“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".
I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.
Out with the old, in with the new, doesn't have to be bad, but it depends on what your old and new are. I'd be a lot less skeptical about migrating OS-level sttuff from C to Rust than from C to React.
If the motivation is "Because I refuse to learn C", then both approaches will be bad. You can't avoid understanding what you're migrating, but seemingly Microsoft thinks they're above that. Fits with the average mindset of developers within the Windows ecosystem, at least from my experience.
Totally agreed, I have learned a lot of technologies to understand legacy systems. Either you run them or to migrate away from them. If you do not learn and respect the legacy system your migration is bound to fail.
I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.
The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.
Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language
There was also the fact that Microsoft introduced it 3 months before Apple announced the product that would kill the iPod, leading with the HDD model (a direct competitor to what would become known as the iPod Classic line) when Apple’s real flagship was the iPod nano.
There was also the crap that was Windows Media Player 11 which I tried to like for about a month.
There was also the incompatibility with Microsoft’s own DRM ecosystem in PlaysForSure which was full of these subscription music services, some of which were quite popular with the kind of people that were inclined to buy a Zune: folks in Microsoft’s ecosystem that had passed up on using an iPod and used something from SanDisk, Creative, Toshiba or iRiver instead. This is because they wanted to replicate the entire iPod+iTunes model entirely.
The 2006 lineup of iPods was also particularly strong, and included the first aluminum iPod nano’s. When Microsoft announced and released the Zune, they were counter-programming against that, right into the Holiday season with a new brand that had no name ID, with a product that was just like the iPod, couldn’t play any of your music from iTunes or Rhapsody, but with… HD radio.
Name or color had nothing to do with it imho (I like the brown personally). It was all timing. They were entering a market with a well estaablished leader (iPod) that was nearly as good, as good, or better depending on who you ask. On top of it phones themselves were taking over the music player market at the same time, which is where Microsoft really dropped the ball.
I mean, iPhone is a really ridiculous name as well if you stop to think about it.
Windows Phone was actually doing well and adoption was taking off when Nadella came in and killed it. It didn't help that they changed the app framework and then blamed lack of apps. Such a brain-dead decision.
Windows Phone was dead in the water because many services did not have first party support, and the third party clients kept getting killed / people banned from said services.
Google was extremely aggressive in muscling Microsoft out. They refused to release a Gmail, YouTube or Maps client for Windows Phone but made sure those services did not work (properly).
And indeed on top of that, Microsoft switched UI frameworks 3 or 4 times. And they left phones behind on the old OS releases repeatedly, that then couldn't run the new frameworks.
Still, Windows Phone its UI concept was really great, and I sorely miss the durability of polycarbonate bodies versus the glass, metal and standard plastic bodies of today.
What burned me was that there was no updating from WP7 to WP8 - After playing around with one and genuinely enjoying the experience, I convinced myself to buy a Lumia 900 in April of 2012, just for Nokia/Microsoft to effectively say "that was stupid, wasn't it?" when the Lumia 920 and WP8 launched just 7 months later. Releasing a so-called flagship device that they knew would be incompatible with their upcoming OS, effectively killing software support before the year was even finished, really doesn't inspire confidence in the longevity of a product.
It was always going to be difficult, but classic Microsoft blunders and extreme arrogance set back Windows Phone dramatically.
They basically couldn't stick to a strategy and alienated every potential audience one by one. I was trying to make a Windows Phone app back then and for developers they forced them to go through an extremely difficult series of migrations where some APIs were supported on some versions and others on other versions and they were extremely unhelpful in the process.
They had a great opportunity with low-end phones because Nokia managed to make a very good ~$50 Windows Phone. Microsoft decided there was no money in that after they bought Nokia they immediately wanted to hard pivot to compete head-to-head with Apple with Apple-like prices. They then proceeded to churn through 'flagships' that suffered updates that broke and undermined those flagships shortly after they released thus alienating high end users as well.
Having worked at Microsoft I think the greatest problem with the culture there is that everyone is trying to appeal to a higher up rather than customers, and higher ups don't care because they're doing the same. I think that works out OK when defending incumbency but when battling in a competitive landscape Microsoft has no follow through because most shot callers are focused on their career trajectory over a <5 year time frame.
Windows Phone 7 was doing well; for some reason they did a breaking change with Windows Phone 8 and broke app compatibility. I will never understand that, they kneecapped themselves despite being multiple laps behind Apple and Google already…
The reason was moving from the CE kernel to the NT kernel between WP7 and WP8. This was supposed to make developers’ lives much easier when porting Windows 8 apps. The minimum hardware requirement had to be bumped and old WP7 devices could never meet them.
They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production.
Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.
I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently.
Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale.
The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out?
Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal.
Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions.
Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."
Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy.
Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem.
I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.
You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.
Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper.
I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years.
But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.
Housing is just one component, there is a lot of other stuff that has equal price: if you order stuff from Amazon the price is the same, if you buy a new car the price is the same.
Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can?
I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold them.
I think uncompetitive compensation is the dominant factor in Microsoft’s decline. Up there with stack ranking. They claim that it’s 30% cheaper to live there but then they go and capture most of that 30% for themselves.
It is my opinion that developer ability is on a Pareto distribution, like the 80 20 rule when 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The job market is more liquid for those that are extremely productive so it’s pretty easy to for them to get a pay rise of 30% by switching companies. In the worst case you can often come back with a promotion because, like many companies, Microsoft is more likely to promote you when trying to poach you back. Doing a 2 year stint at Amazon was quite common. The other problem is that when your best people leave is that the process is iterative, not only are you getting paid less but you are now working with people who couldn’t easily switch jobs. You start being surrounded by incompetence. Stack ranking, which I hear is still being done unofficially, also means that you put your promotion and career in danger by joining a highly productive team. So it is rather difficult to get highly productive people to work on the same team.
Being paid less, being surrounded by incompetence, and being forced to engage in constant high stakes politicking really sucks.
I still think there are ways to hand hold people a bit and grow an ordinary engineer to a better one who is fit for system programming in maybe 12 months.
Otherwise as you said the only way is to offer the best compensation so that people don't leave. But again those people probably would leave for different reasons (culture e.g.).
Compensation is the easiest way and probably the most essential. It is hard to maintain a good culture when your best keep getting poached away with large sums of money. If Microsoft was the only game in town then sure they could get away with paying less, but they're not so they cannot.
Compensation can be the issue if the cost of living is creating problems. If you need 150k to just live in an area, 160k is not motivating while 250k gives you the peace of mind to focus on the work, not just on surviving. If you live in Bangladesh, the difference between 160k and 250k is almost meaningless.
Also compensation is a sign of respect and influences motivation. If you position yourself lower in the market, there is no reason to deliver top results for less money, correct? This attracts mediocrity, especially in management, and slowly kills companies. Usually there is no way back, no large company can replace the entire management and once and the mediocre ones will reject new, better ones.
It's not about the amount, but the type of people who stay when they could move to a higher paying job.
And the fact that it's impossible to poach people from companies offering a higher salary than you do. Unless you give them something more, like better conditions, or "mission", or the idea to work on something cool, but I don't think any of those apply to Microsoft.
A kernel engineering job is much more fun than yet another backend web gig. A large part because when working with typical web coding people do not want you to do actual software engineering.
But the actual issue is that if you underpay people they will not feel respected and valued so they will either not be motivated or leave. So you cannot pay below market, but you do not need to pay FB salaries either.
Theoretically (never happened to me), I'd definitely do a $100K Windows kernel, or whatever kernel work, over a $150K DE job that I currently have (I used to have a $220K DE job too and I won't hesitate to switch).
I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about.
Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.
From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
Yeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.
I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.
I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s
my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim
I remember a thin book describing changes to the API in Vista and 7 compared to XP and it was really thin. Just a few extra APIs to be able to show controls in the taskbar preview and things like that. Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.
>Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.
I've heard a Microsoft executive talk about win32 as legacy that they want to replace. I don't think that's realistic though, it's probably the last piece of technology keeping people on the platform.
Win32, the C API, is stagnant since Windows XP, other than some ...Ex and ...ExN kind of additions.
As mentioned above, the new APIs are mostly delivered as COM, occasionally with some .NET bindings.
There is still a silo trying to push WinRT now on Win32 side, although given how they made a mess of the developer experience only those with Microsoft salaries care about it.
Last year I ran into the issue of .NET network bindings not returning all NICs. [0] This issue has been present in the .NET since the genesis and only resolved in .NET 9. I had to create my own Win32 wrapper so everything works properly in .NET 4 frameworks ... still need to maintain Windows 7 pre-SP1 support in some applications.
Smells like Microsoft was trying to create APIs based on assumptions versus a 1:1 method that exposes managed code and hides unmanaged.
And those new APIs (at least the context menu API) apparently require a "package identity", which requires a signed MSIX installer, which requires paying for a code-signing certificate, unless I'm missing something in the docs.
That is because of what people claiming UWP is dead, haven't gotten the whole picture.
UWP as separate subsystem, yes it is deprecated, and no one should be using it, although Microsoft was forced to introduce .NET 9 support on UWP, because many refuse to move away from UWP into WinUI 3.0, given the lack of feature parity.
Now, when WinRT was made to also work on Win32 side, it also brought with it the concept of package identity, which forms a part of the whole app isolation from UWP similar to Android, now on Win32 as well, hence the MSIX.
> the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude
I think Microsoft’s framework chasing has been a betrayal of that philosophy. Internal divisional politics have been major drivers behind fracturing and refusing to unify the stack and its UI approach, and without clear guidance from the Office team the direction of the entire platforms UI is opaque. Short term resume and divisional wins at the expense of the whole ecosystem.
A developer centric platform would let developers easily create platform specific UIs that look modern and normal. As-is the answer to how to ‘hello world’ a windows desktop app is a five hour “well, akshully…” debate that can reasonably resolve to using Meta’s stack. “VB6 for the buttons, C++ for the hard stuff” is a short conversation, at least.
I think it's more of result of "okay we made it and it works, how we now can excuse still being employed in same head-count" development. And the answer is of course "rewrite, rewrite, rewrite". UI works well, no major bugs ? TIME TO CHANGE IT TO BE "MODERN"
And how about reliability? Having to start a web browser and a web framework to display core OS functionality adds a lot of moving parts that can break.
The point was that users mostly don’t care about wasting resources, but about usability. If usability wasn’t impacted, few people would care about resources being wasted. But since usability is very much impacted, people (rightfully) complain.
It doesn’t necessarily. A lot of resources are being wasted without impacting usability. Users only start noticing and complaining about it when it does.
It does, period. Less things can run in parallel, fans get louder, batteries live shorter and devices feel old years before they should, all of which directly affects usability. The user not noticing the direct cause or having enough resources to waste to at least perform some tasks acceptably doesn't change anything.
Changing UI framework all the times is fine, so is not changing anything for decades. Different strategies that both have value. Reasonably you want to be somewhere in the middle, depending on the use case. In an industrial setting, production infrastructure, etc... you generally want to change as little as possible "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". On emerging, consumer-facing technology such as mobile in the 2000s, "move fast and break things" makes sense.
But anyways, it is not the problem. The problem is just that Microsoft today is doing a terrible job.
The best example, I think, is the control panel. Starting from Windows 8, they changed it. Ok fine, you may like it or hate it, but to be honest, it is not a big deal. The problem is that they never finished their job, more than a decade later! Not all options are available in the new UI, so sometimes the old control panel pops up in a completely different style with many overlaps in features. And every now and then, they shuffle things around in hope that one day, the old control panel won't be needed anymore.
If you make a change, commit to it! If you decide to replace the old control panel, I don't want to see it anymore. It is certainly easier said than done, but if you are a many-billion dollar company and that's your flagship product, you can afford to do hard things!
Using a web engine to build UIs is fine too. As an OS-wide component, a web engine is not that big in terms of resource use, if properly optimized. The problem with Electron is that every app ships with its own engine, so if you have 10 apps, you have 10 engines loaded. But everything uses the same engine, and apps don't abuse it, then the overhead is, I think, almost negligible. It is rare not to have a browser loaded nowadays, so system components can take advantage of this. But again, you need to do it right and it takes skills, effort and resources.
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
WinUI 3 is basically utterly pathetic bul_sh_t attempting to pretend that it is a UI framework. A wet paper plane passing itself off as a passenger aircraft. Please compare with a real desktop UI framework like GTK or Qt. Or just a more modern one like Rust Iced or gpui/slint
Blaming this on Ballmer is a serious stretch, I can't see how you would come to that conclusion. Developers Developers Developers was for the launch of .NET and it brought us a platform that is still considered cutting edge 25 years later.
UX was fine in the Windows Forms days, and WPF was a large step forward (responsive layouts, etc...). The problem was after that it all fell apart with Windows 8 and the attempt to switch to Metro, followed by the Windows Store fiasco and attempting to move to a sandboxed application model.
It all comes down to Microsoft's failure to adapt to mobile/tablets in so many ways. Which is kind of hilarious, because they had some really cool tech for the time (the PocketPCs were pretty fun back in the day, before touch came along).
When I was a developer I was not amused at all with constantly changing APIs to be honest. And UWP was really sucky. Way too aligned with mobile and tablet which nobody actually uses on windows. Even as a user I'm glad it didn't take off.
Even with all that Microsoft still went outside and used React Native for the start menu and Electron for the Visual Studio installer and Visual Studio Code.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1].
Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of course, takes another five minutes to become functional. Meanwhile I have a 13 year old low end Asus laptop at home that boots to a fully usable Linux desktop in well under a minute.
It’s been this way for over a decade. The year of the Linux desktop was 2009; the world is only just catching up.
> My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password.
Yeah, that’s a misconfigured system. I bet you can fuck up Linux enough to get a similar experience.
I’ve always been using Windows and the only time I ever had to wait that long was around the Win98 times on slow hardware.
After login, I can instantly use everything on Win 11, and the only delay is a bunch of apps starting (that I chose to start on boot).
I bet stuff like Crowdstrike has a major influence into this. I used my work computer before and after Crowdstrike and the difference in boot time and general behavior is huge.
In the challenges section, they list a few challenges with React Native that they had to overcome. Interesting thing is that MS already has XAML, WinUI etc., that they built and control and don't havr those "challenges". I don't understand what the team got by using React Native compared to using XAML. Anyone from MS here who could provide some technical benefits for this decision?
Maybe being not laid off along with other long-term staff and being part of easy-to-hire easily expendable army of JavaScript / TypeScript developers? XAML etc. are specific skills the developers are rarer and usually paid better than JS/TS devs.
Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
If Microsoft didn't kill it, lack of YouTube and other Google services would. That was the primary difference. With iPhone you had access to Google-owned stuff, Google never allowed other platforms like Symbian/MeeGo/Windows Phone to ever use its online services.
The game was broken from the start. Microsoft had no chance.
The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
It's been a while since I used Windows regularly or seriously, but I remember start menu search actually being good - maybe around Win7 days? You would just press <Win>, type a few letters of the software you wanted and hit enter, and it would work every time with minimal latency.
I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.
I can only reproduce this by hovering the Windows icon with the mouse and having the finger on a character, in order to press it immediately after clicking. In that case most of the time the Start menu does not open at all, and sometimes it opens but does not have the letter.
When I use the Windows key to open the Start menu I cannot reproduce this, as eg. Win + E opens the Explorer instead of the Start menu.
It does not appear on my machine as if this could possibly happen when opening the Start menu during regular use. Can you reproduce this on your machine?
This rarely (but not never) happened on my gaming desktop when I had windows on that. On the other hand, on my surface go, if it only eats the first character, that’s a good showing, so it’s likely device performance specific
Still, that shows an issue of using fuzzy search for Bing but not programs. There should be a precedent on local items. A typo is far more likely than a web search, especially when the web search is resulting in the intended application.
Did no one think of that feedback loop? That if the web search is suggesting an installed app that that installed app should be prioritized?
Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.
Either I am stupid or you're being dishonest. There is no one click way to disable it.
Only on pro versions of windows, with a group policy otherwise a couple of obscure registry keys no regular users know.
Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
bump, tbh I think this is hyperbole as on my w11 pc the ctrl alt delete menu hasn't changed since 2021's RC (which was just a reskinned version of w10's, which was just a reskinned version of w8.1's... going all the way back to vista)
What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.
I actually need the Processes tab more frequently, which shows the process hierarchy and relates to the visible windows. For example to restart Explorer.
I'm not maining windows, but i dual-boot it on my gaming pc (no BF6 on Linux). In all fairness, Windows is no better or worse now than it was 5 years ago. Its not like its suddenly become completely unusable (or more unusable, depending on your perspective). Copilot fluff is being injected a lot of places, but you can largely ignore it and use windows as before. I do feel like Windows is on some sort of life support, that its not the main focus of Microsoft. Again, this is not really new.
I have to use a Windows laptop for work; it was migrated to Windows 11 a few months ago. Win 11 is definitely, measurably worse than Win 10, at least in the configuration that my employer's IT forces on the machine. One example is that its UI is much slower (typing in the search box at normal speed often misses keystrokes, for instance -- never happened on Win 10).
I'm not a regular user of Windows, so I don't know if the changes I've seen were within the past 5 years or over five years ago. But ...
I've noticed Microsoft has introduced things like programs hijacking the screen (e.g. first launch of Edge, even if the launch was unintentional) and they have been making it increasingly difficult to make a local account on installation (even in the Pro version). Things like promotions for Xbox whatever popping up while I'm at work also tweak me the wrong way. Of course they don't know I'm at work, which is all the more reason not to do it!
As an operating system, I would rate it as fine. Compared to Linux, it appears to have performance issues in some areas, with file access being the main one I notice. They have made some progress in some areas (improved terminal, winget for software management). Compared to Windows of 20 years ago, the base operating system appears to be much better. But none of that means little when your main goal is for the "operating system" to get out of your way and let you use what matters.
I am forced to use Windows 11 at work on my laptop (produced in 2023). When resuming after hibernation - from the time I press the power key and I see the the release-lock prompt screen with the password/PIN box - that's maybe 5 to 10 seconds; but from that point, until the OS actually responds to key presses and shows characters typed into the text box - well, that takes between 2 and 3 _minutes_.
And that's just one example. I curse Microsoft every day.
On my work laptop, the only Windows 11 OS I use bare metal, the UAC prompt can take 30 seconds to one minute to show after requesting _Task Manager_ to start. IT decided to hide a number of applications behind UAC.
Newer version of Windows seem to add latency were there was none before.
I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.
macOS is fine on all officially supported machines. Windows 11 is fine on high-end machines, and sucks on everything else. I have to use Windows 11 for work unfortunately, an almost bare install with just the two programs we use added, no background stuff or other extra resource hogs, and it just. sucks. shit!
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.
After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.
Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.
That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
You forget you’re a minority. Most users use one platform, or at most one work one private (probably with different software). So most software should be optimized for the platform, not consistency across them.
I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.
Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.
As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
There's one problem: If you're competent with non-web UI technologies, it's probably time to schedule your colonoscopy.
Late millennials and gen Z have been spoiled by declarative, reactive frameworks that work identically whether you're doing a local UI or the Web, and the tools (for example Figma) that have grown up around these frameworks. Using C++, Objective-C, or even Swift will be just fine for a personal project, but if you're talking something that needs to be maintained and refined over the long term by a team, you will have a much worse time finding people competent in those languages than in JavaScript+React+Electron.
This is also one of the reasons behind rewriting everything in Rust: C is so dangerous, people who don't already know it inside and out are unwilling to touch it. Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust, and would vastly prefer it over working in C given the choice, so keeping a C project maintained has gotten a whole lot harder.
> Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust
I'd love to know where you get your statistics from.
FYI, as an anecdote, I am 'younger', in the sense of 'only recently joined the workforce', and I write 100+ lines of C and C++ a day, both at work and in side projects. Haven't touched Rust once, although I would like to get into it.
And funnily, the one UI framework I did use at work is Avalonia, which is strongly inspired by Windows Presentation Foundation.
I write plenty of declarative UI too in the form of SwiftUI (where it makes sense; often on Apple platforms the imperative frameworks are better suited) and Jetpack Compose.
Declarative UI has its upsides, but it’s hardly a panacea. There are places where it’s a straightforward dramatic improvement and then others where it’s an awkward contortion at best. Reactivity can be great but works in imperative setups too.
The explosion of popularity of front end web frameworks comes down almost entirely to two things: accessibility and commodity talent. It has a low bar to entry and JS+React is the closest the industry has come yet to achieving its undying dream of cheap, easily replaceable, interchangeable developers. In most other aspects it’s objectively worse than alternatives.
I would hard disagree. Give me QT to make cross-platform applications that properly manage resources, have low latency, and barely register in memory usage.
There was a cross-platform QT tool, running on macOS, Windows, and Linux, for debugging and updating the firmware for an embedded platform solution. macOS & Linux both were quick and fast to code. Windows needed more work and also an abstracted write management system because the application was bringing the OS to screeching halt while writing the debug messages to a SQLite database. The write issue was only on Windows. HTML pages / reports were being saved into the SQLite database and viewable with-in the application. This was all packed into a single file executable so nothing and to be installed, just copied to the computer and ran.
Often low-end hardware is sold in product solutions and frameworks like QT are better suited to make the end user happy with load and response time than HTML5. The only reason I find bloated frameworks being used on such hardware is because the developer only understood one programing language and one UI framework. The former developer who's job I took over jumped ship because he did not want to learn WPF and only knew WinForms.
QT, HTML5, React, WinForms, Gtk ... are all tools in a tool box and each has a proper usage. Hell, if I ever make an iPhone based application I will be learning Swift and the Apple frameworks for such a task.
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.
Same here. I developed desktop applications for 15+ years and was really frustrated with Microsoft's direction for the UI around the time of Windows Phone. While Windows Forms may not be the best, it worked for decades until then. Now even if someone wants to build a desktop application using native UI, it's next to no resource at all because it's all about cross platform nowadays.
Ugh, opposite. CSS is the fucking worst way of laying out a UI. How many human lives have been lost to div class layout nonsense that a better system could handle directly.
I am forced to use windows at work. Last week my web searches looked strange ... not getting the ussual results. Bing! Some windows update reset my default search from google to bing. Again! Microsoft's dirty tricks will never stop.
I am considering writing software specifically to feed random junk jnto Microsoft's telemetry cloud. I will call it "fusk-MS" and it will send random searches to Bing and fake screenshots of a linux desktop to copilot ten times a second until Microsoft stops acting like such a jerk.
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
They tried fixing that by creating widgets, but effectively had the same problem. Then they tried fixing that by making them always present, but then you just lose desktop space. I guess it makes sense if you have two monitors, but at that point, why not just have the full apps open in those same spots? Widgets are a great idea that I wish we could make useful somehow.
A loI of people don't know about this and I don't know if they really went ahead with it (been away from everything Microsoft professionally just about three years now) but at the time they were pretty serious about the idea to build all Office apps in React, so (according to them) they could more easily build "great multi platform experiences" from the same codebase.
Why they thought it couldn't be done with the .NET stack they already had (this was after the purchase of Xamarin and Blazor becoming a thing, mind you) still baffles me.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both),
you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.
(While you can use some JavaScript from QML, the application still have a C++ core. QML applications can still crash. There is no DOM with QML, no browser overhead)
QML is absolutely not JavaScript. It's a markup language to describe user interfaces, spiced with JS for certain interactions. All heavy lifting behind the scenes is done in C++ - the QML runtime as well as the application logic and data models.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).
Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.
> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.
Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:
- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.
- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.
- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.
This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.
Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.
JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.
> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.
In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".
So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.
Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
React native will always be more resource intensive than a native framework because it relies on a whole javascript runtime to work. Don’t know about others, but I personally don’t want a system tool that I cannot disable easily to be designed like this - it ultimately be less responsive and take up more of my resources from other apps.
WPF is pretty complete and used widely in various engineering, finance and corporate applications. It is HiDPI compliant. It is mature (developed since pre-Vista). It supports modern look too (can even look like Win-11, they officially support it!). Some of the beloved Microsoft late programs like Windows Terminal are written in it. If they use it and keep improving it, it has a huge potential.
But no. We cannot have nice things. Microsoft has lost the ability and management capability to release nice things. For some reason, Microsoft is trying to reinvent the wheel with UWP (aka WinUI2) and WinUI3. They are trying to replace everything with these half-arsed libraries when very complete and well-thought, future proof stuff already exists in Windows' DNA. They are shitting on the work of their earlier engineering.
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands.
Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.
Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.
Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.
I’m a big fan of staying private. I own a company that took VC many years ago but we strategically stayed private for a decade now and made peace with the VC. You just keep being honest, stacking customers, playing the long game. I see the value of being public but as a 100 to 500 person company that grows steadily, you keep it private and remove the quarterly earnings. The constant drive to hit the quarterly nut at all costs causes so many stupid short term benefits that hurt long term value. There is an enormous number of small companies you have never heard of like this. It’s just so short sighted to kill the golden goose to juice some profit
It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later.
What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps.
That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.
> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.
I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.
But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.
I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.
I was never really a serious gamer and don't do it much at all any longer.
But one of my senses is that the sort of games that really benefited from a desktop system--primarily Windows--like serious simulations and resource allocation games are increasingly fringe.
