Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.
The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".
I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)
This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.
So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.
Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on
Anecdote time.
I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.
You're not the people I have an issue with, sorry for the ambiguous use of the word "everyone" there.
If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.
> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.
I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.
Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.
I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
GNOME’s design philosophy apparently amounts to one developer (with no training or experience in design) saying “I don’t personally consider this feature to be important, and so it’s gone.”
Thanks for formulating this, as I’m too lazy to even start the conversation with the folks who’d like to have a lot of everything on their screens, with myriads of distractions and just ugly little everything. Otherwise ‘that’s tablet,’ and it’s ‘the Gnome team pushing their nonsense,’ not the particular user being used to something completely wrong from the UI/UX perspective. I’m having no issues with teaching Gnome anyone. It’s simple. Yet powerful, I can use it no issues, and it’s my second favourite after Sway. I feel those of us who actually appreciate Gnome should be more vocal about it, otherwise these weirdos with 2 mins of Gnome experience yelling too loud.
As one of these folks who want a lot of everything on my screen, I'm baffled by your declarations that my workflow is somehow objectively "wrong". Go convince Airbus that the cockpit can only have two gauges, and needs a lot of blank space.
It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.
I use standard GNOME as my desktop environment and nothing about it feels like it was designed for tablets and/or smartphones. Not that it isn’t capable of being used as such, but my desktop usage doesn’t indicate that tablet/smartphone use-cases were the primary goal. Is GNOME even in wide use for those contexts?
ya i was a GNOME hater for a long time after the GNOME 3 transition, switched between Mate and KDE for years. But gave up on those due to persistent video instability and went to vanilla Ubuntu GNOME and it's actually pretty nice. Not sure if it was good originally but I actually prefer it now.
In a bit of fairness to the haters, Gnome 3 used to have a lot of graphical glitches and was unstable in a lot of its early iterations, but I broadly agree with your characterization.
I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.
Years of fighting to restore basic features was funny the first time, but gnome 3 was not the first time; I do not blame anyone for not trusting that gnome won't pull the rug again, and soon.
Vanilla Gnome user here. Gnome may look like it was designed for tablets but it has a keyboard shortcut for basically anything. So you don't do much of point and clicks if you know Gnome. You can but you don't have to. It just gets out of your way as they say.
Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..
It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.
But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.
I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.
I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.
>They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it
I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.
I was never able to get it working on my Thinkpad. Might be me of course, but after days of reinstalls resulting in always transparent windows, I went with Mint. And stayed.
Agreed. AMD just works for me on linux. My problem is that I am addicted to 6+ monitors and top end gpus... nvidia just seems to hate linux for top end setups. Which is sad, windows just handles my dumb 5060+5090 setup easily. Gaming on linux has gotten way better, but I still can't gigure out how to get some games working. So I'm stuck between using linux + sway / i3 which I looooove... and not being able to get the value out of my $6k gaming rig. Sadly this is a tale that's been going on for 20 years for me.
Linux Mint works great with nvidia cards. It has a great driver manager. It is the only distro I found after getting a laptop with a RTX card that just works.
It has worked flawlessly too after 8 months of use.
I personally like mint too for the past 10 years. They also decided to go against the grain of Ubuntu and not ship things like firefox in a snap, which I prefer.
People tease mint as being a distro for normies and grandmas, but it has worked flawlessly for me and really all I want is an environment which just works.
Is it also doing great with the 58xx driver series that is now mandatory on arch for models a couple years old? I've been having severe issues since then to the point where I had to borrow an AMD GPU from a friend just to get my working station up and running again
It’s the only issue I have on my CachyOS install on an AMD 5900X+9070XT without additional peripherals. It seems like when I hit sleep it doesn’t manage to fully enter sleep (illustrated by the power lights) and then never wakes up anymore until a hard power reset.
I remember them working on a hybrid OS that would run on your phone or tablet and then you could switch it to desktop mode. Actually looks like they're still working on that
seriously guys, can we design product pages so they actually give you a sense of how the product actually works? That page sucks.
I found a video and honestly while I love the idea it seems that the implementation is the worst of both worlds. Who thought that this pull down menu style was a reasonable idea....
Many of the sleep issues these days are actually Microsoft's fault. They tried to impose AlwaysOn AlwaysConnected but did a terrible job of specifying it and quality controlling implementation.
I had a Dell Precision from 2020 that never woke from S3 sleep properly, because Dell didn't care about S3 because they expected AoAc (which Windows now defaults to) to actually work. Except A) people don't want laptops that act like phones, and B) it was terrible and munched so much battery it was way better to just hibernate all the time.
Switched to ThinkPad from 2020 and it has a BIOS setting for "classic sleep" and S3 sleep works perfectly.
And Fedora gets 3-4x the battery life than Windows did for general use on both, with much less heat and fan usage, right out of the box. Not to mention bullshit like Windows taking literal seconds to show a directory's contents in the file manager... I'm completely done with Windows for anything beyond gaming (but Valve is changing that rapidly), and dual-booting to a bare Windows install for corporate remote access apps or such, on everything in my house.
> It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025.
This has little to do with Ubuntu and probably much more to do with proprietary hardware that makes it difficult to a write a bug-free driver for Linux kernel sleep mode.
What device is giving you the most trouble with sleep mode?
Wait, what sleep mode issues are you talking about? I've been able to wake my ubuntu machine up using my keyboard and mouse. I haven't gotten around to testing steam link wake on lan though, I'd be disappointed if that didn't work.
I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
Windows 8 is fundamentally just Windows 7 with a full screen start menu. This is a dumb usability downgrade, but unless you went out of your way to install Metro apps, it wasn't such a big change. Your apps worked the same way they always had.
I'm still on Sequoia on both my Macs. I updated my iPad Pro to iOS 26, decided it was meh, and am not updating my phone. My iPhone is over 4 years old and figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
> figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
Indeed, it does run like crap on older phones. You made the right choice. I don't feel forced to upgrade my phone but the new OS definitely drains the battery faster and feels slightly sluggish, making me regret the "upgrade."
Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
In what way does MacOS feels like garbage ? I use it everyday on a +5y MacBook and it’s an absolute blast. Powered on for weeks without reboot, 3x4K 32inch screens, hundred of chrome pages and apps opened and it’s all smooth. Ofc I don’t even hear a fan but the software is amazing for me. It all works, all the time.
I'm someone else, but I also feel like macOS is rubbish.
On linux, if I get a kernel panic, I can dig into the kernel, add debug logs, understand what's going on, and potentially fix it. If I want to swap to a scrolling window manager like niri, I can.
On macOS, it's a black box and any radar I file with apple vanishes in a black hole never to be seen again. There's hardly any customization, and the default UX is horribly undiscoverable and can't easily be driven with just a keyboard.
As a hacker, the above makes macOS garbage, and I'd assume anyone on hacker news would understand that desire to be able to understand and hack on the software you use.
I also like to hack things but you understand that what drive Mac sales are not people who’d like to hack the system but regular people on a massive scale. Linux does not have this problem because there isn’t the same kind of economics involved in year-round salaries. So I won’t consider trash an OS who’s main target by far is not hackers, even though there is still some margin for some customization.
Your point still stands that for you the OS is garbage. But you’re probably not the main user they have in mind when they develop the OS
> Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation
That is garbage ? Changing the UI of settings ? MacOS navigation has been the same for a decade. Who uses the settings daily ? I don’t even open settings once a month. Every single piece of UI evolve and must evolve. The ones that don’t are stuck in the past and belongs to a museum. I don’t see what complex and thus garbage.
Functionality that you use once a year or less is _exactly_ the sort of thing that needs to be consistent. It's literally the last place that an innovation should arrive, after that innovation has been fully developed and battle-tested.
So among the hundreds of things that makes an OS garbage, you’ll likely place as top criteria an UI you use once a year. Windows settings has been the worse of the worse of all UI settings ever. That’s my criteria then, macOS is luxury in any kind of form compared to the maze and hidden UI that make windows.
Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
The new glass look is just so bad. It feels cheap, like a child’s toy. And performance is worse as a result.
I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.
I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
As someone who had been in the Apple ecosystem since Windows XP, it was difficult to lose that constant seamless interplay between my phone and computer. But honestly? The trade-off was worth it in the end. I’m 8mo into Linux-only desktop and man…it’s great.
Look into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop.
Note that Google Pixel hardware is just fine and not evil, and they're looking at a different vendor for the next version anyway, because Google is making it so the Pixel will only run approved OSes.
The Titan chip does a lot more than sign and store keys. It also has storage (could contain malicious payloads) as well as an RNG and AES/SHA accelerators (which could be weakened/compromised), among other things.
However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.
So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
sure but a nation state that takes digital sovereignty seriously could easily devote some resources towards maintaining their own fork. Thats the point. Hell, north korea has their own special linux distro
I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.
The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.
Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.
While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
Distros cannot realistically work without hardware support. Hardware is designed in America. The licensing for the software to use the hardware is controlled by the United States
I mean I can write a kernel right now with all the computer systems theory implemented, but without the architecture specs, the firmware, etc, this is completely useless.
Licensing can be ignored. Specs can be stolen. You think China cares about enforcing American copyright in the slightest? One way other countries can retaliate against American tariffs and invasions is to start ignoring American copyright and IP laws.
You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is American, because the hardware is American. Even if the company wants to open source it, the US government can block it in whatever country.
> You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is America
This thinking is part of the reason for the momentum behind RISC-V and LoongArch.
RISC-V is a lot like Linux in that it benefits from International cooperation and innovation while offereing the ability to seize control if needed.
But you are correct that even an open ISA does not protect you from a proprietary hardware implementation at the chip or firmware level that you still do not control. This requires additional open standards.
Bigger picture, it means "domestic" chip design and fabrication capabilities. The world is just starting to wrap its mind around this. But again, RISC-V is really helping here. There are emerging RISC-V chip capabilities in Europe and even in places like India for example. It is easy to laugh off these efforts as non-competitive. But not only will many of them find niches where they will be economically pheasible but they offer an important backstop to geopolitical risk and the flexibility to at least of enough domestic capability to keep the lights on if needed. Building and rolling out a RISC-V ecosystem will take years or decades. But once there, it can be pivotied to or maintained on any RISC-V chip. As long as you have the ability to produce some kind of RISC-V chip, this ecosystem can never really be taken away from you.
And RISC-V offers the same kind of international collaboration that allows both pooling of efforts and protection from reliance on any one actor or region that could become a political threat.
RISC-V understands its role in this regard. It too was an "American" technology but Linux International was setup in Switzerland for a reason.
No it's not, it's all made in China. Maybe you mean the IP is American, but the IP can just be ignored. If the USA can ignore trade agreements, and defence pacts, then its newfound adversaries can ignore American IP laws too.
The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.
That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.
The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.
You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.
I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
There used to be programs that would connect to multiple proprietary systems, like Pidgin. If we had this today we'd have one free-software app for WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram (and some used in other countries, like IIRC Zangi?). However, the social and regulatory environment changed - now whoever made that app could expect to be charged with a crime.
I don't have a definitive opinion on such messaging apps. I like that it bridges between different services, trying to free the users from the lock-in, but...
If I talk to someone on Signal today, I know that they are probably using the official Signal on the other side. With the guarantees that I know from Signal. Now what if half of the users of Signal were using a third-party app? How much can I trust this app?
Say Matrix has a bridge to Signal. I talk to someone over what looks like Signal from my end, but it goes to some third-party server that pretends to be Signal and then relays those messages to my friend on their Matrix client. As a Signal user, I cannot know it, but my conversation is not E2EE anymore. And it kind of defeats the point of using Signal entirely, doesn't it?
I guess my point is that in terms of security, there is value in making it possible to verify that both ends are using the official Signal app, by locking it as much as possible (e.g. with DRM-like technology). But of course it's annoying to be locked in. Even though I don't feel personally super locked into Signal: I could move to another similar app in a minute. But again people tend to be lazy and don't want to switch apps. It's a hard problem, I guess.
That app already exists. It's called TM SGNL. The Department of War used it. It sent all their messages in plain-text to an Israeli server that was leaking memory dumps to the public internet (a la Heartbleed), 600GB of which were collected by hackers and sold on the dark web. Worst case scenario. That's not a fantasy, that literally happened. Do you still trust Signal?
We've been working on our next major release for a long time now to better support modern protocols. But as an unfunded Open Source project it's hard to get things done quickly when it's a "free time" only project.
The European Commission has recently put WhatsApp under scrutiny in terms of the Digital Services Act, and forced them to open up allowing interoperability with other messaging applications.
Perhaps we'll see a return of apps like Pidgin soon.
To the average person, no. If you ask a regular user, you'll find that there is no alternative what Excel can do, the PowerPoint alternatives are missing loads of features, etc. Additionally, files created in MS Office still cannot reliably be used in the open source alternatives without something breaking. Until a non-technical user can open my PowerPoint presentation in LibreOffice and not have to apologize for the formatting, they aren't equivalent.
A huge part of this is fonts. Users prefer proprietary fonts, and when you open files using them in the alternatives it tends to look like terrible. You will not convince users that this is on them to fix, and to be honest they're right, it's not their problem.
But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.
At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.
Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.
Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
I was saying that non-US office suites are good enough in terms of features, but people don't like to adapt to new things. WhatsApp vs Signal was an example where people don't want to use the better alternative, for no other reason than they can't be bothered to try it.
But even when talking about not depending on US tech, it is relevant: depending on open source US tech is a step towards not depending on US tech. The goal is not racism ("it's made by US people so I don't want it"). The goal is sovereignty ("if I depend on this, the US government can screw me").
Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
I'm in violent agreement with you! Don't even know what I would have done without OCLP on my older systems, still running circles (in reliability) around other non Apple similar devices. And - for the record - I hate iPhones, as well as what Apple is doing with its OS lately.
The HP ZBook G1a is similar to a Macbook in case(*), touchpad, screen and audio quality, design and performance - just the efficiency and battery life are kind of crap and, uh, I haven't figured out yet how to configure reliable sleep on Linux. It lasts 6-7 hours idle. You can also empty the battery in an hour with heavy compile jobs, but that one Macbooks do as well according to info I've found on the net.
(*) Aluminum is more about perceived than actual quality - I wouldn't mind touching something with lower heat conduction, especially in winter. The only thing that I really like about it, compared to a Thinkpad, is the stiffness of the screen part.
Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
Curious to hear which good ideas had their origin in a distro run by fanatical idealists. Not asking for evidence to try and disprove you. Genuinely curious!
Framing it as "fanatical" is a way of not understanding people's needs sometimes and that makes it harder for oneself to admit when they got it right - after all you don't want to find that you've turned into "a fanatic."
I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.
I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.
Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.
Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.
I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.
It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.
Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."
I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).
Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.
There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).
And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.
The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot.
Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.
The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years.
BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.
Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
> No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be
I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.
MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.
I had a wince device before the iPhone existed 2005 ish.. An o2 XDA 2s ... There was flash for the OS ... All your files were stored in ram... Internet was a 56k dialup speeds... The arm CPU was anemic.... Wince also had issues if left on too long.. I.e. phone stopped giving audio in a call ... All in all was cool, the slidenout keyboard I miss but terrible software ... The lack of durable user files made it a fail.
I've been using macOS since 2020, but for the last year I have seriously considered switching to Linux. macOS Catalina felt really fast, easy to use, and lacked the useless features they kept adding and the ipadOS like interface they began implementing. In 2020, the feature set felt much more intentional.
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
If you only need to airdrop between your own devices, try out KDE Connect. It uses the network (WiFi) but I think there's also a Bluetooth mode in beta.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
> I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
I thought I saw various comments to the effect that the Vision Pro is just a developer thing to bootstrap the app ecosystem, a prelude to a real consumer product. But if that is the case I’m slightly confused as to why they aren’t sharing more of their roadmap…
> What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well.
Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do. Everybody was running after VR/AR headsets, now everybody is running after AI.
They see the others run somewhere, they run in that direction. Just in case.
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
Obviously, you can't build something as complex as a modern operating system without intention, and therefore an "agenda" but I have a feeling you know what OP was getting at.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
By agenda-driven, I think they mean the commercial operating systems are designed with the intention of improving the uptake of other products and services by the companies that sell them.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
Was going to say, the online help always baits you into using OpenJDK which doesn't work for random stuff, or in older times there was those non-default "non free" repos you needed to add if you wanted wifi to work.
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....
Yes, prices have gone down over the years, but still unaffordable by people who can afford less.
Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.
They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.
For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:
The Acer Predator Helios 300
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Storage: 512 GB SSD
Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.
I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.
This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.
Still lots of cash, versus a 400 euro laptop, which is what many regular people end up buying.
There is a reason so many European operators have contract offers for TV or Internet packages, where customers get Apple gear "for free", naturally with a several years bound contracts.
Ha, I have nothing on my machine that anyone would want. Yes, my life is that boring. So no, I keep nothing of importance in the drives, just old memories.
Out of the box, I've experienced less spyware-related issues with Linux. I have enabled UFW, installed ClamAV, closed or blocked communication with some ports. But for the most part, I've not had the same problems that had caused system and browser infections. If anything, the badly designed hardware of the machines and systems that I've built tend to cause the problems, for the most part, not to mention my own stupidity. If I do begin to experience, spy or adware-related issues, I suppose I could look into something like this:
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:
-Keep system and software updated.
-Enable firewall (e.g., UFW).
-Use strong passwords and MFA.
-Install from trusted sources only.
-Encrypt disks (e.g., LUKS).
-Use SELinux or AppArmor.
-Sandbox apps with Flatpak/Wayland.
-Install antivirus like ClamAV.
-Disable unnecessary services.
-Monitor logs and use tools like OpenSnitch.
-Switch to CubesOS (qubes-os.org) but I'm not that paranoid, yet :)
I'm just not too tech savvy, but honestly if anyone had enough knowledge, they'd probably could get into my system. That being said, though I consider Linux to be more secure than Windows, no system is 100% secure, in my view.
That unfortunately is true, for the most part. Whether this is due to financial reasons or for lack of engineering best practices, I can't say. All I can say is that, switching to Linux has led to significantly less cost, technical or spyware issues, not counting the issues which I created out of ignorance.
It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.
The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.
It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.
As opposed to the highly cohesive and unified way Large corporations with thousands of developers work. A hive mind of likeminded individuals all working towards a single blissful objective with no distractions or competing ambitions. Not a single legacy being kept without reason, only purpose.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....
And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.
"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.
I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:
menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"
That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:
Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals
I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.
Please be serious, that straw-man is clearly not my point. (I thought you said it was 90# of CRT)
There’s definitely a balance between the newest of the newest bleeding edge hardware that we could only have dreamed of five years ago, and still functional hardware from five years ago.
Just like engineering is a balance between technical optimization and cost.
Seems like your mindset is one that chooses optimization at any cost, which is pitiable.
I bought an M3 when it was brand new but I also have a Dell XPS laptop that’s running an Intel 8th GEN processor. Both have their uses, and the existence of the M3 does not make the Dell worthless or unacceptable.
A 6 year old M1 MacBook Air that is still being sold new for $699 at Walmart is not “bleeding edge” and not expensive. Even the latest MacBook Air with 16GB RAM is $999.
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
> If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
> UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
Arm (and Risc-V and other arches) Linux has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devicetree instead of ACPI, which is better in that it declaratively documents the hardware in a system and how to access it. However, the hardware support which can be found in the Arm ecosystem is in no way better than that for x86 laptops. Many SoC manufacturers still don't put any effort into upstreaming drivers or device trees, many devices are still only supported by tossing a single release of a heavily patched kernel over the corporate wall and then forgetting about them.
It's important to distinguish between the Framework 13 and the Framework 16. The Framework 16 is by far the most ambitious of the two, and so it has had a lot more issues. I use a Framework 13, and I've loved it. It's light, has a solid frame, and runs Linux great. The battery life isn't great, and the speakers aren't either, but I've been able to mitigate the latter with EasyEffects.
If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.
I've got a Framework I am not too upset with, but the battery life (especially during sleep) is definitely one of my gripes. I still have yet to try powertop or other tools to optimize, maybe I would be proven wrong.
Sleep just ceased to exist in the last few years and got replaced with an always on, low power mode.
I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.
I think that the ThinkPad X13s Gen1 might meet these requirements. It is my favorite ARM Linux laptop I've ever used. It has great support in Debian 13 (trixie), and it feels pretty smooth and fast. It doesn't have any fans, stays cool, and I regularly get a full day's worth of battery life out of it with margin to spare (10-12 hours). It's better than the newer Snapdragon X1 Elite based ThinkPads, in my opinion, even though it isn't quite as fast because it is passively cooled, is easily fast enough that I've never noticed it feeling "slow", has good driver support in mainline Linux and Mesa (which took a few years to be fully worked out, but is there now), and it's readily available for a good price (on eBay).
I'm hoping that the new Snapdragon X2 Elite based laptops coming out this year will beat it. Qualcomm seems to have been trying to upstream driver support for them earlier than the X1. Then it's up to what kinds of laptops OEMs offer with them.
Personally I'd still just get a used ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 on eBay at this point if I were going to buy another one today because they're available for around $400, and I don't see anything better that's passively cooled, with great battery life, and great Linux support available at the moment. I hope there will be a better, faster alternative in the near future. I'd gladly upgrade.
I haven't really played around with that much, sorry. I don't typically use sleep on my laptops. I prefer to either hibernate or just shutdown and start up again when I need it.
I'd guess that the X13s hardware support in Ubuntu is likely as good as Debian, and switching probably wouldn't help you much. I have noticed that newer kernel versions (notably 6.12 and later) and the latest firmware (as of sometime last year) really fixed a lot of little issues for the X13s. That probably makes a bigger difference than the distro. I'd check to see which versions you're using.
I love my expensive Macbook at work, but at home old my old Thinkpad running Linux is a godsend. The performance is perfectly adequate for all my daily non-work needs, battery lasts several hours, and since the thing has little monetary value, I can be pretty careless with it, in an environment with small kids running around and doing random things. At this rate, I think it will last me well into 2030's.
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
I believe devices based on Lunar Lake (and the upcoming panther lake) can hit 12h battery life. Something with a 268V will be the fastest low power chip you can grab that will likely support linux.
But I do wish there was a viable ARM laptop offering that supports linux.
But here's the thing with Apple ARM processors. Each core in that M3 chip is faster than the corresponding core in an x86 chip. And it has unified memory, meaning that the CPU, GPU, and NPU all get access to the same RAM.
So you can get long battery life, cool thermals, and superior performance all in the same machine, at the same time. It will take the rest of the industry years to catch up to what Apple has wrought.
I think what you're running into is that you have a different attitude than some of us do about technology. I've been using computers for a very long time as well, but I don't feel a sense of entitlement to the latest and greatest features because it often comes with other compromises regarding freedom and control. Because Linux is several years behind Windows and Mac in terms of adopting those technologies, there is an evergreen argument in every thread about Linux which boils down to "Why can't it do this thing from the last four years?"
This is uniformly tiring and uninteresting. I've been using 1920x1080 displays for 25 years and they're just fine. A retina display is not necessary to do anything that I need. Similarly with these requirements about particular thermals and particular battery lifetime. I can buy a battery and I can find a wall outlet.
You're comparing not having those features to having your husband assassinated during a play. But I don't think a lack of those features ruins the computing experience the way having your husband assassinated would ruin the play. The thing that ruins the play for me is when they chain me to my seat and tell me I have to watch the whole thing while they pin my eyelids open. And that's how I feel about using Windows or Mac OS.
So to turn your original comment around, Windows and Mac OS can call me when they allow me to configure my system as I see fit, and not shove ads for their auxiliary services in my face every time I try to start a program or modify a setting.
Come on, buddy, at this point, nobody could take you seriously.
You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.
You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.
You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.
I recently switched to Debian on my laptop (Zephyrus G14) because it was the only way I could get it to NOT run into the problems you described. Went from ~2 hours of battery life to 10, and no more of the constant jet engine level fan activity I experienced with windows.
I have two laptops running linux. One is a MSI gaming laptop with RTX card that no one would recommend for linux.
I had to try about 10 distros before I settled on linux mint. Everything else had some problem but the driver manager on linux mint made setting up the RTX so flawless.
After 8 months of use, it is the best machine I have ever used. If I had just stuck with my old favorite KDE neon though I would have been posting on how not to get MSI if you want to use linux.
Why would anyone come back? Nobody is bothered by you having a device that you like, and nobody cares if you replace it.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
Battery life is the best selling point of MacBooks and the reason these are selling like crazy. I’m a full time Linux user and I’m even considering buying a macbook and running a Linux VM full time because of the battery.
Just to be clear this is entirely a response to what I have in the parentheses, right?
Ok, perhaps it is not niche. I don’t know. I have never had to use a laptop for 12 hours without any ability to recharge but if that’s a common use case I’m happy that folks are finding a way to satisfy.
I am a Linux fanboy and I totally agree that I am almost always near a plug and don't need that kind of battery life.
But when I can go for days on my work Macbook without charging (and I am a developer, so I do compile stuff), I kinda wish I could have that on Linux, too.
And again, I don't need it. Just like I don't need a fast Internet connection, but well... :-).
Bro I don't care how long the battery life is. I use my laptop plugged in 90% of the time. The portability is so I can change what location I'm sitting at, not so I can be unplugged constantly.
It's the same for me. I understand that people do want to use them without plugging in, but I would imagine at least most developers prefer external screens, right?
For me the battery is good enough when it can last two back-to-back meetings without me getting worried, so about 2.5 hours. Otherwise it stays plugged to USB-C.
The monitor is both powered and the video comes from one USB cord. My MacBook Pro can run 5-6 hours while powering the monitor. I couldn’t do that if the laptop by itself only last 3 hours.
Every now and then I use my iPad as a third monitor.
My “work life” involves business travel - consulting.
My personal life involves month long stints of me working outside the home and even at home, I am sometimes working on the patio enjoying 80 degree weather in the middle of winter in Florida…
It’s really nice - I get miles and hotel points I can use for personal travel and I can extend my work trips and bring my wife along and make it a weekend getaway. I pay for my wife out of pocket for the flight.
Linux will run on most platforms, so just pick up a fast, lightweight laptop, and select a conservative power profile for longer battery life and less heat, and don't run 32-thread machine learning jobs on it.
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
And how many laptops running Linux are light, power efficient, fast, quiet with good battery life?
