Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
The best way to do that would be for all the governments and large corporations that buy Windows machines for their employees to switch to Linux. That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.
Unless and until that happens, the unfortunate fact for individual Windows users is that you're rounding error in MS's numbers anyway. You're not the one they're making all the money from. The large government and corporate accounts are. And as long as people have to use Windows at work, they're going to use Windows at home because it's familiar to them. (Except for outliers like me who run Linux at home even though we have to use Windows at work. But those outliers are rounding error to the rounding error.)
If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].
And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-police-move-from-window...
I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so. The support people have to use MS tools, at least to some extent, but they're not MS employees and they have no inside connections with MS.
It's true that what "OS Support", or more generally "Supporting workstations for employees", would amount to would be different for a large organization that uses Linux, compared to what it is for a large organization that uses Windows. But "different" does not mean "worse". I would expect the quality of such support to be better once it sinks in that the organization means what it says about using open source solutions. And there are plenty of open source software projects that would love a huge influx of customers willing to pay for features (LibreOffice comes to mind, for example).
I’ve received excellent powershell-based support for their cloud services. I can’t imagine what I’d ask of them for OS support. If we can’t solve the issue in a timely fashion, we just reimage the device.
"Voting with your wallet" cannot solve every issue, and that's never been more true than today. Rampant hyperconsolidation means that there are no longer enough companies providing these products and services to have any real hope of being able to just switch to one that does what you need. Furthermore, even if you can find a solution that lets you stop giving them money—like switching to Linux—those solutions are not sufficient for the vast majority of people and institutions, and there's no way for enough to switch to actually hurt the megacorporations.
And even if it did start to hurt them, what do you think would happen? They'd say "oh, our bad, we'll be real nicey-nice now!"?
No; they'd flex their money muscles and find ways to make sure those institutional customers switched back.
The only ways to solve these problems are a) better regulations mandating an acceptable level of service and customer protection, and b) serious antitrust with real teeth. Break 'em up.
Unfortunately, neither of those are going to happen in the current political...situation.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101572
They are the polar opposite of Microsoft and Google when it comes to providing customer support.
No, really. They're not perfect, and as time goes on I keep agonizing more and more about whether they're worth the money. But also, I've had some amazing customer support from Apple employees over the years, and I at least have to concede that the money for those people's salaries has to come from somewhere.
Apple charges more, and people lose their absolute shit over that, but then you don't get abused anywhere near as much as Microsoft/Google do to you.
I have some landfill android tablets that are too slow to run the moral equivalent of flash games. The iPad’s I have (all low end models) are older than the androids (in one case, 2x older) and still work much better.
Retail price / years supported is pretty comparable for Apple and Android. On top of that, you can get deals on “discontinued” newly manufactured apple devices, and used ones as well.
I have many complaints about Apple, but value for money isn’t one of them.
They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.
FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.
100%
So many business models today are based on rolling over the customer, on the theory that anything with that much momentum is impressive to new buyers.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
Monopoly doesn't always mean 100% of the market. They're still the leader by far in desktop operating systems, and pretty much everyone who has a computer as work has an Office license allocated to them.
Only if you limit scope desktop gaming, sure. 75% of gaming market share is on mobile and consoles.
The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.
Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
It can both be true that the US has too many regulations (the tank has too much armour) and that it's in the wrong spots (too much armour in the back and not on the front.)
America needs less regulations in some scenarios, and more regulations in others. It may very well end up that the net result of these combined changes is less overall regulation and also more effective regulation.
Me, I started a game business because nobody else made the game I wanted to play. I started a compiler business because I didn't like the available compilers. I designed a new programming language because the existing languages were not good enough.
One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.
These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.
Heck if the McDonald’s CEO and family were required by law to eat their own McDonald’s product for 80%+ of daily caloric/macro intake, then we would probably see things change quickly.
Companies that can’t run at a particular scale should definitely not be enabled to do so. But sadly, we seem to not hold them accountable, directly.
What you're saying is basically that the ability to do a task means you technically should do that task. I can definitely mop, but that doesn't make me a janitor, not even technically.
Hamurabbi's code: An architect, or equivalent next of kin, was put to death , if the building he had built killed the owner, or a kin of the owner.
Then the shareholders will sell their shares.
> How about making customer support legally mandated
Then you'll have to pay higher prices for the product. Every mandate put on a company costs money and so higher prices are the result.
Price for innovation and corresponding hardware is just way higher then for established tech items
Its like comparing apples vision pro to whatever cheap VR stuff we may get in the future which everyone uses then
$3-5K.
You can rig your product reviews by providing above and beyond customer service, for example, warranty claims dealt with in a day with a replacement in the post arriving as if by magic to surprise the customer. Hit them up for a review and they will write a review with meaning, explaining how you fixed their problem, exceeding all expectations. Unless you have done this then you would never know. Although most companies do collect reviews, they don't know the way to do it is to get reviews from the customers that complained rather than the ones that didn't. It is very counterintuitive.
You can always upsell. If the customer has problems with the product then maybe they need a different product or a whole suite of stuff. With software you can always give trials too. Complaining about what comes with Windows? Maybe you need Office. Here you go, a three month trial to tide you over.
Customer service should also be the eyes and ears of the company, to alert product and sales teams to any problems with new products so corrections can be made very quickly.
It is also about having customers for life. It is more cost effective to retain the customers you have rather than churn them.
All of this applies regardless of the company size. There are some caveats though. Nothing can be queued unduly, queues don't save time for anyone and you still have to get all of that queued work done. This means you need team members that work from both the front and the back of the queue, to have a clean queue by the end of day.
If you get it right then customer service is not a cost, it is the exact opposite, at the heart of marketing due to word of mouth goodness that can't be bought so easily. If you can get the upsells to work too, then a customer service department can pay its own way, to profit even.
You also have to recruit people that will go above and beyond. Lots of people have hectic lives with kids and other obligations that make their lives unpredictable. They will need days off, special working hours and other niceties, however, give them a job that they can fit around their life and they will show gratitude with loyalty and hard work.
There are cultural problems why this 'bring it on' approach is not so common. Usually customer service are down there with the pigeons in corporate pecking order. In reality, customer service needs to be at the heart of the company with more than lip service given to the 'customer first' idea.
With companies giving customer service over to AI chatbots, there is plenty of opportunity for companies of all sizes, including Microsoft, to resist the AI temptation and get serious about customer service.
What you do is have a real capitalist system with decent antitrust protections and real market competition instead a crony capitalist system where oligopolies can easily push regulators and legislators around.
And then, once you have enabled consumers to vote with their money, they will.
This kind of oligopolism, rent-seeking behavior, and general corruption are some of the problems capitalism was invented to fix. And the further societies stray away from actively defending a strong market economy, the more those problems start to come back.
How are the two at all related
This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...
My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.
But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)
There's some form of "BIOS-attached license". Don't really know how it works, but I've seen this for many years. Basically all PCs that have the Windows logo have that, and you can install windows on them as many times as you like, without ever having to enter a license key (I suppose this is limited to the same edition level - I've only ever tried this on "enterprise-level" machines that came with windows pro).
This even works for machines that originally came with windows 8 to install 10, and 10 -> 11. I've never tried "forcing" a win11 install on any machine that came with win8.
The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.
Another issue that I face is that it is increasingly expected that their would be a shared Word document in OneDrive that multiple people can be working on simultaneously. Its really hard to win sometimes when the infrastructure is all against it. :(
I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
If it’s the seller, would Microsoft go after the buyer?
What a PITA it took until I got a human though.
I have two Minecraft accounts, several Live.com accounts accrued over the years, and a smattering of Github accounts for various reasons (professional, self-employed, personal),
Logging into Minecraft java a week ago took me 7 logins across various different accounts -- and then it ALSO uses Xbox for auth, which I never set up. And then, the endpoint is blocked for my ISPs IP range so I had to use a VPN and try from a few locations. Bless you, Ohio.
So the problem is that MS isn't even consistent about how it enforces licenses.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.
I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).
Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.
All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.
Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.
2 thoughts:
1. Possibly something hooked into Explorer. Not necessarily malicious but could be like an acrobat extension or image editor extension or similar that helps to make thumbnails/previews. Or a context menu hook in.
Use Sysinternals Autoruns [0] to have a look. It is a free diagnostics tool from MS that shows everything that loads on startup. It looks at Start menu Startup folder, registry run and runonce keys and a bunch more places where things are hooked in. No restarts or anything required simply to look. It will show plugins/addons to Explorer too. Easy disable/re-enable process allows for somewhat easy troubleshooting. You'll have to restart Explorer after a "disable" step to see the results though.
Be sure to use the "hide microsoft entries" option if you want to narrow it down some.
2. Filesystem filters - things like antivirus "scan on read". If a "scan on read" goes to an antivirus that is not playing ball it will halt the "file open" request for example.
The command "fltmc" will list filesystem filter drivers. But making sense of which one belongs to what software is a further exercise. Which is why I suggest this investigative path as number 2...
[0]:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
I’ve been a multi-os user for years, tried Linux on and off, but for now I have a windows machine I just use for gaming and a mac that I use for development and everything else. The truth if I struggled as much as I did and I’m a software developer with years of experience with this stuff, the dream of the general public using Linux is doomed. Every few years I hope Linux has gotten its act together so that it can actually grow again, but it’s still behind the times.
But my experiences aside, the truth is 99% of people would rather just make a Microsoft account than have to learn and switch to a whole new OS. It might be the breaking point for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s the breaking point for many. If the Linux community continues to stay blind about this and about the very real problems people experience that they insist aren’t problems, then they’ll continue to have a tiny market share, that’s all there is to it.
How much care did you take in getting a machine for running Linux? Did you get one specifically with that in mind? Or did you slap it on the machine you already had?
I'm sure it's Nvidia's fault for whatever reason but Linux proselytizers need to stop being so dishonest about how pain-free switching is.
It's like you running Windows 7 on a PC designed with Windows 11 in mind and expecting a good time. If you wanted a good Windows 7 experience you'd want a PC with parts that are actually compatible and have good drivers. Linux is the same.
First, I am writing this reply in Pale Moon browser running on Arch (KDE Plasma), so I'm a pretty diehard Linux user and have been so for years. That said, I still use Windows as I'll explain.
You are absolutely correct, switching to Linux from Windows is still very hard for many people—likely the majority—for a multitude of reasons, there being too many to give full justice to here. Several stand out however, such as having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new operating system and adapting to new apps that do not have the same feature set as their Windows counterparts, for those wishing to switch compatibility issues are still a significant headache.
Nevertheless, users within corporate environments usually find switching to Linux easier by virtue of having a more controlled set of applications as well as having access to training and helpdesk facilities. For example, switching from MSO/Outlook to say LibreOffice/Thunderbird ought not be too arduous, also their Linux environment is managed by their IT departments. On the other hand, home users and small businesses aren't afforded such 'luxuries' and have to manage everything for themselves. Unless one is technical or reasonably computer-literate converting can be not only challenging but also very time-consuming.
Clearly, Microsoft is aware of the resistance to change factor and is leveraging the fact to its full advantage. When it comes to switching from Windows to Linux I think many Linux users underestimate how important these differences are to Windows users. As mentioned, I still use Windows on a number of systems and I even balk at the changes between the way different Windows versions work at the GUI level let alone the differences between it and Linux (it's why on Windows I restored Quick Launch when MS removed it and why I use that wonderful program Classic Shell by Ivo Beltchev to make the GUIs of my different Win versions all look like XP). Suffice to say, I prefer the old Windows Task Bar to KDE Plasma's Panel; for me, it's ergonomically more functional (even after having made many tweaks to the former).
The same goes for certain important (well-loved) Windows applications, whilst some key programs such as LibreOffice are native to both Windows and Linux, others remain Windows-only apps sans native Linux equivalents but which are arguably substantially better any Linux program with the same or similar functions. No doubt, many Linux-only users will likely differ from that view but that's irrelevant, here it's the perception of Windows users that actually counts—if they cannot run their favourite programs on Linux (or close equivalents) then they will stubbornly resist changing operating systems. I say that from experience, I used to head an IT department and users can make management's life very difficult when forced to make changes against their will. Also, I'm reminded of someone at Microsoft whose name temporarily escapes me saying that the Win32 API was one of the company's most valuable assets. Very true indeed!
Putting a Windows hat on here with some examples, from my experience there is no equivalent or near equivalent native Linux program that is as good or as ergonomically functional as say the Windows file search program Everything, same goes for the excellent image viewer IrfanView, and to a lesser extent same for XnView (if necessary I can justify those claims). Similarly, when it comes to file managers nothing else comes close to Directory Opus in either Windows or Linux, if it were available for Linux I'd buy it immediately.
OK, Linux-only users will immediately retort "just use Wine and your problems will be solved". Right, Wine is great for many 'self-contained' programs but Wine's a pain and essentially incompatible with programs that make certain demands of the operating system outside of those normally handled (or not well implemented) by Wine. For instance, IrfanView allows the viewed image to be edited by an external image editor which here would likely be the native Linux version of GIMP. Attempting to get that to work from within IrfanView whilst running under Wine/Linux is a major headache, just check the many online requests from frustrated users who have been looking for a solution. Similarly, Everything's search relies on accessing NTFS's MFT (thus even on Windows it won't work in FAT32, simply forget any notion of using it with, say, Btrfs).
So we are back to the fundamental problem of incompatibility between Windows and Linux hence the many requests we've seen over the years to make Linux more compatible with Windows. Linux developers rightly say they're happy with their ecosystem and that any further moves in that direction would not only complicate matters but also require much additional work not to mention they'd likely make Linux less secure. That's also pretty much my position.
With these factors in mind it's clear Microsoft has no qualms about implementing changes to Windows that benefit itself even if they are to the considerable disadvantage of users (that's the inevitable outcome with monopolies). Thus, fallout from this latest change will be minimal, yes MS will lose a small percentage of users like those here on HN who are both outraged and technical enough to make the change, but as you say with no other practical option available the vast majority will simply fall into line with Microsoft's demands. In the wash-up, Microsoft will have done the sums and in the end it'll be further ahead.
Given the never-ending issues many users have with Microsoft's administration of Windows and the way it treats its users with abusive contempt, something has perplexed me for years which is why there has been so little support for the FOSS Windows lookalike, ReactOS, it's been in gestation for so long—over quarter-century—that I call it the "Going Nowhere Project". It's damned annoying ReactOS is still not available, if I could get a reasonably stable version I'd use it immediately for all that legacy Windows stuff that refuses to die.
It's not as if ReactOS doesn't have potential, it does and I've actually had various alpha versions running, although they weren't very stable. When I've queried the reasons for its snaillike development more often than not online commentators say it's because MS would sue it if it actually worked as intended. Possibly, but I reckon there's more to it than that which I'll not address here.
Nevertheless, with this latest edict from Microsoft it's clear to me that more than ever we urgently need an operating system that's capable of running the Win API without any Microsoft involvement. As I've shown, Linux can help many but not all Windows users escape Microsoft's clutches, that means we still need a more general/practical solution for ordinary users. Unfortunately, the only suitable project seemingly on the horizon is ReactOS, but it will never become a viable option unless it's put on a much more solid foundation and made into a well-supported mainstream FOSS project.
I agree that some people responding are assholes, though not the person you replied to here.
Also there are distros which handle cutting edge hardware much better than others (like Fedora/based or Arch/based), and some are infamous for always lagging behind (Ubuntu/Debian based). Choosing the right distro can make a huge difference to your Linux experience.
I would highly recommend using a sane newbie-friendly distro which bundles all relevant drivers, like Aurora[1]- they even have a developer edition which may be of interest to you. If you're a gamer though, Bazzite[2] may be a better option - comes with drivers for all popular game controllers and hardware and includes Steam and other stuff so you can get gaming in no time at all.
My 70yr old mum uses Aurora and she has zero issues. She surfs the web, edits documents, prints and scans, backs up and organised photos etc. Pretty much all your basic PC user stuff. If my mum can use Linux, so can anyone else.
I didn't have the time as a working Adult for distro hopping and Gentoo compiles, but the thought of having to live with Windows 11 made me try out modern linux again, glad I did.
I remember after learning Linux, how much of a toy Windows felt, with my needing to grab windows by the bar to move them around (instead of grabbing from anywhere), and trying to resize them by the thin corner (instead of resizing from anywhere), having no concept of workspaces, having no choice of window manager while Linux could engulf windows in flames and render them in a cube, only being able to backspace single characters at a time, no choice of file manager, files having weird limitations on their names, having nothing like bash (pre-powershell) while Linux had multiple shells, no block devices (this could be expanded into a lot of points), no simple way to work the partition tables, not being able to mount things wherever, not being able to treat a regular file like a disk, no real choices of filesystems, poor network utilities, ping only pings an arbitrary 3 times by default instead of just going on indefinitely, no package managers and repos, etc. I could go on a lot more probably, but this is enough. Windows XP was a toy compared to Linux.
But my biggest pet peeve with Windows is updates. Updates, updates, updates, it's such an underrated thing that Linux does so much better, I wish more folks would speak about this:
1. You only really need to reboot for kernel updates 2. Updates aren't forced upon you 3. You're in full control of the whole process - you can even decide to hold back certain packages, , or choose a different flavour that suits your needs better 4. Update everything - including thirdparty apps - from either the CLI or GUI (KDE Discover or Gnome Software etc) 5. Unlike Windows, updates rarely slow down your system, and if anything, they tend to make your system faster and better. 6. Most Linux users actually look forward to updates, whereas Windows users groan and swear at them, praying and hoping they MS doesn't break anything or add more crap/anti-features 7. When you reboot after updates, it's instant - no annoying "configuring... please don't turn of your computer" message that hijack your system when you need it the most. 8. If you've got an immutable distro, updates are atomic and can't break your system. 9. Many decent mutable distros also have the option to instantly snapshot the OS before an update, and allow you to rollback right from the boot menu.
Honestly, updates for me is easily the top reason why I feel Linux is a superior experience to Windows, I could write a whole essay on this.
You list many things that are advantages, but not for the regular end user, the primary target of Windows.
Also, the rest of my points are end user impacting. Updates impact everyone and is a very important part of an OS experience. I used to work on a helpdesk for an MSP, and you've no idea the number calls we used to get from users frustrated about updates for various reasons. Hell, we use Windows at work and I still get annoyed as a user.
The rest of your points don't apply to a user who buys a desktop/laptop and starts using it.
Just to clarify, this was actually like most of Windows. You could (in XP at least via Disk Manager), but they made it harder than it needed to be.
