This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.
Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.
Imagine they just made the browser actually better so that people would want to use it, rather than doubling down on the reasons people don't want to use it
Welcome to Fedora! I've missed literally nothing about Windows since switching to it about a decade ago now (around the time they announced Win7 EOL), and every time I had to use it for work (thankfully never these days), I grew more and more confident that I never will need to return and that Windows is only getting worse.
Thanks for the welcome! :) It is by far my favorite desktop OS now, after decades of advocating for a strong-armed Windows approach. Use this tool, this patch, this .reg file... no more.
I tried installing fedora on mac m1 vmware recently, and enabled 3d acceleration separately. Llm seemed to think 3d acceleration would work better on fusion.
Performance sucked bad, particularly on games. Tux games were unplayable. I am confused what the bubble is on hn or on my end. Before that, on utm I think i tried ubuntu. After decades, linux is still hard to try out.
There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.
Are you sure that you installed the virtualized GPU drivers in fedora? Did you check if fedora was still using llvmpipe (i.e CPU rendering). Did you try the x86 or ARM version of fedora?
> After decades, linux is still hard to try out.
It's not, you just need to get a proper computer to try it where the CPU/GPU company actually support linux.
Comparing system in a VM with a bare metal installation is a very unfair statement. Especially without the details of the VM configuration.
A few years ago I installed MacOS in a VM on linux host in virtualbox and it was slow as hell. I don't claim that MacOS is not ready to be used though.
I did not compare those.
To get a shot at getting a partition on my machine, it needs to show promise in vm first.
MacOS comes ready installed, like it or not.
Just stating what needs to be done to gain user trust. I am talking from user perspective: i am not judging linux or its makers.
If it doesn’t work for some purpose on something, set the expectations accordingly on e.g distro website before letting me down after I already invested my time in it. That is okay too.
It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
Lmfao. What are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exfiltrate your sharepoint data? That is not at all how that works.
Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.
Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.
That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
I kind of disagree that it is done easily in Windows, network drives are pretty cursed everywhere in my experience.
But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.
It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.
Yes, but I don't believe it can do so permanently. And by that I mean, solely through the UI, connect to a network drive and have it persist across reboots. You can do that in the Windows or Mac file explorers.
My initial comment muddied that complaint. You can do it transiently in the UI in Dophin.
Works for me, I have my nextcloud webdav saved there since I didn't want to deal with any client bloat. It's not only persisted across reboots, but persisted across platform upgrades (I run fedora KDE)
Many others have already replied and it is 6 days later, but I wanted to reply to say I am quite happy with the stock KDE Plasma 6 desktop. I use some themes, e.g. "Breeze AlphaBlack" gives a nice Win10-like pure black taskbar, lovely on OLED. But the rest is stock. It Just Works (tm).
OK, so I did this recently and it depends a lot on what software you're then running whether it works or not, and whether the keyboard will actually flip some Caps Lock switch somewhere regardless of being remapped.
ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.
CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.
Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.
It’s too snappy and responsive, real windows I gotta wait with the spinning blue ring thing for a few seconds after clicking ‘x’ on the notifications. That is when they’re generous enough to give an ‘x’ and not force the user through some onboarding flow with no easy way to opt out
You're doing something serious aaand suddenly out of nowhere the fan starts screaming cause some cryptically named process decides right now is the time to get stuck in some loop
n=1 here, I had a 2019 intel macbook for 6 years going through 5-6 major mac os versions and never had a process stuck the entire weekend, now I have a 2026 macbook and still no weird stuck process
I use iStat and I don’t think a week goes by without being alerted to some process keeping a CPU core busy for half an hour. It would be reasonable for something sensible such as photo tagging or disk indexing. But the many background processes can get stuck, just look online for the flood of complaints.
corespotlightd, for example, uses >80% CPU (of a core, I think) for long periods of time. I’m talking _days_. The multiple store and iCloud agents also seem to get stuck. If you inspect a process, you can sometimes see it’s been doing something intensive for days or even weeks.
I get notified at 10 minutes of intense usage, but then I just keep looking and it’s really, really typical for a process to spend a few hours doing something, nuking the battery life of my laptop. I’ve been on macOS since 2008 or so and it’s not getting any better when it comes to zombie processed.
It must be hard for Windows users to imagine that on Linux there are is no activation, no Microsoft account, no cloud backup, and no pop-up requesting that you install crapware when you plug in a peripheral.[0] You also own your disk encryption keys and are not assigned an identifier that can be used against you.[1]
Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.
As much as I love how fast and efficient it is to update every single package on my linux machines, I can count in double figures the number of times there's been a package conflict and I've had to google how to fix it.
For better or worse that doesn't happen in windows update
I've had a pretty good track record with Fedora Atomic / Silverblue. The thing I like best about it is that I can have updates safely staged in the background invisibily. And next time I reboot my computer, I boot into that new version. No waiting around or anything.
