That said, Linux is almost for everyone now, at least if they get someone else to set it up for them.

The single biggest problem is that there is still not one document format to rule them all, and most people use PDF (can't be edited) or Microsoft (can't be rendered correctly and have limited support in other programs) formats. For most things, openoffice or libreoffice can get the job done, but for things that need to actually look the same, or where one needs to fill out the "formula" it often falls short, and then we have to resort to a VM with Windows inside it..

Then there's battery life, at least for EVERY laptop I've ever owned, or serviced, Linux requires a fair amount of tweaking, and then it (or some software running on it) still results in a worse-off battery life than a stock install of Windows.

That said, there are so many good things about Linux and the tools on it, that it's definitely worth the shortcomings, it's still the best OS for me.

RE path limitations. I actively -- and have for many years -- use paths much longer that 25x characters. Including in Windows Explorer. I can't recall the last time I had a issue, though IIRC there is some sort of operation (that I guess I never use?) via Explorer where one can run into issues.

The main issue, and it exists on Linux as well is this in code:

char path[MAX_PATH]; // or equiv

In Linux this generally gives you a 4k buffer so you're MUCH less likely to hit the issue of course.

No overriding auto-update settings.

No license to pay.

I was confused about why there were so many new Github issues filed, and sure enough I did a search on Hacker News and found it posted here.

This was inspired by my annoyance with the prevailing tenor of Windows vs. Linux comparisons at the time, which consisted largely of unsupported generalizations like "Linux is about choice" or undecidable debates like whether the GIMP was an acceptable replacement for Adobe Photoshop, or if LibreOffice was a good enough Microsoft Office. I wanted to go in a different direction and examine how technical design decisions in the kernels affected everyday use, which is why there's so much time spent on filenames.

Ultimately, though, it's just a highly selective overview of the operating systems at the time, with a few historical asides. (I'm particularly proud of digging up the part about case-insensitive filenames using less RAM in the DEC SIXBIT encoding.)

I haven't updated it significantly since 2014, so it is probably out of date in spots. However, much of it is still holds true today. I continue to use both Linux and Windows on a daily basis, and I still occasionally run into the same old problems with path lengths, filename restrictions, and file locking semantics.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://gist.github.com/telamon/85fbfb0caa482786483bd2b8d3fc...

All three have pros and cons.

I use Linux at work because I love i3 and am willing to put up with other quirks to have it.

I use Windows for games, Lightroom, etc.

I use macOS for compiling iOS apps (work) and in bed/on the couch at home for browsing (because I have an extra Macbook leftover from a consulting gig).

I use whatever tool works best for the job I'm doing.

No one OS is better at everything than another. They all have their strengths and their weakness.

However, as much as I like it, I've not even tried to run it on my primary desktop due to the lack of a viable RDP alternative.

The irony here is that with Microsoft implementing RDP support in WSL2, the thing that might finally remove the key obstacle might render the entire point moot.

It used to take work and knowledge to use Linux as a daily driver, like you would Windows. But Linux has matured, and now all of the things you expect to work just do work.

And, aside from doing any .NET projects, EVERY programming endeavor I've worked on in Linux has been an absolute breeze. 98% of the time, everything I need is just an "apt install" away, configures correctly, and runs correctly. There is no reason for Windows to exist anymore.

But still, I'm looking for a decent distro that has minimal setup, very customizable, in active dev, and have decent graphics / audio driver for game dev, for a possible future shift. I haven't done much research yet but am currently looking at KISS and Arch, if you know more please let me know thanks!

Overall I loved i3 window manager as it made things much easier and keyboard centric

But after using macbook for a while I am leaning towards it as it works like a charm and I can do everything what I did on my linux.

Linux is great and one thing I like about it is that it’s highly customizable but sometimes you don’t wanna be spending countless hours customizing your environment you just want something that just works that’s just my opinion

Overall my experience has been great with linux but sadly i can’t run adobe suite on it :( So I decided to get a MacBook

Would love to hear everyone else’s experiences

Not having to reinstall Windows every 6 months just to keep it running fast

I still use Windows for games and stuff, but Windows terminal emulators mostly seem to suck and I spend a lot of time in there.

Either way the platform wars are over. Electron + WSL made them irrelevant. On Linux I have access to every modern app I want. This has been fantastic. All the guys who championed web standards and the web as an application platform should feel proud of being visionaries. Well done.

No it wouldn't - UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding of Unicode codepoints just like UTF-8. Not to mention that what most normal people think of as "characters", i.e. grapheme clusters, are variable length even with UTF-32.

From my point of view, case sensitivity in filenames is not an advantage but a disadvantage.

Why would I want to have "presentation to management.ppt" and "Presentation to management.ppt"?

Same for some of the restrictions in file names. I never found any problem. Maybe it is because I write in english and spanish.

And I do still vaguely recall RADIX 50

But nix has vi, native package managers and doesn't need a GUI most of the time. Saying that, I don't mind hyper-v and it's VBS technology.

If you need to run a business use Windows, if you need to host infrastructure or run an app...use nix.