Multiple workspaces was a thing as well that came with XP Power Toys and was a feature in later versions, but not simple to access, and mostly broken because they never test it.
I made my final transition during Vista. Touching 7, 10 and 11 for work purposes means I can see that I don't miss any of it.
Windows is awful, and has terrible discovery for features, and anything off the main "happy path" is usually broken. This isn't a new thing since they fired their QA folks, it's always been bad.
It is just the "Windows can't do this" statements, when it can.
Better hardware support, more funding and development on the desktops, Flatpak, more apps being web apps, Proton, everything converged finally.
What's odd is this machine does not work seamlessly under Windows, it doesn't support the wifi or ethernet driver out of the box and refuses to load it during Windows setup, and that of course requires an internet connection to complete now. This works fine under Linux.
I've been using both Windows and Linux for the past decade, and I think we have to acknowledge that both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there is no doubt that the Linux UX is less polished or that Windows makes UI customization more difficult (it is possible but you have to write dlls instead of css).
But the points you make do not really touch the core of the difference. The ability to drag windows from any point? That's horrible for people who like to click on stuff without intention to drag a window. It's like the shitty toolbars in Office 95 that were not 'locked' by default so you would accidentally move them around all the time.
Backspace only single characters? Windows 2000 already supported ctrl+bs/del, so not sure where this is going. Same for block devices, those were supported for an eternity, and were contributing to make Windows more prone to rootkits. And so on for most of the points you made - they are simply not true, perhaps because you are not familiar with Windows :(
I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers. So let's get the facts straight and leave out controversial and opinionated topics that only let Windows fanboys go "Akshually".
As someone who's used a variety of OSes (ranging from FreeBSD to Windows and macOS) on desktops and laptops, including trying out 6 Linux distros in the past couple of years (Arch, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Bluefin, and currently NixOS), I honestly don't understand how you end up with "Linux is the best choice for people who are just starting out".
I'm experienced and I prefer Linux, but the amount of time investment I've needed to put into troubleshooting and customizing any of these distros (from Mint having the least to NixOS having the most) has been higher than either Windows (10 or 11) or macOS.
Not OP, but that's not the way it works - you'll need to press a modifier key (typically Alt or Win/Meta) along with the drag operation, so you can't do it accidentally. And you can always turn it off from the settings if you don't like this behaviour.
> I do agree that Linux should be preferred today for most people who are just starting out on computers
Why just single out newbies? Even old fogies can switch to Windows. My 70yr old mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 - 7, and she switched to Linux about a decade ago, starting with Mint, and now on Aurora. She does all the basic tasks most PC users do (surfing the web, editing docs, printing/scanning, backing up photos etc) and has zero issues. If my mum - and old school Windows user - can use Linux, so can anyone else.
Just use a sensible distro with sane defaults (like Aurora), or a DE with a sane GUI (KDE or XFCE) and you'll be fine. The core UI /UX paradigms is the same as Windows, you just need to have an open mind and take your time getting used to the differences.
Naturally there are some people who can't deal with change, so Linux may never be an option for them, but for other folks, unless the have a legit reason to stick to Windows (like dependency on some proprietary app/workflow), Linux is a pretty viable option these days.
yeah, that's exactly what your average Windows user wants from an OS
But, shockingly, despite Windows goals being so small and easily achievable, Microsoft still fucks it up.
Wine is a better Win32 implementation than Win32. And Microsoft just can't help making the OS worse. Every new feature is basically strictly worse than the stuff before.
All they have to do is do nothing and continue making the same things work. But no.
Though you might not notice the last result ever if you always run it from the GUI run box instead of a console, as the resulting console in that instance closes pretty instantly after the fourth result is displayed.
Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.
People use Windows because of the software, not because of the operating system itself. The best thing windows can do is not assert itself and hide as much as possible. As soon as you have to start interacting with any windows systems, it becomes clear how hacky and poorly conceptualized the OS is.
The best versions of Windows were the least annoying.
FWIW, for me Linux became better in the times of Windows XP.
FWIW, for me Linux stopped being better than Windows around Windows 7 and still isn't back.
Windows 11 largely gives me no problems and has worked perfectly fine with the hardware I've thrown at it, with no effort on my part. WSL is definitely a bonus.
The same just has not been true of Linux for me during the same time period with the same pieces of hardware.
I still happen to run NixOS on my laptop (the most recent of 6 distros, and Windows, I've tried over the past couple of years). It's not been entirely trouble-free but (thanks to the Arch wiki, mostly), it's in a decent state now.
And you are right about the hostile anti-features, though, and that promises to only get worse.
My windows PC has been relegated to games and will likely get whatever first stable, headache free SteamOS+NVIDIA incarnation turns up.
I've got no more affection for Windows than for Linux. There are just cases where the former has given me fewer headaches than the latter.
On the Windows side NT 3.5 was rock solid with limited software selection, 4 was decent, XP was fine for me behind a firewall but not everyone was so lucky on the security angle. No one liked Vista but I don't remember it being due to crashing.
Bluetooth loved to disappear for no reason and would only return with a reboot. No amount of unloading/reloading modules could bring it back.
Didn't have any issues with Windows on that laptop.
Current laptop is a Lenovo X1 Nano and it's behaving reasonably.
Once I got my first consumer high end PC that was really my own and payed for with my own money, with one of the early hyperthreading CPU:s, it didn't take long until I made the move from Windows to Slackware and never looked back. I've used later Windows versions quite a lot, but spent more time in Putty sessions against Linux and BSD boxes than anything else on them.
My first attempt at Linux was installing Mandrake sometime circa 2002. I was only a kid that liked computers back then, not really an advanced user. I could not make the mouse work, and gave up. Probably for a more advanced user that was not an issue, and Linux was better already.
Many years later, around 2015, I had the option to work from a Linux environment at my workplace, and went for it. Ubuntu this time around, during Windows 7 days. Many consider Windows 7 to be peak Windows, and I found Ubuntu to be much, much better. At least for regular use and Dev work. The only thing that kept me from using it on my own PC was that running my game library was not possible back then. I did keep it on dual boot for a few years though.
What allowed me to move for good was Proton. In some ways, that is the point where I can say, without any caveats or asterisks, that Linux is definitely better.
I was in fact playing around with several alternate OSes at the time, and the ones which really impressed me the most were QNX and BeOS. I absolutely loved QNX for being so performant - especially at multitasking, was smooth as butter my humble 450MHz PIII. QNX solved the desktop interactivity problem more than two *decades* before Linux did, and I think that's pretty damn impressive. And BeOS blew me away with its multimedia performance.
It wasn't until Windows 7 came out, that I decided to switch to Linux full time (started with SuSE, then Fedora and switched to Arch a few years later). Basically my reason for switching was because I wasn't eligible for Microsoft's student discount and I couldn't afford to pay the full price for 7, and I was actually really looking forward to it and really wanted to buy it instead of pirating it, thinking I could get the student discount... but no. I got really ticked off at Microsoft and decided to just format my PC and switch to Linux for good.
It has been the better OS server-side and for appliance applications (routers, media players, …) for a long time, Windows may be drawing equal but does that count if some of it is due to WSL?
It has been the better OS, or often just the equal OS for a lot of desktop users for a fair while also, particularly non-gamers who don't need other specific tools that don't have a sufficiently compatible Linux offering/alternative. Many use it because the cost is hidden and might use something else given a properly informed choice.
I wouldn't put it in front of my Dad, even though pretty much all he does is no different on Windows than Linux and has been for years, because of compatibility concerns with printers/scanners and because there are others in the family able+willing to support Windows so he isn't stuck waiting for me if he ever has trouble while I'm difficult to contact.
I don't run Linux on my main desktop due to inertia (games are largely what kept me with Windows long enough to have to make the 8->10 transition) but that is not enough any more, partly because it just isn't really there (lack of things keeping me on Windows because they don't work well easily elsewhere, and irritations with Win11 applying a noticeable retrograde force) and partly because my use patterns have changed (modern games are not a thing in my life ATM, my hobbies have changed considerably in the last decade). That machine will be switching over to Linux when I get around to it, or it might just be shut off (almost all data is on Linux on the little house server, and off-site copies, already anyway) in which case the laptop will just gain a dock so it can better use the big screens & whatnot.
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[1] I might also take issue with significantly, as that might imply the change is sudden and due specifically to the Win10 EOL. Windows, both 11 & 10 and 8 before them, has been going downhill slowly enough that each extra irritation has faded into something that people put up with before the next one comes along. Recent changes (more ads etc) are generally small² but are the final straw.
[2] Recall (and the justified consternation it creates) is the one recent change that I would call significant in its own right. As irritating as the other AI stuff nagging us to give it something to do is to those of use that don't want it, in many places it just feels like an evolution of Cortana's presence from a UX PoV more than a revolution in its own right, and doesn't feel nearly as invasive overall as the Recall subset does on its own.
Linux has remained the best operating system for me since that time despite multiple upgrades to more powerful machines. everything I needed was available in the package manager. when I turned it on to work, it turned on and I worked. when I turned it off, it turned off. it didn't start upgrading and then hang, like my friends computers.
In fact I kept supporting friends on windows for a few more years, but after that I just told them I didn't know how it worked, because windows was just such mess to support.
It's not about quality, it's about market dominance. Walk into any major retailer, 95% of the computers they sell have Windows on them (100% if they don't sell Apple). Go to any company and see what they run on almost all their computers, Windows. Go to any school, probably the same thing (though years ago Apple would have had a strong presence too).
And that's not even talking about business software like Office. MS built that dominance back when Linux was almost entirely focused on the server space. What Desktops did exist where mostly hobby projects or relatively small companies. Shit Linux itself was a hobby project lol.
MS has had that position for over 20 years. Windows is the Xerox of computers. A lot of people don't even realize there are options out there. In that environment, even if the Linux Desktops got better than Windows, it should have taken an absolute killer app or some big evolution in the space to get people switching. All MS had to do was keeping offering a competent product. Or even a kind of shitty one that didn't actively give people a reason to switch.
But they can't help themselves. Most of the money isn't enough, they need all the money. And they've degraded their product to the point where it is actively driving people away. And even now it'll probably take another decade for Linux Desktops to break the 10% mark.
Even Mac is pretty bad by comparison.
Again, this is just me, but I wonder if people saying Linux is bad are really just complaining it's different? It does help that I only buy hardware I know works.
The pain points are nothing worse than the crap Windows 11 throws at you. The only difference for the average person is that their go to tech support person might not know Linux. And paid support options like the India call centre stuff that gets thrown in with a laptop purchase for a month or so doesn't exist for Linux.
"You say meeting them was the best thing that happened to you? What does that say about your achievements?"
Yes, this is almost entirely Nvidia's fault, and yes I should know better than to use NV graphics cards on Linux distros; but frankly, the barrier to entry should not be having to replace an expensive piece of hardware to achieve feature parity. (Obligatory "Nvidia, f*k you!")
Are you using GNOME? mutter has this problem where it does not retry commit on the next CRTC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3833. If this is actually what's happening on your system, switching to KDE should solve it.
> HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience)
This also sounds specific to GNOME, as mutter still doesn't have color management. You'll get a better HDR experience with KDE.
Gnome 49 should've solved that. [0]
[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/4102
Since Windows 11 24H2, with the new color management feature turned on, I can get correct colors on the monitor in both SDR and HDR modes. So it ends up with HDR on at all times, and mpv can play HDR videos with no color or brightness issues.
GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with sRGB output in SDR mode, so you get oversaturated colors. With HDR on, SDR content will no longer be oversaturated, but if you play HDR videos with mpv, the image looks darkened and wrong. I've tried setting target-peak and target-contrast to match the auto-detected values on Windows, but the video still looks off.
This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.
This summer I tried to interest a relative in using a Wacom tablet on their Apple computer. In linux-world you just plug the thing in and the job is done. Yet on the Apple computer I was having to hunt down drivers and install stuff, taking me out of my comfort zone. We didn't get the Wacom tablet to work (it is a decade old) and gave up.
All operating systems will inevitably force their ways of working on you to some extent and it is 'better the devil you know' for most people, myself included. My first OS that 'didn't get in the way' of what I wanted to do was SGI Irix. I think Ubuntu has that aspect of not getting in the way, however, I am confidently able to use the command line to type in installation instructions. Text instructions for installing stuff is brilliant since you can reproduce results consistently with not much more than 'cut and paste' needed. As soon as you move to a consumer OS then this becomes murkier, particularly if you have to use things like 'Homebrew'. An Apple user will quibble with me that this is difficult, but each to their own.
Along the way I have invariably kept the standard Windows installation, to never use it, ever. I thought I would need dual boot to hop into Photoshop, Word or some other Windows application, however, this has proven to not be the case.
The time has come for me to delete those Windows partitions and get my disk space back. In so doing I will also be excluding myself from any of those AI integrations that must be polluting Windows these days.
That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.
Pre-Wine, would you have argued that a software vendor is intentionally preventing their software from running on any non-Windows OS?
Or was it just that their audience wasn't on said non-Windows OS?
Not OP, but this is true depending on the game. For instance, when Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA V Online, they broke Linux support, and blatantly lied about Linux not supporting BattleEye, when that's just not true - they just needed to enable that option, but they just straight up lied saying BattlEye doesn't support Linux.
See: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...
> BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication.
So all Rockstar had to do was reach out to BattlEye to enable it, but they couldn't be bothered to do so. Their anti-Linux stance here is pretty obvious.
Rockstar aside, there are other studios/publishers that have been openly hostile against Linux, like Epic for instance - Tim Sweeny has made scathing remarks against Linux, so it's clear where he/Epic stands on that front.
Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.
Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.
They don't spell out clearly what Bazzite is. Is it a distro? A layer on top of Steam? Something else? No idea from the first page.
Still on par with Linux UX, I'm afraid :(
https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#what-is-the-difference-...
> Bazzite originally was developed for the Steam Deck targeting users who used their Steam Deck as their primary PC. Bazzite is a collection of custom Fedora Atomic Desktop images built with Universal Blue's tooling (with the power of OCI) as opposed to using an Arch Linux base with A/B updates utilizing RAUC. The main advantages of Bazzite versus SteamOS is receiving system packages in updates at a much faster rate and a choice of an alternative desktop environment.
It is a Linux distribution, that aims to compete with Valve's SteamOS Linux distribution supplied with the Steam Deck (which itself is based on Arch Linux). Like SteamOS, it can be used on a regular desktop PC as well... but they are mainly aiming to run on the Steam Deck:
https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/FAQ/#is-this-another-fringe-...
> The purpose of Bazzite is to be Fedora Linux, but provide a great gaming experience out of the box while also being an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck and other handheld devices.
Effectively they have taken Fedora Linux, and added to it the same sort of setup and programs that you get out-of-the-box with SteamOS as well.
For the most part, it is not the people offering Bazzite that are doing the hard job of providing security updates, etc., they are hoping that being based on Fedora will provide that assurance. They merely supply and configure some extras on top (e.g. the Steam client software)
Play your favorite games - Bazzite is designed for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts alike with Steam pre-installed, HDR & VRR support, improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay, and numerous community-developed tools and tweaks to streamline your gaming and streaming experience."
In the first 5 words after the 1st title there should be mentioned "Linux distribution". It's not even in the 2nd paragraph, now.
If this is the clarity of the landing page, I suspect documentation is equally user-hostile/inaccessible, which is why 2025 is still not the year of the Linux desktop... in the Linux world there's still an abundance of great developers, and a terrible lack of HCI/UX expertise.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
Basically the only games that don't work are those which include anticheat which intentionally borks Linux. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for any game you're interested in to see if it'll run or not.
Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No. But besides from that, everything is pretty damn nice.
Please stop repeating this long outdated information. The two most widely used kernel anti cheat provider easyanticheat and battle eye support linux with a user space component which needs to be enabled by the developer and has been in many games.
Tools like Battle eye and EAC are not just one tool that gives a binary answer, they are tools that detect a huge range of heuristics about the device and how easy it is to interfere with the memory.
While they have been ported to Linux, an awful lot of those bits of telemetry simply don't give the desired answer, or even any answer at all, because that is very hard to so when there aren't proprietary drivers signed down to the hardware root of trust by a third party (and certainly the average Linux user on HN wouldn't want there to be!).
It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
>It's really not a matter of "enabled by the developer", it's entirely dependent on what your threat model is.
Again irrelevant to the original point
Also, nearly anything with anti-cheat (many online games, esp shooters) won't work.
Nvidia on a machine with an AMD iGPU requires you to blacklist the amdgpu module.
Linux user base grows. One tiny percent of percent every year. Too little to make a dent.
I'm so happy to have made the swap, using my system is now much more enjoyable and if I don't like some aspect of it I can change it up with MUCH less effort than in Windows.
Also I'm positively surprised how good gaming on Linux is now. It was always a big blocker to full commitment to Linux.
3 years, and not a single time I had any regrets. Not a single time I thought about moving back.
I went for Mint because I am a filthy casual, and as you put it, that system is a joy to use. On Windows I needed to do yearly fresh installs as I could feel performance degrading as time went on, On Linux the laptop is performing as well if not better than when I freshly installed it.
It's so good that I even donate 20 bucks to the project every year. It has no right of being that good and also free.
About games - not only I can play basically everything in my Steam library, but even installing things from other sources is very easy with minor tinkering. At least to me, Windows became nearly superfluous nowadays.
Also, my parents bring home documents from work, and they often get documents from different institutions, which means they already hit edge cases of compatibility issues between different office suites, and telling them "this one sometimes reads docx correctly" is hard sell.
> Then don't.
I moved back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon yesterday, because my boot drive with Windows got fried and the replacement will only be here on Thursday. It doesn't feel like the OS is trying to make my life worse, it just sucks sometimes.
Note: this ended up being a bit long, there's a summary at the bottom. Apologies.
It doesn't save window positions after boot properly (I'd probably have to look in the direction of devilspie2 for that, admittedly I was using FancyZones on Windows as well). The grouped window list Applet in the panel doesn't show windows on the correct screen even if I move them from one monitor to the other and then back. This is really annoying because I have 4 monitors and want each of them have a panel and half of those being wrong about what is where sucks, admittedly Windows sometimes had a similar issue with its taskbar, BUT it resolved itself by just dragging the windows across monitors, instead of needing to refresh the entire applet.
The sound output default is something called Line Out Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller which works fine, but there's no obvious way for me to disable HDMI/DisplayPort output devices so programs can't pick those by accident. Whereas for input I have Rear Microphone Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller but that one makes the sound horrible, so I instead need to switch over to Microphone USB PnP Audio Device and hope that will be fine. Better than the issues with audio on Fedora years ago, still not great.