My 16 inch M3 MacBook Pro runs 5 hours at 80% brightness doing development with my USB powered (video and power from one USB cord) portable monitor. The Mac battery is powering the monitor
Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux. Maybe your optics are tinted because you seem to be a Mac person, and Linux support for newer Macs has known issues with low power modes.
I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.
BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.
It’s not “running Linux” that’s the issue. It’s running Linux and getting good battery lifez
And a 1.6Ghz RISC V CPU isn’t exactly “fast” in 2026 or even 2021.
You noted that it was 5 hours when powering a second monitor from its USB port. Not just displaying video from the USB port, the monitor is getting power from the USB port.
How long do you think your 5 hour laptop would last powering an external display - again not just video out, also supplying power?
"Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux."
Well, as long as you buy a Mac laptop that's at least 3 years old you'll be mostly..good. Unfortunately Apple isn't interested in helping Linux and everything has to be painfully reverse engineered and some stuff for M1 is still broken.
I personally don't care about battery life, there are power outlets around everywhere I'll be more than several hours.
Still, no one is getting that kind of battery life outside apple, just the way it is. If your existence revolves around battery life there's no substitute.
But note, this thread is about replacing Windows, and Wintel does not do as well as Apple either. So this thread is off-topic.
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
If you're interested in this aspect of user agency, you might like the "trustworthy technology" site a few friends and I are working on: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
"There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,”"
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
What I don't understand is why it is so much effort to use linux on a phone. Surely these 8 core ARM monsters these days should be more than enough to handle a full kernel. Hopefully it's not a driver issue where manufacturers only contribute the necessary drivers to the android kernel, not the linux one.
The ultimate question is "Would you give up the right of owning your machine to have access to services", and with the decline of rooting scene on Android, the answer is pretty clear.
Not really, it makes use of Linux kernel, cages it on pseudo-microkernel architecture since Treble and Mainline refactorings, uses a Java userspace, and the NDK has a quite clear list of what APIs are allowed to be called.
Sure. But the malaise of smug people taking decisions that are outside of the scope of the software is creeping into linux too. It is up to me decide what is secure, not them.
I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop).
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!
Yes exactly. When I had a Mac for work, I had to tinker with that thing just as much if not more so than I do Linux. To windows credit, it was the best of the three when it came to not having to tinker to get what I want, but the lack of ability to configure it in a way that was comfortable and preferable was more limited and difficult, so there were annoyances I had to just live with. The point at which they started injecting ads into my desktop experience was a dark day and the day I said goodbye
Oh god, I had a Mac for work recently and had to spend 3 weeks becoming an expert in Mac External Displays And Thunderbolt just to get my HP Thunderbolt 4 dock (officially compatible with Macs!) to use a dual monitor setup with it. Finally I got it working, but every configuration I tried Just Worked(tm) on Linux. Jeez...
This sounds more like problem of HP’s dock than a Mac. Just because they said it is officially compatible with Mac doesn’t mean it is. Also, compatible with which Mac- Intel or M series? I use three different docks on two Mac Mini (M4 Pro) and they all worked out of the box. I did my research before buying them by watching YouTube reviews.
This is exactly the double standard, or bias when talking operating systems.
When it's macOS/Windows, it's someone else's fault; when it's Linux, it's Linux fault.
When you have to tinker on macOS/Windows that's just what has to be done, no biggie; when you have to tinker on Linux, it's a burden nobody should be subjected to.
People are blind to the work they've grown accustomed to. There are many things that are much, much easier on Linux than macOS or Windows.
Indeed, and especially the double standard regarding "oh but on Linux you have to carefully check if the hardware is supported by Linux" but when it's a Mac it will "just work." In GPs comment they have to do the same hardware compat research as a Linux user does, but that's never listed as a downside for Mac
This is a bizarre complaint. There are more Mac users than Linux users but still far fewer than Windows users. As such, there are so many examples of hardware and software that are incompatible with Mac. Our IT dude keeps telling me to switch to Windows because of better support from third party vendors.
My comment was specifically about the HP dock. I have nothing for or against Linux as I have never used it, don't know anybody who uses it, and I have no plans to use it. I am simply not qualified to comment on Linux.
Don't take it personal. This wasn't about you specifically, but the sentiment frequently observed. No one would have been blaming HP when we were talking Linux. The need for tinkering, or hardware considerations is frequently brought up against Linux; it's never brought up for macOS, on the contrary, on macOS everything "just works" - even when it doesn't. On Windows, for years, you had/have to search the web for obscure software and drivers, then download them from shady third-party websites, repeating the process for updates; on Linux you always were able to install and update almost everything signed and shipped from trusted sources through the package manager, long before app stores, but apparently adding a line to some config file is unbearable inconvenience. Somehow people are very ignorant about the limitations (sometimes unfixable) and troubleshooting in Windows and macOS, but hyper vigilant when it comes to Linux.
I am running this Fedora installation for a few years, now. No clean install in-between, just super stable and pleasant upgrades. Everything just works for me. Zero tinkering. If there is a bug, it's usually tracked and gone in a few weeks, at most the next release 6 months off. If a HP dock doesn't work, it's HP's fault for not using open standards, certainly not a problem of Linux.
So Mac doesn't support DisplayPort MST like everyone else does (Windows and Linux have supported this STANDARD for years), because they are assholes and don't care about their users, and the fact that multi monitor support is different between Intel Macs, certain M1s (cannot use more than one external monitor at all!), and the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup (other M1s, M2+) is insane.
I eventually got it working on this Intel Mac by using one HDMI and one specific DisplayPort output on the dock so it wouldn't try to multistream it internally in the dock or whatever (can't remember what exactly it was doing). It might have involved an HDMI to DP converter. I honestly tried to purge my memory of it once I got it working.
Note that all setups worked fine with Linux without modifications. Would have likely worked fine on Windows, too, since it supports MST. Only one specific setup worked with Mac.
So no, it's not a problem of the dock, it's a problem with Apple refusing to support a standard so they can make people buy the expensive $400 docks they hawk in Apple stores. Or because they are lazy and think because they don't care, their users shouldn't either.
You will find many people complaining about Mac's multi monitor support (or lack thereof) online. They are choosing to ignore user feedback.
> Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change.
Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME
In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
This shouldn't happen with external disks formatted with ntfs, ext or udf. If you have an EXT4 or something like that external disk things get more hazy...
Whether it should or shouldn't, it did. But I think the issue is less that it happened, and more that the user interface doesn't respond to the "no permission" error by offering up a button you can click to attempt to grant yourself permission. If it can be done through the terminal, there should be a novice friendly way as well.
(For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this isn't an important problem that needs to be addressed. I mostly agree with what you say and I bet the right way to deal with this is to have it be mounted with a special user space filesystem like fuse that wraps the permissions to always look correct for the user that mounted it, but I guess no one so far has decided to take upon such task...
no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.
There's no concept of "external". What would it be, "USB" or anything mounted under /mnt or /media? What if it's the root OS drive of another computer you're trying to fix connected through a USB-SATA adapter? Should any program running with minimized privileges get to overwrite even root files in that OS drive?
I think that it's a pretty good heuristic that if permissions exist in the filesystem, they matter and shouldn't be ignored.
They shouldn't be ignored. but they can be ignored, is the problem. File permissions are not encryption or security: If I can't read a file on this machine, because I'm not root, I'll just move the drive to a different machine where I am root.
But I agree with you, they do have a use and to some use cases matter, and we shouldn't arbitrarily decide to ignore them.
I don't doubt you had that problem. But it, and the solution you want, sound a bit strange. You want a button that gives your user access to everything despite its access settings... Than login and work as root.
I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could have been a distro bug.
> but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I'm a 90% Windows- 9.5% Linux- 0.5% Mac-Admin at day job: Don't tell me Windows has no problems poping up. ;-)
Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?
If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.
And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
>Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
That definitely seems like a feature that could/should be added to some (most? all?) linux file managers. In fact, it doesn't even sound like that difficult to implement with standard system calls[0].
It's not really an issue for me (I prefer the command line -- heck, I still use octal when setting permissions instead of 'rwx'), but it sounds like it bugs you a lot.
You don't mention which Desktop Environment (DE) you're using, but I imagine the file manager in your DE is open source. As such, I'm sure you could make yourself and the (I'm sure) many others who'd like to be able to modify file/dir/filesystem permissions/ownership via their GUI file manager much happier.
Try doing that with Windows Explorer or Finder. I think not.
Hm, I'm a KDE user. I just tested what happens when I try to open a folder I don't have access rights for. The standard file browser Dolphin says authentication is required. "Act as administrator." If clicked there comes a warning and I can enter my password. Than it shows the content.
Good! That's exactly what I would like to have happen! I think the error was more like that it didn't have permission to mount the drive. I logged the message at the time, but I don't have access to that computer this week, so I'm going from memory.
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.
---
Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
> The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Intel lasted for more than 21 hours in our Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² brightness). This device will easily last more than ten hours in everyday use.
Also, tested on Windows not Linux. Still, if I could get 10 hours of regular usage on Linux, I'd be ecstatic.
If you add a MacBook to comparison there on that website, you'll see they last basically the same in same usage. Qualcomm actually can get even more hours, if I remember correctly.
In any case, I don't think the battery time is an issue anyone with 2025+ devices.
I've been running desktop Linux for about eighteen years, though I did take a break and run a Macbook for about four years.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.
Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.
Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.
26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.
So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.
I didn't say it was. This discussion is about relative difficulty of setting things up. It is, objectively, more difficult when you need to download a driver for new hardware and the NIC on your laptop needs a driver your distro didn't come with.
I don't buy a lot of hardware, but the last thing I bought (Vocaster One) came with the driver installer on a small USB mass storage volume when the device plugged in.
I've been on Linux since Ubuntu 8.04 or longer and I literally never had OS install problems with any of it at all. Except for Arch, but what did you expect? Hands-on is the point of Arch Linux.
On the other hand, I remember installing a lot of drivers by hand on windows. Most people never (re-)installed Windows or macOS to begin with.
Probably depends on your hardware, but that's a matter of vendor support, not operating system. It's not like Microsoft or Apple are writing all those drivers. With a Thinkpad or Brother, you likely never had problems with Linux for the last 20 years. People don't complain they can't install macOS on a Chromebook, and Windows has been the absolute OS monopoly everyone had to support. However, with tinkering, you can install Linux on a washing machine.
What has drastically changed is the user space software side. First off some FOSS alternatives like Blender, OBS, Krita... are becoming equal or better than the competition, but Valve also basically solved gaming on Linux, now. Virtualization and software development is and always has been better.
To be fair, Linux also shines now due to enshitification of everything else.
My experience, as a software developer, is that both Windows and Linux desktop are great. The biggest advantage Windows has is better support for desktop applications that are used by a lot of people, which is just the nature of Windows being more popular for desktop users, and is why I use it. With Linux, it's more likely you'll have to be a bit more savvy with occasional issues.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
> To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
Maybe not as a developer, but as a user I still think WSL is only kind of superficially a solution. You still are stuck with an update process that happens automatically and can brick your computer and recovery tools that, as far as I can tell, have never actually worked for anyone in history. You're still stuck with NTFS, which was a perfectly fine filesystem thirty years ago but now is missing basic features, like competent snapshotting/backups, and instead you have to rely on System Restore, which again doesn't actually work.
I mean, yeah, you can do `sudo apt install neovim`, and that's kind of cool I guess, but the problems with Windows, to me are far deeper and cannot be solved with a virtualization layer on top.
I dunno, for local development, I've never ran into any issues with this. And for stuff that really matters, I'm running it in a container anyways which makes it irrelevant which OS my computer is.
I've been using Linux as a desktop for that entire time, and actually, it was better before. The hardware was simpler, more compatible, and relied less on firmware blobs, so making Linux drivers was way easier. And the software was simpler because GUI makers weren't trying to be fancy. The peak of Linux desktop stability and ease of use was in 2002. It's been downhill from there.
The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".
If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
> If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
Not only that, but in the past I've cooked hacky bash scripts to work around issues while waiting for upstream fixes. I'd imagine that'd be harder with other OSs.
Also a long-time Linux user/administrator. Whenever I've tried searching for Windows answers to issues, I've been genuinely shocked by how low quality the answers are. I've got just a basic understanding of Windows, but it's obvious to me that over 99% of all Windows advice is from people who are just posting meaningless answers so that they can get points for answering or similar.
Well, see sibling thread: Looks like you just need to post your bounty in HN and somebody will do within a few hours. Somebody to that for Windows or macos.
Sometimes I feel the bounty topic isn't well served yet. On the GNOME bug tracker it doesn't seem to be very discoverable. Are there current good platforms to advertise bounties where people actually look?
Are you proposing that the linux community offers worse support than any kind of software support that you pay for? I've found strangers on the internet to be worlds better than anything I've ever gotten from a vendor.
I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.
On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.
People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows
Most explorer issues are really file system issues. It's touchy. chkdsk in offline repair mode usually fixes it. For the rest, clear the thumbnail cache.
I did try those, but it did not solved the issue. But searching around I came to know, this was a rare known explorer bug. Which was not resolved ... so that's that.
The default remote desktop client on Windows 11 can have his picture freeze. Mouse and keyboard input still goes through though. (Which is especially dangerous because enraged users will smash their keyboard.) Years without a fix from Microsoft. Just a registry hack as a workaround.
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon with my main work laptop last week, when my perfectly fine (I thought) Windows 11 installation nuked itself without warning (possibly related to merely opening Teams).
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
Excellent, I will try it straight away. I'll pay out 75% if it works (as it fixes my immediate problem), and the remaining 25% if it gets merged. I'll email you after my test.
I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).
Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.
It only stops refreshing if you are hovering the actual SSID list items which in my opinion is the cleanest way to do it, if you want new data you can reclick/rehover the "available networks". The Other option is putting the refresh on a global timer, but that would add magic which isn't clear to the user.
I agree that logic is sound, but it is also not discoverable to the user:
They might open the list (with the cursor resting on one of the items, or use the keyboard to navigate out of comfort or for accessibility reasons), then notice "oh wait, I haven't actually enabled my phone's Wifi hotspot yet", enable that, and wait forever for it to appear.
That's why I'm thinking something should visually (and non-visually) change so the user can notice.
Maybe even cleaner would be to add a tooltip to the currently-hovered entry? That might work for both mouse and non-mouse use cases, and might even work for screenreaders.
Yeah I think this is what OS X does (or used to do), you open the menu and it does its initial refresh, and only after quite some delay of the menu being open, it refreshes again. Easy enough to choose your network in that large amount of time. I may be missing some subtle details of it though, since I haven't used it in a while >_>
Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.
Re: "Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"
So, out of curiosity, if I tried installing MacOS on any of the 15+ computers I have at home, what are the likely chances that this "operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"
I can tell you that my success rate with Linux is 100%.
I’m not especially speaking for MacOS, but to your question, I suspect if you tried to install an appropriate version of MacOS on Mac hardware, you’d have very close to a 100% success rate. That’s certainly my past experience with Mac and, FWIW, Windows too.
Anyway, my point wasn’t that Linux should be perfect; but that if it can’t be, maybe give some help why, and more experienced users shouldn’t just jump to blaming the struggling newbie.
The key is this: if you want Linux to win with non-experts, it needs to target being a better experience for non-experts than the alternatives, to justify the effort of changing.
Re: "if you want Linux to win with non-experts, it needs to target being a better experience for non-experts than the alternatives"
I agree in broad terms, but let me re-capitulate this. Which OS do you think would offer a better experience for non-experts when installing on bare-metal? By my reckoning, Windows is a nightmare to install afresh on random hardware, and MacOS wont work on most-all random hardware. Users think that Windows is easier because they almost never have to install it from scratch.
Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
> I agree in broad terms, but let me re-capitulate this. Which OS do you think would offer a better experience for non-experts when installing on bare-metal? By my reckoning, Windows is a nightmare to install afresh on random hardware, and MacOS wont work on most-all random hardware. Users think that Windows is easier because they almost never have to install it from scratch.
I've done multiple installs of every Windows (except 8) Windows since the NT4 era, and multiple installs of OS X over the last decade. They have almost always been straightforward and successful, unless I've complicated things with weird partition/dual boot requirements. (OS X isn't really a fair comparison, as the target hardware is so hugely restricted.)
----
Aside from the initial installation 'just working' (which I accept might not be dramatically different with Linux, these days, and indeed, I accept that Windows often needs additional drivers downloading, depending on your system.) there's another big factor to consider.
With Windows and OS X there's a long-established concept (at least, prior to the app store era) that if you want to install something, you download a file and run it. This applies whether it's drivers or software, and >95% of the time also provides a simple uninstall path. Even my elderly mother can grok this.
With Linux, this is my recent journey: Must I use APT or APT-GET? Flatpack? Snap? Or can I use the built-in Software Manager (FWIW, I really like the one in Mint, except when stuff isn't available on it.) Oh, so some software (Mullvad, Blender, etc.) I need to download manually? I've installed Mint; am I on a Debian system? Okay, I'll download the DEB, but then how to install that? (Oh, it failed - open-whispr). For other things, we must download an Appimage and make it executable - great, that works, but it doesn't have an install feature, so how to install it somewhere so that it's not forever sitting in Downloads? Huh, okay, I can figure that out, but it's a pain. Oh, wait, some of those self-contained files I've downloaded will run directly from file manager, but for some reason fail silently via the start menu link I've just made. Okay, better trouble-shoot that tomorrow...
(For brevity, I've left out that at every stage, there were multiple web searches to find instructions for the correct approach, diving into all manner of forums, Stack Overflow posts, and Github repositories. And I've left out the more esoteric stuff, like slowing down touchpad scrolling via obscure command-line incantations.)
This is the reality of setting up a simple Linux system with (what is reputed to be) one of the most user-friendly distros there is.
And which is why, if the goal is Linux 'winning' on the desktop (beyond committed nerds) there's still quite some way to go on UX.
> Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
Totally with you, 100% - that's why I'm experimenting with a full shift to Linux myself. But this only applies to relative nerds. Many/most non-expert users don't know or care about such things.
Re: "Or can I use the built-in Software Manager (FWIW, I really like the one in Mint, except when stuff isn't available on it.)"
I think this (built-in Software Manager) is probably the right track for most normal users. Last time I checked, the Debian software repo had over 120,000 packages, so for most normal users, the bulk of what they need is likely there and thus likely easier to install than apps on MacOS or Windows. My usual track record for installing a new desktop for family members, including the top 100 apps they likely need, is under 30 minutes for Linux. The last time I tried this with Windows, it took days of effort and frustration and to some extent opened the computer up to security risks because of the multitude of binary sources I had to trust.
But yes, once you start needing specialist software, then your-mileage-may-vary. Having said that, apps like Blender are already in the Ubuntu repo, which should mean they are also in the Mint Software Manager, and thus a single-click away from installation.
In general, I would consider Linux to be the easiest platform to install software on for the most common 80% of the software that normal users need. It's certainly the easiest to maintain and update that commonly used software of any of the mainstream desktop OSes.
Again, I think a lot of the mismatch of norms & experiences comes down to what someone becomes accustomed to. If you're accustomed to downloading an installation binary (EXE/MSI) and double-clicking that to install on Windows, then you can become accustomed to downloading an installation binary (DEB/RPM) and double-clicking that to install on Linux (viz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOPQPrzmnw0).
Re: "I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol."
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
Asahi linux to not waste hardware and then move away from apple products slowly. But in the meantime, their products are good and are Unix based so they're not a pain for development.
Or, you could help accelerate the move away from proprietary platforms, even if there is a small hit to you personally. This is how we help save society, rather than having others do all the work, no?
In the end, it's in your best interests that Linux and open platforms improve in the direction you want them to, and the best way to achieve that is by joining the effort now.
Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.
This is still a problem. There are a lot of, eg, realtek chipsets that don't work well or simply don't work on Linux.
Another issue is they advertise "Linux support," which actually translates to: minimally working driver source available for very out-of-date kernel. Good luck if you want to rely on upstreamed drivers or even run a recent kernel.
Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on
>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
There's this reply in the comments from the author.
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
I don't think PopOS could be called "obscure". At the time that the LTT video came out, PopOS and Manjaro (IIRC) were the distros to game on, if you wanted up-to-date OOTB working drivers.
Even so, it was hard to take LTT's attempt at using linux seriously when part of it included Linus bitching about how right clicking a list of files on github and clicking "save link as..." didnt give him a copy of the file. It just highlighted how utterly clueless he was and made it clear he couldn't be trusted for the rest of the video either.
Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf).
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.
Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033
> I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades
Yeah, if the goal of the article was to convince Windows users to switch to Linux then Ubuntu would provide as frictionless an install as Windows. Since the author chooses CachyOS, of course there's going to be some important steps during installation that need to be handled with some forethought and extra software to handle all hardware issues. After all, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and inherits it's minimal mindset. But the article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been already written a thousand times.
It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.
For not much prior research, he sure has done a lot of prior research to even know about desktop environments or bootloaders compared to your average windows user. This article read like every other promising Linux is user friendly and easy, then proceeding with the author fixing issues the average user wouldn’t be able to even diagnose.
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
I use Linux exclusively for almost 20 years. I can tackle any tinkering of almost anything in a Linux environment, alongside of heavy use of Vim and Emacs.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
99% of people who don’t work in tech want to configure their computer by clicking buttons and menus, not by running terminal commands or asking ChatGPT.
Not true. They want to talk to their secretary, and the secretary do it for them.
Go around, and ask people if they want a free secretary, see if someone doesn't want one.
They will not ask a computer program to do stuff. They will talk to the secretary, and the secretary will do any computer stuff necessary. For the moment the secretary cannot click buttons and menus as well as manipulate language. The secretary will have realistic skin and lips, and a dress as short as required by the job description.
Language AI is the king of AIs, and the gap will only get bigger. Everything will be tied to language going forward, driving, surgeries and so on.
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.
Even then - I have a reasonably nice Brother Printer/Scanner/etc device, and I could never get AirPrint to reliably work until I switched over to using Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. Something to do with it going to sleep and not broadcasting the necessary mDNS stuff, IIRC. I couldn't find any combination of settings in the printer to make it happy, and since it's now right next to a switch, it's not really worth the effort of digging any further.
> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
> after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
My Dad managed to install linux (Q4OS) on his computer in a dual-boot setup, having never even touched Linux before. He hasn't asked me for help once, whereas historically I've been his tech support when he was running Windows. He's loving the linux experience.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
On the other hand I recently did another dual boot system and despite having done it 100 times I accidentally destroyed the windows install by assuming it was efi when it wasn’t and overwriting the windows boot record which was at the end of the hard drive when making space for Linux, and it became permanently unbootable and ultimately had to be reinstalled. If an experienced user can make a terrible mistake so easily during the standard setup wizard that did it with a smile, than anyone can.
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
Partly, the issue isn't "they would have to learn about Linux, and that's bad", it's "they would have to learn about Linux, and they wouldn't want do that, and so they would get frustrated and quite likely give up on it, and my recommendation would have been a waste of their time".
The other part is that they're not necessarily wrong not to want to learn about Linux! Learning is great, when it's something interesting or valuable. But if I'm not interested in the thing, and my time and mental resources are limited, and I have a good enough alternative, I think it's absolutely fine to avoid it.
Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering. Maybe you're into cars, I don't know, but I bet you take this attitude to at least some of the useful objects in your life.
> Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering.
You can also bring your Linux machine to the mechanic. The only difference is that we linux users are also the mechanics.
My mother only wants a browser and a mail client, maybe a word processor from time to time. I installed Fedora, and the thing is still working after 5 years or so. I ssh into the thing once a month to do a "dnf update", she doesn't even notice. After initial setup, no more tinkering ever needed.
Because although sometimes annoying, people already have a good alternative making the hours required to invest in something they're not interested in a very high price.
It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim.
I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.
It should be a choice, not a requirement. With Windows you can get your work done without knowing much about Windows itself, but with Linux you're forced to understand every level of the entire OS so you can debug it first and then maybe get your work done. For an OS built around user freedom Linux sure doesn't give its users much choice on how to use it.
Windows is worse , just latest example: a USB WiFi antenna for the PC, on Linux it just works, on Windows you need either to buy a CD drive to install the drivers - not sure if your grandma can buy a cd drive, install it and install drivers. On Linux it just works.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
>You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
Sure, sure , so all hardware that does not autoinstall on Windows directly without a driver or internet is junk. AFAIK Windows can't install the correct nvidia or AMD drivers and you need to use special steps to prepare a windows install USB since the installer for some reason starts from the stick but doe's not have the drivers to complete the installation from the stick
Your knowledge needs to be updated then. The latest reinstall of windows I did detected my nvidia card and installed the proper nvidia drivers without me doing anything. I was surprised actually to see that but there you go.
You are hilariously wrong. Seriously, what century are you living in? It's been a very long time since I had to install a specific driver for any piece of hardware on Windows, and I go through a lot of hardware. Every piece of hardware I had is automatically installed and configured without any hassle whatsoever.
not OC, as i mentioned in parallel thread, an USB witreless antena.
The brand of the antena is not important, what is important is the chip used in it, since same chip is used by many brands , some chap no name brands or some well known brands use same chip and package it in a more expensive looking package.
In Windows it does not recognize it, so I pluged it in Linux and just worked directly, no need to scan for drivers or shit like that, so I run the "lsusb" command in Linux, found the chip ID , searched the internet for a Windows driver from Linux, put it on a USB stick and install it on Windows.
Also I am 100% sure that when I bought my desktop the box had CDs for everything from motherboard, sound, network and video card, I am remember for sure that if I would install the drivers in the wrong order in Windows the OS willb e confused and not detect my sound card)because some cofusion between the Realteck network and sound card I think)
Would be an interesting experiment to get N random PCs and N random non tech people and have them install Windows and Linux on them, have them setup the random hardware in the PC, setup a printer and scanner, connect the phone to it and download photos etc the Linux distro must be a distro targeted for normal people not the extreme dev/game/nerd targetd distros so IMO Kubuntu LTS would be a good choice.
You realise printers are NOTORIOUS for having horrifically bad Linux support, right? Linux would lose that battle 10 times out of 10. Manufacturers have a massive incentive for devices to plug and play on windows and they all basically do.
There is no magic plug and play in Windows, you need to install the giant bundle of crap the printer CD comes with, In Linux it actually works this days, no internet and no CD needed.