Spend your time well, people. Solve real issues, have real impact.

Only some games and ableton live are missing from some platforms.

My chrome, lightroom and games (a lot) work very well on my windows desktop.

On my nas, freebsd is doing a great job.

My servers? Ubuntu doing what it does best.

MacOS on my work laptop; Also not bad.

Most others are not a benefit, just preference.

Many are simply omitted where Windows is better (such as MUCH more software, easy of use - for example no automatic mounting on many linux distros of usb drives by default in 2020 is simply insane, much better support all around from vendors, just to mention some).

Some basic and most important stuff are not there, such as difference between Windows and Linux process or difference between PowerShell and Bash.

Some thing are not very comparable but still involve performance differences (for example Windows role based security vs very limited linux default g/u/o security)

TLDR, another linux-is-better-then-windows article that is poorly done, although it pretends its not, by giving tones of references mostly for irrelevant stuff and talking about technological decisions that have almost 0 relevance for most of the people (importance of having API calls in unicode 16 vs 8 to end user is less then 0)

Lets be honest - there is 0 technical benefit regarding what OS you use today, the only difference is:

1. Windows costs money

2. Community

Unless you use thousands of containers point 1 is negliable for most services especially on Windows 10 which you can run perpetually in trial mode. Point 2. is not however, on linux open source mindeset and hacking culture is favored which is something that is for me personally much better (although I still use Windows as my main OS). Windows community just started to go along in that direction, but it will probalby take another decade to come to the level where Linux is now (if ever).

I hope WSL will be better in the future. May be someday people will not compare Windows and Linux when they have WSL on Windows machine.

I currently use Linux as my primary machine on both my PC where I do remote work and on my Thinkpad which is serving as backup and mobile workspace.

The Windows is on a company-issued laptop that I do not use at all and in a VM which is dedicated solely for carrying the invasive stuff that monitors my every keystroke and executed application that my company thinks is good idea to have on my private machine to protect company interests. Hopefully, they never learn to figure out they are running this in a VM.

When I use Windows as my desktop I feel powerless. If something breaks, there is no recourse other than trying stuff I read on the Internet. On Linux I can automate pretty much everything and pretty much everything is open to me and the only thing that limits me is how much time I am comfortable spending on solving my issue.

I hate that Windows does things on my own machine that I am not able to stop or audit. Should I resign myself to giving away my privacy to another company? I think not.

I hate that I am absolutely unable to create an environment on Windows that will still work, without maintenance, in months or years. I do electronics design and embedded development in my free time and I just can't be spending time figuring out what changed in my environment every time I go back to modify code for some gadget I did a year or five ago. On Linux, I just create a VM for every single project, set up my toolchain, turn off any automated updates and then back up the entire image to unfreeze it when I need it.

I find it funny, that Linux had an app store with huge selection of free, powerful application, ready for immediate installation and use, and Microsoft required decades and Apple and Google to finally figure it out and still fail to make it usable. I like the fact that I can bring in seconds a piece of software to be immediately available to me without having to find the installation package, worry about custody of the source of the package or that it might be doing some malicious thing to my PC, worry about how it will pollute and slow down my machine even if it is installed, and so on. I do work on my PC, maintaining it is not my full time job.

I still work on Debian Unstable that I installed ca 2001 which I successfully maintained over the years. The first PC that it worked on had Duron 600 on it (does anybody still remember it?) and 20GB of disk space which was quite a lot at the time. If everything goes well it will see another AMD CPU next year when it becames available next year. I just can't imagine doing the same with Windows. All Windows desktops I had required full re-install after couple of years of use.

It was true in the past that you had to use Windows to use any serious tools. That is no longer the case, most of the time. You can even play games (Steam works though not all games are designed to play on Linux). The tools that don't work on Linux are no longer enough to force me to misery of working on a Windows desktop as my primary one.

Granted, Linux is not fun either. The Gnome is buggy as hell, has trouble with 2 4k monitors. The Nvidia drivers aren't nearly as stable as on Windows and Chrome experiences issues every time I wake up my machine from suspend. The machine sometimes locks and I did not have time to debug it and I just need to press reboot button. Still, beats Windows.

i use linux on a desktop every day but cannot even after trying for many years, develop blinders for all of the shitty parts

Until then it’ll be mainly a server OS for me

I'll give my highly subjective experience. I used Fedora 3x on a X1 Carbon gen 7 and it was not awesome. While I had a highly customizable UI via KDE Plasma, the font always felt off. I had issues directly attributed to Wayland (screen sharing in apps), though I could have gone back to X11.

Eventually I switched to Gnome and the UI was just frustrating from a UX standpoint. The UI lacked so many options to make it more flexible, though some frustrations were taken care of by extensions.

For either DE, if I didn't want to use Firefox, many types of media were unavailable, including certain videos in YouTube due to lack of included libraries. Some of those libraries were available in 3rd party builds, but given the security sensitive nature of browsers, that felt risky.

Performance was fine and the apps I needed were available.