Software availability varies - some stuff is in the regular repositories, some software needs PPAs, some comes in Flatpaks, other software needs AppImages. I still appreciate that I can get most stuff running, but there's occasional weirdness, like KeePassXC starting up with the wrong theme, for example, the light mode kinda burns my eyes. Speaking of which, I no longer need Redshift because Mint comes with a built in Night Light, except that when it toggles on and fades the screen color, it makes the CPU usage spike (Ryzen 7 5800X) and renders the whole system unusable. Oh and speaking of which there is something weird with the CPU scheduler or something, because when I launch some intensive task, it makes even the desktop environment freeze entirely (and voice calls stall) for seconds at a time. Windows wasn't amazing at this, but could definitely be made even better with Process Lasso.
Oh and I tried some gaming with Steam: out of 20 games I tried only 6 worked. Turns out that if I mount my NTFS drives then Wine will get confused and claim I don't own the directory (which I only figured out by enabling Proton logging), which is funny for something that's supposed to provide Windows compatibility and could probably be resolved by UID/GID in the drive mount config... but even so some games like Mashinky just crash the desktop - I get a screen with the OS desktop background and a pointer, much like the login screen, but nothing reacts to input, no ability to close the game or switch to other windows. At the end of it, to even get some games running, I have to put them on the only ext4 drive that I have... which is also only 256 GB and the reason for me picking Linux in the first place until the 1 TB replacement drive arrives. And other games just don't launch no matter how much you babysit them, for example, I couldn't get Motor Town: Behind the Wheel working at all, but maybe because I don't have a lot of time to tinker.
I also miss software like SourceTree (used to pay for GitKraken, cool software, now just have Git Cola), MobaXTerm (way better than Remmina), SteelSeries Sonar, GlassWire and some other packages that don't have direct equivalents. I really like the more consistent approach to theming and fonts, though. Also, way nicer that I don't have to jump through hoops with setting up dev tools and now what's running locally can be closer to what's either on the server or inside of the containers I build. Oddly enough, I didn't find a way to change the default width of the Cinnamon terminal to 120 characters instead of 80. Also I still like how nice updates generally are and how the system seems to have less bitrot and uses less space and resources, even with a midweight DE like Cinnamon (would have gone for XFCE otherwise). Maybe KDE some day.
Summary:
This isn't really meant to be a hit piece or condemnation, but there's plenty of real problems that I still very much encounter for my preferences and desires of using an OS, there are probably solutions and to someone else these might not be problems. The difference is that Windows feels purposefully enshittified and works against me even when the software ecosystem (and stuff like support for games) is good. If they didn't try to make the OS bad with their bullshit and incentives, it would blow the Linux experience out of the water in quite a few regards.
At the same time, Linux distros feel like they're trying to be good and the OS generally respects you as the user... but there's a lot of moving pieces and lots of stuff breaks and some things (like anti-cheat support for games) won't be fixed because that's out of the control of the community and depends on corpos. Same for running Windows software, if Wine has issues you're often on your own, or just have to get used to the closest Linux software equivalent if you want fewer issues. I will say that it constantly feels like it's getting better, though.
In the limited subset of things that "just work" (generally webdev and DevOps stuff, without venturing too far off the beaten path), I have to say that I prefer Linux distros to both Windows and macOS though.
Why would I care if suits "take me seriously"? I grew out of "Windoze" etc. Now I've grown back into it, because fuck Micro$oft.
I'm talking about the people, the home users nominally in control of their own machines, who are on the edge of considering Linux, or something else non-MS, who might be put off if they see something that reinforces a negative stereotype that they've been fed elsewhere (for instance, that the surrounding community is mostly a bunch of undeservedly cocksure 14-year-olds or practically indistinguishable from the same).
I didn’t say anything to you before my previous comment, but I saw how you’d already treated others, in that exact way I’ve unfortunately come to expect from the Linux community. Grow up or stay < 1% market share, it’s up to you tbh.
To jama211 and everyone else: we aren't all like this, honest!
To globular-toast; this brings to mind the old aphorism:
Always be yourself.
Unless you are a bit of a dick,
in which case please try to be someone better.JetBrains seem to have the best IDE for every language I've tried: Rider / IntelliJ / Android Studio / PyCharm / PhpStorm / RubyMine. Never tried CLion though, but given they all share the same base I'd thought it would be of a equally high standard?
Such a naive assumption
Parsing cpp fast and reliably may be significant differentiator between languages
My bad. I naively assumed the successful developer-focued tools company with 25 years experience in parsing programming languages and building IDEs with advanced AST/refactoring tooling, that I've been happily using for 8 years had a great C/C++ story based on my experience of having used 7 of their other IDEs (built from the same platform base), were all best-in-class.
Maybe that's why I ended my thought with a question mark? i.e. So C/C++ developers with experience in both can clarify what makes VS so much better than CLion. Or if they haven't tried CLion that it would be a good alternative on Linux to try given all JetBrains other IDEs are of high quality.
Anyway, Windows has become a pain for normal user but remains fine if you are a company user. The management tools will strip away most if not all the annoyance people are complaining about here. I think Microsoft knows where the money comes from.
Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.
Guys, please. I am all for FOSS, but such delusions can only be harmful, for they prevent from actually improving stuff.
Did you sir ever use debugger in your life?
Emacs has a front end for gdb. Some colleges use other front ends.
What I’m preventing to improve, in your opinion?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Then „n“ for next line, „s“ for step-in, „fin“ to go to the end of the function
Dprintf for adding dynamically printfs for watching variables
List will show you 10 (default) lines of code around the cursor, bt will show you a backtrace…
I think that covers the basics. As you can see, ist just a keypress mostly for doing anything.
With Emacs you can click on the fringe for setting/deleting breakpoinst.
The bread and butter is really easy, and other than seeing the cursor in the code, there is no advantage. In Emacs you DO see the cursor moving…
Stallman himself wrote it so it lies at the intersection of that camp and the lisp cultists (though Ig they are mostly extinct post-LLM), but they used to have a really strong belief that lisp was the path to AI because of it's homoiconicity.
What should be said in it's favor is that due to its architecture it is crazy extensible and hackable. And the fact that the line between configuration and code is very blurry really encourages you to dive into that.
The choice of lisp also helps ensure user freedom as it's a quite simple language - ensuring that compilers and interpreters are a commodity. You don't like one, pick another. Contrast that with say Rust where if you don't like the official Rust you are shit out of luck. It's also a rolling release deal so you can't even easily stay on an old version.
They go all the time adding hundreds of print(f) of log_* function calls. Often they don’t care to remove them after the fact, as I ask them to, often comes “can/will be useful to detect future bugs”
I’m in the automotive industry, where is known to be a disaster in topic SW. but I think it is also common in other industries. I have seen it in telco already.
While I agree that knowing a debugger is important, and as a leader won’t hire somebody who do not use it, is a fact that many people don’t use it, and are doing ok.
Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints: in fact yesterday I had to, as I was debugging a library with sockets, which would timeout pretty quickly. I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.
Well yes, obviously - it's an indespensible tool in any arsenal, I just cannot fathom(as a C++ low level engineer) how someone can be a professional programmer where they are paid for their job and they don't know to use a debugger even to just do a basic pause and step through flow. But then again I don't work with any python programmers, so maybe that's why.
In C etc. printf calls also make all intermediate variables observable in the debugger. You can debug programs where you can't pause it. Etc.
Side note: I have been using msvc in wine for almost 5 years now, so if that works I don't know why the Sony/Nintendo/Xbox toolchain wouldn't.
Have you tried the intellij IDEs? I thought that they were pretty similar in terms of experience, although I have used them for java/dotnet primarily.
I generally use Sublime Text (+ various plugins) for code editing and leave Visual Studio for dwbugging the code or editing GUIs.
Visual Studio is ridiculously overrated, and this is coming from someone that works at Microsoft and forced to use it every day. What really kills me are the insanely complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the process is like some finger breaking ctrl+alt+function key nonsense? Seriously wtf? Oh to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE? Why??
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Of course setting a gutter breakpoint is easier in an IDE, and that’s irrelevant to my point. OP made this aabout vim/emacs versus VisualStudio as if the former doesn’t have gutter-clicking capabilities. Which is ridiculous
Eh? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...
> complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the proces
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/identifyi...
Debug.TerminateAll is right there in the list
> No you’re just completely ignorant
Forgive my skepticism
And cmon modify the registry to debug multiple processes? People work together in teams and share a common tooling that ideally tries to minimize the friction required to get work done. Think about that while contrasting the steps required in that article with the alternative of“launch the app a couple more times, then…”
You just set the startup properties on the solution to start the multiple projects. On that page, look for "To set the startup project or multiple projects from solution Properties" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...)
* "Sometimes, you might need to debug the startup code for an app that is launched by another process. Examples include services and custom setup actions"
Starting multiple copies of the IDE wouldn't handle these scenarios either
I fear Linux will get ruined by the influx of windows runaways. Enterprise managers will start enforcing their braindead ideas. Group policies, DRM, security scanner slowness, ads, they will all start to appear. Banks will start to 'secure' yoyr desktop. Then politicians will come in and require the KDEs of this world to implement chat control-like things. Eternal september awaits.
Linux is still reasonably controlled by the end user. The powers that be only allow that if we are a fringe group. The golden cage to lock down Linux is already built or being built, and letting us keep the key to it is not something that will be tolerated.
Say (hypothetically) they forced KDE and Gnome to do that - they are open source, you can't hide that it was done, someone will rip out that part and either compile and release a new distro or post the git somewhere outside that jurisdiction and someone else will do it.
This isn't a new thing even - we've had free/non-free/rpmfusion and the like for decades - hell back in the day I had to pull and compile freetype because of the patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and not in the EU.
The one that does worry me more is that they straight up just start locking down the hardware more strictly - a mobile phone style attestation/locked bootloaders would be a major challenge to open computing.
* My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu. There is code in there that checks your OS.
* My bank wants the chrome browser. Messing with headers makes it work on firefox. But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.
* sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.
* systemd slowly moves towards encrypted home dirs and a fully validated boot chain. That's a golden cage with a lock to which we have the key. Microsoft can take the key away, and governements can make them do this.
* Android is also theoretically multi distro, but Google is the only one that matters. And they just decided they want developers identity.
* Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers. Facebook, cloudflare, Teams...
Computers are now part of networks, a bit like their own societies. These will force you to use their rules or isolate you. And that's assuming you can keep buying machines that are open or legally jailbreakable.
> My jobs VPN only runs on Ubuntu Does your job allow a personal device? For many jobs I got a company laptop and that was it. No choice of OS/distro or anything. And to be honest, I find this reasonable considering how "careful" are people with their devices.
> My bank wants the chrome browser From the banks I tried (I ended up with 6 accounts) in the last 3 years, only one had some issues with Firefox. So, for me, there was (still) plenty of option.
> Most if the big sites make you jump trough hoops for non-chrome browsers And whoever cares should push back (I mean Facebook? I stopped using it because is crap ignoring any browser/os behavior). It was much worse, I am honestly amazed that we managed to arrive were we are.
Just as an example: in the 2000 I had to wait one month to get a laptop without Windows pre-installed, and need to travel one hour because they would not deliver at home, then install a Linux distro myself. Would you have said then "but we have no option, everything that comes to my doorstep tomorrow is Windows" ? You can say "but not everybody can do that", sure, but if people that can, don't, then wo will?
You can fake the data via eBPF.
> But that's for now and needs me spending time fighting them.
As with anything else.
> sssd is starting some light GPO enforcement on my laptop.
Could be avoided via namespaces.
> systemd slowly moves ...
Could be thrown out of the system, unless you're happy RH user.
> Android is also theoretically multi distro
That is out of scope because I'm fine without it's HAL and other parts.
Sad state of affairs, their mobile version worked fine even in lynx.
When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.
They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.
For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, but they don't. Because if this were not possible, there'd be billions of more PCs out there running instead what would most likely be Linux. Enabling people to use Windows without paying is a key component of their strategy of maintaining market dominance, especially on a global level.
The way of framing it which works for me is that there doesn't seem to be much reason to move to windows, if you were starting computing with a blank slate and could pick anything, why would someone want to pick windows? Most people need a mobile anyway which serves a lot of consumer needs. Gaming is a big one if you're not happy with mobile/console, but there's the wine/proton on linux route although there's a subset that won't work or has compatibility issues (from minor paper-cuts to major). And then there's those that need specific windows-only software with no alternative elsewhere.
The same reason why Ubuntu won the server market (for a while): by capturing the home-desktop/laptop market first, and then worming its way to employer environments by way of familiarity. Linux had broader driver coverage for consumer hardware; there was a time when running *BSD on fragmented consumer hardware was a crapshot.
the answer is because of the AT&T lawsuit against university of California in the 90s that dragged and tainted the BSD code base.
To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does.
If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years.
Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share.
But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now.
In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.
Who could have predicted that back in the Slashdot days!
Entra, outlook365, and cloud hosted solutions. VMs in the cloud are niche.
You probably meant office365, but it's been renamed to Microsoft365 :)
I realise that a good portion of the references to the product on that page is just "Microsoft 365", but other parts seem to include "Copilot" in the product name for Microsoft's office suite.
I'm curious how inflated the numbers are from business sales, since the default option there is still Windows, even if you don't actually use any software that needs it (i.e. you just need a web browser). Consumer sales of PCs is probably only going to trend downwards, and it only got a small spike from people buying PCs for COVID.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/26/mac-market-share-growing-fast...
With that said at least using native apps on phones is becoming more and more of a risk. If you can get away with a browser that's fine. But if you need native phone features you are at the risk of Apple/Google cutting off your entire business for some hidden reason and nearly zero recourse. On that note people have been getting more worried about Apple starting to treat their desktop OS like a phone and locking it down more.
There will be no ChromeOS anymore - just Android - and it will soon be locked down hard so that you need to pay Google or host ads/harvest data for every app.
You just need to make your choice of Tyrant landlord.
Enterprise windows is completely different, in that most of the crap we complain about will either be disable at the MDM level, or from the start depending on the license. A CEO being issued a windows laptop isn't barraged with ads, nor do they care if their account is local or not. It will "just work".
We have a mandate on-high to block this crap at the MDM level. It's more about your company than the biz world overall, I think.
Much of the scripts to "debloat" windows also rely on MDM entry points and overriding user preferences with higher privilege.
Doesn't this exist today for W11 that makes most of the complaints mute? Or is MS getting better at the cat/mouse game?
As you point out it's still a cat and mouse game but I assume they work OK. I tend to go the painful way and do most of it myself following instructions, as I'm not comfortable having these tools run as admin on a system. It's not that bad either.
- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.
- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.
Most people, and most workers simply don't do what you call real work that needs a big screen and a keyboard. I think most of the kids at my child's school don't have a computer at home (other than the district issued chromebook) and likely won't ever own a personal computer.
People do everything on their phones. Google recently said Chrome OS is going to end next year... I don't know what schools are going to do.
But both iPads and Android tablets have keyboard cases. Even many phones can these days be plugged into USB-C docking stations that enable the use of a big screen and keyboard when needed. I agree that most non-programmers will probably end up using phones or tablets with an external keyboard, and even for programming it is kinda usable.
Those schools will probably just switch to Android netbooks or Android tablets with keyboard cases.
Still, I think that’s very different from AI technologies killing the PC form factor. The hardware and software might change, but I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.
I'm not so sure. What was the interface pre-computer: voice and secretaries. Except the secretaries are now AI, and there is an unlimited supply of them and they don't need a salary or health insurance. Instead of "Ms. Wilson, come here and take a letter" it would be "Hey Google, take a letter"
We're already well on the way. Writing emails with AI is done today. Using AI to take notes in a meeting is possible today. OCR and cameras can handle a lot of "transcribe this printed form to that online form" input tasks today. And it will all be vastly better in 10 years.
I'm sure there will still be a place for screens. We are visually oriented and using paper would be wasteful. I'm not sure the screen + keyboard "workstation" of today will be common in 10 years.
I think mobile tech will be closer to a Star Trek TNG commnicator. A small device perhaps worn as jewelry with an earpiece and some kind of retinal projector for heads-up usage, and less like a rectangular slab of glass in your pocket. Current smart watches are a start, they only need a better way to show more information and they would replace phones for many people.
And of course this all presumes that "office work" as we know it is even a thing. If AI becomes AGI or close to it, what would we need people in offices to even do?
Talking to machines is a horrible experience, especially if you’ve got loads of people all trying to do it in an open-plan office.
Operating systems and CPUs may come and go, but there’s plenty of life left in the mouse and keyboard yet.
Alternatively it could be people working from home.
Though, with the state of "prompt engineering", I'm now imagining legions wandering down the street, speaking into Bluetooth headsets, desperately entreating an AI to do the task they've been assigned...
(you get better results if you sound like you're about to cry)
Eh, what? No, they use headsets to talk to the customer and type on a keyboard.
Worse it's always great when you can hear background noise.
Words do that sometimes; it's interesting to see it happen.
As more and more public accessible areas start becoming so inundated with AI generated material, that makes the walled gardens where generated content is not AI generated that much more valuable for training.
Yes, and making corporations and smaller businesses donate their stuff via official spyware os, clouded "services" and "agents" is perfect opportunity for spyware creator :) It is hard to blame them for wanting this :) Except that, probably, will explode in their faces...
Two ways: slowly then all at once.
Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.
Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(
Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.
Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.
[1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
Mobile, and to some degree tablets, just offer a generally poor interface for many aspects of computing from gaming to content creation, and I think that's mostly intractable.
This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere.
This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there.
And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.
They just never shoveled their crap into the OS itself. It was always recommended addons, recommended freebies, and recommended optional features that came along with other products.
When MS started unifying everything into Just Windows, all of the crap they pulled with separate software packages merged into one digital blob, Windows 8/8.1/10/11.
With Windows 8, I can at least appreciate the attempt to unify things so they are easier to use for consumers (if only they hadn't bunged up Windows Phone, repeatedly). I wonder what Windows would be like if they hadn't tried to the Windows 8 experiment.
That's essentially Microsoft Account nowadays, which went thru few rebrandings on the way. In XP it was promoted via Windows Messenger with popup message which for less experienced people would suggest that in order to access the Internet they need this "passport".
Considering how many sites now offer (still optional) logins with apple/meta/microsoft accounts I wonder if the goal here is to be the provider of identity for sites and services and at the same future-proofing for any digital ID checks govt's may introduce
That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)
It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.