No, just no. Across dozens of machines with different hardware configurations, I've never had Windows download a driver. It just doesn't happen. But neither of us can provide any proof, so this comment thread isn't going to go anywhere.
but lets make it simple then, I obtain a retail copy of windows 11, go and buy the latest nvidia gpu, released AFTER win11 was released, and it has a proper driver without downloading?
edit:
or another scenario, i go out and buy a new lenovo or dell or whatever laptop, format the disk, install retail windows, and now windows just has the drivers for all this?
or another scenario, I go and buy motherboard, ram, cpu, gpu, install windows, and it just magically has drivers for all the hardware?
and what hardware exactly do you plug in? obviously its not gonna do it even if you plug in 1000 different USB hid mice, other than that, drivers are totally needed for many things, and windows just doesnt come with drivers for remotely all hardware, which is a very very easily provable fact.
Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Windows, with generally useful error messages when things go wrong.
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
You run memtest86 to rule out a RAM issue, then check with your system reseller or mobo vendor for BIOS mitigations for the latest round of Intel CPU bugs. If you are able to rule out the RAM and CPU, try a different power supply. Failing that, the motherboard itself may be causing the issue.
Unfortunately there are few good ways to narrow down intermittent hardware failures (which is what you are experiencing) beyond these common steps.
It works so far. That means nothing. Different memory areas, different patterns of bus access, hardware usage and CPU activity. And don't forget different hardware drivers, for that matter.
However much Windows 11 sucks, BsoDs are vanishingly unlikely to be caused by Windows itself. They haven't managed to degrade it to that extent. At least not yet.
“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.
I used to concede that yeah, Linux is more hassle than the average person is going to feel like dealing with, but at this point, Windows is so damn bad that you could grab literally any Linux distro and have an easier time with it, and even better, it won't delete all your stuff in the middle of the night due to a forced update either.
I actually don’t agree with that. If you don’t want to fully commit (which would help users transition) good effing luck getting an average user through the dual boot process, no distributed ever made that smooth or understandable. Even I have bricked my windows boot record by mistake and I’ve done it 100 times. But for the sake of argument let’s say they go full beans, my most recent install of Linux involved a manual ini file fix because sleep was totally broken, and learning to backport the graphics driver to an older version because the recommended pascal driver forces the wrong resolution on my main screen. This is just stuff that doesn’t happen with windows, which I installed without a hitch the same hardware.
In my opinion, in the best case scenario Linux is equal to windows in usability, but in every other scenario it just isn’t. Yes, windows is shit these days. But the average person would rather be annoyed at copilot than deal with driver issues.
I agree. Yet another "Linux is great! The only issues I had were A, B, C, D, E...".
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
"Windows is great… you only need to… install the IoT version using Rufus"
Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.
Nope. I tweaked one setting via the GUI (to get the taskbar back to the left where it rightfully belongs). Literally everything else I've left as-is. The IoT edition doesn't come with any bloatware and Rufus does a couple of other tweaks automatically.
I don't think there are any privacy related settings to tweak. The IoT version doesn't have any of the bloat. It's pretty much like Windows 7 but with a slicker interface.
KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.
GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.
GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.
I prefer Gnome. There's hardly any visual clutter, and it can be controlled primarily by keyboard (which I prefer). Every other environment, even MacOS, just has so much noise.
> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
Back in the days of Unity I decided to make a full switch to Linux and it just worked. The UX was unfamiliar but it had a cohesiveness that made sense. I use macOS for the past 10 years as my main system (work stuff needs Mac-specific things) but switching to a decent Linux distro would honestly feel like an upgrade. Windows continues being a shitshow and I want nothing to do with it.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
> What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and proton are so good and so much easier to support than each individual distro natively.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
I wanted to setup a family gaming PC in the living room for Christmas and went with CachyOS. It gave me a one click gaming installation option that just worked. I’m not interested in the FPS games with constant anti cheat mechanisms right now. It has worked with every game I’ve tried so far. Examples include: Crazy Machines 3, Cygni, Gradius, and Bejeweled (all on Steam.)
I have a PC with Windows 10 and so does my dad that I’ll be converting to some kind of Linux soon. Windows 11 isn’t even an option due to the TPM chip requirement. The computers are still quite good and it makes no sense to abandon them. With Linux their performance will probably improve.
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.
> My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
I wonder if this might be some odd library issue that could be fixed in the WINE prefix.
I knew a guy that wanted to play a Japanese version of a JRPG on Linux and he figured out he needed some weird libraries there to properly render the font, which was causing the game to not start.
Anyway, for older games and emulators, playing on Linux has been a magnificent experience for the most part.
Out of incessant curiosity and borderline obsession - I installed KDE, then I enabled the experimental Wayland support for Proton and tried the game again.
It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.
Part of it was the game just didn’t play nice with Wayland, and since I use Gnome I don’t have an X11 session available. I could’ve tried on a different DE but didn’t want to install a bunch of extra bloat; yet I installed a whole other Os…sigh
shrugs
Maybe I’ll try switching to KDE and see if it works better under X11 there.
I recently switched to linux from windows. The only reason I was sticking with windows was because hoyoverse refuses to support linux. I finally decided I need some break from them anyways and took the plunge.
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
The trick with linux is being selective when you buy hardware. Getting things to work the first time is hit or miss, but once they work, they tend to continue to work without too many surprises. For laptops, that means thinkpads.
The dock and monitors aren't mine actually. I got them from work. The work laptop runs windows 11 so the hardware is only tested for windows. I will buy my own stuff when I have to return these and then I will make sure it all works with linux.
What distro / wm / de is good with external monitors, in your opinion? After going through some of the comments on some threads, it feels like external displays are a common pain point across all linux systems.
Yes, external displays can break in weird ways. I remember that a common annoyance used to be that windows and applications don't go back to where you left them before suspending. There are likely other paper cuts as well in areas of variable refresh rates, colour management, etc. I think the biggest issue with external displays, screen tearing, is solved now due to wayland. As for hw and distros, stick to intel or amd igpus, especially in laptops. Both gnome and kde are pretty good these days. Ubuntu and Fedora are both quite good. Distros aren't that different anymore these days. The differences boil down to release cadence mostly.
check out the launchers here for hoyo stuff, i haven't tried the genshin one but zzz worked nearly out of the box (had to change the wine version it was using iirc) https://github.com/an-anime-team
I was watching the Lenovo CES keynote and couldn’t believe how hard they were selling Qira on Lenovo computers and Motorola phones. All the major players have platform specific Windows features that can’t possibly meet their success criteria in terms of ROI. Lenovo isn’t Apple or Google or Microsoft, and even the latter two have trouble selling fully integrated platform services on hardware.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
The "do something" is support open hardware, sell more machines, provision fewer product variations.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
I have been using Fedora comfortably as my main os on a framework for the last 18 months and I have had no issues. I do just think for all that I do, lab work, coding, and gaming. I also run debian on mnt pocket reform and tbh I think it is OSes' like Linux that allow devices like that to exist. Windows and Mac just aren't options.
There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.
Moved my Framework laptop to Bluefin and my gaming desktop to Bazzite early last year. Zero regrets, zero issues. I'm not new to Linux by any means, I've been dabbling since a kid. But in adulthood, I had given up on having Linux as my daily driver because I just wanted my main computers to work, I didn't want maintaining them to be a hobby. That's not been an issue with Bluefin or Bazzite. I'm sure it's not for a lot of modern Linuxes, but these ones I can vouch for at least!
Bazzite is my first immutable distro. Idk that I would want this for my dev machine - but for a gaming/general desktop usage it’s pretty amazing. If they exposed more of the maintenance tooling and stuff like adding RPM layers via the UI then I think they’d have a really compelling OS for non-technical users.
I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
I expected it to be an issue but I’ve had surprisingly few problems so far. If you’re working in docker-land or can use devcontainers, it just works. If you’re not but your stack is well supported by homebrew, also not a problem. Anything else you can handle via a distrobox container, where you can install from package managers to your heart’s content, and they have good integration with the base OS, but I’ve had to reach for distrobox a lot less than I expected.
Interesting, thanks! Out of curoisity would you (or anyone else) mind sharing some details about which stacks you work on? And have you done any GTK or linux native apps?
I do a decent amount of GTK and occasionaly Qt, and wonder if there's any extra friction for that
I think you should take another look, especially at the “Bazzite developer experience” edition: container based development is pretty much what it’s centred around. Alternatively, Bluefin, which is much more dev focused
I switched from Windows to Linux ~20 years ago because and never came back to Windows. First years I used Ubuntu and experimented with Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. Later went to Fedora Linux with Gnome Desktop which is still my preferred Linux Distribution. Nice to see so many people thinking about free and open alternatives to big tech!
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
> The biggest issue I’ve had so far is Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. For some reason, Microsoft hasn’t prioritized making a Linux version of Bedrock. Java Edition works fine in Linux, but I play Minecraft with my kids, and they’re on Bedrock Edition on their iPads. There’s supposed to be a way to run the Android app with MCPE Launcher, but I couldn’t get it to work.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
This was my stance for the past couple years, but I moved to Linux (PopOS) 3 months ago because wsl2 kept crashing from OOM (even though I had allocated excess ram). I kept having to manually manage my memory usage by choosing which apps, containers etc to run.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why?
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished.
Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0
100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.
Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.
NixOS. Had prior Linux experience, so wasn't too worried about learning multiple new major paradigms in parallel. Also had been running a lil' NixOS server for half a year before that, so I could carry over most of my configuration.nix from there, and also the safe feeling of knowing that if I do mess up stuff, I could with very high probability just reboot to a previous generation and have everything back to working exactly the same as before.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
Mint because I am a filthy casual. I love Mint. It has been smooth sailing for the past 4 years running it on a 2019 Dell X5. Part of why I lack any motivation to get a new machine is because it still runs very smooth with Mint.
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I started with Ubuntu but had some problems installing software. Then I moved to Mint and it stuck with me. I converted 6 virtual machines from Windows to Mint Linux, and it's been great.
I then moved my main server that runs the VMs from Windows to Linux Mint, and that went far better than expected, basically no problems at all. I had two LSI x8 SAS RAID cards, each running an 8 disk RAID 10 array. Moving over to Linux there was nothing to do except plug them in, and they just worked. No drivers to install. I did have to find a copy of the management software, but that runs exactly the same as it did on Windows.
The last VM I have is running a somewhat complex IIS web server setup that I have to move over to Linux, and I haven't had the time to dig in on that yet, but I will do it this year.
The last system I have on Windows is my laptop/workstation. It doesn't behave that well on Linux with my 3 displayport monitors, and a few other things. I have it dual-booting to Mint, so I will keep trying. There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
> There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
This is the main barrier for most people, I reckon.
I mostly play on consoles nowadays, but I recognize that games are important as they bring the masses. If gaming on Linux becomes important, the rest will follow.
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
The printer also was my reason I picked Ubuntu over Arch / Endeavour OS :)
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
What are peoples' thoughts on which style of distro is best to hand over to a non-techie user for the least amount of hand-holding?
I re-install so much that I don't know how easy it is, or how the distros prompt, when something like Debian Stable or Fedora need to update to the next version. With Arch, you constantly get the "updates ready" and it is always fresh.
I guess i've never really "switched" - I've always used Linux desktops together with Windows desktops - each to the strengths that they are good at it. And this goes back to the late 1990's. There are times I've used more than the other.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
When I switched back in 2012 I had used an Ubuntu live disk to rescue some files from my borked Windows 7 install. After reinstalling Windows 7 I was annoyed that it didn't have ethernet drivers so I decided to just install Ubuntu. When the Amazon lens controversy happened I started distro hopping and now I bounce between OpenSUSE and Arch. If I wasn't so insistent on cutting edge software I'd probably be using Mageia, which is stable as anything.
EndeavourOS with KDE. For some reason, I always seem to have issues with non-Arch distros, even back when I ran Linux on a netbook. After my Fedora install on my Framework 13 broke, I had switched to Manjaro, but after doing a bit of research when I decided to jump in with my desktop 1.5 year ago I went with EndeavourOS and have been quite happy with it.
Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
You use the platform you use ... until it doesn't work for you. I did that for Windows and now I'm on MacOS. Maybe one day Linux, maybe I pick a flavor there that doesn't work for me eventually.
> macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
100% this. Recent macOS releases really feel like this. For me it was the notification popup UI downgrade, they literally introduced a perfect UI and then botched it in a following release.
How does licensing work for Live? Would they necessarily have been able to update to a version that supports 64-bit? For instance, I have a few different machines that I will never update the OS on because I would then lose access to software I paid for.
On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.
Been running Linux Mint on this ThinkPad A485 for 1.5 yrs, problem-free. There is no feature that doesn't work. Even the media keys and stuff like the wifi-toggle function key work. Still, yeah, there are some things that are perennial problems for open source OSes, particularly wifi. Nice presentation on the topic: "All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIFz9na2lE
May I ask how long the battery lasts under lid suspension? And how quickly does wifi connect after wake? These two issues alone drove me begrudgingly to macOS.
Ooh, actually it's almost always plugged in so I couldn't tell you how long it will last asleep with the lid closed :\ Wifi reconnecting after wake is indiscernible to me because by the time I type in my password to unlock the machine, I'm online. I'm totally guessing but I imagine a big factor is simply the wifi card itself and its respective level of support in Linux. I would also say that wifi management has improved a lot in the past handful of years. I often forget I'm even using Linux because it's so easy to use and problem-free for me -- but again there's always that caveat that some machines have better-supported components than others lol
My Linux evenings usually appear 6 months down the road. It's the big updates that cause system breakdowns. This is like saying I got married in November and everything is going great. Far too early to know how far your patience will be tested before you leave.
I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
Unfortunately, you can only replace it with whatever is readily available... which AFAICR is not much, or just nothing. And even for that you have to be aware of it being replaceable and how to perform that replacement :-(
There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
Linux is insanely easy to use these days. So mature. Even for gaming, I haven't encountered a single game that hasn't run, and most of the time I don't even have to think of setting any compatibility stuff like wine version, it just runs like it was native.
In case of small enterprises, what are the options for migrating to Ubuntu for all remote users?
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right.
Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
Yeah, I requested to have a Linux desktop from my employer and was flatly told "NO". None of our many security applications supports it, which is a real shame. As we use Windows and MacOS, I can't see how we'll really be more secure on those platforms, even with the security theater applications they force us to use.
The standard approach is to use intrusive spyware to monitor all activity "for security" rather than to use systems designed to be resistant to attack. I call it the "fucking for virginity" approach to infosec. The reason why is because it's assumed that all attack-resistant systems break down somehow, under some circumstances but the audit trail to determine who committed the attack and how is non-negotiable, especially in regulatory and compliance settings. So institutional infosec tools are more interested in gathering the audit trail if/when an attack happens than in preventing the attack (in a "while we value the things in column A, the things in column B take priority" kind of way). And since they're almost always proprietary and considered beyond reproach by the corporate infosec division, well... occasionally something like the Clownstrike incident of 2024 does happen. But even that's not as bad as having had a breach without a sufficient audit trail to defend against liability or claims of noncompliance with regulations or industry standards (e.g., HITRUST in the health field).
It's been years since I've seen RHEL on the desktop at work. Any company that tolerated Linux desktops has either been large and geeky enough to go all-in on Linux and roll their own custom management solutions (Google), or else was still operating in "startup mode" with an attitude of "we trust our software devs, let's just give them a laptop and let them go nuts with root" which means they would flunk any serious security audit. And most of those used Ubuntu or similar.
The only place I've actually seen RHEL on the desktop, also the only large instutition besides Google I've seen Linux desktop rollout, was in government labs; and for those the government can commission arbitrarily bespoke security systems. In the real world, the CISO of your organization is going to go with one of the industry standards, like Cisco Secure Endpoint, which—again—only exist on Windows and Mac. In the real world, you might be issued a Mac if you're a developer, otherwise a Windows machine, and that's what you'll use, end of story.
I have old computers. Windows 10 is dead and Windows 11 will not install on old hardware. I put Debian 13 on my wife’s computer.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
Some of the key milestones for desktop Linux which I can remember:
* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.
* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.
* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.
* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.
There are two major hurdles I see:
* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).
* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).
It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
I installed Omarchy last year when it come out (Arch distro for devs) on laptop and December I installed it on desktop machine, the powerful one.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
My mother in law asked for help with her computer. I went in dreading the whole windows mess - only to find somebody had set her up with Linux Mint - I was actually able to help her with her internet issue, and am so happy for that unsung hero.
What's the best backup software on Linux? Something that works like Time Machine on macOS or Veeam on Windows. So one full backup then incremental ones at any given X hours/days and also browsable on file level for individual file restoring.
The big challenge in linux (at least for me) is to connect and work with devices like printers or scanners. It is weird but when I connected my (now old) printer a decade ago its setup was easier and more stable. After several years and ubuntu upgrades at some point I wasn't managed to make it work at all.. And I had no luck with my scanner at all.. Luckily I don't need to use neither printer neither scanner these days but I still keep a laptop (also old) with win7 and all original drivers for such devices.
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
If a Minecraft Java server has the special Geyser plugin ( https://geysermc.org/ ), Minecraft Bedrock clients can connect to it, so you can stick to Minecraft Java on Linux and still play together with your kids who are on Minecraft Bedrock on their iPads.
I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Gaming on Linux is so good now I know multiple people who switched their gaming PC to Linux and have no intention of going back. Then there's Steam Deck, which has 3million+ users alone. 3.6% of Steam users are playing on Linux[0], which is kind of insane if you ask me, especially when only 2.2% are playing on MacOS.
Install Steam in Linux and notice you can play the vast majority of your library. There are some online multiplayer games that won't work due to anticheat[1] though that seems to be improving over time as well.
People interested in similar experiences should check out this podcast/series of videos where two Windows/Mac users try desktop Linux and report out on their experiences.
My Windows gaming graphics performance dropped by 40% after some update. I already was using Linux for everything else except gaming for many years. So I tried out Steam on Linux and I was quite amazed how many games run on Linux via Proton. Just check out protondb.com for compatibility reports.
I picked manjaro because rolling updates + being more noob friendly than arch sounded good and gnome because i wanted something completely fresh than a windows layout i'm used to. Now i'm eyeing after hyprland as the next step but couldn't fimd guts to disrupt my workflow in order to get used to it
I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me.
17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
I moved from 15 years of macOS to Linux (Omarchy in my case). I was mostly using the terminal and am therefore super happy with my choice now. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/, in case of interest.
I have been primarily in the tiling window manager space for the past 5 years… that said I’ve been driving Cosmic on my NixOS workstation and I’m really impressed… it looks great, is simple, performs well and does tiling quite well. It’s not going to take me away from Niri, but it’s my goto suggestion now for any one getting into Linux.
If only I could use recent Apple hardware with Linux :)
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
I noticed the blog post said nothing about working with documents, i.e. the office suite the poster was using. Or - maybe he wasn't at all? I wonder. Same goes for email, although perhaps he was just using webmail.
Have you ever heard of Thunderbird? There's to my knowledge no other mail client besides maybe mutt that offers more features and flexibility.
For office, LibreOffice doesn't feel very modern but is capable of a lot of things.
I have used Linux my entire adult life. Honestly never really had any issue with setup. Everything just works without having to do anything. Much easier than windows usually.
Why Bedrock? Get the kids a Steam Deck, Prism Launcher, open a local server and boom :) It‘s not iOS convenience but they‘ll sure love to tinker with all the mods you can install.
Alternatively one could spin up a local Java Edition server and install GeyserMC translation layer plugin[0] into it. That way, both iOS and Linux PC could cross-play to each other without the need of another new device.
In general, people just use noIP home router VPN, ssh/sftp host on LAN, and a sshfs client on their iOS/Android device or MacOS/Windows/Linux. It will look like any other network shared drive in the native OS.
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
Throwing in opencloud here. I ran nextcloud self hosted for many years. If you need only file sharing on a webui with users, then opencloud is faster, more stable and less resource hungry.
Not a desktop thing (digital out-of-home signage) but we’re dropping Windows like it’s flaming dogshit. Minimal Linux install with X, Blackbox and player software (and management/monitoring stuff obvs) on all new assets and the thousands of extant ones will get replaced as soon as feasible.
Mint is much better unless you need the very newest versions of packages. In which case I'd recommend to augment with flatpak or use Debian testing over Ubuntu. Basically Ubuntu is over for me since snap and they went back to Gnome3.
Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
Yeah, Linux should run very well on them, and of course you'll be able to have all the up-to-the-minute latest software, as sad as it is to lose out on the nice OS that worked so well on those machines.
How do you do taxes in Linux? Install a windows VM? I don't want to use the web version. With Google docs being good enough, I don't really need windows for anything else. Last time I checked, the tax software didn't run under wine.
I hope not because I’ve been doing my US taxes on Linux for 15 years.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
Yes, it is the unfortunate reality of the US. You either fork over all your data to tax preparation companies on the web or pay them to use windows/MacOS software. There is still paper filing by doing taxes by hand, but that's a bit too inconvenient. Free online filing is restricted to $89k annual income.
Article reads like an anti-Linux post because the author goes on about, "muh mouse buttons" and "how many desktop environments?" Screw that, do something simple like Ubuntu that just works without decision paralysis. The whole piece reads like, "Linux is good if you're smart so git gud" esp. since he makes a point of crowing how it's Arch-based.
> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, and I had heard that it’s easy to install and set up for gaming,
Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..
I installed a dual boot on my gaming machine last year when the Win10 support ended, and I have also had basically no issues. Something something HDR in certain video games is the biggest complaint I have, which is not all that important and will be higher priority for developers in future as more gamers leave the sinking Windows ship.
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
* If you have a separate partition, you can replace your OS and your file remain untouched.
* If you don't have a separate partition, your OS and your files will be replaced by the Linux installation. The only way to preserve your files is to copy to some external media before installation. Even if the Linux installer could retain files while reformatting a partition (which might be technically feasible), it would have no way of knowing which files to retain: the user could easily keep important files in arbitrary directories, not just in their designated C:\User\Patrick directory, and they would be understandably irate if the installer promised to keep files but didn't. To say nothing of adding complications of copying files that Windows has pushed to OneDrive.
> This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
That is one of the biggest ifs of 2026. I don't think any major PC laptop vendor has ever sold consumer laptops with anything but one-big-partition layout. For the average user, their files are not stored in any partition, they are stored "right there on my desktop, with a separate folder for photos and bills"
EFI/ESP and a restore partition have been standard or at least common for a decade. Restore partition might be big enough to install to… my Linux system partition is only 30GB.
But yes, been using a /data partition since it was called D:\ under DOS.
What files? Where would the files be originally for this to be a concern? I’ve switched OS many times but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about moving any files.
On servers I prefer Debian, but my experience on Debian hasn't been as smooth as Ubuntu for gaming, even when activating Debian nonfree repositories with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I've had some trouble with the Wayland transition, but now everything works fine.
Also, the Steam client is officially supported only on Ubuntu. Probably SteamOS too, implicitly.
I can't say I understand the prevalence of Windows-esque UI theming/refits beyond short-lived novelty- are people out there actually trying to make their UIs look like Windows XP and then using them like that on a daily basis?
I configured gnome to look like win 95/98, tried to use it for a while but the novelty wore off quite fast. Weirdly the mouse pointer still looks like win95 randomly in certain applications, guess I didn't clean up thoroughly!
This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
I'd advise against it on Linux these days. Intel made their recent WiFi chips incompatible with AMD systems (yes, that's not a joke). So Mediatek or Qualcomm are the only decent WiFi options for AMD users, but obviously, do some research about what works anyway, before buying.
> I reboot, log into Epic and GOG, and start downloading The Outer Worlds, a game from 2019 I’ve been playing a bit lately. It runs fine with Proton, and I can even sync my saves from the cloud. I play it for a few minutes with my trackball, remember I hate gaming on a trackball, and plug my gaming mouse back in. It works fine as long as I’m in the game, but outside the game, mouse clicks stop working again. It makes sense — the bug is on the desktop, not in games — but it’s very funny to have a gaming mouse that only works for gaming.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.
https://archive.is/CEsFK
Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop
Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.
Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
The thing is, Unity was great as a UI even on desktop. The main issue was poor performance early on.
I found it was horrible. It is similar to GNOME here - a design for tablets and smartphones. It simply does not work on the desktop computer.
I disagree with this characterization.
I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.
The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".
I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)
This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.
So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.
Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on
Anecdote time.
I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.
You're not the people I have an issue with, sorry for the ambiguous use of the word "everyone" there.
If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.
> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.
Understandable.
I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.
Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.
I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
GNOME gets flak because they keep removing stuff people want for no good reason.
GNOME’s design philosophy apparently amounts to one developer (with no training or experience in design) saying “I don’t personally consider this feature to be important, and so it’s gone.”
Can you give some examples?
Removing the option to shut down the computer from the session menu:
https://superuser.com/questions/267303/no-option-to-hibernat...
Thanks for formulating this, as I’m too lazy to even start the conversation with the folks who’d like to have a lot of everything on their screens, with myriads of distractions and just ugly little everything. Otherwise ‘that’s tablet,’ and it’s ‘the Gnome team pushing their nonsense,’ not the particular user being used to something completely wrong from the UI/UX perspective. I’m having no issues with teaching Gnome anyone. It’s simple. Yet powerful, I can use it no issues, and it’s my second favourite after Sway. I feel those of us who actually appreciate Gnome should be more vocal about it, otherwise these weirdos with 2 mins of Gnome experience yelling too loud.
As one of these folks who want a lot of everything on my screen, I'm baffled by your declarations that my workflow is somehow objectively "wrong". Go convince Airbus that the cockpit can only have two gauges, and needs a lot of blank space.
It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.
The thing is with gnome, the default is the only option because they don't allow anything else.
It's nice that it might suit newcomers or average people but I'm neither and I know what I want.
Who are you to say they are wrong though if it works for them?
I use standard GNOME as my desktop environment and nothing about it feels like it was designed for tablets and/or smartphones. Not that it isn’t capable of being used as such, but my desktop usage doesn’t indicate that tablet/smartphone use-cases were the primary goal. Is GNOME even in wide use for those contexts?
ya i was a GNOME hater for a long time after the GNOME 3 transition, switched between Mate and KDE for years. But gave up on those due to persistent video instability and went to vanilla Ubuntu GNOME and it's actually pretty nice. Not sure if it was good originally but I actually prefer it now.