Certainly there are games on Linux today but I also wonder if a lot of people won't decide, as you say, that consoles are just easier.
That’s true. You’d have to be a little picky. I know you can plug in a KB and mouse but… why?
Still there are a huge number of games from indies or small publishers that may not make it to console but would still work fantastically with a controller. Or maybe they’re successful and they will make it over, you just don’t want to wait the two years.
Those kind of games are the ones that make me consider getting a Steam Deck.
I'm one of those non-technical users. For the past week or so I've been messing with getting a servarr stack going with a vpn. Mapping a network drive to the host device, configuring the docker images, port forwarding, etc., is all foreign to me and I'm still not sure I understand what port-forwarding is. I used portainer since I like having the GUI. I can just view the dashboard and poke around to explore, rather than staring at a terminal wondering what to do, searching a vague description of the problem, and pasting some cryptic command I find. Instead, I notice the "logs" button and click that.
All that to say that I am interested enough in a Linux machine, but don't feel I have the requisite knowledge to drive one.
> It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions.
Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.
That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes.
Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.
Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:
* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye
* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.
- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat…
- Windows 11…
- (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it.
- LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.
All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
Yeah, I should have been a bit more nuanced. I don't mean to dismiss the incredible mass of raw human achievement that is open source.
Microsoft is one of Valve's direct competitors and Valve is totally dependent on Microsoft. Among the notoriously poorly-received changes in Windows 8, Microsoft also started to clamp down on who can run software. Valve saw the writing on the walls and released their first Steam Machines. But those flopped due to the state of Linux gaming at the time, they started pouring resources into Proton, which had the distinction from WINE in that they would develop Linux-specific patches.
For sure, Valve would have nothing if WINE hadn't already done the bulk of the work, if Vulkan didn't exist, if Linux didn't exist, etc. But there's a world where Microsoft decided not to rock the boat with Windows, and in that world, Linux gamers would almost exclusively be dual booting.
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022.
Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux.
For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation".
When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
In reality, people will probably keep their insecure Win 10 machines running as long as they can. Linux is a leap especially for busy folk (most people in this economy).
I predict a rise in antivirus company share prices.
If Apple do make the rumoured cheap A-series based MacBook, it could be a hit.
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
I was a bit puzzled by Firebird (I thought that’s a fork of Thunderbird, like, say, LibreWolf or Waterfox), but I couldn’t quickly find the project, so my assumption is that it’s just the misprint, and author thinking of Fire-fox -> Fire-bird, not being into ecosystem for too long to remember the actual bird. Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the point author’s making, and I’m happy there’s a new Linux adopter now. Thanks, M$, I guess.
I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.
Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs.
For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.
For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical
Sleep and suspend are still kinda buggy on Linux, and probably will be for the near future. This is more of a vendor thing (as most of the annoying problems in Linux) than a dev thing. To the point where I mostly avoid it, I either shutdown the laptop completely or just let it plugged on a desk 24h
Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.
This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with
Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air
Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI
Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.
I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).
Counterpoint: I've been using enterprise thinkpads for the past 15 years and never had issues with wifi, or suspend. So again, it's about how you choose your hardware so it works with Linux...
I had a Thinkpad T480s that was absolutely perfect with Linux (Mint), although very underpowered, but that was due to Intel CPU.
This year I got a T14s Gen6 AMD as a replacement, and it's essentially unusable on Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Mint), but works fine with Fedora and with Windows.
On Ubuntu and Mint, X just locks up every 80 seconds or so, and I have to hard-reboot it (or switch ttys and restart X). Nothing in syslog, nothing in dmesg, nothing in X.org.log to show what might be going on.
I have the T14s Gen3 AMD and everything just works with CachyOS and Fedora. In general I tend to use as recent kernel as possible with AMD. They do update their drivers a lot in every Linux version.
I've also used enterprise thinkpads for the last 10 years. No wifi issues on those, but sleep and bluetooth issues as described. I have no idea if Windows would have been more reliable.
If you mean with ”just working” that any distro works out-of-the-box with any piece of hardware ever existing, then obviously no, that won’t happen. It won’t happen with any OS ever.
I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.
What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.
A lot of the WiFi and BT issues were due to proprietary firmware blobs which weren't included in package management repos either due to licensing issues or decision not to pollute OSS repos with nonfree software.
This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.
I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is why I don't use Windows. Early last year I paid for a copy of "Windows 10", and it didn't support most of the hardware in my laptop. Even plugging in a mouse I had to use keyboard shortcuts to let it load a "driver", and after that it still didn't support the scroll wheel. Wifi didn't work at all, and wired network was painfully slow. It did at least support FHD resolution in 24-bit colour but very slowly.
My audio interface was completely unsupported, my MIDI interfaces were completely unsupported. Eventually I gave up attempting to run it, wiped the laptop again, reinstalled Ubuntu, and went for Bitwig instead of Ableton, and I've had no problems since.
Maybe one day we'll see the year of Windows on the desktop, but this isn't it yet.
This was true in 2010. I use to have a USB wifi adapter that was specifically meant to make sure linux would always work. I lost that adapter years ago.
I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.
Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.
I wanted to try Fedora recently but it crashed over and over in the install on the screen where you select a time zone. Looked it up and tons of people had the same issue and didn't find any fix that worked for me.
Turned me off Fedora completely.
Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.
I've made the complete switch recently (been using Linux on and off for years, including WSL as well) after my pleasant experience with the Steam Deck and it's been fantastic, but not without issues. A recurring issue over the years of trying Linux has been WiFi drivers; I really can't afford to have WiFi not work as I can't run an Ethernet cable to my computer room. I get that Linux heavily relies on volunteer work, but a broken WiFi driver due to an update is a big roadblock.
Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.
>> what really blew me away is that everything... just worked
It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.
But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.
I had a similar experience after switching to Fedora Silverblue (but any of the immutable Linuxes will probably do - and over time, I'm sure most will be like that). Had set aside a bunch of time to do a major version update, everything fully backed up, and then it was done in a couple of minutes. Literally no different from any other update.
I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.
yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.
That brings back my memory (again) installing Mandriva on my old old old computer which has a NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card. It was a completely nightmare back then to install driver for it in order to get it to output at the correct resolution and refresh rate...
Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver.
I recall my older brother and his friends trying to install Linux on a system with a Matrox S3 graphics pn our families computer, HP Pavilion 133mhz with 16mb RAM.
Back when X was Xfree86 and you were required to create the X configuration without internet.
Oh yeah, the Internet... is was very hard to get things set up if you changed one file and then it turned to a command prompt with no possibility to access a browser, LOL.
Now days when the same thing happens, you could just grab the Internet phone located right in front of you and search away. Technology really changed life.
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
Yes, "Everything" is the tool to use, but to be honest, why isn't MS getting the same speed?
I'm a SE for 25 years now, sticking with C#. Microsoft always did great tech platforms and left the missing 20% to the developers. Look at the .net framework (the old one), microsoft windows until win11, office until 2025, and even Excel that can't open csv files because the delimeter is a region setting.
On one side I hated this attitude, on the other side it allowed and enabled developers to get their own business running - see jetbrains resharper functionality - visual studio up until 2024 was a mess without it...
I see this contradiction all the time. Windows is a mess but there are lots of examples of rock solid, performant applications that have been developed and maintained over decades. Everything is one, also one that springs to mind which is much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge.
While Everything is good on Linux you are spoiled with things like fzf or rgfzf (instant fuzzy search on text file content so you can find "TODO" or "ideas to try" in any file instantly).
On my Windows machines, every time I have to click my Bluetooth icon, which is about a dozen times every day, the full second pause before it presents me with a menu makes me wish I didn't need Windows on two of my systems. It's mindbogglingly stupid that a UI element has a one second delay to present a menu on...any hardware, much less "2025" hardware.
But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.
And on laptops you may need to write a script to disable Bluetooth before the lid closes and re-enable it when the lid opens because Microsoft in its wisdom forced S0 sleep but didn't care to make it stable enough so a drivers can't crash your system during it.
Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.
Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.
That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).
On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
> Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results.
There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".
For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)
Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be
I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.
I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.
My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.
> will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing
Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.
I don't think the usual distros care about the desktop experience as holistically as a long-term consumer company that Valve is. Otherwise one would expect Linux distros would be much better than what they were even 10 years ago.
I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.
Windows can be a good desktop OS. It just takes a lot of work to get it there. And you have to keep putting in a little more work with each update.
I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.
I have pro edition on multiple home systems, definitely have had more issues with my corporate issued Win11 laptop, but it's also many major versions behind what I have at home.
Here's a copy of my Mastodon post [1] from Oct 2025:
---
I had a job interview yesterday, which happened via Google Meet.
Even though I use my desktop Linux workstation and Firefox 99% of the time for everything, my first instinct was to do this interview on a MacBook and Chrome, to avoid surprises and not look unprofessional if something doesn't work, which has happened in the past. Last year, when I was asked to share the screen during a daily, I had to say "um, I'm sorry, Zoom and desktop sharing don't work on my system."
But I thought I'd first do a test on my workstation, just to see if maybe I shouldn't be concerned anymore. I was sceptical.
The ideal scenario was that on my standard GNOME 48 / Wayland / PipeWire desktop I'd be able to use Firefox for this call, and AirPods, a Logitech webcam, and desktop sharing (5K ultrawide scaled at 125%) would just work with no tweaks whatsoever.
And it did!
I've been using Linux on the desktop for over 20 years (on and off, but mostly on) and I know how to hold my Linux systems, but the situation with Bluetooth audio and desktop sharing in previous years has been... spotty. I was less worried about AirPods — I switched to PipeWire ~3 years ago and so I know Linux audio has been rock-solid and pretty much solved already. But desktop sharing used to be hit-or-miss, highly dependent on whether you used X11 or Wayland, further complicated by the use of Flatpaks.
Since my test went well, I did the interview on the desktop machine. It went smoothly, with no surprises.
Therefore, I announce 2025 as the Year of the Linux desktop :)
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!
Yeah I've been running EndeavourOS on my 2015 Air (4 GB) and it is so incredibly snappy and efficient now. Makes macOS look like a lurching zombie of an OS.
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
Adding from Mac perspective, I am also keeping an eye on Linux. I’ve hit a wall with Mac window management, and find the operating system just gets in the way for professional use across multiple of their digital “desktops”. I have no useful way to isolate work streams, and would gladly move to something better.
The blocker for Linux for me as someone who wants some level of reliability has always been fiddling with low level config, but now with Claude Code, low level config appeals!
There's a mix of both worlds that I've tried for a while and want to pick up again in 2026:
Use macOS so that I can utilize the great hardware and the well integrated drivers (e.g. sleep, performance, silence), but then for each project / work stream just fire up a lightweight linux VM fullscreen and do everything related there. E.g. all browser windows/tabs, apps, file explorer windows, terminal sessions.
When I stop working I pause the VM. When I need to continue everything is as I left it.
The main reason why I stopped was that the 2d hardware acceleration for Linux didn't work in UTM.app. I think I'll just need switch to Parallels or VMWare
Keep an eye out for PopOS Cosmic. I have daily drived it since alpha with admittedly some issues, but I see the improvement! Unlike a lot of other "Just Works" distros, it actually has proper tiling, and unlike the specialized tiling WM's I don't have to configure a bunch of stuff!
I do heavily configure applications, but all of these are terminal based now-a-days.
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.
Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.
Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.
I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.
So? It is still a pretty popular and useful piece of software even if your circle doesn't use it.
One of the big barriers to having more people use Linux is having the software packages they use to actually do work available on the platform. Image editing is the most popular software type that isn't really available on Linux with an equivalent to the commercial package that everyone uses.
The point is that if of the hundreds or thousands of people I know don't use it then it seems mathematically provable that the largest majority of people don't use them either and so it's not a strong argument against Linux becoming the standard OS which is what is happening now regardless how much some people don't want it do happen.
This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
Steam users represent well the pc gaming crowd, but they don’t represent well the majority of the mac or Linux user crowd, of course.
But you raise a good point that some users will stop using windows without ever picking up another desktop os at all. Not many that don’t already not use desktops, but some for sure.
I can’t upgrade to Windows 11. I simply can’t justify a major purchase (now a major major purchase) for a new machine for a downgraded OS. My wife would never allow it and I would hate myself for asking. If Microsoft doesn’t relent, I’ll have no other choice. I have to believe there are a great many in my shoes.
Your describing the impact Steam Deck is having without SteamOS being available to easily install on a custom built machine. The tipping point is going to come this year when people who are building new machines have the option to install Windows or SteamOS. A lot of people are going to pick SteamOS.
Sure, they’ll gain more of the gaming enthusiast segment for sure this way, and it will be a tipping point for those users. I just hope that there are ways beyond the gaming sphere to create converts though, as enthusiast gaming is still a smaller segment than people realise, and it will take a long time if this is only something people really consider with new builds, especially with today’s hardware prices! I wish I could run steamos myself reliably, but I get issues with my old nvidia pascal card still and it causes crashes for me on many games, so I can’t commit until I buy new hardware I don’t think.
PSA: Statcounter data is garbage, please stop referring to them.
This data is based on their own tracking solution customers, which is only about 0.3-0.6% of all websites (none of the big ones) and therefore highly self-selected.
Note that "unknown" is basically the inverse curve to Windows and has risen from 6 to 16% within the last year. In India, "unknown" has 55% market share. They don't give any explanation for this absolute failure of analytics, which is telling me that they really don't care at all.
There's no way to know within this context what "unknown" really is, but what I can tell you for sure is that any statistic based on this kind of data is absolutely useless.
I don't really like linking to X, but there's also this "comprehensive" snapshot involving several more sources (which might be self-selecting in their own ways...):
https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1999524735424823413
Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
I dislike windows 11 also and mostly use a mac these days and my gaming pc is dual booted with arch… but windows 10 and windows 11 for me are so very similar that I’m confused about the outrage between them. In both situations I turned off all the crap that was awful like the bloatware and so on, and then it’s kinda the same experience after that.
I've used Fedora on my laptop for over a decade. I switched my main home workstation to Fedora in 2023, and haven't looked back since.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
> there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it
Because support doesn't mean full features. It's like saying iPad supports Microsoft Excel. At some point it's the same name for different software.
I think especially because it's under Proton, that means it's the Windows version of the game you're weakening to anti-cheat too. Even Valve's own VAC has issues running under Proton.
Here's the one that kills me. Not FreeCAD, but rather Zw3d. It has a fully complete, native Linux version. But it's Chinese language only! Even though the Windows version is fully international! Come on, wtf!
I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.
Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)
I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.
I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.
Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.
It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.
For media, I'd pick a distro that has the software you need. Most should work. I like Debian or CachyOS (Arch). Thr desktop environment is likely what will impact your media experience the most. I use Hyprland but wouldn't recommend it for a media desktop.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
- No sudo, or at least no conflict between "Sudo is dangerous and can break your system" / "You need sudo to do routine things"
- Executable compatibility across distro versions and distros
- No CLI required to install software
- Lag-free pen experience
- Good touch support
- Less fragile. I shouldn't have to worry about the PC booting up into a no-GUI terminal after I installed something, or edited a file. (See point 1; don't make me edit system files to do routine stuff like communicate with a USB device without sudo, if they can break the system)
- Focus on speed, and clawing back the performance losses that have been accumulating in all OSs over the years
- Let me open an application by double-clicking it
I would love to ditch Windows and its corporate BS, but the UX is IMO not there yet. I am running a Ubuntu 24 Laptop for work and it's generally fine as I run only a small set of software, but historically things get messy when I install a broader range of software or use non-typical hardware. So, not better than Win yet for my personal uses
Bonus: Something like PowerToys. I recognize this diverges from core OS functionality.
It's not that I don't have my own set of gripes about linux, but this wishlist is weird, at least to me:
- There is nothing wrong with sudo - or to be precise, it is good thing that administrative operations are explicit. And sudo is still less annoying than Windows "admin prompt" anyway.
- Why do you care? Use apt install, yum install or apk add, whatever your distro supports.
- It is not required, there are GUI managers, but again - why?
- Got me there. I don't use pen.
- Used touch on ThinkPad some years ago, it just worked, maybe depends on the laptop?
- Until 15 years ago this was true, but I haven't seen this happen since then. Debian here if it matters.
- I'm typing this on a 15 years old desktop (with NVME, admittedly) and it boots and feels faster than a new MacBook Pro I am testing. Linux accumulated much less, if any, performance losses. I agree that Windows and Mac both became bloated.
- I think doubleclick is the default way, at least in xfce? Or I might be missing what you mean. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts mostly as I try to avoid mouse for this.
With all that said, of course it will not look and feel the same as Windows. It is a different OS, with different priorities. I like it better than both Windows and MacOS, but maybe it's because I found the combination that fits me (Debian + XFCE). Maybe take a look at KDE and XFCE?
I think I can summarize this: In life and devices, I often find processes I find are high-friction, or have room for user interface or other improvements. There is a guarantee that there will be people who will tell me these concerns are invalid.
In the case of Linux usability desires, I will make the cautious conclusion that there is a group of people who consider Linux part of their identity, and any desire for improvement or shortcoming is mentally a personal challenge. I am just a human using computers as a tool, and don't have a desire to play politics on this subject.
I think the "it's fine" / "works for me" / "Actually this is a good thing" / "Why don't you just" replies like this are an obstacle to improvement, but is often overcome.
Sure. Or we could say that when someone is used to the way things work, one is reluctant to change and will find all kinds of "faults" to keep them from taking the plunge.
As I said, I have my own list of things with linux I would like to see different, it's just that they are different. And they are not big enough to keep me in MS-land. But to each their (our) own, I guess.
>- No sudo, or at least no conflict between "Sudo is dangerous and can break your system" / "You need sudo to do routine things"
This is an unreasonable ask. No modern operating system will give you this. You have to escalate credentials on macOS and Windows as well. Typically Linux asks you LESS often than either macOS or Windows. This or I don't understand what you're asking here.
>- No CLI required to install software
Just use GNOME Software or Discover (KDE). They'll install anything on Flathub or in your distro's repositories. Use a different distro than Ubuntu though, since they are non-standard with using Snap instead of Flatpak.
>Lag-free pen experience
I have the same amount of lag in Windows as in Linux on my Surface Pro 9. What does need work is palm rejection, but you can disable the touchscreen while the pen is in use. Not the best.
>Good touch support
GNOME and GTK 3/4 apps are by far the best for this. Not quite as good as Windows though.
>Less fragile. I shouldn't have to worry about the PC booting up into a no-GUI terminal after I installed something, or edited a file. (See point 1; don't make me edit system files to do routine stuff like communicate with a USB device without sudo, if they can break the system)
?????? ?????? If you mess with system files on any system without knowing what you're doing you'll run into this problem with an OS.
>Let me open an application by double-clicking it
Double clicking what?
The executable file in your file manager? That works.
A desktop shortcut? Use a different DE than GNOME or install an extension that allows desktop shortcuts.
Perhaps this exercise will help. You are new to a given piece of software.
A: There is a UI with 2 buttons. How many degrees of freedom is that?
B: There is a text prompt, which accepts any number of unicode characters. How many degrees is that?
Glad linux works for many. Personally I've switched to windows 10 ltsc on my work laptop. Main reason for it was the scaling issues with hidpi monitors that I connect/disconnect frequently. I think scaling is better on win and no issues with any blurry app or font or anything related. I also think its faster for my tasks, supports hibernation and has better power management. The other thing was that I'm a tinkerer and under linux I've lost countless hours with optimization and tweaking. I've always monitored and had to had everything under control. Windows takes it out of my head, so I could finally work. Still linux on my desktop tho.
I do think Linux is accessible to many more people, but I would not say it is ready for the masses. The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
>I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
It’s quite funny, that I was in a very similar thread here a few years ago, where it was flat out stated that everything worked on Linux. Just like how many people state it now. When I commented that, but for example dpi scaling is still broken to an unusable level, I got a ton of unhelpful comments, either recommending basic things, or just “it works for me”. Then now, most say that everything started to work in the past year, and how great the improvement was. I know these people are probably different, but it’s funny how the general sentiment is always “everything works now, but it was shit a year ago”.
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux.
I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.
I installed, she could do the same, insert USB stick, run the graphical installer, remove it, boot into the new OS. That's all I did, on this machine, our LR TV PC, MVR PC, DR PC (for pleasant visual videos on YouTube), her PC, etc. Some are Dell, some are Lenovo, my last PC was an HP. I personally have used nVidia on multiple machines and models the past 2 decades. On mid-2000's machines I'd sometimes have to run the driver installer .sh file I downloaded from their site. The past at least 10 years, it gets installed automatically, didn't have to do anything.
Glad we agree on casual users. She uses Chrome and only 2 apps, same as when she was on Windows. Would you agree that probably most of the world is made up of casual users?
"The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user."
My wife has no idea what a terminal is and does not care - she rocks Arch and has no idea what that means. The people that attend my uncle's PC clinic to have their "Win 10 that won't run Win 11" converted to Linux don't care either.
My Dad's PC will shortly be running Linux after I've taken him through MSOffice -> Libre Office + Scribus + (Evolution||Thunderbird).
I started off my early IT career as a trainer - I once did a day of DTP with Quark Express where I was given the floppies the night before. When I hear that Linux (actually LO etc) is incapable of doing whatever, I soon find that a deep discussion about what constitutes "incapable" generally turns into a training session.
For example I often hear about documents that apparently LO can't handle. That normally ends up with me teaching (proselytizing!) about how to use styles properly or even the real basics such as the four tab forms (L/R/C/decimal). Then we might segue into spreadsheets ... ahh, you'll want a array formula there ... "a what?" and off we go again.
Now, I have wandered off track here somewhat but I'm noting the other "not ready" convo that will often happen after we have covered how to find your mouse pointer or why Windows seems to still have two Control Panels and at least three half arsed IP stacks.
I do actually have a fondness for Windows, having used it since v2.0 at school in 1986ish. That fondness is rapidly going west along with VMware (consultant for 25 years).
I fucking hate being taken for a ride and basically being abused. Today, my company received an email from Broadcom telling us that we are no longer welcome as a reseller/unpaid support org. Luckily we started migrating our customers away from VMware some time ago and only the ones with the deepest pockets and greatest inertia remain. The rest are rocking Proxmox and I'm a much happier consultant too.
One day MS might tell my company that they have decided to dispense with our reseller/unpaid support services too, once they are sure that everyone is tucked up with a subscription.
Well, they can piss off too. I am capable of running email systems on prem (and do) even though I have migrated my firm from on prem Exchange to M365. I still point MX records to our place (Exim + rspamd) and run an imapd for some mailboxes. A calendar app is all that is missing.
What I hope I am getting across is that dumping Windows and co is quite a broad subject.
I think that your choice of Deborah and Ian's (bless!) distro is a really good solid starter for 10 but to be honest after a while you should be able to run any variety of Linux.
You should be able to install multiple Window Managers eg Gnome and KDE Plasma and all the rest at the same time and be able to select which session to use from your Display Manager (eg SDDM).
I have almost certainly overstayed my welcome in this tread but before I go, I will suggest that anyone who calls themself an IT (anything) should at least have a go at all available systems. Nowadays OS/2 Warp on something like 25 floppies is not a barrier to play (spin up a VM).
it's funny because it's Linux (and especially KDE) that has bridged that gap so long ago. I told my dad just open up sftp and edit the files. He's on windows of course. There's some convoluted thing. I totally forgot he cant literally just put in the URL and edit the file in kate!
> I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Kind of glad to read this, I went into it thinking it will be another person saying "I'll use Linux forever!" the day after installing it, similar to everyone who says their new years resolution is to work out more, then proceeds to go to the gym 2 times total :)
Moved to NobaraOS back in April (gaming focused Fedora based distro) on my desktop tower and haven't used Windows since, nor have I felt the need to. Some minor tinkering with launch options for Steam games aside it's been a smoother experience than Windows was the previous 5 years.
The last Windows computer that I have is my work laptop, which is an acceptable compromise as far as I"m concerned.
Maybe I'm more tolerant, but for me Linux was ready for the desktop in 2005 and windows 11 is ok for what I use it for (cubase and games). When I switched my laptop from Windows XP it was a test. 3 years later I noticed I didn't boot back into windows not even once so concluded the test successful. My desktop later was windows only because cubase (and later steam) runs on it, but I honestly don't mind. However, I had to do some development on windows once for a client and that was indeed a horrible experience.
Not only is Linux on desktop "ready", it's been parent-proof for a long time. Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
I've run Linux almost everywhere (work machines excluded) outside of my main desktop/gaming rig for over 15 years, up until a year ago when I switched my desktop. My last Windows install is on my retro PC (98SE), and it'll stay that way, because changing that would ruin the nostalgia.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
> to see if they are in red alert to get users back
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.
Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.
They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.
Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.
There is something massive missing from Linux that for me has made it even less likely that I would use it full-time (I've tinkered with it in my youth): personal data. I have so much personal, important data generated regularly thanks to smartphones. Photos, videos, voice memos, notes, computer files I want to access anywhere, health data etc. etc. iOS/Mac has made this seamless, secure, and in 15-20 years it has not gone wrong for me. Sure there are horror stories posted from time to time but for 99.9% of people it works really well almost all of the time. Replicating this with Linux systems is difficult, requires lots of setup and maintenance, and incurs significant risk for me in terms of data loss.