To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.
There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.
So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
If they have 3 external 4k displays, their company will probably shell out for Macbook.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-3-inch-Lapto...
Memory management on Windows devices in contrast is utterly painful. The RAM itself is already slower simply due to physics (can't beat the SoC proximity with anything socketed), storage I/O usually has to cross through a lot of chips (same thing, Apple attaches storage directly to the SoC), and then the storage itself that you find on cheap devices is actually SATA under the hood or bottom of the barrel NVMe, no competition at all to Apple. Oh and the storage and RAM are both adequately cooled on Apple devices, so Apple can drive them much much harder unlike the Windows world where often enough the only thing that gets cooled is the CPU and GPU.
Yes, I do think Apple wants far too much money for RAM and SSD storage upgrades, but it's undeniable that even the more expensive ends pack a lot of punch.
Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
Other less developer related companies are moving more towards mac as well.
This is just my anecdote between being in/out of tech for the last 25 years and have gone from: "Here is your windows laptop" to "Do you want windows or macos" to "here is your macbook"
Now, if they would just give us the Max.
- OnlyOffice - WPS Office - Google Docs.
> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365
In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.
They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.
We'll see how that works out for them.
Microsoft is floundering right now.
[1]: https://reactos.org/
Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years.
I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky.
And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.
Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore.
It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.
I remember when new Windows versions were still an event: you could read about it on the magazines, people would get excited to try them, people would debate about how pretty/ugly the new UI was, etc.
Nowadays new Windows versions are like some unwanted background noise. I don't even know at what point Windows 10 stopped being the new version and 11 came out, but it went totally unnoticed to me until I heard that Windows 10 was close to EOL a couple of months ago. And then you start dreading the moment that you'll have to migrate and uninstall all the Xbox crap again that they force on you, etc.
Lol. You can verify your claims in 1 minute just by simply googling
It is still huge topic
But you’re right that since Windows 8, Windows is just something I’ve tolerated.
That being said, Windows 11 seems nice, but it looks like Microsoft is pulling the same stuff again.
I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).
Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:
* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.
* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess.
Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me.
And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault.
My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those.
edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
200% scaling works if you only want "looks like 1920x1080", but if you have a 27" 4K display, I'd typically want "looks like 2560x1440" or 150% scaling - if you do that on macOS, the desktop is rendered at 5120x2880 and then downscaled to 3840x2160. So you're getting both higher resource draw from rendering the desktop at a higher resolution and losing pixel-perfect rendering.
It won't be a problem for most people, but it's enough of a problem for me that I won't use macOS with scaled displays.
That sounds like a (graphics driver) bug. It's not something I ever experienced on Windows 10, even when occasionally connecting an additional display set to 150% scaling. I believe you, though, bugs do happen.
>not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
I think his point is that on macOS you pretty much have to use 200%, whereas on Windows it can be any value (though multiples of 25% are recommended).
It wouldn't surprise me, although this is a bog-standard-fare enterprise laptop, a 5 year-old full Intel affair. No dedicated GPU or anything fancy.
But, for a long time, I had weird issues with display output on Windows. It would refuse to output 4k@60Hz without doing a stupid plug-unplug-replug-just-at-the-right-time dance, even though it worked on Linux. It took a good 3 years for that to work reliably.
And, in the beginning, those 5k screens only worked at 4k for some reason. Again, no issue on Linux.
But when any of the above situations happened, the state was actually correctly reported, as in 4k@30 Hz, or the 5k screen running at 4k. That's not the case now, everything says what it should, but the image is not sharp.
That's the only situation where I use Windows with scaling, so don't have any easy way of figuring which component is broken. All I can say is that the hardware itself seems to work fine.
Can't think of a single feature Windows could add to get me to switch back from Linux.
Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.
But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys".
Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.
- remove all this Games & XBox related stuff? - remove everything pre-installed but not used stuff? (Internet Explorer legacy?) - remove all this "fancy" Icons & links: Video/Music etc. in Explorer - deselect to install most of all these Background Services?
And: Does it work for the Windows Server versions as well?
Microsoft have done 180's in the past. I still hope that at some point they'll see the light and what you say here above will suddenly click and become evident to them. Windows, and DOS before that, did not succeed by holding customers as hostages.
I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.
Now, this is a machine I mostly use for goofing out, so it actually has my microsoft account connected to it. It's fully entra id joined: I log into my windows session with my office 365 account, which has a full license (p2 or whatever it's called), I can see the bitlocker key in entra id, the works.
Now, curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I figured I might just as well click that button. Guess what? It didn't work! It apparently doesn't support business accounts!
On my home pc (pro edition, which I use for photoshop and the occasional game), which does have a consumer microsoft account, that tile doesn't show up.
Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?
> maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
What made Windows great were the contracts with hardware manufacturers to have it installed by default on every single PC ever sold.
I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy.
(WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)
Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.
Linux, and open source in general, is infinitely more user-focused than anything from Microsoft, since open source is often built for users and by users.
But if you don't have great computer skills already, Linux can be extremely un-friendly the moment you step off the beaten path.
It's also completely ridiculous when you run "docker run ubuntu; apt install whatever" only to find out that "whatever" is now a snap and won't run w/o getting into nested containerization. For packages that got the snap treatment, window tracking for the Gnome dash was broken for ages if, god forbid, you wanted to create a custom .desktop file to add some parameters. Completely broke the custom launchers I created.
I created bug reports, I tried to work with them. Others did, too. Some of these reports approach 10 years now.
I am purging Ubuntu from all of my employers systems, replacing it with RockyLinux. Only one major application still to go. Friends and family get Debian, that transition is already completed.
I want to do the same, but there was some heavy discord at the top of the community a year or so ago that left me fearing for the org's future. If there was a satisfactory resolution, I haven't heard about it.
Anyone been following this?
If user is linux nerd well yes. For more casual users there is way too many weird annoyances and problems. Maybe not with single version, but migrating between or at end of LTS support...
The software if largely by users for users.
Obviously it caters to the power user, but it also works well for extremely novice users. It’s those savvy with Win/Mac that get screwed switching. I’d encourage them to put a bit more into trying.
If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.
That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.
By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed.
Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.
I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.
I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.
I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.
I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.
To extend, maybe someone could build a "SysAd AI" distribution that administers itself given natural language directions? Let me know if anyone wants to invest. ;-)
I encrypt my disks. Debian 13 can use the hardware encryption of my Samsung SSD, 11 didn't. The installer offered me the option and I accepted it. That nearly bricked the SSD because of (I'm not totally sure) a mismatch between the block size of the file system and the block size required by the SSD encryption. The installer should have made a check and at least warned me. It did nothing of that and the laptop didn't boot. I couldn't even change the partitions on that disk. It enforced its encryption and refused to do anything. I appreciate that but it left me without my disk. I asked questions to either chatgtp or Claude, found the problem and after a few attempts I got the right sequence of commands to unblock the SSD and get an empty one. I reverted to the standard OS based encryption and all is well now. I would have had to dig deeply into forums and learn the meaning of those commands. AI saved me a lot of time. Is this a Linux only thing or a Windows installer would have made the same mistake? No idea.
Enough things have changed in Linuxland in recent years that some of those diversions, as you pointed out, helped me work from old knowledge to new knowledge.
Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.
Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
I tried to have a gaming setup with Linux (SteamOS and Bazzite) but both failed when I tried to connect more than one Bluetooth controller and they'd be unable to distinguish them or disconnect everything after a few minutes, it was a frustrating experience.
All worked better with Windows than Linux. It may depend but I hoped at least one would be good..
When I decided to wipe Windows off my desktop, I started with Fedora because I wanted more container/package consistency with some of the other environments I interact with, and I thought I wanted some of the bare-bones Gnome stuff. But Fedora just didn't feel right.. it was uglier than Ubuntu, the Super-key action was a bit jankier, I missed the menu, I had to manually configure the NVIDIA drivers, and the flatpaks didn't really seem like a huge improvement to me.
Anyway, I wiped Fedora and went again with Ubuntu. I feel like that last round of polish they add to it, and some of their device driver defaults, just work better for me. I have had no issues with snaps though I had to learn to mount external directories over symlinks for things like Thunderbird's snap security for relocated profile stores (moved my profile off the SSD and over to the internal spinning disc). But that was easy.
I tried Linux Mint before and thought about Pop_OS but decided to stick with one of the major distros. Ubuntu has won two of my recent "let's try a bunch of distros" so I think that itch has been quieted for a while.
I will say, for Linux in general, after configuring all the apps I use on the daily (browsers, Obsidian, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc) my Linux storage on / takes up all of 35GB of storage on a 256GB SSD. I am unreasonably pleased by that.
I still went ahead and reinstalled Windows 11 on it. Suffice to say if I knew what it was going to be like, I'd have stayed on Linux.
I've been a windows user at home and professionally since 2.0 (as a bit of a toy) and 3.0+, never felt comfortable on macos, etc, so as close to a fanboy as it gets. But the love story is over.
I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks, which I suppose are “Linux”, but not what I would consider the “Linux Desktop”
Microsoft is a level of entrenched that Linux practically won't be able to beat for reasons that have little to do with technical viability and everything to do with legacy tools, having software that works with business formats (Office; any other office equivalent on Linux will still have compat issues and as long as those exist, they won't be a valid replacement - for much the same reason, although not fully locked to their platform, Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption) and video game DRM on popular titles keeping them basically in that position forever.
I tried their online versions of Lightroom and Photoshop in Firefox on Linux, and I am quite happy to continue paying the subscription. It definitely takes less clicking there to remove an unwanted bird from the sky in a photo than it would take in GIMP or RawTherapee.
For basic usage (crop, edit screenshots) I go for Pinta and can recommend. It’s fast, and usable too. No need to throw even more money into Adobe.
Hasn't it always been the case? Nobody buy licenses besides companies right?
My uncle taught me how to torrent ~20 years ago, he was already cracking stuff for the whole family, he passed away but his legacy lives through me, I have never seen or heard about anyone buying a windows license in my entire life
untrue; bitlocker, an important thing for businesses, is far more secure with a TPM. Lots of things are more secure with a TPM, but people who think that Microsoft requires a TPM to sell more copies of Windows will never, ever, believe that to be the case.
Windows is a relatively small portion of Microsoft's revenue generation these days. Windows used to be the main breadwinner for Microsoft, but that has all changed now that Office is a subscription and Azure exists. That smaller portion of the revenue pie is why Windows has stupid shit like suggestions and tons of preinstalled crap: it matters a lot less who is put off by Windows than it used to.
The TPM is a genuinely good thing. Windows DOES use it. You can write applications which use it as well, if you want to. Short of any hardware bug in the TPM (which did happen once) it is capital-S Secure, as I understand it.
Something Windows was doing for free (time-wise).
Edit: my point was agreeing the TPM is useful which is why I spent time making Linux "more Windowsy" in this case.
I discovered this when I recovered a dead laptop’s disk image to a VM and the sudden absence of a TPM killed all of my cached Office credentials.
Most people will stay on Windows... even with all the increasing annoyances from Microsoft... because there's too much important software that runs only on Windows.
And workarounds such as Linux Wine emulator or QEMU virtual machines are still not enough because lots of Windows software won't run in those environments for various compatibility reasons.
E.g. I can't migrate a friend to Linux because her embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM. It doesn't work by passing it through as a USB device to a "Windows virtual machine" under Linux.
Other examples are Adobe Photoshop, CAD software like SolidWorks, etc. Too much inertia out there with Windows-only software.
If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.
My disagreement isn't because wine or proton exist, it's because most people only use a web browser. They check their email, watch tiktok and netflix, and write documents. 90% of people would have all their computing needs met by a basic chromebook.
Here's an example to start: https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/mobile-vs-desktop...
> 15% of adults in the U.S. only use mobile devices to access the internet.
You're down to 85% already who even have the possibility of using your unicorn Windows-only software.
Yes, CNC machinists, mechanical engineers, and graphics designers exist. No, they're actually not the majority of the population. Also keep in mind this thread was talking about personal computers and not just work computers; just because some cashier's required to use a proprietary Windows XP program on their cash register doesn't mean they need to use Windows at home. Your argument is restricted to the small proportion of people who're either required or desire to do day job stuff on their personal PCs (of which not all of them actually need that highly specialized software you're referring to).
While I don't have any sort of built up library of work or experience with a specific propriatary software, consider reccomending Inkscape + the Ink/Stitch extension to do embroidery designs.
I bought a Husqvarna Designer Jade, and the included windows-only software was a 'Lite' version, with an upsell for more advanced features (and pricing that was an additional 25-50% of the embroidery machine itself!), and I suspect a hardware dongle since I spotted references to it. I've been able to get by Ink/Stitch for the simple hobbyist jobs we've needed to do. The machine's USB port just expects a usb storage device, and the ink/stitch software can write the .vp3 files it needed to run a job.
Some streaming services don't work on Linux, the ones that do have degraded video quality, and it generally feels like streaming services are deliberately trying to break the Linux experience because it's associated with piracy.
Swap over whenever you need something on Windows, easy peasy.
I really like stuff to work. My tinkering days are limited.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=windows%20breaks%20dual%...
He's really not a computer guy, and he picked it up no problem.
If she called my bluff I probably would have still helped her, but she was happy enough to use a Mac.
No argument on my end.
I have been running Linux since 2011, and so much more stuff is in the “Just Works” category, especially if you have AMD graphics. When I installed NixOS on my Thinkpad about a year ago, it was almost comical how easy it was for me; I had gotten used to having to waste an entire day messing with drivers and fixing issues in 2012-2015, so it felt kind of weird for stuff to work as expected immediately.
I am trying very hard to get my parents to use something like Linux Mint because the Windows 11 auto-update on my mom’s computer actually prevented it from booting (making me waste an entire day remotely having them flash a live USB so I could rsync over her files to me…thanks MS!), so this might be enough of a final straw for them.
For me, it's always been the local account and network services. So long as I can run the thing with only a monitor and keyboard, I'm happy. The second I am required to have a net connection, or even a mouse, I will be looking for alternatives. It's 100% that simple.
I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".
What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?
I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.
One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.
Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).
Maybe it's just personal preference but I could also never really get the hang of Gnome.
Most questions came because of the Outlook to Thunderbird switch. I can attribute zero questions to KDE. Though I said the new System is called Linux, they refer to it as Windows 11. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Flathub is the best app store around. Can't wait until they allow selling paid apps (they had a few contractors working on it last I checked)
Feels good to be on Linux, man.
DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux and has a free version.
And yes it runs on Linux.
(Although truth be told, the CPU usage is somewhat higher on Linux than on Windows, even with low-latency kernel. Multimedia just doesn't quite shine on Linux yet.)
re. Games, are you sure proton won't work? I've got ~1400 games on steam, and only a handful have serious issues with proton.
I did F# for years in Visual Studio Pro, and I feel like getting used to Rider on Mac took about twenty minutes.
At least on the gaming side, this is happening verrrrry slowly. It's almost entirely driven by the Steam Deck, which has around a 30% market share for linux users running steam. Since last year linux usage is up a solid percentile, and windows is down a similar amount. OSX and Linux both are making slow but steady progress against Windows' market share.
I don't think there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but there might be a decade of slow transition towards it.
I had to do some recovery stuff on my mom’s laptop recently, which has an Intel GPU, and I just had it boot off an Ubuntu flash drive into Ubuntu desktop, and it worked fine, including WiFi.
On my main “game console”, I have an Nvidia card running in an eGPU case, and that was a pain in the ass to set up, so fair enough I suppose.
More likely though, it's going to be "Eh, do I really need a laptop?" and we'll see even more people than we do already just using their phones and maybe an iPad.
I already see it with the non-tech employees at my work. Very few even have laptops at home. They have an iPad, maybe, a gaming console, and their phone. Sooo many people do almost all of their computing from their phones now.
My grandmother, who doesn’t know anything about computers at all, runs Linux Mint. She primarily uses Chrome, and someone set her up with Thunderbird and LibreOffice and she’s been totally fine with that. Keep in mind, this computer is old. When she bought it, it had Windows Vista installed and she’s still getting some life out of it.
I think Linux is in a weird place, where it’s great for people who know a lot about computers or nothing about computers. If all you do is browse the web and write email, Linux is perfectly capable for pretty much anyone. If you’re a software engineer, Linux has a lot of useful utilities and is perfectly ok to debug and fix.
The worst case is someone like my dad, who is kind of in the “prosumer Windows” camp. He doesn’t know a lot about computers but he knows enough to where he would want to dig down and change stuff, and doing that he would have to relearn everything from scratch if he moved to Linux.
I really don't think it's as bad as what you're saying.
I don’t know anything about music production though.
There's an entire world outside of AAA FPS games-as-a-service that require kernel-level anticheat.
Why stop there then? I could pound a nail through my SSD and now it’s even more secure…it won’t even have the opportunity to write compromising data!
For that matter, instead of wasting all this money on transistors and metal and whatnot, why not just have a piece of paper that has the word “computer” written on it? Don’t get much more secure than something that doesn’t even execute code.
Do you know how valve used to make games and now it makes money? What happens when EA comes up with an amazing amazingly effective and cheap anti-cheat solution? And they offer it effectively for free to all indie developers, and it just works?
I don’t care, because I switched over to console for effectively this and other reasons. But Colonel level anti-sheet absolutely must be rejected.
Originally anti-cheat was to detect the running of the mods but of course now are phoning home every thing you are doing on your computer.
When the next window image manager claims windows is secure ask them to turn off the virus scanner. They will look at you like your nuts.
So now my annoyance at windows does battle with my love of mods. I know the nexus folks are working on a new cross platform mod manager, but they have yet to support bethesda games (I suspect for some of the same reasons I had issues).
Always-online single-player is supremely bullshit though.
While anti cheats have obvious benefits and are a dealbreaker for some, be careful what you wish for. It's a slippery slope. One chess streamer famously had to set up multiple cameras pointing at him from different angles to combat cheating accusations.
Until anti cheat design changes entirely (and it may not be fully possible), the freedom and control Linux provides simply doesn’t work with them.
What I don’t know about this is a lot, so I will admit I am speaking out of my ass here.
All of these things are pretty much non-starters for Linux users. You might as well just use windows if you are going to go that route.
Only thing I can guess is, some Devs might see game support as being complicated by the many variations of Linux and not want to see those tickets.
You know, design better games.
Windows anti cheat gets around this by using code signing and Trusted Platform Modules, which Linux would never be able to support without Linux users giving up control of their own operating system, which is not something a Linux user would do.