In a bit of fairness to the haters, Gnome 3 used to have a lot of graphical glitches and was unstable in a lot of its early iterations, but I broadly agree with your characterization.
I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.
Years of fighting to restore basic features was funny the first time, but gnome 3 was not the first time; I do not blame anyone for not trusting that gnome won't pull the rug again, and soon.
Vanilla Gnome user here. Gnome may look like it was designed for tablets but it has a keyboard shortcut for basically anything. So you don't do much of point and clicks if you know Gnome. You can but you don't have to. It just gets out of your way as they say.
To me, the killer feature of Unity was the searchable application menus. Wish that was still a thing
KDE supports this! It's called the "global menu", and has search built in. GTK app support is iffy, though
Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..
Sorry but no, the parent commenters looked for a global menu within an application (File -> Open, File -> Save, etc.)
by the way, on macOS the global menu is searchable, too. Shortcut is Command+Shift+/
> Sorry but no, the parent commenters looked for a global menu within an application (File -> Open, File -> Save, etc.)
KDE has such a feature, and yes "Global Menu" is the term for the application menu being pulled into system dock
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...
In Ubuntu MATE there's a mode that sort of emulates Unity.
Same here! Never found a replacement for it in Gnome Shell.
It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.
But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.
I was also disappointed that they dropped Unity.
I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.
I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.
Resizing windows on xfce (most themes) is next to impossible though. You have about a pixel sized border to grab.
I used xfce since Unity came out. Switched to KDE Plasma about 2 years ago.
Plasma is the most "sane" out of the DEs right no IMO. Not perfect by any means but good enough.
>They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it
I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.
> I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too.
I loved Unity in the desktop too (I had installed Ubuntu on an old Mac mini). I was disappointed when it was killed and then I switched to XFCE.
I was never able to get it working on my Thinkpad. Might be me of course, but after days of reinstalls resulting in always transparent windows, I went with Mint. And stayed.
I also still have tons of issues waking from sleep mode on various PCs running Win10/11 so I wouldn't be so quick to label it an OS issue.
Yeah, it is a general PC thing. Steam deck sleeps perfectly, so it can be done properly, but manufacturers are lazy.
I suspect that's an Nvidia problem. Never been an issue for me using AMD.
I've had wake-from-suspend issues on plenty of non-nvidia machines, and I have had nvidia machines that have no issues.
I think it has nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the motherboard chipset.
Agreed. AMD just works for me on linux. My problem is that I am addicted to 6+ monitors and top end gpus... nvidia just seems to hate linux for top end setups. Which is sad, windows just handles my dumb 5060+5090 setup easily. Gaming on linux has gotten way better, but I still can't gigure out how to get some games working. So I'm stuck between using linux + sway / i3 which I looooove... and not being able to get the value out of my $6k gaming rig. Sadly this is a tale that's been going on for 20 years for me.
Linux Mint works great with nvidia cards. It has a great driver manager. It is the only distro I found after getting a laptop with a RTX card that just works. It has worked flawlessly too after 8 months of use.
I personally like mint too for the past 10 years. They also decided to go against the grain of Ubuntu and not ship things like firefox in a snap, which I prefer.
People tease mint as being a distro for normies and grandmas, but it has worked flawlessly for me and really all I want is an environment which just works.
Is it also doing great with the 58xx driver series that is now mandatory on arch for models a couple years old? I've been having severe issues since then to the point where I had to borrow an AMD GPU from a friend just to get my working station up and running again
Does it work with two and sway though?
It’s the only issue I have on my CachyOS install on an AMD 5900X+9070XT without additional peripherals. It seems like when I hit sleep it doesn’t manage to fully enter sleep (illustrated by the power lights) and then never wakes up anymore until a hard power reset.
I remember them working on a hybrid OS that would run on your phone or tablet and then you could switch it to desktop mode. Actually looks like they're still working on that
https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
Edit:
seriously guys, can we design product pages so they actually give you a sense of how the product actually works? That page sucks.
I found a video and honestly while I love the idea it seems that the implementation is the worst of both worlds. Who thought that this pull down menu style was a reasonable idea....
https://youtu.be/BuuW5X_ukAk?t=109
Ubuntu Touch isn't a Canonical thing anymore, it's community driven and was picked up by the UBPorts foundation, which is a non-profit.
https://ubports.com
Many of the sleep issues these days are actually Microsoft's fault. They tried to impose AlwaysOn AlwaysConnected but did a terrible job of specifying it and quality controlling implementation.
I had a Dell Precision from 2020 that never woke from S3 sleep properly, because Dell didn't care about S3 because they expected AoAc (which Windows now defaults to) to actually work. Except A) people don't want laptops that act like phones, and B) it was terrible and munched so much battery it was way better to just hibernate all the time.
Switched to ThinkPad from 2020 and it has a BIOS setting for "classic sleep" and S3 sleep works perfectly.
And Fedora gets 3-4x the battery life than Windows did for general use on both, with much less heat and fan usage, right out of the box. Not to mention bullshit like Windows taking literal seconds to show a directory's contents in the file manager... I'm completely done with Windows for anything beyond gaming (but Valve is changing that rapidly), and dual-booting to a bare Windows install for corporate remote access apps or such, on everything in my house.
What device is giving you the most trouble with sleep mode?
Keep in mind there's a whole class of touch screen laptops that did need to be serviced by Windows and Linux.
I liked Unity! Especially the global menu that macOS also has. I was disappointed when Ubuntu stopped supporting it.
Wait, what sleep mode issues are you talking about? I've been able to wake my ubuntu machine up using my keyboard and mouse. I haven't gotten around to testing steam link wake on lan though, I'd be disappointed if that didn't work.
Wonder about power usage.
yep ubuntu lost me with the tablet ui and snaps.
I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
Actually, I think Tohoe is much worse!
Windows 8 is fundamentally just Windows 7 with a full screen start menu. This is a dumb usability downgrade, but unless you went out of your way to install Metro apps, it wasn't such a big change. Your apps worked the same way they always had.
Mac OS Touhou would probably be better received than Mac OS Tahoe.
Well, Bad Apple!! video is pretty neat after all. Perhaps Apple can be just less Bad?
I guarantee that there is enough stuff from 2001 that won't work in Tahoe.
Almost assuredly, given that 10.0 was released on 32bit PPC... and was built around Carbon, not Cocoa... yeah it's changed just a wee bit.
I'm still on Sequoia on both my Macs. I updated my iPad Pro to iOS 26, decided it was meh, and am not updating my phone. My iPhone is over 4 years old and figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
> figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
Indeed, it does run like crap on older phones. You made the right choice. I don't feel forced to upgrade my phone but the new OS definitely drains the battery faster and feels slightly sluggish, making me regret the "upgrade."
What about the security update, especially for the phone ? There have been critical flaws patched recently.
Agree that iOS 26 is trash and it empty my iPhone 13 mini battery in less time than I need to write it.
iOS 18 is still getting updates. Same with Sequoia. Eventually that will stop and I’ll have to upgrade.
Apple already flipped the switch in December with 18.7.3, if your phone is capable running 26, you will not get offered 18.x updates anymore
Oh, I didn't realize this. I guess I'm screwed!! I'm stuck on 18.7.2...
As an update, I gave in and installed 26.2. I've turned on "reduce transparency" and it's not that bad so far.
For better or worse my 2018 iPad is stuck on ios 18 but I still get security updates.
Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
In what way does MacOS feels like garbage ? I use it everyday on a +5y MacBook and it’s an absolute blast. Powered on for weeks without reboot, 3x4K 32inch screens, hundred of chrome pages and apps opened and it’s all smooth. Ofc I don’t even hear a fan but the software is amazing for me. It all works, all the time.
I'm someone else, but I also feel like macOS is rubbish.
On linux, if I get a kernel panic, I can dig into the kernel, add debug logs, understand what's going on, and potentially fix it. If I want to swap to a scrolling window manager like niri, I can.
On macOS, it's a black box and any radar I file with apple vanishes in a black hole never to be seen again. There's hardly any customization, and the default UX is horribly undiscoverable and can't easily be driven with just a keyboard.
As a hacker, the above makes macOS garbage, and I'd assume anyone on hacker news would understand that desire to be able to understand and hack on the software you use.
I also like to hack things but you understand that what drive Mac sales are not people who’d like to hack the system but regular people on a massive scale. Linux does not have this problem because there isn’t the same kind of economics involved in year-round salaries. So I won’t consider trash an OS who’s main target by far is not hackers, even though there is still some margin for some customization. Your point still stands that for you the OS is garbage. But you’re probably not the main user they have in mind when they develop the OS
Lack of customization doesn't make it garbage, that makes it not your cup of tea. That's fine, but it's a far cry from garbage qualities.
Windows 11, and to a lesser extent 10, is indefensible garbage.
Presumably the way he described in the previous paragraph.
> Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation
That is garbage ? Changing the UI of settings ? MacOS navigation has been the same for a decade. Who uses the settings daily ? I don’t even open settings once a month. Every single piece of UI evolve and must evolve. The ones that don’t are stuck in the past and belongs to a museum. I don’t see what complex and thus garbage.
Functionality that you use once a year or less is _exactly_ the sort of thing that needs to be consistent. It's literally the last place that an innovation should arrive, after that innovation has been fully developed and battle-tested.
So among the hundreds of things that makes an OS garbage, you’ll likely place as top criteria an UI you use once a year. Windows settings has been the worse of the worse of all UI settings ever. That’s my criteria then, macOS is luxury in any kind of form compared to the maze and hidden UI that make windows.
Don't read what I didn't write.
We agree on what you said then
That is because Microsoft put a touchscreen GUI on servers. Windows server had the stupid charm menu thing. It was just amazingly stupid.
Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
They also seem to be reinventing Windows Vista (visually).
That's fine by me. Vista was by far the best looking Windows release imo. I would be using Aero right now if I could.
Windows Aero will never die
Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
Lots of Apple fans are giving Apple shit for it now too.
The new glass look is just so bad. It feels cheap, like a child’s toy. And performance is worse as a result.
I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.
I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.
> But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off
I turned it off and the keypad buttons for screen time passcode became white on white.
That's suboptimal
[dead]
Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
As someone who had been in the Apple ecosystem since Windows XP, it was difficult to lose that constant seamless interplay between my phone and computer. But honestly? The trade-off was worth it in the end. I’m 8mo into Linux-only desktop and man…it’s great.
Look into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop.
1. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
I use it some but it’s just not the same. Very useful and well built don’t get me wrong.
Works on macOS and Windows, too.
GrapheneOS is not quite "without" Android but it's without what makes it bad (Google) and works fine for me. I hear LineageOS is ok too.
I love GrapheneOS, but note that it only runs on Google Pixels. But that's what I chose for the smartphone.
Hopefully GrapheneOS will soon be supported by a non-US phone...
Note that Google Pixel hardware is just fine and not evil, and they're looking at a different vendor for the next version anyway, because Google is making it so the Pixel will only run approved OSes.
You mean the Pixel hardware that employs a proprietary black-box security chip that they pinky-promised to open source but never did?
Oh no! A TPM without a driver! How can I trust any device that has a TPM I don't have a driver for?
The Titan chip does a lot more than sign and store keys. It also has storage (could contain malicious payloads) as well as an RNG and AES/SHA accelerators (which could be weakened/compromised), among other things.
BSD is great on desktop now! I'm on it too.
Fairphone with Graphene
I really like my Fairphone. I would but their next model if it grapheneos was available.
Graphene only runs on Pixel phones
However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
Linux is also realistically American since the largest contributors are American corporations and the dictator for life lives on Portland oregon.
America has a monopoly on software essentially.
assumign this is arguing in good faith..
the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
Not to mention that many of the most important open source events and organizations are based in Europe.
But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.
So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
> but it's a lot of work, so very few do.
sure but a nation state that takes digital sovereignty seriously could easily devote some resources towards maintaining their own fork. Thats the point. Hell, north korea has their own special linux distro
The question is which nation you'll have to depend on when you want a bug fixed. With OSS, the answer is "none".
The situation is a bit different now with sanctions.
Depends on if it's a hardware bug or not
You can fix bugs on open source hardware too.
What percent of hw is open source
> Linux is also realistically American
I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.
The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.
Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.
While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
Distros cannot realistically work without hardware support. Hardware is designed in America. The licensing for the software to use the hardware is controlled by the United States
I mean I can write a kernel right now with all the computer systems theory implemented, but without the architecture specs, the firmware, etc, this is completely useless.
Licensing can be ignored. Specs can be stolen. You think China cares about enforcing American copyright in the slightest? One way other countries can retaliate against American tariffs and invasions is to start ignoring American copyright and IP laws.
It doesn't much matter that Americans are the largest contributors, because you can still take it and change it however you want.
You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is American, because the hardware is American. Even if the company wants to open source it, the US government can block it in whatever country.
> You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is America
This thinking is part of the reason for the momentum behind RISC-V and LoongArch.
RISC-V is a lot like Linux in that it benefits from International cooperation and innovation while offereing the ability to seize control if needed.
But you are correct that even an open ISA does not protect you from a proprietary hardware implementation at the chip or firmware level that you still do not control. This requires additional open standards.
Bigger picture, it means "domestic" chip design and fabrication capabilities. The world is just starting to wrap its mind around this. But again, RISC-V is really helping here. There are emerging RISC-V chip capabilities in Europe and even in places like India for example. It is easy to laugh off these efforts as non-competitive. But not only will many of them find niches where they will be economically pheasible but they offer an important backstop to geopolitical risk and the flexibility to at least of enough domestic capability to keep the lights on if needed. Building and rolling out a RISC-V ecosystem will take years or decades. But once there, it can be pivotied to or maintained on any RISC-V chip. As long as you have the ability to produce some kind of RISC-V chip, this ecosystem can never really be taken away from you.
And RISC-V offers the same kind of international collaboration that allows both pooling of efforts and protection from reliance on any one actor or region that could become a political threat.
RISC-V understands its role in this regard. It too was an "American" technology but Linux International was setup in Switzerland for a reason.
>...because the hardware is American
No it's not, it's all made in China. Maybe you mean the IP is American, but the IP can just be ignored. If the USA can ignore trade agreements, and defence pacts, then its newfound adversaries can ignore American IP laws too.
Reduce where you can right now, plan to fix what you can't replace right now.
Some improvement is far better than no improvement.
Are the BSDs as US-focused?
The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.
That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.
The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.
You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.
I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
Yes, it started at Berkeley after all, with mostly contributions from US universities, and compiler toolchains are GCC and clang.
OpenBSD is technically Canadian.
Also, RISC-V also started at Berkeley but it is based out of Switzerland now.
What matters is who is putting the work, e.g. what are the European companies producing RISC-V computers?
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
I don't think that the proprietary office suites are needed. The alternatives are good enough for what people do, aren't they?
The problem is that people don't want to change, because it takes some effort. Why would people use WhatsApp instead of Signal otherwise?
There used to be programs that would connect to multiple proprietary systems, like Pidgin. If we had this today we'd have one free-software app for WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram (and some used in other countries, like IIRC Zangi?). However, the social and regulatory environment changed - now whoever made that app could expect to be charged with a crime.
I don't have a definitive opinion on such messaging apps. I like that it bridges between different services, trying to free the users from the lock-in, but...
If I talk to someone on Signal today, I know that they are probably using the official Signal on the other side. With the guarantees that I know from Signal. Now what if half of the users of Signal were using a third-party app? How much can I trust this app?
Say Matrix has a bridge to Signal. I talk to someone over what looks like Signal from my end, but it goes to some third-party server that pretends to be Signal and then relays those messages to my friend on their Matrix client. As a Signal user, I cannot know it, but my conversation is not E2EE anymore. And it kind of defeats the point of using Signal entirely, doesn't it?
I guess my point is that in terms of security, there is value in making it possible to verify that both ends are using the official Signal app, by locking it as much as possible (e.g. with DRM-like technology). But of course it's annoying to be locked in. Even though I don't feel personally super locked into Signal: I could move to another similar app in a minute. But again people tend to be lazy and don't want to switch apps. It's a hard problem, I guess.
That app already exists. It's called TM SGNL. The Department of War used it. It sent all their messages in plain-text to an Israeli server that was leaking memory dumps to the public internet (a la Heartbleed), 600GB of which were collected by hackers and sold on the dark web. Worst case scenario. That's not a fantasy, that literally happened. Do you still trust Signal?
That just reinforces what I said. It was not a problem in Signal, it was a problem with this third-party.
Pidgin is still here and does work (to some level) with all of those protocols. https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
We've been working on our next major release for a long time now to better support modern protocols. But as an unfunded Open Source project it's hard to get things done quickly when it's a "free time" only project.
The European Commission has recently put WhatsApp under scrutiny in terms of the Digital Services Act, and forced them to open up allowing interoperability with other messaging applications.
Perhaps we'll see a return of apps like Pidgin soon.
We've never left. https://pidgin.im/
To the average person, no. If you ask a regular user, you'll find that there is no alternative what Excel can do, the PowerPoint alternatives are missing loads of features, etc. Additionally, files created in MS Office still cannot reliably be used in the open source alternatives without something breaking. Until a non-technical user can open my PowerPoint presentation in LibreOffice and not have to apologize for the formatting, they aren't equivalent.
A huge part of this is fonts. Users prefer proprietary fonts, and when you open files using them in the alternatives it tends to look like terrible. You will not convince users that this is on them to fix, and to be honest they're right, it's not their problem.
For the context of this thread, WhatsApp and Signal are both American.
Just look to the federal United States government using it for communicating military strikes, and including journalists.
But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.
At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.
Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.
Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
Simplex is a project by a fervent COVID conspiracy theorist FYI. (Evidence: his Twitter page)
And the internet is originally made by the US army (i.e. professional murderers). Doesn't make the internet bad as a technology.
Simplex is quite well designed. Even if it doesn't succeed, I think we'll see its forks and similar implementations.
Wouldn't that lend it credibility if your concern was privacy?
For the context of this thread, it's infinitely better to depend on Signal than to depend on WhatsApp.
The context of the thread was "deAmericanizing." Not "what's good or bad."
You must be joking :-).
I was saying that non-US office suites are good enough in terms of features, but people don't like to adapt to new things. WhatsApp vs Signal was an example where people don't want to use the better alternative, for no other reason than they can't be bothered to try it.
But even when talking about not depending on US tech, it is relevant: depending on open source US tech is a step towards not depending on US tech. The goal is not racism ("it's made by US people so I don't want it"). The goal is sovereignty ("if I depend on this, the US government can screw me").
Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
I miss my Linux work machine with Libre office..
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/mi...
>turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud
Oh wow, that's pretty evil. No technical reason, "would be a shame if something happened to your unsaved changes"...
How odd.. I have this on my iPhone, but to my recollection the mac has never not once asked me to enable any kind of cloud stuff or sell me storage.
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
I'm in violent agreement with you! Don't even know what I would have done without OCLP on my older systems, still running circles (in reliability) around other non Apple similar devices. And - for the record - I hate iPhones, as well as what Apple is doing with its OS lately.
The HP ZBook G1a is similar to a Macbook in case(*), touchpad, screen and audio quality, design and performance - just the efficiency and battery life are kind of crap and, uh, I haven't figured out yet how to configure reliable sleep on Linux. It lasts 6-7 hours idle. You can also empty the battery in an hour with heavy compile jobs, but that one Macbooks do as well according to info I've found on the net.
(*) Aluminum is more about perceived than actual quality - I wouldn't mind touching something with lower heat conduction, especially in winter. The only thing that I really like about it, compared to a Thinkpad, is the stiffness of the screen part.
We are very similar, you and I, and I'm completely with you on all of this.
Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
It makes sense. Services is their second largest division, and it accounts for just under a quarter of their annual revenue (and growing).
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
Curious to hear which good ideas had their origin in a distro run by fanatical idealists. Not asking for evidence to try and disprove you. Genuinely curious!
Framing it as "fanatical" is a way of not understanding people's needs sometimes and that makes it harder for oneself to admit when they got it right - after all you don't want to find that you've turned into "a fanatic."
I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.
I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.
Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.
Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.
I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.
It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.
Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."
I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately
Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]
Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.
There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).
And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
Wow, so the only OSs with no money in them are the FOSS ones. Makes sense, though.
(No, at this point Android hardly counts as FOSS anymore.)
Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.
The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
Except many of those contributions never land upstream.
Hence why we usually with the cloud provider distros.
Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.
> Example, what powers DGX OS isn't fully available to GNU/Linux users other than a binary blob.
What do you mean? Are they violating the GPL by not releasing the modified source?
Most of their stuff isn't GPL anyway, hence why drivers are mostly in userspace.
That’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at how much does land upstream. Linux moves at an incredible pace.
Edit: BTW the figure I cited are contributors to mainline.
Yet it is still a mess to support laptops, because everything still needs to be reverse engineered instead of landing into upstream.
My laptops have been running fine for years.
What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot.
Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
The Pro version doesn't remove the adverts.
What "adverts"? I've been on Pro for over a decade on a dozen machines and have never seen one single "advert".
From https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo...
"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.
I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.
The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years.
BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.
Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?
Meanwhile they have very cool tech like .NET, VS C++ debugging/hot reload, that gets overshadowed by Microsoft being Microsoft.
Then the .NET team asks why there isn't more uptake outside Windows, in spite of all open sourcing efforts, this is why.
Microsoft slowly becomes IBM.
That's "what then".
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
On build your own PC desktop with known parts, yeah.
On random laptop regular people buy at computer stores and needs to be reversed engineered by volunteers, it will be business as usual.
Windows and macOS are now sales funnels for the various subscriptions Microsoft and Apple offer.
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
> No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be
I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.
> and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition
They've already fumbled it.
> the way they did with mobile.
It's the exact same way they fumbled with mobile. They were very late to the party and decided to buy their way in. It _never_ works.
MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.
Also could never name things—they named it Wince.
I had a wince device before the iPhone existed 2005 ish.. An o2 XDA 2s ... There was flash for the OS ... All your files were stored in ram... Internet was a 56k dialup speeds... The arm CPU was anemic.... Wince also had issues if left on too long.. I.e. phone stopped giving audio in a call ... All in all was cool, the slidenout keyboard I miss but terrible software ... The lack of durable user files made it a fail.
I've been using macOS since 2020, but for the last year I have seriously considered switching to Linux. macOS Catalina felt really fast, easy to use, and lacked the useless features they kept adding and the ipadOS like interface they began implementing. In 2020, the feature set felt much more intentional.
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
If you only need to airdrop between your own devices, try out KDE Connect. It uses the network (WiFi) but I think there's also a Bluetooth mode in beta.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
> I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
I thought I saw various comments to the effect that the Vision Pro is just a developer thing to bootstrap the app ecosystem, a prelude to a real consumer product. But if that is the case I’m slightly confused as to why they aren’t sharing more of their roadmap…
Since when does Apple share their roadmap of anything? They have been super-secretive for decades.
I mean, if this was the strategy, it has clearly failed, right? The Vision Pro doesn't have anything approaching a thriving app ecosystem.
And if this was the strategy, I'd have expected to see that consumer product by now. It has been almost two years.
100% agree.
> What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well.
Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do. Everybody was running after VR/AR headsets, now everybody is running after AI.
They see the others run somewhere, they run in that direction. Just in case.
> Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do.
Monopolies so scared of the competition?
Yes, because of inventors dilemma.
That is how Kodak lost digital photography, Microsoft tablets and phones even though it had them for a decade before the competition, and so on.
Monopolies double down on what they know that prints money, and are averse to taking any risks.
KDE Connect
It’s not actually really the same as the visionOS design, merely inspired by it.
I am curious about how you are improving the Linux experience with claude code. Can you dive into that a little?
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
As if Linux was/is not agenda driven. People really forgot I guess.
Obviously, you can't build something as complex as a modern operating system without intention, and therefore an "agenda" but I have a feeling you know what OP was getting at.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
By agenda-driven, I think they mean the commercial operating systems are designed with the intention of improving the uptake of other products and services by the companies that sell them.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
Was going to say, the online help always baits you into using OpenJDK which doesn't work for random stuff, or in older times there was those non-default "non free" repos you needed to add if you wanted wifi to work.
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....
Yes, prices have gone down over the years, but still unaffordable by people who can afford less.
Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.
They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.
For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:
The Acer Predator Helios 300 Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 Memory: 16 GB RAM Storage: 512 GB SSD Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.
I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.
This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.
Still lots of cash, versus a 400 euro laptop, which is what many regular people end up buying.
There is a reason so many European operators have contract offers for TV or Internet packages, where customers get Apple gear "for free", naturally with a several years bound contracts.
Before memory prices skyrocketed, you could buy a 8c/16t Ryzen laptop and max it out with 64GB of memory and 2TB+ of disk space for less than $500.
Did that with the HP Dev One a few years ago, just did it again with a replacement sans memory that I already have.
You can get a dell laptop for like $200.
>price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux
What measures do you take to insulate yourself from desktop Linux's really bad security?
Ha, I have nothing on my machine that anyone would want. Yes, my life is that boring. So no, I keep nothing of importance in the drives, just old memories.
Out of the box, I've experienced less spyware-related issues with Linux. I have enabled UFW, installed ClamAV, closed or blocked communication with some ports. But for the most part, I've not had the same problems that had caused system and browser infections. If anything, the badly designed hardware of the machines and systems that I've built tend to cause the problems, for the most part, not to mention my own stupidity. If I do begin to experience, spy or adware-related issues, I suppose I could look into something like this: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:
-Keep system and software updated. -Enable firewall (e.g., UFW). -Use strong passwords and MFA. -Install from trusted sources only. -Encrypt disks (e.g., LUKS). -Use SELinux or AppArmor. -Sandbox apps with Flatpak/Wayland. -Install antivirus like ClamAV. -Disable unnecessary services. -Monitor logs and use tools like OpenSnitch. -Switch to CubesOS (qubes-os.org) but I'm not that paranoid, yet :)
I'm just not too tech savvy, but honestly if anyone had enough knowledge, they'd probably could get into my system. That being said, though I consider Linux to be more secure than Windows, no system is 100% secure, in my view.
Hah, good one
> Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk.
It has always been.
That unfortunately is true, for the most part. Whether this is due to financial reasons or for lack of engineering best practices, I can't say. All I can say is that, switching to Linux has led to significantly less cost, technical or spyware issues, not counting the issues which I created out of ignorance.