I've spent the past 8 years going back and forth between Linux and Windows. When I switched back to Linux last year I was shocked how well steam/proton/wine worked compared to a few years prior. Valve is truly making incredible progress.
My only hold out until this year was my gaming PC. When Windows 10 became unsupported, so did Minecraft updates. I tried Windows 11 just enough to get MC installed, only to find out I must log into the Microsoft Store to get it to run at all. The launcher installed, the desired versions downloaded and installed, click play, Store login required. Bedrock and Java editions. Just because... why not, I guess?
I decided as long as Rocket League (Steam) runs fine, I'll stick with Linux. It did, without any tweaking (other than telling it to use Proton because, technically, it has native Linux support, just not online play), and it used to require a ton of weird tweaking.
Every game I cared about in my Steam library worked too, way more than when I tried in 2020, also without any tweaking. So did MC Java edition.
The machine has a RTX 3080, which I almost didn't buy, because I've had issue with Nvidia on Linux in the past, but haven't had to do a single tweak this time.
Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
Depends on your hardware. I have a pascal era nvidia card, and everything _supposedly_ works, but games have issues for me still that aren’t concrete, e.g. cyberpunk crashes in specific and repeatable locations for seemingly no reason and it never happens to me on windows. New amd cards are probably much more reliable. It’s no one’s fault but nvidias really that my card is unreliable in Linux, but as an end user I’ve been told many times Linux “just works” now and I’m upset that that hasn’t been my experience.
It's mostly Mass Effect that's trouble under Proton. It requires the stupid EA launcher, which is trash. I have a Lenovo Legion Go S and getting it to work reliably is an absolute nightmare. Most other games I play are fine.
I just finished playing through Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Linux with Lutris. The EA Launcher gave me a few issues (like not launching sometimes), but it eventually worked. I did not have the game through Steam.
I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
I think the main problem for Linux is the fragmentation and lack of focus. If you can live without the Adobe suite and such, any number of distros and desktops can serve you well, but it often tries to do so
An initiative like Omarchy got a lot of traction just by "picking one" of all the infinite options available, writing decent documentation for how it all works in Omarchy specifically, and having the whole thing install in minutes.
Omarchy and tiling VM's are not for everyone but I think the principles are great, and can surely be applied to other DE's as well.
I’ve reached the point where I just use a Mac for most computer stuff and a console for gaming. Maybe one day I’ll set up a Linux gaming box but after spending all day at work trying to wrangle Linux boxes, that sounds a bit too much like my job to be relaxing.
Every year starting back around the year 2000, every year until now there's always at least an article from Slashdot and then HN on the year of the Linux desktop from believers and non-believers alike [1],[2].
[1] Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop (2023):
After decades of macOS, and a bit of Windows, I tried Linux again recently and it was... good? For the first time in 20+ years, I ran into no big issues and no need to switch back.
The new UI stuff happening in Gnome-land, while controversial, has started to make the desktop feel modern and cohesive.
After years of Windows Explorer, clicking around in ~~Nautilus~~Files felt so snappy. The built-in Gnome document viewer is fantastic.
Gnome is starting to show glimmers of being the natural evolution of the Mac desktop, not a poor imitation -- which is very exciting.
Long time Linux Desktop user here. I really think Linux is a great choice as a Desktop in days of liquid glass and webviews. There are a lot of choices to make, but in the end it is working out really well (at least for me).
KDE and the new COSMIC desktop environment with tiling support are tempting, but for now I keep using GNOME until I have more time to check them out.
The things I personally had problems with is BTRFS and printers. BTRFS was completely irrecoverable after a system crash, full story see here [1]. Since I've read a lot of these horror stories while doing some research after the crash, I would encourage everyone using it to be careful and backup your system on a daily basis. I switched to ZFS with ZFSBootMenu[2] and never looked back.
Printer-wise, I have a Canon network printer / scanner which seems to use a strange proprietary protocol. On Fedora everything worked fine while on Arch I did not find a way to get this thing working (I tried hard with different options like driverless, gutenprint, cupsd etc.) - printing also seems to be a bit of a security nightmare when changing firewall settings is mandatory.
Quick note on #2 - there aren't really any issues with storing your encryption root passphrase in a file. If the file is owned by root, with no read permissions for any account, only root can access it. Since it's stored on an encrypted dataset, and your initramfs is as well, it's unreadable when the machine is off. Lastly, if anybody _does_ have a root shell on your machine, they can change the encryption passphrase without needing to know the current value.
In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.
In general I agree with you but there is one difference - a sneaky user with physical access can read it and _not_ change it, vs changing it. The latter is more detectable. But this is minor.
Yeah. Unfortunately, ZFS encryption is missing a few creature comforts of something like LUKS. I've stuck with native OpenZFS mechanisms, though, to keep the complexity sprawl to a minimum.
Absolutely - I know that but thanks for pointing that out again. There is no real "use case" for NOT storing the key into a root owned file. However, as I don't do it for myself there is no way of accidentally deleting the file, copying it quickly from my system to another drive when I accidentally left a root shell open and went to the restrooms (that never happens;) and the one single place I store the key (my head) is pretty much unreadable for everyone except me (at least for now :-) Being paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you :p
Since I reboot my notebook only about once in a month it is no real hassle to enter the key twice 12 times a year :-)
I've run BTRFS on my server (and external drive backups) for over 10 years without issues. I would use BTRFS on my main rig, but Steam (or perhaps Proton in particular) doesn't like it, so Ext4 there.
About a year ago. Games simply refused to run, and some cursory searching suggested it was because my filesystems were BTRFS and advised using EXT4 instead. That worked for me.
I am not sure why people do this. Why post a link without providing any explanation of what the link is. It is quite annoying. No, I am not going to click the link to find out.
I'll toss in my 2 cents: 1. people that have no business whatsoever now know what linux is ie sales dawgs that only touch a computer for the occasional spreadsheet. 2. 70 year old man fed up with windows, moved to linux.
it looks great, its fast and responsive let's make this happen.
It will take few more years before people start abandoning W10 due to security concerns(somehow "hackers" always find some insane backdoors and bugs in old windows, it must be a pure coincidence), hardware upgrade or just need to reinstall. But indeed, it looks like Linux is finally taking over. I'd say that beside Microsoft being so bad at their job, it's Valve and gaming on Linux in general. It's actually doable. What a miracle!
I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
> I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
Music production is indeed still a blocker. I used to use Windows for that; I am now on macOS for work and music (much better than Windows in every way! I use an old trashcan Mac Pro with Monterey for my studio computer) and Debian for my personal machines.
Given the current situation regarding the hardware getting more pricey, I was so fed up with the inconsistencies, the constant micro lagging frame rate drops that I finally bit the bullet on a Mac studio a couple of weeks ago. This happened after 17 years of being a Windows user and having built more than 20 machines unfortunately Linux does not have a lot commercial software that I needed
> then just shat all over them with start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews, and forcing Copilot down everyone's throats
Thank god I've been using Linux long enough to not experience any of that.
At my job in a large non-tech company, almost everyone uses Windows (except for the dev team) purely because of Microsoft Office. As long as that thing exists, they can do all the dumb things they want and still dominate.
Ironically, MS Office is one of the best working Microsoft software on Linux, through Office 365. It works so well, that on my Windows work computer, I worked for months editing Word docs and Excel sheets every now and then, without realizing I didn't have Ms Office installed.
The funny thing is, MS office apps looks less out-of-place on Linux because most apps are already different. On Windows 11, it looks like the forgotten step-child of Windows 8.
Maybe someone here knows a solution. The ONLY thing keeping me on windows is that my employer uses F5/Big IP edge clients. I cannot find a Linux client that can also handle Web SSO. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this?
I'm no expert here, but my employer uses no less that three different SSO services (don't ask).., and all of them work under Linux.
Web-based really ought to work. Maybe your admins are being weird, and checking the user agent? Try using a plug-in to change your user-agent to Windows
I did fight with that a few years ago. Memory is that you can get through some steps running Windows in a VM to get thru MFA checks, and then close it later.
Welcome...1998 was my year of the Linux desktop. Valve seems to have been dredging all of the "maybe"s over the last few years on a few different fronts. Big ups to them (not that they don't get enough praise...still!)
Considering how the load at Linux Mint's forums has recently increased to the point that some of it is being re-directed to gitHummed (a minute ago there were "3362 users online :: 35 registered, 3 hidden and 3324 guests" >10 secs to respond, needed to login), it appears that distro at least is seeing a lot of newcomers.
I am one full page ad away from deleting Windows 11 forever. I will struggle through infinite driver compatibility issues before I sit through a single ad while trying to work. That is my redline.
For me it was the OneDrive ads on the lock screen. And, when I accidentally clicked "enable OneDrive" (a few years ago, this might have changed), IT TOOK OVER MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER AND TOLD ME THERE WAS NO WAY TO REVERT IT!
Yeah onedrive is seriously annoying. It's nice when the free 15GB backup/sync for the desktop, pictures, and documents folder works (for people who put things there) but the way other MS products work with it seems user-hostile to me.
e.g. it took until 2025 for this RFC to be opened on moving PowerShell profiles and modules out of Onedrive: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/388. It should not be taking seconds for my powershell profile to load just because i have onedrive enabled by default.
I also had a non-technical friend recently get burned by a default MS Office setting where edited documents located in the OneDrive folder save directly to onedrive, and it only gets saved on disk when onedrive gets the new copy and uploads it back it to the user's disk. So if the MS office to onedrive integration fails your changes won't save. Apparently users have to enable a setting to first save to a folder on disk? That folder can even be the onedrive folder so onedrive will eventually sync it back up.
I've been using Linux as my desktop since 2020, I switched because I wanted to play games and maintain a development environment I'm familiar with (having run Linux servers for ~15 years at that point) that would be stable. I had long used a Windows machine for gaming and a Mac laptop for development. My Mac was stable enough, but Windows was not-- it wasn't blue screens it was constant unpredictable updates (sometimes erratically running when I didn't want them to). I had an SSD in the machine with Windows, but after installing Pop_OS! (as a happy accident) I never found a compelling reason to use Windows again.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
> If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
I don't really understand why everyone is complaining about Windows here, I'm not at all experiencing the same issues. The ARM64 version of W11 absolutely is the best OS I've ever used. I enjoy using Fedora but it's not coming close for professional use in my opinion.
If you want to understand why everyone is complaining about Windows, you just need to read what is said in those comments. On the other hand, if I want to understand why you think W11 is absolutely the best OS you've ever used, I... guess I'll have to ask you. So, would you mind sharing what makes W11 great for 'professional use'?
I'll obviously depend on what you're doing for work. Most people here are programmers, and I'm not, so your mileage may vary.
I find that W11 just works: the multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
Also, the UI is very pretty, but that's obviously subjective! And you get way more customization options on Linux.
I am not encountering most issues listed here, which I why I was confused, although I agree that Microsoft AI-bullshit-driven "vision" for Windows is a bit worrying.
You mention arm64 bit. What sku is that? a 'pro' version or did it come installed on retail hardware?
(We use Windows 11 on plastic Thinkpads (L15s, intel) at the centre I work in, an educational organisation. They have ads, insist on switching to edge even though we need Chrome for single sign on and do seem a tad sluggish).
MY NY resolution is to switch to Linux after two decades of using MacOS as primary OS. The UI direction, abysmal quality of software and people getting randomly banned from the ecosystem without good reason and with no recourse finally pushed me over the edge.
Software (as of today, still making additions and refinements): Gentoo/OpenRC (I don't like systemd), Kernel 6.12.58 with additional module for the Xbox controller, Pipewire+EasyEffects 8, KDE Plasma 6.5.4/Wayland, Steam
Experience: KDE runs pretty stable, and only has the things I really need (and not the things a vendor thinks I need).
The first game I benchmarked today was Doom (2016), which runs smoothly on 90-120 fps on high settings.
The second game I benchmarked today was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) running on ~56fps on recommended settings on the 7700.
The one game I tried today and could not get to run properly was Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl. I suspect that, given the many positives on ProtonDB, that's mainly either a configuration or Proton issue. I'll do some more research and give it another try in the near future. Right now performance drops to 5 fps immediately after starting a new game, and the CPU running on 600Mhz maximum when starting the game on Proton Experimental.
For now I am quite happy with the results, and the fact that I likely finally am able to eject Windows out of my life.
Windows still have the gamers. A lot of anti-cheat system completely block out Linux users. The Year of the Linux Desktop will still be a meme at the end of this year as well.
My guess is that this is going to shift rapidly for new games. Once the Steam PC launches, most new games will probably run fine on it. There's no logical reason for game studios to throw way significant market share over weird legacy crap related to "anti cheat". I expect the already significant amount of Linux using Steam users will grow to the point where game studios can no longer ignore it in terms of revenue and angry users and will actively test and ensure their games work flawlessly.
Of course one point here is that MS owns some of the more problematic game studios. Anti cheat here might be less about users cheating and more about them using this as a control point to ensure gamers keep on preferring Windows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think MS has much of a moat left for gaming. And it will be tempting for them as well to tap into the few percent of Linux using Steam users for selling them games. They've long stopped insisting on windows for things like Office or SQL Server as well. The whole of Azure is pretty much Linux based at this point. So, they might dig in for a bit but they'll be under growing pressure to give in.
So you’re still rolling a 6 sided dice every time you try a new game as to whether it works at all, and half the time you need to tweak it still? That’s a reasonably large barrier to entry then. I have arch Linux but I still boot into windows to play games that are supposed to be supported because I got sick of playing through 20 min or so of a game for it to crash in a specific spot and I’d have to start over in windows if I couldn’t find a reliable solution. After that happens a few times in a few games, I gave up and now I just go to windows to play games every time so I stop running into issues.
I buy games for my steam deck, only stopping to read up if they're "unsupported". Surprisingly, they seem to often STILL work in that case, this happened with Ghosts of Tsushima, which was unsupported because their online play didn't work (good riddance lol).
Never had an issue with any game running through proton. Only issue was Stardew Valley that couldn't play online. Turns out the Linux version (was default) had an unfixed bug, and choosing the Windows version with proton "Just Worked". Hilariously, "Win32 is the most stable Linux ABI"...
Yeah I’m not surprised, the steam deck hardware was picked with the best compatibility in mind. I’m aware in my case I have non-ideal hardware for Linux, such as an nvidia card.
This is also one of the primary reasons I'll buy the Steam Machine. Sure I could build whatever myself, but I actually want proper hardware support. I also don't mind that the profit margin that I pay to make my life easier goes to Valve and their Linux Gaming pursuits.
I saw someone make a good point about this the other day that that 3% of games represents a much larger percentage of the gamer population - Pareto distribution comes into play with popular games where a small number of games account for a larger share of gamers' attention.
Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Destiny 2 and Rainbox Six Siege are not supported on Linux, how much of those 30 games of 1000 are some of the most played games? I already name 20% of them.
To be honest, I've found ProtonDB to be way too optimistic when saying that games are "playable" (for example, a game running with no multiplayer still counted as "playable").
I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
I would also recommend Mint Cinnamon for anyone. Everything worked out of the box, super fast and simple. Just a breath of fresh air compared to the bloat of the big corporation OSes these days. It’s like being back in simpler times with Windows XP where things are snappy and it doesn’t get in your way
My previous setup with Kubuntu was quite developer friendly with workspaces but Omarchy takes it to the next level. I'm very happy with it. I actually like most of the default tools that come with it. For example,.I was using a lot of vim before but actually neovim is a big improvement.
It has a lot of nice-to-haves which I wouldn't have bothered setting up individually but having them altogether out of the box does improve the overall developer experience significantly.
Heavily invested in Microsoft tech, but not using windows. At all. Couldn’t be happier.
Due to word being too buggy, I switched to libre office in windows. Local outlook was also too buggy in windows, I ended up running the web version. Switched to vscode b/c VS was to buggy and slow.
Teams works better in macos. Web version of teams is ok in Linux, you don’t want to run the native app in windows, it’s a resource hog written as a web app anyway.
Dotnet and powershell (pwsh) actually works better in both macos and in Linux, than in windows. Not a little better, but much better, that ecosystem is very stable and reliable.
And azure has of course no dependency on any local windows, on the contrary, dealing with remote systems are easier in Linux, particular if you accessing remote Linux systems as well.
Then I realized there was no reason to run windows. At all. It will only drag you down when it comes to productivity, it’s an awful os, filled with malware and other shit.
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
About half the reason I used windows so much is for vtubing software. It barely works on windows, getting it working on Linux used to be a process fraught with agony and torment.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
I'm a windows user since I was 5. My favorite OS. both for home and for professional environment. Seems that Windows 11 will be the last Microsoft OS I'll ever use
Same since I was 3. Windows 2000, XP, 7. With 8 it was obvious they didn't believe in personal computing anymore, for me that was the end of the "Decade of Windows Desktop". I'm naive cause I did and switched to Linux without looking back
Let's use the influx of new users to get some money flowing!
It would be great if all those "I switched to Linux" articles would mention a few ways to donate to some important projects, helping to make FOSS thrive.
For me, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. I wanted a replacement for an M1, something beefy to build side projects etc., so I custom built a PC and put NixOS on it. Still rocking it and quite happy with it.
Tempted to do the same. Like it’s a good OS but Microsoft seems intent to drive it into the ground by being insanely annoying. PowerToys is the only bright spot right now.
So I just tried KDE with Fedora 43 on a 4 year old Intel Dell laptop (I've used Linux pretty extensively for 15+ years). It's hilariously bad :
- I managed to make a process crash just clicking around the Settings app
- Sleep doesn't work (spins up the fans, then turns them down, then turns off off displays etc but I then the fan are spinning, so something is running). Looking at the menu, supposedly Firefox is 'blocking' sleep, but I blocked it, and that just meant the fans stayed spun up during sleep. Wtf?
- Monitor connected via dock via USB-C only worked after I plugged it directly into the laptop then back into the dock
- WiFi is preferenced over Ethernet (?!)
- KDE default panel is 'floating' which means wasted pixels below it. Looks ugly and wastes precious vertical space. And the blue highglight of the active window is over the top. And the default panel height is 44 pixels!
- Default fonts especially in Konsole look ugly on a 1920x1080 laptop LCD.
- Booting takes forever
- Impressive it can stream to Homepods out the box...but it cuts out when you open the sound widget in the taskbar. And also at random points
- The default pop-up notifications are too numerous
- The Night Light quick option is to suspend it, not to enable it. Which is interesting, as it's not enabled currently. I want to enable it! There is no option to once-off enable.
EDIT:
- And during boot, the LVM2 unlock is only shown on the built-in display. Then the Login Screen is kind of mirrored, but updates are only shown on the external display ?! (ie password characters not filled in on the built-in display). Very odd
I love Linux, and MacOS might be turning into iOS and becoming buggier, but MacOS has none of those issues.
Can you run MacOS on your 4 year old Intel Dell laptop?
I've been running Fedora full-time for years and have not experienced any of the issues you have listed here. Some of your issues sound like hardware to me?
It was running headless Debian for a while with no issues, and Windows prior to that. The hardware is fine (it's a Dell dock too fwiw). Drives are NVMe
I'm not sure what you mean by your question.
---
So I tried KDE on Debian Stable, which is a bit less broken (it gets the Ethernet preferencing correct). But still:
- Logout causes the monitor to turn off then on, introducing more delays and flickering
- Only certain application seem blessed to be permitted to be pinned to the task manager when you right click in the applications menu. For the others, you have to drag and drop. You can only drop to the left of the existing icons, not the right. You can't change the order or remove them unless you enter the editing mode which is non-obviously done by right clicking then "Show panel configuration". You are however allowed to drag the open windows around without editing? Go figure
- Switching from the Dark theme to the Light theme just crashed plasmashell
- GWenview stutters between images because its default animation is enabled, and set to software. Much better turned off.
- Dolphin "Duration" column doesn't work for videos (I checked baloo was indexing properly, including with 'content') (edit: had to fully relaunch Dolphin...)
- Display scaling set itself to 170%. Seems like an odd number?
- Konsole configuration has many options, but none that I can immediately see to change the default font size ?! Well, at least I can configure Thumbnail generation and Memory Monitoring
(edit: oh right you have to create a new Profile - oh and you can't edit the current "built-in" profile. What a mess. Steps: hamburger menu, Settings, Configure Konsole, Profiles, New, Appearance, "Choose", Apply, OK, OK... not done yet...got to make your new profile the default one..."set as default", OK. Finally, you've changed the default font. Madness!)
To finish my review: there are a lot of rough edges and questionable defaults, but ultimately, KDE is impressive. It's extremely snappy, full of useful features. I can live with it
I think fast + full of features gets KDE a LOT of mileage in terms of what users put up with. But it doesn't help anyone denying that there are crashes and bugs all over.
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.
It will be mine as well but only because consumer agentic AI became available and good. Only it makes all quirks and hardware incompatibilities bearable. I tell it to investigate the problem and it does an incredible amount of digging to help find the cause and eventually, after several iteration, either fix it or implement a good enough crutch. Even then it takes minutes to hours and I would take months.
How does this work? Do you give the AI read permissions on your system, or is it just running arbitrary commands?In the latter case, is it prompting you before each?
There is no such thing as "desktop Linux". What we have instead is a large collection of distros, each with its own UX, unlike Windows or macOS which present a relatively unified platform.
I switched to Linux many years ago because a new laptop was unusably slow under the Windows Vista it came with, and I have not looked back since, yet I'd never recommend Linux to "the masses". Linux can work well for people who just browse the web and read email. Beyond that, the experience quickly becomes dependent on having a knowledgeable person nearby to help with choosing software and supported hardware or troubleshooting it.
To me, articles like this show how disconnected many technically inclined people are from average users' experience. Things like bloated software or aggressive advertising may be annoying to us, but to most users they are just part of using a computer.
With the new PopOS Cosmic and them dumping GNOME for their own UI framework based on Iced [0] (and based on rust), I have high hopes that things will move to more linux (especially for folks here who are rust-heads).
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
I started using Linux Mint on my Framework laptop. That's 99% of my desktop usage. I do have a gaming PC that's rarely used that I keep for windows. Mainly for the odd game and/or the odd windows thing but it's pretty rare since nearly all my gaming is now on my Steam Deck.
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
I handed you the fix to nearly every issue you listed, and you won’t take it. That’s a you problem.
Another factor is hardware friendly to Linux. We have multiple laptops here with different components, different distros X/W etc, and all working great… at least as well as mac or win ones.
I installed Ubuntu in October just to play around with AI models (python and CLI in general was so hard to deal with in Windows) and I realized that I didn't ever need to boot back into windows, not for gaming, not for anything. It was really relieving.
Proprietary, closed user experiences are like microwave home dinners. There’s every reason to hope they can be good, it is very common for them to be crap, and while its possible to hack your own microwave meals you will be doing so in a sub optimal environment with limited options.
An open, modular, diverse UX is like having a stocked kitchen of staples, pans, tools, fresh produce, and a stove. You add a toaster oven, smoker, water bath, grow a kitchen garden of your own, find local butchers and fishmongers. Over time you build up a small collection of both your own and others’ recipes and books and articles on food theory and trends. You can also have a microwave of course, but you’ll use it in many different ways than before.
It’s harder work but so is walking instead of driving or reading instead of watching TV. It can seem irritatingly virtuous to some that you put this extra effort into your daily life but they’ll be swayed when they see you serve up a ZFS snapshot to temporarily test an edit over 20GB of data, or pop up a new niri workspace to track and purchase concert tickets, or dive into editing your journal in a custom distraction free mode you put together showing only your editor and this week’s GPS logs.
You aren’t making everything from scratch, but you do make a few ingredients yourself — pickles and bread in the kitchen and scripts and local web hacks on your computer — and you certainly have complete control over the finished product in a way that simply isn’t possible with a microwave and a boxed lasagna, or a copy of Windows 11.
You don’t even have to cook! You can have pre-made microwave meals with a Linux desktop. They still taste better because they were made with love by a global network of friends and family instead of by Nestlé, Kraft, and Heinz.
I do what I can by serving webapps from my Linux server, or using command line, but I haven't had much success with a Linux RDP or VNC server that can compete with MS RDP for performance. If I could do that I'd switch fully. Does anyone have recommendations?
Are there any alternatives to Lightroom that are not as complex or overwhelming as Darktable. I understand that people say it’s more powerful, but it also looks like it has a steep learning curve I’m not particularly interested in tbh.
Maybe Microsoft knows Windows is terrible and won't last forever, so their short term goal is to exploit their marketshare as much as possible to grab as much cash as they can until the market moves to something else.
I switched to Linux from Win11 a few months ago, because of all the CoPilot junk. Not sure what the native vs. HTML UIs is all about, though. Are the HTML UIs slower, or is it a question of developers' time?
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
> TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Similarly I haven't booted up Windows in months now. Debian is super stable as a desktop OS and does everything I want at it now.
I am in this weird position where I am keeping a Windows installation around just in case I need it for something. I had a one job interview where they wanted me to use Visual Studio (C#) and it turned out they were fine with me using Rider anyway.