EDIT: by Linux, I mean Linux+Proton
We're a few years out from machines that, by law, cannot run an alternative OS on bare metal. As it is, Linux only runs on bare metal because Microsoft, the sole Secure Boot key authority for almost all OEMs, deigns to allow it.
I'm basing this on Brazil's "Felca law", that contains stipulations similar to the UK's age-verification act, but extends to end-user operating systems, which must also implement auditable and secure age checks and access controls for minors. Presumably only operating systems that tie user accounts to online accounts for which a government ID is required, much like Windows 11, would be allowed.
Anyway, Microsoft is still trying to make ARM-based "PCs" happen, like "fetch". Per Microsoft's guidelines, ARM-based Windows "PCs" cannot disable Secure Boot and cannot allow addition of user-supplied signing keys, unlike x86-based systems which must allow these things; in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows. Microsoft gonna Microsoft, and if their Microsofting on this leads anywhere, it's toward a PC ecosystem locked down in its entirety.
I’ve not tried it myself, but a quick google seems to indicate people are running Linux on existing ARM64 laptops and there’s active development to try to achieve full support. For example, Ubuntu is installable on a number of off the shelf laptops, including one of Microsoft’s own Surface devices [0].
[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...
This comment could have been written at any point in the past 20 years.
Since then it comes down to someone wanting to go deeper than the surface and that's not for everyone, particularily if they are busy.
Pain can get the attention of even the busiest people so I really hope they keep making user suffer like this because that is the best driver away from windows and off the plantation.
Much has been said about this before, but much as I would like to see a year of the Linux desktop, what I think we're going to see is a situation where other software vendors will increasingly hook into these bullshit "features" and people will continue to use what is pushed out to them even as it gets worse and worse out of necessity. Companies see Microsoft squeezing as much value out of a customer as possible, and they want in; that means less control, more tracking, more ads, online activation, centralized accounts, etc.
I might need to keep some piece of shit Windows computer around just to satisfy that because I think VMs are explicitly not allowed.
I actually just set up a new laptop this morning with Windows 11 LTSC 24H2. I'm an engineer, I can edit config files and burn bootable USB drives and install Intel storage drivers in the setup environment and validate sketchy batch files and compare ISO hashes. Now that I'm done, it's got a pair of fully-offline user accounts, it stays out of the way, it boots in seconds, the Windows-only software I have to use for work is no longer nagging me about being out of support, I'm quite happy with it.
But it was not trivial. Had I not known what I was doing, there were a dozen ways it could have gone wrong. I suppose it's nice that I'm not vulnerable to Mossad surreptitiously installing a MITM-patched OS while I sleep, but secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick. And I have a good sense for which links are the tools I actually want to download and run, and which links are scams.
But it's nowhere near smooth enough for me to point a non-technical peer at it and say "Oh yeah, if you don't want your OS to do that, just install LTSC."
Any tips for moving to Win11 LTSC? (I've been avoiding Win11 for as long as I can...)
First, just using more cross-platform software on my Mac. Ditched Safari for Firefox; replaced my MacOS-only password manager; using iMessage less.
Bought the cheapest Framework 13 laptop, running stock Fedora. Omarchy is interesting but too weird for me. Gnome, is still familiar enough.
Using the Linux machine more and more, feels very fresh. To be honest not feeling this excited in a long time. Perhaps the year of Linux on the desktop is indeed coming.
But back to the article on hand... Windows has been shoddy since forever, and Windows-compatible laptops are mostly mediocre things that can also run Linux. I could absolutely see a lot of casual Windows users switching to Linux for email, web, and office tasks.
> not being able to load the latest .Net; Teams and more and more other apps refuse to run despite the OS still being "in support" now
1. logifail: I've been using Win10 LTSC since it first shipped, but the pain of it keeps increasing
2. MarcelOlsz: We're so screwed...Win 10 days are numbered
3. You: Win 10 days are numbered in years
4. Me: Erm + quote from #1
5. You: how is this relevant to number of years
6. Me: He's saying there are problems now
7. You (parent of this): I was replying to someone else
8. Me: this
As I understand it, you seem to respond that actually Windows 10 has a long life ahead (its "days are numbered in years"). Yet just above that--the comment causing Marcel's lamentations--is evidence that Windows 10 is already on its way out now.
How would that evidence--that Windows 10 is already a problem--not be relevant to your assertion that Windows 10's days will be numbered in years?
How will its days be numbered in years if there are problems with ecosystem support for it today?
For the record, I detest Windows 11 and intend to stay on Windows 10 until I'm forced off of it
What do you think that means for the second person? EOL or Teams? Compare it to Sonoma vs Tahoe.
> Yet just above that is evidence that Windows 10 is already on its way out now.
For a different person for a different reason! which you keep conflating. If it's already out, why would you complain that its days are numbered compared to an OS that "sucks"???
> How will its days be numbered in years if there are problems with ecosystem support for it today?
Again, if you conflate different arguments into one, how are the days numbered instead of 0 if you believe these problems mean you have no days left / can't measure them in years?
> For the record, I...intend to stay on Windows 10 until I'm forced off of it
Exactly, you see, a different person has a different perspective on whether 10 is expired.
I think it means the same thing for #1, #2, and me: "Windows 10's days are numbered" means "unfortunately we can't effectively stay on it for a whole lot longer because more and more of the ecosystem is dropping support." #2 was rejoining #1, not disagreeing. All 3 of us prefer Windows 10 over 11.
The fact that things have stopped supporting it doesn't mean it's immediately unusable today, it means it's getting increasingly difficult and thus...its days are numbered.
There will come a point when it's too impractical, and the writing is on the wall that's going to happen a lot sooner than years from now.
I've not bothered since switching from Win 10 LTSC to Win 11. Win 11 is definitely faster and better for everyday use in 2025, IMO.
I start with installing a Tiny11 build: https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/the-complete-tiny1...
Massgrave it to pro.
Then I debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
And you end up with a super zippy install that I've had zero compatibility problems with over the last year.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how secure boot works, but why would it prevent you from using the hardware? At worst I'd think you'd just need to reinstall your OS. That's not a brick.
> While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.
If they're only worried that their users may end up with an incomplete Windows install, surely the solution is to provide a better way to set up Windows with a local account? It's not like people are digging around in CMD and RegEdit during the install for the fun of it, they could immediately stop everyone from using these workarounds by adding back the "set up with a local account" button
These are probably the typical fail-upwards product manager decisions. Maybe Windows will sooner than later go the way of the Xbox.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
"Only 3% of users regularly use the start menu." was the justification.
Then they did a bunch of research with eye tracking software to justify the new 'start screen' saying that it was actually better for users who do use the start menu because they were able to locate an item on the full sceeen overlay faster than the traditional start menu.
So of course they figure they can insert ads for their own shit, make it a Bing website search, whatever. People don't want fucking an internet search. They're looking for things on their computer.
You're not supposed to "look" for where something is, you're supposed to know. Just like you're not supposed to look for the X in the top right corner of an application. You know it's there and you know that if you move the mouse into the corner you can click it (which is very infuriating when some UI design decides that the top right corner pixel does not count for pressing the X button). The start menu in the bottom left worked in a similar way.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
I am seeing the exact opposite. It's not just that my tiny company has completely moved to Win10 Enterprise LTSC IoT, but every newly bought computer gets Win11 nuked and that installed. In Germany (shady) resellers of Win10 LTSCblabla licenses are popping up.
Pretty much everyone in the embedded electronics industry that has to use Windows is doing ass covering right now by buying the LTSC licenses while you still can.
The departures time table on your airport or train station is not going to be replaced because M$ claims that Win11 is incompatible with it. It will be moved to LTSC if it's not already on that for long. Same for ATMs, the strange machine my dentist uses together with her drills etc.
Of course I have no clue how/if Win10 LTSC market share is or can be detected at all. But from inside the embedded electronics industry I can say: Panic buying of Win10 LTSC licenses going on.
Not a contradiction to what you wrote, by the way: "Nobody" ) is buying Win10 Pro or Ent anymore. But they are buying LTSC in heaps according to sadly only anecdotical evidence.
) Well, not in their online shop, but if you ask, you very well can still buy new Thinkpads with Win10 installed from Lenovo, for example.
You're conflating the vertical integration of hardware and software (Apple's walled garden) with Microsoft's current direction (you can't use Windows without MS online services).
Microsoft has never given a damn about customers being free to use the software the way they want to. In light of how the company is behaving today, the "openness" of Windows WRT to hardware was clearly only about market share.
> having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc You mean all the stuff apple brought to personal computers?
By the way, you can use a Mac (and iPhone) without an Apple ID and there's no sign that this is changing.
> The detailed CUA specification, published in December 1987, is 328 pages long. It has similarities to Apple Computer's detailed human interface guidelines (139 pages). The Apple HIG is a detailed book specifying how software for the 1984 Apple Macintosh computer should look and function. When it was first written, the Mac was new, and graphical user interface (GUI) software was a novelty, so Apple took great pains to ensure that programs would conform to a single shared look and feel.
Windows NT came out in 1993 by the way.
Parent comment by mine by the way also did not claim anyone invented anything, but that Windows once HAD and FOLLOWED human interface guidelines that made the system optimized to be used by... humans. While now MS is fighting their human users.
But to give you feedback: Sometimes it is nice to sit on a shady park bench on a Sunday without an apple fan boy running by with a loudspeaker "AND DID YOU KNOW? JOBS INVENTED BENCHES!!!".
You then went on a rant about how the reason Windows stopped having standard menu structures is because the Windows UI team now only consists of Mac users.
Even though you don't need an Apple ID to log in to macOS, and those standard menu structures come from Apple in the first place.
Thanks for the feedback. Your communication style is schizophrenic and melodramatic and I still have no idea what you actually think.
Anyway there is a lot you can do with the default apps. But yes you can’t use the App Store without an Apple ID.
How do you handle the "for gaming" aspect?
I'd love to move to Linux but Battlefield is about to release and that's what my friends are going to play, so...
Think MS is in for a rough ride on Windows. Short of corporate world - Excel/Sharpoint/AD - there is just no moat. Browsers work fine on all platforms, dev work is better on linux anyway and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable. And mac side is obviously competitive on various fronts too.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.
Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.
[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware
the problem is, the wide masses still keep buying the latest AAA game thanks to literally sometimes hundreds of millions of euros worth of marketing (GTA V already had 150 M$ marketing budget well over a decade ago), and the free-to-play "whale hunter" games are even worse.
With ye olde purchased online games, like UT2004, you'd think twice before cheating, otherwise you'd get your serial number banned (sometimes not just on one server, but on an entire fleet of servers run by the same op) and you'd have to buy a new license. That alone put a base floor on cheater costs.
In contrast, Fortnite or other f2p games? These are overrun by cheaters, there is no cost attached at all, so it's obvious that the only solution is to ratchet up the anti-cheat measures.
All hail capitalism and the quest for f2p developers to lure in the 1-5% of utter whales that actually bring in the money.
The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.
AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.
Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.
Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.
Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.
Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.
In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.
At one point, during a Dota match, every single Windows machine crashed. And my Linux machine was the only one left in the server.
So not only does it run faster but it's more stable too.
Wine may not be an emulator, but Proton includes a completely necessary translation layer if you intend to play DirectX games on Linux.
On Mac, Apple provides an open source emulation layer, D3DMetal, to translate from DirectX to Metal which is used by Wine.
As someone who has used both Windows and Linux to game on the same x86_64 device, the performance hit with Proton is pretty much negligible (and sometimes games actually run faster on Linux).
Rosetta is a translation layer that only operates the first time you run a given x86 app on Mac, and creates an ARM translation that is written to disk and used in the future.
Does that mean it has no overhead?
Also, Rosetta is more like a transpiler, since it basically recompiles the binary, whereas the others are literally layers that basically take calls in one API and translate them to another. They're pretty much the same thing as ANGLE.
It's a one time only cost, since Rosetta only runs the first time you launch an app and the translation is written to disk to be used in the future.
That means there is no ongoing cost by your logic, and Proton translating an API call every time it is used is worse.
D3DMetal compiles shades into Metal.
So it doesn't introduce overhead?
> Low level Graphics APIs such as Vulkan, DirectX, Metal, and WebGPU, are converging to a model similar to the way GPUs are currently built.
https://alain.xyz/blog/comparison-of-modern-graphics-apis
Proton is not some magic software that is immune to taking a performance hit when you translate from one API to another.
It's sort of like saying that C++ is inherently a performance hit over C because you have to do more translation. Well, no, the translation happens ahead of time, and the result of the translation might be better suited to run on the hardware. For example, C++ has semantics that allow optimizations that are impossible in C. Rust ALSO has semantics that allow optimizations that are impossible in C.
But, I'm being sloppy here. Proton is many tools, and DXVK is just one of them, WINE is another.
But, of the modern graphics APIs, Metal is the most unique. And it does have good reason - the M series chips do have some unique GPU hardware that allows them to do certain things faster.
It's just that those things aren't generally useful or automatic, WE have to set it up. But we can't do that if we use automatic translation.
The frame rates are quite low on the base M4. Cyberpunk 2077 test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gID9S2hwJpU
I think you need an M4 Pro or a Max for a good gaming experience with AAA games.
Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.
Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).
I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.
People for whom the computer is just an appliance with limited applications (and who recognise their relationship to the computer as such) might even be better able to switch, provided that everything is set up for them. My elderly parents used a Linux box I set up for them for years at some point.
Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.
After a lifetime of Windows use, I'd even say MacOS is almost on par with Linux for development, while Windows' best feature on this front is WSL so you don't have to use Windows.
IMO the two biggest pains with MacOS is (1) brew is not as good as any other package manager in my experience (mostly in bugs that need manual fixing) and (2) Docker naturally is much worse (not just for performance, but for requiring 'Docker desktop'.) All the other pains are just the myriad niceities I miss from a lifetime of mostly Linux that MacOS just can never have.
I've been happily not using brew for a couple years now. Nix can function as a brew replacement without much fuss. However it lacks a simple alternative to brew services (for that you have to enter the rabbit hole which is home-manager).
The Dock is the biggest illustration of this : good luck if you have opened more than two windows of the same app.
That's a big market to just handwave away. Manufacturers have been pretty scared off from shipping Linux by default on consumer PCs, so the only way to affect Windows sales is to impact the corporate world.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
I used to run AutoCAD on a 80286 with a maths co-pro with 1 MB RAM. It has changed somewhat since!
Who gives a shit about QB? - you could just run it in a VM and it probably runs under Wine. You can also just switch accounting vendor - there are quite a few. Double book keeping is a good 600 years old and can be considered pretty open source these days.
You may even do some real good to your business (if you think you need QB) by going old school and really getting to grips with the numbers. Buy three huge ledgers and label them: "Sales" "Purchase" and "Nominal" or "General". Also grab an exercise book to act as a cash book and a couple of notebooks to document the system. Now, you will need to do docs too so you will need a drawing board to design your forms ...
Now CAD is not the most common business software in use by anyone which is probably why you went for AutoCAD (which you have heard of), rather than, say, Solidworks or Catia. Autodesk is a vendor and not a stuff.
The alternatives not only exist, they're often pushed by the very same developers who made the original which is, supposedly, untouchable.
I hate Microsoft and Windows just as much as the next self-respecting nerd, but this is no less a lol right now than it was 20 years ago. It’s like Linux users all play the same 15 titles that have Linux support and think those 15 games reflect broad ecosystem support.
Most games that come out today, in 2025, are playable on day 1. I'm not just talking about games that are less graphically demanding (eg. Silksong), but games like Silent Hill f. It just works out of the box.
So yeah, even the most recent, graphically-intense AAA games run on Linux thanks to Proton.
Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windows version of the game instead of the official Linux port.
???
Oh right. ‘Except for games with anti cheats’ - so like, at least half the market lol, and more than 90% of games by game time.
But not all popular games are available on Steam, Fortnite or Rocket League are examples.
Halo Wars 2
Crackdown 3
Gears of War 4
The reason is that these are UWP-only games which are only available through the Microsoft store. Which means they will likely never run on Linux.
The problem is there's no real alternative.
Your grandma is not going to use Linux. So the choice is between windows and mac.. and the truth is a lot of apps people use are windows only.
I don't see windows losing desktop share anytime soon.
Microsoft has a strong cycle of "applications run on Windows" -> "device vendors choose to bundle Windows" -> "people use applications on Windows", but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
If someone who uses their computer to browse the web and check the email picked up a laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu, they'd likely be perfectly fine with it.
>but that has been eroded, in part thanks to Wine and the work put in by people at Valve.
Eroded even more so by the user-hostile approach of Microsoft itself.
Exactly with things like being a complete failure to recognize a strong valid need for general users to only opt-in to an account according to their own personal needs alone. Not with Microsoft or Google or anybody else known to be a source of unwanted ads or anti-professional annoyances.
Why abandon a remaining security element that can protect against PII compromise like no other?
It's just sad to lose an essential feature that has always been built-in to Windows since the beginning, which helped make Windows into a far better business machine than would have been otherwise possible.
And why now when security is more important than ever?
The people who will have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who need proprietary software products that are unavailable for Linux and whose needs are not met by open-source alternatives. Microsoft Office is still the standard for office software, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is still the standard for many creatives.
If LibreOffice ever reached 100% compatibility and feature parity with Microsoft Office, and if the Adobe Creative Cloud ever got ported to Linux, then this could spell trouble for Windows.
That sounds reasonable, given that
> ChromeOS is built on top of the Linux kernel. Originally based on Ubuntu, its base was changed to Gentoo Linux in February 2010 (--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS)
My plan for years has been to install Linux Mint + Cinnamon for my grandma when she next needs a new laptop... but she still hasn't needed one :(. And she's slowly getting too old for any new computer
Every Windows upgrade was a big change again. The UI would change each time, Windows Live Mail got discontinued, Office got ribbons, etc. Why reinvent the wheel each time? I've replaced:
- Windows Live Mail with Thunderbird, that has been stable.
- Microsoft Office with Libreoffice, that has been stable.
- The next item on the list was going to be Windows itself, since Cinnamon hasn't significantly changed since I started using Linux over ten years ago. It still has a start menu, system tray, window list at the bottom (without the windows collapsing and hiding!), everything made for usability and working as you expect.
