My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.
Wordpad confused too many people looking for Word and not finding Microsoft 365 for Family Workgroups Home Edition, especially after they boosted Windows 10 Wordpad to have enough features/power to replace the lost word processor of Microsoft Works, so it was removed.
Maybe these days for interviews, instead of calculating how many golf balls fit in a schoolbus, they can calculate how much time, money, intellect, and brand goodwill they've spent renaming Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot. Then add in how much time, money, and intellect everyone else has spent trying to figure it out
Though to be fair I wasn't trying for accuracy, I also included throwback digs from Windows for Workgroups and Microsoft's "Edition" phase. (Windows 98 Second Edition; Windows Millennium Edition; etc.) Particularly because "Edition" will probably come back around and has already partially done so. (Some of the Microsoft 365 nomenclature does refer to the "home edition" versus "work edition", but for now it is still a little-e SKU difference and not yet a SKU Brand.) Microsoft marketing has gifted us so many terrible brand names across a long history of trying to find the worst, most generic brand names. (To which you can partially blame the "Great" marketer that looked at WordStar, WordPerfect, and many others and suggested to Microsoft the generic "Word" was the best approach. If you own the generic the only way to rebrand is to stack more generic.)
That's a patently absurd reason (although I could totally see it). They could have just renamed it rather than destroy the value proposition of Notepad.
True. Though some of that destruction to Notepad isn't just the loss of Wordpad's fault but Microsoft's problems with Notepad++ eating its brand for too many years and making too many "must install" lists.
I'm not entirely sure how Copilot integration helps them beat Notepad++, but I suppose that's why I'm not a PM.
Why would they care about Notepad++'s impact, though? Nobody is deciding whether or not to use Windows based on Notepad. For some of us, Notepad was most useful in its original form and Notepad++ was not a good replacement.
But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
As someone else who has never particularly liked Notepad++ either, I mostly agree that chasing after it is a mistake, especially this many years after Notepad++'s height in relevancy. Perhaps ironically, many of those same "must install" lists that included Notepad++ have moved on to other tools, one of them being Microsoft's own VSCode. VSCode is a "good, helpful" AI host to sell more AI, so I presume some "AI in Notepad" pressure is "capture the few remaining people not yet installing VSCode out of the box".
> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit
Today I ran an into an issue with Notepad while at work. I tried to open and print a .txt document for an order, and it completely failed with some type of filesystem read error. Didn't save the log, since I was in a hurry to place the order, but a quick google search didn't help at all. Granted, the file is in a Dropbox folder, so I thought could be affecting it somehow, but notepad++ opened it just fine. Sure, using notepad to type and print orders isn't the best possible work flow, but it's always worked for me in that same setup previously.
I tried to explain why my document printed with line numbers to the recipient (who isn't particularly tech savvy), and felt like a crazy person while doing so.
Looks like I'll be using notepad++ going forward, with line numbers off, and I'm pretty confident they'll respect that preference and keep shipping software that works.
I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take.
Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly?
Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
Tabs are fine I guess but also: it's NOTEPAD.EXE. Its purpose to be super primitive and launch in 2 milliseconds and give you a place to paste or type some text real quick. Anyone who needs a good text editor with actual features will just download the good text editor of their choice.
Simple example of the newly poor UX. I try to start notepad to jot down some scratch. It sluggishly reopens whatever it previously had open (e.g. from before a reboot)...and in doing so, doesn't actually create a new document for me.
> Since I already committed to ditching my partner in favor of a more attractive ex…
This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.”
Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage?
All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation.
regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.
Don't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7.
It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken.
Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.
The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people.
I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run.
XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.
>Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.
Not really, Windows 7 had a lot of work poured into it, fixing Vista issues. Even first public betas of W7 were more polished than any of Windows 8..11 releases. That includes work on minimal amount of "noise" notifications, driver issues, speed, design etc
Basically all of those fixes were applied to Vista before the 7 beta. There were some rough parts to Vista's released, but a lot of those were polished by SP1 and SP2.
The reason the W7 beta went so well is because it was already just based on later versions of Vista.
A lot of that bloat is due to compatibility and the 32bit -> 64bit transition.
Linux has suffered from the 32/64 bit problem as well for quite some time. The only difference is because of opensource it's been easier to slowly kill off the 32bit ecosystem.
First up, the nature of dlls is that the same dll for multiple applications gets saved in memory just once. If you have 2 windows applications and one is 32bit and the other 64bit, then both of those applications end up loading up effectively the same dlls, but one is compiled for 64bit apps and the other 32. That nearly doubles the amount of ram needed in a mixed system.
But then there's just the fact that 64bit code by it's nature uses and passes around 64bit pointers everywhere. That's not quite as significant but it does have an effect.
The other part that ends up adding to the memory consumption is from XP on microsoft added compatibility layers. What those effectively did is distribute a different set of dlls based on the application being launched. So now instead of having 1 copy of the dlls like you did with 95, 98 and ME you can end up with potentially 3 or 4 different dlls. And that's ultimately exploded as more versions of windows have been released.
ME was unstable but had charm, it deserved a lot of the dislike because NT was just so good... and they really should not have removed Real-Mode; that would have been the reason to use ME over NT2000...
Vista though?
If you genuinely gave me a patched Vista and said that it was a viable alternative to 11... I would 100% take that 10/10 times.
Vista's problem was that it was heavy and people sold devices that could barely run the basic version as if they were fully compatible.. Widgets were a bit of a misstep too, but I mean, you can ignore them. Oh and the new driver system meant that you needed totally new drivers for everything; and annoyingly the UAC dialog just got in everyones grill: but we still have that!