The sad part of this narrative is that Linux Desktop can be a thing, mostly because other options have gotten worse/enshittified vs Linux Desktop itself has gotten better (It has, but it is probably not the reason of the rise.)
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
Been playing with linux for 20y or so. Used it to program, mostly. Now after 15 days only of having Claude Code I'm flipping my setup to delete windows and have ubuntu as my main. I've never been so happy using a computer in my entire life: in this short time I already have dozens of customizations, custom scripts, opensource stuff personal custom forks, etc. Not to mention the fixes, oh so many fixes that could have taken DAYS of work from me and got solved by cc in minutes.
I even tried vibecoding my own custom text editor to use for todo and notes management, but that didn't go quite well lmao. (if anyone curious about my journey: after that I vibe-coded a Sublime Text 4 plugin that kinda worked, then I discovered Dynalist and it's more structured experience was a big hit. When I found out with Dynalist I didn't own my data, I tried other outliners (liked none), then I spent a couple of days trying to sort out some sort of scheme to use Obsidian similarly to Dynalist, didn't look too promising and also Obsidian is not open source, so now I'm finally trying Emacs (spacemacs) for the first time in my life for org-mode. Wish me luck!)
Linux isn’t perfect but it’s far away from the compromises one needs to make to use Windows. It’s weird frogs are comfortable slowly boiling even when Microsoft turns on the heat to the max.
> I think that Linux on the desktop is ready for the masses now, not because it's advanced in a huge leap/bound.
Yeah, right, these types of shallow pieces about Linux "for the masses" have the same structure without addressing the obvious issues:
- Windows has the following 3 components that became worse.
Well, they were bad 10 years ago (the ones that existed), so you could've spent a few hours per component to replace it (Start menu), disable it (Copilot), or find a workaround (invoke process manager with a shortcut without going through the webview in ctrl-alt-del or maybe there is some non-web app the presents the same menu of a few items) or even just ingore it (what are the serious practical issues with using dumb webviews for a tiny menu?)
But the alternative would require you spending many days learning the whole new OS where many things you're used to would simply not exist.
Want to find any file anywhere instantly (including newly created)? No, impossible, there is only NTFS Everything app that does it.
Got tired of the File Explorer garbage and got used to the greatness of Opus? Well, good luck, there is not a single great file manager over there
Want to relax and play X, Y, Z games? Oops, only A, B, C have good support, will take another decade to fix that (but at least someone is working on that)
Want to use your favorite Productivity/VideoShop app? No one is even working on that, so another decade would not fix that.
So how is it reasonable (for the masses, not you!) to replace a few fixable annoyances with a bigger list of the same and an even bigger list of unfixable stuff?
Indeed, I've purposefully avoided mentioning that because thought it's less "mass-relevant", but yeah, that's a huge blocker for any "advanced" customization OS workflow.
> Fsearch exists and is pretty much exactly that afaict
No it's not, it's worse, and Fsearch dev said that it's not possible to implement it as well due to OS deficiencies. So nothing is getting better here.
I've been using Linux now as my personal desktop OS for 10-15 years. I actually really liked windows, and still think that windows XP and 7 was great OS for me. My Linux mint is still in style of the old windows versions.
But this year I used windows at a new work, and tested using my wife's windows computer. And for the first time I really feel it's shit.
First when I moved to Linux, 10-15 years ago, windows was better and smoother. 10-5 years ago Linux was getting close and worked equally for everyday, only being problem when things really break. Now is the first time that Linux actually is equal and probably overtakes windows. Microsoft making the move of discontinuation windows 11 puts the nail in the coffin
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I've been on linux since 2014; I'm an ocassional user of windows, booting into it with much regret to deal with client's issues. I generally dislike working with MacOS... but for someone used to macOS I see no meaningful degradation of the kind there is with windows - your time is better spent earning/buying/setting up an m series mac air.
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
Welcome to the club. After years of dual-booting, I deleted my Windows partition a few years ago.
And it's not just techies. My non-technical brother-in-law asked me to install Linux for him last fall. I installed Xubuntu, showed him how everything worked, and haven't had a single "support call" since.
Good luck. I've tried to completely replace Windows with Linux over the last two decades or so, and it's still lacks polish. I really don't enjoy having half-written GUIs for different apps and having to compile my own fixes after searching for 3 hours.
I think I finally gave it up in anger, when it was on a laptop I was using for a few important projects and it cost me days of work.
I now use Windows+WSL and it has the best of both worlds: A fully functional GUI with everything I would ever need with Linux.
MacOS is really the best Nix Desktop OS out there. I would use this instead, but I still require some windows apps.
Welcome to the Linux desktop club. One small heads-up from experience: if you’re running NVIDIA hardware, expect a few bumps along the way. The proprietary drivers work well once set up, but kernel updates, Wayland quirks, and driver installs can be more hands-on than with AMD or Intel. Not a dealbreaker, just something to be aware of.
Overall though, solid choice. Hope 2026 really is your year of the Linux desktop.
I had to set up a machine owner key in my motherboard's UEFI to get my 4080 working, but it's fine enough. I haven't had any issues with nvidia drivers since.
If I remember, Linux Mint was on kernel 5.15 at the time.
The TL;DR is that fractional scaling was broken under Cinnamon, and Brightness controls were broken under KDE.
Most gaming was good, but a brand new game (Hogwart's Legacy) had major issues, including crashing and vastly worse performance compared to Windows. Another game wouldn't work with multiplayer (Anno 1800) which meant I couldn't play it with my spouse.
So I'm tempted to go back, give Linux 6.8 or 6.11 a try, and see if those issues are fixed. (I sold that laptop to a family member, so I'd probably try it on a newer Legion 5 Pro, but still with Nvidia graphics.)
For my primary machine though... what I would miss most is DxO PhotoLab. I love my Fujifilm XT-5 and mirrorless photography, and I love editing with DxO. I tried Lightroom, darktable, and a few other pieces of software, but I kept going back to PhotoLab. It's not objective - it's very subjective but I get the most joy out of using PhotoLab for editing.
I really hope (like throw a wish in a bottle) that companies like DxO consider supporting Linux[0] but I doubt it's even on their radar. Software like this uses hardware in demanding ways, and it isn't trivial to support it.
Now, this is one person's anecdote, but I do think it's a factor in overall mainstream acceptance. For Linux users, after years or decades of use, they've embraced the software available to them, but for Windows / macOS users, they will often have to consider what compromises they'll have to make. (I know Adobe is thrown around a lot, and it's a fine example, but I don't like Adobe's subscription model... I still gave it a fair shake but enjoyed PhotoLab much more!) But I think my point will still be that there's a chicken-and-egg scenario, and it's taking a very long time to get Linux to the kind of market share it needs to start forcing the hands of the thousands of companies that don't currently support Linux.
Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
Can you ring the same bell at the GTK and GNOME folks? The GTK4 thing with hamburger menus that replace everything is just a mess. I stumbled on nemo the other day while looking for nautilus. That… was a breath of fresh air: compact UI, menus, features, etc.
It’s painful seeing FOSS making some of the same mistakes as corporations
Yes, I don't like all of that stuff either. Too many FOSS does make those and other same mistakes; there is much more than just that. There are a few people that try to improve some aspects of them, but leave other the same, and sometimes it is not really an improvement (although sometimes it is a matter of opinion).
But, I mostly use command-line programs and write my own programs (and sometimes use older DOS programs, even though I have Linux), without emoji and without LLM, and also avoiding Unicode when I can, and without a desktop environment, etc.
Whoa. At around 21:30 he mentions Raph Koster. I'm 99.9% sure I read that name for the first time in my life... yesterday over at the Digital Antiquarian's blog in a story of how Ultima Online came to be.
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon sure is creepy like that.
"... there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline ..."
I beg to differ. Tiling window managers like ion, ratpoison, dwm, et. al, and the simple and elegant tooling that accompany them are a wonderful example of UI innovation.
UI/UX designers who copy, and iterate on, infantile eye candy have only themselves to blame.
So at that point a ton of people are going to be forced onto Linux?
I don't really disagree with you. More and more I see people living with just their phones. Personally it's not for me, but it's getting more and more prevalent. Even some business just have people using iPads/tables in the field, no point in lugging a laptop around when you're only using one or two apps and email.
For developers and systems administrators though, we're going to need the desktop for decades to come. Nothing else comes close in terms of flexibility. Just think how many SREs live in the terminal still. Not because there aren't UIs and applications, but because those applications can only be installed and configured from the command line.
Accounting is also a long way away from dropping the desktop, again, they need a ton of flexibility.
Microsoft is probably "correct" in that it's not really worth spending to much time on the desktop, because the average user launched a browser, Steam or some custom piece of software and just stays there all day. It's not really financially viable to make something good for the last 10%, on the other hand, those people would probably be fine with being stuck on the Windows 2000 or XP UI.
People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
>>Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
If you just install MacOS, Windows, or any major Linux distros, all work okay with default settings and drivers, almost all the time. Problems start when you want something else or more.
It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the flavor is different.
If you know how to find “reject all” on all cookie banners, Windows will be easier for you.
If you know networking and pf, then MacOS will be easier for you.
If you know how to debug driver bugs, Linux will be easier for you (and fun as hell imho)
Anyway, if you don’t want to do much more than internet browsing/video playing/basic gaming/basic coding, it simply doesn’t matter. // I would still say that the default network/firewall settings for MacOS is sketchy as hell however
Personally I can't stand the dock paradigm...no way to tell if a program is running or not at a glance, and it's not easy to switch between one application with multiple windows. A lot can be changed even if it requires third party add-ons, but I'd say it's the least intuitive OS there is.
A ton of open ports, some of them completely undocumented, and many Macs are shipped with all firewalls turned off by default. Also, I was quite surprised how easy to turn on an unencrypted VNC server without a single warning.
I’m going from macOS to linux currently. It was the hardware obsolesence that kicked things off but I definitely wont miss the constant nagging about my iCloud being full
Just turn off iCloud sync for the things you don't use and you won't fill it up. I sync passwords, notes, find my, calendar, contacts, and safari. Currently using 800MB of the free 5GB.
This is the biggest pickle for me. Mx Macbook Airs are pretty amazing, but Asahi is just not there, and I don't think it will ever be without Apple playing ball a little bit unfortunately. (I'm currently on a t2/intel macbook and it's got more quirks that I care to deal with...but it was free so gotta do what I gotta do)
Maybe for some people, I don't have the capacity to deal with that kind of thing willingly anymore. Stability and knowing I won't be running into some missing feature that may never get fixed/added. It's too small of a project and it's a major uphill battle having to reverse engineer literally everything. I do commend them but it's just too many question marks for wanting a reliable daily driver.
`apt-get update` bricked your system multiple times? How, by filling up your disk? That doesn't install or upgrade any software. It just updates the local cache of the registry. I believe you that there was a real problem I'm just confused about how it happened.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
It was apt-get upgrade, then. Whichever command updates all packages on the system. I must have misspoke, I don’t use Debian-based systems all that much anymore.
I remember it had a particular fondness for deleting old kernel versions, failing to install the new kernel, and thus bricking the system on boot. Alternatively, uninstalling the entire WM because one package had a conflict.
Weird! Sounds like maybe `apt-get dist-upgrade` or `apt-get full-upgrade`. `upgrade` shouldn't uninstall anything or update your kernel as far as I know. `dist-upgrade` or `full-upgrade` could do either. If your `/boot` partition was exhausted or you lost power in the middle of a kernel upgrade, that could leave the system in a broken state.
At any rate, sorry you had such a frustrating experience.
“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".
I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.
Out with the old, in with the new, doesn't have to be bad, but it depends on what your old and new are. I'd be a lot less skeptical about migrating OS-level sttuff from C to Rust than from C to React.
If the motivation is "Because I refuse to learn C", then both approaches will be bad. You can't avoid understanding what you're migrating, but seemingly Microsoft thinks they're above that. Fits with the average mindset of developers within the Windows ecosystem, at least from my experience.
Totally agreed, I have learned a lot of technologies to understand legacy systems. Either you run them or to migrate away from them. If you do not learn and respect the legacy system your migration is bound to fail.
I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.
The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.
Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language
There was also the fact that Microsoft introduced it 3 months before Apple announced the product that would kill the iPod, leading with the HDD model (a direct competitor to what would become known as the iPod Classic line) when Apple’s real flagship was the iPod nano.
There was also the crap that was Windows Media Player 11 which I tried to like for about a month.
There was also the incompatibility with Microsoft’s own DRM ecosystem in PlaysForSure which was full of these subscription music services, some of which were quite popular with the kind of people that were inclined to buy a Zune: folks in Microsoft’s ecosystem that had passed up on using an iPod and used something from SanDisk, Creative, Toshiba or iRiver instead. This is because they wanted to replicate the entire iPod+iTunes model entirely.
The 2006 lineup of iPods was also particularly strong, and included the first aluminum iPod nano’s. When Microsoft announced and released the Zune, they were counter-programming against that, right into the Holiday season with a new brand that had no name ID, with a product that was just like the iPod, couldn’t play any of your music from iTunes or Rhapsody, but with… HD radio.
More than a few missteps were made.
“…you’re absurd, what’s a Zune?!”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jkrn6ecxthM
Name or color had nothing to do with it imho (I like the brown personally). It was all timing. They were entering a market with a well estaablished leader (iPod) that was nearly as good, as good, or better depending on who you ask. On top of it phones themselves were taking over the music player market at the same time, which is where Microsoft really dropped the ball.
I mean, iPhone is a really ridiculous name as well if you stop to think about it.
You think having a dumb name would be a negative, but one of the biggest bands in the world is called Metallica.
[dead]
The Zune software 2.0 remains the pinnacle of Microsoft design
Windows Phone was actually doing well and adoption was taking off when Nadella came in and killed it. It didn't help that they changed the app framework and then blamed lack of apps. Such a brain-dead decision.
Windows Phone was dead in the water because many services did not have first party support, and the third party clients kept getting killed / people banned from said services.
Google was extremely aggressive in muscling Microsoft out. They refused to release a Gmail, YouTube or Maps client for Windows Phone but made sure those services did not work (properly).
And indeed on top of that, Microsoft switched UI frameworks 3 or 4 times. And they left phones behind on the old OS releases repeatedly, that then couldn't run the new frameworks.
Still, Windows Phone its UI concept was really great, and I sorely miss the durability of polycarbonate bodies versus the glass, metal and standard plastic bodies of today.
What burned me was that there was no updating from WP7 to WP8 - After playing around with one and genuinely enjoying the experience, I convinced myself to buy a Lumia 900 in April of 2012, just for Nokia/Microsoft to effectively say "that was stupid, wasn't it?" when the Lumia 920 and WP8 launched just 7 months later. Releasing a so-called flagship device that they knew would be incompatible with their upcoming OS, effectively killing software support before the year was even finished, really doesn't inspire confidence in the longevity of a product.
It was always going to be difficult, but classic Microsoft blunders and extreme arrogance set back Windows Phone dramatically.
They basically couldn't stick to a strategy and alienated every potential audience one by one. I was trying to make a Windows Phone app back then and for developers they forced them to go through an extremely difficult series of migrations where some APIs were supported on some versions and others on other versions and they were extremely unhelpful in the process.
They had a great opportunity with low-end phones because Nokia managed to make a very good ~$50 Windows Phone. Microsoft decided there was no money in that after they bought Nokia they immediately wanted to hard pivot to compete head-to-head with Apple with Apple-like prices. They then proceeded to churn through 'flagships' that suffered updates that broke and undermined those flagships shortly after they released thus alienating high end users as well.
Having worked at Microsoft I think the greatest problem with the culture there is that everyone is trying to appeal to a higher up rather than customers, and higher ups don't care because they're doing the same. I think that works out OK when defending incumbency but when battling in a competitive landscape Microsoft has no follow through because most shot callers are focused on their career trajectory over a <5 year time frame.
Oh, this was like the windows 11 before windows 11. I didn't realize Microsoft made the same mistake twice.
Windows Phone 7 was doing well; for some reason they did a breaking change with Windows Phone 8 and broke app compatibility. I will never understand that, they kneecapped themselves despite being multiple laps behind Apple and Google already…
The reason was moving from the CE kernel to the NT kernel between WP7 and WP8. This was supposed to make developers’ lives much easier when porting Windows 8 apps. The minimum hardware requirement had to be bumped and old WP7 devices could never meet them.
At the very least they could've created some kind of translation / compatibility layer, to ease the transition
The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production.
Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.
> dysfunctional middle-management
I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently.
Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale.
The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out?
Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal.
Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions.
Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."
Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy.
Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem.
I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.
> completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management
Corporate dysfunction made more sense to me when I realized higher execs, because of span of control, are too busy to dig into any issue themselves.
Consequently, it's trivial in most orgs for the only information path to be through managers.
Also why I think more effective execs tend to have parallel investigation resources. E.g. their do-anything assistant who they task with fact finding
You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.
Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper.
I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years.
But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.
Seattle cost of living is still significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. A lower salary goes even farther given the lack of state income tax, too.
But in a world where Amazon prices are the same, car and gas are the same, cost of living is just rent?
Housing makes a huge difference, but there is also the cost of groceries, dining out, etc.
Basically the housing price difference can mean buying a nice house close to your job vs renting a room in a share-apartment.
Best of both worlds is to save in a high-cost area then move to a cheaper area.
Not sure what you're getting at. Housing is the main cost, and is drastically cheaper in Seattle. Food in Seattle is a bit more pricey.
Housing is just one component, there is a lot of other stuff that has equal price: if you order stuff from Amazon the price is the same, if you buy a new car the price is the same.
State and local taxes can make a significant difference for general goods, and especially car purchases.
Amazon also isn't a restaurant, and while they do sort of sell groceries through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, those are again priced locally.
Because those languages were created at Microsoft Research, not DevDiv nor Windows.
All different business units.
Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can?
I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold them.
I think uncompetitive compensation is the dominant factor in Microsoft’s decline. Up there with stack ranking. They claim that it’s 30% cheaper to live there but then they go and capture most of that 30% for themselves.
It is my opinion that developer ability is on a Pareto distribution, like the 80 20 rule when 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The job market is more liquid for those that are extremely productive so it’s pretty easy to for them to get a pay rise of 30% by switching companies. In the worst case you can often come back with a promotion because, like many companies, Microsoft is more likely to promote you when trying to poach you back. Doing a 2 year stint at Amazon was quite common. The other problem is that when your best people leave is that the process is iterative, not only are you getting paid less but you are now working with people who couldn’t easily switch jobs. You start being surrounded by incompetence. Stack ranking, which I hear is still being done unofficially, also means that you put your promotion and career in danger by joining a highly productive team. So it is rather difficult to get highly productive people to work on the same team.
Being paid less, being surrounded by incompetence, and being forced to engage in constant high stakes politicking really sucks.
I still think there are ways to hand hold people a bit and grow an ordinary engineer to a better one who is fit for system programming in maybe 12 months.
Otherwise as you said the only way is to offer the best compensation so that people don't leave. But again those people probably would leave for different reasons (culture e.g.).
Compensation is the easiest way and probably the most essential. It is hard to maintain a good culture when your best keep getting poached away with large sums of money. If Microsoft was the only game in town then sure they could get away with paying less, but they're not so they cannot.
Yeah you have a point. I wonder what the NT kernel team looks like nowadays.
Compensation can be the issue if the cost of living is creating problems. If you need 150k to just live in an area, 160k is not motivating while 250k gives you the peace of mind to focus on the work, not just on surviving. If you live in Bangladesh, the difference between 160k and 250k is almost meaningless.
Also compensation is a sign of respect and influences motivation. If you position yourself lower in the market, there is no reason to deliver top results for less money, correct? This attracts mediocrity, especially in management, and slowly kills companies. Usually there is no way back, no large company can replace the entire management and once and the mediocre ones will reject new, better ones.
It's not about the amount, but the type of people who stay when they could move to a higher paying job.
And the fact that it's impossible to poach people from companies offering a higher salary than you do. Unless you give them something more, like better conditions, or "mission", or the idea to work on something cool, but I don't think any of those apply to Microsoft.
If you could earn $250k why would you settle for $160? There are reasons people do but still money is a powful signal
A kernel engineering job is much more fun than yet another backend web gig. A large part because when working with typical web coding people do not want you to do actual software engineering.
But the actual issue is that if you underpay people they will not feel respected and valued so they will either not be motivated or leave. So you cannot pay below market, but you do not need to pay FB salaries either.
Theoretically (never happened to me), I'd definitely do a $100K Windows kernel, or whatever kernel work, over a $150K DE job that I currently have (I used to have a $220K DE job too and I won't hesitate to switch).
I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about.
Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.
Raymond Chen tries to document it, but he's just one person.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing
From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
Yeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.
Because .NET is under DevDiv, F# came from Microsoft Research, and the OS is under Windows team.
Windows team even refuses to have managed bindings for DirectX, like Apple and Google do on their platforms.
Managed DirectX and XNA were pushed by highly motivated individuals, and lasted only as long as they stayed at Microsoft.
Longhorn was politics, then Google ate their lunch on mobile with Java and JavaScript userspace, across two platforms.
DevDiv is a "here C++ rules!" silo, even the Rust adoption is being widely embraced at Azure, less so on Windows team.
Yeah, as far as I understand it, that politics is: Sinofsky entrenched NIH on every team that he touched.
Just curious what is DevDiv? Tools division?
As I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS.
Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
I think it also includes GitHub now.
I believe GitHub is under a different group (CoreAI), not DevDiv.
Thank you!
I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.
I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s
my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim
Win32 is basically frozen on Windows XP.
Since Vista most newer APIs are done in COM, or WinRT nowadays.
I remember a thin book describing changes to the API in Vista and 7 compared to XP and it was really thin. Just a few extra APIs to be able to show controls in the taskbar preview and things like that. Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.
>Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.
I've heard a Microsoft executive talk about win32 as legacy that they want to replace. I don't think that's realistic though, it's probably the last piece of technology keeping people on the platform.
It was the goal with UAP and UWP, but they clearly messed up the execution.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-an...
Win32, the C API, is stagnant since Windows XP, other than some ...Ex and ...ExN kind of additions.
As mentioned above, the new APIs are mostly delivered as COM, occasionally with some .NET bindings.
There is still a silo trying to push WinRT now on Win32 side, although given how they made a mess of the developer experience only those with Microsoft salaries care about it.
This oldie shows some of the background,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
Last year I ran into the issue of .NET network bindings not returning all NICs. [0] This issue has been present in the .NET since the genesis and only resolved in .NET 9. I had to create my own Win32 wrapper so everything works properly in .NET 4 frameworks ... still need to maintain Windows 7 pre-SP1 support in some applications.
Smells like Microsoft was trying to create APIs based on assumptions versus a 1:1 method that exposes managed code and hides unmanaged.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/100824
Except for anything that came after XP, you need to at least make use of COM.
WinRT can be avoided if you don't do any modern stuff like the new context menu, WinUI, or Windows ML.
And those new APIs (at least the context menu API) apparently require a "package identity", which requires a signed MSIX installer, which requires paying for a code-signing certificate, unless I'm missing something in the docs.
That is because of what people claiming UWP is dead, haven't gotten the whole picture.
UWP as separate subsystem, yes it is deprecated, and no one should be using it, although Microsoft was forced to introduce .NET 9 support on UWP, because many refuse to move away from UWP into WinUI 3.0, given the lack of feature parity.
Now, when WinRT was made to also work on Win32 side, it also brought with it the concept of package identity, which forms a part of the whole app isolation from UWP similar to Android, now on Win32 as well, hence the MSIX.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/app...
On the specific case of the context menu, it depends on what is being done,
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...
You can work around app identity when using the suggested alternative of unpackaged Win32 apps with sparse manifests.
Me too, back then I wrote applications either using the raw Win32 API (GetMessage, TranslateMessage, DispatchMessage, etc), or using MFC.
I think MFC is now long-time dead and buried, but at the time I liked it despite the ugly macros.
MFC is actually still supported by MS, works in the most recent MSVS, and even occasionally receives updates.
> the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude
I think Microsoft’s framework chasing has been a betrayal of that philosophy. Internal divisional politics have been major drivers behind fracturing and refusing to unify the stack and its UI approach, and without clear guidance from the Office team the direction of the entire platforms UI is opaque. Short term resume and divisional wins at the expense of the whole ecosystem.
A developer centric platform would let developers easily create platform specific UIs that look modern and normal. As-is the answer to how to ‘hello world’ a windows desktop app is a five hour “well, akshully…” debate that can reasonably resolve to using Meta’s stack. “VB6 for the buttons, C++ for the hard stuff” is a short conversation, at least.
I think it's more of result of "okay we made it and it works, how we now can excuse still being employed in same head-count" development. And the answer is of course "rewrite, rewrite, rewrite". UI works well, no major bugs ? TIME TO CHANGE IT TO BE "MODERN"
Operating systems should always use C/C++ UI frameworks, and as little costly abstraction as possible, period. Anything else is wasting resources.
It’s not so much about wasting resources as it is about the added latency, jankiness, and inconsistency in look & feel hurting usability.
And how about reliability? Having to start a web browser and a web framework to display core OS functionality adds a lot of moving parts that can break.