The only exception is (grand)parents that need custom software. E.g. my mom has custom software (from Hema I think? Or Bruna maybe?) for editing photo albums to then send it to a print shop and get a real photo album. That will be web based nowadays I imagine. I should ask her but that could still be a barrier to switching
Edit: Similar issue on Android btw. There isn't one function that my (grand)parents use, that Android 16 has that Android 4 did not. The only thing that keeps changing under them is UI. Sure, developer APIs got nicer, support for dual-frequency GNSS is there, screens got taller... none of that needed to touch the UI. Sadly Google does a phenomenal job of obsoleting old OS versions quickly so you need to keep buying new. EU law for longer device support doesn't even help because you still need to upgrade that OS and can't simply use an LTS with security updates
Unfortunately, many MBAs will see it as leaving money on the table.
So yes, the product might cost some money, but that doesn’t mean it’s meeting financial targets, since they grow year on year.. but PCs as a market are not growing at the same rate.
As always, it's about controlling users via high switching costs. I hope we come up with an improved webauthn spec which ruins this for them.
I'm trying to decide if I want to transition my work computer to Linux or Windows 10 LTSC. Most of my day is spent working inside of WSL2. So, it kind of seems like I should just get on with using Linux native, but several decades of sunken cost have kept me on Windows. I don't think I have a desire to 'upgrade' to Windows 11 and Windows 10 Pro is just about EOL.
This way you can slowly migrate your software to the Linux side and maybe eventually forget to turn on your VM for months.
If you happen to not need those pieces, and you don't care about running super out-of-date software? Sure it might work. But it's not a Good Idea in general.
I estimate that 95% of people would be fine with Windows 10 21H2 LTSC. The 5% might miss some 3rd party software that requires version 22H2 to run (just because it's the latest, not for any technical reasons).
Name a single missing part that destroys the "generalpurposeness" of the OS?
Some like the Microsoft Store can be installed afterwards.
Some like Windows Mixed Reality cannot be installed afterwards.
So check carefully what you actually need and decide based on that.
Awesome that they created and then gutted a standard that just bricks my $400 device that they barely even seem to care to support on launch. There's patches that exist for 11 but they're just that, patches, and my WMR experience is already very jank. Nvidia also seems to be the target for most development so I'm not sure where I'll go once this all settles as I have my gaming PC in a nice position where I can just hop on after work and everything just works with no interruptions or issues currently.
11 is a hot mess and I already know that linux/proton simply won't work for the games I tend to quickly hop onto with friends.
WMR situation isn't great but there are ways out. If you have a NVIDIA GPU then you can use Oasis on Windows 10 LTSC (AMD GPUs require Windows 11 24H2 for Oasis). Also on Linux, support for WMR devices has improved markedly via Envision / Monado, but some tinkering is required and it is still behind Windows.
I start with installing a Tiny11 build: https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/the-complete-tiny1...
Massgrave it to pro.
Then I debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
And you end up with a super zippy install that I've had zero compatibility problems with over the last year.
And on that note, have to recommend this tool for them: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Windows for all its faults still has some semblance of the majority of the OS being developed under one roof so things actually work together.
My favourite part of Windows is how opening the start menu causes CPU usage to spike because the start menu is made using React, versus using native UI components for it. Is... that the kind of "working together" that you mean?
I've been running Linux since 2009 and these complaints are fine to pull out when levelled at contemporary Linux, but it's grown up hugely since Valve started throwing money at it. I haven't had to do any major config on a Linux distro outside of "things I wanted to do with it, just because" since around 2021 (this includes games via Steam or Lutris). Meanwhile I very, very regularly have to hear stories from people about how much work they're putting into their Windows setup just to have a remotely functional OS, including replacing the entire start menu component with a random hack made by a private non-Microsoft sanctioned group.
It's honestly very funny, and it's going to get funnier as the trend keeps continuing.
And I tried Fedora at the time but, if I remember correctly, that was the distro that wouldn't load the fingerprint sensor settings page.
Pop_OS!, Fedora, etc. are all better and much more stable, and I can't see this changing given Shuttleworth's weird, bizzare, misogynistic, and ableist hiring practices.
I will say I don't' have a strong opinion on Snap vs Flatpak, but I didn't know that about the CEO's hiring practices. Definitely not interested in touching Ubuntu again after reading some first-hand accounts of his behavior.
Searching for problems about linux is going to yield much higher quality results.
Apple may not "force" you to use an iCloud account for their devices, but they sure push it hard.
As far as Linux communities go, Red Hat, Arch, Cisco, and even Ubuntu have also done their fair share of "bad decisions".
when users make a technical effort to workaround these bad decisions, and you keep chasing after them, subverting said technical measures, in order to enforce said bad decisions, this has gone far beyond being bad decisions; it is being done on purpose to prevent users from opting out of a Hostile ecosystem.
Edit: Actually, currently the whole thing is failing after the second reboot for other reasons. I get an error that says there is some malformed command in the unattend.xml or something. Couldn't fully debug it yet - it's possible the setup succeeds after I figure this one out.
I have found my Windows apps for everything work (or have equivalent or better Linux versions) and will soon be switching my non-technical wife over to Linux to avoid Windows 10.
For her, I've looked at her workflows and setup a configuration that I can use on her new machine that will setup all of her apps and menu settings so it's as seamless a transition as possible. She rarely needs to update her computer or apps, the latest Debian 13 "Trixie" release is what I'm going to try for her.
We don't even need native games. Proton, when it works, is amazing. Win32 is effectively now the stable ABI that Linux always needed but never had.
The real problem is kernel level anti-cheat, which will never happen on Linux, but more importantly, gamers should be pushing back against it even on Windows. It's invasive. The latest of which you can't even enable virtualization support in Windows if you want the anti-cheat to run, which also means you lose virtualization based security, no WSL, etc. It's completely obnoxious and I hope Microsoft cracks down on it, because if they do then more games will run on Proton.
I hope they don't. Competitive gaming has been begging to stop cheaters for a long time. Ring 0 anti cheat has shown to be very effective against the vast majority of cheaters. Compare CSGO with something like Valorant. It's clear it's effective. Is it invasive? Sure. Is it mandatory? No (sorry you just cant play the game).
Bring back private lobbies/private servers then. Make the anti-cheat optional. Those that want to play in public lobbies have to rootkit their PC or play on console, those that don't still get to play the game without it but not in public lobbies.
The main issue is that a lot of people I know need things like Photoshop or propriety CAD apps or video editing software where the alternatives are simply not acceptable - sure I can mention some OSS alternatives but it's not really my field; this is their job and they can't really take the velocity hit, or waste time finding out mid-project that it can't do what they need it to do.
Games requiring anti-cheat however are a big issue that still require a dual boot Windows or VM.
I realized recently that at some point I stopped even checking ProtonDB before buying games on Steam, I guess because its been so long since I've run into one that didn't work. I play a pretty wide variety of games, but not so much the type of competitive multiplayer FPS that seems to have the worst Linux compatibility due to anti-cheat.
Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.
Other than that, there’s literally nothing I need from Microsoft currently.
MS is little more than a rent seeker to me.
I think this applies now also with their complete disregard for the windows 10 EOL. Exposing, if I remember correct : ~40% of the windows market [0]. This seems to me as negligence in their duty to ensure a level of security and quality.
The people who've made these decisions don't seem to realize that there are more options than ever to replace them. It's almost as if they're actively pushing people to find them. Their Azure offering is making ground though [1] and maybe that's where they want to put their efforts in. If that's the case, good riddance.
> “While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”
Imagine being able to use your device however you wanted to. Apperantly that luxury is no longer yours. I've had to setup windows 11 on machines with no wifi drivers from w11 and without the oobe overwrite I would not be able to complete the installation. What possible reason could they have for that.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk... [1] https://turbo360.com/blog/azure-market-share
1. Provide security LTS for critical software as-purchased. If you bought Win 7, you get it. No forced upgrades.
Or
2. Force release of source code if not providing LTS. You don't want to support it fine. But don't block people from what they bought.
Pipe dream and wildly expensive to corps but hey they don't give a shit about us anyway.
Tangentially there is a movement happening in this regard for video games for studios to provide EOL options instead of bricking the game you bought. For software I haven't seen an example of local installations that get bricked after remote services go offline. Maybe for example if Jetbrains closed shop tomorrow and basically said to all users, your license wont be validated, too bad.
Make no mistake - this is yet another way they just squeeze more out of users and play innocent when they don't cough up cash or switch to 11 to sell them more things/more of their data instead. ESU is available even to consumers for the next year, for a per-pc-fee, and corporate users for at least the next 3.
Local-only commands removal: We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly.Poor people. Surely Microsoft is fixing this by giving them a proper local skip that doesn’t bypass the other critical setup?
You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.
I wonder how much of this is Microsoft trying to create recurring profits from the base (Home) sku, rather than that they care about local-user installations in any other circumstance.
I like windows, Its a great system specially for being productive, but the godamn start menu using react and edge and the online requirements are a pain in the ass.
Sometimes it just hangs while you click the windows key. All I want is to open notepad++...
(same reason they still have network printer driver vulnerabilities because they refuse to fix old shit in the name of backward compatibility)
As long as WinPE and the core of Windows exists in its current form, there will always be a way to use Windows entirely offline. The modding scene also still exists, and although it's a fraction of what it used to be (the peak of Windows-modding was probably in the 98/2K/XP era), some extremely talented individuals remain and fight. (One might ask why they haven't moved to Linux; the answer is usually "because Windows is still more familiar, and it's more fun to hack and rebel". To them, to migrate to a different OS is to surrender.)
It's a horrible situation. Specially what Google is doing, as there is no real alternative, like Linux is for the desktop.
We grew up with computers where you could install anything, code programs to run them for yourself on your machine. This was also valid for smartphones to some degree, and it's terrible to see that you're now in a position that you can't "just code an app" for your phone, everything has to be vetted by the big ones.
Once Recall spreads across Windows installs, let's say this takes 5 years, then all of the devices are no longer your devices, but just surveillance machines for those companies and their governments, granting you permission to use certain apps.
Maybe the biggest problem are companies like Qualcomm because it feels like they only grant companies like Google the permission to use their tech, and not us, even if we own the boards they sell.
Linux is for servers and dev work, not day-to-day use.
Unfortunately us folks who grew up on sane, usability tested interfaces are not in charge anymore. A disease that has spread across all OSs. Recommend Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in order of least traditional to most traditional window controls.
Also there is a dconf setting to configure titlebar buttons for GTK/gnome decedents. KDE has a GUI.
I'm happy Gnome exists, but you do you.
People like to rage, and rage about how Gnome killed their father or whatever and I just get tired of the constant hate towards a workflow that I actually like.
Have have you used a version of macOS made in the past 5 years? Fischer-Price is the new Jony Ive.
The versions that are respectful of users are gated behind "being a company" requirement.
(exception of Windows Server but it's kinda messy to setup for gaming. Though it kinda shows that when they have actual competition on a market they do nice things)
(I wonder how subscriptions could handle multiple machines; today it often happens that people have multiple computers but subscription cost would quickly add up; I guess they could have different tiers with different allowed concurrent use count)
- I wanted to install minecraft for my boy. I couldn't just start a game. It required me to tie in account to the system. First I don't like that. Second is that we have lost pin, and could not remember password or something, so we have gone through maze of xbox, microsoft online settings and whatnots. On Linux? Pass account, and password, we are set to go
- The second encounter was with playing a older FIFA game. After launching it complained about some dll file. Turned out it was missing VC redistributable. You had to manually find, and visit, Microsoft page, download old type installer, which my kid was not familiar with (Next, Next, C: program files, I accept).
After so many occasions I see that linux is even easier than Windows. I use bottles to play Warhammer Boltgun. Sure it stutters some times, but not that much. The pros and cons of having Linux looks better every day.
I don't think it's the decisions themselves, but the (inevitable?) consequence in the coming months and years. The biggest example would be WannaCry attacking winxp in 2017, except it's not just individuals/companies who haven't got around to updating but additional hurdles added by MS.
Apple: free as in speech, not free as in Porsche.
How is this possible in a world where MS wants installations to be online?
Meanwhile, Linux installer recognized the wifi right away and worked perfectly fine at full speed.
I think I've been blocked from continuing an installation once, so I assume you'll just have to plug something in that it can detect or grab an install image which has the drivers.
I swapped over to primarily use linux a while ago, but was surprised that they've made windows 10 look like (what I think is) windows 11. When did that happen?
I still think Rufus is perfectly sufficient for avoiding these issues and/or using autounattend. Ultimately you just need to get past first install and nothing else will be an issue using a local account on Windows 11.
I'm fine with using online services, I just don't want my online services account being the thing that controls access to my local computers. Especially when it can be locked or deleted by Microsoft for whatever reason.
Not that that should keep you on Windows, of course.
So I digged into it, and changed my opinion - Microsoft is right, for the Microsoft Account, using a password locally instead of a PIN is LESS secure.
TL;DR: if you want to allow offline login, you need to keep the hash/token to the Microsoft Account locally, and this is dangerous, some malware could steal that, and impersonate you to login to your Microsoft Account. Using a TPM PIN removes this threat - the hash/token is never kept locally, so there is nothing to steal, and Microsoft could still ask for the account password from time to time when they need to refresh the token, and you can't brute force the short PIN (yes, this requires trusting the TPM)
> I just don't want my online services account being the thing that controls access to my local computers. Especially when it can be locked or deleted by Microsoft for whatever reason.
That never happens. You can boot from an Windows install ISO and reset the credentials if you really need to get in. True, might be difficult for your average user.
I'm not following. I thought the whole issue is that users _do not_ want to use microsoft account locally and that microsoft fights that.
My next build will be solo boot!
My work machine is a Mac though I don't get any say in that.
But the fingerprint scanner works. The fingerprint scanner works!
Everything else has been fine.
At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
I understand the complexity with the Windows codebase... it's fkn massive! However, to be able to push out a Windows update and break something literally every single time is something for the history books!
Anyway, I need Windows for some of my software, like my VST's (Roland Earth Piano, XLN Audio) so Linux isn't an option unless there is something I'm missing!
I use Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC with the Massgrave activation... that's me until I retire hopefully. I'd encourage everyone to do the same.
Also updates have broken my printer 3 times (that I can remember). At least once my network connection failed due to updates.
With the resources they have, it's unforgivable.
They gotta make back those hundreds of billions they lit on fire to chase the dream of eliminating all their employees with AI. This will force a lot of places to pay for Azure Endpoint to setup their stuff if you really can no longer sign in without an online account.
You guys are smoking crack if you think regular people are going Linux.
I’ve never been a Windows hater like some people in the industry, and have actually enjoyed and appreciated some of the weirdness and quirks from an OS perspective. I’ve also known
But man this Win11 stuff feels so fucking extreme it’s ridiculous. No I won’t use your MS account. I’d have switched over to Linux or BSD if it wasn’t for games/niche hardware (yes, I know of proton, but this is an HN thread so my personal anecdotes override your evidence)
The decline of Windows will cause a huge power vacuum that Linux distributions can in no way cover. Who will support the huge swaths of tech non-savy average Joe and Brenda users (mostly device drivers, games, Office) that sometime will need to open the command terminal? May be a new future trillion-$ company will come with a new proprietary desktop OS, possibly based on Linux, like android.
It's a platform which means you need it everywhere.
Microsoft Windows has really lost its way.
Microsoft’s current strategy is to 1) keep a stranglehold on enterprise (so, Office and 365 subscriptions) and 2) make money on workloads regardless of platform (with Azure).
What new software, besides games, targets windows anymore? If you wanted to target windows, what SDK and language would you build on, and how many times will it be replaced with $new_hotness in the next 10 years?
When you get past all the garbage, it's a fine OS to work in. Then again, so is MacOS, many flavors of Linux, etc. As the importance of the OS itself becomes less and less important for general consumers when most people live in the browser for their day-to-day job, Microsoft will find it harder to sell licenses (maybe they already are?), and they will resort to more ways to extract money from users, driving more of them away.
fwiw, I prefer the ergonomics of Windows to any other OS for daily activities and non-dev work, but it's such a weak preference that I wouldn't hesitate to switch if they ever actually force any of this MS account or always-online spyware without recourse.
I'm glad I barely have to touch Windows anymore, it really has gone to shit
Continuing to use an operating system, the only software that have full control over your digital life, from a company that have so much disrespect for their users and that is actively hostile against your choices, at one point that’s Stockholm Syndrome.
Look how that changed.
Windows Recall 'We'll never use this in any bad way whatsoever' Sure thing.
Windows 10 goes EOL in 8 days, with the EU forcing Microsoft to give their customer bases security patches. Not anywhere else though, and not in the U.S.
What was the end goal with that? Move everybody over to Windows 11; on their EOL page it lists places you can donate your old non-working hardware to. Forcing users to do what? Buy new overpriced hardware when what they have is fine?
People jumped to Windows 7 out of spite; with Linux Desktop marketshare still slowly, steadily rising over the last 10 months. Windows 7 is EOL and no longer receives security patches, so security wise people are a lot worse off than what was anticipated.
Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
I own this iPad, as in: it's mine. Why should I, and why would I want to put MY device's access and security on the whims of company?
They want to own our hardware, and our software.
I for one preach Linux Desktop, Manjaro XFCE for me. I think people are sticking with Windows 7 despite it being EOL because games and their software will for the most part not run in to issues linux gaming may be facing.
That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice. No cloud accounts/everything being logged on the desktop that people do, no 'requirements' to utilize the new software, and no 'requirements' to connect people to cloud backup systems to later coerce and push people to buy.
If you saw the same report of that, it turned out to be a UA anomaly. Most likely very few people actually went back to Win 7, which now has quite bad compatibility with newer hardware and software.
I wouldn't get too excited about that. That might just be because people are moving off of desktops entirely and now only own mobile devices, a market where Linux may as well not exist (excluding Android). The number goes up, because at large, the portion of people who run Linux desktops are less likely to pivot to using only a mobile phone as they tend to be hobbyists/enthusiasts.
If they'd just been upfront that they were directly targeting a few US companies and prescribed exactly what to do, then the DMA wouldn't be a mess that made some things worse, and they could have made Apple to do what they wanted.
Where do you get these figures from? Is there a sensible % increase?
I've been using Linux desktop for a decade now and I am certain it still used by few, and nothing has changed recently. Or you're telling me 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop?
If it has a passcode and you remember the passcode, you should still be able to wipe the device with Apple Configurator?
If the situation is that you don't have a passcode, but you do have an iCloud account where you don't remember the password and can't access the email address, and either don't have access to the recovery phone number or never specified one, then yeah. You might need to find your receipt and bring it to an Apple store to be reset.
Great question! You did configure it that way, so it might be worth asking yourself.