And anyway after SP2; Vista was a pretty good OS, especially on reasonable hardware for the time.
I would genuinely rather sniff farts all day and use Vista, than be forced into using the consumer version of Windows 11.
My IT department doesn't suck when it comes to trimming down Windows, but it's still not ideal, you can feel the shit constantly trying to break through.
> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on...
Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)
Hate might be a strong word, but it's natural to feel that way towards a product designed with the primary purpose of increasing LTV per customer per PC.
We have crossed into a fascinating time in computing: market power lets incumbents make “whatever”, shove it in a forced update with no going back, and still be valued in the trillions.
I honestly think that the ability to shove updates out live is one of the worst things about software these days. Well, the ability to do so isn't bad, but the way companies actually do it makes it bad.
One thing that is pretty impressive with Windows 11 however is WSL. I can just run a X program and it pops up as its own Window. So for example, I can run Chrome on Ubuntu on Windows, out of the box. On Windows 10, WSL is good for the command line, but Windows 11 takes it much further.
I don't use Windows a lot, but still have a desktop for gaming.
With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features.
My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps.
I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now?
They're not ignoring performance, they're ignoring experience on old machines or hardware outside of top tier. Part of it is laziness for sure but part of it is, I believe, intentional to push the refresh cycle as short as possible. I know people who count down the days to their 2 year phone upgrade just on the off chance the next update might slow their phone down a bit. Not even that they upgrade as soon as the phone gets slow - they proactively upgrade to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, even for a day or two. This is what these companies want.
I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS.
Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.
> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
> /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops
The emphasis here should be on the word _looking_ instead. A lot of these desktops (majority are hyprland setups) reveal themselves to be superficial jank when you try to do anything remotely commonplace, like connecting to a new wifi network. It's great that windows slide around at 60fps, but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for?
And I say this as someone who uses Gnome and maintains his own extension forks.
> but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for
Precisely but I'm on the "if you can see your desktop at all, you're not using the computer right" side of the coin. I use KDE because keyboard shortcuts and infinite customization and reasonably powerful automation. I do not care what things look like, so long as whatever the look like, they stay in the same spot that they have been in for the last decade.
I think my distro changes the wallpaper every point release for KDE but I'm not really sure, I only see it briefly after a reboot.
AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
> Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
Since when is Flatpak on life support? Everybody (except Ubuntu) is pushing for it, from the regular desktop distros like Feodra all the way to image based distros like KDE Linux and Fedora Silverblue.
In terms of features and usability, nothing comes close to KDE, and that includes Windows and MacOS. The integration is tight - everything works with each other. Settings has flatpak permissions, the system monitor has widgets you can just use as widgets, the search backend is available in so many places. Functionally, it feels cohesive, and there's basically nothing you can't do.
The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.
Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.
Yup, Plasma has also gotten really good. It started to get really good with 5 and has polished like crazy with 6. It's defaults are now pretty close to perfect out of the box for me as a long time windows user.
I'd say it's close to the windows 7 or 10 experience. But without any of the clutter that has crept in.
The recommendation for the average inexperienced user trying out Linux for the first time should be Kubuntu. Full stop. Saying this as an Arch and Gentoo user.
Feels like we do these rather often? Tons of people can comment with whatever they're using which they feel are great, and others can tell of their experiences with using the same and not being impressed. It's a rather endless list...
But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download
I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.
KDE and Gnome are the most prominent and they "match" in the sense that they are mature environments that are quite usable. These have been in development for decades. For some reason, in the case of Windows, that doesn't mean much. I've never seen a Windows version with a buggy task bar but here comes Windows 11 with a task bar that forgets application icons (and replaces them with the generic application icon) and is generally sluggish to the feel, in my experience. Scrap my entire first sentence: it's Microsoft's turn to make an operating system as good as the competition.
There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.
It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.
It’s hard to say what really nice means. I have been using Ubuntu for more than a decade for all my home laptops. But I also researched models are very compatible with Linux. Also besides steam, some basic libreoffice spreadsheets and dev tools we mostly use browser and web based things. So our coverage of all the possible Desktop apps and configurations is minimal.
So I never felt like paying a “linux tax”. Quite the opposite, when I dual boot into Windows 10 it irritates me to no end. Random web based link and ads in the start menu. Updates are kind of a pain - they halt both the shutdown and the startup process. I don’t like the flat UI look in general.
As far as overall consistency and polish nothing beats MacOS but well Macs cost more. So if you look for design and UI polish and have the money that’s probably a better choice.
Zorin OS asks whether you want a Windows-like or MacOS-like desktop during setup.
My top recommendation for a Windows user though is Linux Mint. It's desktop is called Cinnamon and while it doesn't look exactly like any Windows desktop, it's familiar enough that people don't have trouble switching to it. Linux Mint seems to be the, "It Just Works", Linux distro these days.
Beyond that, if you don't mind installing themes, most Linux desktops can be themed to look like whatever version of Windows, MacOS, etc. that you want. Getting the feel can be more difficult. KDE Plasma is very customizable though if you are willing to spend the time.
I've been running Bazzite exclusively for two years and, honestly, it works fine. It does work better than Windows for me, which refused to install on the same hardware.
I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)
I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.
It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
Sure. Ubuntu, for example.
I don't know what people's expectations are in terms of UX & GUIs, but I have been perfectly happy with Ubuntu over the last 10-15 years.
Other than gaming (I am not a gamer) and some specialized applications (Photoshop, etc.), I can always find an application on Ubuntu that worked for me: Libre Office, FreeCAD, KiCAD, IDEs, most programming languages, ...
There is no problem with installing stuff either. In the last 10 years, I did not have to build anything from source and "apt" (or its GUI equivalents) works perfectly fine.