It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
You paint a very rosy picture of Linux.
It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.
The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.
It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.
As opposed to the highly cohesive and unified way Large corporations with thousands of developers work. A hive mind of likeminded individuals all working towards a single blissful objective with no distractions or competing ambitions. Not a single legacy being kept without reason, only purpose.
You are wrong. Linux desktop is incredibly fabulous in 2026, and I am reminded of it everytime I have to use Windows for work or gaming.
Commercial OS's are terrible, but theres nothing that gets me on guard more than someone claiming theres an "agenda". The word has lost all meaning.
Windows 10 and Sequoia are the last two versions before the complete and utter enshittification of these operating systems.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....
And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.
"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.
I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:
menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"
That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:
/EFI/debian/shimx64.efi /EFI/debian/grubx64.efi
No, because that wasn't even an option on that device.
Battery life was always better on Macs, along with a bunch of other things.
Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals
Yes, those were far from perfect. Keyboards were horrible. Still superior in many other aspects.
I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.
Yeah, but that’s Mac, not Linux on Laptops of the era designed for Windows
Yes and I also had a flip phone before the iPhone came out and a 90 pound CRT before large CRTs got affordable.
In fact my first computer was a 1Mhz Apple //e with 128KB of RAM.
I’m not sure what your point is?
You were ahead of the curve on displays and behind the curve on phones and I guess congrats on the 2e start, I had an early Mac.
What does this have to do with the price of CPU cycles in clamshell PCs?
You abstained until ARM because you could see the future and you knew that the specs you demanded we’re gonna be available eventually?
My point is that because something is acceptable before something else came along better doesn’t mean it’s acceptable now.
Would you have been okay if Android phones had still been BlackBerry clones 7 years after the iPhone came out?
I don’t know what to say to that other than I pity that mindset.
So I should still be using an Apple //e and an 80 pound CRT TV?
Please be serious, that straw-man is clearly not my point. (I thought you said it was 90# of CRT)
There’s definitely a balance between the newest of the newest bleeding edge hardware that we could only have dreamed of five years ago, and still functional hardware from five years ago.
Just like engineering is a balance between technical optimization and cost.
Seems like your mindset is one that chooses optimization at any cost, which is pitiable.
I bought an M3 when it was brand new but I also have a Dell XPS laptop that’s running an Intel 8th GEN processor. Both have their uses, and the existence of the M3 does not make the Dell worthless or unacceptable.
A 6 year old M1 MacBook Air that is still being sold new for $699 at Walmart is not “bleeding edge” and not expensive. Even the latest MacBook Air with 16GB RAM is $999.
And a 27 inch CRT was between 70 and 100 pounds…
Most of Linux's laptop woes is due to two things:
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
> If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
> UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
Arm (and Risc-V and other arches) Linux has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devicetree instead of ACPI, which is better in that it declaratively documents the hardware in a system and how to access it. However, the hardware support which can be found in the Arm ecosystem is in no way better than that for x86 laptops. Many SoC manufacturers still don't put any effort into upstreaming drivers or device trees, many devices are still only supported by tossing a single release of a heavily patched kernel over the corporate wall and then forgetting about them.
>is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
I was doing this and it was great. I only had to get a smart phone for work, and I hate the stupid thing.
You mean the framework Ive been running for the past 4 years or so?
You mean the same ones that consistently get bad reviews for being hot, with poor battery life, heavy and sub par screens?
https://community.frame.work/t/fw-16-review-the-good-the-bad...
It's important to distinguish between the Framework 13 and the Framework 16. The Framework 16 is by far the most ambitious of the two, and so it has had a lot more issues. I use a Framework 13, and I've loved it. It's light, has a solid frame, and runs Linux great. The battery life isn't great, and the speakers aren't either, but I've been able to mitigate the latter with EasyEffects.
If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.
I've got a Framework I am not too upset with, but the battery life (especially during sleep) is definitely one of my gripes. I still have yet to try powertop or other tools to optimize, maybe I would be proven wrong.
Sleep just ceased to exist in the last few years and got replaced with an always on, low power mode.
I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.
Depends. The Intel models still support sleep on Linux (at least up to 12 or 13 gen, AMD boards only nap.
I think that the ThinkPad X13s Gen1 might meet these requirements. It is my favorite ARM Linux laptop I've ever used. It has great support in Debian 13 (trixie), and it feels pretty smooth and fast. It doesn't have any fans, stays cool, and I regularly get a full day's worth of battery life out of it with margin to spare (10-12 hours). It's better than the newer Snapdragon X1 Elite based ThinkPads, in my opinion, even though it isn't quite as fast because it is passively cooled, is easily fast enough that I've never noticed it feeling "slow", has good driver support in mainline Linux and Mesa (which took a few years to be fully worked out, but is there now), and it's readily available for a good price (on eBay).
It seems this laptop is not available any longer. Are there any ARM alternatives you are aware of?
I'm hoping that the new Snapdragon X2 Elite based laptops coming out this year will beat it. Qualcomm seems to have been trying to upstream driver support for them earlier than the X1. Then it's up to what kinds of laptops OEMs offer with them.
Personally I'd still just get a used ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 on eBay at this point if I were going to buy another one today because they're available for around $400, and I don't see anything better that's passively cooled, with great battery life, and great Linux support available at the moment. I hope there will be a better, faster alternative in the near future. I'd gladly upgrade.
Have you managed to get sleep states to work? I'd love mine but it never sleeps properly.
Ubuntu but I'd change for sleep.
I haven't really played around with that much, sorry. I don't typically use sleep on my laptops. I prefer to either hibernate or just shutdown and start up again when I need it.
I'd guess that the X13s hardware support in Ubuntu is likely as good as Debian, and switching probably wouldn't help you much. I have noticed that newer kernel versions (notably 6.12 and later) and the latest firmware (as of sometime last year) really fixed a lot of little issues for the X13s. That probably makes a bigger difference than the distro. I'd check to see which versions you're using.
I love my expensive Macbook at work, but at home old my old Thinkpad running Linux is a godsend. The performance is perfectly adequate for all my daily non-work needs, battery lasts several hours, and since the thing has little monetary value, I can be pretty careless with it, in an environment with small kids running around and doing random things. At this rate, I think it will last me well into 2030's.
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
Pre-lenovo or post? any particular model?
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
I believe devices based on Lunar Lake (and the upcoming panther lake) can hit 12h battery life. Something with a 268V will be the fastest low power chip you can grab that will likely support linux.
But I do wish there was a viable ARM laptop offering that supports linux.
But here's the thing with Apple ARM processors. Each core in that M3 chip is faster than the corresponding core in an x86 chip. And it has unified memory, meaning that the CPU, GPU, and NPU all get access to the same RAM.
So you can get long battery life, cool thermals, and superior performance all in the same machine, at the same time. It will take the rest of the industry years to catch up to what Apple has wrought.
So everything but good battery life is achievable on a portable device?
“Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
This isn’t 2015… ARM Macs have been out for six years
I think what you're running into is that you have a different attitude than some of us do about technology. I've been using computers for a very long time as well, but I don't feel a sense of entitlement to the latest and greatest features because it often comes with other compromises regarding freedom and control. Because Linux is several years behind Windows and Mac in terms of adopting those technologies, there is an evergreen argument in every thread about Linux which boils down to "Why can't it do this thing from the last four years?"
This is uniformly tiring and uninteresting. I've been using 1920x1080 displays for 25 years and they're just fine. A retina display is not necessary to do anything that I need. Similarly with these requirements about particular thermals and particular battery lifetime. I can buy a battery and I can find a wall outlet.
You're comparing not having those features to having your husband assassinated during a play. But I don't think a lack of those features ruins the computing experience the way having your husband assassinated would ruin the play. The thing that ruins the play for me is when they chain me to my seat and tell me I have to watch the whole thing while they pin my eyelids open. And that's how I feel about using Windows or Mac OS.
So to turn your original comment around, Windows and Mac OS can call me when they allow me to configure my system as I see fit, and not shove ads for their auxiliary services in my face every time I try to start a program or modify a setting.
If you know what to look for, you can also get good battery life. The 268V CPU will give you pretty good battery life.
Come on, buddy, at this point, nobody could take you seriously.
You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.
You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.
You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.
Run Asahi Linux and tell me how it goes.
I don’t care why it’s better. Whose fault is it that Linux gets worse battery life on every computer that also runs Windows or MacOS?
Linux gets WAY better battery life on SteamDeck than Windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/ive-tried-steamos-and-windows-on-m...
Don’t try to act like that is the discussion we’ve been having.
You’re holding Linux on x86 to a Mac on ARM standard.
It’s fine if Linux doesn’t meet your standards, but don’t try to act like that’s Linux‘s fault and not your standards’.
Nothing x86 meets your standards, so save the criticism.
> I don’t care why
So you're clueless about computers and your opinion can be disregarded.
Is there some subject you actually know about that you'd like to share?
it doesnt on thinkpad p16s
I recently switched to Debian on my laptop (Zephyrus G14) because it was the only way I could get it to NOT run into the problems you described. Went from ~2 hours of battery life to 10, and no more of the constant jet engine level fan activity I experienced with windows.
Like the ThinkPad T14s or any other Snapdragon X Elite, or better? Apple chips are great in this space but they're not alone.
Xiaomi, Honor and Huawei make ARM-based notebooks like that. The closest to your description is probably the Qingyun line of laptops.
Just buy any modern Laptop? What you describe hasn't been an issue for at least ten years now.
> any modern Laptop
When I looked up Dell Pro Max 16, I found a thread complaining that its camera doesn't work: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=307529
And there are numerous other reports of how various modern laptops have various problems under linux.
So no, "any modern laptop" is not a good recommendation. It should be specific models.
I have two laptops running linux. One is a MSI gaming laptop with RTX card that no one would recommend for linux.
I had to try about 10 distros before I settled on linux mint. Everything else had some problem but the driver manager on linux mint made setting up the RTX so flawless.
After 8 months of use, it is the best machine I have ever used. If I had just stuck with my old favorite KDE neon though I would have been posting on how not to get MSI if you want to use linux.
I was doing that on my Thinkpad X220 a decade ago.
Why would anyone come back? Nobody is bothered by you having a device that you like, and nobody cares if you replace it.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
Battery life is the best selling point of MacBooks and the reason these are selling like crazy. I’m a full time Linux user and I’m even considering buying a macbook and running a Linux VM full time because of the battery.
Just to be clear this is entirely a response to what I have in the parentheses, right?
Ok, perhaps it is not niche. I don’t know. I have never had to use a laptop for 12 hours without any ability to recharge but if that’s a common use case I’m happy that folks are finding a way to satisfy.
No it's pretty niche. Most people don't have a need for super long battery life.
They certainly aren't in Europe, Africa or Asia, as not everyone has the income to afford Apple prices.
I am a Linux fanboy and I totally agree that I am almost always near a plug and don't need that kind of battery life.
But when I can go for days on my work Macbook without charging (and I am a developer, so I do compile stuff), I kinda wish I could have that on Linux, too.
And again, I don't need it. Just like I don't need a fast Internet connection, but well... :-).
Bro I don't care how long the battery life is. I use my laptop plugged in 90% of the time. The portability is so I can change what location I'm sitting at, not so I can be unplugged constantly.
It's the same for me. I understand that people do want to use them without plugging in, but I would imagine at least most developers prefer external screens, right?
For me the battery is good enough when it can last two back-to-back meetings without me getting worried, so about 2.5 hours. Otherwise it stays plugged to USB-C.
I have a portable external screen that I carry in my backpack when I travel and when I work away from home.
https://a.co/d/6P7gfGA
And this stand
Metal Tablet Stand, a Portable... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3
The monitor is both powered and the video comes from one USB cord. My MacBook Pro can run 5-6 hours while powering the monitor. I couldn’t do that if the laptop by itself only last 3 hours.
Every now and then I use my iPad as a third monitor.
I am a Linux fanboy. But man, when you try the battery life on the latest Macbooks... it can last for days of work without charging.
One good thing is choice. You are free to use macOS or even windows.
But this battery argument is bull shit
15 years ago it was so difficult to find charging points.
Not now. I have never ever been in a situation the I needed to be away from charging for > 6 hours. 6-10 hours is really possible.
If your working or life demands that then pity you. I have better life/work.
And again choice. You are free to use macOS or even windows.
My “work life” involves business travel - consulting.
My personal life involves month long stints of me working outside the home and even at home, I am sometimes working on the patio enjoying 80 degree weather in the middle of winter in Florida…
> travel - consulting
That's why pity
It’s really nice - I get miles and hotel points I can use for personal travel and I can extend my work trips and bring my wife along and make it a weekend getaway. I pay for my wife out of pocket for the flight.
Linux will run on most platforms, so just pick up a fast, lightweight laptop, and select a conservative power profile for longer battery life and less heat, and don't run 32-thread machine learning jobs on it.
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
And how many laptops running Linux are light, power efficient, fast, quiet with good battery life?
My 16 inch M3 MacBook Pro runs 5 hours at 80% brightness doing development with my USB powered (video and power from one USB cord) portable monitor. The Mac battery is powering the monitor
https://a.co/d/gHqpcs3
Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux. Maybe your optics are tinted because you seem to be a Mac person, and Linux support for newer Macs has known issues with low power modes.
I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.
BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.
It’s not “running Linux” that’s the issue. It’s running Linux and getting good battery lifez
And a 1.6Ghz RISC V CPU isn’t exactly “fast” in 2026 or even 2021.
You noted that it was 5 hours when powering a second monitor from its USB port. Not just displaying video from the USB port, the monitor is getting power from the USB port.
How long do you think your 5 hour laptop would last powering an external display - again not just video out, also supplying power?
"Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux."
Well, as long as you buy a Mac laptop that's at least 3 years old you'll be mostly..good. Unfortunately Apple isn't interested in helping Linux and everything has to be painfully reverse engineered and some stuff for M1 is still broken.
I personally don't care about battery life, there are power outlets around everywhere I'll be more than several hours.
Still, no one is getting that kind of battery life outside apple, just the way it is. If your existence revolves around battery life there's no substitute.
But note, this thread is about replacing Windows, and Wintel does not do as well as Apple either. So this thread is off-topic.
[dead]
Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as scary security risks instead of basic user rights. This makes it much easier for lawmakers to argue for removing root access on mobile devices, even though the same idea would be unrealistic on desktop systems.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to all the people who volunteer their free time to create the stable desktop environment we have free access to on Linux in 2026.
If you're interested in this aspect of user agency, you might like the "trustworthy technology" site a few friends and I are working on: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
"There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,”"
Probably need to clarify since Android is Linux. Assume you're referring to community run distros. Unfortunately the issue is usually proprietary hardware that has to be reverse engineered and nobody willing to pay engineers full time to do that.
What I don't understand is why it is so much effort to use linux on a phone. Surely these 8 core ARM monsters these days should be more than enough to handle a full kernel. Hopefully it's not a driver issue where manufacturers only contribute the necessary drivers to the android kernel, not the linux one.
Battery/sleeping is the main challenge I believe, not processing power. Linux laptops still struggle a lot with sleep. And Windows laptop too btw.
Android is running on Linux. It's not the kernel that's the problem, it's the application layer.
The ultimate question is "Would you give up the right of owning your machine to have access to services", and with the decline of rooting scene on Android, the answer is pretty clear.
Android is Linux. There could easily be a secure-boot desktop Linux too if companies cared to target that platform with things like banking apps.
Not really, it makes use of Linux kernel, cages it on pseudo-microkernel architecture since Treble and Mainline refactorings, uses a Java userspace, and the NDK has a quite clear list of what APIs are allowed to be called.
>Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own.
Please run Kate/Kwrite as root and then we will talk on the topic. Or pipe password to ssh
That's the good thing with open source. You can theoretically fork it and remove what prevents you from using Kate as root.
Sure. But the malaise of smug people taking decisions that are outside of the scope of the software is creeping into linux too. It is up to me decide what is secure, not them.
It's smug people telling other people what to do all the way down!
You dont have to use that software. Who even would? You're an adult, presumably, so use vim.
ed is the standard text editor.
Kate/Kwrite will ask to escalate to root if permissions are not sufficient. If it's not available to you, that's because your distro patched it out.
For ssh - sshpass.
I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop).
I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also performs better and is much more comfortable and intuitive to use. I never really want to "work on" my personal computer, I want it to just be there for me reliably. I've always had a soft spot for free software, but I just couldn't justify the effort until now.
So I guess this is my love letter to all the devs that have made the modern Linux desktop possible. Even compared to just a few years ago, the difference is immense. Keep up the good work.
I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor.
I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim to predatory sites and extensions. Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable. Can't do that without techie roots but I love that it's possible and mostly straightforward from a scripting perspective. It's almost exclusively get the right file with the right config in the right place and restart a service.
The only major day-to-day downside IMO is battery life on Linux laptops. Can't compare to current generation of Macs but that's true for Windows too.
I have been using desktop Linux for about the same amount of time and the way I see it now, even on the occasion where I have to troubleshoot something weird (which has maybe been one or two times in the past few years), it doesn't sound any different from the issues people are having with Windows and Mac these days—and at least I can fix it!
Yes exactly. When I had a Mac for work, I had to tinker with that thing just as much if not more so than I do Linux. To windows credit, it was the best of the three when it came to not having to tinker to get what I want, but the lack of ability to configure it in a way that was comfortable and preferable was more limited and difficult, so there were annoyances I had to just live with. The point at which they started injecting ads into my desktop experience was a dark day and the day I said goodbye
Oh god, I had a Mac for work recently and had to spend 3 weeks becoming an expert in Mac External Displays And Thunderbolt just to get my HP Thunderbolt 4 dock (officially compatible with Macs!) to use a dual monitor setup with it. Finally I got it working, but every configuration I tried Just Worked(tm) on Linux. Jeez...
This sounds more like problem of HP’s dock than a Mac. Just because they said it is officially compatible with Mac doesn’t mean it is. Also, compatible with which Mac- Intel or M series? I use three different docks on two Mac Mini (M4 Pro) and they all worked out of the box. I did my research before buying them by watching YouTube reviews.
This is exactly the double standard, or bias when talking operating systems.
When it's macOS/Windows, it's someone else's fault; when it's Linux, it's Linux fault.
When you have to tinker on macOS/Windows that's just what has to be done, no biggie; when you have to tinker on Linux, it's a burden nobody should be subjected to.
People are blind to the work they've grown accustomed to. There are many things that are much, much easier on Linux than macOS or Windows.
Indeed, and especially the double standard regarding "oh but on Linux you have to carefully check if the hardware is supported by Linux" but when it's a Mac it will "just work." In GPs comment they have to do the same hardware compat research as a Linux user does, but that's never listed as a downside for Mac
This is a bizarre complaint. There are more Mac users than Linux users but still far fewer than Windows users. As such, there are so many examples of hardware and software that are incompatible with Mac. Our IT dude keeps telling me to switch to Windows because of better support from third party vendors.
My comment was specifically about the HP dock. I have nothing for or against Linux as I have never used it, don't know anybody who uses it, and I have no plans to use it. I am simply not qualified to comment on Linux.
Don't take it personal. This wasn't about you specifically, but the sentiment frequently observed. No one would have been blaming HP when we were talking Linux. The need for tinkering, or hardware considerations is frequently brought up against Linux; it's never brought up for macOS, on the contrary, on macOS everything "just works" - even when it doesn't. On Windows, for years, you had/have to search the web for obscure software and drivers, then download them from shady third-party websites, repeating the process for updates; on Linux you always were able to install and update almost everything signed and shipped from trusted sources through the package manager, long before app stores, but apparently adding a line to some config file is unbearable inconvenience. Somehow people are very ignorant about the limitations (sometimes unfixable) and troubleshooting in Windows and macOS, but hyper vigilant when it comes to Linux.
I am running this Fedora installation for a few years, now. No clean install in-between, just super stable and pleasant upgrades. Everything just works for me. Zero tinkering. If there is a bug, it's usually tracked and gone in a few weeks, at most the next release 6 months off. If a HP dock doesn't work, it's HP's fault for not using open standards, certainly not a problem of Linux.
So Mac doesn't support DisplayPort MST like everyone else does (Windows and Linux have supported this STANDARD for years), because they are assholes and don't care about their users, and the fact that multi monitor support is different between Intel Macs, certain M1s (cannot use more than one external monitor at all!), and the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup (other M1s, M2+) is insane.
I eventually got it working on this Intel Mac by using one HDMI and one specific DisplayPort output on the dock so it wouldn't try to multistream it internally in the dock or whatever (can't remember what exactly it was doing). It might have involved an HDMI to DP converter. I honestly tried to purge my memory of it once I got it working.
Note that all setups worked fine with Linux without modifications. Would have likely worked fine on Windows, too, since it supports MST. Only one specific setup worked with Mac.
So no, it's not a problem of the dock, it's a problem with Apple refusing to support a standard so they can make people buy the expensive $400 docks they hawk in Apple stores. Or because they are lazy and think because they don't care, their users shouldn't either.
You will find many people complaining about Mac's multi monitor support (or lack thereof) online. They are choosing to ignore user feedback.
> and at least I can fix it!
100% this!
I wrote this in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46120975
> Openbox does everything I need it to. I don’t want Mac or Windows, they both suck in ways I can’t change. Sure, Linux can be rougher, but at least I’m not helpless here. I can make the changes I need, and the software is generally less broken IME
In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.
I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.
No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.
Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.
Don't make block devices directly read/write-able to your user unless you want every user process to be able to have raw disk access to it.
Your distro should have been set up so that you can mount USB drives indirectly through the options your DE exposes.
This shouldn't happen with external disks formatted with ntfs, ext or udf. If you have an EXT4 or something like that external disk things get more hazy...
Whether it should or shouldn't, it did. But I think the issue is less that it happened, and more that the user interface doesn't respond to the "no permission" error by offering up a button you can click to attempt to grant yourself permission. If it can be done through the terminal, there should be a novice friendly way as well.
(For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this isn't an important problem that needs to be addressed. I mostly agree with what you say and I bet the right way to deal with this is to have it be mounted with a special user space filesystem like fuse that wraps the permissions to always look correct for the user that mounted it, but I guess no one so far has decided to take upon such task...
Can't it just do what I _mean_ if it's a Desktop install and mount it like ntfs, udf, or etc?
no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.
What I mean is that it should ignore permissions on external ext4 by default in Desktops.
There's no concept of "external". What would it be, "USB" or anything mounted under /mnt or /media? What if it's the root OS drive of another computer you're trying to fix connected through a USB-SATA adapter? Should any program running with minimized privileges get to overwrite even root files in that OS drive?
I think that it's a pretty good heuristic that if permissions exist in the filesystem, they matter and shouldn't be ignored.
They shouldn't be ignored. but they can be ignored, is the problem. File permissions are not encryption or security: If I can't read a file on this machine, because I'm not root, I'll just move the drive to a different machine where I am root.
But I agree with you, they do have a use and to some use cases matter, and we shouldn't arbitrarily decide to ignore them.
I don't doubt you had that problem. But it, and the solution you want, sound a bit strange. You want a button that gives your user access to everything despite its access settings... Than login and work as root.
I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could have been a distro bug.
> but sometimes these problems still pop up.
I'm a 90% Windows- 9.5% Linux- 0.5% Mac-Admin at day job: Don't tell me Windows has no problems poping up. ;-)
Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?
If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.
And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
>Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.
That definitely seems like a feature that could/should be added to some (most? all?) linux file managers. In fact, it doesn't even sound like that difficult to implement with standard system calls[0].
It's not really an issue for me (I prefer the command line -- heck, I still use octal when setting permissions instead of 'rwx'), but it sounds like it bugs you a lot.
You don't mention which Desktop Environment (DE) you're using, but I imagine the file manager in your DE is open source. As such, I'm sure you could make yourself and the (I'm sure) many others who'd like to be able to modify file/dir/filesystem permissions/ownership via their GUI file manager much happier.
Try doing that with Windows Explorer or Finder. I think not.
Good luck!
[0] https://www.tutorialpedia.org/blog/how-to-change-show-permis...
Edit: Clarified prose.
Hm, I'm a KDE user. I just tested what happens when I try to open a folder I don't have access rights for. The standard file browser Dolphin says authentication is required. "Act as administrator." If clicked there comes a warning and I can enter my password. Than it shows the content.
https://i.postimg.cc/VLgkWpy7/image.png
This feature exists since 2022.
https://kde.haraldsitter.eu/posts/kio-admin/
Good! That's exactly what I would like to have happen! I think the error was more like that it didn't have permission to mount the drive. I logged the message at the time, but I don't have access to that computer this week, so I'm going from memory.
I've been on Mint for nearly 4 years now,. migrating from Windows.
The only hiccup I had was botched updates once, and the OS would error during boot.
The fix was easy, boot to terminal, fiddle with timeshift to restore to the point prior to update, then apply de updates carefully with a few reboots in between.
Now, was that easy? For someone well versed in the technicalities, yes. For a layman, probably not.
Now, that said, it was the only problem I had in 4 years. It has been very smooth sailing besides that.
My experience with Windows prior to that was always horrible. Yearly clean installs because after a while the computer felt extremely sluggish. Random blue screens for god knows what reason.
For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.
---
Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.
I managed to get around ~7W idle on a 2024 dgpu/igpu laptop, with room to further optimize. From my limited casual checks (nowhere near proper benchmark), it's better than windows.
But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.
Current Intel chips get 20h of regular laptop usage. For real: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-empire-strikes-back-with...
The upciming Intel and Qualcomm CPUs are even better. They really caught up with Apple.
Not 20h of regular laptop usage:
> The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Intel lasted for more than 21 hours in our Wi-Fi test (150 cd/m² brightness). This device will easily last more than ten hours in everyday use.
Also, tested on Windows not Linux. Still, if I could get 10 hours of regular usage on Linux, I'd be ecstatic.
If you add a MacBook to comparison there on that website, you'll see they last basically the same in same usage. Qualcomm actually can get even more hours, if I remember correctly.
In any case, I don't think the battery time is an issue anyone with 2025+ devices.
> Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable.
What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?
I've been running desktop Linux for about eighteen years, though I did take a break and run a Macbook for about four years.
