2 years ago...) and can be corporate ordered and customized at scale.
If you're price shopping Lenovo or Asus would probably be better choices with better designs (but TBH if you're in love with macs you're probably in the right spot for them, I don't see why you'd go choose different tradeoffs)
It's really the whole package. The new Qualcomm chip is probably not that far, but having a whole machine designed from top to bottom with a closed system helps taking advantage of every bit.
The closest to that would have been the Surface line, but with Panos out I wouldn't bet on it.