The problem with linux hasn't been the GUI for a long time, even 20 years ago you had flashier GUI than win / mac. Personally I don't care about GUI and just run i3 with shitty looking dialogs.
The problem with linux has been either hardware compatibility or when things don't work it's a pain to figure it out however I have good news on that front! For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers when running linux but now with Gemini I've managed to finally fix it. So if you're scared about things breaking and spending hours inside man pages.. just copy paste your console into an LLM and it'll probably help you out.
I just switched to Linux because Windows is _really_ bad lately.
I recommend Linux Mint. It has the windows feel for sure. I am not exaggerating when I say it works better than Windows.
I didn’t customize anything. Just installed it and connected to WiFi.
Key things to consider:
- installing apps sometimes isn’t as easy as running an exe. But really you get the gist of .deb and .AppImage files really fast.
- I don’t game but I’ve heard GPU drivers just work these days.
- I am a heavy excel user. LibreOffice isn’t even close. However, for basic stuff it is usable. Excel is too bloated these days anyway so it is a pleasure to work with something that runs fast. YMMV.
Mint doesn't support latest hardware. I've just tried to install the very latest Mint released a few days ago on ASUS ProArt P16 with 5090 and it couldn't even boot the Mint installer, it just froze with the Mint logo on the screen. You typically need to wait up to 1 year to get the latest HW supported on Mint, sometimes it won't even fully support it like my previous Zephyrus G14 with a 4090 that never got e.g. display brightness control implemented.
This is the same stuff that comes up every time in these threads, and at some point, you have to consider that maybe you're holding it wrong. For example: "installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source"? Like Windows and macOS aren't hellish wastelands of unreliable and inconsistent installations? Really?
Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?
Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?
Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.
> Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications?
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
- 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
- The remaining 1% (Homebrew/Macports) is really for the power-user, and in most cases you can just download a pre-compiled mac binary from the developers Github anyway.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
> Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
Why ?
Your average user will blindly follow `trust me, sudo curl foo | bash` ...
And your average user is unlikely to look at the apt package build rules and/or source and/or dependency list and in the majority of cases will just answer `Y` to any questions from `apt`.
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
- 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
Part of my job is automating macOS software deployment. I do this all day. I can confidently tell you that your percentages are way off. I wish you were right because dragging an app bundle into Applications is obviously the correct way to do it. But alas, that is very far from the world we live in.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
This is "a tar.gz with random crap". Convenient perhaps, but it doesn't help your argument that macOS is less of a hellscape.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
No, it's really not. It knows what files it puts where and can cleanly upgrade and uninstall with a predictable and standardized method. It's not that I usually care where the files are strewn exactly, it's that I want consistent installations done in a systematic and coherent way; I don't want to rely on an UNINSTALL.EXE that, like the installer, I have no idea what it does.
Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.
I felt the same way for a long time. I switched to linux Mint with cinnamon last september because I'd had enough of windows 11 and feel completely at home on this desktop. I still have to boot windows to play some VR games, unfortunately, but otherwise I'd never touch windows again or miss it.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
I guess if you install systemsettings from kde3, a text editor from gnome, remove 90% of the features from dolphin you're in the vicinity of the mess they are.
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.
Multiple desktops on Windows is not a nice experience for me. When you switch the desktop on one display then they ALL change for every display. I need them independent ala macOS or it is just so infuriating to use. Win11 also has big Fisher Price sized title bars now and macOS Tahoe isn't far behind. I think the GUI designers are on magic mushrooms when coming up with these designs.
Linux Mint/Cinnamon matches Windows GUI and maybe makes a lot of things better. You may need to pay the Linux tax in a few other areas, but as far as UI and basic tools/settings aspects, they have it really good.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
I guess if you look for one you can find Linux distribution with ads in start menu
> But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
not to me
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
For me on Lubuntu my two desktops work well. Required a bit of googling how to setup, but it took me more time to fail at removing similar Windows annoyance.
Package managers are great, I have configuration of my packages in Ansible and single script run installs all my software except VSCodium and Android Studio.
Stuff nearly often just works.
Not sure what you mean by gestures.
> installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Even that beats what I remember from my Windows days that required going through billion of installer wizards, with decent chunk of them trying to bring some unwanted stuff.
And my install is nearly pure install from OS packages with some minor annoyance for Android Studio and VSCodium.
hate is the perfect word. you can't even drag anything onto the taskbar icons yet, and maybe never will be able to. just one small example of many, of why hate is the perfect word
You can drag files etc. onto taskbar icons and it will bring that window to the foreground for you to choose where to drop it. What else do you expect dragging things onto the taskbar icons to do?
not OP, but in macOS, you can drag a file onto a dock icon and that program will open the file if possible. very handy - i use it with Xld, an audio transcoding app. it runs quietly in the background and whenever i need to convert a bunch of FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) i can just drag the folder to the icon and 10 seconds later everything is good to go, without ever really directly interacting with Xld.
The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating.
Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space?
At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.
RemoveWindowsAI shows a massive amount of AI crap they are trying to force on us. It removes EVERYTHING and is updated regularly.
I DO HATE Windows 11 and don't trust Microsoft with my data one bit. Every prompt you make lives in their logs no matter what they say - they flat out lie about it. "Oh we made it anonyomous". Sure. Yeah. RIGHT. With AI any data can be made Not-Anonymous.
My official reasons to hate Windows 11 go on and on. Here are a few
Windows 11 REMOVED vertical task bars - the most screen space efficient way to Task!
Windows 11 ARBITRARILY limits the number of Apps you can have pinned to your task bar,
Windows 11 WASTES a massive number of pixels and forces you to have a blank task bar.