It's a little upsetting that Windows has gotten so terrible, because I think in a lot of ways the NT Kernel is a better piece of software than the Linux kernel. Drivers are simply easier to install and they generally don't require a reboot and they don't require messing with kernel modules, IO is non-blocking by default, and a bunch of other things that are cool and arguably better than Linux.
The problem is that, while the kernel is an important part of an operating system, it's not the only part. Even if the NT kernel were the objectively best piece of software ever to be written by humans, that still doesn't change the fact that Windows has become a pretty awful mess. They have loaded the OS with so much crap (and ads now!), the Windows Update tool routinely breaks your computer, their recovery/repair tools simply do not work, their filesystem is geriatric and has been been left behind compared to stuff like ZFS, btrfs, and APFS, and they don't really seem determined to fix any of this stuff.
Even if the Linux kernel were to be slightly worse, it's still good enough. Even if you do have to muck with kernel modules it's not that hard now with DKMS. Even if the IO is blocking by default epoll has been around for decades and works fine.
So at that point, if the kernel is good enough, and if we can get userland decent enough, then desktop Linux is better than Windows. Linux is good enough, without ads, with recovery tools that actually work, and performs comparably or better than Windows.
It's been like that for 15 years or more.
The fact that you now need an account for almost any piece of hardware, including computers, phones etc is a major drawback that arrived with the internet era. Linux has been able to avoid that temptation.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. 15 years ago I was still looking up installation and driver procedures and workarounds to install Linux on my devices. I failed to install arch in college because I didn't have a driver for my SATA drive for example.
Today though. Yeah totally easy. Especially if you get one of the many machines with Linux support. Smooth sailing all around.
Facetiously: Well actually, you didn't need a driver for the SATA drive but the SATA controller.
Something that was also true for Windows and such a common problem that many BIOSes would offer a IDE compatibility mode one could switch to.
26 years ago I installed SUSE and it just worked on my self build PC. Smooth sailing all around. Than I tried Debian and couldn't for the life of me get X11 to work.
So yeah, the distro and hardware lottery is still a problem.
Windows has also needed external drivers installed at times, since the DOS days. It's the nature of obscure, new, or advanced hardware.
The difference was the device came with a disk containing the driver for DOS and Windows.
I don't see how that is Linux' fault.
I didn't say it was. This discussion is about relative difficulty of setting things up. It is, objectively, more difficult when you need to download a driver for new hardware and the NIC on your laptop needs a driver your distro didn't come with.
Not for a very long time.
I don't buy a lot of hardware, but the last thing I bought (Vocaster One) came with the driver installer on a small USB mass storage volume when the device plugged in.
That's Arch for you.
I've been on Linux since Ubuntu 8.04 or longer and I literally never had OS install problems with any of it at all. Except for Arch, but what did you expect? Hands-on is the point of Arch Linux.
On the other hand, I remember installing a lot of drivers by hand on windows. Most people never (re-)installed Windows or macOS to begin with.
Probably depends on your hardware, but that's a matter of vendor support, not operating system. It's not like Microsoft or Apple are writing all those drivers. With a Thinkpad or Brother, you likely never had problems with Linux for the last 20 years. People don't complain they can't install macOS on a Chromebook, and Windows has been the absolute OS monopoly everyone had to support. However, with tinkering, you can install Linux on a washing machine.
What has drastically changed is the user space software side. First off some FOSS alternatives like Blender, OBS, Krita... are becoming equal or better than the competition, but Valve also basically solved gaming on Linux, now. Virtualization and software development is and always has been better.
To be fair, Linux also shines now due to enshitification of everything else.
My experience, as a software developer, is that both Windows and Linux desktop are great. The biggest advantage Windows has is better support for desktop applications that are used by a lot of people, which is just the nature of Windows being more popular for desktop users, and is why I use it. With Linux, it's more likely you'll have to be a bit more savvy with occasional issues.
To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
> To note, with official Linux support on Windows, it's trivial for me to get everything I want as a developer on Windows, so that's never been a hard blocker for me.
Maybe not as a developer, but as a user I still think WSL is only kind of superficially a solution. You still are stuck with an update process that happens automatically and can brick your computer and recovery tools that, as far as I can tell, have never actually worked for anyone in history. You're still stuck with NTFS, which was a perfectly fine filesystem thirty years ago but now is missing basic features, like competent snapshotting/backups, and instead you have to rely on System Restore, which again doesn't actually work.
I mean, yeah, you can do `sudo apt install neovim`, and that's kind of cool I guess, but the problems with Windows, to me are far deeper and cannot be solved with a virtualization layer on top.
I dunno, for local development, I've never ran into any issues with this. And for stuff that really matters, I'm running it in a container anyways which makes it irrelevant which OS my computer is.
I've been using Linux as a desktop for that entire time, and actually, it was better before. The hardware was simpler, more compatible, and relied less on firmware blobs, so making Linux drivers was way easier. And the software was simpler because GUI makers weren't trying to be fancy. The peak of Linux desktop stability and ease of use was in 2002. It's been downhill from there.
The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?
Not the op, I've been gaming on Linux for over 10 years I think, I have an rtx2080, and using Arch Linux, Nvidia support has gotten better by a lot.
Steam performs exceptionally well. Initially there were issues, but I haven't face any for really long time now.
I don't play mp games though. So that part I can't say much.
Very useful info; much appreciated!
I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi.
This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg...
With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".
If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
> If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
Not only that, but in the past I've cooked hacky bash scripts to work around issues while waiting for upstream fixes. I'd imagine that'd be harder with other OSs.
Also a long-time Linux user/administrator. Whenever I've tried searching for Windows answers to issues, I've been genuinely shocked by how low quality the answers are. I've got just a basic understanding of Windows, but it's obvious to me that over 99% of all Windows advice is from people who are just posting meaningless answers so that they can get points for answering or similar.
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>>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
Mate there are bugs in windows and macos that have been unfixed for years. This is not a good argument in my opinion.
I think the difference (at least with macOS) is the fundamental things that -were- working don't suddenly break*
*macOS26 excepted
> find no help coming anytime
Well, see sibling thread: Looks like you just need to post your bounty in HN and somebody will do within a few hours. Somebody to that for Windows or macos.
Sometimes I feel the bounty topic isn't well served yet. On the GNOME bug tracker it doesn't seem to be very discoverable. Are there current good platforms to advertise bounties where people actually look?
Are you proposing that the linux community offers worse support than any kind of software support that you pay for? I've found strangers on the internet to be worlds better than anything I've ever gotten from a vendor.
I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.
On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.
People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows
Most explorer issues are really file system issues. It's touchy. chkdsk in offline repair mode usually fixes it. For the rest, clear the thumbnail cache.
The ways Windows breaks are different from the ways Linux breaks, but there are still ways to fix it. Most of the rest are solved with one or two commands, and it's usually the same two: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-the-system-fil...
I did try those, but it did not solved the issue. But searching around I came to know, this was a rare known explorer bug. Which was not resolved ... so that's that.
The default remote desktop client on Windows 11 can have his picture freeze. Mouse and keyboard input still goes through though. (Which is especially dangerous because enraged users will smash their keyboard.) Years without a fix from Microsoft. Just a registry hack as a workaround.
I've been recommending Mint/Cinnamon over Ubuntu for years now. Its wifi widget does not do this, nor does it use snap.
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon with my main work laptop last week, when my perfectly fine (I thought) Windows 11 installation nuked itself without warning (possibly related to merely opening Teams).
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
I was really surprised with how well polished Mint is. Everything worked out of the box very snappy.
Mint is my preferred OS for my homelab. Nice to have a decent GUI to plug into when using a KVM switch.
Mint is really polished
It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
PR on the way
PR created https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/merg...
Excellent, I will try it straight away. I'll pay out 75% if it works (as it fixes my immediate problem), and the remaining 25% if it gets merged. I'll email you after my test.
I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).
Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.
Confirming it works, thank you! I sent you a mail. In case it doesn't arrive, contact us via the support chat on https://benaco.com
It only stops refreshing if you are hovering the actual SSID list items which in my opinion is the cleanest way to do it, if you want new data you can reclick/rehover the "available networks". The Other option is putting the refresh on a global timer, but that would add magic which isn't clear to the user.
Thanks, I will be awaiting your test result!
I agree that logic is sound, but it is also not discoverable to the user:
They might open the list (with the cursor resting on one of the items, or use the keyboard to navigate out of comfort or for accessibility reasons), then notice "oh wait, I haven't actually enabled my phone's Wifi hotspot yet", enable that, and wait forever for it to appear.
That's why I'm thinking something should visually (and non-visually) change so the user can notice.
Maybe even cleaner would be to add a tooltip to the currently-hovered entry? That might work for both mouse and non-mouse use cases, and might even work for screenreaders.
Make it so the list refreshes (shows new entires) every N seconds when it is focused. Easy.
Yeah I think this is what OS X does (or used to do), you open the menu and it does its initial refresh, and only after quite some delay of the menu being open, it refreshes again. Easy enough to choose your network in that large amount of time. I may be missing some subtle details of it though, since I haven't used it in a while >_>
This can still make that just as you click, it adds entries and makes you click the wrong entry (accidental clickjacking).
Well, huge shoutout to you for following up on your word!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/rickyb/network-manager-applet/-/com...
Ashamed to admit that the power of monetary motivation got the best of me here. But it was also nice to apply myself.
Have you tried KDE Plasma? I have loved it since coming from GNOME. Install it atop Debian 13 and everything just works.
Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.
Perhaps you could have checked if the firmware was installed? Most distros have non free firmware in their packages, it just needs to be installed.
Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics? Or if it can’t, at least give an indication why?
Blaming a new user like this is one of the cultural reasons why the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ has always been n+1.
Re: "Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"
So, out of curiosity, if I tried installing MacOS on any of the 15+ computers I have at home, what are the likely chances that this "operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"
I can tell you that my success rate with Linux is 100%.
I’m not especially speaking for MacOS, but to your question, I suspect if you tried to install an appropriate version of MacOS on Mac hardware, you’d have very close to a 100% success rate. That’s certainly my past experience with Mac and, FWIW, Windows too.
Anyway, my point wasn’t that Linux should be perfect; but that if it can’t be, maybe give some help why, and more experienced users shouldn’t just jump to blaming the struggling newbie.
The key is this: if you want Linux to win with non-experts, it needs to target being a better experience for non-experts than the alternatives, to justify the effort of changing.
Re: "if you want Linux to win with non-experts, it needs to target being a better experience for non-experts than the alternatives"
I agree in broad terms, but let me re-capitulate this. Which OS do you think would offer a better experience for non-experts when installing on bare-metal? By my reckoning, Windows is a nightmare to install afresh on random hardware, and MacOS wont work on most-all random hardware. Users think that Windows is easier because they almost never have to install it from scratch.
Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
[0]https://au.pcmag.com/migrated-15175-windows-10/104927/micros... [1]https://www.techradar.com/news/is-windows-11-spying-on-you-n... [2]https://www.itnews.com.au/news/apple-delays-image-scanning-f... [4]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microslop-infuriat...
> I agree in broad terms, but let me re-capitulate this. Which OS do you think would offer a better experience for non-experts when installing on bare-metal? By my reckoning, Windows is a nightmare to install afresh on random hardware, and MacOS wont work on most-all random hardware. Users think that Windows is easier because they almost never have to install it from scratch.
I've done multiple installs of every Windows (except 8) Windows since the NT4 era, and multiple installs of OS X over the last decade. They have almost always been straightforward and successful, unless I've complicated things with weird partition/dual boot requirements. (OS X isn't really a fair comparison, as the target hardware is so hugely restricted.)
----
Aside from the initial installation 'just working' (which I accept might not be dramatically different with Linux, these days, and indeed, I accept that Windows often needs additional drivers downloading, depending on your system.) there's another big factor to consider.
With Windows and OS X there's a long-established concept (at least, prior to the app store era) that if you want to install something, you download a file and run it. This applies whether it's drivers or software, and >95% of the time also provides a simple uninstall path. Even my elderly mother can grok this.
With Linux, this is my recent journey: Must I use APT or APT-GET? Flatpack? Snap? Or can I use the built-in Software Manager (FWIW, I really like the one in Mint, except when stuff isn't available on it.) Oh, so some software (Mullvad, Blender, etc.) I need to download manually? I've installed Mint; am I on a Debian system? Okay, I'll download the DEB, but then how to install that? (Oh, it failed - open-whispr). For other things, we must download an Appimage and make it executable - great, that works, but it doesn't have an install feature, so how to install it somewhere so that it's not forever sitting in Downloads? Huh, okay, I can figure that out, but it's a pain. Oh, wait, some of those self-contained files I've downloaded will run directly from file manager, but for some reason fail silently via the start menu link I've just made. Okay, better trouble-shoot that tomorrow...
(For brevity, I've left out that at every stage, there were multiple web searches to find instructions for the correct approach, diving into all manner of forums, Stack Overflow posts, and Github repositories. And I've left out the more esoteric stuff, like slowing down touchpad scrolling via obscure command-line incantations.)
This is the reality of setting up a simple Linux system with (what is reputed to be) one of the most user-friendly distros there is.
And which is why, if the goal is Linux 'winning' on the desktop (beyond committed nerds) there's still quite some way to go on UX.
> Also, do you factor in the ever-increasing nuisances (AI, ads, spyware)[0][1][2][4] that Microsoft and Apple are injecting into their operating systems, and the move towards digital sovereignty which is accelerating in every nation outside of the US in any computation of what is a 'better experience'?
Totally with you, 100% - that's why I'm experimenting with a full shift to Linux myself. But this only applies to relative nerds. Many/most non-expert users don't know or care about such things.
Re: "Or can I use the built-in Software Manager (FWIW, I really like the one in Mint, except when stuff isn't available on it.)"
I think this (built-in Software Manager) is probably the right track for most normal users. Last time I checked, the Debian software repo had over 120,000 packages, so for most normal users, the bulk of what they need is likely there and thus likely easier to install than apps on MacOS or Windows. My usual track record for installing a new desktop for family members, including the top 100 apps they likely need, is under 30 minutes for Linux. The last time I tried this with Windows, it took days of effort and frustration and to some extent opened the computer up to security risks because of the multitude of binary sources I had to trust.
But yes, once you start needing specialist software, then your-mileage-may-vary. Having said that, apps like Blender are already in the Ubuntu repo, which should mean they are also in the Mint Software Manager, and thus a single-click away from installation.
In general, I would consider Linux to be the easiest platform to install software on for the most common 80% of the software that normal users need. It's certainly the easiest to maintain and update that commonly used software of any of the mainstream desktop OSes.
Again, I think a lot of the mismatch of norms & experiences comes down to what someone becomes accustomed to. If you're accustomed to downloading an installation binary (EXE/MSI) and double-clicking that to install on Windows, then you can become accustomed to downloading an installation binary (DEB/RPM) and double-clicking that to install on Linux (viz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOPQPrzmnw0).
Cheers.
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Trollish usernames aren't allowed here (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
Also, it's not ok to create new accounts to abuse HN with, so please don't do that.
You can't just come to Linux and forget about the distinction between free and proprietary software.
I tried a clean install of Windows on a lunar lake laptop and it couldn't even find the disk. This is a device that ships with Windows!
It's just not feasible to have 100% out of the box hardware compatibility.
I tried everything lol.
Re: "I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol."
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
What will you do then?
Asahi linux to not waste hardware and then move away from apple products slowly. But in the meantime, their products are good and are Unix based so they're not a pain for development.
Or, you could help accelerate the move away from proprietary platforms, even if there is a small hit to you personally. This is how we help save society, rather than having others do all the work, no?
In the end, it's in your best interests that Linux and open platforms improve in the direction you want them to, and the best way to achieve that is by joining the effort now.
Probably stop using technology. Might go back to bartending tbh.
You can try to stop using technology, but that wont stop the technology from using you:
https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/?2
The only safe and sane path for humanity is community built software. All other roads lead to serfdom.
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Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.
Yeowch, for my old MBPs (Core 2 duo I want to say) I run Mint and have had no problems. Maybe just luck of the draw but I've been really impressed
This is still a problem. There are a lot of, eg, realtek chipsets that don't work well or simply don't work on Linux.
Another issue is they advertise "Linux support," which actually translates to: minimally working driver source available for very out-of-date kernel. Good luck if you want to rely on upstreamed drivers or even run a recent kernel.
Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on
Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over
That sounds like a GNOME problem, not a Linux problem.
You should give KDE a go.
congratz to receiving the fix
>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,
>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.
Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
There's this reply in the comments from the author.
> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor
Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.
I don't think PopOS could be called "obscure". At the time that the LTT video came out, PopOS and Manjaro (IIRC) were the distros to game on, if you wanted up-to-date OOTB working drivers.
Even so, it was hard to take LTT's attempt at using linux seriously when part of it included Linus bitching about how right clicking a list of files on github and clicking "save link as..." didnt give him a copy of the file. It just highlighted how utterly clueless he was and made it clear he couldn't be trusted for the rest of the video either.
Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf).
Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).
Agreed. As a long time windows user, I never liked ubuntu much (and always had issues with my hardware too). Mint has been amazing for me.
I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.
Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033
> I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades
What are you talking about?
Yeah, if the goal of the article was to convince Windows users to switch to Linux then Ubuntu would provide as frictionless an install as Windows. Since the author chooses CachyOS, of course there's going to be some important steps during installation that need to be handled with some forethought and extra software to handle all hardware issues. After all, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and inherits it's minimal mindset. But the article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been already written a thousand times.
It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.
For not much prior research, he sure has done a lot of prior research to even know about desktop environments or bootloaders compared to your average windows user. This article read like every other promising Linux is user friendly and easy, then proceeding with the author fixing issues the average user wouldn’t be able to even diagnose.
I think anyone technically savvy enough to follow the article is already aware Linux is a viable primary OS, the question is can you manage it without having to become a Linux nerd? I want to be able to tell normal people they can use Linux.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
It's a newcomer, but in ProtonDB data CachyOS is now the second most popular distro after Arch: https://boilingsteam.com/now-cachy-os-is-eating-arch-linux-l...
Fedora is 4th, Ubuntu is 5th.
I use Linux exclusively for almost 20 years. I can tackle any tinkering of almost anything in a Linux environment, alongside of heavy use of Vim and Emacs.
Nowadays every time I want to run a non-trivial command of a program, configure a file somewhere, customize using code Emacs or anything else, I always put the LLMs to do it. I do almost nothing by myself, except check if said file is indeed there, open the file and copy paste the new configuration, restart the program, copy paste code here and there and so on.
No need to be a nerd to use Linux, that's so 2021. LLMs are the ultimate nerds when it comes to digging into manuals, scour the internet and github for workarounds, or tips and tricks and so on.
99% of people who don’t work in tech want to configure their computer by clicking buttons and menus, not by running terminal commands or asking ChatGPT.
Not true. They want to talk to their secretary, and the secretary do it for them.
Go around, and ask people if they want a free secretary, see if someone doesn't want one.
They will not ask a computer program to do stuff. They will talk to the secretary, and the secretary will do any computer stuff necessary. For the moment the secretary cannot click buttons and menus as well as manipulate language. The secretary will have realistic skin and lips, and a dress as short as required by the job description.
Language AI is the king of AIs, and the gap will only get bigger. Everything will be tied to language going forward, driving, surgeries and so on.
They don’t even want to do that.
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
Printers. It always haunts us. I have exclusively bought Brother for home and work for close to two decades at this point because they follow CUPS standards requiring no fidgeting, and their modern offerings all have AirPrint, which eliminates the need for drivers. It's 2026, and the normies still think you cannot print from your phone because printers suck so much.
Even then - I have a reasonably nice Brother Printer/Scanner/etc device, and I could never get AirPrint to reliably work until I switched over to using Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. Something to do with it going to sleep and not broadcasting the necessary mDNS stuff, IIRC. I couldn't find any combination of settings in the printer to make it happy, and since it's now right next to a switch, it's not really worth the effort of digging any further.
Hey, we should be thankful that printers suck. Wasn’t this whole journey kicked off by Stallman getting frustrated with printer drivers?
> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
> after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95.
You have to choose that?
I'm a long-time Linux user, and I don't like GNOME better as a desktop environment. I'll take a Windows 95-like desktop UI over GNOME any day of the week...
My Dad managed to install linux (Q4OS) on his computer in a dual-boot setup, having never even touched Linux before. He hasn't asked me for help once, whereas historically I've been his tech support when he was running Windows. He's loving the linux experience.
I believe if my Dad is able to install, use and benefit from Linux, anyone can.
On the other hand I recently did another dual boot system and despite having done it 100 times I accidentally destroyed the windows install by assuming it was efi when it wasn’t and overwriting the windows boot record which was at the end of the hard drive when making space for Linux, and it became permanently unbootable and ultimately had to be reinstalled. If an experienced user can make a terrible mistake so easily during the standard setup wizard that did it with a smile, than anyone can.
*GASP* OH NO THEY MIGHT LEARN A SKILL!!!!
Snark aside, I really really don’t understand the aversion, even within the tech community, to learning new skills especially as it pertains to Linux.
Would having new knowledge be such a burden? Why is it something to avoid? Why is it not a good thing if normal people learn more about computing?
Do we want a population of iPad baby Linux users? Normal people can use it now, don’t gate keep.
We have people going “I don’t have to read, I could just have the AI do it for me” and pretty soon they’re not gonna be able to think. People don’t want to think or learn because we have such a cultural aversion to being a nerd. Nerd is not a bad thing.
Partly, the issue isn't "they would have to learn about Linux, and that's bad", it's "they would have to learn about Linux, and they wouldn't want do that, and so they would get frustrated and quite likely give up on it, and my recommendation would have been a waste of their time".
The other part is that they're not necessarily wrong not to want to learn about Linux! Learning is great, when it's something interesting or valuable. But if I'm not interested in the thing, and my time and mental resources are limited, and I have a good enough alternative, I think it's absolutely fine to avoid it.
Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering. Maybe you're into cars, I don't know, but I bet you take this attitude to at least some of the useful objects in your life.
> Most of us choose to drive a car that just works, and take it to a mechanic when it doesn't, rather than buying one that requires and rewards tinkering.
You can also bring your Linux machine to the mechanic. The only difference is that we linux users are also the mechanics.
My mother only wants a browser and a mail client, maybe a word processor from time to time. I installed Fedora, and the thing is still working after 5 years or so. I ssh into the thing once a month to do a "dnf update", she doesn't even notice. After initial setup, no more tinkering ever needed.
Because you maintain it for her.
Because although sometimes annoying, people already have a good alternative making the hours required to invest in something they're not interested in a very high price.
It's the same reason why as a software developer I use Visual Studio Code and don't plan to learn (neo)vim.
I (like many who'd have to learn Linux) have better things to do.
You simply dismissed or forgot the learning you did to use Visual Studio Code.
Regardless of how much learning you did you still had to learn how to use it.
Just trying to short-circuit that logic and show you that it cuts both ways and that we should be willing to learn new tools.
That is true, but you can't deny the fact one tool has a significantly steeper learning curve. They are not the same.
It should be a choice, not a requirement. With Windows you can get your work done without knowing much about Windows itself, but with Linux you're forced to understand every level of the entire OS so you can debug it first and then maybe get your work done. For an OS built around user freedom Linux sure doesn't give its users much choice on how to use it.
Windows is worse , just latest example: a USB WiFi antenna for the PC, on Linux it just works, on Windows you need either to buy a CD drive to install the drivers - not sure if your grandma can buy a cd drive, install it and install drivers. On Linux it just works.
People like buy a computer and use whatever is on it, they can't manage to install windows, the drivers needed for the hardware, I had to setup emails, or other online accounts for this kind of people so give them a preinstalled Linux and they should manage,.
You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
>You would never use the cd lol, it would auto install - and if it didn’t you’d download the drivers online though if it’s such a piece of junk as to need that then it’s a junk piece of hardware anyway.
Sure, sure , so all hardware that does not autoinstall on Windows directly without a driver or internet is junk. AFAIK Windows can't install the correct nvidia or AMD drivers and you need to use special steps to prepare a windows install USB since the installer for some reason starts from the stick but doe's not have the drivers to complete the installation from the stick
Your knowledge needs to be updated then. The latest reinstall of windows I did detected my nvidia card and installed the proper nvidia drivers without me doing anything. I was surprised actually to see that but there you go.
hardware that doesnt have builtin drivers to windows are a piece of junk? i think you'll find thats most hardware then
You are hilariously wrong. Seriously, what century are you living in? It's been a very long time since I had to install a specific driver for any piece of hardware on Windows, and I go through a lot of hardware. Every piece of hardware I had is automatically installed and configured without any hassle whatsoever.
not OC, as i mentioned in parallel thread, an USB witreless antena. The brand of the antena is not important, what is important is the chip used in it, since same chip is used by many brands , some chap no name brands or some well known brands use same chip and package it in a more expensive looking package.
In Windows it does not recognize it, so I pluged it in Linux and just worked directly, no need to scan for drivers or shit like that, so I run the "lsusb" command in Linux, found the chip ID , searched the internet for a Windows driver from Linux, put it on a USB stick and install it on Windows.
Also I am 100% sure that when I bought my desktop the box had CDs for everything from motherboard, sound, network and video card, I am remember for sure that if I would install the drivers in the wrong order in Windows the OS willb e confused and not detect my sound card)because some cofusion between the Realteck network and sound card I think)
Would be an interesting experiment to get N random PCs and N random non tech people and have them install Windows and Linux on them, have them setup the random hardware in the PC, setup a printer and scanner, connect the phone to it and download photos etc the Linux distro must be a distro targeted for normal people not the extreme dev/game/nerd targetd distros so IMO Kubuntu LTS would be a good choice.
You realise printers are NOTORIOUS for having horrifically bad Linux support, right? Linux would lose that battle 10 times out of 10. Manufacturers have a massive incentive for devices to plug and play on windows and they all basically do.
There is no magic plug and play in Windows, you need to install the giant bundle of crap the printer CD comes with, In Linux it actually works this days, no internet and no CD needed.
No you don’t? I’m not sure you’re living on the same planet
no, you are wrong. Windows is able to install many drivers by downloading it for you, but we talked about bundled IN windows.