Overall, application in each DE felt more crash-prone. This was true of the updater for the Gnome app store, too.

More than a couple of times I would have odd graphical issues occur in both KDE Plasma and Gnome. A couple examples were font-related issues (incorrect font despite being set correctly in settings) and window-color issues. The Gnome app store window was in dark mode while the rest of the DE wasn't. Oh and lack of DE-wide mouse scrolling on windows was a bit frustrating. I had to get a plugin for Chromium but never found a DE-wide solution.

I was tired of Windows on a laptop, so I did end up buying a MBP, which was my first Mac since my PowerBook G4. MBP does everything I need for personal use and as a development playground, plus generally stable apps. I still use Win 10 on a P1 for work and of course have a desktop for gaming, primarily.

What I'd like to see from a DE is to be highly integrated into the system. We've seen successful implementations via Windows and Mac (classic and OS X/11), and perhaps the not-so-commercial success, BeOS. Many of the Linux DEs "feel" tacked-on.

With that said, I run unbound and haproxy on a handful of Linux VMs where they work wonders and I've had zero issues with stability, etc.

All-in-all my Fedora 3x experience was just OK. It felt rough around many, though not all edges. App crash was more than I'd see using the same apps on Windows (and now macOS).

There were other things that irritated me; lack of fingerprint reader support and lack of a Bitlocker-style solution (no password on boot) available.

Again, my experiences, my impressions. They could all be wrong.

If MS decides to end support for whatever you're using, you're fucked. If Apple decides your hardware isnt supported any longer, or that you cant use your system without an update that makes your old apps incompatible, you're fucked.

If you're using a product, you rely on it not having its end of life before you stop using it, but you can't actually trust that, and we all know that. You know that, once you're in the MS ecosystem, you are at the mercy at whatever business decision they make for their products. If they decide to force you to pay for something that was free before, or decide that they are going to lock a feature behind paywall, the only reasonable thing is to comply.

Now, you might not care, and, hell, you might think the concept of owning your tools is idiotic anyways.

To get back to my point though - Linux gives hardware I own a system that I control. The OS I use helps me get done what I want to get done, it doesnt get in my way, it doesnt try to persuade me, trick me, sell me something, or anything like it. I like to pick what file browser I use, which browser I use, which keybinds do what - without the system acting like i'm an idiot with messages like "oh, you must have misclicked, im sure you want to use edge, not this 'firefox' garbage".

Do I have to pick which file browser I use? No, and I didn't, I just use the default, because it's good. If the developer of it decides to change it, I dont have to update it, I can use the old one, or use a different one altogether, or change it myself if I have the time.

I like Linux because it doesnt treat me like i'm an idiot, it doesnt treat me like i'm a customer, it doesnt actually treat me in any way at all, because unless i interact with it, it doesnt do anything.

When I need to write a patch, I open my laptop, and its immediately there. I open my messages, open my editor, pull, write the patch, commit, push, and close it. I didn't get a "didnt do AV scan in the last 2 seconds", i didn't get random programs autostarting, I didn't get news on my login screen, I didn't get programs notifying me that "its now up to date", it doesnt force me to update before i shut it down, and I dont have to look at a bunch of "welcome back" and "we hope your day is going great" and "did you know this random fact about a mountain in asia?" on my login screen.

Yet, all of these things happen regularly when I launch my windows machine at work. Yes, they're all small things, but once you're used to your system not nagging you for random shit, you can't help but notice.

Yeah

I think you're right that we would expect that to happen only rarely, but it seems implausible to expect that there's an entire windows file api with zero usage.

Side-note: I don't think explaining "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" being different would be thaat hard -- if they look different then they are different. As long as granny doesn't have to worry about zero-width whitespace or other garbage in her file names then that's a good enough rule of thumb.

If I go full screen it's hard for me to distinguish local vs remote, even watching videos, other than occasionally can see video compression artifacts per the connection quality.

Do like that I can blank screen on login, lock screen on logout, similar to RDP, unlike xrdp and others where it's a new session when you connect, you can't resume a session locally (e.g. work half in office, half at home, same session).

https://askubuntu.com/questions/42895/is-there-a-tool-to-upd...

You can also set RELEASE_UPGRADER_ALLOW_THIRD_PARTY=1 before running the updater to allow third party repos to remain enabled during upgrade.

But to address the list's content, it would be interesting to update it to take into account developments made in more recent versions of Windows 10.

Switched to MacOS around 2002. It was not user-hostile back then and a decent Unix env. and Apple seemed to be headed down the right path, promising to support FOSS.

Switched from MacOS to Linux circa 2008 when it became abundantly clear that Apple's "backing" of OpenSource was a complete hoax designed to attract FOSS hackers to the platform and lock them in (the only parts of the OS that were FOSS were the lower layers, the entire stack above it was closed source - a tiger simply can't change its stripes).

Never had to look back, and when I look at the locked-in walled garden privacy hell that OSX has become, boy am I glad I switched.

Now that Windows dev experience (for me) is almost comparable to Linux and will continue to improve, I don't see much reason to switch back to Linux.