That's not to say it's perfect. There was a pretty bad bug maybe around 2 years ago where upgrades just stopped working and without any warnings. You had a notice the issue and run a special command to fix the issue. I've also had quite a few AMD/kernel regressions recently that resulted in artifacts in the desktop and AV1 video decode.
I wish there was like a Debian but atomic that has broad support like Fedora does. Though I did see that openSUSE leap 16.1 introduced an immutable option.
In the age of nix + LLMs, other distros through distrobox, brew on Linux, and virtual machines as a last resort its pretty hard to not be able to get the software you need.
> how often do you run into the software you want not being built for your distro?
Is this even the right question? The whole reason humans create software is to accomplish something. If software a is not available, but software b is and does the same thing nearly as well, why not spend 5 minutes to learn the thing?
Because in practice it's never 5 minutes nor "nearly as well". And because you got some software you need to build and it expects xyz library on that platform as a dependency, not abc library, despite your wishes.
Do you happen to be running Ubuntu? They have made updates terrible in their effort to try and make snaps a thing. I experience far less grief on other distros.
Yeah, though this was always the case for me, not just since snaps came along. I've had breakages on other distros too, just (like you say) not as massive, but still more than on Windows.
>Stick to base community-developed distros like Arch, Debian and Fedora.
Since when is Fedora community developed? It's basically the testing arm of Red Hat and implements their corporate policies that will be added to Red Had in the near future. It's as corporate as it gets, just like Ubuntu.
Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.
Ubuntu 26.04 regularly, automatically adds a duplicate of our HP network printers, using a slightly different driver and defaulting to Letter (the printer default is A4 and my locale is Ireland). If I try to print a label into a specific quadrant using Document Viewer, it slaps it in the top-left. At least once per week, jobs just disappear without reaching the printer. If you want to print images, you'd better learn ImageMagick incantations or accept whatever scaling and positioning lands on the paper. It's far easier to use the cloud services than to set up network scanning.
The Windows process isn't necessarily better (unless your only concern is reliability and you don't have a Brother) but it is certainly different.
......? Windows 95 to Vista all had similar installation workflows to Linux sans an extra step to enter the install key. 7 and 10 made it easier since the hardware ID would make having to enter the key manually on hardware unnecessary. Until 11, there was no need for MS account, cloud, etc.
Windows 10 definitely begged you to use a Microsoft account to log in. IIRC you couldn't even set it up with a local account unless you told the install process you didn't have internet. I believe it also moved your home folder to onedrive without asking with no way to fully undo that
Not sure about the one drive stuff, but I always clicked the button and it was smooth bypass so to me it's not really an impediment, especially since it didn't matter if the system was internet hooked up or not. And for people that were tied into the Microsoft account eco system it did have it's benefits; AFAIK there are people using One Drive and Office 365 for personal stuff. So at least to me I didn't begrudge them for putting in a prompt that says, "Please use a microsoft account." It's a legitimate use case.
Windows 11 crossed the line big time though. Having the option right there to bypass is fine; Having to enter in an obscure key stroke sequence and rebooting while making sure your system is not hooked to the internet basically soured me off 11 so far. Especially now they're trying to rip it out that workflow.
This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.
It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.
2k appeared to retain NT's responsiveness with seemingly separate threads for processing UI stuff where XP appeared to devolve to Windows 98 (pre NT) in terms of UI and app event processing merged together into a single foreground event loop.
I dont even remember now why windows 2000 was superior to XP, but I ran it until I switched to Linux some time in 2004, despite having XP available too. Installed XP on other people’s computers though, FCKGW…
A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
7 had the advantage that the drivers didn't muck up the system requiring a re-install. I liked both - I had a saved image to reinstall when it inevitably screwed up.
Someday in the future, business students will be directing their agents to study cases written by the Harvard Business Review's LLM agent about how people at Micrsoslop saw:
- What good UI/UX could be
- What good LLM integration can look like
- What good office productivity software looks like
And how after seeing those thins they went on to do the exact opposite. I simply cannot believe how bad most Microsoft products are these days. Windows in particular is so much worse than even Windows 10 from just a few years ago that it's almost funny.
I can only conclude that Satya Nadella is a mac user, because nobody who actually dogfoods Windows would consider the current state of affairs to be acceptable.
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.
My aunt pulled a Windows XP computer out of storage recently because she's sick of Win 11. I'm excited to hear updates from my cousin (though unfortunately, I have to expect this experiment will fail)
Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.
That's just awesome and makes me regret not switching to Linux earlier. I wish the creator of this made the start menu suddenly change after running Windows update, because Microsoft knows best on which folders you need to be visible by default. It can be customized, but you can't go back to how the start menu was.
My windows 10 pc continues to bother me to update because I won't get security patches anymore. I will absolutely never update to Windows 11. The only way they ever get me to pay for an OS again is if they go far out of their way to be respectful to the user to compensate for all the disrespect.