Latency is literally wasting resources
The point was that users mostly don’t care about wasting resources, but about usability. If usability wasn’t impacted, few people would care about resources being wasted. But since usability is very much impacted, people (rightfully) complain.
Wasting resources affects usability, and not just through latency.
It doesn’t necessarily. A lot of resources are being wasted without impacting usability. Users only start noticing and complaining about it when it does.
It does, period. Less things can run in parallel, fans get louder, batteries live shorter and devices feel old years before they should, all of which directly affects usability. The user not noticing the direct cause or having enough resources to waste to at least perform some tasks acceptably doesn't change anything.
Changing UI framework all the times is fine, so is not changing anything for decades. Different strategies that both have value. Reasonably you want to be somewhere in the middle, depending on the use case. In an industrial setting, production infrastructure, etc... you generally want to change as little as possible "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". On emerging, consumer-facing technology such as mobile in the 2000s, "move fast and break things" makes sense.
But anyways, it is not the problem. The problem is just that Microsoft today is doing a terrible job.
The best example, I think, is the control panel. Starting from Windows 8, they changed it. Ok fine, you may like it or hate it, but to be honest, it is not a big deal. The problem is that they never finished their job, more than a decade later! Not all options are available in the new UI, so sometimes the old control panel pops up in a completely different style with many overlaps in features. And every now and then, they shuffle things around in hope that one day, the old control panel won't be needed anymore.
If you make a change, commit to it! If you decide to replace the old control panel, I don't want to see it anymore. It is certainly easier said than done, but if you are a many-billion dollar company and that's your flagship product, you can afford to do hard things!
Using a web engine to build UIs is fine too. As an OS-wide component, a web engine is not that big in terms of resource use, if properly optimized. The problem with Electron is that every app ships with its own engine, so if you have 10 apps, you have 10 engines loaded. But everything uses the same engine, and apps don't abuse it, then the overhead is, I think, almost negligible. It is rare not to have a browser loaded nowadays, so system components can take advantage of this. But again, you need to do it right and it takes skills, effort and resources.
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
vscode is successful despite electron, not thanks to electron. The electron part is the worst of it.
No, it does not suck.
I attempted to use WinUI 3, and could not even get PNGs to render the colors correctly, no matter what setting I tried.
Then I gave Tauri a try, and everything worked out of the box, with the PNGs rendering even better than in the Windows Photos app.
Building the UI was much easier, it looked better, and you get to build the "backend" in Rust.
Nothing about this sucked.
WinUI 3 is basically utterly pathetic bul_sh_t attempting to pretend that it is a UI framework. A wet paper plane passing itself off as a passenger aircraft. Please compare with a real desktop UI framework like GTK or Qt. Or just a more modern one like Rust Iced or gpui/slint
Blaming this on Ballmer is a serious stretch, I can't see how you would come to that conclusion. Developers Developers Developers was for the launch of .NET and it brought us a platform that is still considered cutting edge 25 years later.
UX was fine in the Windows Forms days, and WPF was a large step forward (responsive layouts, etc...). The problem was after that it all fell apart with Windows 8 and the attempt to switch to Metro, followed by the Windows Store fiasco and attempting to move to a sandboxed application model.
It all comes down to Microsoft's failure to adapt to mobile/tablets in so many ways. Which is kind of hilarious, because they had some really cool tech for the time (the PocketPCs were pretty fun back in the day, before touch came along).
Remember when Silverlight was _the_ future?
How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.
Problem with SwiftUI is that it only works well on macOS 26, maybe one version prior. AppKit works well on all macOS versions.
Building a macOS 26 only app in SwiftUI today is a great UX, just as fast as AppKit.
But it takes quite some effort to turn an iOS SwiftUI app into a real macOS experience. Though most macOS optimizations help for iPadOS as well.
When I was a developer I was not amused at all with constantly changing APIs to be honest. And UWP was really sucky. Way too aligned with mobile and tablet which nobody actually uses on windows. Even as a user I'm glad it didn't take off.
>Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI
I'll take AppKit -> SwiftUI over Win32-> windowsx.h -> VB6 -> MFC -> ATL -> WTL -> WFC -> WinForms -> WPF -> WinRT -> UWP -> WinUI3 -> MAUI.
Even with all that Microsoft still went outside and used React Native for the start menu and Electron for the Visual Studio installer and Visual Studio Code.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1]. Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
Still in some cases you have to wait a few minutes to get working Start menu search or menu itself on a new not low-end device.
My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of course, takes another five minutes to become functional. Meanwhile I have a 13 year old low end Asus laptop at home that boots to a fully usable Linux desktop in well under a minute.
It’s been this way for over a decade. The year of the Linux desktop was 2009; the world is only just catching up.
> My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password.
Yeah, that’s a misconfigured system. I bet you can fuck up Linux enough to get a similar experience.
I’ve always been using Windows and the only time I ever had to wait that long was around the Win98 times on slow hardware.
After login, I can instantly use everything on Win 11, and the only delay is a bunch of apps starting (that I chose to start on boot).
A lot of it is probably the shoveled-on layers of enterprise endpoint security bloatware.
I bet stuff like Crowdstrike has a major influence into this. I used my work computer before and after Crowdstrike and the difference in boot time and general behavior is huge.
In the challenges section, they list a few challenges with React Native that they had to overcome. Interesting thing is that MS already has XAML, WinUI etc., that they built and control and don't havr those "challenges". I don't understand what the team got by using React Native compared to using XAML. Anyone from MS here who could provide some technical benefits for this decision?
Maybe being not laid off along with other long-term staff and being part of easy-to-hire easily expendable army of JavaScript / TypeScript developers? XAML etc. are specific skills the developers are rarer and usually paid better than JS/TS devs.
Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
If Microsoft didn't kill it, lack of YouTube and other Google services would. That was the primary difference. With iPhone you had access to Google-owned stuff, Google never allowed other platforms like Symbian/MeeGo/Windows Phone to ever use its online services.
The game was broken from the start. Microsoft had no chance.
I had a cheap $25 Lumia (520?) that was the most delightful phone I used.
If it wasn’t for 3rd parties sunsetting their apps, there would have been no reason to give it up.
Despite being a highly underpowered dirt cheap phone it was incredibly smooth and fast to use.
Spot on, .NET Native and C++/CX on top of COM is what .NET 1.0 should have been all about.
Unfortunately it was a big ball of mud in mismanagement.
You would really like Uno Platform. It is the same API.
https://platform.uno/platform/
The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
wait till you see the bugs introduced by their AI rewrite!
Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
When Windows 11 first dropped, a Win3.x file picker buried deep in the OS was memed around (I believe it was the picker for a .dso file for ODBC).
The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
It's been a while since I used Windows regularly or seriously, but I remember start menu search actually being good - maybe around Win7 days? You would just press <Win>, type a few letters of the software you wanted and hit enter, and it would work every time with minimal latency.
You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.
I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.
They are apparently replacing the run dialog with a new "Modern Run" dialog, so we can look forward to that also not working properly:
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/after-30...
the only sane tool remaining in windows is the RUN :( I wont even touch this shitty OS without RUN
This is purely insane. Doesn’t Microsoft violate accessibility laws in some jurisdiction due to this?
"rules for thee not for me"
'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term.
If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results.
Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu.
I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.
It also orrelates with missing the first letter off search terms, such as when you start typing immediately after opening the start menu
I can only reproduce this by hovering the Windows icon with the mouse and having the finger on a character, in order to press it immediately after clicking. In that case most of the time the Start menu does not open at all, and sometimes it opens but does not have the letter.
When I use the Windows key to open the Start menu I cannot reproduce this, as eg. Win + E opens the Explorer instead of the Start menu.
It does not appear on my machine as if this could possibly happen when opening the Start menu during regular use. Can you reproduce this on your machine?
This rarely (but not never) happened on my gaming desktop when I had windows on that. On the other hand, on my surface go, if it only eats the first character, that’s a good showing, so it’s likely device performance specific
Still, that shows an issue of using fuzzy search for Bing but not programs. There should be a precedent on local items. A typo is far more likely than a web search, especially when the web search is resulting in the intended application.
Did no one think of that feedback loop? That if the web search is suggesting an installed app that that installed app should be prioritized?
Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
If your opinion mattered, you would work at Microsoft setting the targets that the Start Menu team need to meet to hit their bonuses/not get fired.
But you don't. So it doesn't.
(I've pinned Visual Studio to the start menu.)
It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.
The best is none. I have no idea why anyone would want a web search there.
Either I am stupid or you're being dishonest. There is no one click way to disable it. Only on pro versions of windows, with a group policy otherwise a couple of obscure registry keys no regular users know.
I stand corrected. I didn’t know the Home Version has no option to disable it. You are right for calling me out.
No group policy is needed on Windows 11 Pro, it's in the settings:
---
Type something in the Start menu
Top right meatballs menu button
'Search settings'
'Let search apps show results' -> Off (or disable only Bing)
---
I don't know about the Home edition.
That doesn't appear for me. Win 11 Pro 25H2.
After you typed a Search term, there is no menu button at the right on the same vertical row as the 'All / Apps / Documents' bar?
You can also launch that Settings page by running in powershell:
Or just 'Settings' and in the left navigation 'Privacy & Security' -> 'Search'Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
the thing you need to trust is that pressing that combination shows the legit OS stuff, that it can't be intercepted (Secure Attention Key).
how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant
windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes
On the new Windows 365 Link thin client I think it is, not sure about normal builds of Windows though?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKg-Z6m8nM - 6:50
bump, tbh I think this is hyperbole as on my w11 pc the ctrl alt delete menu hasn't changed since 2021's RC (which was just a reskinned version of w10's, which was just a reskinned version of w8.1's... going all the way back to vista)
It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.
What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
Holding the control key down stops the task list from updating. Release the key to resume updates. Works on Windows 10 and 11.
For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.
I actually need the Processes tab more frequently, which shows the process hierarchy and relates to the visible windows. For example to restart Explorer.
It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.
Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.
I'm not maining windows, but i dual-boot it on my gaming pc (no BF6 on Linux). In all fairness, Windows is no better or worse now than it was 5 years ago. Its not like its suddenly become completely unusable (or more unusable, depending on your perspective). Copilot fluff is being injected a lot of places, but you can largely ignore it and use windows as before. I do feel like Windows is on some sort of life support, that its not the main focus of Microsoft. Again, this is not really new.
I have to use a Windows laptop for work; it was migrated to Windows 11 a few months ago. Win 11 is definitely, measurably worse than Win 10, at least in the configuration that my employer's IT forces on the machine. One example is that its UI is much slower (typing in the search box at normal speed often misses keystrokes, for instance -- never happened on Win 10).
I'm not a regular user of Windows, so I don't know if the changes I've seen were within the past 5 years or over five years ago. But ...
I've noticed Microsoft has introduced things like programs hijacking the screen (e.g. first launch of Edge, even if the launch was unintentional) and they have been making it increasingly difficult to make a local account on installation (even in the Pro version). Things like promotions for Xbox whatever popping up while I'm at work also tweak me the wrong way. Of course they don't know I'm at work, which is all the more reason not to do it!
As an operating system, I would rate it as fine. Compared to Linux, it appears to have performance issues in some areas, with file access being the main one I notice. They have made some progress in some areas (improved terminal, winget for software management). Compared to Windows of 20 years ago, the base operating system appears to be much better. But none of that means little when your main goal is for the "operating system" to get out of your way and let you use what matters.
I am forced to use Windows 11 at work on my laptop (produced in 2023). When resuming after hibernation - from the time I press the power key and I see the the release-lock prompt screen with the password/PIN box - that's maybe 5 to 10 seconds; but from that point, until the OS actually responds to key presses and shows characters typed into the text box - well, that takes between 2 and 3 _minutes_.
And that's just one example. I curse Microsoft every day.
On my work laptop, the only Windows 11 OS I use bare metal, the UAC prompt can take 30 seconds to one minute to show after requesting _Task Manager_ to start. IT decided to hide a number of applications behind UAC.
Newer version of Windows seem to add latency were there was none before.
Yeah. Crazy when the two most significant desktop OS's (Windows and MacOS) have native UIs where something has gone horribly wrong.
I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
I didn't say that.
From the parent:
> if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
You certainly repeated it and didn’t dispute it. I ask again—What is horribly wrong where you agree enough to repeat the claim?
You can dislike the visual approach of modern macOS but on a framework level the UI ecosystem is generally very powerful and feature rich.
With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.
Don't put words in my mouth. The parent said:
> if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I was merely extrapolating their conditions and their words.
It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.
Both are absolutely fine. I don't get it.
I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.
macOS is fine on all officially supported machines. Windows 11 is fine on high-end machines, and sucks on everything else. I have to use Windows 11 for work unfortunately, an almost bare install with just the two programs we use added, no background stuff or other extra resource hogs, and it just. sucks. shit!
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
Sucks a whole lot less for users though.
I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.
After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.
Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.
That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.
For whom?
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
You forget you’re a minority. Most users use one platform, or at most one work one private (probably with different software). So most software should be optimized for the platform, not consistency across them.
I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.
Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.
As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
There's one problem: If you're competent with non-web UI technologies, it's probably time to schedule your colonoscopy.
Late millennials and gen Z have been spoiled by declarative, reactive frameworks that work identically whether you're doing a local UI or the Web, and the tools (for example Figma) that have grown up around these frameworks. Using C++, Objective-C, or even Swift will be just fine for a personal project, but if you're talking something that needs to be maintained and refined over the long term by a team, you will have a much worse time finding people competent in those languages than in JavaScript+React+Electron.
This is also one of the reasons behind rewriting everything in Rust: C is so dangerous, people who don't already know it inside and out are unwilling to touch it. Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust, and would vastly prefer it over working in C given the choice, so keeping a C project maintained has gotten a whole lot harder.
> Virtually all of the younger system developers are already working in Rust
I'd love to know where you get your statistics from.
FYI, as an anecdote, I am 'younger', in the sense of 'only recently joined the workforce', and I write 100+ lines of C and C++ a day, both at work and in side projects. Haven't touched Rust once, although I would like to get into it.
And funnily, the one UI framework I did use at work is Avalonia, which is strongly inspired by Windows Presentation Foundation.
I write plenty of declarative UI too in the form of SwiftUI (where it makes sense; often on Apple platforms the imperative frameworks are better suited) and Jetpack Compose.
Declarative UI has its upsides, but it’s hardly a panacea. There are places where it’s a straightforward dramatic improvement and then others where it’s an awkward contortion at best. Reactivity can be great but works in imperative setups too.
The explosion of popularity of front end web frameworks comes down almost entirely to two things: accessibility and commodity talent. It has a low bar to entry and JS+React is the closest the industry has come yet to achieving its undying dream of cheap, easily replaceable, interchangeable developers. In most other aspects it’s objectively worse than alternatives.
I would hard disagree. Give me QT to make cross-platform applications that properly manage resources, have low latency, and barely register in memory usage.
There was a cross-platform QT tool, running on macOS, Windows, and Linux, for debugging and updating the firmware for an embedded platform solution. macOS & Linux both were quick and fast to code. Windows needed more work and also an abstracted write management system because the application was bringing the OS to screeching halt while writing the debug messages to a SQLite database. The write issue was only on Windows. HTML pages / reports were being saved into the SQLite database and viewable with-in the application. This was all packed into a single file executable so nothing and to be installed, just copied to the computer and ran.
Often low-end hardware is sold in product solutions and frameworks like QT are better suited to make the end user happy with load and response time than HTML5. The only reason I find bloated frameworks being used on such hardware is because the developer only understood one programing language and one UI framework. The former developer who's job I took over jumped ship because he did not want to learn WPF and only knew WinForms.
QT, HTML5, React, WinForms, Gtk ... are all tools in a tool box and each has a proper usage. Hell, if I ever make an iPhone based application I will be learning Swift and the Apple frameworks for such a task.
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.
Same here. I developed desktop applications for 15+ years and was really frustrated with Microsoft's direction for the UI around the time of Windows Phone. While Windows Forms may not be the best, it worked for decades until then. Now even if someone wants to build a desktop application using native UI, it's next to no resource at all because it's all about cross platform nowadays.
macOS has two separate Telegram apps, technically speaking. The one (most) everyone uses is AppKit based.
Ugh, opposite. CSS is the fucking worst way of laying out a UI. How many human lives have been lost to div class layout nonsense that a better system could handle directly.
Not for the user, unless I forgot that today is opposite day.
I am forced to use windows at work. Last week my web searches looked strange ... not getting the ussual results. Bing! Some windows update reset my default search from google to bing. Again! Microsoft's dirty tricks will never stop.
I am considering writing software specifically to feed random junk jnto Microsoft's telemetry cloud. I will call it "fusk-MS" and it will send random searches to Bing and fake screenshots of a linux desktop to copilot ten times a second until Microsoft stops acting like such a jerk.
"update" lol
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?
That was actually fun if not very useful (I had a dynamic school timetable programmed as my "wallpaper" as I was in high school at the time).
Not very useful because you quickly realize you mostly obscure your desktop with actual applications you want to use on your computer.
They tried fixing that by creating widgets, but effectively had the same problem. Then they tried fixing that by making them always present, but then you just lose desktop space. I guess it makes sense if you have two monitors, but at that point, why not just have the full apps open in those same spots? Widgets are a great idea that I wish we could make useful somehow.
A loI of people don't know about this and I don't know if they really went ahead with it (been away from everything Microsoft professionally just about three years now) but at the time they were pretty serious about the idea to build all Office apps in React, so (according to them) they could more easily build "great multi platform experiences" from the same codebase.
Why they thought it couldn't be done with the .NET stack they already had (this was after the purchase of Xamarin and Blazor becoming a thing, mind you) still baffles me.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.
QML is not JavaScript.
(While you can use some JavaScript from QML, the application still have a C++ core. QML applications can still crash. There is no DOM with QML, no browser overhead)
QML is absolutely not JavaScript. It's a markup language to describe user interfaces, spiced with JS for certain interactions. All heavy lifting behind the scenes is done in C++ - the QML runtime as well as the application logic and data models.
The last point is very astute.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).
Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.
> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.
Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:
- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.
- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.
- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.
This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.
Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.
JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.
> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.
In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".
So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.
Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
> but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs
But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform!
Oh wait
Not a developer, what's the issue with React Native?
React native will always be more resource intensive than a native framework because it relies on a whole javascript runtime to work. Don’t know about others, but I personally don’t want a system tool that I cannot disable easily to be designed like this - it ultimately be less responsive and take up more of my resources from other apps.
Yet somehow I am OK with gnome shell.
> their own UI libraries
It doesn't help that their own UI libraries are unfinished, unpolished, hot garbage.
I commend on using React, though. Like it or hate it, React is the closest to one true framework for everything.
WPF is pretty complete and used widely in various engineering, finance and corporate applications. It is HiDPI compliant. It is mature (developed since pre-Vista). It supports modern look too (can even look like Win-11, they officially support it!). Some of the beloved Microsoft late programs like Windows Terminal are written in it. If they use it and keep improving it, it has a huge potential.
But no. We cannot have nice things. Microsoft has lost the ability and management capability to release nice things. For some reason, Microsoft is trying to reinvent the wheel with UWP (aka WinUI2) and WinUI3. They are trying to replace everything with these half-arsed libraries when very complete and well-thought, future proof stuff already exists in Windows' DNA. They are shitting on the work of their earlier engineering.
How the start menu is programmed is of zero consequence to me.
> is of zero consequence to me
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
Same. 2017 thinkpad, latest KDE, snappier than my 2025 Dell with Win11 and a processor that should be about 60% faster for single thread tasks.
Windows 11 has zero lag on the start menu so I don't care if it is hand coded assembler or some bloated web crap.
I even ran Windows 10 on Thinkpad x240 a couple of years ago, it also ran fine.
Performance isn’t a consequence?
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands.
Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
> It’s literally the ads and bloatware
I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.
Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.
Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.
I’m a big fan of staying private. I own a company that took VC many years ago but we strategically stayed private for a decade now and made peace with the VC. You just keep being honest, stacking customers, playing the long game. I see the value of being public but as a 100 to 500 person company that grows steadily, you keep it private and remove the quarterly earnings. The constant drive to hit the quarterly nut at all costs causes so many stupid short term benefits that hurt long term value. There is an enormous number of small companies you have never heard of like this. It’s just so short sighted to kill the golden goose to juice some profit
That’s awesome! I want to do the same if I start a company.
Indeed quarterly earnings make people think short term, disregard long term. Focus on growth above all else
How did you manage to agree with VC?
Bought them out
It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later.
What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps.
That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.
> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.
I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.
But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.
I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.
I was never really a serious gamer and don't do it much at all any longer.
But one of my senses is that the sort of games that really benefited from a desktop system--primarily Windows--like serious simulations and resource allocation games are increasingly fringe.
Certainly there are games on Linux today but I also wonder if a lot of people won't decide, as you say, that consoles are just easier.
Their point was that Steam Deck is a gaming console with Linux on it.
That’s true. You’d have to be a little picky. I know you can plug in a KB and mouse but… why?
Still there are a huge number of games from indies or small publishers that may not make it to console but would still work fantastically with a controller. Or maybe they’re successful and they will make it over, you just don’t want to wait the two years.
Those kind of games are the ones that make me consider getting a Steam Deck.
I'm one of those non-technical users. For the past week or so I've been messing with getting a servarr stack going with a vpn. Mapping a network drive to the host device, configuring the docker images, port forwarding, etc., is all foreign to me and I'm still not sure I understand what port-forwarding is. I used portainer since I like having the GUI. I can just view the dashboard and poke around to explore, rather than staring at a terminal wondering what to do, searching a vague description of the problem, and pasting some cryptic command I find. Instead, I notice the "logs" button and click that.
All that to say that I am interested enough in a Linux machine, but don't feel I have the requisite knowledge to drive one.
> It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions.
Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.
KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers.
As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience
Thank you very much in advance!
That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes.
Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.
Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:
* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye
* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
Hah. Feh, I still use that once in a while. It is one of very few image viewers that can lock in pan and zoom and then look over multiple frames.
Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.
It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.
It might be the alignment of several forces :
- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat… - Windows 11… - (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it. - LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.
All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
Yeah, I should have been a bit more nuanced. I don't mean to dismiss the incredible mass of raw human achievement that is open source.
Microsoft is one of Valve's direct competitors and Valve is totally dependent on Microsoft. Among the notoriously poorly-received changes in Windows 8, Microsoft also started to clamp down on who can run software. Valve saw the writing on the walls and released their first Steam Machines. But those flopped due to the state of Linux gaming at the time, they started pouring resources into Proton, which had the distinction from WINE in that they would develop Linux-specific patches.
For sure, Valve would have nothing if WINE hadn't already done the bulk of the work, if Vulkan didn't exist, if Linux didn't exist, etc. But there's a world where Microsoft decided not to rock the boat with Windows, and in that world, Linux gamers would almost exclusively be dual booting.
Avalanches start with small movements ...
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022.
Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...
For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation".
When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
In reality, people will probably keep their insecure Win 10 machines running as long as they can. Linux is a leap especially for busy folk (most people in this economy).
I predict a rise in antivirus company share prices.
If Apple do make the rumoured cheap A-series based MacBook, it could be a hit.
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
I was a bit puzzled by Firebird (I thought that’s a fork of Thunderbird, like, say, LibreWolf or Waterfox), but I couldn’t quickly find the project, so my assumption is that it’s just the misprint, and author thinking of Fire-fox -> Fire-bird, not being into ecosystem for too long to remember the actual bird. Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the point author’s making, and I’m happy there’s a new Linux adopter now. Thanks, M$, I guess.
Maybe it's supposed to be BetterBird [1], a Thunderbird tracking fork whose logo is a red phoenix rather than a blue bird?
[1] : https://betterbird.eu/
I misremembered the name, it's Thunderbird. But thanks for your comment, I did not know about Betterbird, but I will give it a try!
Yes, I did not get the name right. Firefox -> Firebird is what I misremembered.
I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.
I've even seen gaming YTbers I occasionally watch being fed up with that shit and moving or at least trying Linux
MS fucked up
Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment
Yeah, myself and several friends of mine with EOL Windows 10 PCs are looking to jump ship.
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
Simpler - it is now objectively a much better OS and it’s free
For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs.
For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless experience (laptops!!) that you’d expect from posts like these.
For a Linux savvy user, it’s definitely worth the switch. I haven’t had any ads in months and it’s magical
Sleep and suspend are still kinda buggy on Linux, and probably will be for the near future. This is more of a vendor thing (as most of the annoying problems in Linux) than a dev thing. To the point where I mostly avoid it, I either shutdown the laptop completely or just let it plugged on a desk 24h
Things are improving, and we should see this fixed in the next years I assume. This is the good thing about it, Linux will probably be fixing all annoying bugs in the next few years.
See this for something that might help your Wi-Fi issue. https://gist.github.com/gornostal/192e2ae29af3da1baeea384d0f...
I had the same problem on my new Yoga laptop with Fedora and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi card.
Thanks, will give that whirl. Appreciate the info
Holy shit that did it, really appreciate that link sir
This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with
Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air
Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI
Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.
I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).