No, just no. Across dozens of machines with different hardware configurations, I've never had Windows download a driver. It just doesn't happen. But neither of us can provide any proof, so this comment thread isn't going to go anywhere.
but lets make it simple then, I obtain a retail copy of windows 11, go and buy the latest nvidia gpu, released AFTER win11 was released, and it has a proper driver without downloading?
edit: or another scenario, i go out and buy a new lenovo or dell or whatever laptop, format the disk, install retail windows, and now windows just has the drivers for all this?
or another scenario, I go and buy motherboard, ram, cpu, gpu, install windows, and it just magically has drivers for all the hardware?
the answer is: it does not, absolutely not.
and what hardware exactly do you plug in? obviously its not gonna do it even if you plug in 1000 different USB hid mice, other than that, drivers are totally needed for many things, and windows just doesnt come with drivers for remotely all hardware, which is a very very easily provable fact.
Nowadays these things contain a hidden storage partition to install a driver.
Well said. There’s a lot of angry comments below but it’s all people who don’t want to deal with these hard truths.
Linux is a lot more user-friendly than Windows, with generally useful error messages when things go wrong.
How do you fix Windows when it breaks every couple of weeks and the only information you get is a bright blue screen with a couple of lines of hexadecimal on it?
I don’t think you’ve used windows in 20 years by the sounds of it
You run memtest86 to rule out a RAM issue, then check with your system reseller or mobo vendor for BIOS mitigations for the latest round of Intel CPU bugs. If you are able to rule out the RAM and CPU, try a different power supply. Failing that, the motherboard itself may be causing the issue.
Unfortunately there are few good ways to narrow down intermittent hardware failures (which is what you are experiencing) beyond these common steps.
The same hardware works flawlessly running Linux.
It works so far. That means nothing. Different memory areas, different patterns of bus access, hardware usage and CPU activity. And don't forget different hardware drivers, for that matter.
However much Windows 11 sucks, BsoDs are vanishingly unlikely to be caused by Windows itself. They haven't managed to degrade it to that extent. At least not yet.
I would expect that kicking seven shades of shit out of it with video editing software would be harder work than just attempting to boot to a desktop.
“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.
I used to concede that yeah, Linux is more hassle than the average person is going to feel like dealing with, but at this point, Windows is so damn bad that you could grab literally any Linux distro and have an easier time with it, and even better, it won't delete all your stuff in the middle of the night due to a forced update either.
I actually don’t agree with that. If you don’t want to fully commit (which would help users transition) good effing luck getting an average user through the dual boot process, no distributed ever made that smooth or understandable. Even I have bricked my windows boot record by mistake and I’ve done it 100 times. But for the sake of argument let’s say they go full beans, my most recent install of Linux involved a manual ini file fix because sleep was totally broken, and learning to backport the graphics driver to an older version because the recommended pascal driver forces the wrong resolution on my main screen. This is just stuff that doesn’t happen with windows, which I installed without a hitch the same hardware.
In my opinion, in the best case scenario Linux is equal to windows in usability, but in every other scenario it just isn’t. Yes, windows is shit these days. But the average person would rather be annoyed at copilot than deal with driver issues.
I agree. Yet another "Linux is great! The only issues I had were A, B, C, D, E...".
I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?
"Windows is great… you only need to… install the IoT version using Rufus"
Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.
Nope. I tweaked one setting via the GUI (to get the taskbar back to the left where it rightfully belongs). Literally everything else I've left as-is. The IoT edition doesn't come with any bloatware and Rufus does a couple of other tweaks automatically.
But you should, if you have any self-respect.</privacy>
I don't think there are any privacy related settings to tweak. The IoT version doesn't have any of the bloat. It's pretty much like Windows 7 but with a slicker interface.
Telemetry still needs to be turned off.
Also there are silly things that windows does, like hide file extensions.
Now you’re pulling at straws
LTSC IoT version has the bullshit stripped out so it's a viable OS. Also, it's not sold to regular people, only companies can buy it for some reason.
KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.
GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.
GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.
I find Gnome way more visually appealing as well. Saying this as a KDE developer, too.
I prefer Gnome. There's hardly any visual clutter, and it can be controlled primarily by keyboard (which I prefer). Every other environment, even MacOS, just has so much noise.
> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware
So this isn't a usual comparison, as the vast majority of users will choose Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint. CachyOS is also a new distro, meaning it won't last long (most distributions, like small businesses, only last a few years). It's also Arch-based, meaning the user is going to get constant updates, which leads to problems. Finally, Cachy is optimized for speed and security, not hardware.
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. I try plugging in a mouse (without unplugging the first one), same deal. Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard
And this is where I stop reading
If you hold out for a few more paragraphs until he gets past the installer there is closure:
The issue is that he was using an obscure gaming mouse, and the solution was to use a different mouse.
> and the solution was to use a different mouse.
Or make a small edit to a config file, to work around that nonstandard mouse vendor's mistake.
Back in the days of Unity I decided to make a full switch to Linux and it just worked. The UX was unfamiliar but it had a cohesiveness that made sense. I use macOS for the past 10 years as my main system (work stuff needs Mac-specific things) but switching to a decent Linux distro would honestly feel like an upgrade. Windows continues being a shitshow and I want nothing to do with it.
What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative. And soon as AAA games start being created for Linux first and run on Windows in some sort of compatibility or emulation mode that will really start turning the tides.
> What I think could really push Linux desktop forward is if various PC gaming influencers started doing content on how to game on Linux. Given that it is not just viable now but actively sometimes better than on Windows it would make for good content AND show people an alternative.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Gamers Nexus at 2.57M subscribers is working on Linux Gaming Benchmarks with help from Wendel at Level1Techs [0]. Steve bemoans the shitshow that Windows has become all the time.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8
I think this is both the blessing and the curse of the incredible work that wine and steam has done. Unless and until we get the Linux packaging stuff figured out in a way that developers can target Linux instead of having to target each individual distro, I think the clear incentive for the vast majority of gaming companies will be to target windows even if they ultimately care more about Linux, because wine and proton are so good and so much easier to support than each individual distro natively.
Don't get me wrong, I rejoice when I get a native Linux game. I buy nearly every native Linux game I can find that is reasonably priced and sounds remotely interesting. I have a couple dozen games in my GOG backlog that I haven't even tried to run yet, but I bought on a sale or something because they were relatively cheap and supported Linux natively. So I would love a world where it was Linux first and Windows second.
Steam runs plenty well on Linux and has for a while but I guess developers might want more than one option for distribution.
But to me it seems like in the long run emulating Linux on Windows is easier than the other way around.
I wanted to setup a family gaming PC in the living room for Christmas and went with CachyOS. It gave me a one click gaming installation option that just worked. I’m not interested in the FPS games with constant anti cheat mechanisms right now. It has worked with every game I’ve tried so far. Examples include: Crazy Machines 3, Cygni, Gradius, and Bejeweled (all on Steam.)
I have a PC with Windows 10 and so does my dad that I’ll be converting to some kind of Linux soon. Windows 11 isn’t even an option due to the TPM chip requirement. The computers are still quite good and it makes no sense to abandon them. With Linux their performance will probably improve.
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.
> My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it
> First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. [...] Not a major issue; I can get around fine with just the keyboard.
> Then I remember that my root partition is only 100GB. I reboot back into the Cachy live image and use the Parted utility to increase it to 1TB, then make a second btrfs partition in the remaining space.
I don't think the goal was achieved here. For most people it still takes some dedication and a lot of computer knowledge to switch successfully.
But I expect things to continue to improve now that Valve has solved the single major blocker for a large chunk of people, that being running their back catalog of games. It's an amazing gift to the community that we should all be very thankful for.
I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.
After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.
Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.
So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.
I saw a gal say that a Windows VM worked solid for gaming, after passing through a GPU.
EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/
thank you!
> Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton
Out of curiosity, which game?
I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.
I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.
I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.
Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.
The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
I wonder if this might be some odd library issue that could be fixed in the WINE prefix.
I knew a guy that wanted to play a Japanese version of a JRPG on Linux and he figured out he needed some weird libraries there to properly render the font, which was causing the game to not start.
Anyway, for older games and emulators, playing on Linux has been a magnificent experience for the most part.
Out of incessant curiosity and borderline obsession - I installed KDE, then I enabled the experimental Wayland support for Proton and tried the game again.
It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.
Guess I'm switching to KDE.
This is actually great to know!
This makes me wonder if this would be a preferable setup for Proton.
Part of it was the game just didn’t play nice with Wayland, and since I use Gnome I don’t have an X11 session available. I could’ve tried on a different DE but didn’t want to install a bunch of extra bloat; yet I installed a whole other Os…sigh
shrugs
Maybe I’ll try switching to KDE and see if it works better under X11 there.
I recently switched to linux from windows. The only reason I was sticking with windows was because hoyoverse refuses to support linux. I finally decided I need some break from them anyways and took the plunge.
First, I tried to install fedora atomic cosmic. It kind of worked but I could not get it to work with my dock + external monitors at all. Now that I am used to that setup, I can't go back.
Not wanting to spend time figuring it out, I just installed Ubuntu instead. Thankfully, that worked out though it's not perfect. Everytime I turn on my laptop, I need to spend 10-15 minutes turning the monitors on and off until ubuntu recognises them correctly and also sends dp output (it shows the monitor in settings and I can open windows on it but the monitor doesn't actually show anything; other times, it reads the monitor as something nvidia with the lowest resolution).
I tried to install genshin anyways on ubuntu. I couldn't get it to work via wine/lutris. Virtualbox doesn't support gpu passthrough so I tried using virt-manager. The setup was too hard and it didn't work anyways. I gave up on hoyo at this point and install steam instead.
Honestly, ubuntu is rough and Linux as a whole is very rough. But on the whole, I would still pick this over dealing with windows any longer.
The trick with linux is being selective when you buy hardware. Getting things to work the first time is hit or miss, but once they work, they tend to continue to work without too many surprises. For laptops, that means thinkpads.
The dock and monitors aren't mine actually. I got them from work. The work laptop runs windows 11 so the hardware is only tested for windows. I will buy my own stuff when I have to return these and then I will make sure it all works with linux.
What distro / wm / de is good with external monitors, in your opinion? After going through some of the comments on some threads, it feels like external displays are a common pain point across all linux systems.
Yes, external displays can break in weird ways. I remember that a common annoyance used to be that windows and applications don't go back to where you left them before suspending. There are likely other paper cuts as well in areas of variable refresh rates, colour management, etc. I think the biggest issue with external displays, screen tearing, is solved now due to wayland. As for hw and distros, stick to intel or amd igpus, especially in laptops. Both gnome and kde are pretty good these days. Ubuntu and Fedora are both quite good. Distros aren't that different anymore these days. The differences boil down to release cadence mostly.
check out the launchers here for hoyo stuff, i haven't tried the genshin one but zzz worked nearly out of the box (had to change the wine version it was using iirc) https://github.com/an-anime-team
Not only you could escape from Windows, you are now free from Genshin dark patterns.
GPU passtrough on a laptop? If GPU is not in a separate IOMMU group I wouldn't even try.
I was watching the Lenovo CES keynote and couldn’t believe how hard they were selling Qira on Lenovo computers and Motorola phones. All the major players have platform specific Windows features that can’t possibly meet their success criteria in terms of ROI. Lenovo isn’t Apple or Google or Microsoft, and even the latter two have trouble selling fully integrated platform services on hardware.
All this time, money, dev energy, and marketing to keep trying to find a magical bean in their stalk and they still just won’t support open hardware and open source OSes with vigor.
Apple people tend to buy Apple products generation over generation, and none of the Windows hardware manufacturers are even close to having that rep. Even in this thread people are recommending Gen 1 Thinkpads, but Lenovo’s heart really isn’t in it across the board. Dell went simple with the revived XPS but the release versions don’t offer Linux in the BYO order flow.
And no, I don’t think Framework is good enough.
Gotta be doing something, elsewise it's layoffs for your business unit
The "do something" is support open hardware, sell more machines, provision fewer product variations.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
I have been using Fedora comfortably as my main os on a framework for the last 18 months and I have had no issues. I do just think for all that I do, lab work, coding, and gaming. I also run debian on mnt pocket reform and tbh I think it is OSes' like Linux that allow devices like that to exist. Windows and Mac just aren't options.
There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.
Moved my Framework laptop to Bluefin and my gaming desktop to Bazzite early last year. Zero regrets, zero issues. I'm not new to Linux by any means, I've been dabbling since a kid. But in adulthood, I had given up on having Linux as my daily driver because I just wanted my main computers to work, I didn't want maintaining them to be a hobby. That's not been an issue with Bluefin or Bazzite. I'm sure it's not for a lot of modern Linuxes, but these ones I can vouch for at least!
Bazzite is my first immutable distro. Idk that I would want this for my dev machine - but for a gaming/general desktop usage it’s pretty amazing. If they exposed more of the maintenance tooling and stuff like adding RPM layers via the UI then I think they’d have a really compelling OS for non-technical users.
I agree, if you have a specific dev flow that is compatible with the immutable OS approach, then these can be wonderful dev machines, but personally I don't want to change my workflow to fit the OS, I prefer the OS to fit my workflow.
At some point I I'm pretty confident that I will switch to an immutable version of Fedora and relearn my workflow in a distro box like world as I do see some real benefits to doing so, but I'm not in a hurry
I expected it to be an issue but I’ve had surprisingly few problems so far. If you’re working in docker-land or can use devcontainers, it just works. If you’re not but your stack is well supported by homebrew, also not a problem. Anything else you can handle via a distrobox container, where you can install from package managers to your heart’s content, and they have good integration with the base OS, but I’ve had to reach for distrobox a lot less than I expected.
Interesting, thanks! Out of curoisity would you (or anyone else) mind sharing some details about which stacks you work on? And have you done any GTK or linux native apps?
I do a decent amount of GTK and occasionaly Qt, and wonder if there's any extra friction for that
I’ve not done any native Linux app development I’m afraid, I can see that being quite painful…
I am mostly over in web application and Python ML land.
I had the dilemma of choosing between Bazzite and CachyOS or Manjaro for my workstation, which is also my gaming rig.
The whole immutable distro felt like a hinder for my workflow (running docker containers, etc.), so that's why I went for CachyOS.
I think you should take another look, especially at the “Bazzite developer experience” edition: container based development is pretty much what it’s centred around. Alternatively, Bluefin, which is much more dev focused
I switched from Windows to Linux ~20 years ago because and never came back to Windows. First years I used Ubuntu and experimented with Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. Later went to Fedora Linux with Gnome Desktop which is still my preferred Linux Distribution. Nice to see so many people thinking about free and open alternatives to big tech!
I switched 25 years ago.
Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
> The biggest issue I’ve had so far is Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. For some reason, Microsoft hasn’t prioritized making a Linux version of Bedrock. Java Edition works fine in Linux, but I play Minecraft with my kids, and they’re on Bedrock Edition on their iPads. There’s supposed to be a way to run the Android app with MCPE Launcher, but I couldn’t get it to work.
The launcher was somewhat pretty stable all along, until Microsoft enabled Google's Integrity Protection "DRM" into it. [0]
Fortunately, they have found a way to run it even with that added in after a couple of weeks later since they added that at Q3/4 last year.
> but I couldn’t get it to work.
From what I've seen, the game will crash when vibrant visuals (a built-in alternative rendering option with shaders-like experience in Minecraft Bedrock) volumetric fog is enabled. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss... [1]: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...
WSL and Windows Terminal has done a fantastic job at delaying my move to Linux as my primary desktop but Microsoft seems hellbent on ruining Windows.
This was my stance for the past couple years, but I moved to Linux (PopOS) 3 months ago because wsl2 kept crashing from OOM (even though I had allocated excess ram). I kept having to manually manage my memory usage by choosing which apps, containers etc to run.
There's nuisances in popos, but I am generally thrilled.
Even Microsoft often doesn't use its own servers for critical infrastructure.
It is a fools errand. =3
I would gladly move to Linux from macOS if only I could get the same energy efficiency on the arm MacBooks.
You can, current Intel lineup does 20h on battery: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-empire-strikes-back-with...
Their upcoming CPUs are even better. Also Qualcomm might actually finally offer good support on Linux and their new X2 is amazing.
For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why?
Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.
Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished. Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0
100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.
Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.
NixOS. Had prior Linux experience, so wasn't too worried about learning multiple new major paradigms in parallel. Also had been running a lil' NixOS server for half a year before that, so I could carry over most of my configuration.nix from there, and also the safe feeling of knowing that if I do mess up stuff, I could with very high probability just reboot to a previous generation and have everything back to working exactly the same as before.
Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.
Fedora.
Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)
However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.
Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.
If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!
Originally started with Xubuntu 22.04, but switched to Mint at the start of March last year since it (Xubuntu) was going to EoL.
Mint does everything I need it to, so there's no need for me to hop.
I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.
I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.
It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.
Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.
Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)
Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.
My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)
I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).
Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.
This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.
I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.
Mint because I am a filthy casual. I love Mint. It has been smooth sailing for the past 4 years running it on a 2019 Dell X5. Part of why I lack any motivation to get a new machine is because it still runs very smooth with Mint.
I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.
I started with Ubuntu but had some problems installing software. Then I moved to Mint and it stuck with me. I converted 6 virtual machines from Windows to Mint Linux, and it's been great.
I then moved my main server that runs the VMs from Windows to Linux Mint, and that went far better than expected, basically no problems at all. I had two LSI x8 SAS RAID cards, each running an 8 disk RAID 10 array. Moving over to Linux there was nothing to do except plug them in, and they just worked. No drivers to install. I did have to find a copy of the management software, but that runs exactly the same as it did on Windows.
The last VM I have is running a somewhat complex IIS web server setup that I have to move over to Linux, and I haven't had the time to dig in on that yet, but I will do it this year.
The last system I have on Windows is my laptop/workstation. It doesn't behave that well on Linux with my 3 displayport monitors, and a few other things. I have it dual-booting to Mint, so I will keep trying. There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
> There's really not much software that I need that only runs on Windows (I do not play any games).
This is the main barrier for most people, I reckon.
I mostly play on consoles nowadays, but I recognize that games are important as they bring the masses. If gaming on Linux becomes important, the rest will follow.
Gentoo with KDE plasma, because I can :)
I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.
Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.
The printer also was my reason I picked Ubuntu over Arch / Endeavour OS :)
I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.
CachyOS KDE. My first time using Arch family after meant years of Debian and some Fedora. Honestly fedora is great, and I wanted to try something new.
You know what's fun? Being able to change system fonts, which you can't do on Windows.
I'm using the IBM Plex fonts and they are so good looking.
edit: after "many" years.
What are peoples' thoughts on which style of distro is best to hand over to a non-techie user for the least amount of hand-holding?
I re-install so much that I don't know how easy it is, or how the distros prompt, when something like Debian Stable or Fedora need to update to the next version. With Arch, you constantly get the "updates ready" and it is always fresh.
My Dad managed to install Q4OS on his own and has been pretty happy with it, hasn't asked me for help even once.
I guess i've never really "switched" - I've always used Linux desktops together with Windows desktops - each to the strengths that they are good at it. And this goes back to the late 1990's. There are times I've used more than the other.
But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".
Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.
When I switched back in 2012 I had used an Ubuntu live disk to rescue some files from my borked Windows 7 install. After reinstalling Windows 7 I was annoyed that it didn't have ethernet drivers so I decided to just install Ubuntu. When the Amazon lens controversy happened I started distro hopping and now I bounce between OpenSUSE and Arch. If I wasn't so insistent on cutting edge software I'd probably be using Mageia, which is stable as anything.
EndeavourOS with KDE. For some reason, I always seem to have issues with non-Arch distros, even back when I ran Linux on a netbook. After my Fedora install on my Framework 13 broke, I had switched to Manjaro, but after doing a bit of research when I decided to jump in with my desktop 1.5 year ago I went with EndeavourOS and have been quite happy with it.
PopOS is what I've picked (using it ~6 years). Their new distribution is called Cosmic (Wayland). They've moved away from Gnome to a rust based Iced.
Fedora 43 with KDE. It's almost perfect.
Switched back in 2009 and back then Ubuntu was the easiest to get running.
And I've stuck with it ever since while trying Fedora, Arch and a few others along the way.
I guess it just works for me, know my way around the tooling and can use that knowledge on my Debian servers.
Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.
With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.
Debian. Rock solid, dependable. If you need new features, use backports.
I also use Fedora only because it seems like Debian's nvidia driver installation is a big pain, Fedora made it as easy as Ubuntu.
Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.
It's not without its problems, though:
Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).
Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.
Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).
WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).
Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.
On the plus side, AI works great!
Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).
Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.
I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.
Linux Mint because it works and doesn't get in my way.
My personal experience with using macOS (m1 2020-) Windows 10 (2018-2020) and Linux (for the last 16-17 years on off) -
If you want to do basic stuff like browsing streaming learning video calls etc, get a non Linux computer with decent specs with some headroom. These operating systems are for people who just want to use that ecosystem and not need to manage anything themselves. Battery life is exceptional. Most people I know need a one or two step process to do things (like backup photos contacts documents etc) and Apple google Microsoft offer you that. It’s not perfect but it’s easy to manage. People really have gotten used to someone managing it for them and these things do fine in that regard. It’s better than people having 5 hard drives with photos and misplacing them imo. I’ve had people in 2000s connect drives to my computers and find private pictures and contacts and files etc I need not be having access to. iCloud and Google Photos offer you that peace of mind. With 2FA you’d rather lose it all than fall into the wrong hands. People have all kinds of stuff on their phones and computers that should not leave their computers and accounts. Imagine having your kids classmates find your intimate pictures on some drive they used to copy something your kid gave them. All this has reduced with cloud managed services with activation locks and 2FA and password mangers built into them. Yes they can lock you out one day, but it’s better than people having access to it.
If you are serious about your personal computer, switch to Linux before you start hating those companies. You are not the target audience anymore and you shouldn’t be disappointed about it.
I use Linux for most things, macOS for streaming and surfing the web (private relay and 4k native works great on M1) and windows when I have to deal with others having windows only accounting software sometime.
It's a catch 22.
The way to make Linux easy to use is basically just to pre-install it and ensure the hardware is compatible.
System 76 does this, and charges 3x as much as other OEMs.
At this point if I'm a consumer ohh Linux is 3x the price.
If you install Linux on a refurbished Thinkpad, most of the time you can get something very nice for 500$ or less.
I often dream, if I had money, of buying and refurbishing hundreds of laptops per year. Installing Linux and giving them out.
Would be better than cities handing out Chromebooks.
If I buy a laptop from Lenovo today, buying it without an OS or with Linux is cheaper than Windows.
Depends on the model.
The vast vast majority of Thinkpads on the US Lenovo website don't even offer Linux.
My experience:
I came from windows to MacOS so despite what folks bemoan about MacOS ... I still love it and it is problem free enough that I don't feel the need to do the lifting to go to Linux.
I think that's a common thing for those of who maybe haven't ridden MacOS for so long.
Windows for me is on a whole several levels of worse when I have to dive back into it. Windows feels like an OS POINTED AT ME rather than for me.
> it is problem free enough
The money's paw curls.
I used to love macOS, back in the Mojave days. You could run almost anything you wanted, and still get work done on a decently made machine. Those were the days when the grass truly felt greener to me, macOS for creative work simply annihilated any other option on the table.
Then Catalina stripped out 32-bit compatibility, ruining my Ableton Live project folder and Steam library. And Big Sur removed the sleek, professional-looking UI that I loved. Apparently Tahoe is infecting it with the glass disease, but I've long since migrated to Bitwig and Steam on Linux.
macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
Yeah I mean that's the software life right?
You use the platform you use ... until it doesn't work for you. I did that for Windows and now I'm on MacOS. Maybe one day Linux, maybe I pick a flavor there that doesn't work for me eventually.
> macOS taught me, ultimately, that any feature you take for granted can be removed to fulfill someone's OKR.
100% this. Recent macOS releases really feel like this. For me it was the notification popup UI downgrade, they literally introduced a perfect UI and then botched it in a following release.
Ableton supports 64 bit. How did that ruin your projects?
How does licensing work for Live? Would they necessarily have been able to update to a version that supports 64-bit? For instance, I have a few different machines that I will never update the OS on because I would then lose access to software I paid for.
No pretty sure you need to pay for version upgrades in Ableton. One of the reasons I really enjoy FL Studio.
32 bit plugins probably.
On the desktop. Laptop/mobile devices still significantly suffer under Linux compared to proprietary operating systems. The author even admits: "Tried getting Linux on my laptop over Christmas. Didn’t work." We have a lot more work remaining to claim any sort of victory.
Been running Linux Mint on this ThinkPad A485 for 1.5 yrs, problem-free. There is no feature that doesn't work. Even the media keys and stuff like the wifi-toggle function key work. Still, yeah, there are some things that are perennial problems for open source OSes, particularly wifi. Nice presentation on the topic: "All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIFz9na2lE
May I ask how long the battery lasts under lid suspension? And how quickly does wifi connect after wake? These two issues alone drove me begrudgingly to macOS.
Ooh, actually it's almost always plugged in so I couldn't tell you how long it will last asleep with the lid closed :\ Wifi reconnecting after wake is indiscernible to me because by the time I type in my password to unlock the machine, I'm online. I'm totally guessing but I imagine a big factor is simply the wifi card itself and its respective level of support in Linux. I would also say that wifi management has improved a lot in the past handful of years. I often forget I'm even using Linux because it's so easy to use and problem-free for me -- but again there's always that caveat that some machines have better-supported components than others lol
I had no trouble running Ubuntu on my ASUS Vivobook 4 years ago.
My Linux evenings usually appear 6 months down the road. It's the big updates that cause system breakdowns. This is like saying I got married in November and everything is going great. Far too early to know how far your patience will be tested before you leave.
In my experience, it's not so much the updates as the upgrades but even upgrades are smooth with Linux Mint.
I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)
Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:
1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!
2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.
3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.
4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.
Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
... and considering the GTK file picker we still have to live with, that's saying something.
File pickers are an XDG standard, you can replace it whenever you want: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
Unfortunately, you can only replace it with whatever is readily available... which AFAICR is not much, or just nothing. And even for that you have to be aware of it being replaceable and how to perform that replacement :-(
Since it is paid, how is he going with hardware accelerated video decoding on YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Prime?
Which I never got to work properly on the laptop/netbook I owned until 2024.
What issue did you have? This should work if you follow the happy paths on video and browser hardware acceleration guides for your distro.
At least for Intel and AMD graphics, the Arch wiki's guide should work.
There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).