Of course that's not to say I don't have any complaints for Windows. For example file names are not case sensitive and it drives me crazy when I need to change a file name's casing.

Then the points being made did not resonate with my own reasons for using Linux.

Microsoft loves Linux and Open source, in paper, but the reason you are not using Linux right now is mostly due to Microsoft.

MS Office, the defacto Office suite, runs only on macOS and Windows, and the OOXML standard was created with obfuscation in mind.

Microsoft bought Corel, and shortly after Corel Office dropped its Linux release.

Microsoft lobbies governments so that they adopt MS Office. Some of those goverments are starving impoverished countries that could rather use that money for humanitarian reasons.

OpenGL was the target of a FUD campaign that scared game developers forcing them to adopt DirectX.

Arguably my desktop is not that complicated (i3wm), so there's not a ton of processes running around.

When I find a bug, I can try to fix it myself. When I want an extra feature, I can add it. I did this so many times already, it's ridiculous. From adding support for new HW to the kernel, to patching my postgresql to support my language better, to adding zstd support to qemu qcow2, and hundreds of other small things over the last 15 years or so.

This is what's great on GNU/Linux.

Pros: Customizability, speed, MS/Apple can't dictate what's on my PC.

Cons: Wifi issues, screen tearing, time spent configuring.

We need to divide the debate into two perspectives: Development and Desktop environment.

As a dev, I always use Linux. I love to use shell all the time. However, I use Windows as a desktop environment because I fed up with the whole Xorg vs Wayland situation and inferior VNC experiences to Windows RDP.

Just recently kwin started freezing occasionally when starting up KDE with the logs mentioning absolutely nothing related to that. I've tried several solutions I found through research but the issue still remains. Even restarting kwin won't solve the problem and I have to resort to rebooting to hope it fixes itself. Quite annoying.

Also occasionally my nvidia dGPU (with power management enabled) just doesn't power itself off even if its not being used by any process. I've once again played around with all kinds of parameters and configs without any luck. I'm aware it's an experimental feature but it's still a major issue for me since its the difference between 6 and 3 hours of battery life.

On top of that for some reason all of my games randomly decide to drop down to very low framerates while barely utilizing my CPU and GPU. It's nothing to do with my temps or either CPU or GPU throttling down (they're still at their max clock speeds), there's nothing in the background using any kind of significant amount of system resources and the niceness / ioprio of my game's process is set high enough so some random process going rogue shouldn't affect game performance too much.

These are just some examples of random problems I'm facing regularily and it's just frustrating having to tinker around (sometimes for days) to (hopefully) fix them. Which is a shame since I'm really enjoying my Linux install.

As a developer, Linux is everything I could want, and I really want desktop Linux to continue to gain traction. While DEs like GNOME (which I use) and KDE look and feel modern and come with some great software out of the box, I still run into issues on occasion. The desktop environment is where Linux begins to fall short in my experience.

Windows and MacOS have the advantage of having a single "DE" to worry about, where as Linux offers a variety which are independently developed. That's awesome, but when I run into a bug once a week, it really sucks. I can fix the problem no issue, but it makes me hesitant to recommend GNOME to a friend to relative.

Granted, this can be because I'm using a 4K display with a new version of GNOME. I haven't used KDE or XFCE recently, so maybe they take care of these a lot better. If they are significantly better, please, let me know. I'd love a good out of the box desktop experience on Linux.

That said, Windows 10 is solid and with the combination of WSL2 and Hyper-V, I can do everything on Windows that I can do on a Linux desktop.

E.g., for musicians. There's Reaper/Bitwig, but you no longer have Live/Cubase/Logic/etc. Your multi-$k audio interface no longer works because its proprietary drivers only work on macos/win too. None of the hundreds of plugins you have work on Linux either. So it's between win/macos most of the time and the choice there is obvious.

Aside from GNOME. For professional users CLI and TUI usage on the terminal is bless and necessity. What is needed are more developers, testers and companies investing into it. The decline of Nokia and their withdraw from Gtk was a huge setback. Then the lost of Sun. And least Canonical helps now again but - years where lost. Canonicals current improvements are significant.

Aside from that. Free software seems to strive always to improve existing solutions when necessary, people see actual problems and want improve them. Within closed-ecosystems this is impossible and you're required to stay within boundaries to survive.

I can't remember the last time I touched one of my friend's computer without seeing any kind of suspicious search bar or fishy "helper" installed. I'm pretty sure this counts as malware.

The Linux (Gnome) UX is miles ahead of Windows.

I genuinely wish I could have Gnome on Windows.

I think this kind of argument works both ways

Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but...

Attacking normal people is easier (I think its fair to assume normal user is worse at computers than e.g trained admin), so you can do it at bigger scale and normal user may not want to sue/find you/call cops meanwhile if you're hacking companies then things are more likely to be very serious.

Thus, both are under constant attacks.

I actually prefer it to Mac, but there are some programs that I just can’t use on Linux. And I now use Windows as my gaming OS.