Having recently been reinstalling Win 95, 98 SE, and XP has been quite a reminder how much classic Windows got out of the way. Aside from a single, auto started Tour (with and easy+permanent opt out), there isn't much to slow you down or hold your hand.
Though for the kids it's quite unfamiliar and a bit intimidating. They're used to first-run tutorials and guides popping along their journey. Things are also more easily lost to them when not on the desktop.
I imagine the ideal is probably a first run wizard that could ask users how much help they'd like coming up to speed. Obviously this excludes selling the user's attention to advertisers, not even for first party offerings.
I recently switched back to windows so I could play Wardogs with the boys and I’m not enjoying my fans running at 100% when I’m not even running a game and the constant notifications. I’ll be back on Linux within a month
1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.
2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.
I've spent a few months trying to convince my management on getting a Macbook after fighting with a kernel memory leak that consumes the 128Gb of RAM in my freshly new Dell Pro Max 16 with Windows 11. It seems the best solution my IT gives me is to replace my laptop... which I have already done... three times.
Sometimes gotta let corporate corporate. After they've blown $16,000 on replacements and lost two months of your productivity they might finally realize approving a MBP is a good idea even though it's $600 above their arbitrary budget cutoff for a laptop renewal.
just want to add that if the creator adds Powerpoint, then starting a Powerpoint presentation should prompt a 10 second countdown to a forced update and restart...
both Linux and macos are roaring ahead and Window declining. I've not really used Windows for years but if it's like this maybe that explains it. Currently on last years macos which is quite good for just plug it in and it works.
Never a wrong time to promote windows 11 debloat [1]. Not affiliated.
Used it a few days ago for the first time and it transformed the stinking pile of poorly designed adware to something that resembles a pretty decent operating system.
I feel like its experience in US version of Windows. I never had so many popups in EU. Whats funny, I feel this way with macos, even after a year after setup I get some start notifications which I clicked many times.
Will anybody, ever, write an OS that doesn't serve the purpose of itself? Like Solaris, Win 3.11.. So many pop-ups, every so often... very nice, very useful, thank you. Worse than Micro and soft guy os.
Ex-Microsoft, but it's incredible how mismanaged this company has become.
Firstly, the level cronyism is just ridiculous, almost comical. You see Principals and Directors that can barely code at what I'd consider SDE 2 level, but are there purely because of favoritism. Then, you have multiple factions duking it out and releasing iterations of the same product over and over, just for the sake of empire building. All this while blocking or even sabotoging other teams from getting ahead.
There's also the constant rotation of the same people speedrunning features and wrecking havoc on projects before getting promoted and rotating out. Then, whoever's left behind to clean the mess gets PIPed because "the project was running fine when we left it!"
And not only that, but executives and PMs shoving a barrage of pop-ups and notifications for the sake of improving key metrics because We'Re A DaTa DriVeN CoMPAnY. Yeah, no shit you get more engagement by adding popups, but who cares because the customer satisfaction metric is too abstract to be tied back to your team.
Finally, at the end of the day, everyone goes home and uses Macbooks and iPhones.
> Restore failed. Control Panel was replaced by Settings, except for the settings that are still in Control Panel.
Microsoft really needs to remove the Control Panel and let us control everything in the Settings app. It's infuriating to have to go dig in this old mess because of backwards compatibility or something.
It's not that complicated. Yeah you have to spend an hour or two after install looking up some guides, tweak some registry keys & turn off a bunch of default Settings.
Then you have practically zero nags.
Also no need to update 600+ MB every friggin day like on Ubuntu...
I spend probably twice as much after Ubuntu install just trying to get the OS to behave in something approaching user-friendly. Plus install and configure extra Gnome addons to get a decent desktop experience.
Yes. Because you say that as if Linux doesn't require the same or longer the second you dare use it as an average user and want to change the defaults. Or just use it in general.
I have Windows 11 Pro and I've never seen an ad. I don't remember turning anything off but I did upgrade from Windows 10, so maybe that had something to do with it, unless it's just that Pro doesn't contain ads.
I also don't use it with a microsoft account and don't have any "services" from them, so maybe that helps.
I have a microsoft account but I use a local account for Windows 11. I always had MSDN and had a pro key so maybe its an enterprise thing. It is a legit copy. I don't use onedrive or 365. When I go to Accounts it has a blue button to Sign In, so maybe local accounts don't get ads.
Really? My Win 11 install (sparsely used nowadays) is nag city. Set up OneDrive, activate cloud backups, sign into your Microsoft account, oops Xbox Game Bar popped up because I pressed some key combination, reboot (a few times) to finish updates, set up copilot, error installing update, reboot before installing update, etc.
Some other ones to add on from my fresh install: Start menu search will search the Microsoft Store for apps they want you to install, some key combinations will launch copilot and if it's not setup it will take you to a webpage that will help you set it up, every office application has a cheap looking unhideable jeweled title bar button to "Upgrade your plan".
Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.
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