As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)
I watch Freetube and Netflix on my Starlite tablet and it works well. Works on the laptop too, though I don't watch there.
libva is usually installed these days but you can install it manually. For Netflix you'll need to install widevine.
Current gen intel and amd gpus support vaapi out of the box on fedora in both chromium and firefox. DRM nonsense is orthogonal and unrelated to linux.
Who knows, it's 2026 now.
Yeah, and still it isn't the Year of Linux Desktop for 90% of the world, unless it is hosted on a VM.
Being generous with Steam hardware survey numbers for GNU/Linux.
Linux is insanely easy to use these days. So mature. Even for gaming, I haven't encountered a single game that hasn't run, and most of the time I don't even have to think of setting any compatibility stuff like wine version, it just runs like it was native.
In case of small enterprises, what are the options for migrating to Ubuntu for all remote users?
How does one have an MDM solution? Most of the solutions out there are poor on Ubuntu or need lots of work to get things right. Can anyone provide a reference architecture/solution that allows them to be SOC2 compliant? But also not have high friction for developers and more importantly not have bigger overheads on process or investment?
The industry standard endpoint security solutions all run on either Windows or Mac. Endpoint security is an absolute MUST for a corporate environment.
Yeah, I requested to have a Linux desktop from my employer and was flatly told "NO". None of our many security applications supports it, which is a real shame. As we use Windows and MacOS, I can't see how we'll really be more secure on those platforms, even with the security theater applications they force us to use.
The standard approach is to use intrusive spyware to monitor all activity "for security" rather than to use systems designed to be resistant to attack. I call it the "fucking for virginity" approach to infosec. The reason why is because it's assumed that all attack-resistant systems break down somehow, under some circumstances but the audit trail to determine who committed the attack and how is non-negotiable, especially in regulatory and compliance settings. So institutional infosec tools are more interested in gathering the audit trail if/when an attack happens than in preventing the attack (in a "while we value the things in column A, the things in column B take priority" kind of way). And since they're almost always proprietary and considered beyond reproach by the corporate infosec division, well... occasionally something like the Clownstrike incident of 2024 does happen. But even that's not as bad as having had a breach without a sufficient audit trail to defend against liability or claims of noncompliance with regulations or industry standards (e.g., HITRUST in the health field).
Crowdstrike Falcon runs on Linux.
Edit: that's probably a bad thing, lol
What is RHEL, chopped liver?
It's been years since I've seen RHEL on the desktop at work. Any company that tolerated Linux desktops has either been large and geeky enough to go all-in on Linux and roll their own custom management solutions (Google), or else was still operating in "startup mode" with an attitude of "we trust our software devs, let's just give them a laptop and let them go nuts with root" which means they would flunk any serious security audit. And most of those used Ubuntu or similar.
The only place I've actually seen RHEL on the desktop, also the only large instutition besides Google I've seen Linux desktop rollout, was in government labs; and for those the government can commission arbitrarily bespoke security systems. In the real world, the CISO of your organization is going to go with one of the industry standards, like Cisco Secure Endpoint, which—again—only exist on Windows and Mac. In the real world, you might be issued a Mac if you're a developer, otherwise a Windows machine, and that's what you'll use, end of story.
EDR products are really quite bad on Linux, even RHEL in my experience.
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Im pretty happy with bazzite after getting used to the atomic fedora underpinning and how it changes the way I have to organize and install some stuff
I have old computers. Windows 10 is dead and Windows 11 will not install on old hardware. I put Debian 13 on my wife’s computer.
At first she found it really frustrating, but then reality set in: she didn’t really know Windows either. On Linux there is pretty broad capability to solve your own problem if you can get over fear of a terminal.
Her favorite game runs faster on Debian so that helps.
Proof that this is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
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It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.
There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.
Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.
I've done the same, though I've used Linux in work and home for 22 years (I think 2004 was my first install).
At home I consistently gave up on Linux due to hardware and game compatibility issues.
A combination of buying a steam deck plus windows 11 pushed me back to Linux.
It is oddly peaceful using mint Linux. No adverts. No "like what you see" wall paper click bait. No news site click bait. No register with an online Microsoft account that doesn't have a no button. Just my computer.
The one annoying thing is, some games just don't play nice with wine / proton (for some reason I want to play soldier of fortune, even though I know it's not great). Others are a pain to set up. But mainly it is good enough. (I'm a gog.com junkie). So I may end up installing windows 11 lts. Though I did that with windows 10 and it was lacking some DLLs that some old games needed and was pretty much unfixable.
Some of the key milestones for desktop Linux which I can remember:
* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.
* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.
* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.
* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.
There are two major hurdles I see:
* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).
* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).
It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century.
Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case.
I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux than on Windows. For in every thread about Linux on the desktop, there seems to be an endless flow of comments saying "I can get 11 hours of battery time on Windows, but I only get 10h40 minutes on Linux".
Linux powers billions, if not tens of billions of devices by now: trust me, it can power your desktop/laptop just fine.
It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying.
Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.
Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.
Try KDE Plasma on Debian 13
I installed Omarchy last year when it come out (Arch distro for devs) on laptop and December I installed it on desktop machine, the powerful one.
Now I can play and work on a same machine for the first time in like 15+ years since I switched to Mac so I can work.
It isn't smooth sailing, I have bluetooth speakers and headphones, switching is not easy experience. Vibe coding, audio dictation works on Thinkpad which is underpowered compared to desktop, but it isn't working there. In fact this is more troublesome issue then headphones.
But for most part I could live with those issues and hopefully they get resolved.
Macs are just annoying, updates are for things I don't care and everything is about pushing me towards some subscription or other. I don't see future there for myself
My mother in law asked for help with her computer. I went in dreading the whole windows mess - only to find somebody had set her up with Linux Mint - I was actually able to help her with her internet issue, and am so happy for that unsung hero.
What's the best backup software on Linux? Something that works like Time Machine on macOS or Veeam on Windows. So one full backup then incremental ones at any given X hours/days and also browsable on file level for individual file restoring.
They tend to be server focused. borg, restic, etc. I don't know how practical they are on a laptop in a start/stop/suspend/internet-loss environment.
The big challenge in linux (at least for me) is to connect and work with devices like printers or scanners. It is weird but when I connected my (now old) printer a decade ago its setup was easier and more stable. After several years and ubuntu upgrades at some point I wasn't managed to make it work at all.. And I had no luck with my scanner at all.. Luckily I don't need to use neither printer neither scanner these days but I still keep a laptop (also old) with win7 and all original drivers for such devices.
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
How does this work compared to VirtualBox?
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
Been using VB twenty years and mostly happy, but ready to try something new.
Seems to be just as fast or faster and doesn't require proprietary software.
Regarding the Minecraft issue:
If a Minecraft Java server has the special Geyser plugin ( https://geysermc.org/ ), Minecraft Bedrock clients can connect to it, so you can stick to Minecraft Java on Linux and still play together with your kids who are on Minecraft Bedrock on their iPads.
I recently rebuilt my home rig with some hardware upgrades, including a motherboard and cpu upgrade.
I use a MacBook and spend a majority of my workday in Ubuntu Linux.
The absolute only reason I installed windows on the home machine is because gaming is still essentially nonexistent in the Linux sphere.
If a flavor of Linux can catch up and run everything that can be run on windows I’d happily switch. I imagine a good chunk of the windows market would as well.
Gaming on Linux is so good now I know multiple people who switched their gaming PC to Linux and have no intention of going back. Then there's Steam Deck, which has 3million+ users alone. 3.6% of Steam users are playing on Linux[0], which is kind of insane if you ask me, especially when only 2.2% are playing on MacOS.
Install Steam in Linux and notice you can play the vast majority of your library. There are some online multiplayer games that won't work due to anticheat[1] though that seems to be improving over time as well.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
[1] https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Huh? This wave of "Linux is good now" articles are driven largely from the fall of Window's lock on games. i.e. Steam by Valve, and more.
People interested in similar experiences should check out this podcast/series of videos where two Windows/Mac users try desktop Linux and report out on their experiences.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2888221/check-out-pcworlds-n...
My Windows gaming graphics performance dropped by 40% after some update. I already was using Linux for everything else except gaming for many years. So I tried out Steam on Linux and I was quite amazed how many games run on Linux via Proton. Just check out protondb.com for compatibility reports.
I replaced windows with linux 30 years ago.
Then i replaced linux with mac os.
Cook, keep in mind that if you keep dumbing down Mac OS I can switch back to linux in 24 hours.
Same! High five!
I picked manjaro because rolling updates + being more noob friendly than arch sounded good and gnome because i wanted something completely fresh than a windows layout i'm used to. Now i'm eyeing after hyprland as the next step but couldn't fimd guts to disrupt my workflow in order to get used to it
I ran Archlinux as my main driver on both PC and Laptop for more than a decade but after having the opportunity to use a Windows machine with WSL and eventually WSL2, I felt like I had access to the best of both worlds: a Linux terminal for development (bash + tmux + vim, now bash + zellij + neovim) without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months and a out-of-the-box native gaming experience.
But with the enshitification of Windows (first all the spam and ads on the Start menu, then Microsoft forcing you to have an account to be able to use the machine and the expensive license for Windows Professional if you want access to Hyper-V, which I did), I did some research, tried a few new distros (Manjaro, Bazzite and CachyOS) and settled for CachyOS (gaming support was the main driver, based on Archlinux was secondary).
I do everything I did on Windows and some more: all the terminal stuff plus browsing, CAD modeling, 3D printing / slicing, Office stuff... I miss nothing. No more double partition to boot into Windows when I want to game.
My RX 9070 XT runs smoothly with no driver issues whatsoever. I even have tested the waters running some LLMs with LM Studio and that also worked out of the box.
The only thing that has been a bit meh are Teams and Slack and I believe that has to do with the fact that I ran them in Firefox. Once I ran Slack on Chromium, noise canceling was again available.
2009 was the year of Linux on desktop for me. 17 years later, after going back and forth between macOS and Windows, it feels good to be back home.
One last note in my random ramble is that I do not have as much spare time as before, and I had heard this from other people back in the day whenever I'd say I ran Archlinux on my machines, so I am going to repeat what others have said to me: it's really nice to not have to worry about much, be able to sit down and get productive right away. To me, CachyOS and KDE have made that idea my actual experience and for that I am grateful.
> without the hassle of updates breaking things every few months
That's not so much a Linux issue as an Arch issue.
I moved from 15 years of macOS to Linux (Omarchy in my case). I was mostly using the terminal and am therefore super happy with my choice now. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/, in case of interest.
I have been primarily in the tiling window manager space for the past 5 years… that said I’ve been driving Cosmic on my NixOS workstation and I’m really impressed… it looks great, is simple, performs well and does tiling quite well. It’s not going to take me away from Niri, but it’s my goto suggestion now for any one getting into Linux.
Very good.
Some advice for Linux newcomers - use AMD, avoid Nvidia. Use something like KDE Plasma for best experience.
I switched my main everyday machine to Ubuntu last May, no regrets, it's a superior experience day to day.
If only I could use recent Apple hardware with Linux :)
A year ago I was about to switch from Linux to Mac for that reason after 25 years using Linux (although I really don't like MacOS). But then Apple released their Glassy OS and so I just bought a used Lenovo for 300€ with 1 year warranty ...
I replaced Linux with Windows and everything is going great for me too.
I noticed the blog post said nothing about working with documents, i.e. the office suite the poster was using. Or - maybe he wasn't at all? I wonder. Same goes for email, although perhaps he was just using webmail.
Have you ever heard of Thunderbird? There's to my knowledge no other mail client besides maybe mutt that offers more features and flexibility. For office, LibreOffice doesn't feel very modern but is capable of a lot of things.
I am a Thunderbird extension developer, my friend...
LibreOffice local, or onlyoffice browser.
If tied to MS, Office online is an option, if you must.
We use OneDrive/Teams/Office365 at work. I think this will be difficult with Linux. Doable with Mac.
In think MacBook Air + Microsoft365 may be the cheapest startup IT setup that doesn’t require windows itself.
I'm mostly happy with OneDrive on Mac. I lead a major competitor to OneDrive back in the day, so that's saying a lot.
I still have to restart it from time to time, though.
You use your private hardware at work?
I came back to Windows when Windows 10 came out and everything is going great too.
Everything just works. Snappy. Professional awesome native tools (Office, Affinity series, Directory Opus, Visual Studio, AutoHotkey,...)
I have used Linux my entire adult life. Honestly never really had any issue with setup. Everything just works without having to do anything. Much easier than windows usually.
Why Bedrock? Get the kids a Steam Deck, Prism Launcher, open a local server and boom :) It‘s not iOS convenience but they‘ll sure love to tinker with all the mods you can install.
Alternatively one could spin up a local Java Edition server and install GeyserMC translation layer plugin[0] into it. That way, both iOS and Linux PC could cross-play to each other without the need of another new device.
[0]: https://geysermc.org/
Is there a secure and good replacement for OneDrive on Linux?
In general, people just use noIP home router VPN, ssh/sftp host on LAN, and a sshfs client on their iOS/Android device or MacOS/Windows/Linux. It will look like any other network shared drive in the native OS.
For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.
iOS sftp:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home
Android sftp:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...
Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)
https://www.linuxmint.com/ or https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop is a great starter OS.
If you already use a posix system like MacOS, than the workflow will seem more familiar. =3
NextCloud?
Throwing in opencloud here. I ran nextcloud self hosted for many years. If you need only file sharing on a webui with users, then opencloud is faster, more stable and less resource hungry.
rclone
I've really been enjoying Linux since I started using it back in mid 2024.
Although I was trying to shift to Linux slowly at the time, I honestly wish I'd switched sooner.
Sadly. For streaming (pcpanel, streamdeck, avermedia cards) is bad :/ is the only reason I kept a win11 partition arround
Not a desktop thing (digital out-of-home signage) but we’re dropping Windows like it’s flaming dogshit. Minimal Linux install with X, Blackbox and player software (and management/monitoring stuff obvs) on all new assets and the thousands of extant ones will get replaced as soon as feasible.
Did this in 91 as well. Going well ever since.
What's the better choice among mint and Ubuntu for a software engineering students? Any advice?
Mint is much better unless you need the very newest versions of packages. In which case I'd recommend to augment with flatpak or use Debian testing over Ubuntu. Basically Ubuntu is over for me since snap and they went back to Gnome3.
Wish I could. Until Ableton and Creative Cloud are native, I'm stuck with WinBlows.
What's a better choice among mint and Ubuntu for software engineering students?
My gaming PC now runs Zorin, my dev box rund Omarchy. It is time. Commercial OSes are dead.
I can't switch to Linux because I am so dependent on Visual Studio.
Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.
What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
Yeah, Linux should run very well on them, and of course you'll be able to have all the up-to-the-minute latest software, as sad as it is to lose out on the nice OS that worked so well on those machines.
How do you do taxes in Linux? Install a windows VM? I don't want to use the web version. With Google docs being good enough, I don't really need windows for anything else. Last time I checked, the tax software didn't run under wine.
In years that my taxes are simple - I open up my browser and go to FreeTaxUSA. In years that my taxes are complex - I pay a CPA. What do you use?
Personally I’m fine using the web version. If you arbitrarily cut out solutions, you will be sure to find unsolvable problems.
Where do you need windows to do your taxes? Is this a US thing?
I hope not because I’ve been doing my US taxes on Linux for 15 years.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
TurboTax has had a great browser-based version for over a decade now
Unfortunately it is not browser based (as in being local HTML+CSS+js). It is web based, where they get all your data.
Yes, it is the unfortunate reality of the US. You either fork over all your data to tax preparation companies on the web or pay them to use windows/MacOS software. There is still paper filing by doing taxes by hand, but that's a bit too inconvenient. Free online filing is restricted to $89k annual income.
What tax software are you running? Basically all of the tax software for individuals is a browser-based SaaS.
Article reads like an anti-Linux post because the author goes on about, "muh mouse buttons" and "how many desktop environments?" Screw that, do something simple like Ubuntu that just works without decision paralysis. The whole piece reads like, "Linux is good if you're smart so git gud" esp. since he makes a point of crowing how it's Arch-based.
When you think about it, lots of Linux and Unix devices.
> I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, and I had heard that it’s easy to install and set up for gaming,
Uh what?? I can’t think of a more easy to use Linux one that’s most supported for everything then… Ubuntu..
I’m getting closer with every update Apple pushes
And you cant gamr so now your gpu is useless
this is the tech equivalent of "I'm a strong, independent nerd and I don't need no windows"
I installed a dual boot on my gaming machine last year when the Win10 support ended, and I have also had basically no issues. Something something HDR in certain video games is the biggest complaint I have, which is not all that important and will be higher priority for developers in future as more gamers leave the sinking Windows ship.
Microsoft has really, really fucked up windows 11, and ultimately abandoning it is the only recourse the consumers have.
Do any of the main-stream Linux installers make any attempt at bringing over your files?
I have seen so many ”anyone can switch to Linux” articles, and none of them seem to mention ”all of your files are going to be utterly lost”
This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
* If you have a separate partition, you can replace your OS and your file remain untouched.
* If you don't have a separate partition, your OS and your files will be replaced by the Linux installation. The only way to preserve your files is to copy to some external media before installation. Even if the Linux installer could retain files while reformatting a partition (which might be technically feasible), it would have no way of knowing which files to retain: the user could easily keep important files in arbitrary directories, not just in their designated C:\User\Patrick directory, and they would be understandably irate if the installer promised to keep files but didn't. To say nothing of adding complications of copying files that Windows has pushed to OneDrive.
> This is a non-issue if your files are stored in a partition separate from your OS, and is infeasible otherwise.
That is one of the biggest ifs of 2026. I don't think any major PC laptop vendor has ever sold consumer laptops with anything but one-big-partition layout. For the average user, their files are not stored in any partition, they are stored "right there on my desktop, with a separate folder for photos and bills"
EFI/ESP and a restore partition have been standard or at least common for a decade. Restore partition might be big enough to install to… my Linux system partition is only 30GB.
But yes, been using a /data partition since it was called D:\ under DOS.
What files? Where would the files be originally for this to be a concern? I’ve switched OS many times but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about moving any files.
What desktop OS offers file migration from a different desktop OS during installation on the same machine? Windows and macOS definelty not...
Windows definitely keeps your files right there in your Desktop / Documents folder when you update from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
Like it or not, Aunt Clara is going to expect the same when she "upgrades" to Ubuntu.
Aunt Clara can ask Samantha to make a backup first.
Can I interest you in some new goal posts right over there?
"Continue reading with a Verge subscription"
Well ...
It's kind of concerning to me that Ubuntu has started paywalling some package updates behind Ubuntu Pro. Thinking of switching to Debian.
Ubuntu pro and snap sure are obnoxious.
On servers I prefer Debian, but my experience on Debian hasn't been as smooth as Ubuntu for gaming, even when activating Debian nonfree repositories with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I've had some trouble with the Wayland transition, but now everything works fine.
Also, the Steam client is officially supported only on Ubuntu. Probably SteamOS too, implicitly.
Welcome to the club!
I hope we can standardize on Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)
I can't say I understand the prevalence of Windows-esque UI theming/refits beyond short-lived novelty- are people out there actually trying to make their UIs look like Windows XP and then using them like that on a daily basis?
I configured gnome to look like win 95/98, tried to use it for a while but the novelty wore off quite fast. Weirdly the mouse pointer still looks like win95 randomly in certain applications, guess I didn't clean up thoroughly!
To me it is adding things that windows love to do.
Examples: binary log files, binary configuration, .ini files, hidden options.
Many people have already done and still do and will keep doing it. But yeah it's doesn't add much value.
This is a thread that's certainly going to go over well.
There are some valid criticisms of Microsoft, and a great many criticisms that are unfounded or are often misdirected. Or in some cases, the vast majority of folks don't use enough of their operating environments to encounter the same types of problems. After all, it's not like Linux operating systems are "perfect". Especially when you begin to push the platforms beyond the most basic functions, problems quickly become apparent.
Microsoft's largest challenge in the Wintel environment is the diversity of hardware, software, and skill levels involved in making it all work together. And quite frankly, most often people trying to cut corners in places they shouldn't or don't know they shouldn't.
On the hardware front, there's a lot of cheap nonsense out there. And lots of folks clamor for cheaper hardware. For example, my $500 Asus motherboard has a checks Device Manager Mediatek Wifi 7 card in it. Now, the reality is that Intel, widely seen as an incredible network chip manufacturer (both ethernet and wlan), doesn't have a Wifi 7 chip available for 3rd parties (i.e. AMD boards). So in order for Asus to get Wifi 7, they have to look elsewhere.
Mediatek's website appears that they focus on supporting new standards first, often before they're stable or solidified, but simultaneously does not provide a robust driver environment that supports multiple platforms.
At any rate, this is just one example. There are many thousands more. Much of this is driven by consumers either wanting features faster, platform vendors aiming for differentiation, or both clamoring for some middle ground between cost and margin. And Microsoft is stuck in the middle.
Maybe the current driver that Mediatek has released through IHVs doesn't have fixes for certain bugs. Perhaps the IHV (motherboard makers, etc.) doesn't have a robust enough team to want to package and release regular driver updates released by the vendor.
As it stands, Mediatek doesn't offer a driver for this card for Linux, either: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/927
But again, Microsoft often gets the blame for problems with this type of hardware (vendors that barely support it, etc.) whereas on Linux it's totally acceptable to say "yeah just ditch that and go buy an Intel Wifi NIC" or something and people just accept that as being a totally okay answer. And then suddenly the hardware problem just 'disappears'.
As far as things that are a bit more in Microsoft's control, for example, requiring cloud accounts to log in and use the computer. I still stand by that this is far less important than the shriekers on the internet make it out to be. But it's most often one of the most primary arguments (because there are actually very few to really make).
Google and Apple require you to login with a cloud account on any of their devices and platforms. In fact, I'd wager that the vast majority of you reading this page right now have Google Chrome signed in with a Google Account that's syncing your history, favorites, passwords, autofill, and tabs right now. You effectively can't use an iPhone without signing in with an iCloud account, and Google is just about ready to force that direction as well by disabling the ability to sideload applications in Android. They already long effectively killed rooting devices (although it is possible in specific circumstances).
In fact, every time you visit a Google property using any other browser than Chrome, Google makes sure to tell you that you really should be using Chrome. And any time you visit a Google property using Chrome, they insist you sign in using Chrome (to your Google account, no less.)
So I really don't get the abject hatred for Microsoft on this front. After all, once you light up Windows Hello on a modern system with TPM2.0 and Windows 11 24H2 or newer, you effectively get free software passkey support (pending the web application properly supports it and isn't using an ancient FIDO2 library that insists on hardware tokens).
For the aforementioned Google account: I'm using a Microsoft Account sign-in to my desktop with Windows Hello, with a TPM-protected passkey to sign into the aforementioned Google account. I get SSO to all Microsoft properties, and "soft" passkey support for all of my Google accounts as-needed, with unlimited passkey storage. No USB dongles required (although I have those, too).
About the only other end user facing problem that is well within Microsoft's control is the amount of Copilot and AI nonsense. I contend that Satya Nadella is well beyond what his tenure should be at Microsoft, but can you blame them for having FOMO? I mean after all, the mobile phone and tablet markets were hundreds of billions of dollars that they missed out on. They also missed the mark on cloud platforms where Amazon raked in hundreds of billions. If they flood the zone with their AI products, and AI happens to catch on somewhere eventually, they're well-positioned to take advantage of it.
Microsoft also lost out on being the primary development environment, when they stopped innovating in the computer browser and software development space, effectively handing the keys to the kingdom over to Google. They only partially regained that with VSCode (which was the perfect blend between their full-fledged commercial IDE and the text-driven IDEs used prior to VSCode's dominance such as Textmate).
As far as "ads" on the platform, I don't really have any. But I turn a lot of stuff like the widgets off. At least the widget bar is isolated and isn't annoyingly embedded into the software like you'll find the ample ad-based notifications being spammed at you via mobile phone notifications. And unable to disable them because you also need those same notifications to actually get time critical information (here's looking at you, Doordash).
This is ultimately a long conversation and has many layers to it. But what I've found in reality is that software of all sorts and all platforms isn't as rosy as the people pitching them as solutions tend to tell you. I think it's silly, for example, on Linux that you have to split your engineering between multiple software development stacks to accomplish typical systems administrator goals (Ansible/Python, Bash, perhaps some Go thrown in there if someone on your team wants to mess around, tons of YAML and JSON). Whereas on Windows it's pretty well unified behind PowerShell and .NET.
To be fair, I often encounter situations where available Powershell tooling doesn't exist and I need to call .NET APIs anyway, or if I really want to secure the environment I need to drop the ability to use Add-Type and end up having to create proper powershell modules anyway. But at least the paradigm and language used is mostly the same.
> go buy an Intel Wifi NIC
I'd advise against it on Linux these days. Intel made their recent WiFi chips incompatible with AMD systems (yes, that's not a joke). So Mediatek or Qualcomm are the only decent WiFi options for AMD users, but obviously, do some research about what works anyway, before buying.
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can we just boot to a browser sandbox and call it a day? ditch all the old bloatware. we do not need native apps.
That's just ChromeOS
> I reboot, log into Epic and GOG, and start downloading The Outer Worlds, a game from 2019 I’ve been playing a bit lately. It runs fine with Proton, and I can even sync my saves from the cloud. I play it for a few minutes with my trackball, remember I hate gaming on a trackball, and plug my gaming mouse back in. It works fine as long as I’m in the game, but outside the game, mouse clicks stop working again. It makes sense — the bug is on the desktop, not in games — but it’s very funny to have a gaming mouse that only works for gaming.
What is it with mice and OSes?
Windows is the only OS I can seem to configure to get low latency, high accuracy, linear movement with, and it's not for lack of effort.
I struggled for several years to do SWE work on a Mac and no 3rd party program could get it working the way it does on Windows. I tried Linear Mouse and many others. I eventually gave up, went against the prevailing (90%) culture where I work, and exchanged my mac for a windows laptop. I haven't measured it, but I feel more productive simply because I can click what I want to click marginally faster.
Is something in Mac drivers performing non-linear mapping? Why?
Based on the quote above it seems like Linux hasn't even gotten up to par with Mac for mice.
The best litmus test for an OS for me is whether I could play an RTS or FPS competitively with it, even though I haven't played either for years.