So while I wish I could do everything on Linux, I’m happy to switch as needed. Linux is my home work station, Mac for the cafe and some other things, and Windows for everything else.

I also just generally have a major issue with the Linux process scheduler (CFS). It definitely doesn't feel like its suited for desktop use.

Been there, done that, didn't get a T-shirt but a lot of scorn from IRC

Files says that image.png is a PNG image

  $ file image.png
  image.png: PNG image data, 965 x 720, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced

  $ mv image.png program.exe

  $ file program.exe 
  program.exe: PNG image data, 965 x 720, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
  $ eog program.exe

  $ mv program.exe sound.mp3

  $ mv sound.mp3 text.pdf

A suggestion to Files' authors: check the magic file definition, not the extension, especially when opening files.

What I use extensions for: to remember what a file is, by the name of it when doing ls in the terminal. The extension is more to help me than the OS. I open most of the files I work with by the command line, not in Files. Another reason is that if I send the file to somebody else I want to make it easy for them. So screenshot-2020-11-16_1000.png and not screenshot-2020-11-16_1000 which maybe breaks some of their tools. Third reason: some files must have an extension: header.h, program.c, program.o, program and not header and code, code, code :-)

And yes, programs in *NIX never had extensions. So ls / and not ls.exe /

While the file extension can be lying maliciously or can be just plain incorrect in 1% cases, its informative for the user in the other 99% cases

You're not really talking about Linux. You're talking about mime types and xdg-open, the de-facto default way Linux desktop environments (not to be confused with distros) handle default applications. You mentioned double clicking so I'm going to assume you were talking about it in the context of a GUI DE opening files from a file manager or the desktop.

xdg-open is configurable and even completely replaceable. For example, I have it replaced with mimeo, which I have a couple hardset rules based on extensions. Any time I don't like its default behavior, I'll add 2 lines to the config file to specify what I want. I personally don't like configuring mime types and stuff itself. It's incredibly predictable because for example I just tell mimeo that anything that ends with pdf should be opened with zathura. I find that Linux tends to be way less mysterious since it's so open and transparent and configurable.

But a valid complaint to this response would be that defaults matter, and that you shouldn't have to tinker to get what you want. So I think in that sense you're thinking of how KDE/GNOME handles this, which last I checked was extremely simple. You just right click a file and set the default application for opening its mimetype. Any future file of this mimetype will be opened by what you specified. And I think mimetypes are just better UX than raw extensions; it's a much better experience telling KDE to open all music files with your music app rather than specifying extensions. And various applications come with .desktop files that let you know what they can handle. So you get a nice list of relevant applications but you can still tell it to open it in whatever you want. Meanwhile in Windows the default behavior is to hide file extensions which I think is actually the worst of both worlds. Using file extensions to inform default applications while hiding them. I find that to be more mysterious.

> In Windows extensions have a meaning. In Linux, why even bother having extensions? In neither OS does the extension tell you about the content of the file. But on Windows the extension does tell you something useful about how the OS interacts with the file.

Again, "Linux" is not a monolith (yes the kernel is monolithic, but you know what I mean) that you can compare directly to Windows. Windows basically has a mime types system but worse (less intelligent with clunkier UI and legacy defaults), and there's nothing you can do to change it. On Linux it depends entirely on what you have setup. For example, for a long time I just never had it set up. There was nothing to "double-click" to begin with, and if I wanted to for example open an image file with my image viewer, I would just type out `imv bruh.png`.

What you're actually debating is xdg-open vs. whatever it's called in Windows. I personally kind of agree with you so I don't use xdg-open. But I'm still using Linux.

When it comes to development I find it immensely better, and found that it has also made me much more confident when I poke around on servers - no context switching between my local environment and remote.

The only thing I miss is Adobe lightroom, but I don't do so much photography these days so it's not a deal breaker

2) Agree, but with popular distributions it is relatively easy to find help. With unpopular ones not so much, but you can always choose more common one. If you need to use some special distro experience can be worse.

3) Sorry, cannot disagree more. For me OS utilities in Ubuntu are dead simple and this works for me quite well. But once upon a time windows 10 decided that for some reason I must have 3 different English laouts (UK, US and Latin or smth like that). I did manage to remove redundant ones by performing some unobvious actions in unobvious settings sections. And extra layouts kept returning after reboots. I had other similarly annoying problems and they were difficult to resolve because solutions posted literally month before had completely different settings layout on screenshots compared to mine. In windows 10 settings do change drastically every few... months?

Command-line-based interfaces seem more stable. And most common issues are already have accessible solutions if you use stable release of popular Linux distro. At least in my experience.

The screenshot thing just depends on the tool...

Its fair to say that even the Win7 to Win10 switch is something people only do if you force them, but I could see the Win10->Linux change happen for a lot of people if they saw anything it had that they needed.

Not having to worry about AV and automatic updates, automatic download and in-OS-ads would be pretty huge already.

