I find it less aggravating than other systems. I have a Mac I use every now and again and every update it seems to have lost a feature. And Windows has gotten to the point where it's just a constant battle against Microsoft trying to steer you into their next distraction, and they reboot the computer on their schedule, not yours. If I leave my Ubuntu desktop for a while, when I come back it does some security updates but is otherwise how I left it.
I think when I started using Linux 20 years ago, Wine was already one of the most impressive "feature" of my first Linux distro (SuSE 9.2 from a magazine btw) and I’m still impressed by this project. But Proton, that’s another beast.
Agreed. It was the one thing holding me back, but now is barely an issue. I'm sure that there are some games that I won't be able to run (most likely AAA FPS titles), but I haven't encountered any that I care about yet.
>and they reboot the computer on their schedule, not yours
When was the last time you used modern Windows and encountered this issue?
Windows rebooting you by force was an issues in the early days for Windows 10 to the point it became a meme people like to refer back to, but that hasn't been an issue in years.
My laptop wakes itself at midnight (somewhere around 12:30pm) and tries to install an update, but it fails every time and just hangs at the lock screen. Because the update is never properly installed, the device will boot up every night until I manually run "Update and restart". Ended up me killing windows update completely.
I've tried to do this a number of times but no matter what I disable in the task scheduler it just ends up reenabled the next time I update the damn thing. Frustrating!
Hey, how about next time I need important updates I will install them manually issuing a simple command like "apt update && apt upgrade" or "pacman -Suy", or whatever else is there? And on top of that reboot my home computer on my own schedule and when I have convenient time to do so. And even gasp not updating my OS with important security updates if I choose so!
Bottom line, screw Windows with its updates. Why it is so if I own the hardware and turn it off and on whenever I want I can't do the same with my software?
Ah, the average Joe that was doing approximately that about 10 years ago on Windows 7 via UI (which linux distros also provide) and wasn't really complaining about it in the process. What changed?
No, but 9 year old me when getting his first PC and learning to use would have loved this. Just because you don't find something useful doesn't mean nobody else does. Same with Solitare and Pinball that shipped with Windows before. You might see it as bloatware but office workers worldwide had their mundane lives improved by them.
Despite HN's opinionated view on this, a commercially successful OS will never be like Arch where you have the bare bones and everybody needs to install everything they need from scratch.
This is borderline trolling.
"Candy Crush Saga" or Netflix is on the right side tabs right at the menu on a fresh install. I did install 22H2 a month ago and saw this atrocity. You are simply mistaken. Also News that I don't really care or wish to see.
> Some apps that are bundled with Windows now have the option to be uninstalled. That list includes the Camera, Photos, and Cortana apps. In the EEA only, Windows users will have the option to uninstall Microsoft Edge and the Web Search from the Microsoft Bing component.
Recently bought a Win 11 laptop (past two months), and to any average consumer it was impossible to not connect it to the internet when you first boot it.
It took me, a fairly savvy user, a couple of tries to figure out what was required, which is pressing Shift + F10, opening a terminal, entering a command, hoping for the best. That didn’t work, so I then needed to do the same process a second time and run a second command to open regedit and amend a registry value from 1 to 0. My father wouldn’t have known where to start.
Anyway, the moment it was all installed and hooked up to the internet to update the ads appeared so I downloaded TronScript and gave that a run to remove all the bloatware and ads.
Quite recently I have come to a machine scheduled to do video transcoding, with a notification "We have updated your operating system" and Handbrake being closed.
Is this finally the year of the Linux desktop? I tried to go full Linux two years ago but gave up and went back to Mac. Between lots of software not available on Linux and weird problems with screens and audio I couldn’t recommend Linux to non tech people. It’s great for dev though.
I think the traditional desktop will go away slowly anyways and most people will use operating systems like iOS and Android.
Laptops are the new desktop, and in those GNU/Linux still has issues with 100% hardware support, even the ones from Linux OEMs still have issues with fingerprint readers, dual GPUs, sleep modes, hibernation.
Where GNU/Linux works just fine are classical desktops, preferably self built.