Devils advocate. Everyone really should be on Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0 in the Windows space. Windows 11 is really there as a checkpoint to force people to upgrade to more secure hardware. If you dont care about security, you probably dont care about security updates, you can remain with Windows 10.
Thats not to say that they went about this in a pro consumer way. Its been bungled. But specifically on the point of hardware upgrades, for your average windows user the hardware isnt really "fine" as you put it.
>Here's the thing, I started up an old iPad last night and the e-mail no longer exists nor can be created, so I can't do a lost password, I can't log in, so I can't install apps, or even format the device without some 'Account Lock'
On the apple front, they get 10x the amount of flak for "enabling" stolen hardware to be reformatted and reused, than they get for bricking people who lose access to an account.
Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
>That ain't the way. Your computer. Your choice.
We really need a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Apple wants you to have a tablet to spend money on apps.
You need hardware built outside of that paradigm to have a hope of avoiding a mess of locked down anti consumer nonsense.
nope. only useful for corporate setting. We should be able to run anything we want, however we want, without any arbitrary requirements by MS. Especially if it was proven already that it isn't a hard requirement to run the OS - just an arbitrary setting.
It just paves road for more invasive DRM and even more locked down systems.
If they have issue with crashes, and taking blame for corporate AV failures - don't give out kernel level access to them.
>Recovery is expendable in Apple town. Recovery of iCloud accounts enabled identity theft and personal photos of celebs to be released. Recovery of hardware enables theft. Its a losing proposition.
I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
There's nothing depending on it that prevents OS to run.
Right, crazy I swear I hung a lantern on that, implying you could just keep using Windows 10.
>I don't care as a customer. I want my data, I don't care about corporate profit margins - and I shouldn't need to. Data theft is pure service issue of them not vetting recovery enough - due to cutting costs on it.
Right, crazy again I swear I thought I wrapped up by saying we needed a hardware path without conflicting priorities.
Microsoft's idea of Security is security from me, not security for me. They use this overloaded language because it's so hard to argue against. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Oh you must not care about being secure huh???
My point was, if you dont care about Secure Boot / Bitlocker / TPM2.0, then you probably dont also care about security updates. Not whatever insult you thought I was making.
If your thoughts were terminated, that was entirely self inflicted.
Secure Boot and TPM are ways to attest that what is running is what Microsoft signed. This is only useful if I think that non-nation-state attackers will have physical access to my hardware. Nation-state attackers can probably get something signed with the public secure boot keys. TPM is just more of the same — it lets the software running on a computer verify that it has not been changed from what Microsoft signed. If I controlled the signing key (perhaps every manufactured device has its own key that is sold with the device, which I can then sign whatever OS I want with), then I could gain some security without this control loss, and that would be useful.
Regarding bitlocker, I can encrypt my drive just fine with no TPM as long as I do not expect my OS to be tampered with (which requires physical access or running something untrusted as root). I can simply use a long password with many hash cycles, so if someone stole my drive they could not decrypt it without the password. But, if the key were in the TPM, then nation-state actors could probably get it back out, depending on exact implementation (for example for biometric unlock). So, in this way, using a TPM is less secure.
We should also do away with TPMs in most cases, since all that they serve to do is attest that the corporation with the keys to the TPM decided what was running and that no one interfered with that. It's DRM, plain and simple.
There are other security updates that I may want, however, even if I am not concerned about giving an attacker root of physical access. For example, Windows has had vulnerabilities which can be exploited over a network.
Huh? I certainly care about the latter but not the former, and I doubt I'm in the minority.
And how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains? How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating? Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience? They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
Because I care that I'm secure, but I don't care that my computer isn't secure from me.
> how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains?
Forever, because the same code works for both unless they go out of their way to do extra work for it not to.
> How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating?
There are basically zero attacks against ordinary consumers that SB/TPM protect from. The kinds of attacks regular people need to worry about are resolved through regular updates that don't need those things.
> Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience?
What are you talking about? There's no bad PR in allowing SB/TPM to be off. The bad PR comes from requiring them to be on.
> They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.
SB/TPM aren't actual security. They're DRM masquerading as security.
> Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.
That's good, but it doesn't invalidate any of the above.
For bitlocker, I like it. But I use the password version that doesn't need any particular hardware.
How long do I expect updates? Well for starters, not even ten years of support for processors that were state of the art in 2018 is very bad. And windows 10 stopped being the newest option in 2021, so would ten years from that be so burdensome for security updates?
And no it's not a PR risk to release updates for windows 10. You don't need to stretch that hard, please.
I'd love to have a nice solution to run run old windows XP and 10 on modern Linux with even 50% native performance (on Nvidia) but it's not looking like my wish I'd getting closer to being fulfilled.
So perhaps it is better Microsoft is actively trying to kill windows. Once it is dead it will be less of a moving target. We have amazing ways to run DOS. I hope one day the same can be said for windows. I have decades and decades of software I like to fire up once every few months to use (ham radio antenna simulation, PCB design, etc. Software I own actually own fully paid licenses for that becomes a pain to run). Currently I use kvm/virt manager and I'm suffering the bad GPU performance and crashes if I try to standby the PC.
Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
What's the difference here?
What you can do:
1. At setup time, you are not forced to provide any apple ID.
2. You can login to your notebook without needing Apple ID
3. Install apps directly (i.e not from app store)
What you cannot
1. Install apps from App Store
2. Get Apple care etc.
And you get an impossible-to-remove notification from the Settings app.
If you are trapped on windows due to a specific piece of software running a virtual machine on linux is your friend. Boot up windows only when you need it and the only thing MS gets is one datastream of your single use of their product and not your entire digital existence. Same also applies for Apple + vm.
Either choice on its worst day is better than what windows has become on it's best.
It’s crazy to me: folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account. What is it worth to Microsoft let someone do that? $12? $144? $1,728?
After about 5 minutes of setting up (never once connected to Internet), it's pretty much exactly what I wanted: a display for broadcast TV and for HDMI inputs. A pretty good one, too. The only "tricky" part was getting it to remember the last channel/input at power-on instead of going to it's "home" screen, but that was just a setting in a menu somewhere, not particularly hard to find (though I'm the kind of person that does a depth-first-search through the entire menu tree just to see what all is there).
I think the key is never letting it get a taste of internet. No internet, no ads :) The internet-related things I do want to watch (like youtube, etc) are easily accomplished through the Linux PC I have connected.
These exist and are called "digital signage" - usually these things got far brighter and more durable panels, downside is they usually hover around 2x the price of an ad delivery device.
Plug in your old Chromecast 4k or Apple TV, that's it.
Do they significantly impact the bottom line though - especially compared to what possibly they gain by these actions? Corporations can tolerate a bit of grumbling on some tech forums.
(Which is also why so many services don't let you pay to get rid of ads.)
Microsoft has many intelligent people who work there and certainly do many risk vs. reward calculations for each modification to Windows. From Microsoft's perspective, they have much more control over the OS when everyone's linked to a cloud account. I morally disagree with that approach, but the security issues with Windows come from unpatched systems. They tried to win over software developers by creating WSL, but the privacy- and security-minded software developers never really bit.
Also, consider that Microsoft's future is obviously pivoted toward cloud infrastructure. Yes, they smartly have other ventures, but all those ventures will rely on Microsoft cloud infrastructure in some way. Server farms are a much better business model, from Microsoft's perpective, especially because it pulls Microsoft into the domains of true wealth: land acquisition, energy production, and data mining.
that is visceraly hilarious.
I'm tired of micromanaging all this, it's getting way too cumbersome even for someone who's grown up with Windows. I've stopped applying all feature updates to my Windows install because I know their current goal is to make your life worse (and more profitable) every single time. Once that install becomes too outdated, I'll move to Linux full-time - I've enjoyed it as a dual-boot experience, but games are still holding me back. Having to constantly tinker with my Linux install was another thing, but at this point Microsoft is making their software so annoying to use that it will soon outpace all the Linux hitches I've had.
I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.
They don't think that at all. They probably know more about Linux than you do because I guarantee half the systems they manage are already running it.
What they think about are the applications that the people who actually make the decisions at your companies refuse to migrate away from. They know the cost of hiring Linux sysadmins vs Windows sysadmins. They think about everyone in every other company and how much harder they are to hire when suddenly none of them know how to use their office computer when they're hired. They think about the half dozen or so business critical applications which genuinely don't have Linux equivalents. None of the executives, nobody in HR, nobody in accounting or business. Nobody in sales. Let alone... nobody in the actual non-tech industry that most businesses operate in.
And it's not the college graduates they're worried about. It's the people with 5, 10, or 15 years experience who will just not want to work at a company where they have to compromise and use non-standard software.
It's still not economically viable for any corporation outside of exactly a small tech industry start-up to switch away from Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with the cost of operating system licenses or support.
There IS Microsoft Defender on Linux because there's multiple products that Microsoft calls Defender. There's the product that ships in Windows for the consumer market, which is just the basic antivirus product that you probably think they're talking about. However, Microsoft's full endpoint protection software is also branded Defender, and there is a Linux version.
And while you might think that it's silly to run that on Linux, (a) your business is probably already licensed for it so will be cheap to add a client, (b) it's what their infrastructure is already using so it's minimal setup, and (c) having security software everywhere is critical simply for saving thousands of dollars in insurance costs. The software nearly pays for itself in reduced premiums at any company of any size even if it does nothing. With how catastrophic ransomware attacks and data breaches are, insurance companies now require annual environmental surveys for evaluating risks.
So you're trying to make this IT team sound stupid, but as someone in the industry I can't even tell from what you said if they are.
I prefer having a beefy workstation at home and connect to it remotely from a cheaper laptop, as I find laptops are noisy and weak unless you spend a sizable fortune.
I've also gamed over RDP. It wasn't the best experience, though to be fair I was on an island literally on the opposite side of the globe, and ran the game fullscreen. But I'm sure a dedicated solution like Steam or Sunshine/Moonlight would fare better for such.
Though at least with Steam the console has to be unlocked, which is a problem if I'm away.
They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.
Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.
I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.
Mac users fellate themselves over Mac usability. But if I click a file in Windows and hit the delete key you know what it does? It deletes the file. You know what Mac does? It makes the “bonk” sound and nothing happens. (Or at least it did, been years since I used it.)
I tried to like Mac for years, even using it as my daily driver for two straight, because their hardware is so good, but I just never could because of 100 little things like that. MacOS sucks.
The concerns of the people who inhabit this tiny little enclave of the internet are alien to 99% of the population at least.
* Windows software development.
* Games.
* Corporate software.
Even if Windows dies now, I'll use it for 10+ years more. There's no alternative for me.
And after 10 years since the death of Windows, I'll be on Mac, not on Linux. Again, no alternative.
Now, if I was exclusively a web dev or something, I'd totally consider moving to Linux. But I'm not.
The game industry uses the same argument that other industries use as well; tiny user base and the distribution is a mess.
I understand those arguments; they are valid, to a point... but if Autodesk uses mostly NodeJS and Python and OpenGL for Fusion360, why can't they ship a linux version, too?!?
Don't really game much, but I did buy a PS4 just for the therapy of offline GTA5 beatdowns.
----
The only Microsoft in my house is a twenty year old Windows 7 Pro machine — it always just works.
There's a big difference in the input scheme between PC and consoles. Playing with a controller might not be satisfying for someone used to keyboard and mouse. The latter also provides a higher skill ceiling for competitive play.
The lower end hardware used in consoles also does not allow for high framerates and high resolution monitors, while with PC gaming one can get as much performance as they're willing to pay for.
I like consoles (borderline prefer them to PCs) but there are some experiences I can only have on PC.
Another aspect is that sticking a console onto my desk and plugging it to my PC monitor wouldn't be very practical, and I don't want to commit my living room to my gaming whims, and even less want to get another TV+couch-like setup in my office.
I bought a PS4pro this year simply to compartmentalize a desire for gaming. Installed a new SSD.
Thrilled to have an offline machine which nobody can ever tell me "won't work" EVER. AGAIN.
The only good thing about alien input control was smooth movement. Wooting Two emulates this by pretenting to be both human and alien input controls. Would be nice if such keyboards would be more widespread.
Thanks (all commenters) for perspective.
And server-side: specific software I need to run for my team, like Autodesk Vault. For the rest, 95% of our servers run Linux.
Is this the year of the Linux desktop? Unlikely, but I've started to donate more regularly to the Linux Mint team and same with any OSS that helps me maintain our privacy which I suspect is driving more and more to look into options instead of accepting the status quo.
A lot of industrial/embedded hardware only ships with Windows drivers. It's super annoying.
> Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough
That’s a guaranteed ban by most anticheats
Yet here we are... It's not safe to trust a modern rootkitted Windows gaming setup with sensitive personal stuff and will become less so moving forward.
Your best bet is treating it like a console and do your real computing elsewhere.
But until the experience and process are seamless (or at least much more simplified), I honestly cannot see people “just switching”.
I had to jump through SO MANY hoops to stop my case fans from automatically spinning at 100% and getting CoolerControl to work (see it87 and Gigabyte), and it’s still happening, that it’s not even remotely amusing anymore.
I’m still 100% Linux on all devices, but this bit really sucks.
Wouldn't disconnecting the fan and plugging it into the motherboard instead also work?
But still, it’s not very difficult mindset that you have to choose from ‘responsible’ (for the lack of a better word) hardware developers. Oftentimes it’s ‘just buy another piece of hardware’ thing. As a grand example, it looks like current M-generation Macs are all awesome and all, but I value Linux so much more that I’d rather have an obviously worse hardware than deal with Windows or even modern-day macOS.
Apart from that, I see zero issues with Linux, it just works. And is very efficient, aesthetically pleasing (mostly), and has not-so-bad UX.
Do it, bozos!
Maybe it's time to switch tax return software.
It's only going to get more and more unpleasant in the commercial desktop OS landscape - need to start contributing money and effort to few OSS projects to keep the dream alive.
I recently was able to purchase a Win11 pro license from Newegg to upgrade a Win11 home machine without creating a MS account, that's probably an easier hole to patch if they truly want to prevent offline use entirely.
This has worked always after they started pushing creation of online accounts.
Do note what others have said about mods and some publishers' multiplayer games and music software. I am not affected but it's best to keep in mind.
1. My Microsoft account is still @msn.com, which I don't trust in any way to be secure, since it's not an email account I ever use
2. I have lots of Samba and other shares that know my local login
3. If my router goes down, I'm probably going to log into this machine to fix it, and it won't be connected to the internet
So of course I used one of the local account tricks when I installed Windows 11, and I hope they don't break it. Apple's solution of letting you have BOTH a local login and an iCloud account is much better.
I have a 10 year old macbook pro with a bootstrapped windows 10 for testing various things, and it looks like everything is kind of working the same way? Steam hardware survey shows that 32% of people are still using windows 10.
Besides "security updates", there is nothing to loose?
I mean, even if you patch constantly, you are only safe from yesterday exploits — not from the next 0-day, and those keep coming super-often. It seems smarter to focus on hardening the system itself rather than relying on Microsoft to patch things fast enough and hoping you are safe in the gap between discovery and fix.
The smart thing to do is patching regularly AND having a good security posture. Neither can be given up, really.
Also, even risky things can work for a long time. An individual can go a lifetime of speeding, doing drugs, things like that, and not be majorly impacted. And on the flip side, another individual can have a stroke of bad luck despite their good posture.
You use Windows because you live in Teams and Outlook. You use Windows because you, your suppliers, and your customers are all using CRMs that don’t run on Mac and your employees of any age sure as hell don’t know how or want to run Linux desktops. You use Windows because you paid Deloitte consulting a trillion dollars to give you your whole tech stack and they can’t even spell Linux.
I could go on and on but no, the corporate world doesn’t care that you have to have an online account (they prefer it), privacy is something you don’t even expect and is managed by IT anyway, etc.
I’ve been hearing how home users are going to switch to Linux for 25 years with no change in marketshare. They’re not. Nobody cares anymore, it’s like saying that HD-DVD is going to win the format war over Bluray now. It’s yesterday’s battle and the victory already divvied up the spoils.
Centralised management and control. Exactly what enterprises want. Local accounts is more what they do not want.
You _can_ buy it, but it's a bit of a quest. You need to register as a company and buy at least five Windows licenses (you don't have to use them), and after that you can get a license for an LTSC version.
It works out to about $700, if you want to go down this route.
LTSC is another option.
Sure, I’d love it if one day Linux got proper support and started to become widespread and Microsoft’s bloatware was impacted. But a lot more has to change before this can actually happen, obviously.
If they're going to completely remove the option to create a local account, could they at least let me override the local username for the account?
As soon as they do that, I frankly don't care whether my account is online or not. I'm using Windows Store, Edge and PIN login; I don't remove auto-updates. Sure, there's some crap to remove, but it's a matter of right-clicking on a few icons and choosing "Uninstall". And no, I don't mind clicking "no" about 5 extra times when Windows asks whether I want some garbage on my PC.
I'll spend more time tinkering with Windhawk and PowerToys than dealing with MS being greedy.
I've been using Windows since Win98. I know what for worse or better. I'm not switching now, because Windows is still the only viable option for what I need.
LTSC is basically debloated version of Win with options to turn of updates or get just security ones.
Without your help I'd inadvertently skip some critical setup screens and potentially exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use and that would be a huge disaster. You literally saved my device!
What are the downsides to this approach or does it not work as I think? I have noticed things occasionally run slow and then it seems like the fan is blowing constantly when TaskManager says CPU is at like 30% utilization.
Windows is not a consumer brand - at least anymore, if it ever was. It is predominantly a business product for enterprises. And their current service model to their clients requires interoperability with cloud services and user profiling for easy authentication and telemetry, which is what they are getting by enforcing Microsoft accounts. That is why there is no contradiction in their POV with this.
Does it suck for you retail "Home" users? Yes, but you were never the target customer base; at best you are a marketing platform. There is a reason why Microsoft has been giving away the product virtually for free has been turning a blind eye to its piracy (heck, MS's own Github hosts multiple cracking tools for it) when it comes to retail customers. They have abandoned you as a serious market segment.
Switch to Linux.
It's just okay. Windows 11 is worse.
Apparently checking a checkbox in rufus is more complicated.
On todays hardware, it should be possible to run Windows in a VirtualBox on a Linux System, or am I wrong?
Thinking about this to be my next setup for the next machine (in 1 or 2 years)
Im mainly using corp & office software and MS dev tools - those should be useable in a virtualized Windows?
Any experience?
Yes. As you transition to using Windows less and less, you'll get reminded more and more about how much of a pain it is to use, and how much of a Stockholm Syndrome you've developed over years of abuse.