Yes, most powerusers on windows know where to turn all that off, but a lot of people, like my parents, are scared to fuck something up, so they dont touch any settings, especially not if windows tells them "this improves your experience, you sure you wanna turn it off? nudge".

A lot of people would not notice or care if you switched their machine to Linux - as long as it means they have to worry about less.

For me, it’s reasons like that which keep me on Apple: 90% of my basic computer operation/maintenance usecases are already taken care of, or have first party software to take care of it.

I leave finessing linux operations and programs for my day job.

After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!

This was my reason for not using KDE for years. The UI these days is cleaner and leaner, rivaling XFCE in resource usage.

> I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

This was my initial impression, as well. But if you want to do something that the GNOME team feels is superfluous, you're either out of luck or depending on some plugin that will break your DE if you upgrade GNOME.

On Plasma Desktop, almost everything is configurable, but it isn't overwhelming and disorganized like it was in KDE 3 & 4. There's a considerable amount of polish. Plugin bugs don't take down the entire desktop environment, either.

Plus WSL2 has way better tooling integration than most VMs - Windows Terminal, VSCode, etc. work well. I've found the experience compelling enough that I don't see much reason to dual boot Linux outside of CUDA applications (which are also supported now on Insiders.)

[1] https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/

I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.

….

I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. …. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.

It is POSSIBLE to do a lot of things on Linux that you can do in Windows? Yes. The question is: how much time will it take you to make it work?

Resolve would be perfect if it worked with my set up. I hope one day it gets there.

[0]: I don't make cinema style movies. Mainly 1080p screencasts. So things like nice looking titles, simple animations, zooming / panning, adding overlays of various shapes and sizes, blurs, etc. are really important to me. Nothing I tried on Linux really comes close to how easy it is to do that stuff with Camtasia and make it look nice. Resolve is pretty close tho, after you put in enough time to build up your own custom libraries.

No, what I said does not suggest that.

> no real binary compatibility, for instance, means that you need this army of maintainers and packagers to keep software working.

It's a smaller army than the army you need in order to keep Microsoft Windows working, and even smaller compared to the army you need to keep the Windows software equivalent to what you get as part of a Linux distribution.

> There are an uncountable number of specialized applications for niche workflows available on Windows that are not available on Linux.

That's not relevant to my argument.

20 years ago I was convinced Linux would win on the desktop. But we still have the same problems decades later.

And then the whole story with AMD open source driver, means I am unable to take full advantage of the GPU in Linux.

Note when I say "written for" I'm not even really speaking very technically - lots of programs written nowadays won't really have any particular dependency on a library that's only available on a certain OS. But if you're using an application that's written in a platform-agnostic way but the programmer only develops it and uses it on a Mac, it's usually easy to tell. Both in terms of system interop/integration and how bugs are prioritized.

So, even if people do things you don't like on their linux install, it's still far better to have as many people on linux as we can get.

For a good number of people it's just better than Windows and macOS.

Beware of this though, if you really want to remove all the telemetry. Seems like telemetry is deeply ingrained in the OS. Last time I used Windows tried to enable every option in O&O ShutUp10, got a BSOD.

Dennis R.

It is a big regression that won't ever be fixed, OpenGL 3.3 instead of OpenGL 4.1 and barely working hardware video decoding.

Yep, it is a 10 years old hardware, yet Windows 10 drivers are perfectly capable of handling it properly.

I would completely disagree here, they're more aesthetic but not more intuitive or discoverable.

Compare tar with apple's camera app on the iphone for example: tar --help will tell you how to do everything in the app. Is there something equivalent that tells how to do manual focus in the camera app? (yes, it's supported that for years and no one knows how to do it because it won't tell you.)

Apple has definitely figured out the "reopen apps when you reboot your computer" feature. I wonder why it's taken Microsoft so long to do the same.

This here is my most hated thing about KDE. I run it on Debian so my version is pretty old compared, has it been fixed in newer versions? I have been thinking about switching to Neon, but I don't care for the Ubuntu base verses vanilla Debian.

I used to try Linux once a year or so but gave up doing that a few years ago because there is no single place to go to for answers and it's a time sink. The operating system needs to get out of my way so that I can make software. Windows does that.

I'm sure bias has a lot to do with my perception, I'm ok with that.

There is a need to package closed source software, to provide dependencies. Some people use outdated distributions, that's root cause. If distribution is switching I'd better search like minded and help with maintaining (or it would be systemd scenario).

At least there is application. Everyone is free to make native. There is Void (Linux), runit [1], at least on Arch Linux there is big choice [2]. Fork Gnome, KDE 3 forked as Trinity Desktop Environment [3]. Boot to xmonad — 100MB RAM, Chromium — several GB RAM.

It is easy to imagine arguments against — Steam builds distribution platform on top of Linux, no packages there, Wayland vs X11, distributions spread resources, maintainers breaks software. I am not Steam user, I am not Ubuntu user, but I benefit from wider community.

[1] https://voidlinux.org/

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/init

[3] http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Indeed, the popularity of docker, flatpak and hobby/fad distributions and language-specific package managers is leading to many security nightmares and harming traditional distributions.