Just typing this is letting the rage flow and I'm embracing the DARK SIDE.
I love AI when it's my choice to give them my data, and I love developing with it, and I love building it into Apps for users who need it as a tool.
Plus 1000% NSA scooping up everything including with moles on site at every major tech company.
In addition to the title’s “hate is a strong word”, in the comments we have “hate is a weak word”, “hate might be a strong word”, and “hate is the perfect word”, averaging out to something like hate being ever-so-slightly on the strong side of perfect.
Undo Close Tab - A very handy add-on, adds a button to quickly undo
a closed tab. There is probably a shortcut for that, but I
cannot bother remembering it.
It's Ctrl+Shift+T for those wondering. Works similarly if the last thing you closed was a window.
Just today when trying to run Forza Horizon 5 from a new laptop I got an Xbox login popup with some QR code I was supposed to scan but the window was super small and I wasn't able to resize it to actually see the full QR code. One has to wonder what is going on with Microsoft if things like these pass they "quality" checks.
I used Ubuntu at home for years, but went back to Windows when my last Thinkpad died, around the time WSL became a thing. Then I stopped coding and just became a Windows user. But it just got worse every week. Slower and more annoying. I think I'm going to ditch my family Office subscription and install Ubuntu again.
Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared.
When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.
It feels like everything is falling apart and getting worse. Yet somehow people are racing to produce AI slop faster. If software eventually collapses under its own weight, things might be so borked we have to bootstrap everything from scratch, staring with assembly.
I know it's not fashionable to be positive about macos but since ditching Windows a decade ago it's pretty much just worked, and I can run Excel and the like. I'm sticking with Sequoia and avoiding 26 though, for now.
>2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012.
Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option."
Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
But I think we have to recognize that it has had a pretty large usability issue. There are several programs, like winetricks, that have existed because of how hard it can be to get things setup to work well with random bits of software.
It's been a far cry from the windows or mac experience of double clicking on an installer and having everything just work. Though it's pretty close to that now.
> why is the UI so slow / explorer slow / bluetooth slow
this is a legitimate complaint, but I see latency absolutely everywhere. my iPhone 17 Pro dropped frames out of the box . now 3/4 unlocks drops frames.
I'm not defending Windows, it's obviously in decline -- but trying to identify root cause. There used to be curmudgeon engineers on staff who would berate team members over blocked UIs, dropped frames, input latency over 30ms . Dave Cutler made a rubber stamp that rejected (then paper) code reviews with "Size is the Goal". That culture has retired.
Web-dev's design interactions targeting 500-2000ms, so to them everything on the OS looks fast . Adding 150ms to right-click is unnoticeable . Like 15kHz audio to a boomer or purple to the color blind .
It's easy to beat up on MS, because most open-source devs have despised them. But Microsoft had a very high bar for engineering until about 10 years ago ( you may laugh, but remember they were writing OS's that last 40+ years) . Apple had an extremely high bar until about 5 years ago.
This isn't just one bad product, but an entire industry lowering its standards.
It's because these things aren't priorities for management so they aren't for the engineers, the latest fads like AI are priorities and therefore they get integrated everywhere.
that's a copout in my opinion. Most of the quality decisions are established by team culture and experience. If a team is full of webdevs, no amount of management investment in performance will make a good app. conversely, a team of high performance members will be able to deliver quality apps despite management's input.
It still depends on management to determine the culture and what requirements and limitations are most important.
I mean take a look at what happened to Boeing, there were people that cared about quality down in the trenches but they were overridden by the people that didn't care about quality, just about shoving items out the door.
Hate is a weak word, basic stuff like notepad, snipping tool or terminal don't even work today https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.
Telemetry said a lot of people were using notepad so if they shove AI into it the AI usage number goes up.
Wordpad confused too many people looking for Word and not finding Microsoft 365 for Family Workgroups Home Edition, especially after they boosted Windows 10 Wordpad to have enough features/power to replace the lost word processor of Microsoft Works, so it was removed.
You're a little behind, it's Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium now
(They may have turned it into a joke, but that is the truth https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-microsoft-365...)
Maybe these days for interviews, instead of calculating how many golf balls fit in a schoolbus, they can calculate how much time, money, intellect, and brand goodwill they've spent renaming Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot. Then add in how much time, money, and intellect everyone else has spent trying to figure it out
Though to be fair I wasn't trying for accuracy, I also included throwback digs from Windows for Workgroups and Microsoft's "Edition" phase. (Windows 98 Second Edition; Windows Millennium Edition; etc.) Particularly because "Edition" will probably come back around and has already partially done so. (Some of the Microsoft 365 nomenclature does refer to the "home edition" versus "work edition", but for now it is still a little-e SKU difference and not yet a SKU Brand.) Microsoft marketing has gifted us so many terrible brand names across a long history of trying to find the worst, most generic brand names. (To which you can partially blame the "Great" marketer that looked at WordStar, WordPerfect, and many others and suggested to Microsoft the generic "Word" was the best approach. If you own the generic the only way to rebrand is to stack more generic.)
Oh I know, it was tongue-in-cheek in the sense of "it's tough to out-satire these folks"
I'm not sure if they'll manage to top this one ("Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 SP3 Feature Pack") https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=442...
I might title this piece, "Full STEM without liberal arts"
Office and Windows are good words. Copilot is a good word.
Microsoft and 365 are ok.
Microsoft should really be the hidden name like Meta or Alphabet.
Office Copilot is a great name. Of course they didnt use it.
That's a patently absurd reason (although I could totally see it). They could have just renamed it rather than destroy the value proposition of Notepad.