To the point that you'll be avoid Windows as much as you can. You'll be booting your system infrequently enough, that, at every boot, Windows will be unresponsively slow, hogging your CPU and your bandwidth to forcefully update whatever bloatware is in need of an update. It will nag you about needing to restart, it will stand in you way, it will make your experience even more miserable. From time to time it will simply announce that the system will be rebooting in two minutes, without any recourse possible, your work be damned. Because, why not? Who the f*k cares about your work?
Be warned, you might reach a point of no return where you'll be avoiding this abusive piece of bloatware like the plague. You might discover light and happiness at the end of this dark, damp tunnel. You might free yourself from the PTSD you didn't know you were suffering of at the slightest mention of the word "Update".
It will be a liberating experience. Come and join us on the other side.
One thing I always see when using this machine - this version at least has some problem with the memory manager: Very often the system comes up from hibernation mode and does not stop swapping whatever stuff to disk, making it unusable until I reboot completely - this at least works on Windows :-D
I was actually pleasantly surprised the other day, I booted into Windows for the first time in several months and it was surprisingly quiet. No nags, no bs. Just "normal" stuff like Epic Games forgetting my account again and Windows updates going on in the background.
My friend whose laptop has Windows 11, on the other hand, that was a WILD experience. Similar situation, he mostly only brings it out for gaming with friends. He also had gone several months without booting, and the system was borderline unusable. Like, the battery settings page would refuse to open until he waited for the updates to finish and rebooted. No error, just an infinite loading spinner. Windows 11 also seemed much more aggressive about hogging the laptop's Internet connection -- our laptops were both downloading Windows updates and Fortnite updates at the same time, and my Fortnite update was literally progressing at twice the speed (~200mb/sec vs his ~90mb/sec).
Anyway, all that to say, I don't miss Windows, and anytime I'm exposed to it, that attitude is constantly re-affirmed.
I suggest that you just try - it's a couple of hours to install Linux and install Windows in a VM. You can try Linux dual-booting, so, no need to impact your existing system. If you end up not liking the out of the box Win VM performance, there are a couple of tricks that you can try to get substantial improvements.
And can I also use MSSQL server? (which I could ditch anyway then, I guess, since we are using mainly ORM and no database-specific features)
If your CRUD apps are Winforms I had success with Wine, but you might want to try something else. I've heard good things about avaloniaui.net but never liked XAML so I haven't tried it.
Good luck!
To your second point, yes, I imagine that MSSQL could be exchanged to something else like Postgres, MariaDB or MySQL. Although, maybe you can get away with SQLite too, depending heavily on the use case of course.
Good luck!
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
Proton and Steam Deck made sure I have no reason to ever go back.
When the overwhelming majority of their stuff is in a browser, Steam, or Office, it's pretty easy to lay out Linux as an alternative. Nobody actually _uses_ windows itself, unless you're running some specialized software that requires it.
Also, a lot of people treat computers as appliances: boxes of fixed capability that ship from a factory as-is. Basically, a very complicated toaster. Windows machines run windows, Apples run MacOS, and so on. The idea that you can deviate from factory spec is, frankly, not even a thought most carry around. One must take the time to be kind and show the path through this wilderness of choices and technology decisions.
As for the MS Office thing, O365 and LibreOffice are the Linux-compatible choices I recommend. Depending on their use-cases, the latter is usually enough. I'll give O365 credit for multi-user Office and 1:1 capability with the current desktop option. That said, those aren't always compelling uses for the home-gamer.
Heavy MS Office usage. MS Office is preferred for compatibility (toward other people's MS Office documents), and heavy usage means that the web variant are struggling.
Windows-only apps like Photoshop, audio software etc.
The kids only get chromebook and Macs.
Seriously considering the move to Linux - I've heard it's getting better, but it would cost me a bit of time getting used to it. The pain is really starting to seem like a lower cost every day.
What makes Linux especially painful to windows users is they basically need to relearn how to solve the same sort of problems they’ve forgotten they’ve been solving all the time in windows, but in Linux. Which makes the effort novel and thus especially noticeable.
Basically it takes accepting one is going to get smacked with fractal side quests of searching how to fix problems for a bit, but it does get better fairly quickly.
But as long as I can continue my local hosted llm and playing around with that, and my son can play his games, I'll probably bite the bullet in a few weeks.
FYI I'm a C# dev and .NET works flawlessly on Linux (Fedora). Since I only used Rider/VS Code for my .NET Apps on Windows it works as just as good on Linux, albeit even better given access to better command-line tooling.
I don't run any legacy .NET Framework Apps on Linux (which require Mono) but I'm still able to build our software for all our supported platforms: .NET Framework v4.7.2, .NET Standard 2.0, .NET 6.0, .NET 8.0 both locally and on our Ubuntu GitHub Actions Runner.
Here’s some projects you may find useful
For playing around with dev projects, “Distrobox” is an easy way to manage mostly isolated environments, to keep your main system clean: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
I use Nobara as my Desktop OS, which is a fedora/KDE based distribution by GloriousEggroll that’s a desktop first and foremost (unlike a console UI oriented distro like Bazzite). It includes a bunch of nice things and cutting edge (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom) stuff out of the box so there’s less for me to set up with. Steam, and the few games I play on it just work like normal.
For games from places Like GOG, Lutris works far more often than not. If I recall correctly, it’s literally just a matter of running the .exe
Most of my other programs are installed as flatpacks, which I would recommend.
Note that Nobara is not currently an immutable distro (like Bazzite). Like windows, you’ll likely want to reinstall it in a few years (or after some failed project) to start “fresh”.
For my NAS boxes, I use Proxmox, which I guess is mostly Debian with a Ubuntu kernel and select packages kept more up to date and a built in web UI. Proxmox is nice because its kernel (even the opt in newer kernels that can be offered on the forums) is kept in sync with ZFS which I use for my archives. I disable High Availability, among other things. Useful links:
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/
Biggest gotcha with proxmox is if it seems to have lost internet access (like the webUI suddenly not working), your network device got changed/renamed due to a kernel update. You’ll need physical/KVM access to update the entry in /etc/network/interfaces with the new active network device name. Also if you install on a ZFS root, proxmox uses system-boot and silently ignores classic grub settings.
It's one thing to try to steer basic, non-technical users toward an MS account by default. Fine; I may not like that, but I get it. But at this point, anyone left who's still using these methods to create a local account is likely to be a technical user who's deliberately and intentionally wanting a stay on local account for whatever their own reasons.
I suspect that's a rather small group, which leaves me puzzled: (1) is the juice really worth the squeeze, and (2) is it really worth being so hostile to your power users?
Anticheats makes multiplayer games hard to run on Linux (still sad that Apex walked back on Linux), and hardware may have sometime random issues on Linux (for some reason my mic was not working well on Discord (did not investigate, suspecting something on the software side since I could hear myself well when testing but my friends couldn't); I cannot use multiple screens with my current video card without my text editor dropping to 10FPS for some reason).
Plus Microsoft Office for people that prefer the ribbon over menus (but the browser version probably works well enough).
Though I feel that sleep is more reliable on Linux than on Windows today with "modern" sleep.
Electronic Health Record software is a similar story. Doctors outright hate these. Yet, prevalent.
Mac is an option, but Apple is plenty hostile to their users, and you're tied to their hardware.
Linux is an option, but good luck getting that business software you absolutely need that only runs on windows working.
Running everything online in a SaaS is an option, but at the end of the day those services aren't generally any less hostile than MS.
Both paths should be industry standardized with UI as much as possible so no cat-and-mouse play with hidden settings would happen, and both should be configurable at any part so even inexperienced user could benefit from disabling "recommendations" or bundled software. Such OOBE configuration should be also persistent - once the choice is done it stays and doesn't require "additional steps" hijacks every other large update. And at any points given user can re-run the OOBE if for whatever reasons changed mind about e.g. sharing data.
This might be relatively simple to implement as a standard but would require actual commitment from consumer protection organizations, regulators that would push on companies. But somehow seems no organization care about these pushes - Microsoft goes each year further in limiting what uses can do on Windows. Perhaps as I said here already, there's some agenda of becoming the identity provider and going ahead with govt's ideas for online identification. Or perhaps it's just a plain greed for data.
Seriously you could install a modern distro with KDE on any computer and the average user would get by fine.
And more enterprises are starting to enable macOS and Linux as browser based tooling becomes the norm.
Why would anyone start with Windows at this point? And if I were Microsoft, why would I spend money to make life worse for the incumbent users?
I am surprised that somebody agrees to that terms.
There were hints of where Microsoft was heading in Windows 10, but at least a lot of the worst “features” could be disabled.
I find 11 just completely unacceptable software to run on any system I own.
* Professional MS Office / Sharepoint use - if you need the installed apps, there’s just no alternative. Amusingly MS have helped the Linux migration with their browser alternative/lite versions, but IMO they’re only suitable for smaller and less involved documents.
* CAD - aside from Freecad (def. not for me) most top established CAD packages are Windows-only (with a subset also working on Mac).
* Desktop publishing - there’s nothing I’ve found to rival even old PagePlus, let alone InDesign or QuarkXpress. (I may give Scribus another try at some stage; I auditioned it as a possibility for an elderly relative a while ago and it was no-go then.)
1. no more random reboots
2. fast updates
3. much lower idle cpu use
4. cleaner operation with fewer crashes
5. no ad garbage from the OS to worry about
6. much much faster linux environment (WSL2 is atrocious).
It was 600% worth switching. Caveat -- I used linux as a daily driver in the late 90s early 2000s, and went back to Microsoft for work compatibility. Linux is much better now, but I still wouldn't try to get my parents to run it.
I finally switched my desktop this year and I wish I had done it sooner but gaming held me back. Now any games that intentionally won't run under Linux are games I'm not interested in playing.
But Apple is the one that normalized this.
...Like the developer account for mobile
...Like "sideloading"
And this is why this things should have been fought much harder from the beginning.
These companies are merely copying what the other is getting away with.
Like in the song: for every hole you give me, i (Microsoft) give you three.
I just got an iPhone 17. I travel often and have a bunch of SIMs and eSIMs from various countries, with varying periods of validity.
With the physical SIMs, I can just pop them into the new phone and still use them for a month or two more just fine. (I specifically got a Singapore region variant with a SIM tray AND eSIM support just for this)
But with the eSIMs, it goes for "approval" through the carriers, some of whom demand me to update my ID with them before they can allow an eSIM to be used on a new phone.
When Apple announced going eSIM only in the US and other draconian countries, I thought nothing of it. Now I see how bad it can be...
At least I have since migrated to Mac, so I guess it can just stay win10 forever.
If it's so easy, which are these ways, then? Do you think they'll remain available indefinitely?
Not that I don't underwrite the risks involved in getting your OS from untrusted or unreputable sources
Not only does it allow you to create a local admin account, but you can also skip all the other setup screens that you want by pre-supplying values. Throw this file into your Windows boot media, do a fresh install (which you should be doing when you get a new machine regardless), and away you go. I use this both personally and my work environment. Not only are you then not relying on modifying OS ISO's or compilations, but an XML file is relatively easy to verify that only the settings you have set are the ones being input into the system if you utilize a third party tool like the one available at schneegeas.de
I suppose I might still be worried about targeted offline-acting malware if I were using Windows to control some enrichment centrifuges or something. But apart from that, I'm fine with whatever inhabitants it may have frolicking in their isolated jungle.
There are trusted tools out there, like Rufus, that will enable workarounds for you if you tell them to create bootable media. Tools with developers you can look up, rather than anonymous pirates.
As far as installation process:
If I go to the site of any libre project that doesn't install through nix/apt/etc, it will have a focused list of directions that I need to do to install it.
If I go to Microsoft's site and search for how to install Windows, I will be greeted with a deluge of articles I need to read and understand all of the various different methods and scenarios (after avoiding the links to BUY BUY BUY. I already have plenty of Windows licenses that were anticompetitively bundled with every old laptop I have sitting around, thank you). And then since I want to avoid their consumer install methods that insist on holding victims' wrists, I will likely need to go an eNtErPrIsE route - meaning even more reading between the lines of overwrought bullshit.
Whereas if I download a torrent of Windows, it will come with a focused list of directions that I need to do to install it.
BTW doesn't Rufus only run on Windows? That's kind of pointless for me. My workflow is virt-install --cdrom /path/to.iso
Perhaps I will look into setting up a "KMS server" next time I need to reinstall, but I would guess it's a bunch of admin tinkering for not much gain. The kind of admin work that will have fallen apart in the few years before I need it again.
... doing a quick look it seems like "KMS server" only runs on Windows itself? And there is a libre reimplementation for Linux, but it doesn't seem to be in nixpkgs, and requires setting up a heavyweight "Domain" with Samba? A few lines in smb.conf or nixos config and I'd be game, but no, it looks just as bad as I thought it would be. Please correct me if I'm missing some way that is actually straightforward and simple, but this doesn't seem to be the case!
So yeah in short, that's why.
In other news, Linux is over 5 now.
Of course HN is a bubble, like every other place like this, but sadly, I would argue that this is the mindset that pretty common among Linux users and holds Linux-native alternatives back. For those saying that Linux is already better than Windows in everything, there is no incentive to work towards actually making it better. When emacs is equally good for those people as VS, when Linux gaming still depending on Windows APIs is considered a great success, when FreeCAD or OpenSCAD in their eyes do not lack anything when compared with professional CAD software etc, then you know you are seeing a bubble that will burst, sooner or later.
I suspect in 2025 even project like FreeCAD would not happen, because today people for some reason believe it is fine to go away from OS that do not respect user agency and their privacy, and use web-based apps that do... exactly the same, but they are not from MS so that's fine I guess. For some reason Windows requiring internet connection is a bad thing, but driving Linux and relying on bunch of web apps that also require internet connection is good.
Celebrating WINE, Proton and Steam OS as victories still baffles me, because the fact that FOSS and Linux world couldn't create real alternatives and had to become good at pretending to be Windows instead is simply a failure.
But hey, I know I am crying in the wilderness.
Everything feels faster, and to her it was a wow-experience to have office software without the hassle of payments. According to her the only drawback is that some games and gaming clients don't work, notably the Riot client, but enough do work that she's satisfied anyway. She found she prefers Thunderbird to Outlook and the package catalog is much nicer than both the MICROS~1 application store and ye olde 'download and double click this binary, hope you won't forget to uncheck the spyware checkbox!' style of program management.
Next project is to get my CEO to make the switch.
Dysfunctional middle management is motivated more by protecting their job, kingdom building, and promotions.
Microsoft will never change its ways, no matter how much windowdressing they use underneath it is the same evil empire that it always was.
Really my only complaint is the lack of a nice, modern desktop UI framework but you can’t win them all.
Security updates for years and no BS
Not in the US, though, so you're right insofar as the US is concerned.
1) Office (libreoffice is a steaming pile) 2) Fortnite
If those can be solved, I'm done with Windows. I've been a windows fanboi since 3.11. But I'm finally ready to move to Debian desktop (even Ubuntu has gotten crappy lately).
I say this as someone with very little tolerance for linux bullshit - my job is hard enough I don't want to wrestle with OS bullshit.
But this level of scrutiny is precisely why such DIY security claims ring hollow.
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So where is the contradiction?
Alternatively I could pay what is, for me, a pittance, and know that my OS is not compromised.
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/b...
https://massgrave.dev/manual_hwid_activation / https://massgrave.dev/manual_ohook_activation / https://massgrave.dev/manual_kms38_activation
Most of those 19861 lines allow it to be an all in one script for multiple activation methods and products. And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
Maybe at the very least educate yourself before acting so smug.
Other poster writes that code is not auditable since it is not 5 lines, but 20 000 lines and you tell them to audit it?
> And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
That's nonsense, of course, how would it help other users? Also, do you expect every single user of the crack to have the capabilities and time to do that?
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
Commenter was suggesting using original Microsoft ISOs and verifying through massgrave.
Zero malware
My TL;DR: a. Get a Microsoft 365 subscription, so you can set up Entra ID and avoid the 'consumer' account nonsense; b. It would sure be nice if the EU DMA would also be applied to this obviously monopolistic situation; c. Do, however, note that there are exactly zero Linux distros that even come close to offering comparable functionality...
(Just for the reference, joining the computer to a non-cloud AD does _not_ remove the requirement for a Microsoft account during installation)
Get well soon.
Source: I'm sort-of the IT manager for several around-50-employees businesses. All of these offer a choice of Windows, Mac or Linux laptops, because that's what needed to attract quality employees these days.
For Windows, it's really simple. Order HP or Lenovo without an OS, put on the Windows 11 Enterprise image, and send it on along with the Entra credentials. User powers the machine up, selects 'for work', enters the AD credentials and gets a working desktop with AV, firewalling, Office and so on.
MacOS? Slightly more involved story: we need to provide instructions on how to successfully navigate the forced Apple sign-in story, then download some dependencies to get to the point where the Windows users already were.
Linux? Oh, boy... Even when standardizing on something like Ubuntu LTS, basic compliance and policy enforcement is a huge pain. As in: hours and hours of support. I've evaluated several supposedly-solutions for this, and, ehm, no...
And: to be perfectly clear: I'm wide-open to suggestions for something better! If you can offer Ubuntu LTS, (or, well, anything) but with AV, firewalling and basic policy enforcement that can be remotely attested, I'm all ears!
We're talking about individual users, people who buy a computer for their kids or for themselves.
Fancy hosted domain and entra setups and enterprise activations are not relevant to this discussion.
There will be many people "stuck" with Windows for work (or even choosing it for some particular piece of software). For me, work is MacOS and Apple hardware, and home is Linux on the desktop and my NAS.
For work, I don't choose, it's chosen for me. My company oriented to "zero-trust" remote work even before the pandemic. That means that transition away from being a Microsoft shop was easier (they were Windows / .Net before 2017, but cloud-everything changed that).
For personal use I will 100% advocate Linux over Windows. You're advocating Windows because it's easier for you to ship boxes to employees. Not because it's better for the employees.
here's what you can do:
First, make sure you unplug your ethernet cable or turn off WiFi before you start installing Windows. This way your computer isn't connected to the internet during setup.
When you get to that screen where it's asking you to sign in with a Microsoft account (you know, the annoying one from the post), here's the trick: press SHIFT and F10 at the same time. This opens up a command prompt window.
Then just type this command: start ms-cxh:localonly and press Enter. It should bring up an option to make a local account instead! Just fill in a username and password like the old days.
After you finish the setup and get to your desktop, you can connect back to the internet and download all the updates.