There are reasons for painstakingly vet and package software:

- security

- stability AKA you don't want to force feature upgrades with new bugs on servers and workstations

- legal compliance: people are unaware of the amount of license issues in docker hub, flatpaks and most distributions

Next, sleep / resume. Has never worked for me on Linux; at the work place where I used Linux, I just let the machine run overnight. That would be a no-go at home, as I sleep in the same room.

When I got a new machine, I installed Linux only to check that the HW was working and to download Win installation. The kernel had only experimental support for the chipset and integrated graphics (Intel, Skylake just about came out). I had to enable it with boot switches, after which I was able to start GUI (X). However, the GUI randomly and completely froze the machine, a hard reset was required.

I also think that audio mixing didn't work out of the box.

I also tried copy/paste for the fun of it, it did work this time, but only if I managed to guess the "correct" clipboard.

Thanks, but no thanks. $100-ish license that I paid for Windows Professional has paid itself out immensely with things that "just work" out of the box. My time is worth way more than $100.

Probably not a driver problem, but screen tearing while playing youtube videos is annoying.

As for Kickstarter projects with proprietary drivers targeting only Windows and/or OS X, well, yeah...

You’re right that with proprietary closed-sourced drivers one has to be prepared to be a bit cautious or conservative when upgrading the kernel. Though unlike Windows there’s no real reason to always be on the most recent version (critical kernel security issues are rare).

Running a 4.x kernel is still considered bueno.

It's why I went back to cinnamon. I mean in the realms of the phrase "Fuck, marry, kill", I'd fuck KDE, marry cinnnamon, and kill MATE.

I've used open source OS for a decade. It has changed my mind. I've never downloaded software from site. I trust community, not vendors. I use just one non open source application (slack) and I do not trust them, I'd rather run it in a sandbox.

My system comes with a framework to download, build, install any package with just a few commands:

    $ yay -G foo
    $ cd foo
    $ makepkg -sei

No other ecosystem comes close. Browser extensions and smartphone applications replicate some of it but

* it can be adware/spyware/malware

* it can change overnight, no one checks

* one gallery by popularity or by restriction

Even my closed source software comes from community maintained recipes, Windows finally got it with winget.

Oh, I know! Compare it with programming language package managers — gems, pip, cargo.

Or people update when it's convenient for them vs when it's convenient for the OS.

> Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.

Linux has a higher server market share already, and its virus problem there is still not as bad as Windows'.

> > No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.

> True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.

Today, Windows has forced updates and Linux doesn't, and Windows hosts are more likely to be part of a botnet than Linux hosts.

> distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons.

True but misleading. For example, Ubuntu doesn't install nonfree drivers by default, but all you have to do to install them is check the checkbox when the installer asks you. Way easier than dealing with drivers on Windows.

In fact, the latest versions of Proton are so good, the only games I haven't been able to get to work with regularity are the ones that require EA Origin, and honestly, I've had similar problems on Windows. In fact, sometimes the Proton version of the game works better than the Linux binary. So, if gaming is holding people up from switching (which is a common excuse), that's not as much an obstacle these days.

2. Any time there is an update, it's an opportunity for something to break. If a user has no choice when a computer updates, they risk interrupting important, time-sensitive work. So, a user must ask themselves, are they more worried about their machine possibly used in a botnet, or are they more worried about it rebooting right in the middle of a meeting or video call? Or taking 20-30 minutes to update after an unexpected reboot, such as a power failure? I would rather have the choice, and deal with problems caused by updates only I want to, when I have the time. Also, many zero-days are for software that's over a year old. As long as a user has done an update in the past year, which is a reasonable expectation, the risk of compromised security is much lower.

3. Facebook downtime and the incapability to launch any third-party application at all are two very different problems. Further, Gatekeeper is not the only source is potential problems. Windows Defender has been known to quarantine DLLs and executables that are perfectly harmless, but fixing problems caused by an overzealous update to (and application of) Windows Defender definitions is often beyond the capabilities of the average user.

4. The Linux kernel absolutely supports non-free drivers. Inclusion of non-free driver "blobs" is a common argument.

In fact, I would like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as "ideological Linux", is, in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...

Linux as my desktop OS, not so much. I have to reboot my Linux laptop every few days for various reasons, including complete unresponsiveness to any keyboard input.

What did you miss in VP?

I am not trying to convince you of anything, and you have the right to hold to your contradictions, but I find this at odds with most proprietary software, even more so if their execution environment isn't stable or 100% under control.

Regarding your specific needs, it also does sound a bit like the XY problem: you don't really need an app (unless locked-in by data you can't migrate), you just need the functionality it provides, though that may require some unlearning first. Oh and yeah, of course there aren't alternatives for everything.

But if you are really locked in and see the writing on the wall for your solution, you always have the option of creating your own migration path, or a stub application that does the bare minimum you need. Other might step in and help you, so it might be worth asking around first.