Counterpoint: I've been using enterprise thinkpads for the past 15 years and never had issues with wifi, or suspend. So again, it's about how you choose your hardware so it works with Linux...
I had a Thinkpad T480s that was absolutely perfect with Linux (Mint), although very underpowered, but that was due to Intel CPU.
This year I got a T14s Gen6 AMD as a replacement, and it's essentially unusable on Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Mint), but works fine with Fedora and with Windows.
On Ubuntu and Mint, X just locks up every 80 seconds or so, and I have to hard-reboot it (or switch ttys and restart X). Nothing in syslog, nothing in dmesg, nothing in X.org.log to show what might be going on.
I have the T14s Gen3 AMD and everything just works with CachyOS and Fedora. In general I tend to use as recent kernel as possible with AMD. They do update their drivers a lot in every Linux version.
I've also used enterprise thinkpads for the last 10 years. No wifi issues on those, but sleep and bluetooth issues as described. I have no idea if Windows would have been more reliable.
If you mean with ”just working” that any distro works out-of-the-box with any piece of hardware ever existing, then obviously no, that won’t happen. It won’t happen with any OS ever.
I have never had any issues with any Linux-distro regarding WiFi. Most hardware I have used has been largely compatible even. Maybe I have just been lucky, but it seems there’s millions of us who are really lucky these days.
What has also changed from 2010’s is that the documentation like Arch wiki is a lot better. You can also ask an LLM to help you configure things - obvs the docs are better and safer - so if and when you do have a problem, there’s actually sources to help you fix it.
A lot of the WiFi and BT issues were due to proprietary firmware blobs which weren't included in package management repos either due to licensing issues or decision not to pollute OSS repos with nonfree software.
This has mostly been solved by either putting them in the nonfree repos or just the fact that WiFi hardware vendors aren't using such stuff anymore.
I still remember pulling firmware blobs for my Broadcom cards, then it magically worked fine. It was far from trivial and I think that's what caused a lot of people who tried Linux on laptops in early 2000s to turn away.
> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work
This is why I don't use Windows. Early last year I paid for a copy of "Windows 10", and it didn't support most of the hardware in my laptop. Even plugging in a mouse I had to use keyboard shortcuts to let it load a "driver", and after that it still didn't support the scroll wheel. Wifi didn't work at all, and wired network was painfully slow. It did at least support FHD resolution in 24-bit colour but very slowly.
My audio interface was completely unsupported, my MIDI interfaces were completely unsupported. Eventually I gave up attempting to run it, wiped the laptop again, reinstalled Ubuntu, and went for Bitwig instead of Ableton, and I've had no problems since.
Maybe one day we'll see the year of Windows on the desktop, but this isn't it yet.
This was true in 2010. I use to have a USB wifi adapter that was specifically meant to make sure linux would always work. I lost that adapter years ago.
I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.
Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.
I wanted to try Fedora recently but it crashed over and over in the install on the screen where you select a time zone. Looked it up and tons of people had the same issue and didn't find any fix that worked for me.
Turned me off Fedora completely.
Tried two other distros on the same machine right afterwards with no problems though.
I've made the complete switch recently (been using Linux on and off for years, including WSL as well) after my pleasant experience with the Steam Deck and it's been fantastic, but not without issues. A recurring issue over the years of trying Linux has been WiFi drivers; I really can't afford to have WiFi not work as I can't run an Ethernet cable to my computer room. I get that Linux heavily relies on volunteer work, but a broken WiFi driver due to an update is a big roadblock.
Beside that though, I'm happy to have left Windows behind completely.
>> what really blew me away is that everything... just worked
It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.
But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.
I had a similar experience after switching to Fedora Silverblue (but any of the immutable Linuxes will probably do - and over time, I'm sure most will be like that). Had set aside a bunch of time to do a major version update, everything fully backed up, and then it was done in a couple of minutes. Literally no different from any other update.
I've done more than a handful of major version updates since then, and almost don't bother to backup any more.
> I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed.
Could you share the model, please?
Which laptop was this? Could you share the exact model?
yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.
Yeah I started in 98 or so and stopped in 2009. I should check back in.
That brings back my memory (again) installing Mandriva on my old old old computer which has a NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card. It was a completely nightmare back then to install driver for it in order to get it to output at the correct resolution and refresh rate...
Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver.
Ah, something never change.
I recall my older brother and his friends trying to install Linux on a system with a Matrox S3 graphics pn our families computer, HP Pavilion 133mhz with 16mb RAM.
Back when X was Xfree86 and you were required to create the X configuration without internet.
Oh yeah, the Internet... is was very hard to get things set up if you changed one file and then it turned to a command prompt with no possibility to access a browser, LOL.
Now days when the same thing happens, you could just grab the Internet phone located right in front of you and search away. Technology really changed life.
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
> It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches.
Fixed via the Everything app - instant search of any file in a nice resizable/sortable table
> if something is broken I have the control to fix it.
Instant search doesn't exist, how do you fix it?
What year are you posting from lol?
>It was faster to rg to search files
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
On Windows, just use Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/
Yes, "Everything" is the tool to use, but to be honest, why isn't MS getting the same speed?
I'm a SE for 25 years now, sticking with C#. Microsoft always did great tech platforms and left the missing 20% to the developers. Look at the .net framework (the old one), microsoft windows until win11, office until 2025, and even Excel that can't open csv files because the delimeter is a region setting.
On one side I hated this attitude, on the other side it allowed and enabled developers to get their own business running - see jetbrains resharper functionality - visual studio up until 2024 was a mess without it...
I see this contradiction all the time. Windows is a mess but there are lots of examples of rock solid, performant applications that have been developed and maintained over decades. Everything is one, also one that springs to mind which is much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge.
> much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge
I have found Beyond Compare to be very good on Linux, even on large files/directories.
While Everything is good on Linux you are spoiled with things like fzf or rgfzf (instant fuzzy search on text file content so you can find "TODO" or "ideas to try" in any file instantly).
Fzf also works on Windows. That being said, most content search I need is for PDFs and Office documents.
paperless-ngx?
On my Windows machines, every time I have to click my Bluetooth icon, which is about a dozen times every day, the full second pause before it presents me with a menu makes me wish I didn't need Windows on two of my systems. It's mindbogglingly stupid that a UI element has a one second delay to present a menu on...any hardware, much less "2025" hardware.
But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.
And on laptops you may need to write a script to disable Bluetooth before the lid closes and re-enable it when the lid opens because Microsoft in its wisdom forced S0 sleep but didn't care to make it stable enough so a drivers can't crash your system during it.
Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.
Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.
That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).
On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.
Why do you touch your bluetooth icon so many times?
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
ReFS riffs on reflinks - take a gander at XFS.
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
> Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results.
There is likely too big of a gap in "terminology".
For example, the file explorer startup is so "Instant" that even Microsoft officially added an option to preload the app to fix the delay. But if you don't notice / don't appreciate real instant, then sure, you won't understand the complaints. (or maybe your hardware masks it well enough)
Similarly, if you've never used Everything or better file manager for search, you might get used to the bad search results and call them "decent" since you're not aware how awesome it can be
I have the same confusion as you do. Note, I am not ignorant about Linux or MacOS. I ran Linux as my main OS from 2001 - 2015, still run it on a server. MacOS from 2015 - 2021. Since 2021 I am on Windows for my main machine (a laptop) and my gaming desktop.
Win 11 seems fine to me. I do see Copilot appearing everywhere. I don't see ads from MS at all, though- sometimes my vendor driver-management software asks me if I was to extend my warranty. Not Win11 fault, though. Start menu seems fine, phone integration is nice, OS runs very stable (in the very early days of using Linux 20y ago I marveled at how much more stable it was than Win98! That gap is gone now as far as I can tell).
My suspicion: I am paying for M365 (or whatever they call it now) and so they don't advertise it (or anything?) to me. I don't see CandyCrush or other random things added to my machine. All seems OK.
I've read that Win12 will be subscription-based. Maybe I am personally already there. For now, M365 offers me good value- I use MS Office and OneDrive. But if this changes I can see the equation balance shifting and I will then change platforms again.
TMI, I left MacOS because of Gatekeeper and the inability to repair hardware. Before that I left Linux for work interoperability and regressions I saw on my personal mobile hardware. Neither were "bad", really, I have experienced different trade-offs among the three choices I have used. For now, Win 11 is working just fine for me, with no fuss.
> I do see Copilot appearing everywhere.
> I don't see ads from MS at all
You can only pick one.
I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.
I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.
My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.
> will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing
Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Pop!, Deepin (and the list goes on) all have corporate backing. Steam is a well-known consumer brand though, so that might make a difference.
I don't think the usual distros care about the desktop experience as holistically as a long-term consumer company that Valve is. Otherwise one would expect Linux distros would be much better than what they were even 10 years ago.
I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.
Windows can be a good desktop OS. It just takes a lot of work to get it there. And you have to keep putting in a little more work with each update.
I set up a lot of PCs and what has astounded me is how much less work it takes. Unlike with Windows, most of the defaults are fine. I don't have to scour through all the settings after a fresh install. I only need to install half as many apps. I don't have to run powershell scripts to debloat everything. And I don't have to worry about updates undoing all the changes I've made in the future.
Is your windows 11 home edition or managed by corporate IT?
I have pro edition on multiple home systems, definitely have had more issues with my corporate issued Win11 laptop, but it's also many major versions behind what I have at home.
[dead]
Here's a copy of my Mastodon post [1] from Oct 2025:
---
I had a job interview yesterday, which happened via Google Meet.
Even though I use my desktop Linux workstation and Firefox 99% of the time for everything, my first instinct was to do this interview on a MacBook and Chrome, to avoid surprises and not look unprofessional if something doesn't work, which has happened in the past. Last year, when I was asked to share the screen during a daily, I had to say "um, I'm sorry, Zoom and desktop sharing don't work on my system."
But I thought I'd first do a test on my workstation, just to see if maybe I shouldn't be concerned anymore. I was sceptical.
The ideal scenario was that on my standard GNOME 48 / Wayland / PipeWire desktop I'd be able to use Firefox for this call, and AirPods, a Logitech webcam, and desktop sharing (5K ultrawide scaled at 125%) would just work with no tweaks whatsoever.
And it did!
I've been using Linux on the desktop for over 20 years (on and off, but mostly on) and I know how to hold my Linux systems, but the situation with Bluetooth audio and desktop sharing in previous years has been... spotty. I was less worried about AirPods — I switched to PipeWire ~3 years ago and so I know Linux audio has been rock-solid and pretty much solved already. But desktop sharing used to be hit-or-miss, highly dependent on whether you used X11 or Wayland, further complicated by the use of Flatpaks.
Since my test went well, I did the interview on the desktop machine. It went smoothly, with no surprises.
Therefore, I announce 2025 as the Year of the Linux desktop :)
[1] https://hachyderm.io/@ku1ik/115388713511052943
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!
Yeah I've been running EndeavourOS on my 2015 Air (4 GB) and it is so incredibly snappy and efficient now. Makes macOS look like a lurching zombie of an OS.
Yep, we upgraded an old ~2010 iMac to 8gb and put Mint on it, good as new.
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
Adding from Mac perspective, I am also keeping an eye on Linux. I’ve hit a wall with Mac window management, and find the operating system just gets in the way for professional use across multiple of their digital “desktops”. I have no useful way to isolate work streams, and would gladly move to something better.
The blocker for Linux for me as someone who wants some level of reliability has always been fiddling with low level config, but now with Claude Code, low level config appeals!
There's a mix of both worlds that I've tried for a while and want to pick up again in 2026: Use macOS so that I can utilize the great hardware and the well integrated drivers (e.g. sleep, performance, silence), but then for each project / work stream just fire up a lightweight linux VM fullscreen and do everything related there. E.g. all browser windows/tabs, apps, file explorer windows, terminal sessions. When I stop working I pause the VM. When I need to continue everything is as I left it. The main reason why I stopped was that the 2d hardware acceleration for Linux didn't work in UTM.app. I think I'll just need switch to Parallels or VMWare
Keep an eye out for PopOS Cosmic. I have daily drived it since alpha with admittedly some issues, but I see the improvement! Unlike a lot of other "Just Works" distros, it actually has proper tiling, and unlike the specialized tiling WM's I don't have to configure a bunch of stuff!
I do heavily configure applications, but all of these are terminal based now-a-days.
How does it compare to Omarchy? The whole space looks extremely interesting, and on the other hand I need reliable
Like a modeling clay sculptor? I guess if a rock sculptor went too far, they would have trouble adding rock back.
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
You're not missing much by dumping windows.
“Runs perfectly” but it’s 2025 and you’re getting 2.5 hours of battery life.
Seems more hardware than OS related, my MacBook Air M2 on Asahi Linux gets to 9+ hours.
> Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
Damn, even my several year old Intel + Nvidia MSI GE66 can match that. Why is it so bad?
Really only Photoshop is the big gaping hole I feel as a linux user. Gimp is just atrocious.
There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.
I thought the same about Gimp, until I sat down and tried to learn it's workflows. Once you adjust, it's pretty great. imo, ymmv, obviously.
2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.
Year of the Linux desktop perhaps; Year of the Linux laptop perhaps not..
2.5h of battery life is absolutely not typical though. Linux on laptops is often fine.
Picking hardware with good support helps a lot. I would expect system76 to be a safe bet though (but I haven't tried their hardware).
I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.
I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.
Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.
Depending on what you are doing, if you don't fancy Gimp, then maybe one of: Krita, Darktable, Inkscape?
Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.
Have you tried Photoshop's online version that runs in a Web browser?
(it uses wasm)
I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.
So? It is still a pretty popular and useful piece of software even if your circle doesn't use it.
One of the big barriers to having more people use Linux is having the software packages they use to actually do work available on the platform. Image editing is the most popular software type that isn't really available on Linux with an equivalent to the commercial package that everyone uses.
The point is that if of the hundreds or thousands of people I know don't use it then it seems mathematically provable that the largest majority of people don't use them either and so it's not a strong argument against Linux becoming the standard OS which is what is happening now regardless how much some people don't want it do happen.
gimp is actually pretty good, but things are in different places than photoshop and that's a huge change.
This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
Regarding the Steam Deck, Linux is _already_ 3% of Steam users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey, while MacOS is under 2%.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
Steam users represent well the pc gaming crowd, but they don’t represent well the majority of the mac or Linux user crowd, of course.
But you raise a good point that some users will stop using windows without ever picking up another desktop os at all. Not many that don’t already not use desktops, but some for sure.
I can’t upgrade to Windows 11. I simply can’t justify a major purchase (now a major major purchase) for a new machine for a downgraded OS. My wife would never allow it and I would hate myself for asking. If Microsoft doesn’t relent, I’ll have no other choice. I have to believe there are a great many in my shoes.
Why not? There’s a known way to skip the security thingo that complains and it works on basically anything that runs windows 10
There are ways to upgrade to Win11 on unsupported hardware, though also ways to extend security on Win10 for a few more years
Ever tried to get answers from "the Windows community?"
https://github.com/hahndorf/Set-Privacy
Still not the year of the Windows desktop.
Windows doesn’t really have an enthusiast community, it just has users.
s/users/hostages/
I don’t feel like a hostage on any of my OS’s to be honest, even windows.
Your describing the impact Steam Deck is having without SteamOS being available to easily install on a custom built machine. The tipping point is going to come this year when people who are building new machines have the option to install Windows or SteamOS. A lot of people are going to pick SteamOS.
Sure, they’ll gain more of the gaming enthusiast segment for sure this way, and it will be a tipping point for those users. I just hope that there are ways beyond the gaming sphere to create converts though, as enthusiast gaming is still a smaller segment than people realise, and it will take a long time if this is only something people really consider with new builds, especially with today’s hardware prices! I wish I could run steamos myself reliably, but I get issues with my old nvidia pascal card still and it causes crashes for me on many games, so I can’t commit until I buy new hardware I don’t think.
Most charts I've seen indicate Linux already passed 5% usage worldwide.
Not quite: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
PSA: Statcounter data is garbage, please stop referring to them.
This data is based on their own tracking solution customers, which is only about 0.3-0.6% of all websites (none of the big ones) and therefore highly self-selected.
Note that "unknown" is basically the inverse curve to Windows and has risen from 6 to 16% within the last year. In India, "unknown" has 55% market share. They don't give any explanation for this absolute failure of analytics, which is telling me that they really don't care at all.
There's no way to know within this context what "unknown" really is, but what I can tell you for sure is that any statistic based on this kind of data is absolutely useless.
Cloudflare is a better alternative: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&loc=&dt=5...
I don't really like linking to X, but there's also this "comprehensive" snapshot involving several more sources (which might be self-selecting in their own ways...): https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1999524735424823413
Note that they count the distribution ChromeOS as separate from other Linux, for me they add up to 7%.
But they also show both Android and iOS at 0% which makes me think the dataset is not really representative.
Android and iOS don't show because it's filtered for desktop.
I can’t distinguish the colors of the Linux and MacOs colors on that chart.
You can turn individual lines on and off on the chart by clicking on the legend.
Depends on how you count it
Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
I dislike windows 11 also and mostly use a mac these days and my gaming pc is dual booted with arch… but windows 10 and windows 11 for me are so very similar that I’m confused about the outrage between them. In both situations I turned off all the crap that was awful like the bloatware and so on, and then it’s kinda the same experience after that.
I've used Fedora on my laptop for over a decade. I switched my main home workstation to Fedora in 2023, and haven't looked back since.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
It's a great, extremely stable system.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
[2] https://distrobox.it/
> there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it
Because support doesn't mean full features. It's like saying iPad supports Microsoft Excel. At some point it's the same name for different software.
I think especially because it's under Proton, that means it's the Windows version of the game you're weakening to anti-cheat too. Even Valve's own VAC has issues running under Proton.
Reading comments like that really don't motive me to switch to Linux for gaming on my +2000 gaming library.
> FreeCAD
Here's the one that kills me. Not FreeCAD, but rather Zw3d. It has a fully complete, native Linux version. But it's Chinese language only! Even though the Windows version is fully international! Come on, wtf!
Best luck! My year of the Linux desktop has been 2006, so it's now 20 years (with a short 5yrs relapse around 2012). I never look back.
(Similarities to smoking cessation are neither coincidental nor intentional, but unavoidable.)
Mine was a few years earlier (YoLotD). Sadly, I kept up with the fags until 2018 ...
FTR to other readers, "fags" in this context refers to cigarettes (per the GP's parenthetical remark about smoking).
Very kind of you to note a potential en_GB => en_US buggeration.
I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.
Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)
I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.
The vertical integration is what makes for the small amount of configurations. The total count of OEMs they have to satisfy or work around is one.
How's battery life if you run Linux in a VM on Mac OS?
I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.
Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.
It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.
https://wiki.debian.org/KDE#Installation
For media, I'd pick a distro that has the software you need. Most should work. I like Debian or CachyOS (Arch). Thr desktop environment is likely what will impact your media experience the most. I use Hyprland but wouldn't recommend it for a media desktop.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
Wishlist:
I would love to ditch Windows and its corporate BS, but the UX is IMO not there yet. I am running a Ubuntu 24 Laptop for work and it's generally fine as I run only a small set of software, but historically things get messy when I install a broader range of software or use non-typical hardware. So, not better than Win yet for my personal usesBonus: Something like PowerToys. I recognize this diverges from core OS functionality.
It's not that I don't have my own set of gripes about linux, but this wishlist is weird, at least to me:
- There is nothing wrong with sudo - or to be precise, it is good thing that administrative operations are explicit. And sudo is still less annoying than Windows "admin prompt" anyway.
- Why do you care? Use apt install, yum install or apk add, whatever your distro supports.
- It is not required, there are GUI managers, but again - why?
- Got me there. I don't use pen.
- Used touch on ThinkPad some years ago, it just worked, maybe depends on the laptop?
- Until 15 years ago this was true, but I haven't seen this happen since then. Debian here if it matters.
- I'm typing this on a 15 years old desktop (with NVME, admittedly) and it boots and feels faster than a new MacBook Pro I am testing. Linux accumulated much less, if any, performance losses. I agree that Windows and Mac both became bloated.
- I think doubleclick is the default way, at least in xfce? Or I might be missing what you mean. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts mostly as I try to avoid mouse for this.
With all that said, of course it will not look and feel the same as Windows. It is a different OS, with different priorities. I like it better than both Windows and MacOS, but maybe it's because I found the combination that fits me (Debian + XFCE). Maybe take a look at KDE and XFCE?
I think I can summarize this: In life and devices, I often find processes I find are high-friction, or have room for user interface or other improvements. There is a guarantee that there will be people who will tell me these concerns are invalid.
In the case of Linux usability desires, I will make the cautious conclusion that there is a group of people who consider Linux part of their identity, and any desire for improvement or shortcoming is mentally a personal challenge. I am just a human using computers as a tool, and don't have a desire to play politics on this subject.
I think the "it's fine" / "works for me" / "Actually this is a good thing" / "Why don't you just" replies like this are an obstacle to improvement, but is often overcome.
Sure. Or we could say that when someone is used to the way things work, one is reluctant to change and will find all kinds of "faults" to keep them from taking the plunge.
As I said, I have my own list of things with linux I would like to see different, it's just that they are different. And they are not big enough to keep me in MS-land. But to each their (our) own, I guess.
"In life and devices, I often find processes I find are high-friction, or have room for user interface or other improvements ..."
Agreed - and I find the same thing.
Distilling these processes to terminal commands has the highest potential for usability and efficiency gains.
>- No sudo, or at least no conflict between "Sudo is dangerous and can break your system" / "You need sudo to do routine things"
This is an unreasonable ask. No modern operating system will give you this. You have to escalate credentials on macOS and Windows as well. Typically Linux asks you LESS often than either macOS or Windows. This or I don't understand what you're asking here.
>- No CLI required to install software
Just use GNOME Software or Discover (KDE). They'll install anything on Flathub or in your distro's repositories. Use a different distro than Ubuntu though, since they are non-standard with using Snap instead of Flatpak.
>Lag-free pen experience
I have the same amount of lag in Windows as in Linux on my Surface Pro 9. What does need work is palm rejection, but you can disable the touchscreen while the pen is in use. Not the best.
>Good touch support
GNOME and GTK 3/4 apps are by far the best for this. Not quite as good as Windows though.
>Less fragile. I shouldn't have to worry about the PC booting up into a no-GUI terminal after I installed something, or edited a file. (See point 1; don't make me edit system files to do routine stuff like communicate with a USB device without sudo, if they can break the system)
?????? ?????? If you mess with system files on any system without knowing what you're doing you'll run into this problem with an OS.
>Let me open an application by double-clicking it
Double clicking what?
The executable file in your file manager? That works.
A desktop shortcut? Use a different DE than GNOME or install an extension that allows desktop shortcuts.
"No CLI required to install software"
This seems very odd ... a quick one-liner install process is by far the simplest and most efficient way to install a piece of software ...
What other fragility and unnecessary complexity comes along with graphical installation tools ?
Is this a pain point for non-technical users you might prepare this system for ? Who do you have in mind when you specify this ?
It is not simpler, if you don't know the exact magic line that does it for the specific application. GUI tools allow for easy and convenient search.
Easy and convenient is highly subjective and context dependent. Thankfully GUI tools exist for people who find that convenient.
Perhaps this exercise will help. You are new to a given piece of software.
I read the docs and go for B.
Now try to automate/script it.
Good luck with A
For scripting or automation, I want something like a code editor or IDE; not a terminal.
Glad linux works for many. Personally I've switched to windows 10 ltsc on my work laptop. Main reason for it was the scaling issues with hidpi monitors that I connect/disconnect frequently. I think scaling is better on win and no issues with any blurry app or font or anything related. I also think its faster for my tasks, supports hibernation and has better power management. The other thing was that I'm a tinkerer and under linux I've lost countless hours with optimization and tweaking. I've always monitored and had to had everything under control. Windows takes it out of my head, so I could finally work. Still linux on my desktop tho.
I do think Linux is accessible to many more people, but I would not say it is ready for the masses. The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
>I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
It’s quite funny, that I was in a very similar thread here a few years ago, where it was flat out stated that everything worked on Linux. Just like how many people state it now. When I commented that, but for example dpi scaling is still broken to an unusable level, I got a ton of unhelpful comments, either recommending basic things, or just “it works for me”. Then now, most say that everything started to work in the past year, and how great the improvement was. I know these people are probably different, but it’s funny how the general sentiment is always “everything works now, but it was shit a year ago”.
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
I hope they will get burned this time. MS has been playing with fire, I agree.
> The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
My wife is the average computer user and has used Linux apps for years and never opened a terminal once.
Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux.
I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.
I installed, she could do the same, insert USB stick, run the graphical installer, remove it, boot into the new OS. That's all I did, on this machine, our LR TV PC, MVR PC, DR PC (for pleasant visual videos on YouTube), her PC, etc. Some are Dell, some are Lenovo, my last PC was an HP. I personally have used nVidia on multiple machines and models the past 2 decades. On mid-2000's machines I'd sometimes have to run the driver installer .sh file I downloaded from their site. The past at least 10 years, it gets installed automatically, didn't have to do anything.