True. Though some of that destruction to Notepad isn't just the loss of Wordpad's fault but Microsoft's problems with Notepad++ eating its brand for too many years and making too many "must install" lists.
I'm not entirely sure how Copilot integration helps them beat Notepad++, but I suppose that's why I'm not a PM.
Why would they care about Notepad++'s impact, though? Nobody is deciding whether or not to use Windows based on Notepad. For some of us, Notepad was most useful in its original form and Notepad++ was not a good replacement.
But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
As someone else who has never particularly liked Notepad++ either, I mostly agree that chasing after it is a mistake, especially this many years after Notepad++'s height in relevancy. Perhaps ironically, many of those same "must install" lists that included Notepad++ have moved on to other tools, one of them being Microsoft's own VSCode. VSCode is a "good, helpful" AI host to sell more AI, so I presume some "AI in Notepad" pressure is "capture the few remaining people not yet installing VSCode out of the box".
> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit
Today I ran an into an issue with Notepad while at work. I tried to open and print a .txt document for an order, and it completely failed with some type of filesystem read error. Didn't save the log, since I was in a hurry to place the order, but a quick google search didn't help at all. Granted, the file is in a Dropbox folder, so I thought could be affecting it somehow, but notepad++ opened it just fine. Sure, using notepad to type and print orders isn't the best possible work flow, but it's always worked for me in that same setup previously.
I tried to explain why my document printed with line numbers to the recipient (who isn't particularly tech savvy), and felt like a crazy person while doing so.
Looks like I'll be using notepad++ going forward, with line numbers off, and I'm pretty confident they'll respect that preference and keep shipping software that works.
The purpose of Notepad, for Microsoft, is that it is an experimental playground, and always has been.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take.
Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly?
Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
To wit: "Second was how he got Notepad to load files so quickly"
So much for that
Tabs and auto-recover are welcome additions (but still cannot compete with the likes of Notepad++).
Tabs are fine I guess but also: it's NOTEPAD.EXE. Its purpose to be super primitive and launch in 2 milliseconds and give you a place to paste or type some text real quick. Anyone who needs a good text editor with actual features will just download the good text editor of their choice.
> Tabs and auto-recover are welcome additions
They were very unwelcome to me.
Simple example of the newly poor UX. I try to start notepad to jot down some scratch. It sluggishly reopens whatever it previously had open (e.g. from before a reboot)...and in doing so, doesn't actually create a new document for me.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. For my use case, it rendered Notepad unusable.
Then turn off session resuming? Turn off Copilot? They're options in the Settings menu, if you don't want them.
> Since I already committed to ditching my partner in favor of a more attractive ex…
This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.”
Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage?
All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation.
regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.
Don't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7.
It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken.
Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.
The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people.
I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run.
XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.
>Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of.
Not really, Windows 7 had a lot of work poured into it, fixing Vista issues. Even first public betas of W7 were more polished than any of Windows 8..11 releases. That includes work on minimal amount of "noise" notifications, driver issues, speed, design etc
Basically all of those fixes were applied to Vista before the 7 beta. There were some rough parts to Vista's released, but a lot of those were polished by SP1 and SP2.
The reason the W7 beta went so well is because it was already just based on later versions of Vista.
I don't think we should excuse Microsoft for bloating Windows because memory became abundant.
A lot of that bloat is due to compatibility and the 32bit -> 64bit transition.
Linux has suffered from the 32/64 bit problem as well for quite some time. The only difference is because of opensource it's been easier to slowly kill off the 32bit ecosystem.
That's not been an option for windows.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of RAM needed.
Absolutely it does, for 2 different reasons.
First up, the nature of dlls is that the same dll for multiple applications gets saved in memory just once. If you have 2 windows applications and one is 32bit and the other 64bit, then both of those applications end up loading up effectively the same dlls, but one is compiled for 64bit apps and the other 32. That nearly doubles the amount of ram needed in a mixed system.
But then there's just the fact that 64bit code by it's nature uses and passes around 64bit pointers everywhere. That's not quite as significant but it does have an effect.
The other part that ends up adding to the memory consumption is from XP on microsoft added compatibility layers. What those effectively did is distribute a different set of dlls based on the application being launched. So now instead of having 1 copy of the dlls like you did with 95, 98 and ME you can end up with potentially 3 or 4 different dlls. And that's ultimately exploded as more versions of windows have been released.
Then explain how Windows 7 64 bit uses much less memory than Windows 11.
If you'd ever opened a directory of a program in windows you'd know that they always bring their own dlls, windows is not debian.
Usually, yes. Those aren't the dlls I'm referring to. I'm talking about common dlls that every windows app needs like kernel32.dll.
Every windows app relies on os provided dlls to some extent.
8 and 8.1 were two full different releases as well. 8.1 was much better than 8.
The Kernel Version Numbers are a better hint at what is going on than the marketing releases.
Windows 2000 NT5, XP NT 5.1
Vista NT6, 7 NT6.1, 8 NT6.2, 8.1 NT6.3
> If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years,
To be fair, I agree they are overdue for a truly awful release.
I mean, there was Windows Me and then 7 years later Windows Vista.
Those were truly Gold medal awful podium releases.
Even with Windows 11 I don't think we've hit that level in the cycle just yet.
Absolutely not.
ME was unstable but had charm, it deserved a lot of the dislike because NT was just so good... and they really should not have removed Real-Mode; that would have been the reason to use ME over NT2000...
Vista though?
If you genuinely gave me a patched Vista and said that it was a viable alternative to 11... I would 100% take that 10/10 times.
Vista's problem was that it was heavy and people sold devices that could barely run the basic version as if they were fully compatible.. Widgets were a bit of a misstep too, but I mean, you can ignore them. Oh and the new driver system meant that you needed totally new drivers for everything; and annoyingly the UAC dialog just got in everyones grill: but we still have that!
