I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
yeah, thankfully I can go a bit more basic than that, I just need to figure out what hub, or even cable, I wanna get.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Idk is it CAD software? I know there are webapps for that now
Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
Linux: “We’re dropping support for this device because we’re fairly sure we had the last one in existence and it just died.”
Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:
- LinuxMint 21.1
- MxLinux 21.3
- Elementary OS 7
- Ubuntu 22.10
- RHEL 8.6
- RHEL 8.7
- RHEL 9.1
- Fedora 37
I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.
Still can’t believe they dropped support for i386 😤
carefully select hardware
lmao, i’ve exclusively run linux on franken pcs cobbled together out of mostly second hand parts
That’s much easier grounds then… checks notes… a modern laptop straight from the factory.
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
It’s the professional software that’s lacking in Linux, and that’s the only reason I keep a Windows machine around. For music production, video production, design work, photography and so on, Windows has good commercial software that is well established in these professions.
But for most people, including gamers, Linux is a very good option right now.
I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
Don’t worry. It won’t. It’ll just frustrate you. Windows has gone seriously downhill since 7.
It was alret horrible at 95. I used windows for about a good 2 years in my life. I’ve been on Amiga is before, Unix osses for a while and over 21 years now on Linux. Windows, any version, compared to any of those is a joke
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You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’m really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I’ll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don’t have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.
I’ve been using all of the major OSs and they’re all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don’t think it’s as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.
I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I’d prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it’s not the worst thing.
I upgraded my Intel system to AMD today. And I didn’t have to reinstall a damn thing, because my existing Linux installation Just Worked™. It really is to the point that I could never imagine going back to Windows.
There’s this thing I notice. If windows asks you to learn something or put up with some BS it’s seen as the cost of business, reasonable, or simply not even noticed. If Linux requires you to learn something, like read one article about which distro might work best for you, it’s seen as an insurmountable difficulty or an absurd ask.
Also the half life of windows knowledge is a lot lower than linux knowledge. Under windows: when you have this problem, click here, click there, find this button, select this option and then it might help, until the next version changes everything. Under linux you find this config file, change this line to that and the fix will likely survive multiple system upgrades and could even work on different distributions.
Absolutely. Once you spend just a bit of time figuring out how config files work suddenly fixing problems on and maintaining your Linux system is far easier than windows. Not hidden behind layers of bad UI that doesn’t work. Just edit the file. Restart the process.
Linux is cool and all but can it tell if I’m watching porn and suggest me other porn like windows 11?
Is the other porn at least relevant?
For Microsofts sake it sure better be
The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I’m concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?
Surely we can admit that Linux is ready for general population on the desktop? It’s the better choice overall, but the barrier to entry is very high.
Edit: I mistyped and missed the word “not”. It’s “not ready for general population on the desktop”. Sorry guys.
I mean it’s to the point that if you’re willing to install an operating system (a smaller sunset of computer users overall) , you can go with Linux no problem
I don’t disagree, but that’s not general population. You need the “normies” to drive adoption.
The barrier of entry is basically the same as Windows if you buy a laptop with Linux pre-installed
But someone has to install it on the laptop and put in on the store shelf. And I’d love to see that happen. It just hasn’t yet. Not enough.
Well, is not super common for sure, but Dell sure sell the same laptops with Ubuntu pre installed, they’re a bit cheaper too. At least in here South america they do, pretty much every single computer they sell has a Linux option from the box.
But I also can’t think of any other big brands that also do that, so you have a point, Asus and Acer have some models, but they’re harder to find, even online.
It’s a future I wish for, but I’m not seeing it.
There are many available but unfortunately they are usually more expensive for thee same hardware
Which makes no material sense, but makes sense when you remember what a monopoly Windows has.
What barrier, it’s totally easier to use than windblows.
Well, in the real world, Windows has won. It’s the default desktop OS. Whatever Linux distro is trying to take over needs to be just as simple to use, and needs to be designed so that most of the knowledge that your grandma has regarding her Windows computer can transfer over. Once that happens, and the only difference between Windows and Linux is the cost, then Linux will win.
you use a system like mint and it is as easy if not easier to use that windows and the local application search bar actually works decently and doesnt bring up a bunch of useless fucking web results.
I guess the last thing is to get some company to install it on laptops and sell them at Walmart. Because the “normies” are not going to go out to install something themselves.
This. so much this.
My grandma never lived to see Windows or Linux. But my mom who’s in her 80s learned Linux pretty much instantly when moving from XP to Mint.
Yeah, but XP was on the tail end of operating systems that still needed their users to understand what’s going on. Back then, you HAD to be “tech savvy” (at least relative to today) in order to get your computer set up. People understood what a file was. What a file format was. They needed to understand what folders were on their computer and how to get to them from different applications. The kind of knowledge that you’d think people still have.
Since then every single UX designer has been working towards making everything “just work”. So, at this point people just assume that technology is doing what they intend it to do in their heads. Everything auto opens, auto updates, auto installs, and auto syncs. In modern operating systems you don’t control over anything, but everything is done for you. Obviously that’s not really the case, but that’s the design. And now, most people don’t even have a desktop in their home. Most people do everything from their phone and use a tablet for anything that the phone is too small for. And because of that, many people coming out of school don’t know what a “file folder” even is. What it means to put a file onto a flash drive and move it to a computer. It’s old people nonsense to them.
I hope that we can bridge this gap, but I don’t know how that would work.
You make a very valid point, I didn’t think of that problem before. My mother learned how to use a PC back in 1988 when we had XT and Wordstar. It’s obvious that she understands the basics of OS and filesystems, but I guess that skill is now becoming quite fringe.
Ah yes… it is easy as long as you do something difficult first.
Reminds me of that comment on Dropbox where some guy said it’s going to fail because he can easily build something similar with an ftp server.
Nothing started easy, someone has to figure out the hard part for everyone else to benefit.
Dropbox is even making money…(I am shocked as it sends tech firms rarely do.)
I want to use Linux at the desktop, but I want HDR and Freesync support. Not sure if Linux supports either in a big way.
Freesync yes, HDR soon™
The company I work at only works with windows Servers
Same… The principal engineer on this project also referred to me learning C# as my first exposure to a “real programming language”
After already being advanced in Python
And familiar with C, C++, JavaScript.
I think what he meant by “real” is it comes out of the box with proprietary windows components that aren’t going to work anywhere else and don’t have human readable code.
Linux OSes have always been the ones to run on everything lol, it took Microsoft like a decade to make Windows run on ARM
Which is weird because WinNT 4.0 had several CPU architecture ports. Then MSFT dropped them all for only x86.