I'm running a 6.7 kernel on an AMD lenovo and would respectfully disagree that there's a hardware support problem. I have full suspend/hibernate/resume and everything comes back up just like it would in Windows or Mac OSX.
I'm also running an AMD Lenovo (Gen 3 T14) but can assure you there are still hardware support issues. The issues are rare, but there none the less. WiFi will occasionally be slow after resuming from sleep, the fingerprint reader will just stop working after a while (but can be recovered by restarting the USB device with a script), plugging in a USB3 monitor previously crashed my system but I think that was fixed in the recent kernel updates, and early on when I first got the laptop I had system resume issues. Last year I had bug regression break something, I think ethernet, was another month before that got re-fixed. I did buy it when it first hit the market so I wasn't surprised to have issues.
I've been on T14 Gen 3 and E14 Gen 3 for quite some time and hadn't had a single issue you describing. Even running a UHD screen through Type-C and using fingerprint to authorize after powerdown (a thing MacOS and Windows can't really do). Care to share what distro and kernel you are using?
Are you on the AMD T14 Gen 3 or Intel? I've read the Intel ones are a bit better supported. I'm running Pop! OS with 6.6 kernel. Here's one of the bugs that affected me previously: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214649 What are you running to have never had an issue?
As someone that uses Linux in some form since 1995, has UNIX administration as one of my roles, I likewise disrespectfully disagree, having had laptops where recovery from hibernation required taking out the battery (luckily it was still possible), the fingerprint reader had its days, and no matter what incantation on OS configuration, video hardware decoding never worked, and were the only ones not able to keep a stable WiFi connection on longer downloads on my home network, requiring a LAN cable.
Probably the Thinkpad range is what you're after then. They're widely used by Linux developers, so their peripherals have working drivers sooner rather than later.
Ever since WSL2, Windows has been objectively the best desktop os (with the only caveat that you have to have the pro version which lets you disable a bunch of the annoying stuff, and disabling that stuff takes a little bit of tweaking).
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under linux, while having a linux dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
I mean, if you use any popular software from big companies, you really don't have privacy either. Microsoft is no different. Its not as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
Thats a separate topic. The issue is that people claim that Microsoft does not respect privacy, while [insert their favorite electronic brand here] does.
I dont know if you can do this on the home edition, but on the pro edition you can basically set the login to the local computer instead of logging in with microsoft account, and it disables pretty much most of the stuff.
Getting WSL2 working just right can still be an unnecessarily complicated process. And the Home versions of Windows do indeed suck for power users.
But Windows will generally support every monitor and resolution/scale well which can't be said of Linux (which struggles with hidpi) or macOS (which can't do fractional scaling and has blurry fonts on lodpi).
Ever since Proton and Wine, Linux has been objectively the best desktop os.
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
The issue with that setup is that it takes a lot more to get it to work, and its never a guarantee. I used to run Solidworks under Wine and it took some researching to setup. Proton has gotten better, but when a game releases, its never really a guarantee that it will work right out of a box. Some of the games that are 4 years old at this point are still silver.
Whereas if you go with Windows and WSL2, everything just works with a lot less setup. WSL2 also has an x server now, which means graphical applications work under Windows.
For laptops, linux is the way to go because of i3wm, nothing as good as that exists for mac or windows, and because they are more resource constrained, you can do more tinkering and disable a bunch of things to speed up the system. For desktops however, the only reason I want linux is to do development, which pretty much only requires a file system and a linux terminal, which WSL2 with VSCode Remote SSH extension provides fully.
Slightly less here. Using GNU/Linux on the desktop from 2004 and Athlon 64 release. Just works and respects me as a user and human being, unlike other alternative OSes.
14 years for me since 2010. I was a casual windows user in college so when my first job gave me a bare metal RHEL5 desktop I was very nervous. 14 years later, one of my main criteria when changing jobs was whether the new company allowed Linux machines. The company I joined not inly allows Linux laptops but also allows bringing your own device. I am now running an AMD Ryzen 9 7950x with 128G RAM workstation running Linux. Totally overkill but I love it.
