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.