And anyway after SP2; Vista was a pretty good OS, especially on reasonable hardware for the time.
I would genuinely rather sniff farts all day and use Vista, than be forced into using the consumer version of Windows 11.
My IT department doesn't suck when it comes to trimming down Windows, but it's still not ideal, you can feel the shit constantly trying to break through.
> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on...
Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)
Hate might be a strong word, but it's natural to feel that way towards a product designed with the primary purpose of increasing LTV per customer per PC.
Why indeed is Windows 11 Explorer so slow? Why is file copying so slow?
I started using Double Commander over Explorer and Terracopy for moving files around. Double Commander isn't the prettiest but it works quite well.
The responsiveness of both these apps shows that the problem isn't necessarily the Windows 11 operating system itself.
We have crossed into a fascinating time in computing: market power lets incumbents make “whatever”, shove it in a forced update with no going back, and still be valued in the trillions.
Can’t wait til this phase is done.
I honestly think that the ability to shove updates out live is one of the worst things about software these days. Well, the ability to do so isn't bad, but the way companies actually do it makes it bad.
It is feeling quite reminiscent of the IE6 era, minus the updates part.
One thing that is pretty impressive with Windows 11 however is WSL. I can just run a X program and it pops up as its own Window. So for example, I can run Chrome on Ubuntu on Windows, out of the box. On Windows 10, WSL is good for the command line, but Windows 11 takes it much further.
WSLg also works on Windows 10.
Why the pain of working with W11, when you can run Ubuntu or, better, any other distro in your machine.
So you can continue to work with MS Office, etc. on your at-work machine, maintained by the IT department.
No I can't. I have Windows 11 on my work computer, and it is what I have to use.
I don't use Windows a lot, but still have a desktop for gaming.
With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features.
My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps.
I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now?
[0] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
They're not ignoring performance, they're ignoring experience on old machines or hardware outside of top tier. Part of it is laziness for sure but part of it is, I believe, intentional to push the refresh cycle as short as possible. I know people who count down the days to their 2 year phone upgrade just on the off chance the next update might slow their phone down a bit. Not even that they upgrade as soon as the phone gets slow - they proactively upgrade to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, even for a day or two. This is what these companies want.
I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS.
Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.
> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
> /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops
The emphasis here should be on the word _looking_ instead. A lot of these desktops (majority are hyprland setups) reveal themselves to be superficial jank when you try to do anything remotely commonplace, like connecting to a new wifi network. It's great that windows slide around at 60fps, but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for?
And I say this as someone who uses Gnome and maintains his own extension forks.
> but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for
Precisely but I'm on the "if you can see your desktop at all, you're not using the computer right" side of the coin. I use KDE because keyboard shortcuts and infinite customization and reasonably powerful automation. I do not care what things look like, so long as whatever the look like, they stay in the same spot that they have been in for the last decade.
I think my distro changes the wallpaper every point release for KDE but I'm not really sure, I only see it briefly after a reboot.
AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
> Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
Since when is Flatpak on life support? Everybody (except Ubuntu) is pushing for it, from the regular desktop distros like Feodra all the way to image based distros like KDE Linux and Fedora Silverblue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068400
https://www.osnews.com/story/142467/flatpak-not-being-active...
KDE, you need to use KDE.
In terms of features and usability, nothing comes close to KDE, and that includes Windows and MacOS. The integration is tight - everything works with each other. Settings has flatpak permissions, the system monitor has widgets you can just use as widgets, the search backend is available in so many places. Functionally, it feels cohesive, and there's basically nothing you can't do.
The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.
Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.
Yup, Plasma has also gotten really good. It started to get really good with 5 and has polished like crazy with 6. It's defaults are now pretty close to perfect out of the box for me as a long time windows user.
I'd say it's close to the windows 7 or 10 experience. But without any of the clutter that has crept in.
The recommendation for the average inexperienced user trying out Linux for the first time should be Kubuntu. Full stop. Saying this as an Arch and Gentoo user.
Feels like we do these rather often? Tons of people can comment with whatever they're using which they feel are great, and others can tell of their experiences with using the same and not being impressed. It's a rather endless list...
But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download
I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.
KDE and Gnome are the most prominent and they "match" in the sense that they are mature environments that are quite usable. These have been in development for decades. For some reason, in the case of Windows, that doesn't mean much. I've never seen a Windows version with a buggy task bar but here comes Windows 11 with a task bar that forgets application icons (and replaces them with the generic application icon) and is generally sluggish to the feel, in my experience. Scrap my entire first sentence: it's Microsoft's turn to make an operating system as good as the competition.
There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.
It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.
It’s hard to say what really nice means. I have been using Ubuntu for more than a decade for all my home laptops. But I also researched models are very compatible with Linux. Also besides steam, some basic libreoffice spreadsheets and dev tools we mostly use browser and web based things. So our coverage of all the possible Desktop apps and configurations is minimal.
So I never felt like paying a “linux tax”. Quite the opposite, when I dual boot into Windows 10 it irritates me to no end. Random web based link and ads in the start menu. Updates are kind of a pain - they halt both the shutdown and the startup process. I don’t like the flat UI look in general.
As far as overall consistency and polish nothing beats MacOS but well Macs cost more. So if you look for design and UI polish and have the money that’s probably a better choice.
Zorin OS asks whether you want a Windows-like or MacOS-like desktop during setup.
My top recommendation for a Windows user though is Linux Mint. It's desktop is called Cinnamon and while it doesn't look exactly like any Windows desktop, it's familiar enough that people don't have trouble switching to it. Linux Mint seems to be the, "It Just Works", Linux distro these days.