Glad we agree on casual users. She uses Chrome and only 2 apps, same as when she was on Windows. Would you agree that probably most of the world is made up of casual users?
Installing is straightforward these days. You live boot a USB and install it from the actual OS
Booting from a USB is not straightforward to the average person. Even understanding what that means is advanced.
I mentioned the same thing somewhere north of your comment.
My wife rocks Arch and could not care less.
"The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user."
My wife has no idea what a terminal is and does not care - she rocks Arch and has no idea what that means. The people that attend my uncle's PC clinic to have their "Win 10 that won't run Win 11" converted to Linux don't care either.
My Dad's PC will shortly be running Linux after I've taken him through MSOffice -> Libre Office + Scribus + (Evolution||Thunderbird).
I started off my early IT career as a trainer - I once did a day of DTP with Quark Express where I was given the floppies the night before. When I hear that Linux (actually LO etc) is incapable of doing whatever, I soon find that a deep discussion about what constitutes "incapable" generally turns into a training session.
For example I often hear about documents that apparently LO can't handle. That normally ends up with me teaching (proselytizing!) about how to use styles properly or even the real basics such as the four tab forms (L/R/C/decimal). Then we might segue into spreadsheets ... ahh, you'll want a array formula there ... "a what?" and off we go again.
Now, I have wandered off track here somewhat but I'm noting the other "not ready" convo that will often happen after we have covered how to find your mouse pointer or why Windows seems to still have two Control Panels and at least three half arsed IP stacks.
I do actually have a fondness for Windows, having used it since v2.0 at school in 1986ish. That fondness is rapidly going west along with VMware (consultant for 25 years).
I fucking hate being taken for a ride and basically being abused. Today, my company received an email from Broadcom telling us that we are no longer welcome as a reseller/unpaid support org. Luckily we started migrating our customers away from VMware some time ago and only the ones with the deepest pockets and greatest inertia remain. The rest are rocking Proxmox and I'm a much happier consultant too.
One day MS might tell my company that they have decided to dispense with our reseller/unpaid support services too, once they are sure that everyone is tucked up with a subscription.
Well, they can piss off too. I am capable of running email systems on prem (and do) even though I have migrated my firm from on prem Exchange to M365. I still point MX records to our place (Exim + rspamd) and run an imapd for some mailboxes. A calendar app is all that is missing.
What I hope I am getting across is that dumping Windows and co is quite a broad subject.
I think that your choice of Deborah and Ian's (bless!) distro is a really good solid starter for 10 but to be honest after a while you should be able to run any variety of Linux.
You should be able to install multiple Window Managers eg Gnome and KDE Plasma and all the rest at the same time and be able to select which session to use from your Display Manager (eg SDDM).
I have almost certainly overstayed my welcome in this tread but before I go, I will suggest that anyone who calls themself an IT (anything) should at least have a go at all available systems. Nowadays OS/2 Warp on something like 25 floppies is not a barrier to play (spin up a VM).
it's funny because it's Linux (and especially KDE) that has bridged that gap so long ago. I told my dad just open up sftp and edit the files. He's on windows of course. There's some convoluted thing. I totally forgot he cant literally just put in the URL and edit the file in kate!
> I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Kind of glad to read this, I went into it thinking it will be another person saying "I'll use Linux forever!" the day after installing it, similar to everyone who says their new years resolution is to work out more, then proceeds to go to the gym 2 times total :)
(oh, and then, I noticed this is Xe!)
Moved to NobaraOS back in April (gaming focused Fedora based distro) on my desktop tower and haven't used Windows since, nor have I felt the need to. Some minor tinkering with launch options for Steam games aside it's been a smoother experience than Windows was the previous 5 years.
The last Windows computer that I have is my work laptop, which is an acceptable compromise as far as I"m concerned.
Maybe I'm more tolerant, but for me Linux was ready for the desktop in 2005 and windows 11 is ok for what I use it for (cubase and games). When I switched my laptop from Windows XP it was a test. 3 years later I noticed I didn't boot back into windows not even once so concluded the test successful. My desktop later was windows only because cubase (and later steam) runs on it, but I honestly don't mind. However, I had to do some development on windows once for a client and that was indeed a horrible experience.
Not only is Linux on desktop "ready", it's been parent-proof for a long time. Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
I've run Linux almost everywhere (work machines excluded) outside of my main desktop/gaming rig for over 15 years, up until a year ago when I switched my desktop. My last Windows install is on my retro PC (98SE), and it'll stay that way, because changing that would ruin the nostalgia.
Linux and freebsd have been ready for the desktop for me in 1998 already.
Yeah I know, I spoke to "you" around that time and a bit earlier, but I wasn't convinced enough to switch. It seemed like arcane magic to me then.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
> to see if they are in red alert to get users back
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
I think they have moved on to other sources of revenue, so I don't think they care that much anymore.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Yeah, it's all AI, Azure, and Office 365. Everything else is basically a forgotten product by microsoft. Even xbox is basically dead at this point.
Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.
If it were forgotten it’s worked as it did. The problem it’s that it’s nerfed to funnel you through the new AI or Cloud user harvesting.
VS (and vscode) also get some love, though mainly as drivers towards getting things published using Azure infrastructure, SQL Server too.
Yup. They’re not stupid, they’re sunsetting that pandering to consumers OS market.
Funny, not to oversimplify, but this is basically how IBM exited the consumer market
Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.
They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.
Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.
There is something massive missing from Linux that for me has made it even less likely that I would use it full-time (I've tinkered with it in my youth): personal data. I have so much personal, important data generated regularly thanks to smartphones. Photos, videos, voice memos, notes, computer files I want to access anywhere, health data etc. etc. iOS/Mac has made this seamless, secure, and in 15-20 years it has not gone wrong for me. Sure there are horror stories posted from time to time but for 99.9% of people it works really well almost all of the time. Replicating this with Linux systems is difficult, requires lots of setup and maintenance, and incurs significant risk for me in terms of data loss.
I've spent the past 8 years going back and forth between Linux and Windows. When I switched back to Linux last year I was shocked how well steam/proton/wine worked compared to a few years prior. Valve is truly making incredible progress.
My only hold out until this year was my gaming PC. When Windows 10 became unsupported, so did Minecraft updates. I tried Windows 11 just enough to get MC installed, only to find out I must log into the Microsoft Store to get it to run at all. The launcher installed, the desired versions downloaded and installed, click play, Store login required. Bedrock and Java editions. Just because... why not, I guess?
I decided as long as Rocket League (Steam) runs fine, I'll stick with Linux. It did, without any tweaking (other than telling it to use Proton because, technically, it has native Linux support, just not online play), and it used to require a ton of weird tweaking.
Every game I cared about in my Steam library worked too, way more than when I tried in 2020, also without any tweaking. So did MC Java edition.
The machine has a RTX 3080, which I almost didn't buy, because I've had issue with Nvidia on Linux in the past, but haven't had to do a single tweak this time.
cool story bro
Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
All of my Steam games work under Linux. For one or two, I gave to select a specific Proton version, but that's the only issue.
Try dual-booting, and see if your games work...
Depends on your hardware. I have a pascal era nvidia card, and everything _supposedly_ works, but games have issues for me still that aren’t concrete, e.g. cyberpunk crashes in specific and repeatable locations for seemingly no reason and it never happens to me on windows. New amd cards are probably much more reliable. It’s no one’s fault but nvidias really that my card is unreliable in Linux, but as an end user I’ve been told many times Linux “just works” now and I’m upset that that hasn’t been my experience.
It's mostly Mass Effect that's trouble under Proton. It requires the stupid EA launcher, which is trash. I have a Lenovo Legion Go S and getting it to work reliably is an absolute nightmare. Most other games I play are fine.
I just finished playing through Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Linux with Lutris. The EA Launcher gave me a few issues (like not launching sometimes), but it eventually worked. I did not have the game through Steam.
https://theandrewbailey.com/article/290/Mass-Effect-Legendar...
I game on standard Kubuntu, not a custom distro but to each their own.
I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
They’ve done the research and they know x% will never change and that’s enough for them to monetize. So that’s what they’re doing.
Even, I would imagine those who switch are least likely to click on desktop adds anyway.
I think the main problem for Linux is the fragmentation and lack of focus. If you can live without the Adobe suite and such, any number of distros and desktops can serve you well, but it often tries to do so
An initiative like Omarchy got a lot of traction just by "picking one" of all the infinite options available, writing decent documentation for how it all works in Omarchy specifically, and having the whole thing install in minutes.
Omarchy and tiling VM's are not for everyone but I think the principles are great, and can surely be applied to other DE's as well.
I’ve reached the point where I just use a Mac for most computer stuff and a console for gaming. Maybe one day I’ll set up a Linux gaming box but after spending all day at work trying to wrangle Linux boxes, that sounds a bit too much like my job to be relaxing.
Every year starting back around the year 2000, every year until now there's always at least an article from Slashdot and then HN on the year of the Linux desktop from believers and non-believers alike [1],[2].
[1] Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop (2023):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33213663
[2] Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop" (2009):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821673
The phrase itself has been a well established joke since I can remember.
Same.
After decades of macOS, and a bit of Windows, I tried Linux again recently and it was... good? For the first time in 20+ years, I ran into no big issues and no need to switch back.
The new UI stuff happening in Gnome-land, while controversial, has started to make the desktop feel modern and cohesive.
After years of Windows Explorer, clicking around in ~~Nautilus~~Files felt so snappy. The built-in Gnome document viewer is fantastic.
Gnome is starting to show glimmers of being the natural evolution of the Mac desktop, not a poor imitation -- which is very exciting.
Long time Linux Desktop user here. I really think Linux is a great choice as a Desktop in days of liquid glass and webviews. There are a lot of choices to make, but in the end it is working out really well (at least for me). KDE and the new COSMIC desktop environment with tiling support are tempting, but for now I keep using GNOME until I have more time to check them out.
The things I personally had problems with is BTRFS and printers. BTRFS was completely irrecoverable after a system crash, full story see here [1]. Since I've read a lot of these horror stories while doing some research after the crash, I would encourage everyone using it to be careful and backup your system on a daily basis. I switched to ZFS with ZFSBootMenu[2] and never looked back.
Printer-wise, I have a Canon network printer / scanner which seems to use a strange proprietary protocol. On Fedora everything worked fine while on Arch I did not find a way to get this thing working (I tried hard with different options like driverless, gutenprint, cupsd etc.) - printing also seems to be a bit of a security nightmare when changing firewall settings is mandatory.
Everything else is working absolutely stunning.
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=13013
2: https://github.com/sandreas/zarch
Quick note on #2 - there aren't really any issues with storing your encryption root passphrase in a file. If the file is owned by root, with no read permissions for any account, only root can access it. Since it's stored on an encrypted dataset, and your initramfs is as well, it's unreadable when the machine is off. Lastly, if anybody _does_ have a root shell on your machine, they can change the encryption passphrase without needing to know the current value.
In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.
In general I agree with you but there is one difference - a sneaky user with physical access can read it and _not_ change it, vs changing it. The latter is more detectable. But this is minor.
Yeah. Unfortunately, ZFS encryption is missing a few creature comforts of something like LUKS. I've stuck with native OpenZFS mechanisms, though, to keep the complexity sprawl to a minimum.
Absolutely - I know that but thanks for pointing that out again. There is no real "use case" for NOT storing the key into a root owned file. However, as I don't do it for myself there is no way of accidentally deleting the file, copying it quickly from my system to another drive when I accidentally left a root shell open and went to the restrooms (that never happens;) and the one single place I store the key (my head) is pretty much unreadable for everyone except me (at least for now :-) Being paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you :p
Since I reboot my notebook only about once in a month it is no real hassle to enter the key twice 12 times a year :-)
I've run BTRFS on my server (and external drive backups) for over 10 years without issues. I would use BTRFS on my main rig, but Steam (or perhaps Proton in particular) doesn't like it, so Ext4 there.
I’m running BTRFS now on a Cachy install and Steam/Proton seems fine - when did you last try?
About a year ago. Games simply refused to run, and some cursory searching suggested it was because my filesystems were BTRFS and advised using EXT4 instead. That worked for me.
https://x.com/EnterpriseCPU/status/1972103355012124891?s=20
I am not sure why people do this. Why post a link without providing any explanation of what the link is. It is quite annoying. No, I am not going to click the link to find out.
I'll toss in my 2 cents: 1. people that have no business whatsoever now know what linux is ie sales dawgs that only touch a computer for the occasional spreadsheet. 2. 70 year old man fed up with windows, moved to linux. it looks great, its fast and responsive let's make this happen.
It will take few more years before people start abandoning W10 due to security concerns(somehow "hackers" always find some insane backdoors and bugs in old windows, it must be a pure coincidence), hardware upgrade or just need to reinstall. But indeed, it looks like Linux is finally taking over. I'd say that beside Microsoft being so bad at their job, it's Valve and gaming on Linux in general. It's actually doable. What a miracle!
I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
> I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
Music production is indeed still a blocker. I used to use Windows for that; I am now on macOS for work and music (much better than Windows in every way! I use an old trashcan Mac Pro with Monterey for my studio computer) and Debian for my personal machines.
I'd say about less than .00000001 percent of the world is in the same use case as you.
Given the current situation regarding the hardware getting more pricey, I was so fed up with the inconsistencies, the constant micro lagging frame rate drops that I finally bit the bullet on a Mac studio a couple of weeks ago. This happened after 17 years of being a Windows user and having built more than 20 machines unfortunately Linux does not have a lot commercial software that I needed
> then just shat all over them with start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews, and forcing Copilot down everyone's throats
Thank god I've been using Linux long enough to not experience any of that.
At my job in a large non-tech company, almost everyone uses Windows (except for the dev team) purely because of Microsoft Office. As long as that thing exists, they can do all the dumb things they want and still dominate.
Ironically, MS Office is one of the best working Microsoft software on Linux, through Office 365. It works so well, that on my Windows work computer, I worked for months editing Word docs and Excel sheets every now and then, without realizing I didn't have Ms Office installed.
The funny thing is, MS office apps looks less out-of-place on Linux because most apps are already different. On Windows 11, it looks like the forgotten step-child of Windows 8.
Maybe someone here knows a solution. The ONLY thing keeping me on windows is that my employer uses F5/Big IP edge clients. I cannot find a Linux client that can also handle Web SSO. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this?
I'm no expert here, but my employer uses no less that three different SSO services (don't ask).., and all of them work under Linux.
Web-based really ought to work. Maybe your admins are being weird, and checking the user agent? Try using a plug-in to change your user-agent to Windows
I did fight with that a few years ago. Memory is that you can get through some steps running Windows in a VM to get thru MFA checks, and then close it later.
Welcome...1998 was my year of the Linux desktop. Valve seems to have been dredging all of the "maybe"s over the last few years on a few different fronts. Big ups to them (not that they don't get enough praise...still!)
Considering how the load at Linux Mint's forums has recently increased to the point that some of it is being re-directed to gitHummed (a minute ago there were "3362 users online :: 35 registered, 3 hidden and 3324 guests" >10 secs to respond, needed to login), it appears that distro at least is seeing a lot of newcomers.
Those 3324 guests are all AI scrapers sadly.
I am one full page ad away from deleting Windows 11 forever. I will struggle through infinite driver compatibility issues before I sit through a single ad while trying to work. That is my redline.
For me it was the OneDrive ads on the lock screen. And, when I accidentally clicked "enable OneDrive" (a few years ago, this might have changed), IT TOOK OVER MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER AND TOLD ME THERE WAS NO WAY TO REVERT IT!
Yeah onedrive is seriously annoying. It's nice when the free 15GB backup/sync for the desktop, pictures, and documents folder works (for people who put things there) but the way other MS products work with it seems user-hostile to me.
e.g. it took until 2025 for this RFC to be opened on moving PowerShell profiles and modules out of Onedrive: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/388. It should not be taking seconds for my powershell profile to load just because i have onedrive enabled by default.
I also had a non-technical friend recently get burned by a default MS Office setting where edited documents located in the OneDrive folder save directly to onedrive, and it only gets saved on disk when onedrive gets the new copy and uploads it back it to the user's disk. So if the MS office to onedrive integration fails your changes won't save. Apparently users have to enable a setting to first save to a folder on disk? That folder can even be the onedrive folder so onedrive will eventually sync it back up.
What devices are you expecting driver issues with? Even NVidia is not much of a problem these days
I've been using Linux as my desktop since 2020, I switched because I wanted to play games and maintain a development environment I'm familiar with (having run Linux servers for ~15 years at that point) that would be stable. I had long used a Windows machine for gaming and a Mac laptop for development. My Mac was stable enough, but Windows was not-- it wasn't blue screens it was constant unpredictable updates (sometimes erratically running when I didn't want them to). I had an SSD in the machine with Windows, but after installing Pop_OS! (as a happy accident) I never found a compelling reason to use Windows again.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
> If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
I don't really understand why everyone is complaining about Windows here, I'm not at all experiencing the same issues. The ARM64 version of W11 absolutely is the best OS I've ever used. I enjoy using Fedora but it's not coming close for professional use in my opinion.
If you want to understand why everyone is complaining about Windows, you just need to read what is said in those comments. On the other hand, if I want to understand why you think W11 is absolutely the best OS you've ever used, I... guess I'll have to ask you. So, would you mind sharing what makes W11 great for 'professional use'?
I'll obviously depend on what you're doing for work. Most people here are programmers, and I'm not, so your mileage may vary.
I find that W11 just works: the multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
Also, the UI is very pretty, but that's obviously subjective! And you get way more customization options on Linux.
I am not encountering most issues listed here, which I why I was confused, although I agree that Microsoft AI-bullshit-driven "vision" for Windows is a bit worrying.
You mention arm64 bit. What sku is that? a 'pro' version or did it come installed on retail hardware?
(We use Windows 11 on plastic Thinkpads (L15s, intel) at the centre I work in, an educational organisation. They have ads, insist on switching to edge even though we need Chrome for single sign on and do seem a tad sluggish).
MY NY resolution is to switch to Linux after two decades of using MacOS as primary OS. The UI direction, abysmal quality of software and people getting randomly banned from the ecosystem without good reason and with no recourse finally pushed me over the edge.
I've just finished the base install of Gentoo on my brand new Framework 16 and I still wonder why I didn't make the move sooner.
Hardware: HX370, 128G RAM, Radeon 860M iGPU, Radeon RX7700S dGPU, Xbox Wireless Cntroller, 2T + 8T SSD storage
Software (as of today, still making additions and refinements): Gentoo/OpenRC (I don't like systemd), Kernel 6.12.58 with additional module for the Xbox controller, Pipewire+EasyEffects 8, KDE Plasma 6.5.4/Wayland, Steam
Experience: KDE runs pretty stable, and only has the things I really need (and not the things a vendor thinks I need).
The first game I benchmarked today was Doom (2016), which runs smoothly on 90-120 fps on high settings.
The second game I benchmarked today was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) running on ~56fps on recommended settings on the 7700.
The one game I tried today and could not get to run properly was Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl. I suspect that, given the many positives on ProtonDB, that's mainly either a configuration or Proton issue. I'll do some more research and give it another try in the near future. Right now performance drops to 5 fps immediately after starting a new game, and the CPU running on 600Mhz maximum when starting the game on Proton Experimental.
For now I am quite happy with the results, and the fact that I likely finally am able to eject Windows out of my life.
Windows still have the gamers. A lot of anti-cheat system completely block out Linux users. The Year of the Linux Desktop will still be a meme at the end of this year as well.
Except ProtonDB website reports that completely blocked games make up 3% of the top 1000 Steam games.
Meanwhile, 84% is perfectly playable (some with minor tweaks).
https://www.protondb.com/
My guess is that this is going to shift rapidly for new games. Once the Steam PC launches, most new games will probably run fine on it. There's no logical reason for game studios to throw way significant market share over weird legacy crap related to "anti cheat". I expect the already significant amount of Linux using Steam users will grow to the point where game studios can no longer ignore it in terms of revenue and angry users and will actively test and ensure their games work flawlessly.
Of course one point here is that MS owns some of the more problematic game studios. Anti cheat here might be less about users cheating and more about them using this as a control point to ensure gamers keep on preferring Windows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think MS has much of a moat left for gaming. And it will be tempting for them as well to tap into the few percent of Linux using Steam users for selling them games. They've long stopped insisting on windows for things like Office or SQL Server as well. The whole of Azure is pretty much Linux based at this point. So, they might dig in for a bit but they'll be under growing pressure to give in.
So you’re still rolling a 6 sided dice every time you try a new game as to whether it works at all, and half the time you need to tweak it still? That’s a reasonably large barrier to entry then. I have arch Linux but I still boot into windows to play games that are supposed to be supported because I got sick of playing through 20 min or so of a game for it to crash in a specific spot and I’d have to start over in windows if I couldn’t find a reliable solution. After that happens a few times in a few games, I gave up and now I just go to windows to play games every time so I stop running into issues.
I buy games for my steam deck, only stopping to read up if they're "unsupported". Surprisingly, they seem to often STILL work in that case, this happened with Ghosts of Tsushima, which was unsupported because their online play didn't work (good riddance lol).
Never had an issue with any game running through proton. Only issue was Stardew Valley that couldn't play online. Turns out the Linux version (was default) had an unfixed bug, and choosing the Windows version with proton "Just Worked". Hilariously, "Win32 is the most stable Linux ABI"...
Yeah I’m not surprised, the steam deck hardware was picked with the best compatibility in mind. I’m aware in my case I have non-ideal hardware for Linux, such as an nvidia card.
This is also one of the primary reasons I'll buy the Steam Machine. Sure I could build whatever myself, but I actually want proper hardware support. I also don't mind that the profit margin that I pay to make my life easier goes to Valve and their Linux Gaming pursuits.
Indeed, the steam machine is very tempting to me too
I saw someone make a good point about this the other day that that 3% of games represents a much larger percentage of the gamer population - Pareto distribution comes into play with popular games where a small number of games account for a larger share of gamers' attention.
Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Destiny 2 and Rainbox Six Siege are not supported on Linux, how much of those 30 games of 1000 are some of the most played games? I already name 20% of them.
Correct, for top 10 Steam games it reports 50% perfect play.
To be honest, I've found ProtonDB to be way too optimistic when saying that games are "playable" (for example, a game running with no multiplayer still counted as "playable").
I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
I would also recommend Mint Cinnamon for anyone. Everything worked out of the box, super fast and simple. Just a breath of fresh air compared to the bloat of the big corporation OSes these days. It’s like being back in simpler times with Windows XP where things are snappy and it doesn’t get in your way
I've loaded up omarchy and I'm really digging all the keyboard short cuts and window tiling.
My previous setup with Kubuntu was quite developer friendly with workspaces but Omarchy takes it to the next level. I'm very happy with it. I actually like most of the default tools that come with it. For example,.I was using a lot of vim before but actually neovim is a big improvement.
It has a lot of nice-to-haves which I wouldn't have bothered setting up individually but having them altogether out of the box does improve the overall developer experience significantly.
Things like this don't help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471081
Actually surprised that Xe wasn't already a Linux user.
Have been for a while, had Windows for games, but now Fedora runs them well enough I don't have to care.
I thought you used NixOS? Is it just your gaming system that's Fedora? Do you still use Nix?
Heavily invested in Microsoft tech, but not using windows. At all. Couldn’t be happier.
Due to word being too buggy, I switched to libre office in windows. Local outlook was also too buggy in windows, I ended up running the web version. Switched to vscode b/c VS was to buggy and slow.
Teams works better in macos. Web version of teams is ok in Linux, you don’t want to run the native app in windows, it’s a resource hog written as a web app anyway.
Dotnet and powershell (pwsh) actually works better in both macos and in Linux, than in windows. Not a little better, but much better, that ecosystem is very stable and reliable.
And azure has of course no dependency on any local windows, on the contrary, dealing with remote systems are easier in Linux, particular if you accessing remote Linux systems as well.
Then I realized there was no reason to run windows. At all. It will only drag you down when it comes to productivity, it’s an awful os, filled with malware and other shit.
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
Been following this blog for a while and this is the last person I would have expected to be a Windows user.
About half the reason I used windows so much is for vtubing software. It barely works on windows, getting it working on Linux used to be a process fraught with agony and torment.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
I'm a windows user since I was 5. My favorite OS. both for home and for professional environment. Seems that Windows 11 will be the last Microsoft OS I'll ever use
Same since I was 3. Windows 2000, XP, 7. With 8 it was obvious they didn't believe in personal computing anymore, for me that was the end of the "Decade of Windows Desktop". I'm naive cause I did and switched to Linux without looking back
I recently switched to Linux for all development. I still use my Mac for everything else.
The main reason was to protect my personal data from possible supply chain issues or LLM agent mishaps.
I’m 99% in VSCode, a browser, and a terminal. There’s hardly a difference day-to-day.
2026 will certainly be the year of the 'I'm switching to Linux' thinkpieces
Let's use the influx of new users to get some money flowing!
It would be great if all those "I switched to Linux" articles would mention a few ways to donate to some important projects, helping to make FOSS thrive.
For me, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. I wanted a replacement for an M1, something beefy to build side projects etc., so I custom built a PC and put NixOS on it. Still rocking it and quite happy with it.