From my point of view, Linux is not broken at all. It runs the software I need (I'm comfortable with Gimp, I don't have spreadsheets that pass the limits of LibreOffice and I don't use EA). Lately, the move from X to Wayland has been introducing some brokenness - it's not as easy as it used to be to run X apps across the network - but I imagine all these will be eventually fixed.

Like you said, most users don't worry EA is Windows-only because most users don't worry about things like OS.

You are confusing a subset "developers who use linux-compatible tools" with the set "users".

https://linux.die.net/man/5/motd

https://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune

All written in Python, recently moved to Qt5 and PySide2, runs on Windows and when I figure out packaging for Linux (probably AppImage) will release it for Linux as well.

I believe there are Qt bindings for other languages too.

So you're not stuck with C++ :)

Disclaimer: Content customer

However with Dell XPS Linux version, Lenovo has a couple, and also System76 and things you have now hundreds of laptops guaranteed to work and many more that actually still will. Just research them first if you're not sure. These days there is so much info on laptops that work well.

The first class supported ones like XPS (which I'm on my second) get firmware updates etc. it gets easier and easier every year.

That said, for my use case, I have never found a software that I need on Windows that is only available on Linux.

The opposite happens to me a lot.

> grep and sed are missing on Windows,

cinst grep sed dngrep ...

> "replace this line in all files in this folder"

Everything file search engine is beyond anything LInux has to offer.

> I use SSH, which isn't on Windows,

cist mls-software-openssh

Besides, Open SSH is now OTB in Windows

> use KDE Plasma 5 and find it amazing, having been a fan of KDE since 3.5. I like KDE Plasma overall much more than Windows Explorer,

All GUIs everywhere are equal SHIT. Its just your preference.

>OpenSSH has been added to Windows as of autumn 2018, and is included in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.

Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?

As for background services, of course they spend (at that moment unused resources). But you completely forego that they have an actual usefulness. Indexing files makes searching later faster. Prefetching makes loading commonly used programs faster. Virus scanning keeps your computer safe. Telemetry helps developers recognize issues and prioritize bugs, even stop hackers in time. The article you mentioned wants you to disable the firewall (bad advice) but also a lot of services that are not even consuming resources unless you have the necessary policies/hardware, like the bluetooth service or touch screen service.

Not that Windows these days runs from high-end server to low powered ARM devices, while still looking generally the same. This is not the same Windows from 20 years ago where you could easily tweak the system to get some more performance out of it. These days Windows comes out of the box running as fast as it can, while giving a reasonable user experience.

As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.

I've tried Windows 10, it is not bad as consumer OS. Tray notifications gone, so good. WSL1 has limitations, should be solved in WSL2. PowerShell, OpenSSH and winget are good improvements.

Windows interface is changing, at least some people should like it. I feel it is getting progressively worse. That's strange — I like macOS Aqua. I didn't like brushed metal, it has gone now. I have no other explanation but blind spot of Windows users.

Sounds like you're using Visual Studio... which at this point is closer to an Operating System than an IDE...

Also - it's not supposed to be "tons of random stuff", it's supposed to be the libraries you're relying on. Maybe I'm missing something in the point you're making?

And that's just as abhorrent as when Windows does it. Luckily there are lots of other distros.

> a free upgrade from 7/8

Microsoft forced that on a lot of people too, so it's not the users fault for "not paying"

> a campus license from their university, "included" in the computer they bought

Someone still payed for that, whether it is the OEM or the university. It still doesn't excuse the practice.

> Many of the advantages and disadvantages of various OS come down to personal taste and willingness to deal with them. There's no need to belittle either side.

I agree for the most part. If you have to use windows or MacOS because it is the only OS that some specific software is compiled for, and you need the software, then I don't blame you for using the OS. But really it's the software developer's fault for not releasing on all common platforms that brought the limitation in the first place.

But I'm sorry I am going to belittle people who defend dual payment systems as you call them. That is just pure greed.

If there is a subset of L that is larger than W, then L itself is also larger than W.

I was proposing that if you count every image, or every repo, then dockerhub-only or the GitHub-only subsets of L might be larger than W because the effort of creating an additional windows project is much greater than the effort of creating an additional Linux project.

You want to be able to buy bleeding edge hardware without checking for driver support and have it just work. That is important enough for you to prefer windows for this reason. Fair enough.

Something to think about: What do you think causes this situation that on day one windows has a stable driver and Linux doesn't? Could it have anything to do with the cooperation of the hardware vendor?

Assuming you actually wanted to run linux, would there be any way you as an end user could work around this problem? Is there anything people could do to improve the overall situation? Maybe something more helpful than puplicly complaining about experimental drivers being experimental?

It's ok if you don't care about this. But characterizing the story above as "linux has driver problems" strikes me as something between superficial and disengenious.

But yeah, you can't always blindly throw the newest Linux at the newest hardware and expect it to work. Free Software requires a a certain amount of taking responsibility for your own computing.

There is a new filesystem api: https://web.dev/file-system-access/

Electron still provides more freedom but I would argue many of the existing electron apps don't need it.

What are you even talking about? Any unprivileged process can open a udp socket.