Beyond that, if you don't mind installing themes, most Linux desktops can be themed to look like whatever version of Windows, MacOS, etc. that you want. Getting the feel can be more difficult. KDE Plasma is very customizable though if you are willing to spend the time.
I've been running Bazzite exclusively for two years and, honestly, it works fine. It does work better than Windows for me, which refused to install on the same hardware.
I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)
I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.
It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
Sure. Ubuntu, for example.
I don't know what people's expectations are in terms of UX & GUIs, but I have been perfectly happy with Ubuntu over the last 10-15 years.
Other than gaming (I am not a gamer) and some specialized applications (Photoshop, etc.), I can always find an application on Ubuntu that worked for me: Libre Office, FreeCAD, KiCAD, IDEs, most programming languages, ...
There is no problem with installing stuff either. In the last 10 years, I did not have to build anything from source and "apt" (or its GUI equivalents) works perfectly fine.
The problem with linux hasn't been the GUI for a long time, even 20 years ago you had flashier GUI than win / mac. Personally I don't care about GUI and just run i3 with shitty looking dialogs.
The problem with linux has been either hardware compatibility or when things don't work it's a pain to figure it out however I have good news on that front! For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers when running linux but now with Gemini I've managed to finally fix it. So if you're scared about things breaking and spending hours inside man pages.. just copy paste your console into an LLM and it'll probably help you out.
> For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers
Click on the volume applet, select the device.
Any decent distribution nowadays works just fine with that, and uses pipewire.
I just switched to Linux because Windows is _really_ bad lately.
I recommend Linux Mint. It has the windows feel for sure. I am not exaggerating when I say it works better than Windows.
I didn’t customize anything. Just installed it and connected to WiFi.
Key things to consider: - installing apps sometimes isn’t as easy as running an exe. But really you get the gist of .deb and .AppImage files really fast. - I don’t game but I’ve heard GPU drivers just work these days. - I am a heavy excel user. LibreOffice isn’t even close. However, for basic stuff it is usable. Excel is too bloated these days anyway so it is a pleasure to work with something that runs fast. YMMV.
Mint doesn't support latest hardware. I've just tried to install the very latest Mint released a few days ago on ASUS ProArt P16 with 5090 and it couldn't even boot the Mint installer, it just froze with the Mint logo on the screen. You typically need to wait up to 1 year to get the latest HW supported on Mint, sometimes it won't even fully support it like my previous Zephyrus G14 with a 4090 that never got e.g. display brightness control implemented.
This is the same stuff that comes up every time in these threads, and at some point, you have to consider that maybe you're holding it wrong. For example: "installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source"? Like Windows and macOS aren't hellish wastelands of unreliable and inconsistent installations? Really?
Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?
Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?
Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.
> Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications?
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )> Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
Why ?
Your average user will blindly follow `trust me, sudo curl foo | bash` ...
And your average user is unlikely to look at the apt package build rules and/or source and/or dependency list and in the majority of cases will just answer `Y` to any questions from `apt`.
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install. - 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
Part of my job is automating macOS software deployment. I do this all day. I can confidently tell you that your percentages are way off. I wish you were right because dragging an app bundle into Applications is obviously the correct way to do it. But alas, that is very far from the world we live in.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
This is "a tar.gz with random crap". Convenient perhaps, but it doesn't help your argument that macOS is less of a hellscape.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
No, it's really not. It knows what files it puts where and can cleanly upgrade and uninstall with a predictable and standardized method. It's not that I usually care where the files are strewn exactly, it's that I want consistent installations done in a systematic and coherent way; I don't want to rely on an UNINSTALL.EXE that, like the installer, I have no idea what it does.
[dead]
Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.
There really isn't much to set up especially for anybody diving in with Kubuntu
I felt the same way for a long time. I switched to linux Mint with cinnamon last september because I'd had enough of windows 11 and feel completely at home on this desktop. I still have to boot windows to play some VR games, unfortunately, but otherwise I'd never touch windows again or miss it.
> I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows
So crappy ? Maybe something bloated like Ubuntu or Fedora.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
I guess if you install systemsettings from kde3, a text editor from gnome, remove 90% of the features from dolphin you're in the vicinity of the mess they are.
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.
Multiple desktops on Windows is not a nice experience for me. When you switch the desktop on one display then they ALL change for every display. I need them independent ala macOS or it is just so infuriating to use. Win11 also has big Fisher Price sized title bars now and macOS Tahoe isn't far behind. I think the GUI designers are on magic mushrooms when coming up with these designs.
KDE/Plasma you only need to change the default behaviour of the mouse selection and you will have a better Windows like experience out of the box.
I installed CachyOS with KDE Plasma for my 8 year old and it feels way better than Windows or MacOS, with fewer bugs too.
Linux Mint/Cinnamon matches Windows GUI and maybe makes a lot of things better. You may need to pay the Linux tax in a few other areas, but as far as UI and basic tools/settings aspects, they have it really good.
It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on.
I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives.
As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?
I guess if you look for one you can find Linux distribution with ads in start menu
> But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
not to me
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
For me on Lubuntu my two desktops work well. Required a bit of googling how to setup, but it took me more time to fail at removing similar Windows annoyance.
Package managers are great, I have configuration of my packages in Ansible and single script run installs all my software except VSCodium and Android Studio.
Stuff nearly often just works.
Not sure what you mean by gestures.
> installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Even that beats what I remember from my Windows days that required going through billion of installer wizards, with decent chunk of them trying to bring some unwanted stuff.