Funny that at the last minute of 2025 (at least in my country), I wrote a blog post titled "2025 is the Year of Linux Desktop, at least for me".
It is just a short post to note about how in 2025 some of my friends are finally migrating to Linux. And that was something awesome for me.
https://blog.juliardi.com/2025-is-the-year-of-linux-desktop-...
Tempted to do the same. Like it’s a good OS but Microsoft seems intent to drive it into the ground by being insanely annoying. PowerToys is the only bright spot right now.
So I just tried KDE with Fedora 43 on a 4 year old Intel Dell laptop (I've used Linux pretty extensively for 15+ years). It's hilariously bad :
- I managed to make a process crash just clicking around the Settings app
- Sleep doesn't work (spins up the fans, then turns them down, then turns off off displays etc but I then the fan are spinning, so something is running). Looking at the menu, supposedly Firefox is 'blocking' sleep, but I blocked it, and that just meant the fans stayed spun up during sleep. Wtf?
- Monitor connected via dock via USB-C only worked after I plugged it directly into the laptop then back into the dock
- WiFi is preferenced over Ethernet (?!)
- KDE default panel is 'floating' which means wasted pixels below it. Looks ugly and wastes precious vertical space. And the blue highglight of the active window is over the top. And the default panel height is 44 pixels!
- Default fonts especially in Konsole look ugly on a 1920x1080 laptop LCD.
- Booting takes forever
- Impressive it can stream to Homepods out the box...but it cuts out when you open the sound widget in the taskbar. And also at random points
- The default pop-up notifications are too numerous
- The Night Light quick option is to suspend it, not to enable it. Which is interesting, as it's not enabled currently. I want to enable it! There is no option to once-off enable.
EDIT:
- And during boot, the LVM2 unlock is only shown on the built-in display. Then the Login Screen is kind of mirrored, but updates are only shown on the external display ?! (ie password characters not filled in on the built-in display). Very odd
I love Linux, and MacOS might be turning into iOS and becoming buggier, but MacOS has none of those issues.
Can you run MacOS on your 4 year old Intel Dell laptop?
I've been running Fedora full-time for years and have not experienced any of the issues you have listed here. Some of your issues sound like hardware to me?
It was running headless Debian for a while with no issues, and Windows prior to that. The hardware is fine (it's a Dell dock too fwiw). Drives are NVMe
I'm not sure what you mean by your question.
---
So I tried KDE on Debian Stable, which is a bit less broken (it gets the Ethernet preferencing correct). But still:
- Logout causes the monitor to turn off then on, introducing more delays and flickering
- Only certain application seem blessed to be permitted to be pinned to the task manager when you right click in the applications menu. For the others, you have to drag and drop. You can only drop to the left of the existing icons, not the right. You can't change the order or remove them unless you enter the editing mode which is non-obviously done by right clicking then "Show panel configuration". You are however allowed to drag the open windows around without editing? Go figure
- Switching from the Dark theme to the Light theme just crashed plasmashell
- GWenview stutters between images because its default animation is enabled, and set to software. Much better turned off.
- Dolphin "Duration" column doesn't work for videos (I checked baloo was indexing properly, including with 'content') (edit: had to fully relaunch Dolphin...)
- Display scaling set itself to 170%. Seems like an odd number?
- Konsole configuration has many options, but none that I can immediately see to change the default font size ?! Well, at least I can configure Thumbnail generation and Memory Monitoring
(edit: oh right you have to create a new Profile - oh and you can't edit the current "built-in" profile. What a mess. Steps: hamburger menu, Settings, Configure Konsole, Profiles, New, Appearance, "Choose", Apply, OK, OK... not done yet...got to make your new profile the default one..."set as default", OK. Finally, you've changed the default font. Madness!)
I don't know how anyone defends this
To finish my review: there are a lot of rough edges and questionable defaults, but ultimately, KDE is impressive. It's extremely snappy, full of useful features. I can live with it
I think fast + full of features gets KDE a LOT of mileage in terms of what users put up with. But it doesn't help anyone denying that there are crashes and bugs all over.
Last year I got a laptop with Linux, after a Mac gap of 6 years (work) and it's been super smooth with NixOS and KDE.
My main issue now was the 16GB of RAM using a VM and working on rust, which would kill the system, but now I have more, so all the issues are gone.
One of the machines has become a media-center, with a remote keyboard, anyone at home can operate now.
Multiple screens, bluetooth, drag and drop, night/light all seems to be working
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY
edit: not affiliate to linked yt - organic enthusiastism
As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.
BAR is definitely one of the stars of OSS game dev.
It will be mine as well but only because consumer agentic AI became available and good. Only it makes all quirks and hardware incompatibilities bearable. I tell it to investigate the problem and it does an incredible amount of digging to help find the cause and eventually, after several iteration, either fix it or implement a good enough crutch. Even then it takes minutes to hours and I would take months.
How does this work? Do you give the AI read permissions on your system, or is it just running arbitrary commands?In the latter case, is it prompting you before each?
BTRFS is certainly adventurous. That's one way to make sure you have a good backup policy in place.
Corey (a character of mine) says stick with ext4.
There is no such thing as "desktop Linux". What we have instead is a large collection of distros, each with its own UX, unlike Windows or macOS which present a relatively unified platform.
I switched to Linux many years ago because a new laptop was unusably slow under the Windows Vista it came with, and I have not looked back since, yet I'd never recommend Linux to "the masses". Linux can work well for people who just browse the web and read email. Beyond that, the experience quickly becomes dependent on having a knowledgeable person nearby to help with choosing software and supported hardware or troubleshooting it.
To me, articles like this show how disconnected many technically inclined people are from average users' experience. Things like bloated software or aggressive advertising may be annoying to us, but to most users they are just part of using a computer.
With the new PopOS Cosmic and them dumping GNOME for their own UI framework based on Iced [0] (and based on rust), I have high hopes that things will move to more linux (especially for folks here who are rust-heads).
[0]: https://iced.rs/
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
For me Windows XP was the intolerably ugly release that made me switch once and for all in 2002. Never looked back.
I started using Linux Mint on my Framework laptop. That's 99% of my desktop usage. I do have a gaming PC that's rarely used that I keep for windows. Mainly for the odd game and/or the odd windows thing but it's pretty rare since nearly all my gaming is now on my Steam Deck.
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
Just install Mint/Cinnamon and forget about it.
They are moving to Wayland too and will not get around any of these issues. And using those things brings with it a number of other issues.
I’m a user and the experience has been great.
Almost as if a single users experience isn't a good way to judge a gigantic ecosystems with millions of users.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46478677
I handed you the fix to nearly every issue you listed, and you won’t take it. That’s a you problem.
Another factor is hardware friendly to Linux. We have multiple laptops here with different components, different distros X/W etc, and all working great… at least as well as mac or win ones.
I installed Ubuntu in October just to play around with AI models (python and CLI in general was so hard to deal with in Windows) and I realized that I didn't ever need to boot back into windows, not for gaming, not for anything. It was really relieving.
Proprietary, closed user experiences are like microwave home dinners. There’s every reason to hope they can be good, it is very common for them to be crap, and while its possible to hack your own microwave meals you will be doing so in a sub optimal environment with limited options.
An open, modular, diverse UX is like having a stocked kitchen of staples, pans, tools, fresh produce, and a stove. You add a toaster oven, smoker, water bath, grow a kitchen garden of your own, find local butchers and fishmongers. Over time you build up a small collection of both your own and others’ recipes and books and articles on food theory and trends. You can also have a microwave of course, but you’ll use it in many different ways than before.
It’s harder work but so is walking instead of driving or reading instead of watching TV. It can seem irritatingly virtuous to some that you put this extra effort into your daily life but they’ll be swayed when they see you serve up a ZFS snapshot to temporarily test an edit over 20GB of data, or pop up a new niri workspace to track and purchase concert tickets, or dive into editing your journal in a custom distraction free mode you put together showing only your editor and this week’s GPS logs.
You aren’t making everything from scratch, but you do make a few ingredients yourself — pickles and bread in the kitchen and scripts and local web hacks on your computer — and you certainly have complete control over the finished product in a way that simply isn’t possible with a microwave and a boxed lasagna, or a copy of Windows 11.
You don’t even have to cook! You can have pre-made microwave meals with a Linux desktop. They still taste better because they were made with love by a global network of friends and family instead of by Nestlé, Kraft, and Heinz.
I do what I can by serving webapps from my Linux server, or using command line, but I haven't had much success with a Linux RDP or VNC server that can compete with MS RDP for performance. If I could do that I'd switch fully. Does anyone have recommendations?
Are there any alternatives to Lightroom that are not as complex or overwhelming as Darktable. I understand that people say it’s more powerful, but it also looks like it has a steep learning curve I’m not particularly interested in tbh.
Maybe Microsoft knows Windows is terrible and won't last forever, so their short term goal is to exploit their marketshare as much as possible to grab as much cash as they can until the market moves to something else.
I switched to Linux from Win11 a few months ago, because of all the CoPilot junk. Not sure what the native vs. HTML UIs is all about, though. Are the HTML UIs slower, or is it a question of developers' time?
"I'm going to go with Fedora on my tower and Bazzite (or SteamOS) on my handhelds."
Why not Bazzite on both? Bazzite is a fantastic desktop OS! Easier to use than naked Fedora and virtually unbreakable.
Wait didn't xeiaso use NixOS?
https://xeiaso.net/talks/asg-2023-nixos/
Did, past tense. I'm no longer using it.
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
I have been using arch for a while now everything is good except BIOS updates after which I need to reset & fix secure boot everytime
Cool, see you back on Windows in a month. There's always something. It'll be like the New Year's resolution of going to the gym.
wait until you see you can use wine..
> TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Similarly I haven't booted up Windows in months now. Debian is super stable as a desktop OS and does everything I want at it now.
I am in this weird position where I am keeping a Windows installation around just in case I need it for something. I had a one job interview where they wanted me to use Visual Studio (C#) and it turned out they were fine with me using Rider anyway.
Been bazzite-only since April and I love it
Niri + DankMaterialShell is an amazing desktop experience. I've heard great things about the COSMIC DE as well.
The sad part of this narrative is that Linux Desktop can be a thing, mostly because other options have gotten worse/enshittified vs Linux Desktop itself has gotten better (It has, but it is probably not the reason of the rise.)
See, now this is how a website *should* look: mainly text, with non-obtrusive ads at the bottom. It's really not that hard!
There's a stickied ad at the bottom that says
> The AI Agent that gets your codebase Copilot & Cursor letting you down? Try Augment. Install Now
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
Hey, gotta pay the bills, somehow! *shrug*
I already switched to Cachyos. It's Arch based with really good defaults.
Been playing with linux for 20y or so. Used it to program, mostly. Now after 15 days only of having Claude Code I'm flipping my setup to delete windows and have ubuntu as my main. I've never been so happy using a computer in my entire life: in this short time I already have dozens of customizations, custom scripts, opensource stuff personal custom forks, etc. Not to mention the fixes, oh so many fixes that could have taken DAYS of work from me and got solved by cc in minutes.
I even tried vibecoding my own custom text editor to use for todo and notes management, but that didn't go quite well lmao. (if anyone curious about my journey: after that I vibe-coded a Sublime Text 4 plugin that kinda worked, then I discovered Dynalist and it's more structured experience was a big hit. When I found out with Dynalist I didn't own my data, I tried other outliners (liked none), then I spent a couple of days trying to sort out some sort of scheme to use Obsidian similarly to Dynalist, didn't look too promising and also Obsidian is not open source, so now I'm finally trying Emacs (spacemacs) for the first time in my life for org-mode. Wish me luck!)
I wish iPhone users had a new os option. iOS is getting so unbearable with each update.
Why not just use an Android phone?
Google.
https://grapheneos.org
This is the perfect iPhone user meme.
yeah ios26 is objectively a piece of shit
“for me” - this should had been in the title but missed out.
Linux has got better but not yet there.
Linux isn’t perfect but it’s far away from the compromises one needs to make to use Windows. It’s weird frogs are comfortable slowly boiling even when Microsoft turns on the heat to the max.
Judging by the website repo readme.md, the developer seems very obnoxious.
Agreed. I’m not at all surprised that they are the main contributor to anubis, which is also very obnoxious.
Then you'd probably get along pretty well.
> I think that Linux on the desktop is ready for the masses now, not because it's advanced in a huge leap/bound.
Yeah, right, these types of shallow pieces about Linux "for the masses" have the same structure without addressing the obvious issues:
- Windows has the following 3 components that became worse.
Well, they were bad 10 years ago (the ones that existed), so you could've spent a few hours per component to replace it (Start menu), disable it (Copilot), or find a workaround (invoke process manager with a shortcut without going through the webview in ctrl-alt-del or maybe there is some non-web app the presents the same menu of a few items) or even just ingore it (what are the serious practical issues with using dumb webviews for a tiny menu?)
But the alternative would require you spending many days learning the whole new OS where many things you're used to would simply not exist.
Want to find any file anywhere instantly (including newly created)? No, impossible, there is only NTFS Everything app that does it.
Got tired of the File Explorer garbage and got used to the greatness of Opus? Well, good luck, there is not a single great file manager over there
Want to relax and play X, Y, Z games? Oops, only A, B, C have good support, will take another decade to fix that (but at least someone is working on that)
Want to use your favorite Productivity/VideoShop app? No one is even working on that, so another decade would not fix that.
So how is it reasonable (for the masses, not you!) to replace a few fixable annoyances with a bigger list of the same and an even bigger list of unfixable stuff?
Yeah, I started to appreciate Windows more recently. In fact I prefer it over MacOS and Linux. WSL2 it's great when I need a linux shell.
File manager is one those reason. Damn, there is no alternatives to DOPUS.
Don't get me started with AutoHotkey. There is nothing compared to that.
> Don't get me started with AutoHotkey.
Indeed, I've purposefully avoided mentioning that because thought it's less "mass-relevant", but yeah, that's a huge blocker for any "advanced" customization OS workflow.
I get your general point but as others said things are getting better.
> Want to find any file anywhere instantly (including newly created)? No, impossible, there is only NTFS Everything app that does it.
Fsearch exists and is pretty much exactly that afaict. https://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/
> Fsearch exists and is pretty much exactly that afaict
No it's not, it's worse, and Fsearch dev said that it's not possible to implement it as well due to OS deficiencies. So nothing is getting better here.
If I didnt have a macbook from work I'd use Linux, but I got a macbook
I've been using Linux now as my personal desktop OS for 10-15 years. I actually really liked windows, and still think that windows XP and 7 was great OS for me. My Linux mint is still in style of the old windows versions.
But this year I used windows at a new work, and tested using my wife's windows computer. And for the first time I really feel it's shit.
First when I moved to Linux, 10-15 years ago, windows was better and smoother. 10-5 years ago Linux was getting close and worked equally for everyday, only being problem when things really break. Now is the first time that Linux actually is equal and probably overtakes windows. Microsoft making the move of discontinuation windows 11 puts the nail in the coffin
So I agree, 2026 is the year of Linux desktop.
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I've been on linux since 2014; I'm an ocassional user of windows, booting into it with much regret to deal with client's issues. I generally dislike working with MacOS... but for someone used to macOS I see no meaningful degradation of the kind there is with windows - your time is better spent earning/buying/setting up an m series mac air.
I am holding out for an M5 air!
Write a strongly worded letter to the manager (apple). It's easy on other hardware.
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
[1] https://flatpak.org/
[2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html#sandb...
[3] https://flathub.org/en
[4] https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
[5] https://distrobox.it/
[6] https://containertoolbx.org/
If you use KDE Plasma (like with Fedora KDE or Kinoite), you do not need Flatseal, as the functionality is integrated into System Settings.
Great tip - I do use KDE but didn't know this. Always just reached for Flatseal - but the functionality being integrated is even better. Very cool.
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
Flatpak gives you a lot of permission controls for GUI apps and you can similarly sandbox a lot of CLI tools with toolbx or distrobox.
2026 marks the year of IPv6 and Linux on the desktop.
Welcome to the club. After years of dual-booting, I deleted my Windows partition a few years ago.
And it's not just techies. My non-technical brother-in-law asked me to install Linux for him last fall. I installed Xubuntu, showed him how everything worked, and haven't had a single "support call" since.
Welcome ;) Linux is my desktop last 20+ years.
cachyos has been rock solid for me, including gaming. nvidia 40xx series, HDR OLED monitor
Good luck. I've tried to completely replace Windows with Linux over the last two decades or so, and it's still lacks polish. I really don't enjoy having half-written GUIs for different apps and having to compile my own fixes after searching for 3 hours.
I think I finally gave it up in anger, when it was on a laptop I was using for a few important projects and it cost me days of work.
I now use Windows+WSL and it has the best of both worlds: A fully functional GUI with everything I would ever need with Linux.
MacOS is really the best Nix Desktop OS out there. I would use this instead, but I still require some windows apps.
Welcome to the Linux desktop club. One small heads-up from experience: if you’re running NVIDIA hardware, expect a few bumps along the way. The proprietary drivers work well once set up, but kernel updates, Wayland quirks, and driver installs can be more hands-on than with AMD or Intel. Not a dealbreaker, just something to be aware of.
Overall though, solid choice. Hope 2026 really is your year of the Linux desktop.
I had to set up a machine owner key in my motherboard's UEFI to get my 4080 working, but it's fine enough. I haven't had any issues with nvidia drivers since.
I believe this was Dec. 2023 through Feb. 2024 (I should add dates to my little "blog"...):
https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm
If I remember, Linux Mint was on kernel 5.15 at the time.
The TL;DR is that fractional scaling was broken under Cinnamon, and Brightness controls were broken under KDE.
Most gaming was good, but a brand new game (Hogwart's Legacy) had major issues, including crashing and vastly worse performance compared to Windows. Another game wouldn't work with multiplayer (Anno 1800) which meant I couldn't play it with my spouse.
So I'm tempted to go back, give Linux 6.8 or 6.11 a try, and see if those issues are fixed. (I sold that laptop to a family member, so I'd probably try it on a newer Legion 5 Pro, but still with Nvidia graphics.)
For my primary machine though... what I would miss most is DxO PhotoLab. I love my Fujifilm XT-5 and mirrorless photography, and I love editing with DxO. I tried Lightroom, darktable, and a few other pieces of software, but I kept going back to PhotoLab. It's not objective - it's very subjective but I get the most joy out of using PhotoLab for editing.
I really hope (like throw a wish in a bottle) that companies like DxO consider supporting Linux[0] but I doubt it's even on their radar. Software like this uses hardware in demanding ways, and it isn't trivial to support it.
Now, this is one person's anecdote, but I do think it's a factor in overall mainstream acceptance. For Linux users, after years or decades of use, they've embraced the software available to them, but for Windows / macOS users, they will often have to consider what compromises they'll have to make. (I know Adobe is thrown around a lot, and it's a fine example, but I don't like Adobe's subscription model... I still gave it a fair shake but enjoyed PhotoLab much more!) But I think my point will still be that there's a chicken-and-egg scenario, and it's taking a very long time to get Linux to the kind of market share it needs to start forcing the hands of the thousands of companies that don't currently support Linux.
[0] https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406558299537-Syst...
where is ChromeOS in this story
Among the average hn reader...I think it'll stick.
Wider man on street, less sure
As for me - having a good time on linux
Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
Can you ring the same bell at the GTK and GNOME folks? The GTK4 thing with hamburger menus that replace everything is just a mess. I stumbled on nemo the other day while looking for nautilus. That… was a breath of fresh air: compact UI, menus, features, etc.
It’s painful seeing FOSS making some of the same mistakes as corporations
Yes, I don't like all of that stuff either. Too many FOSS does make those and other same mistakes; there is much more than just that. There are a few people that try to improve some aspects of them, but leave other the same, and sometimes it is not really an improvement (although sometimes it is a matter of opinion).
But, I mostly use command-line programs and write my own programs (and sometimes use older DOS programs, even though I have Linux), without emoji and without LLM, and also avoiding Unicode when I can, and without a desktop environment, etc.
was it this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
Whoa. At around 21:30 he mentions Raph Koster. I'm 99.9% sure I read that name for the first time in my life... yesterday over at the Digital Antiquarian's blog in a story of how Ultima Online came to be.
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon sure is creepy like that.
"... there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline ..."
I beg to differ. Tiling window managers like ion, ratpoison, dwm, et. al, and the simple and elegant tooling that accompany them are a wonderful example of UI innovation.
UI/UX designers who copy, and iterate on, infantile eye candy have only themselves to blame.
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See you in 2027 with the same prediction!
This headline couldn't be more absurd. Who cares... computing ceased being desktop-centric 12 or 15 years ago.
So at that point a ton of people are going to be forced onto Linux?
I don't really disagree with you. More and more I see people living with just their phones. Personally it's not for me, but it's getting more and more prevalent. Even some business just have people using iPads/tables in the field, no point in lugging a laptop around when you're only using one or two apps and email.
For developers and systems administrators though, we're going to need the desktop for decades to come. Nothing else comes close in terms of flexibility. Just think how many SREs live in the terminal still. Not because there aren't UIs and applications, but because those applications can only be installed and configured from the command line.
Accounting is also a long way away from dropping the desktop, again, they need a ton of flexibility.
Microsoft is probably "correct" in that it's not really worth spending to much time on the desktop, because the average user launched a browser, Steam or some custom piece of software and just stays there all day. It's not really financially viable to make something good for the last 10%, on the other hand, those people would probably be fine with being stuck on the Windows 2000 or XP UI.
People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
Wait, does Xe not know about this? https://www.thurrott.com/dev/330980/microsoft-to-replace-all...
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
They're going from Microsoft to... Linux. From bad to worse. Just use macOS and get on with your life.
I’m not sure about that.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
>>Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
If you just install MacOS, Windows, or any major Linux distros, all work okay with default settings and drivers, almost all the time. Problems start when you want something else or more.
It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the flavor is different.
If you know how to find “reject all” on all cookie banners, Windows will be easier for you.
If you know networking and pf, then MacOS will be easier for you.
If you know how to debug driver bugs, Linux will be easier for you (and fun as hell imho)
Anyway, if you don’t want to do much more than internet browsing/video playing/basic gaming/basic coding, it simply doesn’t matter. // I would still say that the default network/firewall settings for MacOS is sketchy as hell however
Personally I can't stand the dock paradigm...no way to tell if a program is running or not at a glance, and it's not easy to switch between one application with multiple windows. A lot can be changed even if it requires third party add-ons, but I'd say it's the least intuitive OS there is.
What’s sketchy about it?
A ton of open ports, some of them completely undocumented, and many Macs are shipped with all firewalls turned off by default. Also, I was quite surprised how easy to turn on an unencrypted VNC server without a single warning.
I’m going from macOS to linux currently. It was the hardware obsolesence that kicked things off but I definitely wont miss the constant nagging about my iCloud being full
Just turn off iCloud sync for the things you don't use and you won't fill it up. I sync passwords, notes, find my, calendar, contacts, and safari. Currently using 800MB of the free 5GB.
yeah. fuck iCloud.
Can’t stand the MacOS UI philosophy and built in software. Gotta skip. The hardware is pretty good though.
This is the biggest pickle for me. Mx Macbook Airs are pretty amazing, but Asahi is just not there, and I don't think it will ever be without Apple playing ball a little bit unfortunately. (I'm currently on a t2/intel macbook and it's got more quirks that I care to deal with...but it was free so gotta do what I gotta do)
Yeah that’s sad. Mac hardware with a Linux Os with proper drivers is the dreamland. Asahi is good for M1 though I heard?
Maybe for some people, I don't have the capacity to deal with that kind of thing willingly anymore. Stability and knowing I won't be running into some missing feature that may never get fixed/added. It's too small of a project and it's a major uphill battle having to reverse engineer literally everything. I do commend them but it's just too many question marks for wanting a reliable daily driver.
tbf mac is starting to get pretty bad too
The ai and liquid glass rollouts do not inspire confidence in the future of macOS.
I've moved from macOS after 15 years to Linux in past year (niri + DankMaterialShell), it's mostly better aside from missing Miller columns in Finder.
I would go on full macOS, but I can't afford a Mac Studio at the right specs for what I need right now.
Why is Linux worse? Why, for example, is KDE worse that the macOS desktop?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092464
`apt-get update` bricked your system multiple times? How, by filling up your disk? That doesn't install or upgrade any software. It just updates the local cache of the registry. I believe you that there was a real problem I'm just confused about how it happened.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
It was apt-get upgrade, then. Whichever command updates all packages on the system. I must have misspoke, I don’t use Debian-based systems all that much anymore.
I remember it had a particular fondness for deleting old kernel versions, failing to install the new kernel, and thus bricking the system on boot. Alternatively, uninstalling the entire WM because one package had a conflict.
Weird! Sounds like maybe `apt-get dist-upgrade` or `apt-get full-upgrade`. `upgrade` shouldn't uninstall anything or update your kernel as far as I know. `dist-upgrade` or `full-upgrade` could do either. If your `/boot` partition was exhausted or you lost power in the middle of a kernel upgrade, that could leave the system in a broken state.
At any rate, sorry you had such a frustrating experience.
It is?
The monster that ate Windows have already started eating Mac OS.