> “I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.
Absolutely NOT. I would not use Linux if it forced a desktop environment on me. The whole reason of me not using windows or osx is because they do.
This is the problem with "Linux on the desktop" becoming mainstream. Mainstream users want a company to tell them how to work with their computers. I have my own opinions.
Absolutely, I think most people probably mean Gnome when talking about the Linux Desktop. Which really says a lot about "most people" and how little I give a shit about their opinions.
The benefit however is that more people using Desktop Linux might force Hardware vendors (like Nvidia) to finally get their shit together.
If I had to use Gnome in order to use Linux, I'd switch back to Windows. I'd rather deal with all the horrors there (ads, etc.) than put up with Gnome telling me how I have to do everything.
Yes exactly that's what I was thinking. If "Linux" adopts a common desktop I'm sure it'll be gnome and that means I'm out. I can't stand it either. Opinionated software just doesn't work for me.
I really love KDE. It's getting better and better and doesn't tell me how to work but it enables me in figuring out my own style of workflow by adapting to me instead of me to it.
That’s nothing, suspend works 100% of the time when you close the lid if you clicked on Power off before closing.
Ah, the joy of opening the lid the next day to see it waking up on the logout screen, then power off then you discover the battery is empty. Such a hard issue for a 3 decades OS and a quarter of a century on laptops.
Even Linux never ever did that, and I can remember that sleeping haven’t always been a given under Linux.
>“I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.
This Torvalds guy is right. If you try to write a tutorial for how to do something in Linux, you will be in a world of pain, because users aren't using Linux, they're using apps that are using Linux.
Can I write "click on the start menu at the bottom left"? I can't. Because first of all nobody even officially calls it the start menu as Windows does. Sometimes the taskbar is at the top, other times it's at the left. Can I say press windows key (I mean, the super key (I mean, the meta key)) to bring up the application launcher? I can't do that either, because it depends on the distro's default configs. Can I say Ctrl+Alt+T brings up the terminal? Who knows! At least, surely, all of these distros are GNU/Linux so I can rely on bash commands being available everywhere, right? But then if I'm writing a tutorial for SSH'ing into a server, and the server is running FreeBSD, now the commands are the same but the arguments are different! And I know FreeBSD isn't Linux but it surely is weird that all these things that are similar but different are different from that thing that is also similar but different.
Meanwhile if you write a tutorial for Windows XP, it still works in Windows 11 because the system GUI and tools barely changed.
This is an advantage in volunteered end user documentation that Linux can't enjoy, because any step-by-step tutorial for Linux would have to be written for every single distro, or become or a ridiculously convoluted mess. And with Waylands that is only going to get worse.
Personally I'm not really counting on Linux desktop gaining popularity because, with all honesty, I found the GUIs of almost every Linux application I tried just terribly poor. Maybe this is because from I'm from XP era when lists and buttons were tightly packed into forms without all this auto-save switches nonsense, but in my mind, if Windows is losing users as they abandon their old GUIs and move into this same waste-of-space-fest (although that's probably not the reason for it), then maybe Linux should just make their GUIs like old windows instead of making them like new windows.
I don't see the reason why so many of these apps lack a main menu, for example. When an app has a main menu, and I can't find a function in the main menu, I just go "well, guess it just can't do that." But now I'm just wasting my time looking around the screen seeing if there is something I can click to do what I want. And right click often doesn't do anything. Where are my context menus? And where are my tooltips? This isn't designed for desktops, is it? It's designed for tablets. I just don't think going from Windows 11 to Windows 8 is much of an improvement. It's like you made a CLI tool without --help. In KDE Discover if I press F1 do I get a manual? No, I get the About screen.
Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
> Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
This is like searching "How to do X in Windows NT" and expecting to get results for Windows 11. Should be no great shock that when you use non-specific search terms the search engine returns non-specific results.
No, this is like searching "How to do X in Windows" because for a normal user it's Windows and Linux, not Windows and Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.
Edit: I just realized Windows is so obviously Windows I didn't even write Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11. I just wrote Windows. That's what not being fragmented means.