And my install is nearly pure install from OS packages with some minor annoyance for Android Studio and VSCodium.
hate is the perfect word. you can't even drag anything onto the taskbar icons yet, and maybe never will be able to. just one small example of many, of why hate is the perfect word
You can drag files etc. onto taskbar icons and it will bring that window to the foreground for you to choose where to drop it. What else do you expect dragging things onto the taskbar icons to do?
not OP, but in macOS, you can drag a file onto a dock icon and that program will open the file if possible. very handy - i use it with Xld, an audio transcoding app. it runs quietly in the background and whenever i need to convert a bunch of FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) i can just drag the folder to the icon and 10 seconds later everything is good to go, without ever really directly interacting with Xld.
The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating. Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space?
At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.
What they have done with 25H2 should be ILLEGAL. - Forcing AI - Reversing Anti-Adware settings by default
RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI
ProtonDB The list of AI crap is jaw gobbin massive.
ProtonDB checks known linux game compatibility && login with Steam to check your library! https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
RemoveWindowsAI shows a massive amount of AI crap they are trying to force on us. It removes EVERYTHING and is updated regularly.
I DO HATE Windows 11 and don't trust Microsoft with my data one bit. Every prompt you make lives in their logs no matter what they say - they flat out lie about it. "Oh we made it anonyomous". Sure. Yeah. RIGHT. With AI any data can be made Not-Anonymous.
Hopefully the EU will smash!
I'm trying bazzite (https://bazzite.gg) which is made for gaming.
My official reasons to hate Windows 11 go on and on. Here are a few
Windows 11 REMOVED vertical task bars - the most screen space efficient way to Task! Windows 11 ARBITRARILY limits the number of Apps you can have pinned to your task bar, Windows 11 WASTES a massive number of pixels and forces you to have a blank task bar.
Just typing this is letting the rage flow and I'm embracing the DARK SIDE.
I love AI when it's my choice to give them my data, and I love developing with it, and I love building it into Apps for users who need it as a tool.
Plus 1000% NSA scooping up everything including with moles on site at every major tech company.
In addition to the title’s “hate is a strong word”, in the comments we have “hate is a weak word”, “hate might be a strong word”, and “hate is the perfect word”, averaging out to something like hate being ever-so-slightly on the strong side of perfect.
win11 is the product of a legion of middle managers. It's embarrassing
Just today when trying to run Forza Horizon 5 from a new laptop I got an Xbox login popup with some QR code I was supposed to scan but the window was super small and I wasn't able to resize it to actually see the full QR code. One has to wonder what is going on with Microsoft if things like these pass they "quality" checks.
I used Ubuntu at home for years, but went back to Windows when my last Thinkpad died, around the time WSL became a thing. Then I stopped coding and just became a Windows user. But it just got worse every week. Slower and more annoying. I think I'm going to ditch my family Office subscription and install Ubuntu again.
What’s wrong with strong words?
There is MacOS and Linux, nobody forces you to stay on Windows
> Disable AI - Disables search engines’ AI features (they don't even run in the background)
I don't mind duck duck go's search assistant.
ExplorerPatcher fixes everything I hate about Win11
Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared.
When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.
Yesterday I discovered that Windows 11 has two right click menues that appear depending on where you click on a file???
I despise W11.
It feels like everything is falling apart and getting worse. Yet somehow people are racing to produce AI slop faster. If software eventually collapses under its own weight, things might be so borked we have to bootstrap everything from scratch, staring with assembly.
I know it's not fashionable to be positive about macos but since ditching Windows a decade ago it's pretty much just worked, and I can run Excel and the like. I'm sticking with Sequoia and avoiding 26 though, for now.
With as much telemetry and unwanted features, one would be forgiven to find the actual OS under it all.
> However, there are some programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me
2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012.
We're making good progress, folks!
>2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012.
Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option."
Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
Wine has gotten very good over the years.
But I think we have to recognize that it has had a pretty large usability issue. There are several programs, like winetricks, that have existed because of how hard it can be to get things setup to work well with random bits of software.
It's been a far cry from the windows or mac experience of double clicking on an installer and having everything just work. Though it's pretty close to that now.
The author was _so_ close!
> why is the UI so slow / explorer slow / bluetooth slow
this is a legitimate complaint, but I see latency absolutely everywhere. my iPhone 17 Pro dropped frames out of the box . now 3/4 unlocks drops frames.
I'm not defending Windows, it's obviously in decline -- but trying to identify root cause. There used to be curmudgeon engineers on staff who would berate team members over blocked UIs, dropped frames, input latency over 30ms . Dave Cutler made a rubber stamp that rejected (then paper) code reviews with "Size is the Goal". That culture has retired.
Web-dev's design interactions targeting 500-2000ms, so to them everything on the OS looks fast . Adding 150ms to right-click is unnoticeable . Like 15kHz audio to a boomer or purple to the color blind .
It's easy to beat up on MS, because most open-source devs have despised them. But Microsoft had a very high bar for engineering until about 10 years ago ( you may laugh, but remember they were writing OS's that last 40+ years) . Apple had an extremely high bar until about 5 years ago.
This isn't just one bad product, but an entire industry lowering its standards.
It's because these things aren't priorities for management so they aren't for the engineers, the latest fads like AI are priorities and therefore they get integrated everywhere.
that's a copout in my opinion. Most of the quality decisions are established by team culture and experience. If a team is full of webdevs, no amount of management investment in performance will make a good app. conversely, a team of high performance members will be able to deliver quality apps despite management's input.
It still depends on management to determine the culture and what requirements and limitations are most important.
I mean take a look at what happened to Boeing, there were people that cared about quality down in the trenches but they were overridden by the people that didn't care about quality, just about shoving items out the door.
Good example .